I'm back this week from MLA 2010--actually only my second time attending the national conference, since it was in Hawaii last year and my budget did not quite extend that far. I had three main agenda items this year: the Books Panel meeting and presenting a poster and paper.

I enjoy browsing the lists of contests like the Webby Awards because, in any given category, I'm sure to be unfamiliar with at least one of the nominees. (Even in the highly popular comedy/captioned-pictures-of-kittens area, there was a nominee I'd never even heard of!) All right, I'm not going to get away with festooning our library homepage with lolcats, but I might see some inspiring typography or layout.

Obvious blog fodder: scientists figure out how to play a sound recording from 1860, made by a French librarian who never did devise a way to play back his recordings but apparently thought them still worth making. From the point of view of a music listener, this isn't very impressive--the recording doesn't sound very good.

Today's New York Times article about software and services for inventorying wine collections reminded me of a project that I did last quarter in a class on Information Architecture. Students identified and analyzed new website genres, and one of the genres I chose to discuss was what I called inventory sites. These sites allow users to create useful electronic representations of their belongings in the physical world--and in this way, they have a lot in common with library catalogs.