Today is the 5th anniversary of my Sites and Soundbytes blog!  This blog originally started as a way for me not to have to manually update my enormous collection of links.  It has gone through a few incarnations in between, but my love of new Internet options and helping patrons find things online has stayed at the forefront of my mind.

I have seen a couple of the hot library blogs start to wonder at whether Library 2.0 is worth anything.  As a library blogger, I firmly believe it is.  When I started blogging, I was the director of a library serving a population of 3000 (no I did not miss a zero).  And it didn’t matter.  I could still share the sites I discovered, join the conversation, and reach out.  Now I have three public blogs and even more internal ones at work, and blogging is vital to my work day.  So is IM, so are RSS feeds, so are podcasts and so is a website that invites sharing and talking.  If that is Library 2.0, then it works.  Yes, we must select the tools we use carefully and see how we as librarians can best insert digital tools into our day.  But without these tools, I would be a far less communicative, less involved, and less informed professional.

Thank you all for reading whether you are fairly new or have been along with me for all five years.  I appreciate knowing that what I type here alone in my office is being read by more than a handful of people. 

FedSpending offers you a very slick way to find out what is happening with federal government spending.  You can choose to look at either contracts or grants.  For contracts, you can search by contractor, see the top 100 contractors, view it by congressional district or state, or sort by product or service provided.  With grants you can view the recipients by type, state or congressional district.  You can also view them by agency and type of assistance provided.  The best feature of the site is the many ways you can see the data represented.  It makes the information all the more clear and interesting to view it in a myriad of ways. 

If you are looking for science news, this is the site for you.  They offer breaking news on their front page, but then allow you to access more focused science news lists with categories such as nanotechnology, physics, technology, medicine and space/earth science.  Even better, you can access pictures, videos, subscribe to feeds, leave comments, vote for what it listed on the main page, and chat on forums. 

PortableApps.com offers an open source way for you to carry your personalized desktop around with you on your USB drive or iPod.  The software is free and comes in a suite of programs that offer word processing, Internet browsing, antivirus, email and calendaring.  If you are someone who already carries your Firefox portable around, why not add even more applications?  If you haven’t tried portability yet, you’re missing the joy of your own bookmarks on any computer you use.

LitLovers is a site that offers information for book clubs.  They have book reviews, discussion aids, recommended titles for discussion, hints to help you talk about books, ice breaker activities, and much more.  If you are running a book club at your library, this site is the place to visit.  Find the next title for your club and a handy discussion guide all at one site!

NowPublic is an interesting news website.  It offers you, the citizen journalist, the ability to write your own news story, and upload photographs, video and audio.  There are various channels you can access as a reader that are similar to newspaper sections.  You can also view the front page filled with the most recent news items and the most popular channels. 

Stories can also be highlighted, which move them up the popular ladder.  And you can discover stories by the contributors who can also be searched by the regions of the world they cover. 

This is a very slick yet friendly site.  RSS feeds are also available.

I know that as librarians you all know to be skeptical of the information on websites.  But often our patrons really don’t understand that, no matter what age they are.  When I was the one who did the Internet classes, I loved to be able to pull up obviously fraudulent or incorrect information on an official-looking website. 

Well today I have a doozy for you!  www.martinlutherking.org  It is a site by a white-pride group called Stormfront, which strives to question Martin Luther King Jr’s speeches, intent, and life style.  It is horrid, racist crap, but worst of all, if you aren’t paying close attention it looks legitimate.  Use this one to point out to people who you are trying to inform about being skeptical online, especially with its nice URL that looks so very nondescript.  I think it points to a lot of the mistakes that novice researchers make online.  Then take them to the library databases and encourage them to use those to do online research! 

The 80th Annual Oscar nominations have been announced.

No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood led the nominations with eight each.

Michael Clayton received six nominations.

The five nominees for Best Picture are:

No Country for Old Men
Michael Clayton
There Will Be Blood
Atonement
Juno

Great stuff for your library blog! 

The nominees for the 2008 Razzie Awards have been announced.  These are the awards given to the worst movies of the year.  If your popular movie collection is anything like ours, you will find you have most if not all of the movies nominated.  I think it could be a great PR opportunity for a library to show that they don’t stock only Masterpiece Theater, though we have those too.  We stock the movies you love to hate! 

Top nominee was I Know Who Killed Me with 9 nominations followed by Norbit with 5.

The Eternal Night is a UK-based site dedicated to science fiction, fantasy and horror.  You will find book reviews, bibliographies, sample chapters, interviews and press releases.  The interface takes a little getting used to.  It works with drop-down menus rather than keywords or searches.  If you are looking at even the bibliographies, they are listed by when they were added to the site rather than alphabetically.  But there is a lot of information here of interest to genre fans and it is worth the bother.