2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 200,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 4 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!

Click here to see the complete report.

Lauren Pressley Wants to Give You Her Book!

Editor’s note: This is the first of a two part series. An interview with Andromeda Yelton of Gluejar will be posted next week on Thursday, December 6.

We drew you in, didn’t we? Well, it’s true: librarian and author Lauren Pressley is working with crowdfunding startup unglue.it to provide free access to her book So You Want To Be a Librarian. Read our interview with Lauren to learn more about the book, unglue.it, and how you can contribute!

Welcome New Writers!

We are delighted to announce that Hack Library School has welcomed nine new contributing writers. We were all very impressed with the range of interests and experiences that they will bring to the blog.  Without further ado, here they are!

Wikipedia, Libraries and the GLAM Project

Participants at the Wikipedia edit-a-thon held at the Indiana University Archives.

How often do you use Wikipedia? If you’re anything like me, probably a lot! I’ve been interested in exploring the relationship between libraries and what I’m pretty sure it’s the only encyclopedia I’ve ever used for a long time (giant physical copies were already on their way out by the time I was old enough to use one). Sad story, though: when I was an undergrad preparing to apply for library school, I included a link to the Wikipedia page on stereoscopes in a post on my personal blog about my university’s special collections. I was soon told by a librarian that I would be looked down on as a future library professional if I included links to Wikipedia in a post I wanted to be taken seriously. I remembering wondering right then if I would fit in in the library world–I wasn’t citing it in my dissertation, I just wanted readers to see a picture and get a brief overview of what the contraption was. From then on, I was constantly aware of this Wikipedia/library tension boiling under the surface, but I wanted no part of it.

My Experience at the HathiTrust Uncamp

A word cloud showing the most frequently occurring words in a selection of dime novels from the HathiTrust corpus.

On September 10^th and 11^th, I attended the HathiTrust Research Center UnCamp held in Bloomington, Indiana. The UnCamp was a joint venture organized by Indiana University, my institution, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. All in all, the UnCamp spanned a day and a half of demonstrations and hands-on examples geared to orienting attendees toward new uses of HTRC data. As a graduate student, I was lucky enough to have my registration paid for by IU’s Data to Insight Center in exchange for volunteering throughout the UnCamp. For my post today I wanted to briefly share my experience.