Off the Mark

Photo courtesy of ishrona under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

Carnival of the Infosciences #2 hosted by Greg at Open Stacks is now online.

Hop on over and check out some interesting, wonderful, and illuminating writing on a plethora of topics related to libraries, librarians, a literate society, library school, technology, copyright and others.

It looks like submissions are up, and there are some excellent articles/posts/thoughts pointed to by the Ringmaster.

Congrats to Laura of lis.dom for her winning EFF 15th Anniversary blog-a-thon essay. Stop what you’re doing and go read it if you haven’t already. And I really liked her essay on “the anxiety of influence” also. These I had read already, but there is enjoyment in seeing things you like get recommended to others.

Possibly even better is the exposure to works you didn’t know about.

Next week the Carnival is on the road for the 1st time with the first stop in the heartland of Missouri at Wanderings of a Student Librarian. So get those submissions in by emailing Joy - joy at mollprojects dot com. Submission (and hosting) guidelines. Even if you aren’t ready or willing to promote your own writing (although you should be, otherwise, why are you writing?), feel free to recommend a piece by someone else that you particularly “liked.”

A Carnival is a community affair. It is not like going to the opera or the movie theater. It requires participation by all—young and old, geek and freak, professional and ?, short and tall, and all those other differences that aren’t really dichotomies—and lots of shouting, raucuous laughter, maybe a fright or two, and even on occasion a tear possibly. Join us, won’t you?

And for any of my schoolmates out there, where are you? I keep getting told that we’re the #1 school; so help me show it. We can’t rely completely on the alums to represent for us can we? Folks like Karen do a great job, but is our responsibility too.

I know some of you are lurking out there; you’ve told me so. What are you up to? What are your interests? What are you doing to develop professionally? I may be sticking my neck out here on occasion, if the Tribbles and Gormans of the world have their way, but I’m also engaged in a community, thinking, working out ideas, learning about others’ takes on those same ideas, learning about other ideas, developing my writing skills in a new format, and many other useful things all at once. Join me; it is a friendly crowd here.