March of the Librarians

The annual conference of the American Library Association (ALA) is in Washington, DC this weekend. I'm attending from Thursday to Tuesday and will spend most of my time with the Public Library Association (PLA). I'm looking forward to meeting new people and observing the conference in general.

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Social Media

The lecture and discussion about social media today in LIS 2600 was pretty good. The idea that these are tools a library can use to invite people into the community is a useful way to frame the topic. Many people use these tools, so the library ought to use them too. The result may be more people playing a role and being involved in the library community.

One of the examples that speaks to the success of building a community is the open source movement. The article "The Cathedral & the Bazaar" that we read in LIS 2000 describes why open source works and how the process incorporates the best in people when they are collaborating on topics they feel passionate about.

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Pierogi Mascot Fired

This post is weakly related to libraries or technology. It is about public relations. The Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team demonstrated how little they understand public relations when they fired a pierogi mascot for writing critical statements about the Pirates on his Facebook status. Earlier in the week, the Pirates admitted to extended the contracts of Manager John Russell and GM Neal Huntington, which had been kept a secret for a year. It's really one public relations disaster after another. Did the Pirates think that no one would pick up on this juxtaposition where the pierogi was fired instead of the GM and/or Manager?

I just think it makes for interesting commentary. I'm not in favor of firing JR or Huntington (yet) but to fire the pierogi the way they did seems like no one in their office has a sense for how a story like this plays out. Not well.

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