I know I’m an old-timer because when I read this post on LISNews about LII “merging” with the IPL at Drexel, my first thought was “Drexel?” I was an IPL volunteer back in 1994 or 1995 when it was still at the University of Michigan and my oldest library friends and colleagues are from there. You can see one of my early contributions on this FARQ which still gets me some email from time to time. I think of LII as blossoming under Karen Schneider’s guidance and leadership before they started doing a bad-funding tailspin and while I’m happy that the LII will continue to exist, I’m a little concerned it may lose some of its unique identity or focus. In any case, I went to the LII homepage and the IPL homepage and saw no mention of this so I guess we’ll all have to wait and see how it all shakes out.
the social OPAC has its own website
If you’re interested in the idea of using web 2.0 types of features in a library catalog but don’t want those features sold to you in clunky forms by your existing ILS vendors, The Social OPAC may be for you, and now has its own website and developer community. Go look! Here’s a little bit of backstory explaining what the tool is and how they’re using it at the Darien Library.
Brewster Kahle at TED, discussing free digital libraries
“I’m a librarian. What I am trying to do is bring all of the world’s knowledge to as many people as want to read it. The idea of using technology is perfect for us.” Brewster Kahle gives a twenty minute talk about free culture and libraries and digitzation at TED.
My flyby trip to the UP
UP in case you don’t know, stands for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I had been there before, but merely driving through, though I did manage to get my second highest bowling score of all time there (164!). This time I went up to do a half-day talk at the Upper Peninsula Region of Library Cooperation’s annual conference in Marquette, Michigan. I decided to add a few days to my trip since I rarely get to the UP and it’s lovely. Someone from MetaFilter noticed that I was going to be up near Michigan Tech and invited me to do a public talk there, so I got to take a nice drive out to Houghton Michigan and meet some folks there and see the public and MTU libraries. I took a few photos: here is the Portage Lake District Library. I’m still uploading my photos of the MTU archives. Thanks to everyone for showing me around.
My page of notes from the talks is here. I tried to go the extra mile and not just link to keynote and pdf versions of my talks but also hyperlink the specific sites I mentioned so that people could click through to them relatively easily. We’ll see how this goes. One of the things I enjoyed doing was checking out the digital archives that were available online: Keweenaw Digital Archives and the Upper Peninsula Digitization Center Collections. I love this photo for example, with all the people commenting on who the people in the photo actually are. I used this photo in one of my talks.
protecting privacy in libraries
Judah Hamer, the current president of the Vermont Library Association, wrote a good opinion piece in the Burlington Free Press responding to a parent’s editorial concerned about Vermont’s new patron privacy laws. I think it’s always a good idea that official-type library people spend the time to outline just why we feel privacy is important and speaking up in order to dispell rumors that spread about what did and did not happen in a given library dispute.