It’s a dark, rainy Monday and the weather matches my mood as I get back into the swing of things at work after a nice but short vacation. I really think I need to be more like Tigger and less like Eyore but it’s hard to fight years of pessimism.
We had a really good [...]

This beautiful bird is the type of bird we bought today at the Spring show of the Greater Chicago Cage Bird Club held at the DuPage County Fairgrounds. None of us had ever been to one of these shows. We decided to go because Tristan really wanted to get a bird as a [...]

I just finished upgrading to WordPress 2.5. Pretty easy-peasy! I love the much-improved admin interface. Still trying to figure out what all the new goodies are, but already I see a lot to like.

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Good news to hear: Today, the NASIG 2008 award winners were announced. Here they are!
Fritz Schwartz Serials Education Scholarship
Alena Jewel Rucker, University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Information Science
Marcia Tuttle International Grant
Stephanie Schmitt, Zayed University, Dubai, UAE
NASIG Conference Student Grant
···Eugenia Beh, University of Texas at Austin, School of Information
···Barbara Birenbaum, UCLA, Department of [...]

When it comes to the Internet, faster is better, just about always. I have been thinking a lot about this since reading a post about this issue in the Official Google Mobile Blog a few weeks ago. In that post the author wrote about how Google used analysis of their search logs to [...]

Last Friday a colleague of mine (who also happens to be a fellow UIUC GSLIS alum — GSLIS alums are plentiful where I work!) gave a lunchtime presentation introducing the social web to other colleagues in our library organization. We only had an hour in which to present a broad overview and as a [...]

Thanks to Jamene Brooks-Kieffer @ KSU for a writeup of a very interesting presentation at the ER&L conference on the problem of maintaining multiple knowledgebases of information for libraries. The presentation and more information is available at LibraryOKRA.com. OKRA stands for One Knowledgebase to Rule them All. Love the title. Presenters [...]

I was excited to find out that some important publications from UIUC GSLIS are now digitized and available in UIUC’s institutional repository, IDEALS. These include:
Allerton Park Institute Proceedings(1954-1997)
Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing (1963-1995)
Occasional Papers (1949-2004)
These are highly important publications in terms of recent library history, and it is great that they are [...]

Last night I spent a lot of time figuring out how to use my WordPress categories to create a tag (technically, I guess, a category) cloud. I’ve tried doing this before but was never quite satisfied with the end result. Part of the problem is that I hadn’t used categories consistently, and also, [...]