9-27-04: happy banned books week
Banned books week seems to have snuck up on me this year. Are librarians not excited about banned books anymore? The first Google hit for a search on "banned books week" is, naturally, the ALA site, which seems to be down at the moment. The fourth hit is for the ACLU Banned Books Week page ... for 1998. Seriously, isn't this supposed to be a big deal in library land? Maybe the controversy is just too much for us this year.
9-17-04: library assistant gone bad
Just for some Friday fun, and because I haven't seen it making the rounds yet: Librarian suspended for shooting (Gary Post-Tribune, 9/17/04). Note, just for the record, it's actually a library assistant, not a librarian.
9-9-04: librarians are doin' it for themselves
Well, perhaps not quite yet, but maybe they should be. reinvented responds to recent complaints about "how come our OPAC vendors are such dorks" by suggesting that the only way librarians will get the OPACs they really and truly want is by making them themselves. How very DIY! But I wonder about small and underfunded libraries--will they have to settle for out of the box solutions (as many of them do now), or will they be able to piggyback on the successes of larger, better funded, and more adventurous libraries?
Of course, what vendors will or won't provide has everything to do with the dynamics of the market and not much at all to do with whether they are dorks or not. And, as Catalogablog points out, there are already open source options available:
If the option is for a free product that is easy to customize and is responsive to trends or a high priced system that can't be changed and is slow to use new technology, not many will opt for the later.
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