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In many of the talks that I have given over the years I have taken pains to point out a key fact about library budgets: the vast majority of any library’s budget the budget for most libraries goes to staff. Usually I use this as a way to put investment in computer hardware in perspective. […]
Code4Lib is a unique place. I don’t know of another space like it in the library world. It has inside jokes all over the place, from the love of bacon, to the poking of fun at OCLC as an organization and me as an individual. Both myself and my employer (OCLC) are good for it, […]
Last night I heard about the untimely and sudden death of a professional colleague and personal friend for whom I had only the utmost respect. Tragically, Rich Wiggins is with us no more. And we are so much the poorer for it. There will be others who will write a better biography. There are others […]
Anyone who has heard me speak in the last decade or so has likely heard my mini-diatribe against the acronym “OPAC”. Besides being impenetrable jargon, it is thoroughly anachronistic. It owes its life to an extremely brief period of modern librarianship when we had automated circulation systems that didn’t have a publicly available instantiation. That […]
A while back (just about a decade ago actually) I gave a presentation wherein I used a number of quotes and illustrations from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. One of my favorites is this exchange: “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, but you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re […]
Please forgive me, upon occasion I dip into highly personal topics that do not focus on digital libraries. Since this is one of those times, you may wish to avert your eyes. Yesterday at ALA Midwinter I ran into someone I knew who was active in LITA and she asked me why I didn’t show […]
I was a fan of Karen Calhoun’s work even before we happened to both join OCLC on the same day in 2007. And although she subsequently left OCLC while I remained, we have kept in touch. One of the projects that Karen took on when she left OCLC was a book on digital libraries. But […]
The highly regarded Wellcome Library in the United Kingdom has released a new web site with over 100,000 digital images for viewing, and in some cases, downloading. The images include “manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements,” as well as contemporary images. Unlike most web sites that provide access to digital or digitized images, the […]
Last summer I went on a Great American Road Trip. In this case, I drove from New Orleans to my home in Sonoma, California. In preparation for such a journey, my wife and I of course went to our local public library to find and download audio books we would like to listen to on […]
empower – give (someone) the authority or power to do something – Oxford Dictionary of American English Someone whom I greatly admire recently set me thinking about the mission of librarians. David Lankes has that effect on many of us. In a talk late last year at the Digital Library Fall Forum, Lankes recast the usual […]
