The Obscure Reference Librarian

Here's some advice on I'm planning on implementing for my next meeting at work: Send out the presentation and supporting data beforehand. That saves the meeting time for the most important part of face-to-face meetings: The discussion.

A little humor for those librarians facing the crappy job market. How many of these have you seen on the ALA job list?

Um. No. Do not test 3-year-olds on reading and math. For pete's sake, they're 3-year-olds. Better to grade them on mudpie construction.

Investigations of and research on the CIA, its actions, and policies are about to get much harder. The CIA has decided to close its office that declassifies old files in order to save money. FOIA requests will still be handled the old way but that office will have to absorb time-based declassifications, too. The general opinion is that this will slow down the process of getting access to old materials that shed light on what the secretive agency was up to decades ago.

Another helpful little article on how to write persuasively. Again, it's great for writing on the web and also for making your case with the public or funding organizations.

Here's a great, quick read that will help you write more effectively for the web. It's aimed at marketers, but the principles are the same for online information.

The pesky spies at the NSA have got some serious wiggle room in what rules they do have about what data they can collect and keep on American citizens in the United States. Seems that if you go to the trouble of encrypting your data so that prying eyes can't read it, the NSA is allowed to hang onto it for a much longer time than if you send messages in the clear. And there's nothing saying that they can't throw their code-breakers at it to find out what it actually says.

I remember arguing this back in 2004 when I started my web development career. Library research online, with all of its different databases and pop-up windows was just too damn confusing for students. The search process needed to be fixed.

If this article is any indication, it looks like that sort of searching (which hasn't really improved in the nigh-decade since I started whining) no longer frustrates just students, but now university faculty are getting confused and sick of it.

The author makes the brave suggestion that maybe we need stop expecting students to search at all and just make a selection of appropriate materials available to them on reserve. That would be a lot of work, especially in fast-changing fields. But we're in this business to serve, so would this sort of work be the logical continuation of the services we already offer?