Value in the online world

Love for sale

Constructive criticism
Let this be a lesson to you — never write a comment on a blog post while you have a baby on your lap who is simultaneously grabbing at your laptop and spitting up on your pants (yes, this really happened, I have the stained jeans to prove it). Trust me, what you write will never come out the way you wanted it to. I commented on a friend’s blog post about the Library 101 project and what I wrote came out really badly. So I hope to clear it up here, though while I may be more clear in my explanation, I may make an even bigger hash of things. Seriously, I should probably stop contributing to the web entirely until Reed is in ki

Shades of gray
Ever since the news of LibLime’s enterprise version of Koha and whether or not their actions consisted a fork of the code, I’ve been thinking about how black and white some of us (me included, at times) tend to see library products and library vendors. Stephen Abram’s “position paper” on open source ILSes got me thinking about it again. I’ve found it interesting how some vendors are vilified (sometimes fairly, sometimes not) while others get a free pass — to the point where we no longer even think of them as

Who should teach library instruction?
Don’t worry, Walt, I won’t apologize for being away and I won’t promise that I’m going to post more often (though I have a lot of ideas for posts, something has been preventing me from getting them out of my head and onto the screen). Wayne Bivens-Tatum recently wrote a very interesting post questioning who should be teaching library instruction — librarians or faculty. This is an issue that I’ve been thi

Roles and responsibilities for 2.0 technologies
I get asked a lot of things via email from librarians, but very few actually make it to this blog. This question was so interesting and probably better answered by the “hive” than just by little old me. I am also curious how others would respond. I was wondering if you had any advice or links to websites or professional literature that deal with this issue. That issue is: how do libraries deal with the roles and responsibilities of 2.0 technology? Some of it crosses borders and/or job descriptions. Who is in charge or responsible for tweets on twitter, the library marketing director, the reference librarian, the library director, etc. I suspect this is some

It’s not about us (or more ramblings on possessiveness)
I know Jenica wondered if her blog post, Rambling about possessiveness, really had a point, but it was right in line with things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Jenica wrote about the fine line between taking ownership of a project/thing in terms of really being really invested in the success or failure of a project vs. taking ownership in a possessive sense. This is something I’ve been wondering about too, especially as we’re working on a lot of projects that will, to some extent, change the way students use the library online. When I work on a project, I get very invested