Library Bailout
Posted On Oct 7 2008It’s always fun to hear a story about libraries on NPR, and the latest one is no exception. But I was a bit puzzled by the title: “Libraries Shine in Tough Economic Times.” First of all, libraries shine all the time. It’s just that some people don’t notice it until $40 seems like too much to pay for a book club meeting where you barely discuss the book. Secondly, the bustling business that libraries do in harder economic times is usually followed by harder economic times for libraries themselves. This boom of library demand is likely to be followed (sometimes …
What have you done for me lately?
Posted On Sep 22 2008About 3 or 4 years ago, I stood before a panel of library automation CEOs at the annual RMG session hosted by Rob McGee. The discussion had taken a typical turn–why do we pay so much for these systems? I’ve never really accepted that premise. I always thought that libraries were paying what was required of them for vendors to do what was being asked–incremental changes to legacy systems are expensive and time-consuming. I have put this in another more pejorative and accusatory way: vendors squandered our money doing exactly what libraries asked them to do. But in that RMG …
Data for the Young and Old
Posted On Sep 15 2008I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking about “network-level” applications for the last several months. Some people call it “cloud computing,” others “grid computing”…whatever. Suffice it to say that it is more than software as a service (SaaS), which is sometimes as far as libraries will go in trusting the network to their applications. Now the Gen-X in me wants to be an ageist about this and say that older people just don’t get the power of cloud computing or SaaS. The former head-banger in me (yes, you heard me) recalls the words of Rob Halford, the Beast of …