Not too long ago I saw a sign in a store that asked (or at least I recall it asking), “Do you know what to do if a tornado is coming your way?” My gut response was “Scream and faint.” Then, while pushing the cart around the store (randomly, so that I had to criss-cross […]
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 […]
Thing is, sometimes I think we don’t know what business we’re in. A couple weeks ago, while I was in the cornfields discussing library software, the National Book Critics Circle had a panel discussion in New York City about the fate of small print-based literary journals. This grew out of writer Kevin Prufer’s plaint that […]
I’ve been blogging every month at ALA Techsource for two years, and have decided it’s time to move on. Here’s my last post. It was a good run and I look forward to seeing where it goes (just as I was pleased to see Joe Janes step in as the Internet Librarian, a column I […]
dweinberger posts this today: “stopped by a fruit-sniffing beagle at US customs Confiscated my apple, a well-known gateway fruit.” Bookmark to:
I baked it just for you. As the title suggests (“Wikipedia’s Awkward Adolescence”), I tried to hit the middle ground; like Google and the Big O, Wikipedia isn’t going away any time soon, so I’d rather be constructive than dismissive, especially for a tool I use every day. Wikipedia is a hugely fascinating culture; to […]
Note: over on Techsource, I wrote about open source OPACs this month — worth reading if you’re thinking about OPACs and such. Also see Marshall Breeding’s Library Technology Reports on Next-Generation Library Catalogs. A week from Friday, I’m giving a talk in Illinois called “The OPAC sucks” at at the Symposium on the Future of […]
Note: the URL for this survey has changed. I’m on an ALA LITA Committee that is trying to design better technology conferences. We want to know what you liked, did not like, or would like to see at a technology conference in the future. If you have ever attended a technology preconference, session, conference, or […]
Quite often, I really love librarians, and this is one of those times. The Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan Library has ported the intriguing Ithaka Report into CommentPress to make it easier to engage with the text. In the words of the authors, “this paper argues that a renewed commitment to publishing […]
Over at ACRLBlog, Steven Bell fressed that “library resources” got the big ignore on a list of “top 100 e-learning tools.” My first bit of advice (which I also shared on the blog) is that when we see this happening we should skip the hand-wringing and take action. Why not pull together a dozen librarian […]