By Michael Stephens | Ah, summer break. It’s nice to have some time to breathe and energize. My eyes fall on the stack of fiction and just-for-fun reading awaiting me these next few weeks. I must confess, however, that my thoughts also return to teaching and prep for next semester.
ALA TechSource Blog
By Jason Griffey | I'd like to talk about a style of software that everyone in libraries is definitely familiar with--the massive interconnected hunk of software that does everything. In libraries, that could be the ILS, but what I'm going to talk about today is something that almost everyone is familiar with: the Microsoft Office suite. In fact, let's just take a single piece of the suite: Microsoft Word. Word is easily the most popular word processing program in the US. But as we know from reality television, popular does not always equal good.
By Jenny Levine | Registration for the 2008 ALA TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium is now open! Last year we sold out at 300, and this year we expect the 350 spots to go quickly, so we encourage you to sign up early.
By Jenny Levine | We're in full swing for planning the second annual ALA TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium, which will take place on November 2-4, 2008, in Oak Brook, IL (a western suburb of Chicago).
By Tom Peters | About forty years ago Sunsweet Pitted Prunes ran a famously funny TV ad, written by Stan Freberg. It featured a stuffy British character actor complaining about the fact that prunes contained pits and were wrinkled. Once you have a prune pit in your mouth, there is no graceful way to extricate it. All wrinkled fruit is abhorrent.
By Michael Stephens | Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting and speaking at the new Loyola University Information Commons on the campus of Loyola University just north of Chicago. It was a blustery, rainy cold day along the lake, but the space and the library folk were warm and inviting.
By Michelle Boule | When you are training a dog, you do not start with something complicated. You begin with something small and easy: sit. From sit, you move on to tricks that build on that one skill, like shake and lie down. You never start with lie down or shake, because a dog has to be sitting to do those things.
By Tom Peters | Posted on 03/26/2008 at 02:56:43 PM by Tom Peters [Robin Williams is the newest member of the ALA TechSource Blog Team. Welcome, Robin! Recently she and I met and chatted on ALA Island in Second Life, the 3-dimensional virtual world. The text chat transcript of our conversation is pasted below. Greylin Fairweather is the name of Robin's avatar in Second Life, and Maxito Ricardo is my avatar.] -- Tom Peters (interim editor of the TechSource blog)
By Jason Griffey | As the new guy on the TechSource blog, I'm obliged to introduce myself to the readership, in order to try and give everyone some idea of what to expect over the next year from me. Since I don't really know what ideas will float to the surface in the upcoming year, I think the best way to introduce myself is to show you what I've been involved in in the past.