My reason for attending the recent Midwinter Conference of the American Library Association in Seattle had to do with my committee responsibilities related to the upcoming ACRL Conference in April 2013. I am co-chair of the Cyber Zed Shed Committee (the name: I know, I know). Conference chairs met on Sunday afternoon to ensure overall... more ›
I love ALA and governance work. I love LITA and my colleagues in that organization. I love conferences. And I love Seattle (more than any other city). I spent last Thursday through this Tuesday at the conference, getting only the smallest amount of time to see anything beyond the ALA campus, and still it was... more ›
Victor Steinbrueck Park It is wonderful to be back in Seattle, my third trip to this vibrant city. It brings back memories and not only because my first trip here was to attend my first ALA Midwinter in 2007. But what was also special about that first trip was that it was the inauguration of... more ›
Susan, Mary Beth, Kyle, Molly and I started our day at a breakfast sponsored by ProQuest where Steven Bell, (current ACRL President among many, many other things) was the keynote. The title of his talk was “Unbundled and Rebooted: Library Leadership for Disrupted Higher Education” and it was very good. I will summarize here as... more ›
Yesterday, I attended an interesting day-long “interactive event”, CurateGear 2013, sponsored by UNC SILS in Chapel Hill. This year’s theme for the day was “Enabling the Curation of Digital Collections.” The format of the day was new to me. There were five tracks, but they ran one after the other. Each track began with a... more ›
Thomas and I attended the Fall meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information in Washington, DC on December 10-11, 2012. CNI is a membership organization dedicated to best practices in information technology, from both the Library and IT sides.As happened last year, I had bad luck traveling to the meeting due to a delayed flight.... more ›
Earlier this fall, I was invited to attend the 2012 Leadership Institute that was sponsored by the North Carolina Library Association (NCLA). It was held from October 25-28 at the Caraway Conference Center outside of Asheboro, and it brought together thirty representatives of public, academic, school and special libraries from across the state. Our own... more ›
The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries held its Fall 2012 meeting in Atlanta (Decatur, actually) on November 13-14. The first night, I had dinner with a ZSR donor who happens to be a retired librarian, which was a very enjoyable experience considering that she was born and raised 3 doors down from my house in... more ›
Charleston Conference 2012: “Accentuate the Positive!” Nov. 8-10, 2012 For the first time, I attended the Charleston Conference and found it very rich and wide-ranging in its content, with myriad sessions, plenary and concurrent. I had no trouble filling my dance card, choosing to emphasize user- and liaison-related issues. Highlights from particularly useful and interesting... more ›
A keynote speaker used ‘gatekept’ as a past participle verb. The OED hasn’t caught on to that yet, but the Google Ngram shows a small but steady increase in the word since 1970. In “The Changing World of eBooks,” Mike Shatzkin focused on the viewpoint of trade publishers. They’ve discovered that most readers just want... more ›