hi – 27mar

Hi. I’ll be at the Rhode Island Library Association conference this upcoming week and then I’m done with library-related travelling until ALA, and then I’m really done until September. I had a chance to wander around the basement of the Library of Congress with the THOMAS webmaster [who I met in one of my online communities, don’t tell me that technology can’t take you places] and hid out from the rain at one of the DC public libraries [which was very nice and welcoming]. I met a group of librarians who are grappling with becoming part of a consortium, and I talked to some library staff who were very skeptical about technology as i tried to explain why I thought some of it was worthwhile.

Posted in hi

ALA CMS RFP, OMG!

Looks like ALA is going to get a new CMS for dealing with their web site and they have sent out an RFP [pdf]. We can yammer all we want about how this should have been done last time, and debate what damage was done by two years of a substandard web site, but it’s a step forward to at least try to do it right the second time and hope too many people haven’t joined SLA or ASIS in the meantime. Here are my comments to the Council list, and here are Karen Schneider’s.

so you call me crassly egotistical and then get huffy when I call you a fool?

It’s becoming a bit of a tired meme. Insult all bloggers using overgeneralizations and snarky language, closely track posts about your article in the blogosphere, report back, quoting nasty remarks and say this proves your point that all bloggers are just the way you said they are. I’m as worried about civil discourse as the next person — the lack of it on Council lists sometimes disturbs me — but I’ve also always thought that the best way to ensure that things stayed civil was not to call total strangers names in a public forum in the first place. Perhaps it’s just me. [thanks rikhei]