Dilettante's Ball

Category: philosophizing

  • What we talk about when we talk about http://dbpedia.org/resource/Love

    I’ve been accused of several things in the Linked Data community this week:  a circular reasoner, a defender of the status quo “just because that’s how we’ve always done it”, and (implicitly) an httpRange-14 apologist.  Quite frankly, none of these are true or quite what I mean (and I’m, of course, over dramatizing the accusations),…

  • Commoditizing the Stack

    I had the opportunity to attend and present at the excellent ELAG conference last week in Bratislava, Slovakia.  The event was advertised as being somewhat of a European Code4Lib, but in reality, the format seemed to me to be more in line with Access, which in my mind is a plus. Being the ugly American…

  • I’m only here for the closures

    I am not a programmer. Since I first began writing code, my approach to learning a new language has been to take something that does the sort of thing I am looking for and start fiddling, seeing the results of the fiddling (most likely through some sort of error message) and refiddle until I start…

  • Risk, reward, and the in-between

    I have been following a thread on the VuFind-Tech list regarding the project’s endorsement of Jangle to provide the basis of the ILS plugin architecture for that project.  It’s not an explicit mandate, just a pragmatic decision that if work is going in to creating a plugin for VuFind, it would make more sense (from…

  • Filing an extension on my fifteen minutes

    I was reading Brian’s appeal for more Emerils in the library world (bam!), noticed Steven Bell’s comment (his blog posting was a response to one by Steven in the first place) and it got me thinking. First off, I don’t necessarily buy into Brian’s argument.  Maybe it’s due to the fact that he’s younger than…

  • Union Card

    Can anyone give a rational explanation as to why a job with a description like this: DESCRIPTION: Provides technology and computer support for the Vanderbilt Library. The major areas of responsibility include developing, maintaining and assisting in the enhancement of interfaces to web-enabled database applications (currently implemented in perl, PHP, and MySQL). The position also…

  • A proposal to Endeavor Voyager customers

    If YPOW, like MPOW, is an Endeavor Voyager site, you’ve got some decisions ahead.  Francisco Partners, naturally, would like you to migrate to Aleph, and I have no doubt that Ex Libris is, as I write this, busily working on a means to make that easy for Voyager libraries to do.  But ILS migrations are…

  • “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…

  • The Librarian/Staff Divide

    Every library I have worked at has had an uneasy caste system between the faculty and staff. While I understand this to extent, this delineation is used without rhyme or reason much of the time. The implication is that this means the librarians are treated as “career professionals” and the staff is merely “the help”…