blasts from the pasts and looks towards the future

In the course of working on a web page for my summer class, I was reminiscing about some of the very first web sites I remember seeing.  Many have gone the way of the dinosaur (the Iowa City/Cedar Rapids ICON, an alternative weekly that I read online in college and wrote for after I graduated, but a few are still around (I’m so happy to see that Fireland is still alive, even if it is described as rickety). 

Also still around, and now a blog as well as a repository of wonderful things, is Literary Kicks, which points to the coolest use of Google Maps I’ve seen so far: a map of Sal Paradise’s journey in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

The web site I look at most often these days is the fairly new InciWeb, which tracks forest fires around the country (and gives updates on them via RSS!).  The about page notes that InciWeb is currently being tested and will be “used nationally in the 2007 Fire Season.”  Thanks to an IM conversation today with Steve Lawson, it occurred to me that perhaps a few others out there in western states might want to tuck it away for future reference. 

Our fire is still burning, although many of the 332 Forest Service personnel who were here to fight it have now left.  A hundred or so of them were camped up by the school (and thus also by the library) last week.  People frequently came into the library to hang out or check e-mail or look through the books in our booksale or browse our magazines.  I can’t tell you how many of them were amazed that we had internet access.  “Actually,” I said, becoming a walking talking ALA quotable fact sheet, “98% of public libraries in the US offer internet access to the public!  And have I told you about our databases?  And you can download your digital photos using our handy memory card reader on this computer where I’ve got Picasa installed!”  Some days I frighten even myself–but I hope they left with a few more ideas about public libraries than they had when they came in.

wyoming librarianship: another day

Today was, while not exactly typical, interesting, and since people seem to like these day-in-the-life posts, and since I haven’t done one in awhile, I thought I’d write it up.

The big news around here at the moment is that we’ve got a forest fire burning about 30 miles from here, at Venus Creek in the Shoshone National Forest.  (And yes, you can now get RSS feeds for forest fires).   The whole area is blanketed in smoke: this evening the sky was dark and the moon was shining red long before the sun set.  My friends took some pictures of the smoke on Sunday, which I uploaded to Flickr.  When I left work today, there were bits of ash in my car.

Today was the day after the last day of summer reading for the kids, which meant that my coworker, who runs the program, spent the day figuring out which kids will get which of our fabulous prizes at the party on Thursday.  They’ll also get cookies from the Meeteetse Chocolatier.  In addition to the usual day’s work–recording statistics, working the circulation desk, walking down to the post office at 10 to get the mail, and so on, I spent the day typing up lists of discarded westerns and self-help books.  The Wyoming State Library has prepared a guide to the needs of the libraries at Wyoming state institutions, and I’ve been e-mailing with some of the librarians there to see if they’d be interested in some of our discarded and donated books. 

The population of Meeteetse doubled this afternoon and evening as riders from the Tour de Wyoming poured into town.  Many of them came in to the library and were pleased but surprised when I told them that yes, we had internet access, and yes, they could use a computer, and no, they didn’t have to sign up or show ID or anything.  I had planned to stay after work for about an hour to do some work for my online course before I went swimming.  There were still a number of bicyclists using the computers, reading magazines, and generally doing library-ish things at 4, when we normally close, so I decided I might as well just keep the library open for an extra hour, since I was going to be there anyway.

This evening I went to dinner with a friend at the Spoke.  Aside from the owners and staff, we were pretty much the only locals there, and so we regaled the out of towners with various tales (some tall and some not) and heard, more than once, someone say, “Wow. . . you get to live here!”–to which I could only nod and say, “Yes.  Yes, I do.”

wyoming librarians on the web

While it’s true that Chicago still ranks as the center of the library webiverse, we’re not doing too badly out here in the West.  Here are a few Wyoming librarians I know of on the web.  If you are one and aren’t listed here, or if you know of others, please let me know, and I’ll add them. 

Meg Martin and Katie Jones run the Library Law Letter, which contains “summaries for recently decided Wyoming Supreme Court opinions and Wyoming State Law Library Information: announcements, how-to tips, and services.”  I’ve already learned several good things from their tips, and they’ve given me some great law-related collection development advice.

A librarian at the University of Wyoming in Laramie runs a blog called Jag soker job (that o in “soker” should have an umlaut over it, but my keyboard skills are lacking), and she’s got a Flickr account with some gorgeous photos of Wyoming scenery. 

Erin Kinney, the Digital Initiatives Librarian at the Wyoming State Library, has been adding photos all summer to a Flickr set on the state library’s relocation