Laurabelle's Blog

There's been a lot of discussion in my classes about the way people nowadays simply type words in a text box (any box will do) and expect to get results. I think this must be even truer than I previously believed, because I looked at my MT activity log today and saw queries like this: [...]

Stephen Meyer, a library student at the other UW has chimed in on the subject of technology and librarianship. I think he missed the point of what I was trying to say, and that's probably because I said it badly. I guess they and I are talking about two different things, and I need to [...]

Dorothea says some really good things about the love-hate relationship between library science and information science, although she doesn't put it exactly that way. The fact is that there are a lot of stereotypes going around between old-school librarians and technologists, and none of it is helping the mutual-good-feeling points, but we all need each [...]

Dorothea claims that the way to tell a librarian from a library technician is by whether that person knows his own Cutter number or not. While I don't disagree that it can be hard to tell those with a degree in library science from those without (alas, I used to be one of those people [...]

Today I went neither to class nor to work but to the PLA National Conference, which was in downtown Seattle. I picked up lots of free books, spent money on three others, and went to three fairly interesting sessions. I won't say that I was as excited about the whole thing as I was at [...]

I'm in the Google directory! Reference > Libraries > Library and Information Science > Weblogs > Personal Weblogs I don't know why this shocks me so much.

So I found out that LCSH actually has a heading for Melton family (as well as many other families in fact, as long as they've had something written about them), and of course I had to look it up in WorldCat to see what's there. My cousin some-number-of-times-removed, J.V. Melton, wrote a book called The [...]

This morning as I woke up to NPR's Morning Edition, there was a story about a student project at MIT that is effectively a digital music library. One of the developers of this project said that one of his inspirations was the fact that the campus library owns lots of CDs but that most people [...]

It's a terrible thing that I can't even look at a catalog record now without seeing errors everywhere. The title and statement of responsibility field of the bib record for An Edward Lear Alphabet Book in the KCLS catalog is wrong. That's a descriptive field, which means that all the words in it should come [...]

While I was in cataloging class yesterday, it occurred to me that descriptive cataloging is very similar to braille transcription in some ways. Specifically, both are attempts to translate documents into a form which is accessible in ways unlike the original. In both cases, the creator or creators of the original document were most likely [...]