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Wasn’t it considerate of the folks in Chicago to arrange for that unexpected (and most welcome) stretch of lovely, clement weather? I was steeling myself for the typical onslaught, packing the sweater for icily over-air-conditioned meeting rooms, only to be greeted by blue skies and 70 degrees. And a couple million hockey fans. So I’m … Continue reading The Toxic Middle
If you’re like me, you’ve completely lost track of the number of times you’ve clicked the little “I agree” button—on software, upgrades, website registrations, and the like. We know, as little attention as we pay to such things, that they probably mean something, sorta, and we have that microscopic pang of guilt—or more appropriately, misgiving—about … Continue reading Exiled by iTunes
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As always, it was a pleasure to welcome friends and colleagues to Seattle for the Midwinter Meeting this past January. Two topics of conversation often arose, unexpectedly: our recent ballot measures on marriage equality and marijuana legalization. Of course, we’d been living with those issues all through the election, so the fact that anybody else … Continue reading As a Matter of Fact . . .
“Far too many people are floundering in our educational system and I believe libraries can change that.” “What else is a coffee-obsessed, over-organized, well-read information analyzer with a love for technology to do?” “I am a convener, a catalyst for action, a collaborative project manager.” “I want to be forever bothered—bothered people make great things … Continue reading The Applicant Pool
Okay, now I’ve got this bright, shiny new column to play with. What will I do with it? Be provocative? Reassuring? Speak the uncomfortable truth? Turn to history for lessons? Look to the future for inspiration? More than likely. For now, let me ponder this month’s title question. It doesn’t take much to find numerous … Continue reading Why Do Publishers Hate Us?
Did you know that about 95% of incarcerated people eventually reenter the general population? Neither did I. Nor did I know that a high proportion of them are high school dropouts, though I suppose that’s not all that surprising. Given those circumstances, the importance of, say, health literacy training for inmates seems pretty obvious. Obvious, … Continue reading Making Friends with Research
And here we are, at my 100th column. Readers with long memories (or nothing better to do) may recall that for my 50th (Feb. 2007, p. 27) and 75th (Aug. 2009, p. 36) columns, I pioneered the groundbreaking idea of letting the internet do my work by, respectively, googling the numbers “50” and “75” and … Continue reading The Wheel Turns Again
Can it really be 10 years since I began writing this column? It doesn’t seem possible, yet there I am, horrible picture and all, chirpily nattering away on page 74 of the September 2002 American Libraries. A lot of water has gone under many bridges since then, which puts me in a nostalgic frame of … Continue reading The March of Time
I wrote here a few months ago about reading—its power and ubiquity and transcendence of format: “The authors and publishers get it; the ways in which the stories are displayed come and go, and what matters are the story and the storytelling.” Events in the ensuing months—the Department of Justice settlement with publishers, which may … Continue reading Amped-Up Ebook Apps
I’m sure you found all of these as fascinating as I did, undoubtedly also wondering where this was going. These facts and a few gazillion others come to you courtesy of Factual, the brainchild of mathematician Gilad Elbaz, who gave us the company that is now Google’s AdSense. In Factual’s 500 terabytes of storage, there’s … Continue reading Data, Data Everywhere
You know that feeling you get when you come home from a conference, and it’s all kind of a blur? That’s been my post-Midwinter experience. Of course, it came right after being housebound for several days during a rare Seattle snowstorm, so I was happy just to be somewhere sunny and warm, no matter how … Continue reading A Hazy Shade of (Mid)winter
If you haven’t googled the word “Santorum,” now would be a good time—otherwise most of what follows won’t make a lot of sense. Fair warning: What you find won’t be pretty (i.e., it will be explicit), but it will be instructive. Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s examine this phenomenon. The neologism … Continue reading What’s in a Name?
