Category Work

Books, iTunes, and rental

With the announcement of the iPad yesterday devoting a substantial portion of the time to a demo of what books and reading will look like, I’m wondering about the business model for books in the iTunes Store, and whether there will be an opening for circulating (particularly public) libraries or not.

On digital “lending”

On Tuesday, I recorded an upcoming episode of Digital Campus with my old colleagues at CHNM and another “special guest”, Jennifer Howard; near the end of the podcast (now available here), I floated an idea that I’d like to get out in the broader online discussion of eBooks. I’d like to get it fleshed out [...]

Need short-term Zotero labor…

UPDATE: Found someone. I’ll explain more about this when we’ve got the finished product up. Thanks, everyone…
For a project we’ve got going on at NYPL, I need to get about 1200 references from spreadsheets into Zotero; I’m figuring it’s generously maybe 15-20 hours of work, since roughly half are represented in NYPL’s catalog (and thus [...]

I’m a celebrity…

…albeit the next to least popular one according to New York Magazine’s feature on YouTube. Next to last, baby! The only one after me was, well, a history professor. I just *knew* that moving from a university to a library was a step up in the cultural firmament!

Thanks, Roy

It’s now been more than two weeks since I heard the news that Roy Rosenzweig was gone; two weeks caught between an irrepressible urge to say something and a complete inability to find the right configuration of words. I spent most of that time reading what others had written, and the things that stick [...]

Breaking: site finally collapses under crushing neglect

In the digital equivalent of letting my lawn get so overgrown that it overtook the house, Dreamhost shut down epistemographer.com a few days ago (according to them, an RSS plugin was out of control, spiking load on my shared server). So, I’ve rolled back to a vanilla Wordpress installation, and hopefully the process of building [...]

Key moments in moving…

We got the boxes moved, the kitchen unpacked, and have been scoping out the new neighborhood. It’s all felt a bit off-kilter, however, until tonight…
…that big sigh of relief I just heaved (which might have been audible all the way down the east coast) was prompted by a happy little green light on my Airport [...]

Greetings, New York Public Librarians…

If my guess is right, there will be a whole lot of new people checking out this site today, as the news about my new job (as well as this URL) hits the in-house New York Public Library staff newsletter. With that in mind, let me just say hello to all my new colleagues! I’m [...]

Archivists not keeping archives…

File under ironic…

Big Changes Afoot

Several pieces of news that I’ve been sitting on for a few weeks, but might as well announce publicly before I head to SXSWi on Monday (heading down late ’cause my sister chose this weekend to get married, one of the handful of events worth missing “Geek Spring Break” for):
1) In mid-April, I’ll be leaving [...]