March 2007
Volume 27 No. 9

Reference Picks
This month's picks lean toward Web 2.0 uses, featuring the scholarly and trendy. We also include tax sites for procrastinators.

apophenia - making connections where none previously existed
Danah Boyd, PhD candidate at the School of Information (SIMS) at the University of California - Berkeley and a Fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communications, is creating a buzz among social commentators and librarians with her research on users of social networking sites such as MySpace. Her "best of apophenia" entry links to resources on trends, services, blogging, design and privacy. Her website, Zephoria.org, has 3 links: her blog, apophenia. her publications, installations, presentations & workshop papers, and her profile.

Twitter - twitter.com
Text message your whereabouts and activities on your Twitter page. Michael Stephens and Democrat presidential candidate, John Edwards already have Twitter pages. Learn about this site from its blog. Start a Twitter account by reading its Terms of Service. See who's on now.

Tax Help from the Palo Alto Library
These sites were profiled in the January 2007 issue of the library's Hot Off the Shelf newsletter. The sites for these commercial e-filing vendors are more direct and quicker to use for forms and help in filing your tax returns, although the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and California Franchise Tax Board's sites are still popular and helpful.

• 1040.com, published by Drake Software, makes it easy to find your form. It has a tax calculator, tax calendar, tax headlines and more.
• unclefed.com, published by National Tax Services, has much the same information as 1040.com, but is more geared to tax professionals. Here you can easily find the latest IRS Bulletins, Tax Court cases, and Government Accounting Office (GAO) reports on the IRS.

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Questions and Answers
In preparation for each month's Search, we accumulate websites we think you might like for the Reference Picks section. Dr. Saad Eskander's diary is one of the ones we saved. However, in trying to see how our colleagues react and to get some background, we ended up making a stumper story. We hope you like it.

The Diary of Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraq National Library and Archive.
Posted by the British Library, this diary details the day-to-day struggles of these librarians to do their work of retrieving, restoring, and replacing documents of a culture and civilization that underlies the Western and Middle Eastern civilizations. The comments and stories on these related sites, below, detail the heroic efforts of the director and his staff and suggest ways that information professionals can help.

• Cemetery of Books. Keynote speech the Internet Librarian International 2004 conference held in London Oct. 10—12, 2004.
• Baghdad Day to Day: Librarian’s Journal. This article by Patricia Cohen published in the February 7, 2007 New York Times is an ad-free permalink on the blog that is the information page about the Robert Goldwater Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The library's information page is also an example of the use of a blog as a library web site. In contract, the library's entry on the museum's "Library and Study Centers" page lists only its hours.
• Response to the Destruction of Iraq’s Historical Collections. This essay by Heela Naqshband, guest contributor on Razorcake.org, published on October 27, 2006, describes the response by library and archivist organizations to the destruction of Iraq's national archive. The bibliography at the end of the article is extensive.
• Rebuilding Iraq's Once-Prized Library by Lourdes Garcia-Navarro aired on NPR's Weekend Edition on Sunday, January 9, 2005.
  Listen to the then-hopeful Saad Eskander and hear the sounds of rebuilding in this NPR broadcast.
• Ready Steady Book. Although the entry isn't as informative as the others in this list, Michael Thwaite, the blogger, is. Ready Steady Book is packed with book reviews and author features, and it might inspire your serious readers.

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News from our Members
Library 2.0 in Monterey County Free Library's Seaside Branch
Beata Obydzinski, Reference Librarian at the Seaside Branch of the Monterey County Free Libraries, has been using LibraryThing for the library's book group for a year and a half. The Seaside "Food for Thought" Book Club meets once a month on a Saturday 1:00pm - 2:30pm. Instead of an in-depth discusion of one book, participants take a turn to talk about their favorite books or the ones that they're currently reading. Participants who belong to other book clubs mine these meetings for more book suggestions.

In one year, the group discussed about 300 books. After each meeting, Beata posts an annotated bibliography of the books discussed on LibraryThing.

To see Beata's list, go to LibraryThing - www.librarything.com, click on the "Search" tab at the top, and input beata in the "search users" field. In her profile, Beata describes the book club and posts the meeting schedule for the next few months. You can click on her reviews and more. The user, seasidereader, who is the president of the Seaside Friends of the Library and a member of the book group, also has posted her books, her profile and the tags she shares with Beata.

Now Beata has expanded her usage of the LibraryThing to train library staff in Readers Advisory. Here is what she does:

"When new staff members ask me for reading recommendations, I create accounts for them in the LibraryThing. Then I send them this email:

"I am glad you asked me for some reading recommendations. To facilitate it, I created your free account on my favorite social computing website, The Library Thing. Go to: www.librarything.com. Your user name is------ your password is -----.

"Please don't change your password so that I can add new titles to your list. If you want to see my catalog, you can search my username beata. I suspect that some of those books you may have already read. Please familiarize yourself with that website. It is easy and fun to use. Once you have read one of those recommended books, please add your tags, ratings and comments. This way I will know that you read the book and you will feel comfortable talking with patrons about it. If you read any book on your own, please add it to your catalog too. You will see how useful it is to have something in common with your patrons. We librarians are expected to read a lot, but time is limited..."

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