My CiL Talk/Slides/Handout

I’m on my way to give my talk in one of the giant ballrooms. For anyone who wants to follow along at home or in the back of the room, here are the links you’ll want.

Update: Talk went great. I spoke to about 200 or so people and almost all my demos worked! I went to go sit down and catch up on email and I ran into Jesse Andrews who is the guy behind userscripts.org (greasemonkey script repository mentioned in my talk) and BookBurro (very cool, check it out). He’s speaking tomorrow late afternoon, if you get a chance to see him, you should.

see it’s in the URL

I changed my permalink structure a bit here. URLs to individual posts now contain the post number and the post title. They will also work with just the post number, so old URLs will work fine. I’m expecting it to function with no problems at all, but I’ve been wrong before. If you notice anything squirrely, put a note in the comments or email me. Thanks.

hi – 13apr

Hi. I spent an awful lot of time on the phone or on Skype today, most of it making things with other folks. In order

– Chitchatting with Casey about his Library Technology Report in which I write a chapter on Open Source Software Tools for libraries. We messed about with formatting and structure, laughed about how “Web site” is spelled in formal publications compared to everywhere else on the planet, and admitted the whole thing looks pretty good. Keep an eye peeled for it.
– Talked to Jay Datema from Library Journal and Bookism along with Peter Brantley for a podcast about all sorts of things. Specifically we discussed the nature of library content and social content becoming digital and the ramifications for archivists, librarians and plain old lovers of books.
– Did my weekly podcast with Matt Haughey from MetaFilter. This is always a fun weeks-end summary of what we’ve noticed on the site including my favorite posts from Ask MetaFilter

Then I swam. Then it was nighttime. I decided to take the train to CiL so that I can swing by and say hi to some friends in NY on the way. I have books and a few little snacks to bring with me. I’ll be in the CiL area from about Sunday night late til Tuesday afternoon/evening so please say howdy if you see me around. My talk is Monday. As with most of these quickie conferences, all my mealtimes are spoken for, but I still have some discretionary walking around time, depending on when I wake up. On the way back I’ll be stopping to see friends in Baltimore and then going to give a talk in Dodge City Kansas. People laugh when I say Kansas for some reason but I had such a good time there last time and finally got a good answer to my “please explain this Second Life and Libraries thing” question from some Kansas librarians.

So, I will be on the road for a while. Then I am coming back to teach an eBay class, some more digital pictures classes, maybe help one of the small libraries I work with install an actual OPAC instead of their in-library PAC and preparing a few more local talks in the next few weeks. I may not have mentioned this previusly, but I’m contributing occasionally (well, once so far) to the Slow Library website, so if you were waiting for it to come back from dormancy, that time has arrived.

An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut – Library Journal April 15, 1973

This interview with Kurt Vonnegut appeared in Library Journal almost 34 years ago, it was nice of LJ to put it on their website.

Vonnegut expressed no surprise, however, at the censorship problems some of his books have run into with public schools in parts of Michigan and Ohio. “It’s the same thing every time. They ban something of mine, the ACLU jumps in, loses the case in the lower court, and wins the appeal. After all,” he stresses optimistically, “they can’t win. What they’re doing is unconstitutional.”