To make a long, long rant much shorter, I’ll just say this: I think OPACs have a long way to go before they stop sucking. To be more precise, I think we need to throw out the whole concept of the “Online Public Access Catalog.” But that’s not going to happen today or tomorrow. In [...]
Inspired by David Lee King’s series of posts on “Inviting Participation,” I wrote a post for MPOW’s public blog in which I raised issues about our library and libraries in general, openly inviting people to respond. Being the hotspur that I am, I went ahead and published the post…and then thought, “Maybe I should’n’a done [...]
Gee whiz, would I love to have a job as a Collaborative Publishing Librarian or Exploration & Training Librarian! Maybe someday… (Coordinator of Patron Participation sounds really great, too.)
My jaw is on the floor. I missed this point, so I’m very thankful that Jessamyn West has pointed out one incredibly great thing about Casey Bisson’s WPopac. Catalog records distributed freely under a CC or GNU license? Jumpin’ Jupiter! That’s monumental! That’s heroic! That’s…about damn time!
Casey Bisson won the Mellon Award for his WPopac. The first time I saw his proposal for a library OPAC based on WordPress, my mind was fairly blown. So it’s great to see him getting an award for that. (Getting an award for creating the WPopac, that is, not for blowing my mind. There’s no [...]
I’m a fan of rants and manifestoes (especially when I agree with what’s being said) and I’m a fan of LibraryThing. Throw both of those in a blender, add some chocolate syrup, and I’m one happy camper. And so, Tim Spalding’s latest post on the Thing-ology blog: “Is Your OPAC Fun? (a manifesto of sorts).” [...]
The “Library 2.0” entry on Wikipedia is being considered for deletion. I’ve joined Steven Cohen, David Lee King and others in voting to have it kept. If you have a Wikipedia account, log in and voice your opinion. If you don’t have a Wikipedia account…it’ll take you two seconds to create one. And why shouldn’t [...]
I recently upgraded my laptop’s operating system from Ubuntu‘s “Dapper Drake” release to the latest release, “Edgy Eft.” The upgrade went more smoothly than the last time I upgraded (from “Breezy Badger” to “Dapper Drake”), when I had quite a few problems. I’m not anywhere close to being a topnotch Linux guy, so when I [...]
The Librarian in Black blogging about Stephen Abram’s CLA 2006 speech: He quoted Karen Schneider’s famous line: “The user is not broken.” We are trying to turn our users into little librarians. We should not market “information literacy” — we are calling users illiterate before they come to us for help. That does not begin [...]
I absolutely love Laura Cohen’s Librarian’s 2.0 Manifesto. I’ll no doubt have more to say it, but for now, I’m just all about the love.
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