For those at the UGA Libraries, there is an internal mentoring program via the Professional Development & Research Committee. too.New Member's Roundtable of ALA offers a mentoring program:----Have you been a librarian for 5 years or less? Do you sometimes feel you have professional questions to ask and no one to direct them to? Do you find yourself wondering, in the midst of hardcore budget season, or in that massive collection development strategy meeting...What the heck are they talking about?

Although a good portion of what I read in terms of change in libraries is cataloging/metadata/systems related (metadata for electronic & digital objects, nex-gen catalogs, rda, opensource ILS, products to enhance user experience that work with the existing catalog (e.g., vufind, etc.), changes in LC policy, etc.), occasionally an article which is more reference oriented wanders across my desk.

Hopefully, some of my fellow metadata "moonlighters" will see this survey also.------------To *all catalogers* (with or without MLS) in academic libraries:SURVEY: Integrating Non-MARC Metadata Production into the Duties of TraditionalCatalogers. You are invited to participate in a brief national, online survey.

Friday (8/1/08) I attended the GOLD/GALILEO Annual Users Group Conference. This conference gets better and better every year and I think the session offerings get better, too.The keynote speaker was funny and enthusiastic (Cliff Landis) -- always a plus. I attended a session on website redesign, blogging, and the third, on the GALILEO Institutional Repository project.The first session was on website redesign.

Collaborating In The Cloudhttp://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=collaborating-in-the-cloud-1211649031746821-8&stripped_title=collaborating-in-the-cloudview presentation (tags: collaboration

Well, since I have so many little library related tidbits floating around in my reader, I'm just going to do a roundup:

• Over at the shifted librarian, she has a nice blog post about the new startup project, bibliocommons @ the Oakville, Ontario library, to build a library catalog interface from scratch. The interface includes things like reviews, tagging, faceted searching, etc.

Brief and interesting post @ RSS4Lib about projects to tag various library catalogs, and the relevance of lesser used tags. No mention of PennTags, but there is a brief mention of MTags from the University of Michigan.

The real value of tagging is like that of a library: it's the collections, the constructed universe of things that someone (a librarian, a subject expert, a user) brought together.

Build the Open Shelves ClassificationDescription: I hereby invite you to join the Open Shelves Classification (OSC), a free, "humble," modern, open-source, crowd-sourced replacement for the Dewey Decimal System.

---from LibraryThing.You can follow its progress or contribute to its effort here

Well, if you haven't heard all of the chatter and buzz, Google Librarian Central hadn't been updated in a year (before today, that is)...and Google wasn't at ALA leaving some librarians to call out google for punking librarians or even using librarians, while other librarians proclaimed,

Okay, not quite... at least, not yet. ;-)

Google has entered yet another space with the launch of Lively, a tool for creating 3D social spaces on Web sites, which is now available in a public beta test.The platform lets users create and personalize their own character, so-called avatars, and their own rooms, which is nothing new: Second Life does as much. But a key feature of the Lively platform is integration with the regular Internet.