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I know what you are thinking: “Oh, come on! What a chestnut! I’ve heard this like a thousand times and I know what you mean already.” You would be right. And you would be dead wrong. You know it from the perspective of someone who hasn’t bet the farm on their ability to read water. […]
A brand-spanking-new Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life study (just released this morning) has found some surprising information about young people and their opinions of libraries and print books. Here’s the lead: Belying the stereotype that younger Americans completely eschew print for digital, those ages 16-29 have wide-ranging media and technology behaviors that straddle the traditional paper-based […]
In the late 1970s I was primarily guiding on the Stanislaus River — the famous “Camp Nine” stretch. This was nine miles of some of the best Class III whitewater in the state, if not the nation. At one point it winds past a nearly 1,000 foot cliff of gray-green limestone rock. Oak and madrone […]
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 […]
