Free Range Librarian

I had wondered why the FRL commenting fell off in the last few days. Then Lorcan Dempsey wrote to ask if I was going to post his comment to my post about his post about the long tail (which feels like a very long tale when I say that).
Answer solved. Last week I kicked up [...]

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Sarah “Librarian in Black” Houghton blogged a response to a message I posted to the California Library Association list as my contribution to a discussion about the Pew Internet and American Life report announcing that the Web for many people is increasingly a leisure destination. Good response from her, but I am repeating my post [...]

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You can bet I’ll be watching this. Given all the commotion, I’m surprised that the Book TV summary doesn’t even mention Cuba. It will be interesting to see how much time Codrescu actually spent on other issues in his talk.
And, yes, I want to see Gumby’s face when Codrescu–who knows from authoritarian regimes–talks about [...]

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Table of Craft, More Clearly, originally uploaded by freerangelibrarian.

A crisper view of the Table of Craft.

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Lorcan Dempsey, at the eponymous Lorcan Dempsey’s Weblog, pessimistically but elegantly tackles libraries and the Long Tail, pointing out that libraries exhibit classic–this term shall have to do–Short Tail characteristics, including redundant inventories, cripplingly high transaction costs, and bad resource navigation. That last prim comment is directed both at individual tools, such as online catalogs [...]

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The knife, angled just so, can cut to the bone. Mocking me on the ALA Council list, a councilor wrote, “Don’t you know that she is *practicing* to be a Real Writer?”
That’s how most of us feel, most of the time, while writing. Nobody needs to say that out loud; it’s the backbeat to [...]

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Updated. Don’t miss the Flickr tagset for Michael! I didn’t have a serviceable picture of myself so I borrowed John Ashcroft.
Congrats to Michael Stephens on his wonderful new job. I remember Michael talking about getting a PhD… then he was in school… then he was teaching… now he’s very close to being ABD, with [...]

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Somehow I missed that today was the 14th. Oops.
But through a series of what are now fortunate events, we ended up with a brand-new disposal today, and I am the heroine who sat in the living room chipping away at the MPOW rock pile while the plumbers plumbed, patiently agreeing with their advice (which roughly [...]

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This is a space I created over break for reading, studying, and revision (which for me is done largely by hand, with a Red Pen Of Death–a fine-point PaperMate Flair with its distinctive maraschino-cherry-colored ink). I call this spot my Table of Craft (”craft” being a word I love to toy with, resonant as it [...]

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This is a very informal RFI
we developed internally at MPOW as part of our Search for the Search. Frankly, this list doesn’t present big hurdles. Nearly every feature on this list should (and is) available in every product on the market today.
Does your OPAC support these features? Many of them? Some of them? A [...]

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