Monthly Archives: April 2004

Federated searching and library catalogs

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There has been quite an interesting discussion on Web4Lib these past few days on the topic of the role or place of the library catalog vis-a-vis federated searching. I have some strong views about this but have enjoyed the thoughtful perspectives of several others. Check this out at Web4Lib’s archive and look for the “Federated Searching and the OPAC” thread. It’s well worth reading — and NOT because of any contribution I’ve made to the discussion.

Sick kids

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Keegan has been on the high honor roll at his school for most of the year and as a reward, was scheduled to go with other kids from his school to Chicago for the day today. Unfortunately he became sick to his stomach last night and spent the night throwing up several times. He didn’t get to go to Chicago, which is a real disappointment. Hopefully he’ll feel better today, but in the meantime, I’m here at home watching the younger kids so that Michele can get some much-needed sleep after being up with Keegan several times during the night.

Trip to Indianapolis to attend consortial meeting

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Yesterday was a pretty long day for me. Our library is part of the PALNI (Private Academic Library Network of Indiana) consortium and we had a consortial meeting yesterday at PALNI HQ, which is at INCOLSA’s offices. (INCOLSA is yet another library consortium but one that has a broader, statewide membership.) The meeting was the first-ever meeting of a group called the PALNI Aleph System Librarians. Since PALNI libraries share an integrated library system (Aleph 500 ver. 15.5) and since a big load is borne by designated system librarians at each member library in terms of the daily management of the system, this was quite an important event.

The reason it was a long day for me was that I was asked to give a presentation on macro software (I’ve attached the Word document here Macro Express.doc) Taylor has already purchased for use with Aleph, and I hadn’t had a chance to prepare anything up until the last minute. I was up at about 4a, got to work at 5a, and worked on the presentation until it was time to go to Indy at around 8a. After the all-day meeting, I then had to work the evening reference desk until 10p.

Anyway, the meeting was quite a success, in my opinion. I finally was able to put faces to names as I hadn’t met most of my counterparts before in the 23 libraries that make up PALNI. I also thoroughly enjoyed getting to meet one of the PALNI systems analysts face-to-face for the first time, someone with whom I have spoken on the phone and emailed back and forth for a long time, but had never met in person. Plus we as a group came to some important decisions about the system and how we’d like to manage it. This is a great first step to leveraging the power of a group to addressing the many complexities and demands of our implementation of this new system.

New playground for kids

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Yesterday Keegan and I spent most of the afternoon building a new Little Tikes playground set. Tristan and Brinley are pretty thrilled with it already! Click here to see a photo and description. We bought it from Meijer’s at a pretty good price. Michele has been wanting to get something like this for a long time so that the kids have more to do outside in our yard. Tristan and Brinley are such busybodies so to have a place for them to play outside will help a lot. I need to set up wood chips around the whole thing and then anchor it, but otherwise that project is pretty much complete. Next up: Setting up the pool my brother bought for us. We set it up the year before last but didn’t set it up last summer at all, so I hope everything is still intact and in working order.

Preprint article on journal management solutions

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Just finished webifying a preprint version of an article I wrote for the summer 2004 issue of Serials Review . It’s entitled “Which Route Do I Take? A Viewpoint on Locally-Developed vs. Commercially Available Journal Management Solutions” and I hope it’ll garner at least a bit of interest in terms of the focus on a locally developed e-resource management system into which I’ve put a lot of effort.

Inaugural entry

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I’m about out of my mind with feeling overwhelmed by work and personal life, so why am I adding a new thing into my life like this blog? Well, for several reasons. One is to gain some firsthand experience with this new medium of expression. Another is to more readily share what’s going on in my life (which is a lot) with family and friends. Then, too, I get the tool (iBlog) for free, why not give a whirl? We’ll see for how long I can do this given that I have little free time to work on the computer at home until after all the kids are in bed. And by then, I am usually too tired out to do anything else but veg for a while or go straight to bed.