New blog for library stuff

I have started a new blog to focus on issues in libraries and librarianship. It’s called Daniel, A librarian in Alaska and can be found at danielcornwall.tumblr.com.

Twitter Followers: The End of My Feed is Near! Options if You Want Them

In the last couple of days, I’ve noticed a few new Twitter followers who don’t seem to be spammers. I found this odd as practically the only Twitter activity on my account these days are automated posts from this blog and my public Facebook page.

A few weeks ago I decided to terminate my Twitter account at the end of 2012. I just really don’t pay attention to it anymore. I don’t wish to people to think I’m snubbing them if I don’t notice an @danielcornwall for a month or two.

Many people find Twitter VERY useful and I won’t argue otherwise. It just doesn’t fit into my communications mix right now which is mostly Facebook, e-mail, Tumblr (for my more leisure side) a tiny smidge of LinkedIn, and even tinier smidge of Google+. In 2013, I plan to make more use of LinkedIn because it seems to be a decent “professional/non-political” space to be in.

So if you’re one of my 215 followers and don’t want to miss my minimal Twitter content, here’s what to do:

1. Subscribe to this blog, either by the “email subscription” box in the upper right hand of my blog, or via the blog’s rss feed.
2. Subscribe to my public Facebook feed or “like” my page on Facebook.

And if you won’t miss my Twitter feed? I’m not hurt. It’s a HUGE twitterverse after all. I just hate to see people sign up for a feed days before it ends.

Reminder about photo blog

For those of you getting this blog through RSS/feed readers, I wanted to remind you that the vast bulk of my photo blogging is taking place on Tumblr. The address is http://alaskanlibrarian.tumblr.com/ and it is usually pretty active. Plus, if you like my photos but don’t care for my politics or library science musings, the Tumblr blog is for you. It is virtually all photos all of the time.

 

New Photo Blog on Tumblr

One of the occupational hazards of being a modern technology/digital resources librarian is the compulsion to experiment with “new to him/her” technologies. I like to think I keep a good handle on this most of the time, but this week is not “most of the time.”

I decided to start playing around with Tumblr and so far it seems to be a superior platform for blogging photos from Flickr than WordPress is. One special thing I like is that the blogging to Tumblr app on Flickr imports my Flickr tags to my Tumblr tags. When I blog a photo to WordPress from within Flickr, the category is listed as “uncategorized” and stays that way until I log into WordPress itself and fix it.

You can find my photo blog at http://alaskanlibrarian.tumblr.com/. It is titled “Photos by an Alaskan” and the intention is that it will be about 90% photos with a little bit of tumblr style reblogging and the occasional Q&A. If you’re a user on Tumblr and enjoy my photos, I encourage you to follow me.

I’ve posted links to the tumblr blog on this site.

My opening of the Tumblr blog doesn’t mean that photos here will entirely stop. Nor does it mean that I’m shutting down this blog. At least not any time soon.

 

Presenting My Public Facebook Page

After some thought I have established a Facebook “fan page” for myself at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Daniel-Cornwall-Librarian/147356955366122 that will focus on the professional side of my life. Should you be here primarily to hear about library and government information resources, I invite to check out this page. You don’t have to be a Facebook member to view the page, but if you are a Facebook member you can like the page and get a politics/religion free feed of items. “Liking” the page also allows you to comment on my items.

The content of the Facebook page will be a mix of links to things I find interesting in a professional or hobby sense, plus some longer items excerpted from my current writing project, a writer’s guide to government information. I’m writing the bulk of this book during this month (National Novel Writing Month), but I expect the project to keep me busy for at least a year (assuming I don’t drop it).  There may also be some commentary on library items from time to time. If there’s a way to plug in a RSS feed from it, I may do that once I decide to drop the “We are the 99%” photo feed. Not that I’m there yet.

If you happen to be a fan of the Alaska Agency Databases series, those posts aren’t moving. Future installments will stay on Alaskan Librarian. Likewise with political/religious/personal posts once I get around to doing them again.

See you here and/or on Facebook. If you’re in the North like I am, stay warm!

Sometimes it’s the little things that count and annoy

Since most of my readers appear to use RSS feeds to consume content from this blog, you might not have noticed that the front page of my blog looked weird ever since I posted Three Books on Cooper Landing.

I noticed it a few posts after, but only got around to fixing it till Saturday, May 28th. To isolate the problem, I reduced the number of posts that appeared on my front page until the front page looked normal. Then I added back the next post and confirmed that the display looked odd only when that post was displaying. That turned out to be the Cooper Landing post.

WordPress’ default is WYSIWYG, but you can easily switch to editing HTML. I did so and decided that in the book citations I copied over from WorldCat there were some unmatched <div> tags. These tags without an obvious home probably somehow latched onto the invisible CSS that powers my WordPress theme and started messing with my display, throwing my Flickr widget down to the bottom of the page.

I removed all the <div> tags in the Cooper Landing post and all was well. <div> tags have also been given me headaches at work. Those headaches are going away as I learn more basic CSS but I’m still annoyed that I keep running into problems that are as obscure as a single </div> tag throwing everything off.

Caveat Lector

Thanks to my new “subscribe by e-mail” feature, I can tell a couple of librarians have signed up for this blog over the past few days. I suspect others may have picked up the feed as a result of my recent participation in Library Day in the Life Round 6.

If you’re a librarian who has signed up in the last week, you’re certainly more than welcome to stick around as long as you find this blog engaging or not too annoying to unsubscribe. I thought I should warn you that the title of this blog, “Alaskan Librarian”, refers more to me as a person and less to the subject matter of this blog. That is, this is a blog written by a librarian in Alaska and not so much about libraries or librarianship in Alaska though this does show up from time to time.

The one library-like topic you’ll see here regularly is my Three books on … series.  This series appears once a week on Saturdays. I am working through the list of communities on the Alaska Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development’s Community Database. I take the names of inhabited communities from that list and perform a subject search in WorldCat. I then list out three books (when available) along with reprinting the “location and climate” section of the community from the Community Database. The books are chosen on the basis of interesting titles, and I give some preference to titles available online. My aim with this series is twofold – to publicize the availability of the amazingly useful Community Database and to show Alaskans that no matter where they live, some library has books relevant to their community.

Aside from the “Three Books on …” series, I can go for weeks without mentioning a library related subject. Aside from my participation in “Library Day in the Life”, I tend not to write about my workplace. I like my job. A lot. But I don’t think I need to chronicle it here on a regular basis. While I do get frustrated with work (who doesn’t?) a blog is NOT the place to take out my frustrations with work. I don’t find that professional.

So, what do I write about? Alaska (though NOT state politics), Astronomy, Civics, History, and Photography, among many other subjects.

If you’re eclectic in your interests, I think you’ll like it here. If you were hoping for the ins and outs of librarianship in Alaska, you’ll need to look elsewhere. You have been warned. Thanks for stopping by regardless of whether you stay.

Alaskan Librarian by e-mail

I’m testing out a WordPress feature for a colleague. Specifically, the ability to receive new posts by e-mail. We want to see how the e-mails are formatted. I didn’t want to do this for his production blog, so I’m doing it here.

If you are a site visitor, you should see a e-mail subscription link in the upper right hand corner. If you’re not a registered WordPress user, it will ask you for your e-mail address. If you are a registered WordPress user, all you have to do is click on the link. Either way, you’ll start to see my posts by e-mail.

Leave me a comment if you think this is a useful feature or have feedback on the entries by e-mail feature. I’m going to post a few more entries tonight so that I’ll have something to look at in my inbox.

Try Your Hand at Hunting Extrasolar Planets

The latest entry on my Astronomy by Internet page is Planet Hunters, another project from the Zooniverse team. Planet Hunters is using public data released by the Kepler mission to look for planets around other stars and to make new discoveries about variable stars. The project is based out of Yale University.

Want to try your hand at finding the next extrasolar planet or odd variable star? Log on and start checking those light curves. You can follow the team’s work on their blog or through their Twitter feed.

Milky Way Project Added to Astronomy by Internet

I’ve updated my Astronomy by Internet page to add the Zooniverse’s Milky Way Project.

Description from site:

The Milky Way Project aims to sort and measure our galaxy, the Milky Way. Initially we’re asking you to help us find and draw bubbles in beautiful infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Understanding the cold, dusty material that we see in these images, helps scientists to learn how stars form and how our galaxy changes and evolves with time.

For more information, see the Zooniverse blog post Site Goes Live. If you give it a whirl, let me know what you think.