“The librarian as information priest is as dead as Elvis,” Needham said. The whole “gestalt” of the academic library has been set up like a church, he said, with various parts of a reading room acting like “the stations of the cross,” all leading up to the “alter of the reference desk,” where “you make supplication and if you are found worthy, you will be helped.”

Via.

priest, librarian, libraries, lib20, library 2.0, church of information

That’s my contribution to the Springfield Public Library meme that Michael Casey and Laura Savastinuk started over the weekend.

springfield public library, the simpsons, simpsons, cartoon character, cartoon, smartypants, funny, librarian, librarians, bar, moe, moe’s bar, self portrait, casey bisson, springfield

Via Librarian Way I found the LiS Radio webcast of a conversation between Sandra Erdelez and Karen Fischer, two of three editors of Theories of Information Behavior from ASIS&T and Information Today.

Unfortunately, the interview focuses on how the book came to be more than the content, but the description reads:

overviews of more than 70 conceptual frameworks for understanding how people seek, manage, share, and use information in different contexts.

Request, can we have another LiS Radio webcast where these theories are discussed?

tags: information, information behavior, librarian, libraries, library, lis, lisradio, manage, radio, seek, share, use

It used to be you could identify the librarian by the sensible shoes, but times they are a changing. Witness this ad from Library Bar. Sure their “librarians” are bartenders, but what cultural shift changed to thrust librarians up the sex appeal scale?

Yeah, this is old. After all, it was the Spring 2004 of Bust Magazine that asked if librarians might be the new “it” girls, but it’s still amusing.

Ruth A. Kneale explores this at length at librarian-image.net and Monika Bargmann, Flickr’s Library Mistress has cataloged quite a collection of images of librarians in contemporary culture, like Linux Lass (and the Library Bar photo above).

bartenders, bust magazine, contemporary culture, image, librarian, librarians, library bar, monika bargmann, ruth a kneale, sensible shoes, sex appeal

Jenny Levine is talking about an example of The Perfect Library Blog over at The Shifted Librarian.

The posts are written in the first person and in a conversational tone, with the author’s first name to help stress the people in the library. The staff isn’t afraid to note problems with the new catalog, the web site, or anything else. Full transparency — nice. You can feel the level of trust building online. They respond to every comment that needs it, whether it’s a criticism, question, or suggestion. And some of the comments are fantastic. Users are even helping debug the new catalog.

Jenny quotes some examples, go look.

tags: blog, blogging, communication, corporate blogging, institutional blogging, jenny levine, librarian, library, library blog, organizational blogging, suggestion, the shifted librarian, transparency, trust building