Site of the Month-News With an Attitude

www.lisnews.com

Blake Carver, the majordomo at LISNews.com, has an MLS degree, but works for a dot-com he won't name. For Carver, LISNews.com is a side project, but the site draws lots of regular readers. Carver (bcarver@lisnews.com) says he started it because there was no library news site he liked "that offered a wide variety of stories on different subjects contributed by a number of different people."

Not-com: Despite its dot-com domain, Carver cheerfully admits, "We have no employees and make no money (I actually lose quite a bit of money on it)." He does have a regular gang of contributors who relish the chance to post a rant on an issue like filtering library terminals, and who send him links to news stories on topics in all fields of librarianship—including things that don't appear in American Libraries or Library Journal (or SLJ, for that matter). Regular site visitors find links everywhere that they feel will interest librarians, from the conventional to the bizarre, and send them to Carver. One recent posting, for example, told of a site for the study of student plagiarism. Another linked to a Los Angeles Times article about "slash fiction—homoerotic stories written mostly about TV characters by straight female fans."

Good news, bad news: In another recent story, Carver listed (and complimented) all his competitors, such as the very casual throw-it-up-there-and-see-what-sticks Library Stuff (www.librarystuff.net) and the e-zine Library Juice (libr.org/Juice). Carver tries to follow the news in all flavors of librarianship, although he admits that he recently signed off LM_NET because school library media specialists "are a chatty bunch!" He's been encouraged by recent efforts to revive school libraries in inner cities, but worries about Ontario, Canada. "Stories on the libraries there," he says, "are nothing but bad news lately."

An incredible job: Carver admires the way that the library profession has "embraced the Web and used the Web in ways that should be a model for all other businesses. From the beginning of the Web, librarians have done an incredible job of integrating the Web into the everyday activities at the library."