About Andrew K. Pace
My Kind of Conference, My Kind of Town
Posted On Jul 6 2009I’m used to wearing many hats at ALA Conference. In fact, it was the number of hats and the frequency with which I changed them that led to name of my blog. When I joined OCLC 18 months ago, I shed one of those hats–American Librariescolumnist. Nevertheless, the other two hats–OCLC and LITA–seem to have gotten much bigger (please no snide comments about the size of my head). This Annual Conference in July is gearing up to be one of my busiest ever. Rather than bore you with the details of that busy-ness, I thought I would share what I …
Renaissance Geek
Posted On Jun 23 2009Last week, I addressed a group of librarians about cloud computing trends, web-scale, and how OCLC plans to apply them to library management systems and services. One of the thematic questions before I took the podium was whether libraries are entering a renaissance period. That discussion might have been more interesting had the previous topic not been the very sorry state of library funding. As I am always inclined, I tried to mix the topics all together. A few folks asked me to reproduce my brief remarks, so I will attempt that here. Technology applications makes for a boring topic …
Working Furiously and Happily
Posted On Jun 4 2009Six weeks goes by fast. Yes, it’s been six weeks since OCLC announced WorldCat Local “quick start” as the first step toward a web-scale, cooperative library management service. Not only does that six weeks represent two full iterations of agile development for the three main web-scale components–circulation, print and licensed acquisitions, and license management–it’s also been several interviews, speaking engagements, and lots of pressing product management work. One of the things I’m asked repeatedly is to explain the distinctions of OCLC’s effort in this space. Here they are, taken directly from my powerpoints, listed as succinctly as possible, but with …