Librarian Avengers

was crawling through my archives this morning and came across this little rant that I wrote years ago, during my first, horrible, post-grad school job at the Cornell University Library. I know several of you Gentle Readers are in school right now, and I thought you might enjoy the sentiment:

First of all, and lets just get this out of the way: a full-time job is actually a pretty shoddy reward for 2.5 years of graduate school stress.

Yes, I’m grateful and all, glad to be here, nice to meet ya, etc. but frankly, I think I was looking for something along the lines of “congratulations on your degree, here’s your houseboat, now get out of here you scamp.”

I suppose having a stable schedule and slightly-more-realistic paychecks is reward enough, but lately I’ve had to face what seems to happen any time you put enormous effort into something. Which is, a rather slow transition into something different that requires enormous effort.

Like learning not to scream when someone suggests you attend the Metadata Working Group Meeting.

’m a librarian by ethnicity, if not profession these days, and there’s nothing I like better than free information. Free as in beer and free as in speech. Which is why I like Freebase.

Freebase is a free database. Of data. On everything.

Everything in Freebase is publicly available, including the relationships between topics. The information is culled from a variety of open sources, and includes things like, say US zip codes and Walmart Store locations.  Every week their community manager (who happens to be my flatmate and a fellow Victorian Housekeeping Aficionado) picks a topic for a “data mob”, and the community adds information to Freebase on that topic.

This week it’s libraries. So, Librarian Avengers, I encourage you to go in and add stuff. I suspect you know a bit on the subject.

Who knows? Maybe one of you will make a video showing the correlation between library locations and Something Really Good…

*Edit* You gotta have an account first. Just so you know.

Hooray! There’s some new t-shirts over at the Librarian Avengers Store. Because if you are like me, you are frantically looking for holiday presents when you should be working.

That’s it. I’m done. Everyone is getting PowerSquids for Christmas this year.

Buy a t-shirt.

kthnkxbye

Modern Day Prometheus or why my boyfriend is the greatest guy ever. Can you believe I get to kiss this man?

My first question was a slightly judgmental “where were his parents during all of this?”

I’m remembering week after week of library visits when I was a kid. We didn’t have any money, but we had all the books we wanted. My first library card was at age, what? four?

Apparently the parents were there checking out videos. Hopefully they will return.

Penny Arcade realizes that the word “librarian” doesn’t imply gender, except in issues of pay equity.

Webcomics’ newfound appreciation for the finest of underpaid professions is thanks to an encounter with the authors of Unshelved after the San Diego comic con.

This is the same comic con, coincidentally where my friend and coworker Jon, author of the excellent DogBlog, ran into Joss Whedon while both gentlemen were drunk and thanked him thanked him thanked him for making such excellent movies.

Jon has a photo to prove it, which he will show you at the slightest provocation. Walk quietly around him and don’t make any sudden moves.

Oh? And as they point out, there’s already a word for a male librarian. It’s Librarian. Or Guybrarian, if you buy into my pathetic merchandising attempts.

rom a conversation with my friend Jenny on the implications of library censorship…

The webcomic xkcd has the goods on librarians this week:
The Advantages to Dating Librarians

It’s true. It’s so so true. The librarian Achilles Heel.

Geeks: check out the alt tags for more funny.

Binders of field notes sit in the common area of the Macaulay library, the audio/video library where I spent three years working as a software interface designer.

These are all digitized now, but the collection goes back to the 1950’s so these books are the last line of defense in case of a digital preservation catastrophe.

1. Queen Bees are expensive
2. It’s damned difficult to find a cat-sitter in Ithaca
3. Johnathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love me Yet is, so far, an absolutely perfect book
4. Tom Phillips is an artist who did a really great book painting featuring fictional books with titles stolen from Shakespeare
5. Roccapulco is a salsa club in San Francisco. I’m going next week with my friend Jake
6. The Lunch Meeting is the gold standard for interviews at eBay

Oldschool Metadata

7. You can randomly teleport somewhere in Second Life and end up getting juggled by a large pink elephant
8. Hotels in San Francisco are way cheaper than hotels in NYC. Jobs in San Francisco pay way better than jobs in NYC.
9. All it took for me to get my finances in shape was to get some software with a decent interface
10. The only cure for pregnancy-induced hypertension is childbirth (hi clay!)
11. My friend Josh has taken over things digital at the NYPL
12. Adobe CS3 will steal your soul with its compelling beauty
13. Google Analytics has a new interface that will steal whatever bit of your soul is leftover after Adobe gets done with you
14. Half of you people are still using Internet Explorer. I’m saddened. Please, for the love of all things holy: Use

just spoke with a gentleman who helps run Second Life, and he informed me that there are, like, a billion librarians on SL, who own a string of islands and facilitate information exchange. Can anyone confirm this?

Are we cool or what?