I’m up, up, up in the air, flying over the Southwest as I head to Albuquerque and then Santa Fe for a quick visit with my mother. Sandy was able to visit her in January during a business trip, and now I’m the one with the precious combination of time and opportunity. I would be […]
This is a smattering of lessons I keep rediscovering in management, which I felt like summarizing as I tick into a new calendar year. A lot of it is obvious, very little of it is new to me (and some of it has been said here before) — but management seems to consist of relearning […]
This past week we had a visitor in the library who (completely without guile) commented that the library felt very dated and dowdy. He didn’t use the word “dowdy,” but it hung in the air nonetheless, while I shrank in my seat. I had just finished bragging about how much space we had opened up […]
I took gobs of photos in New Zealand with both my iPhone and my unwieldy quasi-prosumer Kodak (sometimes cantankerous, sometimes great photos). But except for the rare Antipodean posting, only in the last 24 hours have I moved these pictures from devices to cloud storage, and at that, with only the barest metadata and organization. […]
I set aside my pre-LIANZA preparation to note that the theme for the past several weeks in LibraryLand is: be bold. (Warning, the following blog post is a babblish mish-mosh; I’m so busy I had to abandon plans to brew the White House beer for a local competition, let alone structure or revise this writing.) […]
In the few spare moments I am allotted, I’ve been working on an article (a weekend project, as my weekday pattern is commute-work-work-work-commute-gym-eat-sleep-repeat), but in the back of my brain I’ve wanted to follow up on OCLC’s un-hire of of Jack Blount, particularly in light of my “I am the man” post several weeks back. […]
Sarah has a great post about her transition to library administrator. Because she feels awkward in that cloth she’ll likely do great. Naturally, being The Man myself (a few times over), I have my own twist on her observations. There’s a fine line between being transparent and over-sharing. I don’t believe in transparency so much […]
First, context. On April 27 I attended DPLA West, and let me take it from the horse’s mouth: DPLA West—which took place on April 27, 2012 in San Francisco—was the second major public event bringing together librarians, technologists, creators, students, government leaders [including IMLS and the National Archives], and others interested in building a Digital […]
I’m going to focus on some highlights, rather than rehashing the entire Library Journal Design Institute, but overall it was a timely, highly worthwhile event, a solid mix of panel sessions and interactive problem-solving sessions. Most of the attendees were from public libraries, but there were a few academics, and the ones I spoke with […]
As many of you know, last week Random House raised its Overdrive ebook pricing a lot. Not 20-percent-a-lot. More like 300-percent-a-lot. Enough so that a cart of 9 ebooks I had in Overdrive, only some of which were Random House, suddenly bloated to nearly $500 before I deleted the RH titles… dropping the total to […]