I finished up the ALISE conference on Friday by attending a session on library technology history that analyzed e history of intellectual freedom in libraries (it turns out that libraries have reacted in many different ways to intellectual freedom challenges over time) and a history of library automation focused on the work that led to... more ›
My first two days in San Diego were spent at the ALISE conference. ALISE focuses on librarianship, education, and research. The opening session focused on the changing needs of the profession and the impact on LIS education. In fact this seems to be an ongoing theme, how librarians continue to prepare themselves for new challenges... more ›
Today Erik and Audra attended a webex session from the Internet Archive on new features in ArchiveIT 4.0. They had me from the first few minutes when they announced that this year had been named the ‘year of metadata’ at the Internet Archive! They focused on new features including metadata searching, crawl date limiting, and... more ›
Last Friday I had the fortune to attend the 2010 ACRL/NY Annual Symposium at Baruch College, Vertical Campus Conference Center in New York. The theme of the symposium was “Innovation by Design: Re-Visioning the Library.” The symposium was a really well run event. ACRL/NY is an excellent organization, and they know how to put on... more ›
This past week was the first “production” week at Z. Smith Reynolds Library’s new offsite storage (LOST) facility. This time-lapse movie demonstrates the sort of work that is being done to accession over 100,000 books from the old storage facility and from the stacks in ZSR Library. This first week was a learning experience for... more ›
Tuesday I attended a workshop on OCLC’s WebScale service. The workshop was a joint offering from OCLC and Lyrasis held at the Durham Public Library. DPL, OCLC and Lyrasis were excellent hosts as we had wifi, coffee, and lunch (I chose a basil, tomato, mozzarella sandwich). We started the day with an exploratory talk by... more ›
Indianapolis skyline: On November 5th I had the chance to present at IOLUG as part of their fall symposium on Cloud computing. I spoke on both the ZSR experience in moving to the cloud and in how cloud computing impacts IT and libraries in general. If you are interested in what I said, you can... more ›
Honestly, they could’ve renamed this the “Patron-Driven Acquisitions Conference,” given the many talks on that topic. Rick Anderson’s opening plenary promoted the opposite of the Big Deal: The Tiny Deal, or, single article purchases. He reported two surprises with his library’s Espresso Book Machine: An interest in self-publishing, especially for family histories. Demand for blank... more ›
From 10 am this morning until 3 pm this afternoon, Z. Smith Reynolds Library was inhabited by 50 excited archivists and librarians (from across the state and as far away as Texas) to learn about Archivists’ Toolkit. The workshop, sponsored by the Round Table on Special Collections of the North Carolina Library Association and ZSR... more ›
On Wednesday, Nov. 10th, I had the privilege of leading a discussion about two articles on Reverse Mentoring today. Our group discussed “How to Use Reverse Mentoring as a Retention Tool for Gen Y Employees” and “Reverse Mentoring Empowers Emerging and Established Leaders”. (links here:http://www.delawareemploymentlawblog.com/2008/10/how_to_use_reverse_mentoring_a.html and www.diversity-executive.com/article.php). Reverse mentoring is when a younger employee is... more ›