wcrawford

I posted what was to be the last post on this blog yesterday. This morning, in clearing out archives (of stuff that originally appeared on the original site), I accidentally cleared out the most recent 25 posts instead of post 796-821. (Don't ask.) I'll restore the other 23, maybe, at least to one…

Some of you may remember back in May 2008 when I discussed the unexpectedly good customer service provided by Mill Creek Entertainment, the company busily mining public domain (and otherwise minimal-license) flicks and TV flicks to create really inexpensive bundles of movies on DVD. (That's not all…

More of you attended this year's ALA Annual Conference than ever before. If the programs I attended (and I attended more programs than usual) and the crowds I saw in exhibits are any indication, you were active at the conference, not just there for the sunshine. (Yes, "active" includes schmoozing;…

I don't usually go nine days between posts, but... You can blame ALA Annual 2009 in Chicago for most of that. I (still) travel without technology, so no blogging from ALA--and also no keeping up with blogs, FriendFeed, etc. (but email once or twice in the hidden Internet room in the exhibits).…

A couple of days ago, on Walt, Even Randomer, I posted a set of desultory reviews of the fourth and final DVD of Alfred Hitchcock: The Legend Begins. Sidebar: One eccentric feature of this blog used to be the "treadmill movie reviews," brief reviews of movies from Mill Creek Entertainment's…

Say what? I don't believe the three words are directly related--but they all play into changes in articles in the Library Leadership Network over the past week. It's been one of those weeks where everything's a change in existing pages articles than brand-new articles. Sometimes that's a tough…

Cites & Insights 9:9 (August 2009) is now available--just in time for the 2009 ALA Annual Conference. That's not a coincidence, to be sure; although the issue may not be directly relevant to the conference, if I didn't publish it now, it wouldn't be out until at least July 19. This one's 32…

I was reading the July 2009 Consumer Reports (as usual, I'm about a month behind on magazines) and reached a set of ratings for chain restaurants. Read the commentary and the neat little sidebar where trained tasters compared oversized New York strip steaks at Morton's with slightly less oversized…

It's time for a serious post. E.g., a careful analysis of patterns of spam attempts on a widely-read but essentially dormant blog. The blog in question is now entitled "Walt, Even Randomer" and combines four years' of Walt at Random archives with the occasional new post that isn't right for the new…

Here's another little post about the Library Leadership Network (LLN)--naturally suggesting that you might want to go look, but also thinking about how it develops and some of the recent content. Some weeks, most new content goes into existing articles. Some weeks--this past one, for exmaple--most…

In the past few days, one of the best libloggers called it quits: She explicitly said there won't be any more posts on that blog. By itself, while it's noteworthy, I probably wouldn't post about it. The writer isn't going away, the archives aren't going away, and the circumstances may be unusual.…

When I wrote this post, I left out a whole second "trigger" because of time and energy. That trigger--once again, wondering whether my humanities background (rhetoric major, math minor) leaves me simply unable to cope with the true Scientific Mind--regarded the format used for publication. Or, to…

When the Library Leadership Network began, it was mostly about management--and much of the management literature uses terms leadership and management interchangeably. Over time, I've tried to distinguish the two. The standard shorthand for that distinction is, I think, a bit too simple: Managers…

Angel Rivera was kind enough, in commenting on my previous post, to say "Yes, what you do is information science." I wonder sometimes--both about the field called "information science" and about whether what I do fits within it. A snarky way to put this might be: Can you do information science if…

Here I am on ScienceBlogs, thanks to the loose definition of "science" that lets in "information science" and the even looser definition of "information science" that includes whatever it is I do. And yesterday I found myself wondering whether I had any business being here--although the thought…

It would be nice to say that the Library Leadership Network grows through advance planning and scheduled changes. It would also be nonsense. Sure, there's an overall plan (of sorts), but weekly changes tend to be opportunistic--articles grow and change depending on what I encounter and what's…

I picked up a little buzz about Google software engineers planning to rework the guts of some major open-source software to make it run faster. Since it wasn't software I use, I didn't read enough to remember what software, but it brought up memories... Walking to school in the snow, 3 miles,…

I'm not snarky by nature. Really I'm not. Or, well, I'm recognizing that pure snark rarely improves a situation, and trying to reduce the amount of it within the e-zine. I got rid of one running section that was always negative by nature, just because it was always negative by nature. But sometimes…

The penultimate section of the July 2009 Cites & Insights is Trends & Quick Takes--another "occasional" feature, this one for little thoughts that are more substantive than the foolishness in My Back Pages but not substantive enough for their own essays. Realistically, most pieces of this…

Do words have meanings--meanings that change slowly over time--or did that noted logician Charles L. Dodgson get it right when he had one of his more scholarly characters, H. Dumpty, assert that: When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less To some extent, this…

The third section of the July 2009 Cites & Insights is an installment of an occasional series, Interesting & Peculiar Products. When C&I began (in December 2000, as the ejournal continuation of a monthly print-newsletter section that ran from 1995 through 2000), much of its focus was…

Long-time readers of Cites & Insights will know all this. Bibs & Blather is my alternate name for the ejournal itself--and may have made more sense when the ejournal (ezine?) was heavily composed of "Cites," that is, citations for various articles and discussions of those articles. Bibs…

The first major essay in Cites & Insights 9:8 carries forward a set of discussions that began in the April 2009 issue, Cites & Insights 9:5. Both essays are largely "masses of metablogging"--that is, blogging about blogging--with a healthy amount of commentary and synthesis. The earlier…

Most, but not all, of the archives for the original version of this blog now appear here. I omitted old movie reviews, cruise line commentaries, and a handful of "temporal posts"--ones that really have no meaning at this point. In all, I omitted less than 10% of the posts. There are a lot of posts…

I was going to write a series of posts describing each essay in the current Cites & Insights, and still plan to do so. But this hit me by surprise--a LISNews item pointing to a makeuseof.com post pointing to Blind Search. Blind Search? People who care deeply about open web search engines spend…

I've just published Cites & Insights 9:8 (July 2009). The 30-page issue, PDF as usual but with HTML versions of most essays, includes: Bibs & Blather Notes on sponsorship for C&I, the status of four possible future projects--and the move of Walt at Random to ScienceBlogs. Making it Work…

A bit of background for those new to Walt at Random The Library Leadership Network (LLN) is "a platform designed to help library leaders (and those who will become leaders) communicate, coordinate, find resources and share information." It's a service of Lyrasis, a large library network formed from…

I'm Walt Crawford. This is another blog in ScienceBlogs' new Information Science channel. As with the pioneers, John Dupuis and Christina Pikas, it's not a new blog. And as with those two--both of whose blogs I've followed for years--I was pleasantly surprised when ScienceBlogs contacted me, in the…