Please, someone awesome take this job.
Month: May 2006
truer words have rarely been spoken
Why is it so hard to say that some things simply suck? I’ll quote Casey Bisson, quoting himself.
Please, stand with me now and repeat:
“When something sucks I will say so. When vendors spout crap I will call them on it. My staff deserve good tools, my users need good tools, and I can’t afford to buy stuff that sucks.”
Together, we’ll fix the world one product at a time.
Related story: State of our ILS
“It’s a new world and building onto a system that is more than 15 years old isn’t going to cut it anymore – there needs to be a new system, one that allows for more freedom, and it has to come soon, because more and more libraries are going to turn to open-source.“
the black box of computer trouble paired with the bright light of radical trust
It’s easy to morning-after quarterback big computer disasters, but eleven days seems awfully long for an OPAC outage that was caused by a disk drive failure. When my ISP has a disk drive failure, they’re back up in an hour or two and restoring the data in the background over the rest of the day. It would have been really interesting to have been able to read a library blog about this outage and get updates on how the restoration was going, wouldn’t it? Instead we can peek at the Google cache to see what the library web site looked like, and see how it looks now. That sort of potential transparency is scary, but ultimately builds patron/customer/funder confidence, and helps with messes like this one. Michael Stephens has been discussing Darlene Fichter’s idea of radical trust, or put more simply “trusting the community.” and I think it’s something we’ll all be hearing more about, if not actually talking about. Trust me.
hi – 04may
Hi. It’s my partner Greg’s birthday today. He is 30. All of the things I manage to do in my life, here, on the road, in my head, I do with his encouragement and rock solid support. If you’re near a camera today, maybe you could drop him a little birthday greeting in Flickr (tag: happybirthdaygreg)? A few other people you might recognize have already done so. Thank you.
RLG + OCLC = ???
Will Walt Crawford start blogging for It’s All Good? We can only think about whether that would be a consequences of the pending OCLC and RLG merger. Here is OCLC’s press release. Here is RLGs press release (note, they are the same). I’ll link to RLG’s version when I can find it, or when they write one.
According to the release, the current president of RLG, James Michalko, will get a new job title: “Vice President of RLG-Programs Development, working under the leadership of Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President of Research and OCLC Chief Strategist” The press release also notes that “Any change in RLG service offerings will be announced well in advance.” and doesn’t mention what will happen to OCLCs service offerings, presumably nothing. The press release uses nice words like “combine” a lot, an awful lot actually, but when I think of combinations, I think of how you mix butter and sugar to make something that is part both and part neither. This seems to be the sort of combination where you mix sugar and water and what you wind up with is water, sweetened. It will be interesting to see how this works out. [web4lib]