FRL HAS MOVED. (Second notice!) I beat a hasty retreat to http://freerangelibrarian.com.
I had been planning to do the neatnik librarian thing and only move after implementing a long list of tweaks, but the migration to MT 3.0 rendered MT Blacklist unusable, and I really wanted to move to comment registration. MT Blacklist is well-intended, but chasing after spam every day is annoying and labor-intensive. I was bombarded by comment spam this afternoon, and chose to make the move to the new site.
Come on over to http://freerangelibrarian.com! II'm trying to create a nice, tidy redirect (one of those neatnik tasks...), but feel free to forward this message to interested parties, and UPDATE YOUR FEED.
Here are some basic facts and posting/comment guidelines for Free Range Librarian.
As the tagline notes, FRL is a personal blog, owned and operated by one person. FRL is one librarian's daily meditations about librarianship and any other issue that interests her. FRL features subjective, opinionated entries without benefit of editorial review.
Unlike many blogs, FRL accepts the overhead of "comment management" in order to encourage reader discussion of the issues raised on this blog. However, FRL is not a public forum. The author, Karen G. Schneider, reserves the right to share, praise, mock, criticize, or delete any comment on this blog. The author also reserves the right to ban comments from any organization or person, either temporarily or permanently. Comment spam is routinely cleaned up with MT-Blacklist.
A good guideline to go by in posting comments on this site is to imagine you are meeting new friends of friends for coffee, and an interesting discussion arises. What would you say, and how would you say it?
Comments that have a good choice of being retained have these characteristics, as determined by the site author:
* Interesting, even if inaccurate or poorly-argued
* Amusing, intentionally or otherwise
* Historically significant
* Pertinent to the discussion
* Generally rounding things out
* Concurring with previous posts
Comments that have a good chance of being deleted have these characteristics:
* Rude, particularly to friends and colleagues of the site author
* Intolerant, particularly if homophobic, racist, sexist, or just plain mean-spirited
The author reserves the right to delete comments without warning, but may ask the poster to reconsider his or her remarks before the comment is deleted and/or the poster is blocked from this site.
Restoration to posting status may require apologies and/or promises to behave better in the future.
That title is misleading, because I am not at liberty to discuss why Free Range Librarian suddenly vanished after two well-received issues in the fall of 2002. I will have to save that for another time, another day. The salient news is that it is back.
However, I can tell you why I started Free Range Librarian. After over seven years as the "Internet Librarian" for American Libraries, I needed to try something different. American Libraries was wonderful to me; I truly loved writing for them. But I needed -- different.
It couldn't be that different, however. I do not have the soul of a blogger; I like to gather ideas like fallen or plucked fruit, spread them across the floor of my mind, and contemplate them until they ripen into my written words. And I almost always share what I write with a trusted source before I put it online, because I don't like to pass up the chance to improve what I say and how I say it. Finally, I like the idea of a monthly deadline; it has the expectant, celebratory feeling I associate with opening a new issue of Vanity Fair or settling into a seat in a darkened movie theater.
This is the result. I'm pleased with it. I am considering taping the articles, as well, because I've been playing with sound. And who knows, but I just might go wild and add a picture or two.
I hope you enjoy FRL. Please use the comment feature to share your ideas, or e-mail me at kgs @ bluehighways.com.