Category: Observations

Photo source. The fabulous Kathryn Greenhill recently blogged about rewarding conference speakers at Computers in Libraries 09, or conferences in general. It was an interesting and thought provoking post. Instead of a gift bag of sponsor shwag, Greenhill would prefer: I wonder whether we could replace the Speaker’s Gifts at some of our conferences with…

I just got back to my hotel after spending a night out on the town with a bunch of librarians. I’m in Monterey for Internet Librarian. This year I plan to spend less time holed up in my hotel room working on school stuff and more time networking- networking meaning hanging out with other librarians.…

Today LIS News asked “Do we Dewey?”, which was originally from a New York Times blog called Papercuts. It’s a small thing, I know. And I still love libraries. But isn’t it time to replace Dewey with something more usefully up to date? Papercuts blogger Gregory Cowels wonders if something like the bookstore model would…

This week I was asked to participate in a phone poll about an issue on the November ballot. I assumed it would be about Proposition 8– the amendment to ban Gay marriage. Instead it was a 20 minute poll about the proposed bond for the Berkeley public library branches. It reminded me that I never…

Yesterday I went to a session at SLA 2008 with a conversation about new “info pros”- talking about their jobs and their expectations. The audience was about half “experienced” librarians and half “fresh librarians”. The perspectives of the three panellists were interesting, but they weren’t Millenials– the generation range people seem most leery of. The…