wcrawford | September 18, 2009I 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 of the two sites. Meanwhile, for anyone who didn't get the message:
This version of Walt at Random is ending.
The original Walt at Random will continue (with, eventually, posts from this one added.)
Here's most of what I said yesterday about reasons for this change:
As noted on what was, for a while…
wcrawford | July 17, 2009Some 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 the company does, to be sure, but I know them most for the "50 Movie Packs"--50 movies on 12 DVDs--of which there are now 23 examples. The company's motto is "changing the face of value entertainment!" and they're also doing other things, including TV series and documentary compilations.)
The gist…
wcrawford | July 17, 2009More 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; seeing e-acquaintances from all around the country face-to-face is certainly one big reason I've been attending ALA for the last 34 years...)
So here's a challenge for y'all:
What lessons related to leadership (or other topics covered on the Library Leadership Network) did you learn in Chicago?…
wcrawford | July 15, 2009I 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).
There's also getting ready for Chicago... and catching up from Chicago, which is likely to take another day or two. Particularly since it's mixed in with continued "trying to fix wifi/internet" (which may finally be fixed, by replacing both modem and router)--and dealing with people doing quotes for…
wcrawford | July 6, 2009A 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 multidisc packs viewed while I was exercising. I've reviewed a little more than 300 movies over several years. In moving to this more august site, I left the reviews behind and am not posting new ones here; that's one of few things still being posted on Walt, Even Randomer. The treadmill's gone as well--…
wcrawford | July 6, 2009Say 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 decision, sometimes not. Last week, it was a split decision: One major commentary from a blog, and a smaller related commentary from a different blog, started out as a new article--until I realized, the same day, that they worked better as part of an existing article.
Anyway...
Hemispheres
Much of…
wcrawford | July 5, 2009Cites & 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 pages, PDF as usual, but those who detest PDF or otherwise really need HTML can download the three articles separately.
The issue includes:
Perspective: Writing about Reading 3
The theme for this installment: Rethinking books and rethinking reading. Which means most of the long essay is about ebooks…
wcrawford | July 4, 2009I 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 New York strip steaks at Outback, Applebee's and Friday's. (Conclusion: The steak's best at Morton's--duh--but Outback's probably the best value.)
But then got to the actual ratings--and noted a lot of chains with black dots (the worst rating) for taste, some also for service, mood and choice.
And…
wcrawford | June 30, 2009It'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 home of Walt at Random--e.g., reviews of old movies, ALA schedules, pure copies of posts from other blogs (except for the announcements of new Cites & Insights issues, which do appear on both blogs).
The semi-dormant blog was averaging 3,000 page views per day when the active portion moved and…
wcrawford | June 30, 2009Here'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 goes into new articles. And some weeks (also including this past one), a new article emerges from pieces of old ones.
For the record, the new articles for the week ("week" being last Monday-Friday, June 22-26, 2009):
Advocacy and marketing begins with thoughtful commentaries on advocacy from Leigh…
wcrawford | June 28, 2009In 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.
But there's a context that might be worth discussing and pursuing further--actually two contexts, one only marginally related.
Direct context
One comment on this shutdown said that, according to the writer and a colleague, this particular blog was the only consistent liblog around (not in those…
wcrawford | June 24, 2009When 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 put it another way, the widespread and vehemently-expressed view that PDF sucks (to use a polite version).
What I saw, in several conversations, was a seeming demand from text-miners that everything must be in HTML (or, better, XML) so it was easy to mine, with a complete disdain for layout and…
wcrawford | June 22, 2009When 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 get things done right. Leaders find the right things to do.
Another simple distinction is that managers have subordinates, while leaders have (willing) followers. If you have subordinates who wouldn't willingly follow you, you may be a manager but you're not a leader--and you can be a leader without…
wcrawford | June 21, 2009Angel 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 you're not part of academia?
Or,
Can it be information science if it doesn't appear in the form of proper scholarly articles in proper refereed journals?
Not that I haven't had articles in refereed journals. I have--not many, but a few.
But most of what I'd call research, particularly in the past…
wcrawford | June 19, 2009Here 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 was more along the lines of "Holy cr*p! What's going on here?" The situation had nothing to do with this blog--and a lot, I think, to do with culture clashes along the lines of that half-century-old notion of the Two Cultures.
The trigger
The trigger was a cluster of conversations taking place on…
wcrawford | June 15, 2009It 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 suggested to me.
Many LLN articles are composites, series of smaller commentaries on an overall topic. Sometimes I add overviews to those composites or rewrite them as more synthetic (synthesized?) pieces; frequently I don't.
A couple of examples from changes over the past week (for the full set of…
wcrawford | June 14, 2009I 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, uphill, both ways
No, this isn't going to be one of those posts. I only wish we'd had the kind of raw processing power in my early years (decades?) as a systems analyst/programmer that we take for granted now. Most people today spend more time on what needs to be done, and that's as it should be.
This is…
wcrawford | June 12, 2009I'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, just for a little while, I like to have a little fun with what I see as excesses. That section is My Back Pages, and like many other "last page" features it's not intended to be taken too seriously. That section is also a "PDF bonus"--I don't make it available as a separate HTML section.
The July…
wcrawford | June 12, 2009The 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 section would work nicely as blog posts--and there is some crossover.
When this section appears, it's usually longer than this time around and usually includes a section of "Quicker Takes," each a single paragraph. This one has a trio of items, each triggered by something I saw elsewhere:
A note on…
wcrawford | June 12, 2009Do 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 essay--the second major essay in the July 2009 Cites & Insights--is about the proposed settlement of the Association of American Publishes and Authors Guild lawsuits against Google over Google Book Search.
To some extent, it's a followup to the issue-length Perspective: The Google Books Search…