I recently installed PhpGedView, an open source genealogy application, and am learning to use it, with some help from Terrell. Yvonne and I got heavily into genealogy research back when we were living in Syracuse, probably 7 or 8 years ago now. But then we got sidetracked by, you know, finishing our graduate programs, and put it aside & haven’t picked it up again until just recently. In the last.. Read More
Ifrane Itinerary
As I’ve mentioned on Twitter, I’m going to Morocco tomorrow, to Ifrane. Actually it’s me and Javed, and we’re going to have initia meetings to establish a distance librarian-training program at Al Akhawayn University. We just received our itinerary for the first 2 days of our trip. And since I have nothing else to say at this point, I thought I’d feed your envy by posting that. I’ve deleted the.. Read More
Markets, Research, and Ethics
More musings induced by my Econ course… My textbook states that “market transactions are characterized by voluntary exchange coordinated by prices.” Except that there’s a big difference between “voluntary” and “well-informed.” One can do something voluntarily that is extremely poorly informed (examples abound), or one can be actively misled and misinformed. One of the arguments that my text makes for why advertising exists, and works, is that it increases the.. Read More
Economics questions
I’m currently taking an Economics course, EC 205: Fundamentals of Economics, a self-paced correspondence course through the Friday Center. Why? Because over the past few years economics has become an increasingly major part of my evaluation-related research: return on investment, cost analysis, etc. And for most of the time I’ve been working in that arena I’ve relied heavily on Lori‘s Econ chops. But now that she’s moving onward and upward.. Read More
Thoughts on the DuraSpace Press Release
I’m sure everyone who pays even a small amount of attention to digital libraries has already seen this press release: Fedora Commons and DSpace Foundation Join Together to Create DuraSpace™ Organization I have to admit that when I first saw this announcement I thought it was a late April Fool’s joke, you know, like those “announcements” that Microsoft and Yahoo are merging and will change their name to Microhoo, or.. Read More
Post from the iPoderantz
Thanks to the good people at ibiblio, specifically Ken, I now have the WordPress app for the iPhone set up. Behold, the matzah… or, in this case, my first post from my iTouch. Which, yes, I call the iPoderantz. (It was just too easy a shot… when I had a Palm, I called that Palmerantz. I mean, come on, with a name like Pomerantz, you have to take it where.. Read More
Breathing new life into the old blog?
Now that tenure is a done deal — on March 10 I submitted a signed copy of my tenure letter to the Provost’s office… see my celebratory tweet — I keep telling myself that I’ll put some effort into this blog again. Not that I don’t have about a dozen other things that I should be writing instead. But for reasons passing understanding I am not willing to just completely.. Read More
I can haz tenure
And now, for your viewing pleasure, my tenure letter. This is, I would just like to point out, the culmination of thirteen, fourteen years of my life, since I started my Masters program in 1995… though it wasn’t until 1996 that I decided that I wanted the job of a faculty member and that I was going to go on to do the Ph.D. And I would just like to.. Read More
Book fetishism
I’ve written here before that I have CueCat lust. Well, I finally caved and asked Y to get me one as a stocking-stuffer for the holidays, which she obligingly did. So I spent far too much time last night playing with it and adding books to our LibraryThing library, mostly from what we refer to as our Pretentious Bookshelf, which is to say the bookshelf in the living room where.. Read More
Librarianship First Principles
The more I prep for my Library 2.0 course, the more I find myself thinking about what Library 2.0 really is all about. And the more I think about what Library 2.0 means, the more I return to what I think of as the First Principles of librarianship. I don’t mean Ranganathan’s Five Laws, though certainly those are true enough, and useful as a way of framing the philosophical underpinning.. Read More