Free Range Librarian

K.G. Schneider’s blog on librarianship, writing, and everything else, since 2003.

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Entries from October 2005

Do You Know Search?

October 31st, 2005 · No Comments

At My Place Of Work, we are planning to do a requirements statement and then start hunting for a consultant, but I thought I’d float this balloon right here and right now.
MPOW is grant-funded for a new search engine (probably not enough money, but then is it ever?). More than that, really, MPOW needs [...]

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Tags: MPOW

MPOW10K in Bloglines

October 31st, 2005 · No Comments

Sometime this weekend MPOW’s RSS feed went over 10,000 Bloglines subscribers. Couldn’t happen to a nicer site.
Why, you ask? Well, it’s good. Well, many things are good.
1. We pimp it on our site.
2. We wrote a really good tutorial and link that from our main page.
3. Most of all, Bloglines considers us comparable to [...]

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Tags: MPOW

Brief Hellos to Friends, Readers, BiblioBloggers, Etc.

October 31st, 2005 · No Comments

Post-Internet-Librarian, I worked for one frantic day and then went to the ALA fall muckety-muck meeting, so I didn’t get a chance to do the big ol’ summary of What Went Right, and What Went Right. (Though Friday’s news about Scooter made me itch to post my Schadenfreude right there during a meeting.)
Since this was [...]

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Tags: This and That

Other Things I’ve Written

October 30th, 2005 · No Comments

This entry logs some of the other articles and works I’ve written (most of them don’t show up in Google Scholar, for what that’s worth).
Internet Librarian (column for American Libraries, 1995-2002): This is a partial archive. I’ll work on the gaps with My Friend Google.
1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002
Other articles:
ACM, [...]

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Tags: Recto and Verso · Writing

Map of Public Libraries Affected by Katrina

October 30th, 2005 · No Comments

Zounds, an entry that writes itself! “This map presents information on the libraries that were substantially damaged by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Libraries with minor damage are not included. … The information used to assemble this map was based on a variety of sources and any updated information is welcome. Yeoman work was done assembling [...]

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Tags: Katrina and Libraries

It’s the Technology, Stupid

October 28th, 2005 · 10 Comments

So here I am at the fall meeting of ALA muckety-mucks (division presidents and councilors, Executive Board, etc.) and we’re finally getting down to brass tacks: as an association, what drives us, and what holds us back?
It was gratifying to hear nearly every division say: technology. (Not the only answer, but a biggy.) We [...]

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Tags: American Liberry Ass'n

ALA and the Resolution on Iraq

October 27th, 2005 · No Comments

This week I had to do a presentation at the Internet Librarian conference about ethics and blogging. In preparing for this talk, I spent a fair amount of time trying to move beyond the utilitarian rationales for ethical behavior so that I could explain what it means in the universal sense to have an obligation [...]

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Tags: American Liberry Ass'n

Ethics: They’re Good

October 24th, 2005 · 3 Comments

Tomorrow morning I’m giving a talk about ethics and blogging at Internet Librarian. I didn’t go much farther past the article I wrote last spring for Library Journal, but I do include some (hopefully) amusing examples of ethical breaches, none from within the biblioblogosphere, and only one from LibraryLand. Feel free to judge for yourself. [...]

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Tags: Librarianship

Gandel on Libraries: Hurts So Good

October 23rd, 2005 · 11 Comments

Paul Gandel, CIO at Syracuse University, just published an essay (in the strangely archaic PDF format) about the future of libraries.
I had a number of “clicks” during this essay. The part that went bing-bing-bing:
“It is no longer unusual to hear about people who prefer to buy a book online and have it delivered right [...]

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Tags: Librarianship

ALA and New Orleans: So Just Go, O.k.?

October 22nd, 2005 · No Comments

My extended grousing about keeping ALA Council in the loop notwithstanding, I want to underscore that I agree with the decision to keep the conference in New Orleans. I’m sure it will be good for New Orleans, and it will help rebuild the economy. (You must all be aware that among the thousands of city [...]

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Tags: American Liberry Ass'n