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By August I will have published the current awareness newsletter Current Cites every month for twenty-four years — with all but the first of those years (1990-1991) freely available on the Internet. My children, now in college, aren’t even that old. In fact, my only absence from its publication was the period shortly after their birth. […]
Recently my colleague Karen Smith-Yoshimura noted a blog post that demonstrates effective traits for using social media on behalf of an organization. Titled “Social Change”, the post documents the choices that Brooklyn Museum staff made recently to pare down their social media participation to venues that they find most effective. As they put it: There […]
Fifteen New Jersey libraries—including public, school, and academic institutions—have received funds from a New Jersey Library Makerspace grant initiative making way for libraries to become a hotbed of community skill building and personal connections.
Sometimes I’m shocked to realize that I’ve been writing software for over 30 years — longer than some of my younger colleagues have even been alive. And people who know my code are shocked as well, that so much time could pass and my code still sucks. But I have an excuse: programming does not […]
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, […]
This past January, the Alliance for Excellent Education published a report showing school librarians in the front lines of the education movement to shepherd digital tools and skills into the hands of students.
EBSCO has rolled out Research Starters, a new feature for EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) that presents student researchers with short, citable summaries on frequently searched topics. Drawn from sources such as Salem Press, Encyclopedia Britannica, and American National Biography, more than 62,000 of these 500- to 1,500-word summaries are accessible, offering students an authoritative overview of their chosen subject, as well as links to other research starter summaries, or peer reviewed research where they can delve deeper into a topic.
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 […]
