Tate Museum #museumweek discussion about museums of the future

This online discussion about museums highlights areas of interest to libraries as well, in thinking about the future.

Conservation talk on twitter with Tate staff

Lovely Storify of a q&a session with Tate staff

Talk to your librarian

I found out about this blog post via a comment on my Flickr account.  It is a very nice post encouraging connecting to the skills, knowledge and experience of librarians, and highlighting how these keep developing.

This could be a library or a bookshop...

This came through my tumblr feed

http://tumblr.libraryjournal.com/post/113351973633/newyorker-a-cartoon-by-edward-koren-from-this

I am troubled by it, whether it is a bookshop (since it is from the New Yorker this may be more likely) or it is a library. Either way it is someone, apparently a staff member, who does not want to help with technology. If this is a library this means not helping someone access the library content, not connecting someone to the skilled staff (who can help provide access to content and services)...and a lot more. It also shows a distain for the clients as the staff member is not interested in what the question being raised by the woman is.

 Maybe I am reading too much into it.

Impressive work from Smithsonian Libraries

I came across this tweet

It is #NationalCraftMonth and about time you learned how to net. http://t.co/uIj5ibhZG2 pic.twitter.com/HqcllsJ4Ol
— SmithsonianLibraries (@SILibraries) March 11, 2015

and the first link takes you to a fully digitised book from their collection which can be easily looked at page by page.  I like the way this digitisation is promoted, and the digitisation is lovely.

The homepage is lovely with some of the navigation by coloured dots.  You can also read more of their books online in many different subjects.

Anita Sarkeesian: 'What I Couldn't Say' (All About Women 2015) from @sydoperahouse

Minneapolis public library; fifty years of service 1889 - 1939

This is a thanks to Hathi Trust post. This is a wonderful books to discover and it is very interesting seeing public library data compared over 50 years.
Some of the pages have dodgy scans, but you can still have an overall view of the information.

rss and alerts updates

In an earlier post I wrote about how I was dealing with the demise of Google reader.  I am still enjoying Newsblur and Zite.

There was a recent post on Doug Belshaw's blog called Seven places I find interesting, relevant and useful stuff in 2015. This is an excellent post to read, and it has given me a few more places to explore.  The main news ones I am using are Nuzzel as it prompts me about things which people I follow on Twitter highlight and Know about it.   

There are some alerts I can only receive by email, and that works well too.  There is overlap in the different streams, but it is not a problem.

a nice way of explaining rss

I was adding an rss feed to my aggregator (and will do a separate post about this), and was interested to see a link on the page for people who may not know what rss is. This was helpful, and even made me look (because I wanted to see where the link went).

Inclusive reading, and inclusive readers advisory work.

Yesterday morning two very different kind of posts came through my Zite feed. One was headed 

No Boys Allowed: School visits as a woman writer. This is an excellent and depressing post by Shannon Hale. This is well worth reading as it has some very helpful points about readers advisory work and who/how you suggest titles and authors, and not being apologetic.

The other, I am not linking to, was called something like Key number of  [name of genre] books to read if you are a real [name of genre] fan.  Only books by men were included in this list.  The first post was about encouraging reading and encouraging a diversity in reading.  The other went down the unfortunate line of "real" fans which is problematic.  Each of us will read our own cluster of titles which have meaning to us, but whose grouping may leave others wondering.  That is good.  I can be a fan of the genre listed and not have read any of the titles suggested by this list.  I am troubled by the use of real in this context, perhaps I am an unreal fan of the genre as I have not read the entire list?  I can live with that.  It is not helpful to have lists (which is why I am being annoying and not linking to it) which say you can only be in the club for this genre if you have read/watched/played this exact set.  Where is the fun in that?  Where is the focus on the appeal characteristics for individual readers?   

I am sure that this list was meant to be encouraging, encouraging reading, encouraging a sense of accomplishment, encouraging a sense of belonging to a group.  

I was also concerned that the key titles were all written by men, that no woman was deemed good enough to write a key [genre name omitted] title.  There are many wonderful women and men who write in genre listed, so read across the spectrum, and enjoy.

Reading these two posts together highlighted the importance in readers advisory work of being deliberately inclusive so that people see and enjoy diversity in what they read.  

I realise that by writing this post that I am putting myself at risk of A Toxic Stew: Risks To Women Of Public Feminism, another post which came through Zite yesterday.  So be it.