All librarians who interact with multimedia at all [that is to say “all librarians”] should start understanding Digital Rights Management issues now. Jenny has a few good anecdotes about why buying items with DRM can be the equivalnet of bad customer service for libraries.
Month: December 2004
LISFeeds – now attractive!
The new LISFeeds covers 131 blogs and even has a search function. The new and today’s items options means you can do a quick check-in with the LIS world with one click. Plus, it’s attractive. Nice job Blake [and Steven for getting the whole ball rolling on this in the first place, mazel tov on the new job].
why do you go [or not go] to Midwinter?
There has been some discussion on the ALA Council list lately about why people go to conferences and why they don’t go to conferences. As an outreach librarian who asks a lot of people why they DON’T go to the library, this question interests me. Rochelle has a little mock-up of an unofficial survey over on her blog. If you’ve got some feedback that you’d like to give to an ALA Councilor, head over there. If you’d like to read some of the Council back and forth, you can check out the ugly but quite functional ALACOUN list archives where surveying is discussed.
mid-course corrections, library-style
My friend Matt went to the new Seattle Public Library and took photos of all the temporary signage that has had to be put in place to clearly state some directional/usage guidelines that were perhaps intended to be obvious. [update: apparently many of these “temporary” signs have been up since May]
the library was a great space filled with interesting things to look at and useful spaces, but far too subtle for an obvious funtional space like a public library.
another way to get your reporting out there at ALA
Walt Crawford is inviting those who are interested to submit reports about ALA’s Midwinter conference and other programs and discussions of interest to his readership, for publication in Cites & Insights. [beyondthejob]