Family Man Librarian

Surely the news from last week about some Congressmen unfavorably comparing the Library of Congress to the likes of Wal-Mart and UPS was one of the stupidest things I have ever read. I was genuinely shocked by the level of ignorance and, well, stupidity…shown by Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.) and Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.), [...]

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 [...]

Tomorrow during class, Karen Calhoun, Associate University Librarian for Technical Services at Cornell, will be a guest to discuss the report she authored for the Library of Congress, entitled “The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools.” I am really thankful that Karen so graciously agreed to meet online [...]

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 [...]

[Through a series of missteps that I won't go into here, I discovered that I had accidentally deleted this post, first published a few weeks ago. I feel pretty dumb. When I figured out what happened, I sat here, stunned, wondering what to do. Then I remembered Google's good 'ol caching capability, did a [...]

2006-05: Changes to Holdings data fields to accommodate ONIX for Serials in the MARC 21 Holdings Format (Network Development and MARC Standards Office, Library of Congress)
Just came across an announcement of proposals for changes to MARC that will be discussed by MARBI (Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information Committee) at ALA Midwinter. One proposal, referenced above, is [...]

Within the last month or so, the Library of Congress’s online catalog received an upgrade that allows users to view and search for records using non-Roman (Unicode) characters in Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Persian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. See more information about it on their What’s New for the online catalog help pages. I [...]

Some recent developments and announcements make me think that e-archiving solutions may be the next big thing in the world of information technology and libraries. Certainly, things are heating up in this area. Several weeks ago the National Archives of the U.S. announced a contract with Lockheed Martin to develop a tool known [...]

The other day I was listening to a podcast (NPR: Technology) on the way home. The topic was tagging, which is a hot topic right now in the blogosphere (see ‘Tagging’ Lets Ordinary Users Organize the Internet.’) Some time ago I wrote about tagging with the basic reaction of “Duh, this is the [...]

Just wanted to point out a new site that I learned about last week, called LibraryThing (www.librarything.com) that allows users to register to post their book collections online. That in and of itself doesn’t sound radical but what is interesting is that users can then readily see the contents of others’ libraries, how they [...]