Now it can be told: Meredith from Information Wants to be Free, and the ALA Wiki, is going to be my new [sort of] neighbor. She’s moving to Vermont to become a Distance Learning Librarian. We got to meet her and her husband this past week, and I’m really looking forward to having another tech-savvy librarian to pal around with.
Month: June 2005
sirsi and dynix together at last
why the wikitorial didn’t work, and why we knew it wouldn’t
I like wikis, it’s no secret. I also like Wikipedia. That’s one of the reasons I winced at the Wikitorial project because I knew in my bones that it would 1) fail 2) bring with it the “see? wikis suck!” crowd. I like this post explaining why it didn’t work [upshot: poor planning, lack of vision, lack of wiki understanding to prdict problems]. For some crazy reason, this made me think of fingerprinting patrons in libraries, or maybe RFID. [web4lib]
direct democracy @ your library conference
I’m not sure how many people really feel like they need to have a say in how ALA conducts its business. Membership Meetings at ALA have been a chance for rank and file ALA-ers to have a chance to discuss issues and write, discuss and even pass resolutions. In the past, the quorum for the meetings was set sufficiently high [1% of membership] that it was hard to get the requisite number of people for them to act offically.
Thanks to a bylaws amendment ratified by membership, quorum is now set at 75 members, though the bylaws currently do not reflect this online [don’t get me started on how hard it was to pry all of this information out of the ALA website]. There are at least two resolutions coming before membership this time around. I’ll be at both of these meetings. If you want to get a peek at ALA democracy in action, the meetings are at
Saturday 4-5 pm [before Barak]
Monday 11:30-12:30
ALA bloggers list
Meredith’s ALA blog has a list of people who will be blogging at the ALA Conference. I leave tomorrow. My schedule is here. I like meeting folks, though my time is getting pretty well-spoken for. If you see me in the hallway, or eating alone, please come up and say hello.