Steven Bell is a fellow librarian whom I’ve never met but whose voice is strong, reasoned, and influential for me.  I think he wrote his best blog post to date when he discussed how he has gotten to his current position in the library world, and points out the hills and valleys that we all [...]

There are many things I’m still getting used to in terms of corporate vs. academic librarianship.  One of the differences is the types of information/current awareness sources that can sometimes be found in the corporate environment.  For example, I regularly read reports from Outsell, Inc. and find almost all of them very useful and instructive.  [...]

The main reason I was able to go to NASIG this year was that Anne McKee, program officer for the Greater Western Library Alliance (apparently known as GWLA, pronounced “Gwilla”), kindly invited me to participate in a panel discussion about alternative library careers for serialists. I jumped at the chance to present with friends [...]

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 [...]

I’ve mentioned before that I am annoyed when universities don’t link to their libraries on their home page, forcing me to hunt for the link through some other link (e.g. to “Academics”) or dropdown menu.
What if, on a library’s home page, there was no link to its online catalog? What then? It may [...]

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. [...]

It has always bothered me when a link to the library of a particular organization is not prominently featured on the home page of its website. This is particularly bothersome for educational institutions given the de facto role of the library as a centerpiece of learning. In fact when I browse the web [...]

blogwithoutalibrary.net » state of the library blogosphere, 2006
Amanda Etches-Johnson of blogwithoutalibrary.net has produced some interesting graphs about the state of the library blogosphere. (When writing this, I just noticed that she didn’t use the term “biblioblogosphere” — thank goodness.) Of particular interest to me was the statistic that 12% of academic library blogs [...]

My big news is that I will shortly begin a new job. Yesterday I accepted a job offer from one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, to manage their library’s systems as well as their technical services operation. I am really excited about this opportunity. I’ve worked for two large, academic [...]

Game On: Home
A lot of discussion and news has been shared about gaming in libraries lately. Just about all of that seems to me to involve public libraries. That makes it all the more interesting that the university library of my alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has recently announced an [...]