Riot Librarian

The revolution will be organized.

  • 100 Best Novels

    Awhile ago, I posted a list, purportedly from the National Endowment for the Arts, of “great books” which supposedly people didn’t read. However, the list was weird and I think the whole exercise would have been better served with a better list. So I’m going to try to re-start this meme with the list from…

  • Library Day in the Life, Wednesday

    Today is going to be a busy one, largely because yesterday I was a little bit of a slacker. Procrastination, thy name is Laura. I have a weekly project phone call with the WEST folks this morning, where hopefully we’ll be able to finalize our final project requirements (for this phase of the project, at…

  • Library Day in the Life, Tuesday

    Today? Well, today was kind of slow. I’m waiting for our programmer to make some changes to a MARC record converter so I can get a new set for QA, and I guess it’s more troublesome than he first assumed. I spent most of my work time today with another programmer, talking about workflow issues…

  • Library Day in the Life, Monday

    Another year, another round of the Library Day in the Life Project. The last time I participated, I was a shiny new librarian in a new job as Systems and Metadata Librarian at Whitman College. Now I’m a slightly less shiny new librarian in another new job, so I thought it would be fun to…

  • The Phantom Tollbooth, revisited

    A few years ago, I discovered that the classic children’s movie The Phantom Tollbooth wasn’t available on DVD. I considered this a terrible, terrible tragedy, and I signed some weird petition online and then kind of forgot about it. It appears that signing that petition was effective (clearly, it was all about the petition!): The…

  • Another Big Deal? Working with Publishers

    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ebooks and digital content, and about what libraries have to do to get publishers and other content providers to work with us and play nice. I’ve been trying to think of what we can offer them in exchange for favorable terms on digital content, and my mind has…

  • The Big Picture

    Since I got back from ALA, I’ve been thinking about how to tie together everything I saw and thought and learned while I was there. I’ve been looking for the big picture. Throughout the week, in a variety of sessions, a few phrases kept popping into my mind: Re-think the ILS, re-think the bibliographic record.…

  • 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…

  • Open Discovery

    I was lucky enough to attend a session at ALA on the growing field of Discovery Systems. A group of people representing content providers, discovery system vendors, libraries, and standards bodies came together for a preliminary discussion toward an Open Discovery Initiative. As this was a very preliminary discussion, nothing more tangible came out of…

  • Michael Porter on Library Renewal and eResources

    Michael Porter presented a session with a nice, attention-grabbing title at ALA Annual: “You Mean Libraries Will Be Able to Deliver Content Better than iTunes and Netflix?” The session wasn’t really about how libraries will deliver content better than commercial providers; it was more like a rousing exhortation to libraries to start re-thinking how we…