Well the Carnival is in full swing here at InfoTangle, so grab some popcorn and fried oreos and try your luck with any of these fine blog posts. You’re in for a real treat as we have a lot of reports for you from the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans. Thanks everyone for your submissions and for providing your great posts! Next week the Carnival moves onward so check it out over at Baby Boomer Librarian.

Tom Peters at ALA TechSource blog gives a great introduction to the “long tail” phenomenon and discusses its relevance to libraries in his post The Long Tail Wags the Dog.

Laura Crossett at PLA Blog posts about John Ellison’s ALA conference presentation on Intellectual Freedom in Rural Libraries and includes a helpful checklist of tips from the session.

On the LITA blog, Eric Morgan has created an in-depth five-part series about A “Next -generation” Library Catalog, which he describes as not a catalog at all, but instead a tool for students, teachers, and scholars to conduct research. This is part 1, but I’d readily suggest checking out all five parts.

Also at PLA blog, Hagar Shirman discusses library outreach to diverse and under-served communities in How My Parents Learned to Eat: Dim Sum, Fry Bread, Collard Greens and Tacos in the Library, another ALA Annual conference session.

Jenny Levine, the Shifted Librarian, summarizes ALA president Leslie Burger’s inauguration speech given at the ALA Annual conference in her post Leslie Burger Initiates Year of Transformation.

Here’s part IV of Libraryman’s series entitled Netflix Takes Libraries To School in which he discusses the social aspects of Netflix as well as it’s valuable data mining capabilities. You may want to check out all four parts of this!

Rick Roche over at ricklibrarian gives a thorough report on the ALA Annual RUSA CODES program Establishing and Promoting Readers’ Advisory in Small and Medium-sized Libraries.

Marie L. Radford blogging in the Library Garden provides this post on International Live Chat Study finds 30% Ready Reference Questions, an informative post which includes PowerPoint slides from 2 ALA Annual sessions.

Head over to Confessions of a Science Librarian and help decide what John Dupuis will read on his summer vacation.

Joe Kissell at Interesting Thing of the Day disusses Dead Media, a thought-provoking post about the need to catalog obsolete media formats and preserve the information they hold.