Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Monday, November 10th, 2008
Rachel said:
"So, yeah, when I hear all the stuff about trying to make our libraries more like businesses and trying to make our patrons more like customers it makes me despair. Despair because, for one, if we seriously think we can compete with commercial booksellers at their game we’re seriously ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Saturday, November 8th, 2008
A few months ago, I went to a professional conference and was inspired, or at least interested enough, by the keynote speaker and conversations with friends that I went and placed holds on a pair of non-fiction titles at my library: Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational and Clay Shirkey's Here Comes ...
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Saturday, November 1st, 2008
I don't have many heroes and I lost one yesterday when Studs Terkel died. Good-bye Studs, who will tell our stories now?
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Monday, October 20th, 2008
Sometimes it takes near on a year to finish a thought, so here goes.
Early hype of Amazon's Kindle e-book reader raised the question of whether it could revolutionize the book industry the way Apple's iPod had recorded music. "Revolution" and its variants are some of the words I most commonly ...
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Friday, October 17th, 2008
I've been thinking a lot about leaky libraries lately. From chains on books to user authentication, we do everything we can to make sure that when people get some information from us, they have to come and get it themselves.
This is no good. It's not how the world works ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
I'm kind of a relentless optimist. I was asked in the interview for my current job to describe myself in 5 words: "optimistic" was the only one that came easily. One quality optimists tend to have is the ability to take the long view, to believe that things have been ...
Posted in Uncategorized, rants | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
I love reading books that teach you to farm and garden by giving hilarious anecdotes.
Adams, John Festus, Backyard Poultry Raising, Random House, 1977
Madison, Michael, Blithe Tomato, Heydey Books, 2006
Warner, Charles Dudley, My Summer in a Garden, Houghton Mifflin, 1881.
Young, Rosamund, The Secret Life of Cows, Baskerville Press, 2003.
I wish ...
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Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
I was talking to C earlier this evening about the differences between CNN's website, cnn.com, and the New York Times' website, nytimes.com. Cnn.com, I explained, both are mostly text with some media, and the difference is that CNN is adding text to their media and the New York Times is ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
Monday, September 1st, 2008
Recently I was looking at some of the searches that had brought visitors to ⌘f and noticed "if i was a librarian how would i search" was among them. this kind of clicked with something that's been rattling around my head the last few days about a couple of ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »
Monday, August 18th, 2008
I probably shouldn't bother, but I love to hate on American Libraries, the trade magazine of the American Library Association. In August's issue, I particularly enjoyed tearing into Adam Bennington's "Dissecting the Web through Wikipedia," in which the author entreats teaching librarians to have students analyze encyclopedia entries for bias ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »
