Family Man Librarian

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 [...]

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 [...]

Recently I was contacted by a student at UIUC GSLIS to whom I’ve been assigned as a mentor for LIS578 (Technical Services Functions). (This is the “traditional” version of the class I will be teaching again this summer via UIUC GSLIS’s distance education curriculum, known as LEEP.) This role of being a mentor [...]

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 [...]

I’ve been silent for a long time now. Just a note to explain part of the reason why: I have decided to leave academia once again and go back to my old job at Endeavor Information Systems, Inc. We are shopping for a house somewhere in the west or northwestern suburbs of [...]