Aaron Schmidt rightfully quotes himself with pride from an article in the Chicago Tribune:
"There's a lot of dead wood in libraries, and I think there's a lot of administrations that are kind of just biding their time for retirement and don’t feel like putting forth a lot of effort," he said. "I think there’s a general culture of resistance to change. That needs to go away."
He's right of course but I think the problem is a bit more complicated.
I'm working on a neat new utility which will be ready to unleash on the world in a couple of days.
It's a combination of a couple of things that I hope people will find useful. All I can say at the moment is that it's library-related and that it came to me as I was thinking about the next 'Website of the Month' piece.
Being the neurotic perfectionist I am, I repeatedly go over the thing, thinking about how to improve it. That adds extra to the amount of time it's taking me.
In any case, I'll try to have it finished either this week or next.
Bill Drew (SUNY Morrisville) posted a link on Web4Lib to the American Library Association's new Wiki, 'Read Write Connect'.
The Wiki brings together many of ALA's online services loosely defined as 'Web 2.0' (i.e. Podcasts, flickr, etc.) This is one of a series of new online products, the most successful of which, IMHO, is the electronic newsletter, AL Direct.
This is neat: Chicago mapped out in Flickr tags courtesy of the ZoneTag Project (Yahoo! Research).
Zoom in and move around and you'll see different tags show up. Click on the link, 'View on World Explorer', for a larger map and a photo browser. (h/t O'Reilly Radar)
After a pain-staking process of vetting countless candidates, I'm pleased to announce that this year's CL Person of the Year is none other than Ms. Dewey (aka Janina Gavankar).
In a year, when the best that Time Magazine could do was award its prize to a crummy Piece of Mylar, we here at CL have boldly designated a persona whose sole purpose in life is to drive traffic to a search engine! Her incessent fidgeting, banging on the monitor and entreaties to "type something here" go beyond the call of duty and serve to remind us that the best reference interview technique oftentimes consists of encouraging the library patron simply to "try again".
While the precision of her responses needs some work, her enthusiam and charm -- together with a willingness to drop everything and come to our aid serves as a fine example for those of us involved in bibliographic instruction and public service. Others might deride her as nothing more than a flash animation but her panache ought to make her a welcome addition to any (virtual) reference desk.
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