Not long ago I came across a printed book that lacks many of the conventions we have come to expect from printed books: The title page verso lacks CIP There is no publisher information to be found anywhere on the book Sections begin wherever they fall, not just on the righthand page Why? This was […]
The Forrest Gump of Library Technology
By on April 9, 2012
If you’ve ever seen the movie “Forrest Gump”, you know the premise. Forrest stumbles into every major event of the last part of the 2oth century, and therefore his life story is the story of his day. In preparing for a presentation I gave recently, it occurred to me that I’m the Forrest Gump of […]
The Art of Looking the Other Way
By on March 15, 2012
You know we’ve all done it. We don’t really want to pay attention to something, so we don’t. We have other, more pressing obligations, we say to yourselves. If it’s really that important, it will be there tomorrow, we rationalize. And we may even be right. But where the problem comes in is when we […]
Are You a Librarian Superhero?
By on February 27, 2012
Today Gale has announced the launch of the second annual “Are You a Librarian Superhero?” contest ” to recognize the often heroic efforts put forth by librarians around the country, and to encourage other feats of greatness.” Don’t laugh, they seem to take this quite seriously, and they reportedly received over 800 nominations last year. From the […]
Hadoop for Large Digital Libraries
By on February 15, 2012
Digital libraries will increasingly need to deal with massive amounts of information if they are to serve their clienteles well. Some libraries are already delving in data curation, and once you go down that road the sky’s the limit. Thankfully, there are new ways of dealing with massive amounts of data that have been pioneered […]
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here
By on February 8, 2012
Yes, I realize my title gives away the topic of this post, but so be it. Surely when you read the title you thought to yourself — “Oh no, he’s gone and done it now! He has searched a Unix error message on Google for a remedy! What a fool!” And you would be spot […]
“www” — Time to Get Over It, People
By on February 3, 2012
When the Internet was young most of us using it had no idea where it was heading. There were a plethora of new services that quickly joined file transfer (FTP) as the initial service: email (which began life as a file transfer), mailing list software (remember BITNET?), Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), Gopher, and the […]
Finding Efficiencies
By on January 31, 2012
I have a disease. I don’t know the name, but it manifests itself as a constant desire to take less time to do repeated tasks. Call me a manic efficiency expert. Perhaps it is born from being the father of twins and someone who had to commute an hour each way to work and at […]
The Single Best Tech Skill is Tenacity
By on January 25, 2012
Once again I’m in the throes of a personal server transition. Over the years I’ve accumulated quite a stable of web properties, most of which are of dubious benefit but nonetheless receive the love that any parent feels for their child. Well, not exactly, but you get the drift. Suffice it to say that I […]
