All Mashed Up
Posted On Sep 12 2006I was flattered when Talis, a library systems and services company based in the U.K., asked me to be a judge in its very first “Mashing Up the Library” competition. Put simply, a mashup uses web services and data from two or more sources to create a new service. John Blyberg took home the first prize with Go-Go–Google Gadget; Second Life Library from Alliance Library System took home second place. Rather than repeat it here, I will simply point to Teresa Koltzenburg’s excellent coverage of the winners on the ALA Techsource blog. The flattery I felt in being asked was …
TechPatience
Posted On Sep 6 2006This week’s title is a play on TechEssence, a great tech blog for library administrators, created by Roy Tennant, to which I am a (too infrequent and currently delinquent) contributor. But it is also homage to my father–he passed away last week at the age of 70–whose patience and impatience has me thinking about technology in the context of his (too short) life and the stories that he used to tell me about his career as an editor for the Federal Register, the U.S. government’s official newspaper. No one in my family would have accused my father of being patient. …
Overheard at IFLA
Posted On Aug 29 2006Okay, so I heard it second hand–I was nowhere near Seoul, Korea, for the 72nd IFLA conference (I’ve only been to IFLA once. . .when it was in Boston) when Sungdae Ahn, vice president and general manager of EBSCO Information Services-Korea, said, “Service, not content, is the new king.” While she might not have been the first to use that phrase, I’m not quite sure what I think of it. I will give EBSCO their props for creating some pretty innovative services for the content that they already govern. A partnership with WebFeat has increased metasearch access for EBSCO A-Z …