Sunday, February 11

Shaking sand out of my shoes

Just a metaphorical excuse to continue the coastal imagery. I'd like to shake out answers to a couple of comments. On style, remember that I am a copyist by trade, a collector, a librarian, a gatherer and gleaner, rather than a creator. Some of my sentences are mine. But I try to attribute those that are not, in the true bibliographic spirit. We librarians like to point to the works of others, just as museum curators showcase their gatherings so as to point to the wonders of the world. We do not pretend to be original, although we are inspired by the originals.

Okay, that was a lot of sand. Shake that out of your shoe, and let's move on.

Two practical bits. How to create tag cloud, like my "Cloud of Shards:" go to zoomclouds.egrupos.net and follow the directions. It takes a little playing around, but it's pretty easy.

On the question of how to show your past blog titles, here's the scoop, the straight stuff, the real deal.: switch to Blogger Beta . I learned a mantra somewhere in InfoLand: Beta is forever. Think about it a while; it's deep.
I also continue to drink the Kool-Aid of Google. Part of me secretly believes that I'll live to regret this slavish belly-up. But the adventuring library part says Google Ho! Onward and upward! It's cool, it works, and it's free! I really love grape and lemon-lime -- what's your favorite flavor?

Anyway, back to the question of formatting your blogpost titles. I can hardly remember the old Blogger, but in the Beta when you go to your blog and look at the tabs, you can choose "Template." Now, in the beautiful [lemon-lime] Beta version you are shown a graphical representation of the sections of your blog. the whole page. You can edit any section or create a new one (including a new "widget," such as my bookcover mashup from LibraryThing) without messing with inserting blocks of HTML into screens of code, as you did in the old Blogger. When you edit the Blog Archive it gives you several display choices.
Go for it. Switch to Blogger Beta. It's so easy. Root beer or cherry, maybe?

2 comments:

Bri Johnson said...

"a copyist by trade, a collector, a librarian, a gatherer and gleaner, rather than a creator."

That's really nice. (Though I think of you as both - creator and collector.)

I've been thinking a lot about this very thing lately. I've been thinking of myself as a "producer," or "assistant producer," (which I found on the Creating Passionate Users blog: Producers are "the people who pull it all together, support the craftspeople, and make it happen.") But I like much better the way you phrase it.

My work feels purposeless to enough of an extent to make me feel like I'm going crazy, and will have to live that way forever just because that's me.

The thing is, I want to be both creator AND collector. Gatherer and gleaner AND connector. Copyist and recontextualist.

Today I am in a terrible terrible mood. But, less so now. Thank you for that!

JLH said...

Yup. Yup to all of that. What to say? You especially are combining two quite different fields, or talens, and one question might be -- is each served, synergized, by the combining, or not? I certainly don't know.
One of my best friends in library school was Mary D., an artist who went to library school kind of on a hunch (as I did, too). I loved her because she sooo buucked the trand there of all these earnest young people interesting in studying the effects of integritive design on user interface and subsequent satisfaction, or something like that. What was it all about? Who are these people? But Mary had a quiet, sunny little apartment just enough off the main road out of town to have a cat, and butterflies on the zinnias, and an enthusiasm to discuss children's books and art.
There are a thousand stories in the Naked City, and this is but one of them. Mary's story is her own. But the artist librarian combo is a wonderful and maybe sometimes schizzy one.
Or, you could say that a lot of day to day librarianship is like childrearing, or keeping a busy house -- you're acting in response to people, patching things up, just waiting, and you're never able to get deeply into one thing. Think about it. Benefits and freedoms, but at a cost.