Author: jessamyn

Jenny tosses down the gauntlet “Why don’t OCLCs blog or news releases talk about the new OCLC stuff?” OCLC [or the staff that maintain a non-official blog] responds. This sort of notification would have been really handy during the whole OCLC sues the Library Hotel flap where we had to dig through press releases from them to get any news. I’m not sure we would have seen more than a few official announcements but it’s better than nothing at all. ALA could benefit from this as well. Right now most of the rotating content on the ALA front page is sales and marketing and public information office news. Nothing wrong with that, but I’d like to read the news that’s relevant to me as a member of the organization, not as just a potential buyer of products or services. Things like “The search engine wasn’t working earlier, it’s fixed now” or “A list of hotels is now available on the conference site” or “New councilors added to roster” or “List of new committee appointments made by incoming ALA President.” Part of the problem is that this sort of effort requires either coordination [to get news in] or trust [to get people using the tools that affect publicly viewable content] both of which are hard to come by in an organization that is tight on funds and short on IT staffing. As it stands there is currently no way to figure out what content has been newly added to the site which means users spend a lot of time clicking through to all the pages that reflect their interest. What was it that Ranganathan once said…? Incidentally, if you want to help out with the “What We Want In Our OPACs” wiki, please email me and I’ll give you the URL.