I woke up yesterday slightly startled by the realization that it was my two year anniversary with OCLC. A lot has happened in those two years. Besides all the personal adjustments, which of course are not trivial, work has been unbelievably busy and rewarding. But don't take my word for it--apparently moving library management services to the cloud attracted a lot of attention last year as the number one story at Library Journal.
But the year was more than a news releases, we've actually got working software and it's being tested by the initial pilot libraries. We've got great engagement from our Advisory Council as well. I was going to start holding forth on what the future will hold, but my good friend Roy Tennant just warned me about doing that. I'll get back to trying to make the future.
If you want to catch me at ALA, I'll be pontificating and/or presenting in a couple of venues:
You can sign up for that second one and other OCLC events here. You can also find me at the OCLC Breakfast on Sunday morning, Top Technology Trends (10:30-12 on Sunday in 162 A/B...man, I should just sleep in that room!), and the LITA Town Meeting on Monday morning.RMG 2010 ALA/Midwinter Annual President's SeminarFriday, January 15, 20102:00 - 5:00 p.m., Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, Room 162 A/BNo, I was not promoted to President, but I am honored to sit amongst the peers whom I used watch on this yearly panel.Web Scale for Libraries: A Sea Change for the 21st CenturySaturday, January 16, 20104:00 - 5:30 p.m., Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, Room 162 A/BCome learn about OCLC's effort to move library management system functionality to Web scale. New network-level functionality will include cooperative services for circulation and delivery, print and licensed acquisitions, and license management.
Another busy ALA, but I'm looking forward to it.
Dashing through the
stacks
with a Kindle in my arms
Dodgin' folks dirty looks
They're immune to e-book charms
Hand-held ring tones sing
Mine plays Three Dog Night
What fun it is to mobilize
My library tonight.
Oh, blog and chat, LOL
Facebook all the way
Oh, what fun it is to Tweet
my deep thoughts every day
Blog and chat, LOL
Facebook all the way
My status says "I'm almost
home."
More WordTwist I will play.
I used to go offline
But now it makes me Jones
How can you dodge the grid
with Netbooks and iPhones?
I need something more real
I'll go and play the Wii
And do my printing with e-ink
It's green to save a tree.
Oh, blog and chat, LOL
Facebook all the way
Oh, what fun it is to Tweet
my deep thoughts every day
Blog and chat, LOL
Facebook all the way
My status is an inside joke
Is that clever or cliché?
A dozen years ago
There was no Google search
No fickr, eBay, or YouTube
The world was in the lurch
One-forty keystrokes more
What did we do before?
We read whole books and saw our friends
It really was a bore.
Oh, blog and chat, LOL
Facebook all the way
Oh, what fun it is to Tweet
my deep thoughts every day
Blog and chat, LOL
Facebook all the way
I'll see you all in Twenty-Ten
Enjoy the holiday!
-----------------------------------------------
Happy Holidays everyone.
For previous Hectic Pace Christmas parodies, see:
Dewey the Decimal Maker (2008)
Shame has always been a good motivator for me. My colleagues remind me of the dry spell that is my blog. I've barely kept up on Twitter and FaceBook. If you're waiting for a LinkedIn respsonse, my apologies. But the best shaming came last night when my 11-year-old daughter, Emma pointed out that a quick glance at my blog indicated that I had not written anything new in months. Of course, she said it with a tone that also indicated that my blog posts were somehow akin to an LP collection, as in "how quaint that you still try to keep it going."
It's almost time for my annual holiday post, so look for that in a couple of days...and my New Year''s resolution will be to use this forum to update folks on the initiatives that have kept me too busy to write about them.
So shame is my motivator, not only to get the blog going again, but to prove to my digitally born child that the medium is still worthwhile.
It's almost time for my annual holiday post, so look for that in a couple of days...and my New Year''s resolution will be to use this forum to update folks on the initiatives that have kept me too busy to write about them.
Since announcing OCLC's web-scale management services strategy, it seems that the term "web-scale" (or "webscale" depending on your editing preferences) has been catching on a bit.
At first, some users diluted the meaning that Lorcan Dempsey had labored to establish in the library space. And I will continue to argue that web-scale in the context of library automation--especially management systems--is a major sea-change. 5000 transactions per second may be no great shakes for Google, Amazon, and Twitter, but in library automation, we've never seen anything like this before.
Then web-scale began to catch on a bit, and I thought the library technology lexicon was beginning to change, but the more I saw and heard it used, the more I feared that we might be getting away from it's original meaning.
Then I see that Mark Dahl has articulated so clearly what my colleagues and I have been discussing...what the library community in general has been discussing in many forums. While experimenting with metaphors, trying to explain a major initiative in one sentence, and living in powerpoint (all while simultaneously keeping up with a massive product development effort), I was struck by one simple turn of phase:
"it gets better the more people use it"
What a great way to sum things up. While I've been grappling with analogies, cloud computing, the web-scale landscape, and library sea-changes (that's four metaphors in one sentence for those of you keeping track), Mark, I think, gets it right. The only extension that I would add to Mark's distinctions about Web-scale is that they apply equally to library management systems and not just discovery-to-delivery.
We've begun testing of the web-scale circulation component. Print and licensed acquisitions and license management are soon to follow. I can't wait for more people to start using these services because I know they will only get better.
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