Tinfoil Bigtop: Carnival 13 on the 31st

First off, I'd like to localize this carnival and pay homage to the Milner Library (at Illinois State University) Circus and Allied Arts Collection.  I live in a community which has a deep and rich circus heritage that is collected and preserved at ISU.  I was hoping they'd have some of their collections digitized and online, but, maybe later....

Thanks to the carnies and barkers who sent along the following submissions. I really appreciated this opportunity, as I saw lots of items I might not have looked at, given my specific interests. It's good branch out!  Thanks to Greg at Open Stacks for keeping this idea going.

If you sent me a submission and don't see it here, please let me know!  I had problems using the labels function in Gmail, and may have skipped over one or two.

Photo credit to Alohamama on Flickr.

Jill O'Neill, from NFAIS (and next week's Carnivalista) this along from SiteLines; "Rita Vines of SiteLines has an interesting piece that pertains to quality concerns and authoritativeness with specific reference to healthcare information."  Jill also stretched my suggestion of Halloween-themed posts by pointing us to the Librarian in Black's post Google: Catalyst for Digitilization? Or Library Destruction? which summarizes a presentation at Internet Librarian. It meets the Halloween theme in that Roy Tennant gave an overview of all the "Scary Monsters" in Google's closet. 

T Scott Plutchak, Director of Lister Hill Library of Health Sciences (U of AL), points us to a post on his blog, (curiously titled T Scott) about an open access model for scientific/medical research being promoted by DC Principles for Free Access to Science. T Scott thinks that librarians need to buy in to the DC Principles model.  Good discussion follows in comments.

My biggest frustration with the whole open access debate is that it has put librarians and the society publishers in opposition.   Instead of working together to transform scholarly publishing, we waste time and energy arguing.   This proposal is an opportunity to get us all on the same side of the fence -- where we ought to be.   

Last week's Ringmistress, Rebecca Hedreen of Frequently Answered Questions, has a big, juicy post about how she, as a distance librarian, uses free social bookmarking services to organize resources, in addition to Refworks (a subscription based bibliographic tool)> She does a great job of talking about the differences between and benefits of SPURL, FURL del.icio.us, PASTA, blinklist, and how they can work together.   Rebecca also gave me a cautionary tale about waiting til the last minute to put Carnival together.  Did I listen?  What do you think?

Christina of Christina's Library Rant was particularly impressed with posts by Glenda Claborne on the ASIS&T Annual Meeting Blog.  More to come, as the conference continues through Nov.2.

Joy Weese Moll, that Wandering Student Librarian, wrote about her presentation at the Missouri Library Association conference. While she wrote a bit about the content of her presentation (a primer on using blogs in libraries), she specifically addressed giving presenations as a new or student librarian. Joy also pointed us to "a more forceful recommendation that student librarians give presenations," from Dorthea at Caveat Lector.

Meredith at Information Wants to be Free (who has survived her first Nor'easter), sent us a link to her post, New Communities, Physical and Virtual which she summarizes thusly:

While people who are new to the Biblioblogosphere may see
it as a clique where there are significant barriers to entry, the
Biblioblogosphere is just like any other community.  In any new place,
whether online or in the physical world, you need to learn the players
and the vocabulary before you can really feel like an insider.

Having just moved to a new place, I see real paralells between my
adjustment to Vermont/work and my adjustment to the biblioblogosphere
when I first started reading blogs.  This post was inspired by Laura of
lis.dom's post, On the Uses of the Biblioblogosphere.

Krafty Librarian, Michelle Kraft, wonders "What Becomes of Our Research."

As librarians are asked to justify their very
existance, we must come up with better methods of
proving our value.  Theresa Cuddy's Value of hospital
libraries: the Fuld Campus Study, demonstrates how
librarians can track what becomes of their research
and provide better information on our impact within
our institution.  Medical, academic, law, and special
librarians all can benefit from this.

Suzi Holler, who has the best name I've heard in a long time, sent along a link to something she hopes to make a weekly feature on her blog CFLC Currents (Central Florida Library Cooperative Currents)--Reference Riches: Tuesday's Tool. Her inaugural entry is supposed to  points to Halloween lore, but it's a dead link this a.m. Will check with her and see what the scoop is.

Editor's choice is forthcoming....Aaron Schmidt's CIL presentation, "Smart Computing at Your Library: Saving User and Staff Time (and Keeping Sane); Or Geek Out, Don't Freak Out."  I particularly like the slide that asks "Do you have friendly computers?"  My guess is that most libraries don't.  Now we've got something to reach for.

Comments

[Yvette]

Aloha! Thank you for letting me know about using my picture and it's fine by me so it's no problem! Have a good day!

[Suzi Holler]

Nice Carnival! Sorry about the dead link you mentioned last...we've been having DNS problems with Sprint on and off all week. Here's a link to the site using CFLC's IP address that should work in the meantime: http://65.41.132.135/public_html/holiday.html