The city of Richmond CA, facing very serious financial problems, elected to “eliminate” the director’s position, which has been vacant for over a year. A cursory review of the city’s budget-cut plan suggests the library is the only department to eliminate its leadership as a cost-cutting measure. The budget does not indicate if the city […]
Shared by a colleague: Our boiler was failing. We decided that we loved steam heat and we wanted to keep it, so we started interviewing plumbers who knew steam. The house sat on a slab with a tight crawlspace around the perimeter and a small basement with the boiler under the kitchen. One of the […]
The latest Cites and Insights is a delight, as always, but Walt’s comments about the Public Library of Science rocked my world. After we added a record for PLoS to LII, a reader wrote to complain that our record description, pulled straight from the site, didn’t match the actual content on the site, which to […]
http://www.barbstripling.net/ We are very fortunate to have two very highly qualified candidates running for ALA president. ALA has benefited from the many contributions of both Michael Gorman and Barbara Stripling. Both of them share core values I can identify with. However, it is Barb’s candidacy I am excited to throw my weight behind. Barb Stripling […]
Walt Crawford is a charter member of the “I was dialing up Dialog on my 300-baud modem when Al Gore invented the Internet” club, and he’s a great writer, to boot. He quickly dispatches Ashcroft’s lies in the latest issue of Cites & Insights, and is also very funny about RSS, cataloging, OpenURL, and anything […]
The library director who was canned due to her well-advertised extracurricular hobby as a sado-masochist dominatrix is at the top of my “Library Darwin Arwards” for 2003, leading even OCLC’s attempt to sue the Library Hotel over using Dewey numbers for its hotel scheme. Still, it’s fascinating that though the story has cropped up–oops, no […]
For some time I had wondered why I hadn’t seen recent issues of “Less Access to Less Information by and about the U.S. Government,” which ALA began publishing in 1981. I found out today that it ceased publication in 1998, when its author Anne Heanue, retired from the ALA Washington Office. Fellow ALA Councilor Bernadine […]
Jessamyn West lists a number of good Web resources on librarian.net. AIDS inspired one of my first real-time, patron-in-front-of-the-desk Internet searches for reference, in 1993, when I worked at the science/business/government desk at Newark (NJ) Public Library. A man walked up to the desk and announced, “I’ve been diagnosed with AIDS.” I walked to our […]