Link Love Roundup

On Thursday I had an annoying but minor crick in my left shoulder (no, not radiating pain — just a definite discomfort around my neck, collarbone, and scapula). I thought it would go away on its own, based on my experience with other cricks and creaks. On Friday I woke up at 6 a.m. and shouted out in pain when I tried to roll over (it didn’t bother Sandy, as she was at a meeting several states away).

So my nice boss drove me to a nice doctor (since it helps whilst driving if you can move your head from side to side) who prescribed some nice meds for this strained/pulled muscle thingy — it happened at discus practice; o.k., o.k., you want the truth… it’s probably from falling asleep crooked — and since then I’ve been nicely non compos mentis.

(The doctor was very pleased that I presented him with a printout of the part of the back where it was hurting, and pulled out an anatomy book to show me the muscles he believes are involved.)

I had various long posts swirling in my head last week, but I experienced these past three days as if I were driving in very dense fog: my brain slowed to a crawl, and until this afternoon I couldn’t make sense of anything farther than a few yards from my nose. I’m not doing the heavy meds any more (goodbye, purple haze!), and I’m feeling MUCH better, thank you, but I’m a wee bit tired and therefore in kind of a slothful catch-up mode.

So here are a few tidbits:

Sylvia Plath’s library on LibraryThing. Now you can enter books into LibraryThing from beyond the grave! They call it MortisThing. No, not really — but the most excellent “I See Dead People[‘s Books]” project has expanded to include some women writers. I share two books with Plath — Middlemarch and A Room of One’s Own.

Heightened interest in OpenID. I am so not a software developer, but I humbly observe that while Shibboleth may theoretically be the perfect single-sign-on protocol, OpenID is apparently the protocol organizations can and do implement.

Virtual Kissing Booth. Tell your kissing story at the Culture Scout blog; the best entry gets a free copy of The Dictionary of Love.

Techsoup’s MaintainIT project has just issued a new (free!) cookbook, Recipes for a Five-Star Library. Why not print and bind a couple of copies for the favorite small library in your life? Topics include wireless, print and time management, and laptop checkout programs.

Without (visible) muss or fuss, PLA is proposing a bylaws change that would establish communities of practice (similar to LITA interest groups), downsize the PLA Board, eliminate the Executive Committee, and provide methods for virtual participation. What — they aren’t waiting for an ALA Task Force to issue a report? They aren’t asking permission? Hmmm, this Internet thing is really catching on. I hear tell LITA is closely observing PLA.

PLA is also holding its first virtual conference. LibrarianInBlack has written about it; my take is different. PLA needs to flesh out the program descriptions better (names, we want names!), but on the actual format, I think they’re on track. There has to be a reason that some of the highest-tech conferences I’ve attended, such as Defrag, do not attempt to merge analog and digital, especially at this, PLA’s first foray. (I don’t mean taping or podcasting live presentations, but attempting to mingle physical and digital attendance. If someone can spell out a model for this that is financially reasonable and also delivers a good product, let’s go get rich on it.) At $200 for two days of sessions, if PLA can deliver the goods (like I said… we want names!), it’s a pretty darn good deal.

PLA + Open Source, sittin’ in a tree: Equinox, the software support company for Evergreen, will be at the PLA conference (hey, love your spiffy new website!), as will LibLime, the company that supports Koha. N.b. The last time I discussed Evergreen I got a cranky response suggesting I was on the take (read the comments). Just a hunch: that comment didn’t come from the open source community.