Shame 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 …

Welcome 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 …

I’ve had a great time this week, talking to media and bloggers, tweeting, talking to colleagues in libraries, and engaging the community towards OCLC’s new Web-scale effort.  The amount of energy and curiosity around this new effort is amazing. The cooperative nature of this profession makes this effort worthwhile.  I’m looking forward to the opportunities in the months ahead to share more details and gather more reaction to the web-scale management services strategy.  More specific details on my project are forthcoming, on this blog, and on the OCLC Product Works page.  I’m convinced that it will be some time before the …