Many of you have heard me say “Time flies, whether you’re having fun or not”–and that has certainly been the case since I got back from the NISO Roadmap meeting a few weeks ago. Somehow, with my head down, I missed part 1 of Roy Tennant’s post “The Post-MARC Era, Part 1: “If It’s Televised, [...]
Articles in category 'Futures'
A couple of weeks ago I made a short presentation at a linked data session at the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL). Many of the audience members were people I’ve known since I was a baby librarian (this is the group where I started my career as a presenter, and they invite me back [...]
A few years ago, I wrote an article for a collection of writings in honor of Tom Turner, a talented metadata librarian at Cornell who sadly died too young. That article, “Looking back—looking forward: reflections of a transitional librarian” (Metadata and Digital Collections: Festschrift in honor of Tom Turner), although it meanders around a bit [...]
If we were asked (as we sometimes are) what we’d like to see develop as a result of the BibFrame effort, the emphasis in our answer would have both technical and social aspects. First, given the technologies developing in several different places and considering what we can do now to bring Linked Open Data into [...]
Like most people who do blogging (whether regularly, or sporadically like I do), I keep a list of ideas for posts, which I often add to, but less often write up. I’ve been a very poor blogger recently, and it’s not because nothing is going on, LOTS is going on. Perhaps it’s more that I’m [...]
Recently I retweeted the following: “nice quote “your data ages like fine wine, whereas your software applications age like fish” in @mattwall’s j.mp/o8zsQG (via @edsu)” Since then I’ve been thinking about the important lesson encapsulated in those less-than-140 characters, and how we’ve not really internalized this lesson in LibraryLand, no matter how many times we’ve [...]
I’m supposed to be writing a paper (as part of a team and as designated herder) but like most people I have strategies for avoiding such tasks, not necessarily in ways that are entirely useless, just useless in the context of a particular deadline. In this instance, I’ve been listening to an interview of Janet [...]
At my keynote at Code4Lib a few weeks ago [recorded here about 90 minutes in], I got a good laugh when I equated the continuum that catalogers and programmers inhabit to that described by Kinsey in his famous discussion of sexuality. Since then, perhaps as a response to my presentation and Eric Hellman’s at the [...]
One continuing theme of the recently concluded DC-2010 is that of the perpetual search for consensus on what the hell DCMI should be doing. I know this continual search for identity is a common phenomenon with this sort of organization, as it is for the human adolescent hovering around the age of 15 years. Like [...]
Ten days or so ago I took some time out to listen to a webcast by Jenn Riley, ‘RDF for Librarians’, which was well worth the effort. Jenn has been worth watching for a long time, and she’s done us all a service by putting out her slides and a bibliography as part of this [...]