Preserving Money
Posted On Sep 26 2007It was about eight years ago this fall that I sat down to make my very first attempt at professional writing. I submitted my very first column for “Coming Full Circle” in Computers in Libraries. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I think I worked harder on that column than on any one since, with the possible exception of my very first column for American Libraries. I’m happy to say that the CIL article on digital preservation still has legs. I’m a little sad for digital preservation that the article still has legs. I was pretty good in those days …
Change is Good
Posted On Sep 12 2007Is change really good? This is one of those phrases that is spoken like a truism. I wish it was one of those phrases that had been bastardized, like “money is the root of all evil.” Actually, “the love of money is the root of all evil” is more correct. Let me try this: “The love of change is the root of all disorder.” Of course, I say this with a love of disorder. I believe that some of us are drawn to librarianship not out of a penchant for organizing things or out of some deep-seated anal- retentiveness (though …
ICE is Nice
Posted On Aug 29 2007I am willing to admit that I remain skeptical about the “one big pile” approach to next generation catalogs that is sweeping the library automation world. While I don’t agree that advanced relevance ranking techniques are ineffective on bibliographic records (go look, there is no literature that I can find on this topic…there’s tons on full-text, but nothing on surrogate record relevance), I wonder what happens when the catalog becomes more than it used to be. If a relevance algorithm is based on whether or not a library holds a title, what happens when an article is thrown in the …