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

worDLcat?

I want to start this by saying that this was completely Kathleen Kern‘s idea. We were talking over dinner at LIDA last week, and she asked me, essentially, “Why isn’t there an equivalent of WorldCat for digital libraries?” I gave some lame answer: no standardization across DLs, complexity of dealing with item- and collection-level description simultaneously, cost, I don’t even remember what all I said. (In my defense, we were.. Read More

More fun with calendars and task lists

I’m still futzing with Remember the Milk. I got to wondering today if there’s a way to sync RTM to Lightning, for which I installed the Thunderbird add-on when I was investigating new calendar apps, but never ended up using. Using my superhuman search skills, I was easily able to discover that yes, there is a way to do this. Unfortunately it’s only one-way, RTM > Lightning. But still, that’s.. Read More

Kicking the Microsoft habit, Part I: RTM

I’ve been trying to wean myself from all Microsoft products lately, by which I mean everything: the entire Office suite, and Outlook. The Windows OS too, though that will take longer to achieve: I’ve already decided that my next laptop will be a Mac. I have technology envy for the Air, though Yvonne has nixed that on the grounds that it’s apparently a chick magnet. This is the story of.. Read More

I’m a twit

Once again again, I come late to the party… Yvonne has shamed me into creating an account with Twitter, by accusing me of being a Luddite. My new tweety username: jpom. I have to admit I don’t really get it… I don’t care if the world knows my status on a minute-by-minute basis, or even an hourly or daily basis. And Paul‘s often quite hilarious tweets notwithstanding, I don’t really.. Read More

My very own wiki

Once again, I come late to the party, but once there I join in with abandon… I now have my own wiki! I’ve installed MediaWiki in my ibiblio space. I’ve been meaning to install MediaWiki for a while now, but I had no real reason to do it other than just wanting it, so I never bothered. But Paul and I have recently been discussing proposing a course on Library.. Read More

Democracy is Communism

This is another spring cleaning post, last updated October 2005, apparently. But it seems appropriate to yesterday’s post. Sure, you’re saying, upon reading the title of this post. And freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. But actually the title of this post is the exact opposite of my real point; I was just going for the catchy title. I’ve just started to reread Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation (on.. Read More

Predictable

I recently discovered Pandora (thanks, David Weinberger). And can I just say that the Music Genome Project is about the coolest name for a project I’ve ever heard? But in a way it’s bumming me out. It’s a bit depressing to discover how predictable my musical taste is. One channel I’ve created, for example, that I consider my easy listening channel (though I suspect it would not be so for.. Read More

Thoughts on LibraryThing

I recently found myself in the rather odd position of trying to explain LibraryThing to several of my colleagues. Without getting too much into that conversation, let me just relate what for me was the best moment: Evelyn‘s question, “Why do people feel the compulsion to catalog their own books?” And this is why I love Evelyn: she has the rare ability to be snarky and simultaneously make it clear.. Read More

Sakai Action

Apparently our Information Technology Services here at UNC has started a Sakai Action Group, to investigate the use of Sakai as an enterprise-wide course management system. One presumes the unspoken here is: instead of Blackboard. Pam Sessoms in Davis turned me on to this, as apparently she’s in charge of the library’s efforts to pilot Sakai. So I met with Kim Eke from ITS yesterday, and I’ve officially volunteered to.. Read More