Web-scale Blogging
Posted On May 8 2009This week I had the good fortune to participate in a Talk with Talis with Richard Wallis. I can’t quite tolerate listening to the sound of my own voice, but I hope others will give it a listen. One of the questions he asked me was about OCLC’s use of the term ‘web-scale’ (often hyphenated as a compound adjective, and not hyphenated otherwise, but I am now erring toward hyphen consistency). Some have referred to it as synonymous with ‘the web’, however, I think there is a distinction that those more familiar with the history and state of library automation …
And now for something completely different
Posted On Apr 23 2009Five years ago, I wrote an article for Library Journal about “Dismantling the System.” At the end of that article, I suggested that it would be necessary for us to dismantle systems so that we could rebuild them. Of course, I left out how exactly we should do that. Now it’s time to be more explicit about what I have been up to for the last 15 months. I’ve been pretty busy listening to the library community, trying to put their views into a strategy, and creating something new that I hope will represent a real sea-change for libraries and the OCLC …
Sacred Cow #4: Notes, notes, notes
Posted On Sep 5 2008In case you’re wondering how many cows are in this pasture, I started counting and figured I could keep this series going for at least the rest of the calendar year. How long can I milk this one? After a while, though, it begins to look whiny and tired, so I thought I would end with a cow for which it might make sense to make more hay. (there, have I…ahem…butchered that metaphor enough?). Some of last week’s work had me thinking about notes fields in bibliographic and item records. Boy, do we love notes. We didn’t quite have the …