We recently had our new piano tuned and it sounds wonderful! I try to play it every chance I get. Unfortunately my hands are not as flexible and strong as they used to be so they tend to ache after playing the piano for a while. I miss having the sheet music [...]

When I first read the official announcement posted today by Google about their new library catalog search feature, I thought, Hey, good deal! A closer alignment of library holdings with Google Book Search is, in my mind, a very good thing.
Then I went immediately to Google Book Search to try it out, only to [...]

I recently read a final report from the task force on the university library at The University of Chicago, written by Andrew Abbott, a professor of sociology there. It is fascinating reading and I hope it will receive widespread attention because it touches upon many issues that large academic and research libraries are facing. [...]

This past Saturday I logged into iChat and saw that Tim Spalding was online as well, so I sent him a request to do a video chat. (For those of you unlucky enough to not be Mac owners, well, this kind of interaction is a piece of cake!) Tim accepted my invitation and [...]

I’ve gone back and forth a few times about use of tags vs. categories in FML. I’ve also tried various methods for making insertion of tags and categories easier to do, with limited success. This leads to a messy blog, I guess, but hey, this wasn’t intended to be a cataloging project or [...]

Lots of nice improvements have been made recently in web-related software and services that I regularly use. Here is a list of the ones I can think of that are worth mentioning:

coComment: This service just keeps getting better. Now it allows me to track conversations via webpages or comments on individual postings. [...]

The big news in libraryland this week has been the passing away of Fred Kilgour, founder of OCLC. But the bigger news for me, personally, was finding out that an excellent librarian friend and colleague, Kathy Zar, died recently. Kathy was a librarian at The University of Chicago whose career there spanned close [...]

The Carnival of the Infosciences is an informal, weekly roundup of interesting or worthwhile blogs and news items relating to library and information science that is hosted on various library-related blogs, usually a different one each week. I’ve never participated in this before but I’ve always read each installment with interest. Much to [...]

Tomorrow during class, Karen Calhoun, Associate University Librarian for Technical Services at Cornell, will be a guest to discuss the report she authored for the Library of Congress, entitled “The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools.” I am really thankful that Karen so graciously agreed to meet online [...]

The news this a.m. that Amazon now provides shelf ready services for libraries is somewhat startling. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising because libraries have made good use of Amazon for many years. Below is something I wrote to accompany this announcement when posting to the class blog for the class I’ve been [...]