Riot Librarian

The revolution will be organized.

  • NISO BIBFRAME Roadmap Meeting, Part 1

    April 15th and 16th, I attended NISO’s BIBFRAME Roadmap Meeting in Baltimore. The meeting was intended to bring together different people working in the information space, not just librarians but publishers and organizations involved in scholarly communication, to talk about a path forward as we begin to move beyond MARC. The Library of Congress has…

  • Linked Data Baby Steps

    I’ve been thinking A LOT about linked data over the past few months. To be less specific, I’ve been thinking about ways that librarians can better share library resources and metadata on the open web, and make our resources more discoverable. We know that Google, to use one search engine example, ranks things on the…

  • I fixed it!

    Last week I discovered some wonkiness happenings with pages in my wordpress installation. I recently moved from one hosting account to another, and I figured something off must have happened when I was re-setting up this site. And I was right. I had some extra lines in my .htaccess file that were causing some issues,…

  • I busted it

    You might notice that some of the links on this site are broken. Sad face! I recently transferred my domain to a new hosting account, and somewhere in the process of setting up this site, I busted it. I’m trying valiantly to fix it, so keep your fingers crossed that I can. In the meantime,…

  • The Catalog is Dead

    In the five years I’ve been a part of libraryland, one conversation seems never to die: How can we improve our online catalogs? There are so many ways to approach this question, from a user-interface perspective or a metadata perspective, a software architecture perspective or a task-based perspective. But there is an assumption at work…

  • ALA Again

    Sometimes it seems that the only time I update this site is when I’m heading to ALA. Sometimes it seems like I’m always going to ALA. I’m excited about this one: I love Seattle, and Sean is coming with me, for the first time. We have shared some wonderful visits in Seattle in the past,…

  • The Infinite Library and Linked Data

    This week I read an excellent article by Stacy Allison-Cassin in The Journal of Library Metadata, “The Possibility of the Infinite Library: Exploring the Conceptual Boundaries of Works and Texts of Bibliographic Description.” Allison-Cassin explores the ways that library discovery and cataloging are bound to notions of “the work” and texts that are solidly grounded…

  • Libraries as Publishers

    Two weeks ago, I wrote up a fun thought exercise on my vision of the library of the future. One huge component of that vision involves libraries stepping into a publisher/producer role in the scholarly communication sphere. I do believe it’s hugely important for us to begin to embrace these roles, which is why I…

  • The Library of the Future?

    During the closing keynote speech at LITA National Forum this year, Sara Houghton encouraged us to engage in a little thought exercise. She wanted us to imagine the ideal library of the future, without the limitations of what we believe is possible or what we’re currently doing. We should, she suggested, set aside some time…

  • LITA National Forum

    Last week I attended the LITA National Forum in Columbus, Ohio. This was by far one of the best conferences I’ve attended. It reminded me of the regional library conferences in the Northwest area that I loved so much: small scale, and very practical. I love the smaller setting of events like this, because you…