LJ Insider

November 19, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

Steve Lawson (libraryland's Lucian?) has delivered a one-act play that does a remarkable job of distilling some of our profession's recent dramatic episodes. It's got it all: satire, intrigue, and all the relevant background you might need to get up to speed in case you've been, you know, actually doing some work instead of following the blow-by-blow of all the latest dust ups.

It of course touches on the Annoyed Librarian's sole authorship of the most recent issue of the Journal of Access Services, and the AL's being hired to blog for LJ (including some of...Read More

November 7, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

As mentioned in the story on OCLC and the recently-released WorldCat records use policy, there have been some strong reactions from within the cataloging community and beyond.
Without doubt, the most creative of those reactions has got to be the Declaration of Metadata Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that Metadata is essential to all Users, and that the Creation of Metadata endows certain inalienable Rights, that among th...Read More

August 15, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

As I was leaving for my recent trip to Ireland, I received an excellent message straight out of Twitter-land, one that under different circumstances could have made all the difference between a terrible journey and a wonderful one. The message I got that day was enough to make a believer out of me, and to make me think that maybe Twitter’s Fail Whale and the Nereid Canaries really are watching out for me after all.
I was at the airport with plenty of time, already checked in and waiting at the gate for my flight to Dublin when I saw a scrolling headline on CNN informing me of significant baggage problems at JFK, "causing major delays." Of course, the cryptic scrolling headline provided me with absolutely no additional information whatsoever, so I had no idea what the actual problem was, or if I was going to be affected. I hadn't noticed anything unusual as I was ...Read More

July 13, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

July 5, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

The LITA Top Tech Trends panel at ALA last Sunday was a little bit hard to watch (see the news summary here). There were dozens of interesting things mentioned from some of the leading technology folks in the field, which made it all the more puzzling why I was having such a difficult time following them. I'm not the first to write about this (see Robin Hastings', Mary Carmen Chimato's, and Tom Wilson's blogs for another couple of views, among others), but here's my take:

To the left of the eight seated panelists was the text-based information flow of a chat ro...Read More