Blogging Elsewhere

I’m working with some other Nashville folks on a collective blog project, Music City Bloggers. The site is intended to highlight Nashville bloggers and their conversations, discuss local and national topics, and continue growing a community that was fostered elsewhere. We’re just getting started, but go check it out, especially if you’re in or around Nashville.

Light posting here while I get a couple of things taken care of there. The fine ladies serving as CEO & Editor-in-Chief have given me a title, Taxonomy Community Manager, so I have to actually get the categories in some kind of working order.

When you get done checking out MCB, see “A Hipper Crowd of Shushers,” an NYTimes piece on the new generation of librarians – “in real life, there are an increasing number of librarians who are notable not just for their pink-streaked hair but also for their passion for pop culture, activism and technology.”

How did such a nerdy profession become cool — aside from the fact that a certain amount of nerdiness is now cool? Many young librarians and library professors said that the work is no longer just about books but also about organizing and connecting people with information, including music and movies…

 

Ms. Campbell added that she became a librarian because it “combined a geeky intellectualism” with information technology skills and social activism.

 

Jessamyn West, 38, an editor of “Revolting Librarians Redux: Radical Librarians Speak Out” a book that promotes social responsibility in librarianship, and the librarian behind the Web site librarian.net (its tagline is “putting the rarin’ back in librarian since 1999”) agreed that many new librarians are attracted to what they call the “Library 2.0” phenomenon. “It’s become a techie profession,” she said.

 

In a typical day, Ms. West might send instant and e-mail messages to patrons, many of who do their research online rather than in the library. She might also check Twitter, MySpace and other social networking sites, post to her various blogs and keep current through MetaFilter and RSS feeds. Some librarians also create Wikis or podcasts.

I think this quote on Jessamyn West actually profoundly underestimates the techie nature of the modern librarian.