From its founding Facebook has been a playground for students. Its decision to expand beyond the educational world is a gamble. A year from now will Facebook be as passe as Friendster? Students seem unhappy at the prospect of sharing their online space with others. Will they abandon that space and leave it to the interlopers and move on to a new space that an entrepreneurial opportunist creates to replicate the Facebook features students seem to value?

It is interesting that Facebook will structure new communities on geographic regions. Wasn't the Internet supposed to bring an end to geography? This has been a de facto feature of Facebook. It originally limited membership to students at its birthplace, Harvard. Most of those students were on or near the Cambridge campus. As it expanded to include other colleges, a similar implicit geographic limitation has been inherent. Is there an implicit questioning of the limits of online community, and implicit recognition that f2f community and physical proximity are at least as important?

This coming weekend the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison will celebrate its 100th birthday! The celebration will feature panel discussions on abiding topics such as intellectual freedom, publishing, and research libraries as well as the very contemporary such as blogging, and the lessons recent graduates can teach us. Speakers include distinguished UW SLIS alumni such as Nancy Kranich, Beacher Wiggins, and Sarah Pritchard. Former SLIS director and professor Charles Bunge, one of my mentors, will review the school's history and contributions.

I received my MALS from UW SLIS in December 1975. I wish I could be there for this weekend's festivities, but other obligations prevent that. There are few places more glorious in early fall than Madison! The program promises to stimulate participants' brains. And in good Wisconsin tradition, a beer tasting will stimulate their taste buds. It will be a grand celebration and I wish all who participate a rewarding and enjoyable time.

On Friday, August 18, my week ended on a down note when the last e-mail of the day informed me that “It is with regret that let you know your proposal, The Reference Question–Where has Reference Been? Where is Reference Going?, was not chosen for presentation [at the 2007 ACRL National Conference in Baltimore]. The selection process was an exceptionally difficult one this year. We received 147 proposal abstracts for the 36 available slots and many fine proposals could not be accepted.” In other words, I had a lot of good company with 75% of those who submitted proposals. Even so, scant consolation.

In “State of the Annotation” in the September 13 issue of Inside Higher Education, columnist Scott McLemee muses about marginalia, especially others' marginalia, in books. He sometimes purchases a clean copy of a book so that a previous reader's underlining, highlighting, and comments won't skew his own interpretation of the text.

It is so much easier these days, as readers' comments at the foot of McLemee's column demonstrate, to add marginalia to a text. Freed of the limits of narrow margins, today's e-marginalia can be more fully formed and more articulate. (More legible, too!) It also lets readers choose between the author's pristine text or the author's text cum commentary. Now and then one will run across a book at a used book sale, or more likely in a library's stacks, in which multiple readers have carried on serial commentary, one adding marginalia commentary on a previous readers marginalia. The opportunities for this are much richer now, making genuine conversation back and forth possible. Readers comment in writing on authors; things have stayed the same. However things have changed for the better now that readers–as well as willing authors–can engage one another in give and take about a text.

Today, September 1, 2006, is the 30th anniversary of my first day working in a library. It was a somewhat atypical beginning; I had never worked in paid library position before that day. I had done a little bit of practicum work associated with a reference course; other than that, my library experience was as a user. My first library job was as the assistant reference librarian (yes, just one of two reference librarians for an institution with an enrollment of some 4,000) at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky. It was an atypical start in that I accepted the job without having met the gracious woman who would be my supervisor. She was on vacation the day I interviewed. It would not have made much difference had she been there. At best we would have had a hello and a handshake. The director of that library at the time conducted the entire personnel process, including the interview, solo. In addition to a brief discussion with him in which I had few opportunities to make a self-destructive error since he did most of the talking, there was a pro forma meeting with the VP for Academic Affairs. I listened as they shared university gossip with each other and soon wrapped up with a few brief comments to me about what a great place it was to work. My interview, such as it was, consumed something just over half an hour.

From that beginning I have come to today. What a let down today has been! Wind and rain from advancing tropical storm Ernesto knocked out power to the University of Richmond at 7:40 AM. By 1:00 campus authorities learned that power would not be restored until after midnight. So the library has been a haven for about ten students taking advantage of scattered emergency lights and the natural light coming through windows. They enjoyed a low-tech library experience. Most simply sat and read. A few had laptops, at least until the batteries gave out. A dwindling number of staff–by 1:00 down to two students, one other librarian, and me–closed the building at 3:00. The day provided an opportunity to catch up on some reading, to clear out old files, to fill a recycling bin, and to bring some much needed order to my office. Sort of a new beginning for a no longer new librarian!