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« Previous EntriesDo you link to Harvard Business Review from EBSCO?
Friday, June 26th, 2009Paul Pival wrote today and yesterday about “mafia tactics by Harvard Business School Publishing”, wherein they are trying to charge libraries to link to articles from Harvard Business Review in EBSCO for online classroom use and then are turning off PURLs to HBR articles in Business Source products if the school refuses to pay.
I’ve known [...]
It’s not all about the tech – why 2.0 tech fails
Saturday, March 14th, 2009Yesterday, I gave a talk for the ACRL Virtual Conference entitled Can’t Get There From Here: Achieving Organization 2.0. If you’re registered for the Virtual Conference or the regular ACRL Conference, you can access the archive of the talk, and if not, my slides and links to what I discussed are provided on my presentation [...]
Why not?
Sunday, March 8th, 2009I have been so touched by the kind words people have written about me with respect to my winning the LITA/Library Hi Tech Award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology (or as my father-in-law started calling it to everyone he saw last weekend “tech librarian of the year” — lol). I always feel [...]
Online conferences – the future is now
Sunday, February 15th, 2009I’ve been lucky to have had some recent involvement with two online conference models — one that recently happened and one that will be happening soon. I’m really pleased to see more organized professional development opportunities being offered online in light of the current economic situation and, selfishly, the fact that I personally won’t [...]
ALA Annual Unconference
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009For the past year and a half, I’ve had the pleasure of serving on Jim Rettig’s Presidential Advisory Committee. I honestly had no idea at the time what it would mean to be on this committee, but Jim seemed like a really cool guy with a vision for a more inclusive ALA, and I really [...]
Separate but not equal?
Saturday, January 10th, 2009When I read David King’s post about Ask-a-Librarian services last week, I didn’t have a strong emotional response to it. That was, until he wrote a follow up which brought my attention to some of the responses people had made to it. With email reference, it’s pretty obvious that it’s not a synchronous medium. We [...]
Technology education and the “real world”
Monday, December 15th, 2008I just love that feeling of serendipity when I find that people are thinking about the same things I am at the same time. Karin Dalziel made an impassioned case for every librarian to learn how to program. Dorothea Salo responded to it and described how she thinks technology should be taught in library school. [...]
Validation of my crackpot teaching ideas
Thursday, December 11th, 2008Last week, my students in the Web 2.0 and Social Networking class I teach (at San Jose State) presented their fantastic proposals (via web conference) for implementing a specific social tool at a specific type of library. I was so impressed with their creativity and professionalism. Each of them made a very good case for [...]
Satisfaction with free/open source software survey
Thursday, November 6th, 2008I know I’m late in posting this, but Brenda Chawner (a long-time expert on library open source software in New Zealand) has developed a survey for her PhD research that explores people’s satisfaction with free/open source software and their satisfaction with any F/OSS projects they’ve been involved in (MediaWiki, Koha, Drupal, MyLibrary, DSpace, etc.). If [...]
Inmates running the asylum?
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008At the beginning of the conference I went to in Iceland, the President of Iceland’s Library Association discussed how they’d assembled all of these great experts from around the world to speak on their areas of expertise. Whenever I hear that word — expert — I get a lump in my throat. The fact is, [...]
Fomenting revolt in Iceland
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008I got back from Iceland this weekend just in time for a storm to knocked our power out at home. It’s back on and I’m slowly recovering from the travel, jet lag and mountains of emails and to-dos. Iceland was absolutely amazing! The landscape is so unique — I got to see lava fields, double [...]
The Abbreviated Fall Speaking Tour
Monday, October 13th, 2008With the pregnancy, I tried to keep my speaking schedule light for Fall. However, all three of the talks I’m giving fall within a two-week period, so it’s made me a bit harried in October. Last Tuesday, I gave a webinar for METRO NYC which was very fun, but it’s always weird to give a [...]
Library school survey results
Saturday, September 27th, 2008A few weeks ago, I posted a survey to Survey Monkey to get people’s views about their library school education and what they think should be taught in library school that isn’t (or wasn’t when they were in school). The 91 responses I got were really interesting and I wanted to post them so everyone [...]
SOPAC 2.0 at Darien Public Library
Monday, September 1st, 2008Run, don’t walk to check out the Darien Public Library’s awesome new Drupal-based website along with the John Blyberg-designed new-and-improved SOPAC 2.0. I, for one, am totally impressed with the site and the catalog. One of the biggest things about SOPAC 2.0 (short for Social OPAC) is that its component parts are going to be [...]
Teaching online with Drupal
Sunday, August 17th, 2008In the Spring, I taught a class for San Jose State University on social software in libraries. Last week, I received both the student review of my teaching (which is anonymous) and the peer review of my teaching by a permanent faculty member at SJSU. I was beyond pleased by the comments and by my [...]
Love for sale
Thursday, July 10th, 2008Seriously, I just don’t get it.
So, Google used to have a blog just for librarians called Librarian Central. I remember hearing about it from lots of folks way back when, but I didn’t read it because I figured if Google came out with something cool, I’d hear about it from someone’s blog. Apparently, the blog [...]
Value in the online world
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008I’ve been thinking a lot about how we value online things in light of a few interesting posts I’ve read recently. The first was Walt Crawford’s post about some negative reactions people had to his charging money for the electronic version of his book. One critic wrote:
But seriously, Walt, $29.50 for a paperback is bad [...]
If you haven’t heard of it, it’s new to you!
Sunday, June 8th, 2008I don’t write much on this blog about the gadgets and applications I use, but I’ve recently started using several things that I thought people might want to know about and try for themselves (if they don’t know about them already). I often assume that everyone already knows about the things I’ve discovered, but after [...]
Followup on Is this how we encourage people to contribute?
Thursday, May 15th, 2008I’ve been thinking a lot about the discussion last week about speaking, being compensated for speaking, transparency, the profession and it’s (perhaps?) inferiority complex, and so much more. Everyone contributed such unique and interesting perspectives, some I agree with, some I don’t, some that made me change my perspective a bit. We’ve all had different [...]
31 Day Comment Challenge: Days 2-7
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008In case you were wondering, I haven’t given up on the comment challenge! I’ve just been rather involved in the comment storm that’s taking place on my blog right now.
I definitely didn’t do all of these activities “by the book” but my goal with this is really to be a better blog citizen and think [...]



