Riot Librarian

The revolution will be organized.

  • Moving On

    I’m both excited and sad to announce that after almost two years as Systems/Metadata Librarian at Whitman College, I’m moving on. I’ve accepted a new position as Metadata Analyst at the California Digital Library, in Oakland. I’ll be working on a variety of projects with the CDL, including work with the HathiTrust and the WEST…

  • 21st-Century Academic Libraries

    I just finished reading Checking Out the Future: Perspectives from the Library Community on Information Technology and 21st-Century Libraries, a policy brief from the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy. Yeah, I’m a little late to the game on this one, seeing as it was published over a year ago. There’s not a whole lot…

  • 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…

  • ALA in the Morning

    I attended ALA Midwinter for the first time when I was still in library school. I wasn’t actively involved with ALA, and I spent most of that meeting wandering around trying to find a place to sit down and plug my laptop in, trying to find someone, anyone, to talk to, trying to feel like…

  • Another year of readin’ books

    Two years ago I decided to keep track of what I read over the course of a year, because I never seemed to be able to remember back more than a month or two on my own. With the aid of a simple Google document, I can look back over 2010 and remember every book…

  • Conferences, Conferences

    ALA Midwinter is in my hometown this year, and seeing as it’s right after the holidays, I arranged to stay in San Diego an extra week after New Years to attend. And because this conference will be relatively inexpensive, with no airfare or hotels necessary, I’m also going to be going to ALA Annual this…