Hi. I try to update my about page every year or so. I’ve just updated it. This week also saw two checks in the mail. One from Powells for $45 or so for my yearly affiliate fees and one from my publisher with this year’s royalty check for $200 or so. Revolting Librarians Redux has now sold over 1000 copies which makes me sort of happy.
Month: February 2005
blog policy questions
Now that organizations are starting to get their own blogs, people are starting to have some of the blog-policy questions, which is something you get when trends becomes more institutionalized. Karen has been working on blog ethics for a while and her recent post discusses CLA’s new blog and their stated intent to make the blog feeds a CLA member benefit. She discusses the whole idea of member benefits which confront the more wired idea of getting and giving content for free. ALA has back issues of American Libraries as a member benefit. At my library we used to have nine public access computers but only one for non-patrons that could access email. The three other “email computers” were a patron benefit. Not only was this system not particularly useful to our patrons — many people who want Internet access at the library specifically want to check their email — but it made us, as librarians explaining the system, look like we didn’t “get technology” We had to make the computers do something that they wouldn’t do normally in order to put a barrier between what we wanted to give away for free, and what we wanted people to pay for. Similarly in the CLA case, blogs made with any current CMS have an RSS feed. Whether or not you link to it, it still exists, right?
CLA may have produced a great journal in the past; now it can produce a great blog. It will not be a great blog if only its members can access it, because what makes blogs great are their impact on society. CLA, the cluetrain has pulled into the station. Please, I beg of you: get on board.
ipod shuffle for books on tape?
If your patrons could check out books on tape loaded onto this cute little number, do you think circulation might increase? [thanks scully]
TTW: Libraries Doing Cool Things with iPods
Of course if you’re aksing questions like “how can I use this nifty technology in my library?” you know Michael will have something to say about it.
mazel tov Dan!
Hey my pal Dan won an award from LITA, congrats Dan!
Chudnov led in the creation of two online communities (oss4lib and usrlib) and in the organization of successful hackfests at Access2003 and Access2004. He has been described by a colleague as “a continual source of new ideas, and seems to be able to effortlessly bring people together to collaborate.” Most recently, Chudnov led in the development of Unalog, an open source link sharing application that is finding wide usage and acceptance. Another colleague said, “no one is more influential in the area of Open Source software and the use of technology for social computing in libraries than Dan Chudnov.”