One of the things that came up in conversation a few times when I was at NASIG this past weekend was that last year I made a proposal to UIUC GSLIS for a new, advanced course on electronic resources management. My intent in proposing this new course was that an existing course that I [...]

Recently my mentee at UIUC GSLIS asked me to look into my crystal ball and articulate some thoughts about what lies in store for technical services librarianship. What follows is my response. I publish this here because although my points aren’t polished and well-defined, what I wrote to my mentee expresses some of [...]

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 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 [...]

Last week I met face-to-face with the students who signed up for LIS578LE: Technical Services Functions at UIUC GSLIS. Overall it was a great time, including an informative meeting with librarians and staff who work in technical services areas at the Main Library at UIUC, followed by a guided tour. This invariably serves [...]

I’ve pointed several times to the You’re It! blog because there is a lot of useful information to be found there about tagging in a context that is much broader than the library world.  (In fact, I have yet to see or recall any mention of libraries so far in what has been written there.)
Today [...]

It was interesting to read this report from CNET on a meeting to discuss how to improve tagging. Underlying the meeting was a common understanding that tagging as it currently stands is not as useful as it could or should be. The main reason for this lack of usefulness, according to the participants, [...]

I’m thoroughly enjoying conversations with my mentee @ the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He is very familiar with Web 2.0 and so naturally we have already begun a dialog about the viability of the library side of this technology trend, known as Library 2.0. I [...]

I’ve mentioned LibraryThing several times already, but I have to write about it again, this time, because of its groundbreaking and chaotic foray into cataloging nirvana, er, FRBR. Basically Tim Spalding has set LibraryThingers (LibraryThingamabobbers?) loose on figuring out what a “work” is and combining multiple versions of a work together into a “work” [...]

Some time ago I noted here that an acquaintence of mine had snagged an interesting job at ALA as RDA Project Manager. Yesterday I sat down and read more about RDA, which stands for Resource Description and Access. In particular I read through the RDA Prospectus, published by an international group called the [...]