Family Man Librarian

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 [...]

I’ve mentioned many times that I have close ties to my alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, so forgive me for yet another mention of them. I have been meaning for a while to mention here that they are providing some nice social web functionality. Included in this is a library-specific [...]

I was thinking today, after reading through the many different reports about the recently concluded Computers in Libraries conference, that after having read all of them, I feel as if I did not miss much by not attending.  This is something new, I think.  Lorcan Dempsey phrases the phenomenon in a much more cerebral way [...]

I was glad to see an announcement that Ex Libris has added social web features into its latest release for Aleph 500, its integrated library system. (Seen via Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog.) I wish that this was something Endeavor Information Systems and other library systems vendors in the research and academic library marketplace were [...]

I’ve been following the development of a new technology called COinS with a lot of interest. Lorcan Dempsey wrote about it last week on his blog and used that post to announce the availability of COinS functionality in Open WorldCat. Great news! If you use the Firefox web browser and have installed [...]

Quote “overheard” from an excellent blog called It’s All Good, derived from notes jotted down during a live symposium sponsored by OCLC at the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting (known as ALA Midwinter). The full quote was “It’s like a public park for your brain” and this statement was made by one of the [...]

Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog: Reeling and writhing
orweblog.oclc.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/472
This post by Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC was an interesting read. I agree with his point that “It would be good to have an on-web publication venue for the reflective practitioner in the library community.” I really had to chuckle when he wrote, “I wonder who is best [...]

An article in the Indianapolis Star reports that the Lilly Endowment lost 20% of its value last year. This is big news because this is the largest source of charitable funds in the whole state, and the Lilly Endowment is particularly generous to educational institutions like the one where I work. In fact, [...]

Just proved the usefulness of RSS once again…having heard via MacCentral that today, Apple released a new version of the Safari web browser. Unfortunately the one thing that remains the one problematic site for which I’d like to use Safari, OCLC’s Connexion service, still won’t work in spite of the improvements in this new [...]