Riot Librarian

Category: cataloging

  • The Holdings Forum

    The days since my trip to ALA are increasing, and I still haven’t completely finished writing up my thoughts on some of the things I attended and learned there. I kept wondering if it was really worthwhile to write all of this up, but it helps me organize my thoughts and impressions, so here we…

  • Library Linked Data

    Over the last year I’ve read and heard a fair amount about library linked data, and I have not yet been able to form a whole and coherent picture of what this means for libraries. I see examples, and I understand the idea and the benefits, but I don’t see how the examples and the…

  • The Infinite Collection: OCLC Symposium on Resources in the Digital Age

    OCLC held a symposium after their Americas Regional Membership Meeting on digital resources. They brought together Clifford Lynch, Rick Anderson, Bobbi Newman, and Brian Schottlaender to share their thoughts, and it was a thought-provoking and engaging session. It ended up being the one of the best sessions I attended, and I hadn’t even planned to…

  • The Future of Tech Services in Academic Libraries

    I had a carefully planned out schedule for my first day at ALA, and as it turned out, most of it got thrown out the window, largely because I misunderstood some of the session descriptions. Thankfully, I didn’t have too many newbie errors like this during the week, and the sessions I attended were interesting.…

  • The Un-standard Standard

    I’ve been working with a lot of MARC records lately, from a handful of different libraries, and a handful of different library systems. Over the next few months, I’ll be working with MARC records from approximately 80 different libraries. And what is really striking to me, as someone who is fairly new to libraryland, is…

  • The Presidents’ Panel

    Perhaps I was a little harsh yesterday on the Twitter, when I was at the RMG Presidents’ Panel. Maybe I shouldn’t have said the Innovative rep was being petulant. Maybe that wasn’t very professional of me, but you know what? It was really unprofessional of him. I guess ILS vendors and their reluctance to provide…

  • ASIST08: Tagging as a Communication Device

    The second session I attended yesterday dealt with tagging, another subject I’ve been drawn to during my year in library school. Heather Pfeiffer of New Mexico State University gave an overview of ontology building. She used the framework of language—syntax, semantics, and pragmatics—to talk about how we construct ontological frameworks, and she placed tagging within…

  • Everything is Miscellaneous

    I picked up Everything is Miscellaneous to read while on vacation, and was promptly made fun of by my library school colleagues, because, apparently, it’s an assigned text in one of the cataloging classes. Well, I commend the person who’s assigning this book, because it’s really excellent. David Weinberger does a great job talking about…