Getting it right
Posted On Sep 25 2009Since announcing OCLC’s web-scale management services strategy, it seems that the term “web-scale” (or “webscale” depending on your editing preferences) has been catching on a bit. At first, some users diluted the meaning that Lorcan Dempsey had labored to establish in the library space. And I will continue to argue that web-scale in the context of library automation–especially management systems–is a major sea-change. 5000 transactions per second may be no great shakes for Google, Amazon, and Twitter, but in library automation, we’ve never seen anything like this before. Then web-scale began to catch on a bit, and I thought the …
Web-scale: Portfolio Director’s Cut
Posted On Aug 18 2009As you might imagine, I’ve been doing a lot of presentations about Web-scale lately…both the general concept and how it applies to the web-scale management services that my team is building for circulation and delivery, print and licensed acquisitions, and license and rights management. Lots of people have been asking for copies of the presentation that I gave at ALA. I used to always have problems sharing slides. For one thing, the joke slides never work out of context; for another, I try very hard to avoid bulleted lists of things, also making context-less Powerpoint viewing difficult. Now I can gladly say, …
My Kind of Conference, My Kind of Town
Posted On Jul 6 2009I’m used to wearing many hats at ALA Conference. In fact, it was the number of hats and the frequency with which I changed them that led to name of my blog. When I joined OCLC 18 months ago, I shed one of those hats–American Librariescolumnist. Nevertheless, the other two hats–OCLC and LITA–seem to have gotten much bigger (please no snide comments about the size of my head). This Annual Conference in July is gearing up to be one of my busiest ever. Rather than bore you with the details of that busy-ness, I thought I would share what I …