Thompson-Gale's Contemporary Authors: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Nonfiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television (ISBN 13: 9780787678777, ISBN 10: 0787678775) is slated to be a sure-fire winner with information professionals and library patrons alike.

At a mere US$225.00 per copy, many libraries will want to include multiple copies in their collection, with "biographical information on more than 120,000 modern novelists, poets, playwrights, nonfiction writers, journalists and scriptwriters".

Of particular note is the latest release, Volume 248. This is the one that has incorporated information on A.B. Credaro, although how she has been catagorised is not known at the time of writing, so if there is any library out there that can actually afford a copy and has brought one and can send us the information ...

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Australasian Emergency Services librarians are bracing themselves for the Warrior Librarian keynote address at the opening night of their upcoming annual conference.

Representing the corporate libraries of wide-ranging international, national and state bodies such as law enforcement, ambulance, fire fighting, weather monitoring, and geosciences, the invitation to speak at the conference came on official letterhead from the Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department. Which didn't seem to greatly over-impress folks at the Warrior Librarian's (then) Place of Primary Employment.

There was still the need for the obligatory screaming match, followed by bouts of alternate wailing and sighing, to get the necessary leave approvals rubber-stamped after sitting around in various intrays for months and being somewhere down the bottom of numerous managerial to-do lists ...

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BIBLIOGRAPHIC INSTRUCTION

Google releases teaching tools; LMS and TLs still captive

Who knew that Google had a Librarian Center? Much less a suite of copyright-free handouts available for download?

OK, probably more than half the world's literate population. But Warrior Librarian is proud to be able to provide this heads-up for those information professionals who have been too busy doing stuff like managing their libraries, fundraising, justifying their existence, or all of the preceding, to sit around surfing the net and discovering these gems.

Google's Library Center, imaginatively named Google Librarian Central certainly has a familiar ring to it, writing as we are from Warrior Librarian Central (established 1999) ...

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BUTT-KICKING LIBRARIANS

Black-belt librarians maintain low profile; don't even answer emails

Meet James Augur, Reference Librarian at the Ontario City Library. He holds a second-degree black belt in Shotokan karate and a first-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo.

And that's just one of them. The Butt-Kicking Librarian website features many more. Take Warren Graham, for instance. His book, Black Belt Librarians: Every Librarian's Real World Guide to a Safer Workplace (ISBN 1-59948-027-1) doesn't contain one joke, but is still pretty good.

Graham's bio includes the information that he " ... is a nationally renowned security, safety and customer service consultant recognized for his unique approach to personal and professional safety. His experiences include 25 years as a security professional, nine years as a retail manager and 35 years as a martial artist with teaching credentials in five disciplines. Since 1989 Warren has served as Security and Safety Manager for the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, developing and overseeing its security procedures ..."

For some reason, the website's administrator didn't seem interested in the fact that The Warrior Librarian herself managed to get as far as an Orange Belt in Go-Kan-Ru karate (before moving onto other things); has numerous trophies for competition pistol shooting (before moving onto other things); has sky-dived from 12,000 feet (before moving onto cheaper hobbies); and regularly gets into arguements about budgets, policies, priorities, and the relative merits of popular verses quality in reading materials (among many other things). But although the informative email wasn't answered, the website did already have a link to Warrior Librarian ...

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TECHNOLOGY AND PATRON SERVICES

Live help more popular than live rejection

There has been a sharp rise in the number of libraries offering real-time online assistance. UNC's Davis Libraries has incorporated an IM (Instant Messenger) tutorial on its website, covering AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, or Jabber clients.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, over 2000 library folk in government schools are struggling to maintain their fragile interpersonal professional communication networks. Compulsory 'portalling' of the schools' LANs and WANs has meant that their access has been withdrawn to facilities such as Yahoo!Groups where their listservs are based ...

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It might have been a quiet Christmas season for you, your family, or your library, though it might not have been. Whatever.

Things here at Warrior Librarian Central have been something of a mixed bag, socially, personally and professionally. The relatives have gone home, the tinsel is packed away, long-awaited corrections and fix-ups to various WLW pages has been completed - including the installation of the new js menu; the Copyright Folks seem to have gone into hiding, and The Article of the Decade has been published. Although I'm not sure that there isn't a connection between the last two.

The start of this working year sees me in a new gig at an academic library. We'll all have to wait to see if this is a good deal, as my Minnesota buddies would say.

For every progressive, questionning, collaborative, savvy TL [LMS] I meet, there are five "Shhhh librarians" fussily protecting the neatness of their fusty collections. I sometimes say that I "manage school libraries" which seems to get a nod of respect not garnered by saying I am a teacher-librarian or a librarian.

A Canadian Teacher Librarian Who Can't Be Named Here for Fear Of Being Pecked to Death By Colleagues of Both Persuasions. Warrior Librarian is now considering the possibility of investigating the practicality of establishing a Witness Protection Program.

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Alan Becker's "Animation vs Animator" is the second of this graphic's genius' work over on the Atom Films website. If your network administration has blocked YouTube, you still might be able to get onto this one.

Mind you, Becker's work far exceeds the quality of just about anything over on That Other Website ...

My name is Mufid, a librarian at [identity deleted by WLW]. After I read your work that title:COLLECTION EVALUATION IN SCHOOL LIBRARIES [on the Warrior Librarian website]. I am interested in your work that made me a dream to create a same work in my Library in order to make a better collection development in the future. But I need to several references to make this work. Couse, I don't have or lack of the references for this work. I write this letter is subject to ask for you send printed books or non printed books which used in your work to help me that I need to make this work. I will be very happy if you able to send/give your books.

The end, Thanks for your attention.

Sincerely,
Mufid, S.Ag., SS.
A Librarian 
 
If you want to send your books for me, 
please to send at my address:
[Address was supplied]
 

Mufid,

you cannot have a professional standard library without a budget to run it. You must make an allocation out of your budget for professional materials such a those you have asked me to give you. Which are not mine to give. They belong to the library.

The end.

Thanks for your advise me, I want to information for you about Budgetting at my library. Budgetting have determined to collection development to suport education, especially for lecturers and Students. So, special collection suporting about librarian less enough. Based on it, I dificult to look for reference book to write a work of librarianship. one again, thanks for your attention and advise me about it.

Mufid,

You should refer to the training you did to become a librarian. If you did not do that training, then please be advised that I am not going to provide it to you. Sorry.

No more correspondence was received.