So what?
Posted On Jan 13 2009Whether or not I had young children, I think my favorite movie line would still be from Mary Poppins, where the father, George Banks says to his wife, “Winnifred, please! Kindly do not cloud the issue with facts.” I’ve been thinking lately about “business intelligence”–the other “BI” that isn’t Bibliographic Instruction (if I start blogging about Bibliographic Instruction, please shoot me). My simplistic version of this is how do libraries turn simple reports in actual business intelligence? From a technical standpoint, I have one answer–include more network effect into the data, e.g. how many libraries have this book? or how …
Dewey the Decimal Maker
Posted On Dec 18 2008(sung to the tune of Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer) You know Dana and Dempsey and Avram and Nutter. S.R. and Putnam and Berman and Cutter. But do you recall The most famous librarian of all? Dewey the Decimal Maker had a healthy love of tens. He saw the scattered book shelves through his metric decimal lens. All of the other book worms still liked keeping books on chains. They knew a book’s location– kept it locked up in their brains. Then one fateful shelving day a cataloger caught the bug Dewey with your decimal scheme 1-3-5-point-3 …
The Happiest Place on Earth
Posted On Dec 5 2008Nope, I’m not talking about the blogosphere. I actually just got back from my first famliy trip to Disney World since I was 12 years old. It was a great place to spend Thanksgiving, actually. Since my return, and given the dearth of blogs posts on Hectic Pace lately, I have been seeking some sort of meaningful metaphor for libraries out of the experience. I know that at some point there were libraries out there signing up for the Disney cutomer service training. But I somehow can’t really picture all librarians shaving their facial hair, smiling all the time, and …