In the years since I received my MLS (University of Arizona, Class of 1989), I've done quite a bit of writing. At first it was under the pretext of things I needed to do for promotion. Really, I just enjoy writing, and many editors are happy to run my words. Now when I go to a library conference, people tell me "That name rings a bell." It's the writing. It has made me a semi-famous librarian. Here are some of the details:
This is one
of my favorite library writings, and judging from input that I got the last time I was job hunting, it's the one people remember. It was originally published in American
Libraries and then reprinted in The Whole library handbook 2. For a while, ALA published it on the web, and now it has been picked up by actual Zen Buddhists (go figure): Zen in the Art of Troubleshooting.
Here is a
list that I created in 1991 of misspellings that are likely to be found in your
OPAC. When I first
presented this research, a lot of people were surprised at
how widespread the problem was. This is the
complete list: Typographical errors in databases
One of my first forays into multimedia - a Breeze presentation called
Google this. Here is a study that I did several years ago that may make me among the least popular people in the field. The concept is fairly simple. I went to the masthead of some of the more important refereed journals in library science, and searched the names of the referees in Library Literature to see what they had written, and how many of them had written an article in the journal that they represent. See for yourself in
Library Referees. I changed the names to numbers for several reasons.
Several years ago I wrote a column on etexts - not the contemporary books distributed with mechanical readers, but the trend of making public domain texts available on the web. Since I knew that lots of great things would be made available in the weeks before the column appeared, I constructed an up-to-date file that links to some of the better etext providers. Check out ETEXTS This got me interested in managing an etext project here at Quinnipiac. The result so far is a collection of 25 books that we web-published. These fall into two main categories - books about the Great Famine of Ireland and books about Connecticut History.
As a committee member in ACRL's College Library Section, I go to almost every American Library Association national gathering. I normally write web reports for my colleagues back home - popular with some for a mix of hard information, travelogue material, and plain silliness. Here are the 2002 reports for Midwinter at New Orleans, and the main conference in
Atlanta. Since people actually read these reports, I've also added a page about the 2003 conference in Toronto, and the San Diego 2004 Midwinter, and the report for ALA 2004 in Orlando. In a similar vein (vain?), here is a report that I did for the MERLOT conference in California. This was a mixed group of educators interested in adding useful learning materials to the Web for all to use. Count me in.
One of the nicer things about working in Connecticut is getting to know the academic library directors here in a positive way, by being the webmaster for their organization, the Council of Connecticut Academic Library Directors.
Both of the times that I designed a new Web Opac, I started by looking through
the listing of other INNOPAC webpacs. There are so many now, that looking at
everything is becoming very time consuming, so I've started a listing of
III Webpacs that display particularly good design
or have unusual enhancements.
