They tried to make me go to FRBR, I said no, no, no

I just finished a major draft of the first soup-to-nuts literary essay I have written since spring 2006, when I was crankin’ ’em out for MFA workshop homework assignments. (The essay, about local food, was on request, for an anthology.) Yay me! I hope it doesn’t suck, or at least that any sucking can be easily de-sucked. I now know a startling amount of information about Apalachicola oysters — that’s always useful (particularly since I’m going to turn around and take what I know to build a review for this week’s homework assignment in my food writing class).

To celebrate, I’m going to make oyster chowder tonight (I bought a pint of fresh-shucked A-Bay oysters at the Shell Oyster Bar yesterday afternoon) with the very best ingredients I can hunt down, and serve it with the best bread and wine I can find. I plan to have a nice food week, as Shrove Tuesday approacheth, and those jeans I bought four years ago, when we got very serious about South Beach for a few months, are a wee bit snug in the seat. (Cookbook idea: Skinny Bitch Localvore, Southern-Style!)

However, my brain is too numb to write and so I bring you even more link love. Let the love flow!

I had my picture taken at ALA with a cardboard Obama (note: for Sandy, not for me), but I’ll be darned if I can fish it out of this website. They scanned my card, and they know my email, but they can’t point me to my picture? Fun idea, bewildering execution.

David Lynch on watching movies on an iPhone — a priceless 30-second video.

I’m giving a talk on Tuesday about the state of the ILS, updating my presentation from last September with such news as I have gleaned about updates for Evergreen, LibraryFind, Koha, xCatalog, Aquabrowser, WorldCat, and so forth. I’ll be showing some before-and-after slides of sucky OPACs and unsucky OPACs, so suggestions welcome. I have a few but I’m always looking for the nadir of bad design, particularly where the heavy hand of librarians playing interface designer is evident.

(Incidentally, if you look at the presenter evaluations, take note that Michael Norman’s presentation was luminous; he just said some things about the future of cataloging that some folk find a twee unsettling, so you can read his ratings as polarized, versus my usual crowd-pleasing. Bravo Michael.)

In the course of looking for simple ideas to express service-oriented architecture, I found this YouTube video, “SOA this, SOA that.”

I stole my slide design from David Lee King’s talk at ~~Peninsula~~ Panhandle Library Access Network the previous week — white Gills san serif on dark grey, heavy on the visuals, sparing with text. Thanks, David! Great talk, too.

Dan Chudnov goes ballistic on WoGroFuBiCo, and I’m with him. The final report stinketh of typical librarian change-avoidance. We do NOT need to stop RDA; we need to implement FRBR and get it right, not “test” it more; and we do NOT need to do years more of “user testing” to teach us what we already know.

There’s been a Library 2.0 “course correction” which is both healthy and inevitable. Kate Sheehan and John Blyberg are particularly astute on this topic. This doesn’t mean that Library 2.0 is “over”; it means that people are thinking more carefully about what it means (and quite a few people have been doing that all along). My feeling was summed up Friday in a Skype chat with a wise colleague who said the driving question needs to be, “What are we trying to be successful at?” Amen, bro.

OCLC’s governance study, or at least core docs thereof, have been on the Web since mid-November, I learned last Friday. If you skim or read the recommendations, note how without fuss or muss they say meetings will be both f2f and online. No extended hand-writing, no blah blah blah. Also note that they increase the percentage of self-appointed directors on their board (hmmm), eliminate Members Council (a good thing — it has no real power anyway and is too cliquey) and establish regional member groups (fascinating).

Random thought: I like buying books. I like reading online. What I don’t like to do is use my own printer, paper, and toner to print out and staple some unwieldy PDF and try to read it, even if it’s “free.” It’s the clumsiest way to read anything: it won’t fit in my purse, the page-turning gets ridiculous, and then I can’t file it easily if I want to keep it (duh, binding?). Delivery is crucial.

I really wish NPR reporters wouldn’t get cutesy with food reporting and munch over the radio, especially while they’re talking. It’s gross and puts me off my feed. LIANE HANSEN STOP THAT NOW!