Once again LibraryThing has done something fresh and marvelous. This time it’s SantaThing.
“You play Santa to a random LibraryThing member, and buy them up $20 worth of books, based on their library or a short description. Someone else does the same to you. LibraryThing orders the books and pays the shipping, so no addresses [...]
Our tankless water heater quietly gave up the ghost sometime between my shower yesterday afternoon and 7 a.m. today. While waiting for the plumber to call back (which happened only five minutes later, a very good sign; even better, he didn’t express surprise that our water heater was tankless, and simply asked “What model?”), I [...]
My essay “Chow” is in the fall issue of Gastronomica, pictured here.
Gastronomica’s website doesn’t show it yet, but I’m bursting with pride so here you are. Yes, that is Freud holding a weenie. Sometimes a Hebrew National is just a Hebrew National.
That makes three essays this year: “David, Just as he was,” [...]
(And if you’ve never heard that term…)
The Big O’s long-awaited report on “sharing, privacy and trust” begins by pointing out that lots of people use the Web, and adds (the far more interesting point) that people increasingly build the Web. “We have moved from an Internet built by a few thousand authors to [...]
Invariably, when I write about libraries dropping subscriptions to print literary magazines, at least one person says, “but there are other costs associated with serials management!” Yes, I do know that; I’ve lived it as a practitioner/pinch-hitting copy cataloger/administrator/geek-type/budget maven in a variety of libraries.
A few quick responses to the usual comments:
1. Let’s get some [...]
In the past six months I’ve left a job because it wasn’t a good fit and stopped writing for a publication to pursue other interests. Yet after reading Walt Crawford’s post about honesty, I feel it oddly necessary to say, no, really: in my case, in this situation, that’s just how things went down. He [...]
My online presentation, “Death to Jargon,” went pretty good today, for a first-time-talk, though at one point I began stammering and I realized it was because I was talking to over fifty people I couldn’t see or hear. So I went inward and focused on the topic, as if I were presenting to myself, and [...]
So Wyoming rolls out this ad campaign for libraries with the silhouette of a naked woman on a mudflap and once again I’m in a mild (very mild, custard-sans-even-vanilla) conundrum.
I can be a Totally Cool post-feminist sex-positive librarian who gets the sheer irony of the juxtaposition of traditionally sexist images with the concept of libraries [...]
[updated] I woke up early Saturday morning, the last day of a galvanizing good conference on the future of library catalogs (Carl Grant and Michael Norman were especially good; no, they were amazing, and Kate Sheehan of Librarything for Libraries was fabu), and tore my presentation to shreds.
My talk the previous day had been all [...]
In a couple of places I’d mentioned that in response to various surveys of librarian blogs, I’d make my own list of my top 25 “favorite” blogs.
On consideration, I won’t do any such thing, simply because I don’t have a list of 3, 25, 50, or even 100 “favorite” library blogs.
Blogs become more or less [...]
