ALA Annual Goes Social

Posted on June 20, 2008 by Peter Murray

The American Library Association annual conference is getting more social each year, and as a long-time member of ALA and often a critic of the, well, un-togetherness of ALA’s electronic capabilities, it is nice to see the trend continuing this year. Take, for instance, the Blogger’s Room. Initially just a LITA thing, it is now being promoted as an association-wide service. As I write this, that page has about two dozen entries for individual and group blogs that say they will be covering conference events.

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Who Said You Couldn’t Catalog the Internet?

Posted on June 6, 2006 by Peter Murray

I seem to remember, in the early heady days of the internet, there was a cry from the library profession to “Catalog the Internet” — to create descriptive records and controlled vocabularies for every resource out there deemed useful. The early Yahoo!, with a librarian on the staff, was going to help by putting everything in a neat, orderly classification system. The rest of us were going to catalog sites like mad and put them all into WorldCat (and keep them up-to-date). A nice dream.

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