"A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for. Sail out to sea and do new things." -- Grace Hopper

Several years ago I had a lovely power lunch with Don Chatham, Patrick Hogan, and Teresa Koltzenberg of ALA Publishing. They asked me about blogging, and I happily prattled away as I forked up free food in a fancy restaurant.

About an hour into the lunch it dawned on me they weren't just looking for background on this new thingy called blogging. They were thinking about establishing blogs for ALA, which for an organization that not too long ago was operating from a late-1980s framework (faxing: they did that well, at least), was mind-blowing.

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I wrote my longest TechSource post of last summer while sitting in a very warm home office in Palo Alto, sweating in my skivvies. Now in late summer 2007 I find myself in a day-job where the A/C is so efficient I drape a my “office blanky” around my shoulders in the afternoon (I'm essentially a snake, so I'm cold wherever I go in the well-refrigerated South). Things change, don't they? Read more »

 

What do two initiatives from a new branch library and a large city library have in common? Both--from Maricopa (Az.) County Library District and Phoenix Public Library--are about moving out of library silos and leveraging the wide world of information. Read more »

(If you're at ALA Annual Conference while you're reading this, the RDA Update Forum is Saturday, June 23, 4:00-5:30 at WCC 206.)
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This book is dangerous. Everything is Miscellaneous takes all the precious ideas we are taught as librarians and throws them out the window. Structure, order, precise metadata, bibliographic control: gone, gone, gone, gone. Even, for you edgier types, ye who tell of your Semantic Web and your RDF triples: old-school, good-bye, don't let the door hit you on the way out. Read more »

In late February, the Library of Congress announced it was holding an “open” meeting on March 8, 2007 at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. Comments were invited.

 

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I'm a big fan of the interactive/ dynamic/ RSS'ed/ video-blogged/ to-the-user-born school of library services. The days when we saw our job as input/output for books and journal articles are, I hope, long over. Most of us get itchy when we think about spending a year to make a minor decision… that way of doing things is so very 1995.

But when I talk to colleagues inside the belly of the IT beast, they share one heartfelt concern: think about what you're asking for.

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For better or worse, I'm usually quite prolix on TechSource, but this is a day when I woke up early feeling the need for a wee happy post. It's a day when I flung open the curtains and shouted to the world, "World, the OPAC doesn't always have to suck!"

That's particularly true because of the work of Casey Bisson, inventor/developer/creator/instigator/leader of WPOPAC, built "inside the framework of WordPress, the hugely popular blog-management application."

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Remember Maslow's hierarchy? At the bottom of the pyramid were the most basic needs… at the top, self-actualization. In between were concepts such as self-esteem, respect, family, and security.

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LibraryLand has seen much excitement since the ALA TechSource blog launched a little over a year ago. As much as Library 2.0 turns me on—Skype me, baby, 8 to the bar!—the trend that makes my heart go pitter-pat is a more subtle water-on-stone metamorphosis, one in which long-held perceptions and attitudes are changing, souls are becoming emboldened, and librarians push forward with new ideas. It's a trend loosely called "NGC," for NextGenCatalog, which does not refer to Land's-End mail-order shopping for college students, but is the set of future services we as a profession will provide for information discovery.

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