truer words have rarely been spoken

Why is it so hard to say that some things simply suck? I’ll quote Casey Bisson, quoting himself.

Please, stand with me now and repeat:

When something sucks I will say so. When vendors spout crap I will call them on it. My staff deserve good tools, my users need good tools, and I can’t afford to buy stuff that sucks.

Together, we’ll fix the world one product at a time.

Related story: State of our ILS

It’s a new world and building onto a system that is more than 15 years old isn’t going to cut it anymore – there needs to be a new system, one that allows for more freedom, and it has to come soon, because more and more libraries are going to turn to open-source.

Higher Ed Blog-Con

What a nice looking site this is! Now that the week of Library & Information Resources is winding down, go look at the great list of articles, screencasts and presentations that have been assembled. They include some good thought proviking pieces as well as some very practical tutorials. There is a set of screencast howtos from Jason Grifffey about how to make a Digital New Book display and instructions on how to put a Google map on your library website from Chris Deweese. One really picky problem I noticed: I found one presentation (John Blyberg’s) through a del.icio.us link page. When I got to his presentation, I couldn’t figure out who wrote it! (now fixed!)

good news in Oklahoma, for now

State bill HB 2158 did not go to the state Senate. It passed in the House and the Senate did decide to hold a hearing on it. This is the bill to deny state funding to libraries that did not comply with a directive to restrict access to books with sexually explicit passages and homosexual themes to “adults only”. More information about Oklahoma libraries can be found on the librarystories blog and more generally at the Oklahoma Library Association website. Also, check out all these other Oklahoma library blogs (taken from the librarystories’ sidebar).

Adventures of a curious mind
Bartlesville Public Library blog
Karl the YoYo Librarian
Law Librarian Blog
Library Shrine
McAlester Public Library
Oklahoma Library Tech News
Oklahoma Writing Project
Orange Splot
Reading Oklahoma
SWOSU Library Blog
Slacker Librarian
Western Plains Libraries