Riot Librarian

Category: technology

  • I’d say they’re displeased

    I’m doing some research for a paper I’m hoping to write (in the next 10 days…) and I came across this quote that I can’t help but call prescient. I’m reading Julian Everett Allgood’s 2007 article, “Serials and Multiple Versions, or the Inexorable Trend toward Work-Level Displays” (yes, it’s thrilling), and he writes, Probably the…

  • New Amazon Search Feature?

    I wish I had time to write a proper post, but these days, time is something I don’t seem to have much of. However, I wanted to mention something I just saw that I think is kind of awesome: Amazon seems to have created a new search feature that groups results based on which words…

  • Building Better Websites

    I’ve had an idea floating around in the back of my mind for a few weeks, to write about quick and easy ways libraries can create better websites. Then this morning I saw that Amanda Etches-Johnson and Aaron Schmidt presented on just this topic at Computers in Libraries this week, and I think they did…

  • More thoughts on ebooks, and preservation

    I haven’t had a lot of time to sit down and write up a polished piece on ebooks and my growing reservations, but I wanted to get a few thoughts out of my head in the midst of the madness that is my life these days. My growing reservations are really around one of the…

  • eBook User’s Bill of Rights

    The question of ebook access rights kind of exploded last Friday in the biblio-blogosphere, when HarperCollins, through ebook vendor Overdrive, announced their intention to have library ebooks expire after 26 uses (that equates to about a year of constant lending). Their rationale is that print books physically deteriorate and have to be replaced, which is…

  • Librarians with Tablets

    We’re in the midst of a huge inventory project in my library right now, and one thing I didn’t anticipate about this project is how much paper it generates. We run inventory reports, and have to take these reports into the stacks to verify what’s missing, reshelve what’s missplaced, find what shouldn’t be there, and…

  • 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…

  • I don’t want to be a slow adopter

    Yesterday, in my management class, one of the campus librarians came in to talk about managing and keeping up to date with technologies in libraries. And she mentioned repeatedly that librarians “are always a few years behind the newest trends.” She mentioned this as through there is nothing to be done about, as though it’s…

  • Twitter for Good or for Evil?

    To those who complain that Twitter is just a growing forum for navel-gazers with nothing significant to say, I offer this post from the Columbia Journalism Review: At the TimesOPEN conference it was easy to assume that the audience of Twitterers (Tweeters?) wasn’t paying attention, but what was really going on was a broader, more…

  • Library Websites, redux

    I read a great article this morning about the future of library websites, and thought it more than worth sharing. Steven Bell writes in Inside Higher Ed that we need to re-think the purpose and role of library web portals. He points out that most scholars (and students) are no longer using library web sites…