Exciting news!  I've been asked to attend the Canadian Library Human Resources Summit in Ottawa on October 6-7.  It's sort of short notice but an all-expenses trip paid to Ottawa so who am I to complain? 

Here's the blurb I was sent which explains a bit more about what the summit is and how it came about:

"The Canadian library community has an invaluable data resource through the research of the 8Rs Research Team on the state and future of human resources in the Canadian library community. To assist practitioners and management to use the research, in 2005 then CLA-President Stephen Abram struck the President’s Council, composed of individuals from a variety of practice settings. The President's Council in the past year has focused primarily on information gathering, with the major project being the Info*Nation website (http://www.cla.ca/infonation/). These projects have helped to bring in other contextual information to the published 8Rs report, and have continued to raise the profile of the work that has been done thus far.

The key question for the next incarnation of the President's Council is how to map out the next stage of work: an action-oriented national strategy. This strategy should include actions designed to ensure that the sum of work already accomplished by the President’s Council is maintained. CLA has offered to lead a community-wide effort in partnership with other associations and organizations that can commit resources to achieving the project goals.

VISION: To develop a national strategy and action plans that will ensure an adequate supply of well-educated, well-trained librarians and information professionals who will meet Canada’s knowledge and information management needs in the first three decades of the 21^st century.

GOALS:

· To build upon the President’s Council work and to recommend specific actions that will lead towards the achievement of this vision.

· To propose and promote specific actions and outcomes to be undertaken by organizations and associations on key human resource issues.

The Summit’s agenda will involve research presentations on several different human resource concerns we are currently facing in the library community, including the accessibility of MLIS education, leadership development models, and continuing professional development for staff. These presentations will include models that could be adopted by the Canadian library community to address the concerns. After the presentations, small breakout groups will discuss whether these models (or others) might be feasible from their perspective, and report their discussions back to the larger group.

The Summit delegates represent a range of library sectors (academic, public, and special; representing individual libraries as well as associations). The delegates tend to be senior administrators, human resource managers, and/or executive association members who have much experience in the field and have the ability to speak to their area’s need for and interest in a particular strategy."

I booked my flight tonight and will get to Ottawa late on Saturday afternoon.  I'll have that evening and all day Sunday to be a tourist before going to the conference on Monday and Tuesday (anybody in Ottawa want to get together for supper and/or drinks?). 

I don't know what they're calling us but the seven "youth delegates" as I think of the group of new librarians who've been invited have also been asked to blog about their experiences so I'll be sure to post that URL when it's up. 

That whole idea about "find an specialty and become a ranking practitioner within your first three years as a librarian" that was raised in a list of tips for new librarians by Wendy Newman that I reprinted has me wondering if Library HR/Organization Development might turn out to be my specialty?  That would be...unexpected. 

But it makes sense in some ways.  In fact, I had a conversation today with someone and we both wondered if I may be the only professional librarian working in the HR department of a public library in Canada?  Who knows?  Maybe I'll find out at the Summit...

Yet another groundbreaking Google project was announced a month ago. I didn't blog about it at the time but I recently rediscovered it via the Vancouver Law Librarian blog which made me realise the full scope of this project already. So I thought I better pass it along.

So Google's announcement that it will be digitizing archives of newspapers from around the globe is pretty cool. And not just just the articles, but also ads, headlines, and photos--in short, all that peripheral content from outside the day's story.

There doesn’t appear to be a comprehensive list of newspapers participating, and coverage does seem a bit patchy still. But a few random searches pulled hits from the Vancouver Times from as far back as 1864, and the Vancouver Daily Post from 1865. And on the proud Canadian front, the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph (according to Google, the oldest newspaper in North America) is also there, along with a 1822 copy of the Montreal Herald.

"A girl I once caught reading Fahrenheit 451 over my shoulder on the subway confessed: "You know, I'm an English lit major, but I've never loved any books like the ones I loved when I was 12 years old." I fell slightly in love with her when she said that. It was so frank and uncool, and undeniably true."

(via MetaFilter)

My parents got invited to the Investors Group cross-Canada comedy tour stop in Regina tonight and invited Shea and I to join them. The second comedian, Tim Nutt, began his act this way...

"Alright Regina! How y'all doing? Thursday night in Regina - must be exciting - let's go down to the nice theatre and hang out with our financial planners." (I laughed at that.) "What're we going to do next? Go down to the liberry (yep, he actually mis-pronounced it), find some noisy people and shush them?"

The worst part? This joke brought the house down too. Old stereotypes die hard I guess. So in all fairness, I'll throw a similarly lame joke back his way and even give you a choice of punchlines.

"How many comedians does it take to change a lightbulb?"

1. Two - one to ask the librarian to read the manual to them and one to change the bulb.
2. None, they're all in the dark anyhow.
3. Just one - as long as his name is Dewey!

Hey, lookit me! I'm a cum-median.

(He did point out during one badly received, sexist joke that "You may not be aware that you are at a comedy show. There is an outside chance that I may be joking, you know." And to be fair, he was still the funniest of the three comics who performed including a guy who'd been on "In Living Color" back in the day.)

The other day, I was at our local mall and popped into the bookstore. On the shelf, I saw a new title called "The 100 Greatest Canadian Albums of All-Time". This one caught my eye and was quickly in my hand as I turned to head for the cashier. But then I thought, "Twenty five bucks for a book I'll only read once? And that'll be a pretty quick read at that? Don't I work in a library? They might have it." So the next day, I go in and do the search and not only is the book in the system but it's at Central Branch, checked in. So at noon, I walk up a flight of stairs, find the proper area and by my bus ride home that day, I'm reading away. Sometimes it's the simple pleasures in life, no?

...Be Found in Social Q&A Sites? 

I think so.  Ask.MetaFilter.com is one of my first stops whenever I'm seeking information - whether it's technology, parenting or pretty much anything else. 

Jessamyn may not be going quite as far as me on this but she did have a recent post on the topic. 

"[It] really comes down to an elucidation of one of the first things I learned in library school: people ask their friends to help them with their information needs before they ask experts or professionals."

I start my new job tomorrow and so it's the usual mix of nervousness and excitement today.  But to be honest, I'm more excited than nervous for this one and the biggest thing I'm worried about is whether I should take the bus or drive followed closely by "what should I take for lunch?" since I'm not going to get home for lunch everyday like I did in Weyburn.   

Here's a list of 10 Things To Help You Survive Your First Day at a New Job  and Google has lots of similar results on the topic. 

"A new library in Casanera, Colombia shows us what humankind might have built with sticks and stones if they'd never discovered bricks, steel, and electricity. The Villanueva Public Library was built on a modest budget, designed by a bunch of university students in Bogota. And instead of importing fancy, expensive materials, builders used local timber and stones from nearby rivers to lower transportation costs. Then, instead of hiring experienced construction workers, they trained local people to build it."

(via Reddit)

On another topic, a question for all of you MacVangelists out there.  If you were to buy a new MacBook, which one would you go for?  Is the MacBook Pro worth what seems to be a substantial extra cost?  Do any of you run Parallels or other software to run Windows for PC-only apps?  Any other thoughts somebody looking to possibly convert should consider?  I'm just kicking tires here but with a new laptop in my near horizon, I want to check out all the options. 

There's a difference between lists of "Books I'm Reading" and "Books I Have Out From the Library".  This is because I tend to take out a lot of books that sound interesting or I've heard about via various sources (Internet, magazine articles, friend recommendations, publisher catalogues) but usually only get around to reading a few of them in the end. 

What I do instead is use the library books I have out as a "mini-library" where I can pick out a new book as I finish a different one.  (I've just finished "Shush...Dispatches From A Public Library" and "Parking Lot Rules and 75 Other Ideas For Great Parenting" - neither of which really blew me away by the way and am currently reading "X Saves The World: How Generation X Got the Shaft But Can Still Keep Everything From Sucking" which I'm quite enjoying.) 

Here's what's on my Library Bookshelf right now...
"Blood Meridian" - Cormac McCarthy
"Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks and Gangstas in the Public Library"
"Armageddon in Retrospect" - Kurt Vonnegut
"The Nasty Bits" - Anthony Bourdain
"Obama: From Promise to Power"
"Around the World in 57 1/2 Gigs" - Dave Bidini
"I Sold My Soul on Ebay"
An assortment of five or six children's board and easy books
A couple paperbacks for Shea
A couple parenting books - one on play, one on helping your child sleep
A few magazines - Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, Wired

What's that quote?  "If you want to know a man, take a look at his bookshelf?" There's truth to that although I would argue that our bookshelves are often compiled to reflect the public persona we wish to present to the world, not necessarily so that they reflect who we really are.  (How many people own copies of some "literary classic" that they've never read and never will?  How many people conveniently store their copy of the latest King/Steele/Clancy/Grisham away from their bookshelf to keep it from judging eyes?) 

So is my library bookshelf the public me or the private me?  (I'll resist the urge to say "it has to be 'public you' since you're blogging about it, dumbass!")  Well, to my credit, I didn't "forget" to list any books I have out right now (honest) although there are times when I probably would have.

But when I mentioned the two most recent library books I'd read earlier, I did neglect to "mention" the third last book I read, a cultural studies survey of professional wrestling for example.  So probably a mix of both depending on the day, the time and who's looking at it.