I Own Me
Posted On Sep 22 2006I got a very exciting email today–probably one of the best I have gotten in a long time. It was a statement from Sallie Mae announcing that my last student loan payment would be posted next month. “It’s like you’re a real librarian now,” said Sharon, my loving wife. Actually, that was a good one. I felt like I owned something new. It got me thinking about ownership, sort of a hot topic in libraries for the last several years. I don’t want to belabor content ownership here because others have done that better. My concern lately is just who owns …
TechPatience
Posted On Sep 6 2006This week’s title is a play on TechEssence, a great tech blog for library administrators, created by Roy Tennant, to which I am a (too infrequent and currently delinquent) contributor. But it is also homage to my father–he passed away last week at the age of 70–whose patience and impatience has me thinking about technology in the context of his (too short) life and the stories that he used to tell me about his career as an editor for the Federal Register, the U.S. government’s official newspaper. No one in my family would have accused my father of being patient. …
Overheard at IFLA
Posted On Aug 29 2006Okay, so I heard it second hand–I was nowhere near Seoul, Korea, for the 72nd IFLA conference (I’ve only been to IFLA once. . .when it was in Boston) when Sungdae Ahn, vice president and general manager of EBSCO Information Services-Korea, said, “Service, not content, is the new king.” While she might not have been the first to use that phrase, I’m not quite sure what I think of it. I will give EBSCO their props for creating some pretty innovative services for the content that they already govern. A partnership with WebFeat has increased metasearch access for EBSCO A-Z …