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Roy Tennant is a Senior Program Officer for OCLC Research. He is the owner of the Web4Lib and XML4Lib electronic discussions, and the creator and editor of Current Cites, a current awareness newsletter published every month since 1990. His books include "Technology in Libraries: Essays in Honor of Anne Grodzins Lipow" (2008), "Managing the Digital Library" (2004), "XML in Libraries" (2002), "Practical HTML: A Self-Paced Tutorial" (1996), and "Crossing the Internet Threshold: An Instructional Handbook" (1993). Roy wrote a monthly column on digital libraries for Library Journal for a decade and has written numerous articles in other professional journals. In 2003, he received the American Library Association's LITA/Library Hi Tech Award for Excellence in Communication for Continuing Education. Follow him on Twitter @rtennant.
I was 20 and living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains when a friend of mine suggested that we train to be commercial river guides. It was the Spring of 1978, and a large snowpack had finally broken the drought of the mid-1970s. River companies were scrambling to hire more staff to take [...]
As someone who works with large masses of MARC data on a regular basis (at my day job at OCLC Research), you’d better believe I see a lot of inconsistencies in MARC data. This happens for a variety of reasons. One huge issue is that quite a few MARC elements are free-text fields. This means [...]
By now the announcement of a collaborative project by the big search engines to create a vocabulary for encoding metatada for people, places, and things, is old news. Schema.org made a splash a while back, but it’s a bit hard to tell what the take-up has been like by web managers. However, since I recently [...]
In Part 1 of this series I looked at what has become the inevitability of change in our fundamental bibliographic metadata standard MARC. And by MARC I really mean the collection of technologies, rules, carrier formats, and what have you that could be hung off that rubric. However, as I turn to identifying specific problems [...]
As reported by CNet and elsewhere, Adobe is make a dramatic move to “cloud-only” versions of its famous Creative Suite of software applications. Creative Suite includes such programs as Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, among others. Suffice it to say that most creative professionals rely on Adobe software on a daily basis. And it’s quite possible [...]
Please note: This series of posts outlines my opinions and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of my OCLC colleagues or of OCLC as an organization. Also, these opinions are held regardless of any impact the paths I suggest may have on my employer. You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will [...]
I ran into this the other day, someone was once again saying “If everything goes as planned.” We’ve all said it. But here’s the thing: it never does. So why don’t we spend just as much time learning what to do when things inevitably stray off our path as we do to create the plan [...]
Recently I’ve noticed a very disturbing trend of social networking sites that require you to throw your friends under the bus to get whatever goodness the given site is offering you. The latest entry in this social networking arms race is Bing, which recently presented me with this very scary dialog box: So not [...]
By now, you’ve no doubt heard about the lawsuits that the Edwin Mellen Press brought against McMaster University librarian Dale Askey. One of those suits (which also named McMaster as a plaintiff) was subsequently dropped, but as far as I know at this writing the other (naming Askey alone) still stands. I’m not writing to [...]
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