Well my big news is that I will be moving to Nunavut in about a month to assume the position of Manager of the Nunavut Public Library System. This is a very exciting opportunity. I will be leaving Gander to live in Baker Lake which is roughly 500 km north of the Manitoba border. It is not quite at the Arctic Circle but fairly close to it.

The NPLS is composed of 11 branches serving the population over an area of approximately 2 million square kilometers. I am quite excited about this as it will be a good career move but also a good opportunity to implement some of the new social technologies which are being adopted by libraries in the south. Also the people I have talked to in the government of Nunavut have been very friendly and positive about the position and appear to be looking forward eagerly to my arrival. I am so very excited!

I will be extremely sorry to leave Gander and Newfoundland. I have created a wonderful home here and met many wonderful people. Mark and Anne Maire, Elaine, Natalie, Susan, Glenda, Howell and too many others to mention. But this is too good an opportunity for me to pass it up.

As it stands I finish up here on April 30, 2007 and will begin with the NPLS on May 16th so there are lots of things to do in the meantime such as getting Emmie spayed so that I won't have any little accidents!

Ryan Deschamps has an entry in his blog about what you (the public) would like us to keep and what you would like us to throw out. One of the little known facts about libraries is that we throw out books. Often the public gets very irate when they realize we are doing this but at the same time if we did not get rid of the old books and the ones no one is reading there would be no room left for the new and the popular stuff.

I know that in the system I work for the rule of thumb is to throw out a book which has not circulated in five years. This is a fairly conservative rule. Additionaslly with Reference Collection use in the basement and Non-Fiction circulatiuon stagnant the question of weeding/retention policies is critical to our redevelopment of the public library as a relevant institution. But what do you think?

This article illustrates one of the major directions libraries are taking in their attempts to get teenagers and "youngsters".

AS I TYPE this, R&B singer Jaheim's new album "Ghetto Classics" is blaring from a speaker overhead. A dozen or so teenage boys are clustered around a honeycomb of computers, chewing the fat while a couple of them watch an Akon music video and the rest surf Myspace. And just a little ways over, by the Xbox projector, a group of boys and girls decked out in their finest goth attire are brainstorming the video game of their dreams.

"You should be a dragon so you can burn people!" a guy exclaims.

"It should be set in a futuristic past and you could speak a mix of French and Italian!" throws in another boy.

"You know what?" cries one girl. "You should be able to squish insects. I love killing nasty bugs."

As we keep struggling to bring young peopl into our branches more public libraries are resorting to the innovative strategy of giving themn what they want(!). These are mainly games and an environment where they can get together with other kids to share their gaming experience. This is innovative for libraries mainly because it means bending or breaking some cardinal rules we used to associate with libraries. Food is in the library and so is noise.

Well that is the direction I am thinking we have to go in, but getting there is a slow process. There is a culture in my profession which has been built up over centuries and is only breaking down slowly. We cling to our cardigans and index cards like , like... big clinging things. It must be too early in the morning. I need more coffee

Many people might not be aware of the critical role the US governement's Library of Congress plays in the world of Librarians. It is mainly because the US governement does not claim copyright on the LC classification or subject headings that we have so many excellent public and academic libraries in North America. However, recently with the development of metadata and evolving "folksonomies" the role of LoC and their library tools are changing. In late February, the Library of Congress announced it was holding an “open” meeting on March 8, 2007 at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. Comments were invited. Karen Scheinder wrote this scalding comment. One of her comments which resonated with me was this one.

... we are behaving like the train companies, who thought they were in the train business, not the transportation business, and like them, there are already signs that the “train business” we do is on artificial life support. We are not even close to being the first service of choice for information seekers; we are pretty much down there with asking one's mother.

That is one of the most accurate and damning comments I have heard about libraries and it pretty much echoes my own opinions. We as a profession are fiddling while Rome burns. The ultimate result of this will be that we will increasingly become a niche service foir the aged until they decide to move us into the old age homes. In the meantime Libraries by another name, Internet Resource Centres will evolve and that will be that.

I have been disturbingly quiet lately as life beat me down but I will be posting several items over the next few days as I do reports on my attendance at the annual Ontario Library Association SuperConference. Sessions I attended included

• Thursday
  RADICAL TRUST: WHY '2.0' REALLY MATTERS TO LIBRARIES by Doug Horne
  INFORMATION IS NOT ENOUGH: SHAPING THE USER EXPERIENCE by Joan Frye Williams 
  NEXT GENERATION CATALOGUE: NOT SO CONFIDENTIAL: EXPOSING 2.0 WEB SITES by John Blyberg 
• Friday
  PRODUCE YOUR OWN LIBRARY TV SHOWS: LITERACY IN A BOX by  Brenda WIlson
  BEST PRACTICES FOR SOCIAL SOFTWARE IN LIBRARIES by Michael Stephens
• Saturday 
  SOLUTIONS FOR A NEW GENERATION by Max Valiquette 
  TOP TECH TRENDS Panel with Michael Stephens, Amanda Etches-Johnson and John Blyberg 
  SOCIAL TOOLS: MORE THAN JUST A GOOD TIME by Jenn Horwath and Cynthia Williamson

I didn't plan to attend these sessions as much as I lucked into them through the good advice of friends at the Conference. The sessions with Doug Horne, John Blyberg and Michael Stephens were particularly good.

 I found myself during the sessions writing down lists of webpages I had never heard of but which were very intriguing. Services like "Library Thing" and "Last FM" sound fantastic. But I am still absorbing heaps of info so it will take a few days at best before I can make any real sense of what I have seen and heard. But as I describe the sessions I will be linking to locations and examples on the web.