Has any librarian not linked to and blogged about this post on 100 Terrific Tips and Tools for Blogging Librarians? Most of these tips will be useful to anyone who wants to be a good blogger.
Writers write about writing and bloggers blog about blogging. We all have much to learn.
From the July 13, 2009, ATC, NPR story, Librarians Go Wild for Gold Book Cart:
‘….Five teams of librarians — dressed in costumes ranging from Vikings to Elvis Presley — competed for the coveted gold book cart. They marched in drill-team formation, equipped with metal book carts.
Gretchen Roltgen, a 62-year-old librarian with neon blue hair, says it’s a long way from Baraboo, Wis., to “the big dance.”
This is a Quick and Easy Guide. More complicated ones exist, but it just doesn’t have to be that hard – and this way you have no excuse for not speaking out:
In a Nutshell (example of a 4-step script follows):
1) Who IS your legislator? One quick way to find out is to use this Find Your Legislator tool. It will give you your state and federal legislators’ names and contact information.
If you remember that Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book was about how to get Free Stuff, and stuff for free (beg, borrow, and steal), this blog post from the Beaverton (Oregon) City Library is better, much better – and you’ll stay on the side of the angels. No stealing, please. Scrounging, yes, but stealing, no.
It has been said that lawyers are frustrated writers. Well, so are most writers! Visit Oregon Authors, a new website that also has links to Oregon writer and reader groups.
As for law library blogs (and bloggers are writers if nothing else), there are 185 of us already, blogging professionally as law librarians (mostly).
I like this: Publisher Confidential. Writers might find it useful too.
It’s from the creators of Unshelved, who have been talking, and listening, to public librarians for a long time. You can download Publisher Confidential (PDF), free!
Law librarians could probably add a few more pages, but we’re not as restrained as the public librarians featured in Publisher Confidential. Maybe we’ve just been pushed a bit too much and too hard in the past couple of decades and are may be approaching “Fleeting Expletives” territory.
The newly redesigned Washington County (Oregon) website is up and running, however …
One of the many perils of migrating to a new county webpage is that links from this Oregon Legal Research blog to research guides on the Washington County (Oregon) Law Library’s (WCLL) webpage will be misdirected. Not all of them, but too many. I am slowly making my way through the cleanup, including updating previous blog post links to some of our most frequently used research guides.
Here is the list so far, with correct links for the guides I’ve been told are not linking properly from old posts. (You can also get to these guides from the WCLL webpage.)
Owning the copyright is not enough. You have to protect it.
If you write books and publish them, in paper or online, through a publisher or by yourself, you need to learn how to protect your copyright interests. Let your imagination be your guide. Who would have envisioned these events? Don’t leave it to the science fiction and fantasy writers to imagine life, and publishing, in the future.
1) Google Book Settlement (See also the Guide for the Perplexed and posts at Library Law, here and here , click on googlebooksettlement in the Library Copyright cloud or at the ALA GBS site.)
The very funny title leads into a very, very interesting blog post from BlawgIT. I love it also because it ties in with what law librarians say all the time:
Don’t Treat Your Law Librarian Like a Lawyer! Law librarians know and teach legal research. If you have a legal problem, ask a law librarian how to research it. If you want a solution to your legal problem, hire a lawyer!
But hear it from a lawyer:
Two news articles that ran this week in the Oregonian shared a theme that I wish would carry through to another story I’ll tell in a separate blog post. Before getting to that, I’m talking about these two stories:
1) Multnomah County’s drug court faces budget ax, by Aimee Green, The Oregonian, Tuesday March 10, 2009
“A county department that funds a world-recognized drug rehabilitation program is offering to sacrifice it to help balance Multnomah County’s budget.
Oregon Legal Research Blog