Tag: libraries
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Banned Books Week: A Defense
Another Banned Books Week is coming to a close, and once again, my RSS feed has been filled with arguments for and against this most well-known library tradition. I’ve always been a supporter of Banned Books Week, even organizing events around it for the Simmons College community when I was chair of the Simmons Progressive…
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Kindle Library Books
The inability to check out books from my library using my Kindle irked me from the first moment I started using the Kindle. When Amazon and Overdrive announced that they were finally partnering to allow library lending on the Kindle, I was pretty excited. Sure, as a librarian I know it’s far from a perfect…
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Know Your MARC
I’m deep in the midst of a project that involves dealing with a lot of MARC records, and I know I’ve said it many times before, but seriously? How is it possible that this “standard” involves so many un-standard elements? Sure, a lot of the core data really is in the same place in every…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…