redefining relevance

Everyone has their own ideas about when the overpopulation of the Internet started resulting in a noticable lack of quality. Generally this point is somewhere along the lines of “A year or two after I got here….” For me it was when I started noticing that FAQs were being used for marketing purposes and no longer had the “just the facts” helpfulness that I had grown to expect from anything called a FAQ. Plus, I had to walk two miles in the snow just to get to the Internet and even then we had to use a hand crank to get it started.

This is all an elaborate lead-up to say that I spent some time in library school learning about the concept of relevance and now do-no-evil Google is trying to tell me their ads are relevant? Feh.

NHLA day one, first talk

I’m giving two talks at NHLA. I gave the keynote today — I LOVE getting to talk about big ideas, keynotes are fun — and now it is online: Until We’re All Robots: Sensible Approaches to Technology in Libraries. It won’t make too much sense unless you look at the printable version with the hidden notes, but you’ll notice I am starting to get a little craftier with the presentations.