As probably many of you have, I’ve been curious from afar about this effort dubbed “The Digital Public Library of America”. I even subscribed to the electronic discussion for a while until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Between bickering over goals and meddling by folks who seemed rather distant from libraries of any type, I […]

As I write this, I am sitting as smack dab in the middle of the University of Michigan campus as you can be and still have your own private room and a drink of your choice (I know, students can only get one of those, if they’re lucky). Literally, I’m in a hotel that basically […]

As is so often the case, Meredith Farkas has a very thoughtful and thought-provoking piece on “The Changing Professional Conversation” on her “Information Wants to be Free” blog. I wanted to blog about it both to bring more attention to it and also to comment on it. So go on over there and read it. […]

Previously I had posted about Elsevier’s “Apps for Library Idea Challenge” contest. I am one of the judges. Basically, all you need to do to enter is to suggest an application for the SciVerse platform your or your user’s workflow while using SciVerse. Unlike many other software contest, this is one only of ideas, so […]

My most recent post was on some of my issues in working with Google Fusion Tables. As a part of that work, I found that I could not simply ingest the data as it was and have it depicted the way I wanted it. First I needed to merge some of the data points so […]

Recently I’ve had a chance (should I say “a need”?) to play with Google Fusion Tables. This is a beta service that seeks to make it easier to mashup piles of data onto maps or do other interesting things with it. I happen to want to put the data on a map. I have about […]

I’ve written before about how the iPad is a paradigm shifter. It has changed where, how, for how long, and for what purposes I interact with computers. A recent revelation came when I put two-and-two together and started precinct walking with it. Here’s the story: my wife is running for the Sonoma County Board of […]

Rick Anderson, someone always worth listening to in my book, has a new post over on the Society for Scholarly Publishing blog about his experience with the Espresso Book Machine that prints books “on demand”. Although he admittedly comes clean in the spirit of “how we did it bad” by being brutally honest about their […]

Jason Griffey has a couple of thoughtful blog posts that are well worth considering for their potential ramifications on how people are increasingly using computing devices and the impacts these changes may have on library services. Although it is the release of iCloud, a new Apple service to store your data “in the cloud,” where […]

A colleague recently said something that had me digging back through my presentation archive and I stumbled across something I hadn’t seen in years. It was a mockup of a piece of software that, for lack of imagination, I called the “Digital Librarian”. Now don’t hate on me for that. I created it to depict […]