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’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 [...]

TagFetch Searches YouTube, Flickr and More
This new service sounds quite interesting. I haven’t really tried it out yet, though. One big missing piece here is LibraryThing. I hope that someday the extensive amount of tags used in LibraryThing will be included in such metasearch engines.

Last week (or maybe the week before, I forget), the first public beta release of my favorite web browser, Flock, was released. Naturally I was eager to put it through its paces. I’m glad to say that this is an even better browser than before, with one or two exceptions. In my [...]

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 [...]

Today I found an interesting post via Pubsub, written by an ex-librarian, discussing the role of the online catalog for libraries in the (near) future. Basically he posits that the online catalog IS the library, and goes on to describe ways in which that promise or ideal can be reached. These include combining [...]

Just a quick post to mention several changes I’ve made to this blog overnight. I’ve added a link to a tag cloud in the sidebar. I’ve also added new custom icons in the sidebar for “RSS Subscribe” and “Email Subscribe.” The “Email Subscribe” button’s link replaces the link to an external service, [...]

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 [...]

From the You’re It! blog comes an interesting post that describes the use of tags to help researchers find related papers in institutional repositories. Investigating the usefulness of tags in this way is important, I think.

Thanks to a comment from Jay Datema (newly appointed Technology Editor for Library Journal who oversees the LJ Techblog) on my post regarding the marginalization of comments in the blogosphere, I found a nifty new service (well, new to me, anyway) called coComment. coComment provides the ability for you to track and view your [...]