Free Range Librarian

Over on TechEssence, Roy Tennant has posted a manifesto about library software.
The part of the manifesto that hit me most was the list of consumer responsibilities… and though the manifesto is good and deserves discussion on its own point, I’m going to drift in another direction.
I just spent two days among very smart, dedicated people [...]

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I read David Vann’s A Mile Down early one Saturday morning when I thought I was going back to sleep but didn’t, in one luxurious unstoppable four-hour marathon that meant the cats sulked in the living room because I didn’t top off their food bowls and I was late to some meeting I had sworn [...]

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Earlier I observed that in one part of its policy manual ALA attempted to redefine “meeting” in order to include some virtual functions, but that the definition was too literal.
(Incidentally, there is a truism floating around that it takes “two votes of Council” to change policy. No, that’s only true for changes to the constitution [...]

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For some time I’ve observed that ALA’s rules about virtual members box us into face-to-face meetings for the “work of the association”:
Virtual members of committees or task forces have the right to attend meetings, participate in debate, and make motions. Virtual members are not counted in determining the quorum nor do they have the right [...]

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Simply because several dozen other bloggers claim to be the Annoyed Librarian does not make it so.
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The gig is up. I could tell people were getting close to the truth; last week I received email from unsuspecting friends saying they were tracing Annoyed Librarian, I have a friend who’s an investigative reporter who was poking around, and I didn’t want some Oprah-James-Frey-Nan-Talese-Britney-Paris “Oops, yeah that WAS really me” blowout appearing in [...]

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Pete Warden of PeteSearch provided a great summary of my defrag talk. (I love his one small error: don’t you think we work with “marked data”? There’s a posse lookin’ for yew, and yew is marked.)
I’m tagging this with the naive tag provided at the conference (defragcon) and two variants: defragcon07 and defragcon2007 (Y2K-compliant [...]

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This is a syllabus-in-progress for a workshop I’m teaching this Friday, “Writing for the Web.”
I know a lot of instructors consider their syllabus to be closely-guarded goods, but my take is that this syllabus is not much more than “CliffsNotes” for what (I hope) will happen in the classroom — and I’d rather put [...]

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I wanted to do a lavish long post on this, but I’m whaling away at my workshop material for this coming Friday, as I really need to finish getting it together today and tomorrow, so that on Monday another person from MPOW and I can drive to Atlanta for a NISO meeting on NCIP, which [...]

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Note: as a reminder, my email to bluehighways.com and freerangelibrarian.com is still very screwed up. I have had any number of people tell me they sent me email; I’ve participated in small threads where other people see responses that never arrive. I’ve sent myself email from other accounts that get there. And of course, I [...]

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