Besides the excellent content, it’s fun reading Karen Schneider’s Free Range Librarian blog these days because she’s discovering the sense of community and the unexpected level of conversation you get when you blog with open comments. I say “unexpected” because you never expect anyone else to really care enough to take the time to enter a comment, and yet it turns out a lot of people care enough. I never, ever anticipated that side of it, and it’s become one of the things I really love about my blog. Trackback fills in a whole other side of the conversation, the cross-blog one.

And that’s what library organizations don’t get – conversation. That’s why ALA, LITA, ILA, and other major institutions don’t blog, certainly not with open comments. Even this seems beyond their reach right now. But that’s what we need to open up – a conversation with the outside world, as well as amongst ourselves.

Bonus FRL quote (emphasis is mine): “Donning my lii.org hat, we had a remarkable education when we added RSS feeds. Now people find us through the blog-finding agents. Librarians, including me, suck at marketing, but by adding RSS feeds, we stumbled onto a way for the audience to find us, instead of the glacially slow process of dissemination through our existing readership.”

OCLC is is loosening up and having some fun in a Google Labs kind of way!

OCLC Research Software Contest

“In celebration of libraries and their heritage of technological innovation, OCLC Research is sponsoring a software contest to encourage innovation in the use of web-based services for libraries.

Prize

• $2,500 in cash
• Visit with OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc., in Dublin, Ohio
• Potentially have your code incorporated in OCLC services for libraries

The challenge

OCLC is providing a set of bibliographic records extracted from WorldCat plus a set of services:

• ResearchWorks
• Terminology Services

You may also use Open WorldCat, either by simply incorporating links to publicly accessible records or by enrolling in Open WorldCat's Partner Access program. Contact us if you wish to discuss enrolling in this program for the purposes of this contest.

Your mission is to write a program that does something interesting and innovative with the WorldCat data using at least one of the OCLC-provided services. You must submit a working prototype.

Part of your job is to convince us of why your program is interesting and why it will help libraries and/or library users; other than that, you're free to implement whatever strikes your fancy.”

And they were smart enough to ask Jon Udell to be a judge – good call! I hope we see some really cool stuff come out of this, in more than just a proof-of-concept way. Makes me wish I could actually program. Entries are due by midnight on May 15. If you’re entering, good luck!

I had to go all the way over to LISNews to find out that a sister Library System here in Illinois has started a totally awesome project called Libraries Matter. Here at home, our kids saved up some money to buy the 10–pack of Lance Armstrong yellow wristbands because they’re all the rage at school. Can you imagine if we could start something similar with these blue ones for libraries? Brilliant job, Alliance Library System!

One thing, though – how about offering packs smaller than 50 so that ordinary folks like myself can buy some and give them out to friends, kids, etc.? Let’s get some grassroots support going, not just top down from the institutional level! Then, let’s think about how we can use these on Advocacy Day this year.

Tangent: When visiting the ALS web site tonight, I realized they’ve added blogs to the home page (kind of, sort of). Sweet! Unfortunately, no RSS feeds to be found anywhere, which means I won’t be able to add them to my aggregator, which means I’ll have to keep relying on other web sites to highlight ALS projects for me. Not sweet. C’mon, ALS, show us the RSS!