In youthful naiveté, I assumed being a new member of the profession (and ALA) that I would just go to Midwinter, attend some stuff, get involved, etc. My brother moved to Philadelphia a few months ago so it sounded like a great time to make a visit to him and attend my first ALA conference [...]

Joe Lucia, Villanova University’s University Librarian, made some interesting suggestions about open source development in a recent post to NGC4Lib, a mailing list dedicated to “Next Generation Catalogs for Libraries.” What most frustrates me in a general sense is the degree to which in libraries our human capital and our financial resources are tied into [...]

There were two comments to my post about this profession needing to do more to develop its future leaders. Intentionally, my post was intended to speak to the need for upper echelon administrators, and the importance of developing our next generation of leaders who will take over those posts. Now perhaps that caused some umbrage [...]

It’s a trifle ironic that, on the same day that the new NEA jeremiad, er, report on how reading is going to hell in a handbasket (again) Amazon finally released its e-book reader, Kindle. So, if nobody reads anymore, is Kindle – or, as Newsweek puts it in swooningly glowing terms, “the future of reading” [...]

Reading the latest (November 2007) issue of Against the Grain brought two surprises in one article. In his regular column (In My Humble But Correct Opinion) Rick Anderson takes up a public service issue, not his usual fare. So surprise number one is that he’s taking on the problem of the reference desk and the [...]