Monday Morning Blog

This blog post was written at a point where my term position was coming to an end and I didn’t know if I would get the tenure track position which I did eventually get.   It seemed to make sense as a “metadata update” at the time but when I rediscovered this post the other day, I was less convinced of its relevance.   In the end I decided to edit the post and share it.   The summer of 1984 was about as hot as it gets in Saskatchewan, at least that is the way that I remember it.   All of my friends were getting summer jobs. With up-coming band trips and my budding interest in the latest clothes and records, I decided that it would be good for me to break out beyond the world of paper routes and babysitting to get a “real job”. I don’t actually recall the details my first little resume but I’m sure that it was an impressive little sight with all of my babysitting experience, the various paper routes I had over the years and a reference from my piano teache...

This blog post was originally intended to be posted in June 2014: I’ve finally gotten around to completing my reading about the April 2014 changes to RDA.   As is the case with reading the details of any descriptive cataloging standard, it’s enough to either give you a headache or put you to sleep if you try to focus on too much of the detail at once. I do have a few comments to make about this update.   First of all, many of the changes are, in my mind, just clarification of the points which help to bring metadata creation away from the world of trying to fit as much information as possible onto a little index card and into a complex international information environment.   For example, it is reinforced that for serials you don’t assume that users understand that “v.” stands for volume.   Instead, volume should be spelled out as such as should issue.   This does make sense in an international, multicultural and multi-generational environment.   C...

I attended the Canadian Library Association’s annual conference in Victoria British Columbia on May 28 th to the 31 st .    The setting and the spring weather were wonderful. Notice that I haven’t used the usual abbreviation of CLA seeing as for some of my readers the abbreviation CLA stands for California Library Association.     The two large library associations which are both commonly called CLA has definitely confused me in the past.   Of course, in thinking about RDA, I see another situation where limiting the use of abbreviations where the audience for either a metadata record or a piece of writing moved from the local to international sphere. This was my first time attending CLA and I wasn’t quite about what to expect.   In the previous two years I had attended ALA Midwinter and had come to enjoy the highly specialized meeting and presentation topics as well as the fast pace of the event.   In looking at the CLA line-up I was a littl...

To my horror, I see that I have four blog posts which I wrote going back to this spring which I never published to this blog.  I see that a couple of them are out of date.  I'll update them and start posting them as time allows. With all of the editing tools in Blogger there is no reason to type out my posts in Word and then cut and paste them in here so I'm going to stop doing that. I was getting ready to type out my November post which is a follow-up to my Library 2.014 conference presentation when I discovered this...so, it looks like you'll actually get five blog posts in the next month or so.  Nothing like doing everything at once. Check back in a few days once I've had a chance to update my CLA conference update.