Category: hi

Hi. With great power sometimes comes great responsibility. This was in my inbox today. “Dear ALA councilor-at-large, please tell the person in charge of designing these to stop looking at these. It’s derivative and therefore embarassing.” In other words, we’re approaching National Library Week, aka the first anniversary of the ALA website!

Hi. I just got back from Massachusetts where I helped my sister clean out her office [what else are librarian sisters for?] and wished my Mom a happy birthday and taught her how to use RSS to read the Boston Globe. If you’re in Manhattan this Friday consider poking your head in to the Columbia symposium. According to the symposium notes “We are extending invitations to librarians from Brown University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Rutgers University, and Yale University.” That’s eleven invites, but there’s twelve people on the program…. hmm. Oh yeah, the other person is me!

Hi. The interview that I did with Jonathan Crowhurst in Free Pint about the USA PATRIOT Act and the war on terror is up today.

Hi. I am working on my ten minute panel presentation for the Columbia gig next Friday. My topic: “Honoring Tradition, Embracing the Future. How we keep current with evolving educational, technological, and cultural trends, while maintaining our traditional reference skills and our commitment to public service” [I did not write that] I’m planning something to do with collaborative information systems and maybe put in a few good words for sites like Web Junction. Or I may just focus on how “cultural trends” lately include turning the public library into one big place to check email and play games online. I am not suggesting that this isn’t a good role for the library to fill, just that in Vermont we don’t have staffing or systems or enough of a technology-aware culture to appropriately deal with it. There are many many reasons why giving someone access to an hour on an Internet-enabled computer is different than handing them a book. Maybe I’ll just spend ten minutes listing them….

Hi. I resigned from the ALA Website Advisory Committee today, preferring to focus my website reform efforts from within ALA Council. I haven’t been feeling that effective lately, and my personal threshold of “how long I think I should have to wait for change to come” is significantly shorter than most people who are used to working for ALA. This made me impatient and grouchy and not a helpful team player in the long path to getting the ALA website accessible, functional and user-friendly. As always, I encourage people to send feedback to the ALA webteam, as I have constantly done, they really are trying to make the best of a bad situation.