ALAO Leadership Retreat

Monday and Tuesday (June 13 & 14) the annual ALAO leadership retreat was held at the Inn at Honeyrun in Millersburg, OH. During the business meeting, it was my responsibility to contribute CMCIG's yearly report for 2004-2005 and indicate something new, or of interest, being considered by the Interest Group. I was happy to report we had a new co-chair, Greg Martin, and that we were currently working with a CMCIG blog for the November conference.

Our blog generated a great deal of interest among board members (an ALAO blog is being considered) and other IG chairs. As promised, I did not reveal the topic currently under discussion, or divulge the blog address. I did encourage attendance at the CMCIG sponsored session in November!

Thanks for your continued work on this worthwhile project.

Books on Blogs and Blogging

I recently purchased two books for the library with blogging as a topic. The first is Who Let the Blogs Out, by Biz Stone (reviews on amazon.com). This book includes background information on blogs and a chapter (6) titled 'Politics and Pupils: The impact of Blogging on Society' which is of interest to our endeavor as it discusses instances of blogging in education. The second title is Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq, by Riverbend (reviews on amazon.com). It is hard copy of the author's blog accounting of the war in Iraq and is a personal statement on how blogging has changed the landscape of reporting and first hand accounts of people and countries at war.

Is anyone familair with either of these titles? I have read the first and just checked out the second (fresh off of the new book shelf) today.

Blogging - in general

It is one of life's great mysteries; decide on a topic of interest and suddenly there is a plethora of information delivered to you. After our CMCIG workshop, and subsequent decision to tackle this blog project, two articles published in Library Journal landed in my mailbox.

The first, an editorial in the April 2005 issue, defended a decision made by the journal to publish an article titled "Revenge of the Blog People!" Intrigued, I searched for the article to read what all the commotion was about. While I do not agree with the broad stroke definition presented, or the attitude of the author concerning bloggers and blogs, one of the points raised is that of accountability. We have a responsibility to provide current information in a professional manner.

The second article, published in the Spring 2005 netconnect supplement, discusses blog ethics. "The Ethical Blogger" details a few simple ideas blogs and bloggers should follow. According to author Karen Schneider, there are five rules or "concepts: transparaency, fairness, cite it, get it right, and if you broke it, fix it. We should keep in mind everyone is not thrilled with blogs, their technology, or what their place should be in an academic library. It is important to represent ourselves, our IG, in a professional manner.

I'm In!

Hello All -- Do we want to talk about or contrast blogs with discussion groups like Children's Literature at Yahoo or the Childrens' Books discussion group on About. I get those in one of my news readers and had assumed that the difference between them and a blog was that the blog was a one-person venture. I did not know that we could all co-author this blog. Cool!

Educator Blogs Online

I came across this today as I was looking for Praxis resources. It's seems to blog about examples of educator blogs. I haven't really had a chance to look too closely, but wanted to make sure I shared it with the group. It's called Edblogger Praxis. It appears to link to many education blogs, with a split between higher ed and PreK-12.