John Miedema

With every passing year, I get more interested in food! I’m interested in the politics, the economics, and very much more interested in the cooking and eating of healthy, tasty food. This past year, I went vegetarian, started exercising regularly, and lost 45 lbs! Because I am travelling for work, I need to a way to share my recipes between home and work locations, so I decided to start posting them online. They don’t belong in this blog, so I started another one just for recipes. It’s just a place …

I have only just started tweeting on a semi-regular basis. It has taken me awhile to get used to such a noisy technology. But if you have been following my tweets, you may have picked up on a tweeted only story (till now): my fascination with a very non-noisy, clean, elegant technology, the fixed gear bike. It has been something of an obsession since I first saw one in a bike shop about three months ago. I had never seen one before. For newbies like me, a fixie is a …

Walt Crawford has written a thoughtful piece on slow reading in the March 2010 issue of Cites & Insights. I am honoured that Walt highlighted some of the important themes that I have discussed at this blog and in my book. He also refers to a number of other related writings by T. Scott Plutchak, Will Richardson, and Steve Lawson. Well worth reading.
Walt is not new to the subject of slow reading. In my research, I ran across an article called “Contemplation and Content: Getting Under Their Skins” in …

My Kindle Shakedown series is being reprinted at the TeleRead blog. Part 1 has been posted here and there, and eight more posts are planned for the series. Teleread provides news and perspective on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics. I have found it a helpful source of information as I evaluate the Kindle, so I am pleased to contribute back.

I recently added a Reading Gallery to my blog. The gallery is a collection of images of readers and acts of reading. Each time you visit my blog home page you will see one of the images in the upper left. The particular image is randomly selected. The current collection has six items and I will be adding to it slowly. New images will be introduced with a post.
Images were obtained from artists distributing them under a Creative Commons license or with their explicit permission to me. Credit is …

The blogosphere has been a vital part of my recently completed library degree, so it makes sense that I would make it part of my library job search. Let’s see where this goes …
Mr. John Miedema is a graduate of the Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) program at the University of Western Ontario (ALA accredited). He has made recent distinctive contributions to the library field. In October, he presented at the Library of Congress on his recently published book, Slow Reading. He also developed open source software which …

This is the third anniversary of my blog, variously titled with my name, John Miedema, or domain, johnmiedema.ca, or a major project, Slow Reading and I, Reader.
Happy 2010. January is a good time for a fresh start. I have implemented several blog changes.
A reading gallery of photographs. If you click on my homepage, you will see an image of a reader at the upper left of my blog. It is one of a collection of photographs of readers, selected by me from photographers distributing them under Creative Commons licensing or …

The year of 2009 has been a lively one at this blog:

Slow Reading was published by Litwin Books. I was honoured to speak on the subject at the Library of Congress.
OpenBook version 2 was released. A significant enhancement was the ability to link book data on web pages to specific library catalogue records using OpenURL. Published an article on it in NISO’s Information Standards Quarterly.
Built FuzzyCat, a web crawler for library OPACs. The alpha prototype showed that it could query ten distinct OPAC models used by hundreds of libraries.
Wrote the …

Last week, I submitted the last assignment of my last course of my Master of Library and Information degree. That, and the 2009 year end, make this a good time for reflection.
I started the program in January of 2006 at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario. The program requires 15 courses that can be completed in twelve months, but I enrolled as a part-time student, taking one or two courses per term as I continued to work full-time. Convocation is in February, but I am …

Simplify and order life; plan ahead;
Follow the line resolutely;
Eliminate non-essential things;
Keep distractions to a minimum;
Live day by day, by bread labor, with people;
Establishing worthwhile contacts;
Do research and follow trends;
Write, lecture, and teach;
Keep in close contact with the class struggle;
Acquire an understanding of basic and cosmic
forces, gradually uniting
together a unified, integrated, poised personality
that is constantly learning and growing.
Scott Nearing, 1932

Off to the Big Apple for a little holiday. See you in September. Lots of new and different stuff up my sleeve.

Readers of my blog may note that I cover a fairly broad range of topics — book reviews, reading research, book widgets, library technology, library school, open source. Sometimes, when I can’t restrain myself, I get political. (Just now, for example, I felt like chanting hurrays about the momentum of our new post-conservative era, but did not. Er, I guess I just did).
Not everyone is interested in all of these topics. Today, I wanted to create a feed just for posts that would of interest to the Planet Code4Lib aggregator. …

I’ve been crazy busy for awhile with a new job assignment in Ottawa. Lots of things worth blogging about, just haven’t had the chance.
Slow Reading at LibraryThing. Litwin Books has generously offered 30 copies of Slow Reading for LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers. As of this writing 630 members have requested a copy. I will be setting up an author chat soon.
Slow Reading in the News. The Hutchinson Leader newspaper in Minnesota published an editorial, “Print is the next big thing”. The article cites Slow Reading and the connection it makes between …

Now that Slow Reading has been released, my attention is turning to the next phase here at johnmiedema.ca. Here’s what’s on the “to do” list:

Finish development of OpenBook 2. It will likely be combined with an independent research course, so some kind of publication may be involved.
Finish the FuzzyCat series. I am really stoked by the FuzzyCat concept, but the software is a full-time project, needing a sponsor. At the very least, I will finish writing the series with a brain dump of my ideas on the subject.
Offworld. A well-crafted …

Help me understand a curious repeating event on my website.
About every six months, on a Sunday evening, I observe a swell of hits for a particular book review, The Republic of Nothing by Lesley Choyce. I get about 250 hits a day for three days. WordPress provides the search terms that people use to find my website. Google those phrases and my website turns up first. It is clear that people are looking for a book review of this particular book. As of tonight, Tuesday, it is subsiding.
What causes the …

Despite having a career, education and interests that are soaked in technology, I tend to be a late adopter of technology, or more accurately, a slow adopter of new technologies. I tend to watch at a distance for quite some time before trying it myself. I read library blogs for a year before trying my hand at one. I also tend to shut down technologies abruptly if they seem too much noise for the signal, e.g., Facebook.
There are mixed opinions about what is happening with the library blogosphere, but I …