ALA Council is having a debate online about U.S.News & World Report’s outdated library school rankings, which are based on a survey circulated to library schools in 1998 (wasn’t Netscape still king?). The academics say they “scorn” these rankings. (I thought scorn was an emotion reserved for the French.) The public library types, me included, [...]
The past week has been a perfect storm, work-wise. I’m finishing our annual grant for MPOW, which I spend way too much time on so my conscious will be clear if we don’t get everything we ask for. Today I went in to check our statistics for another bit of braggadocio, only to discover 800 [...]
Tom Wolfe was on my list of must-read books in high school, back in the early 1970s (yes, young’uns, before blogging, Internet, faxing, and photocopying. I went to college with a Smith Corona with an automatic return, and that made me hot stuff).
I was supposed to like Tom Wolfe, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ken Kesey, Joseph [...]
Adam Cohen of the New York Times opines today about ethics and blogging. It’s a piece that makes a few points but not particularly well, and ultimately raises more questions about Cohen than about blogging.
Cohen repeatedly makes reference to “bloggers,” but he is not referring to bloggers as you and I understand them. Cohen [...]
This is more mutterings about search engines and improving MPOW, inspired by a day of grant-writing. (The grant is due at the fiscal agent next Tuesday.)
Some of you newer to this blog may have missed my fevered descriptions of how to improve search in a content-sparse metadata database such as MPOW. As I mapped [...]
As the Seattle Times reported this morning, Microsoft reversed its position and will again support gay rights legislation, stating “if legislation similar to HB 1515 is introduced in future sessions, we will support it.”
Without further ado, I’m pasting in the entire memo, forwarded to me by way of one of umpty-ump mailing lists. It’s a [...]
Update 5/5/05 11:00 a.m. PT: the survey now requires an ALA login. Btw, it wasn’t me on a cached machine or anything–this came up on the GLBTRT discussion list yesterday, and other folks reported the same hole. I guess ALA monitors the lists and blogs, ay?
ALA is conducting a “demographic” survey that supposedly [...]
Hot diggity dog! Bloggers, surfers, and compulse email-checkers, rejoice! ALA Executive Director Keith Fiels just advised Council that at ALA Annual this June in Chicago, “Wireless connectivity will be … available for the first time to attendees at a highly discounted rate.” This is fab news. I also asked Keith how wireless would be distributed [...]
Another blog I follow is David Bigwood’s Catalogablog.
Catalogablog can be cataloging-intensive, as well it should be, but I track it because this blog reviews issues related to cataloging as it should be discussed in the 21st century, with plenty of props for METS and MODS and OAI, oh my. Speaking of oh my, I [...]
Up to now I’ve been immune to the Famous Writer Panic Syndrome, where an MFA student is so rocked by the exquisite perfection of a famous writer that it sends the student into a spiral of anxiety and depression. I know I don’t write as well as Virginia Woolf or Gretel Ehrlich, but I am [...]
