There’s currently a lot of discussion about techie women in librarianship (which now has far too long a string of episodes for me to sort out and link here, but somebody should collect them all together in some appropriate spot: Lazyweb?). Kudos to Karen Schneider for her recent post on LGBT librarians. I’ve felt some kinship in the discussion of women in technology librarianship, but I didn’t really feel I had enough library experience to talk about it coherently. Karen’s done a good job pointing out the similarities and differences in relating to the techie library world being LGBT vs. being a woman or of color (namely, it’s pretty obvious that someone is a woman, but LGBT-ness isn’t very visible). She doesn’t really have any answers, and I don’t either, but her observations are good.

Something I’ve occasionally wished for and just found out actually existed: proximity searching in Google (via a third-party using the Google API). Only up to three words away, but still, that’s useful.

• via Thing-ology

I’ve been pretty quiet lately, because there are three weeks left of library school (eep!) and I’ve been super-busy.

However, I’m briefly popping my head out of the burrow to engage in a little shameless self-promotion. I’d like to call the attention of the reader to two things I’ve been working on lately. First, you can check out my article in this month’s Library Journal, “Shoestring Digital Library”. It’s based on my experiences building a prototype digital library using Ruby on Rails (detailed in an earlier post) and provides some ideas for building digital libraries using software from outside the usual pool of suspects.

Second, I’ve been working this semester in an internship-for-credit with the wonderful folks at PINES who are developing Evergreen, an open-source ILS. It’s currently in public beta and it’s shaping up quite well! I’ve been making use of my technical writing skills by working on the documentation. (Be aware that it’s still in progress, one of many things I’ll be working fiendishly on in the next few weeks. But it’s also a wiki, so feel free to contribute if you have the inclination!)