As always, LITA Forum had an exceptionally good wheat to chaff ratio, though to my intense sorrow I could not get to Forum in time to hear Tim Spalding of LibraryThing.
I hope Tim’s session was recorded, though I know ALA has this idea if they record too many sessions No One Will Come To Conferences Any More. I believe the opposite is true — it’s called marketing — but anyway… all I heard for the next two days was “As Tim said…” or “Tim made this really good point…”
I’m aware some folks get irritated by Tim, and this is what I think it’s about: Tim really doesn’t care what we think of him. He’s on Planet LibraryThing, puzzling through the creative problems associated with user engagement and whatnot.
Every once in a while he says something really provocative. You can agree with Tim or not, but it’s not as if he’s calling anyone a pee-pants poopyhead (let alone — to give us a political moment — anything so disgusting as “Obama Bucks,” which so amply underscores the bankruptcy of the McCain campaign).
My recommendation is take a chill pill, and when your library software can do even a fraction of what Tim’s software can do, then you can begin to waste time stewing over him.
Anyhoo, so I’m sitting in the Cincinatti airport waiting for my flight and working on this test installation of Dokuwiki, when I install a plugin called IndexMenu and then begin browsing its demo page. What word do I see? Synecdoche! One of my favorite words, largely because I had to get an MFA to learn it is pronounced close to “Schenectady,” and not — as I had been saying it for several decades — “cynic douche.”
What small neural spark had someone slide “synecdoche” on a wiki page? My guess is it’s the special handshake known among English majors… we are insidious moles. You find us everywhere.
How about that Colin Powell, eh? He joins Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Buckley in the long line of people who say Yes We Can. Tomorrow I go to the polls and vote for Barack Obama for president!
Posted on this day, other years:
- Two retirements - 2014
- ALA's virtual members and their real obstacles - 2007
- Williamsburg Regional Library Staff Day Presentation - 2007
- "Waiter, a table for 17,000": The Midwinter Rooming Crisis - 2006
- Automated LCSH - 2004
- Open This, Open That, Drink Me: Get Real! - 2004
By now, I think everyone would have heard the history of baseball on the radio, how the owners opposed it because people would not come to the game, but how it massively increased the fan base.
Yeah, record those talks.
There is a new movie, “Synecdoche, New York”.
Of course, nobody’s going to actually stand up and actually say, “Dear ALA. Please record the sessions, so I can go to the conference city, hang out with everybody I see once a year, and then crib my trip report from the audio while flying home.”
Well, if ALA records the sessions that delays the trip reports until we get home… there’s always some drawback 😉
I almost forgot: Equinox is hiring! See esilibrary.com
I am a huge Tim Spalding fan. I saw him speak at Computers in Libraries a few years ago and he blew me away. I think some librarians feel threatened by him because 1. he is quite brilliant and 2. he isn’t a “librarian.” I think Tim is more in tune with what libraries are/should become (i.e., places of discovery and sharing) than most in the field.