About Andrew K. Pace
A Break from the Heat
Posted On Aug 8 2007My wife and I just decided that we would rather live without heat than air conditioning. We decided this after living for four days without it, during the hottest week of the year in Raleigh. A mixture of bad luck and some repairman incompetence made for a very long weekend. I remember when I first started at NC State, I jokingly asked one of the older staff why everyone in N.C. walked so slow. She replied—quite wisely—that you can separate North Carolinians into two camps: those who lived here before air conditioning and those who moved here after it became …
An Unerring Eye for the Inessential
Posted On Jul 25 2007Every once in a while, I read something that just grabs me by the throat. If I’m lucky, it stimulates my thinking, makes me laugh, and prompts me to actually do something. I recently had such an experience when my boss forwarded a reprint of an article by Maurice Line, whom I am now ashamed to admit I had never heard of. He worked for the British Library and was a consultant before he retired in 2005. “Librarianship as it is practiced: a failure of intellect, imagination and initiative” was reprinted in Interlending & Document Supply (33/2, 2005, pp. 109-113). …
Even More Meta
Posted On Jul 11 2007Every time I look, metasearch is still with us. Part of me keeps hoping it will go away, but nope, it’s still there. And thank goodness that there are enough people and companies out there still trying to make it better. Index Data announced Monday that they have created IRSpy, a registry of information retrieval targets that support Z39.50 and SRW/SRU. “Each registry entry consists of both database level information, such as the indexes supported for searching and the record syntax and schemas supported for retrieval, and record level metadata such as titles, authors, and descriptions.” Such a registry has …