Blogging about Professional Blogs
inkdroid by Ed Summers
Earlier this semester I started following the blog inkdroid by Ed Summers. Summers currently the Lead Developer at Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. Previously he worked for the Library of Congress (LOC) and has 20 years of experience working with libraries and archives in the public and private sector. I choose to follow this blog because of Summers’ connection with technology for libraries and his previous work with the LOC
I must admit much of what Summers writes about is beyond my comprehension. Hopefully, I will better understand some of the terminology as I take more technology classes. One interesting project that he has been working on in his spare time, which he talks about in his post on August 30, is cataloging tweets related to the protest and political climate surround Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri. As someone who has worked at the LOC, the home of Twitter Archives, Summers is someone who is very interested in recording history through social media, particularly Twitter (you can read more about the Twitter Archive here). Summers created a command line utility (which he makes available through his blog) to search as far back as Twitter would allow him to capture tweets. That is about two weeks. Unfortunately, he could not retrieve tweets from the first two days following Michael Brown’s death, but he was able to capture over 13.5 million tweets. He used another open source code to sort the tweets into manageable packets.
Since his August 30 post, he has been approached by three people to share the tweets that he compiled. He notes in his "On Forgetting" post, that one person worked for a defense contracting company and the two other people were professors from research universities who approached him about the tweets. He ignored the contractor for his own ethical reasons, and he explained to the university professors that due to Twitters service terms agreement he could only make available the Twitter IDs that mentioned Ferguson. However, he could share more of the information that he collected with his employer, University of Maryland. In this post he linked to the Internet Archive page where he uploaded people’s Twitter ID.
I like inkroid for several reasons. In his post Summers covers a wide variety of topics, social justice, archival practices, social media, coding and technology which are all related to library and information science. He makes archives seem current and timely rather than a place with moldy old books, documents, and artifacts. Also this is the first time that I read about someone addressing digital-born artifacts.
After following Summer’s blog for a few months I also began to follow him on Twitter
But You Don’t Look Like a Librarian
I follow a lot of librarians on my tumblr feed, but this one stood out to me the most “But You Don’t Look Like a Librarian…” because I don’t think I look like a librarian or whatever that may be. The Blogger does not give her specific name, so it is much more casual than Ed Summer’s blog, which all about his profession. She describes herself as follows: “I am an academic librarian with a wide range of interests from information literacy to archives. I am also surrounded by otherwise intelligent people who think it's clever to ask me where my glasses are. I shush them and move on.” I find that wildly hilarious.
This blog gives a glimpse into the daily life of an academic librarians. For example, two weeks ago she explains students’ amazement at learning how to use a JSTOR and Google Scholar with a Harry Potter gif:
She also post about Public Service Loan forgiveness programs and points out that it would be something that most librarians should look into because we do often work in the public sector and we have very expensive degrees which we have to pay back.
Plus she discussed her University's library inviting local high school librarians to discuss information literacy, collections, and helping ease students’ transition from high school to college. I think this is an amazing example of community outreach especially for a university that can sometimes be insular.
I really enjoy the blogger’s sense of humor, and it’s refreshing that she might be my age too. I think she does a wonderful job of balancing personal and professional interests on her blog. I think my blog would be more like hers over time.