This morning I received word that divShare introduced a new feature for videos uploaded to its site. Basically they now have a built-in utility (have I mentioned it’s free?) to convert existing videos to Flash. My preferred video format is Quicktime and I’ve learned how to embed QT movies into posts, but it [...]

Next week I will be speaking about electronic resource management at UIUC GSLIS. At the end of May I will be joining a panel of friends who are speaking at NASIG about alternative career experiences in libraries. These are my only speaking engagements for the foreseeable future. I continue to be amazed [...]

After spending Monday night and most of Tuesday in a clinic for a sleep study, the results are in: I have a moderately severe case of sleep apnea. My wife, Michele, isn’t surprised at all; she’s told me this for years. In fact, she recently told me that I had to go [...]

Here is a link to a post by Tim Spalding of LibraryThing that describes his latest adventure: LibraryThing for libraries. What can I say? Just, WOW. If I had control over a library catalog that would be suitable for this, I’d jump on it right away and implement his free widget. [...]

I have known this to be true for years (I started out as a serials cataloger, after all), but the value of quality in metadata has recently been reinforced for me. Quality metadata is absolutely essential to building robust and flexible applications involving search, taxonomy, and retrieval of information for libraries (and for other [...]

We just found out today that Michele’s neurologist has made an appointment for her to be seen by a team of specialists at Mayo Clinic in a few weeks. This is something we had thought about pursuing eventually if we didn’t get answers, but it comes as a bit of a surprise that a.) [...]

If ever there was a librarian who deserves all of the honors she gets, it is Dr. Linda Smith, Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I was very pleased to read that she received yet another award, this one celebrating her pioneering [...]