Dilettante's Ball

Category: libraries

  • YYZ

    At the beginning of the month, I gave two presentations at the Ontario Library Association’s SuperConference. I had a good time. My first time to Toronto and it snowed. Although, with all due respect, Mr. Lee, YYZ totally sucked. My presentations were: Librarian’s Lib: Taking control of what’s ours The Communicat: contribute to the collective…

  • Nice threads

    I have been working on Fancy-Pants quite a bit in the last couple of weeks. This is an AJAX layer over Voyager’s WebVoyage — an attempt to de-suck-ify its interface a bit. Why is it called Fancy-Pants? Well, Voyager still has the same underwear, it’s just got a new set of britches. There are two…

  • The Soul-sucking vacuum that is EAD

    I have a very conflicted relationship with our archives department. While their projects still need to get done, their services get very little use (especially when compared to other pending projects) and every time I get near any of their projects, it starts to become “Ross Singer and the Tar Baby”. Everything, EVERY SINGLE THING,…

  • “I dropped my pick”

    Library Geeks #4 is out. I’m back (instead of being the ‘Poltergeek’ of episode 3), and Dan set this one up in kind of a neat way. He certainly leads and guides the dialogue, but it’s much more of a roundtable and informal discussion. No doubt this is largely due to the fact we’re all…

  • The Librarian and the Travel Agent

    I have been thinking a lot this week about how libraries are skirting ever closer to a precipice they generally refuse to acknowledge. While certainly a cynic, I’m not generally a Cassandra, so before proclaiming last rites on the library, I wanted to make sure I had thought about this some. This was probably spurred…

  • Experiment

    I am embarking on an experiment to learn the value of an ALA-accredited MLS. I’ll give details in a couple months when it’s over.

  • Another Chudnov-et-al joint

    Ariadne #48 includes “Introducing unAPI“, written by Dan, Jeremy, Peter, Michael, Mike, Ed and me. It explains the potential of unAPI and shows some examples on implementations. Like the last article I “wrote” with this group, I didn’t have to do much. On the flipside, publishing has such a minute effect (if any) on my…

  • Pödcäst

    Dan Chudnov “interviewed” me about the Ãœmlaut for the first “Library Geeks”. It’s crude and show obvious signs of “learning as we’re going”, but if you want to hear more about the Ãœmlaut from my voice and hear my favorite curse word (and boy is it a doozy), take a listen. Note the “3-2-1″ at…

  • Üpdate

    It’s been a while since I’ve written anything about the ümlaut. It’s been a while since I’ve written about anything, really. Lots of reasons for that: been frantically trying to pull the ümlaut together in time to launch for fall semester, and I’ve got this little bit of business going on… Still, it’s probably time…

  • ELUNAmating

    This is really the first time I’ve gotten to sit down and write since I got back from the first annual ELUNA (Ex Libris Users, North America) Conference earlier this week in Knoxville, TN. I made a presentation on the umlaut (and I’ll go into that a bit later), but, in general, I really enjoy…