I love the year-end lists. (If you love year-end lists, you surely know of the exhaustive annual Fimoculous meta-list). I have put together a little year-end non-required reading list of the library-related stuff I have read this year that has really stuck with me; that I have read and re-read, or recommended to others, or has shaped my thinking about libraries, librarianship, and the web.

I think all these first appeared in 2005 (though perhaps the OPAC Manifesto had earlier origins), and it’s all available on the web (though for one article, you need access to a Project Muse subscription). I think the vast majority of the words I read this year were on a screen, rather than on paper.

Of course this list is missing loads of great stuff. If you have your own list of “greatest hits” for 2005, leave a comment or a trackback with a citation; I’d love to read more.

Tags: library, 2005, list, reading

Click through to see the list…

Non-required reading, 2005

In no particular order:

• What I Wish I Had Known by Roy Tennant in Library Journal. I want to be Roy Tennant when I grow up. I suppose if I try and learn these lessons now, I’ll have a fighting chance.
• Let’s Call It the “Ubiquitous Library” Instead . . . by Charles B. Lowry. In portal: Libraries and the Academy 5.3 (2005) 293-296. (Subscription to Project Muse needed for access). This is a clear vision of the “digital library” (one of the terms he is trying to replace with “ubiquitous library”), but it is already looking a little dated, as it doesn’t take into account some of ideas inherent in library2.0.
• What is Web 2.0? by Tim O’Reilly on the O’Reilly Network. If you read only one article on Web 2.0, this is the one to read. Web 2.0 is a contested term, but O’Reilly makes a good case that something important is happening.
• Library 2.0: The Road Ahead by John Blyberg on blyberg.net. It is a little harder to find a singular post to sum up the idea of Library 2.0. You can start with my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged library2.0, then hit Michael Casey’s Library Crunch and go from there. But this post by John Blyberg is a very good one (as is his ILS Customer Bill-of-Rights, the follow-up and all the associated responses and commentary that it generated.)
• The OPAC Manifesto by Jessamyn West and friends on librarian.net. I have been working on re-designing our catalog this year and find this manifesto inspiring, along with Blyberg’s aforementioned Bill of Rights.
• Dumb down the catalog? Yes, let’s! by Meredith Farkas on Information Wants to Be Free. While we are on catalogs, I’ll throw in this one by Meredith (check out the links in her post, too). I love Information Wants to Be Free; it sort of snuck up on me as my favorite library blog this year. It has a very high signal-to-noise ratio, and Meredith’s writing is a joy to read.
• The user interface that isn’t by Lorcan Dempsey on Lorcan Dempsey’s Weblog. We all know that the library comes up short in users’ estimation when compared to Amazon and Google. This is the clearest analysis I have read of why this is true, and, though he doesn’t mention “library 2.0,” I think his concept of “intrastructure” plays right into L2-land.
• The eruption of posts in response to Gorman’s “Blog People” rant that made late February / early March so much fun. Many of them are collected in An an Accumulation of Random Facts and Paragraphs From The Blog People on Michael Gorman by Blake Carver on LISNews.org. My favorite is probably from Neil Gaiman (scroll down past the first ellipsis).
• Just hack it by Dorothea Salo on Caveat Lector. There is nothing I like better than Dorothea on a tear. Go, Dorothea, go!
• Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags by Clay Shirky. I don’t agree with everything he says–I have a bit more faith in traditional metadata and subject headings–but Shirky makes a compelling case for folksonomy.
• 32 Small Tips to Increase Innovation Capacity for You and Your Library (three PDFs: part 1, part 2, and part 3) by Stephen Abram, via Stephen’s Lighthouse / Stephen Abram Articles and Presentations. “Small tips,” but big ideas from the big brain of Stephen Abram.