Today's Soapbox

Hold on while I climb up.

Okay.

Everyone who wants to do a good thing today needs to go sign the Petition for Public Access to Publicly Funded Research in the United States. You can follow this link or you can click on the "go stick it to the man" button on my sidebar. Because even if you don't care about having access to publicly-funded research, there are other people who really want it and would make great use out of it. Plus it's research that we have paid for, so we darn well should be able to see it and use it. It's a step in the right direction towards Open Access and Access to Knowledge and information goods not being controlled by greedy rights-infringing corporations and don't you make me post my entire dissertation up here because I will. Just go sign the thing; it will earn you karma points. I promise.

If you haven't downloaded Firefox after I already told you to, then you really need to get on that. At least upgrade to Internet Explorer 7, even though that is so not Sticking it to the Man. I'm just sayin'.

Kids these days don't even know what an encyclopedia is anymore. What is up with that? And it's not like they're off using something better. They don't actually know how to use the Internet to do research. Their parents just drop them off at the library and expect them to figure it out. There are so many things I wish I could be teaching people how to do with computers at the library. There are so many free programs and so many databases that have already been paid for. I could run a "Homework Help" class. I could run a "Why Firefox is True and Will Bless Your Life with Bunnies and Unicorns" class. I could run a "Here are all the cool things you can do with Google and a few of the things you really shouldn't" class. It would be amazing. But I'm stretched thin and frazzled as it is. Plus the library's computers are steaming piles of crap.

I'm trying to work on my professional development by reading good library blogs and listserves and keeping up with what's happening in Libraryland, but it's making me feel a bit overwhelmed. People are doing such cool things, and I know the point is to just do the things that are possible for you and your library and are the most needed, but I don't know if we'll ever get to the point of doing some of this stuff.

I need business cards. Why don't I have them? How am I supposed to network at this week's Utah Library Association conference if I don't have business cards?

I am officially done having people ask me why I need a master's degree to work in a library. I am not talking about Singin's sweet husband here, because he was just taking an interest and had lots of good questions & suggestions. Also he made me scones. So he wins. Everyone else, though, will get a kick in the teeth, a million nasty papercuts, and a dip in a vat of lemon juice. I'll just start printing out librarian job descriptions and handing them out. "Can you do that? I didn't think so." People think that stuff like library catalogs and search engines and databases just happen and magically show them things. Only guess what? There is so, so, so very much more going on there than we think there is. And it took a lot of work to make it seem that simple, so that even an idiot (Read: The next person who says "You have to get a master's degree to stamp books??" to me) can use it. And to those people I say, when you consider that there is more information available on everything under the sun than there ever has been, you had better be grateful that there are people out there who figure out how to organize it all and make it so that out of all those billions of things you can find the one thing that you actually want and need. And you should be grateful that there are people who care about whether you're getting good & accurate information instead of standing back and letting natural selection finish you off.

The End.

Climbing back down.