About Andrew K. Pace
Hectic Shame
Posted On Dec 21 2009Shame has always been a good motivator for me. My colleagues remind me of the dry spell that is my blog. I’ve barely kept up on Twitter and FaceBook. If you’re waiting for a LinkedIn respsonse, my apologies. But the best shaming came last night when my 11-year-old daughter, Emma pointed out that a quick glance at my blog indicated that I had not written anything new in months. Of course, she said it with a tone that also indicated that my blog posts were somehow akin to an LP collection, as in “how quaint that you still try to …
Getting it right
Posted On Sep 25 2009Since announcing OCLC’s web-scale management services strategy, it seems that the term “web-scale” (or “webscale” depending on your editing preferences) has been catching on a bit. At first, some users diluted the meaning that Lorcan Dempsey had labored to establish in the library space. And I will continue to argue that web-scale in the context of library automation–especially management systems–is a major sea-change. 5000 transactions per second may be no great shakes for Google, Amazon, and Twitter, but in library automation, we’ve never seen anything like this before. Then web-scale began to catch on a bit, and I thought the …
What is our ROI?
Posted On Sep 10 2009Welcome back guest-blogger, Matt Goldner. ROI (Return on Investment) is not commonly used among librarians while it is a key issue for commercial business. This is somewhat natural given our different missions, libraries typically serve the public and businesses serve their shareholders. I have been wondering about a possible application of this same measure to libraries and where it might be applied. Commercial businesses have over the last half a decade moved more and more of their business processes up to the cloud, e.g. as Web delivered applications. Areas that might have been unthinkable to have stored and maintained offsite …