Previews, Reviews, and Collection Development
I had the extreme pleasure of spending 14 hours yesterday reading a hardcover copy of Lisa Lutz’s latest, The Trail of the Spellmans cover to cover, and have to make a couple comments about it. First, there is a dinner scene that outdoes any Lisa or Janet Evanovich has ever done (even the “shooting the [...]
I hooted out loud when I read this tonight, and figure others can use a similar outburst of unremitting laughs: “Why I Am Leaving Sea World: Resignation letters from Shamu’s trainer, Roger Goodell, and other disillusioned employees,” published today in Slate. Speaking of hooting out loud, or, for that matter, rolling around on the floor [...]
Okay, so if you saw my March 9th post, you know I was learning to play poker with a roomful of Harvard librarians last Thursday evening. So this afternoon, at my weekly dinner with my sister and her husband, a retired 20+ year submariner, I mentioned the session, and talked about a number of the [...]
Just got back from one of the most enjoyable events I’ve ever attended at Harvard: Poker as Strategy with Prof. Charles Nesson. You may have seen Professor Nesson on the Colbert Report, or in the Youtube video of a Google Tech Talk, Poker Teaches, or perhaps you’ve seen the website of the organization, the Global [...]
It’s Sunday afternoon web noodling time, and today in my noodling I found the best site ever: the Willard Library Ghost Site of Willard Library in Evansville, Indiana. Willard Library is the oldest public library in the state of Indiana, but it’s distinctive for another reason, as well: it’s haunted by the Grey Lady ghost, [...]
Ten years ago, my friend and colleague Ed Tallent and I felt compelled to write a small article for Library Journal: “Beware Blogging Blunders.” I say “compelled” because, after having interviewed a slew of job candidates for various library positions, many with nascent online personae, we wanted to deliver a cautionary tale to applicants about [...]
I was quite pleased over the weekend by the spate of e-mails that came in in response to my Friday post (“The Most Annoying, Pretentious And Useless [Library] Jargon“). Messages came from far and wide, as far away as the UK and from as near as a few cubbies over from mine here in Widener. [...]
Okay, so this article in Forbes is really titled: “The Most Annoying, Pretentious And Useless Business Jargon,” but a quick read reveals that just about every one of these words and phrases have leapt (not crept) into the dreaded library jargon. Which does underscore my belief that libraries are increasingly aping business models more than [...]
Being interested in human rights and in most things Internet, when I came across the NYT op-ed piece, “Internet Access is Not a Human Right” by Vinton Cerf, I was intrigued. I have to admit I initially had a mixed reaction to it: Mr. Cerf’s arguments are good and points well-taken. But my thoughts and [...]
As I’m gearing up for this week’s CLIR workshop, I’ve been looking around for materials related to what we’ll be working on, and I came across, “Participatory Design of Websites with Web Design Workshops,” in The Code4Lib Journal, Issue 2, March 24, 2008, by Nancy Fried Foster, Nora Dimmock, and Alison Bersani. Once having found the [...]
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