Free Range Librarian

Ron Miller, a freelance writer, posts about using libraries to do “old-fashioned research.”
It’s a flattering post, but several flags popped up for me: first, that a public library couldn’t meet his needs; second, the silos between academic and public libraries (as Frank Paynter notes, when you’re out of academia, you’re cut off from [...]

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39-cent stamps
Originally uploaded by freerangelibrarian.
(a work in progress, as this post got posted live and now I’m writing it in pieces throughout this evening, saving as I go along.)
Today, while a breeze stirred the preternaturally dry spring air, I sent out six essays.
I don’t buy lottery tickets; I lose interest in slot machines [...]

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I move between many cultures, and as I ride that bus, I pick up habits from one and transfer them to another whether I mean to or not. So recently I was IM’ing with a friend, and after the second time I corrected a term I had misspelled, he pointed out that was unnecessary (he [...]

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Here’s a blog post that could be fun for librarians to weigh in on: Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, asks about the role of reviews in buying books that you “read.” I put ‘read’ in quotation marks because so many of FRL’s readers are librarians who buy [...]

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In concert with its findings that technology users fall into different categories (those researchers… always ahead of the curve!) Pew has released a quiz you can take to measure what kind of technology user you are. I fell into the “omnivore” category, even though I disagreed with statements such as ” I believe I am [...]

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The old feeds may be forwarding, but I recommend you subscribe to the new feeds.
As a reminder, here are the new feeds. I recommend rss2 and comments:
http://freerangelibrarian.com/comments/feed [comments]
http://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/rss/
http://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/rss2/
http://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/rdf/
http://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/atom/
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[ June 2, 2007; ] Topic: “Libraries in a state of emergency”–a discussion of what we’ve ceded to The Man. Also good fun, plus I get to hear Bob Stein and Dan Chudnov.

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[ May 10, 2007; 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm. ] Two hours of 2.0 goodness for a SEFLIN Board retreat in West Palm Beach… this should be wonderfully good fun.

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For some time now, Sandy’s church website has needed some radical TLC. I baldly admit, I have avoided getting involved in this for reasons understandable to anyone who has worked with any low-tech committee-run organization on a tech issue. But since I suddenly have time right now to do something other than my day job, [...]

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Thanks to our ace editor, Tom Peters, my review of David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous is now up on ALA Techsource, just a handful of hours after I drafted it. (If the formatting looks a little funky in your browser, bear with us–the blogging software we use at Techsource is one of those one-of-a-kind, ALA-had-to-get-something-different [...]

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