I have just returned to the US from a couple of weeks vacation in Ireland and England. I was more than usually struck by my bookstore (aka book shop) experiences, and this prompted the curation entry I have just written. First of all, an interesting note that I have quoted... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

As existing practices evolve and new ones emerge it often takes time for the way in which we talk about them to settle down. There may be some interim terminological confusion. This has happened in our world with 'archive' for example. We can also see this happen with curation/curation/curator. In... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

I am on vacation and traveling this week, and so am taking the opportunity to air again an entry of a couple of years ago on what I called 'stitching costs' .... We are familiar with switching costs, the costs of changing a supplier. I may decide not to change... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

One of the recurrent themes of this blog has been the work done by libraries to put more of their services in the flow of their users' working, learning and research behaviors. In this context, I was pleased to see the work by my colleagues on implementing Worldcat searches in... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

[No 2 of 3. No 1 here.] I was pleased to participate in LITA's Top Tech Trends panel at ALA this year (see the video and live coverage). We were each asked to talk about three trends: current, a bit further out, and a bit further out again. In thinking... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

I was pleased to participate in LITA's Top Tech Trends panel at ALA this year (see the video and live coverage). We were each asked to talk about three trends: current, a bit further out, and a bit further out again. In thinking about the exercise, it seemed to me... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

We tend to have a very record-based view of bibliographic systems. Searches in a resource result in lists of record-based displays for items. All fields may not be indexed. This means that the data works less hard than it might, given the variety of ways in which it could be... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

I will be on the LITA Top Technology Trends panel on Sunday. I have yet to finalize my thoughts, but I am sure that mobile and cloud will figure. We are increasingly familiar with the twin discussions about mobilization and the cloud, and about how each trend supports the other.... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

Here are some recent reports/papers produced by OCLC Research or in which we have been involved ... Kroll, Susan, and Rick Forsman. 2010. A Slice of Research Life: Information Support for Research in the United States. Report commissioned by OCLC Research in support of the RLG Partnership. Published online at:... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

In the print era, the cost of interacting with multiple information sources was high so there were incentives for newspapers to present a complete view of news, entertainment, local affairs, and so on, to local audiences. In the network environment, that cost goes down and there is an incentive to... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

We downloaded Rick Riordan's latest novel, The Red Pyramid, to my son's iPod Touch this afternoon. As he began to read, he came across this nice dedication: To all my librarian friends, champions of books, true magicians in the House of Life. Without you, this writer would be lost in... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

I recently read Greil Marcus's book on Van Morrison. While I have most of the Morrison oeuvre on some form of physical medium it was useful to be able to refer to my aggregate digital collection, and to the Zune marketplace and iTunes Store as backup. I could quickly look... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

Last Friday I attended the RLG Partnership Symposium. The topic - When the books leave the building - reflected the growing discussion around the management of legacy print collections across the academic library system. The balance between local print, offsite print (local or shared), and emerging digitised collections, presents interesting... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

I have found that the phrase Discovery happens elsewhere has quite a bit of resonance in discussion. Increasingly people discover websites, or encounter content from them, in a variety of places. Most clearly, this happens through network-level services like Google or Twitter, but also happens in personal services (my RSS... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

I have been using these three 'switches' as contextual background in presentations for a while: Consumer switch Then: More investment in business/education environments. Now: More investment in consumer environments. It used to be the case that the computer and communications capacities we had at work or in college exceeded those... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

Greil Marcus finished an article about the reception of his recent book on Van Morrison with this lovely quote: Not all the stories people tell about Morrison, though, are stories of conflict, confusion, resentment, or regret. "I was talking to my father today," a woman in Portland said. "He asked... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

I have been using this phrase, outside-in and inside-out, to discuss a contrast in information management practices that is becoming more important. Here is how I spoke about it a little while ago in these pages: Think, for example, of a distinction between outside-in resources, where the library is buying... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

I wrote an entry on yufind the other day, noting its use of xISBN to cluster editions in results. yufind is an implementation of VuFind. Here is another example of the clustering: Villanova. As Till Kinstler points out in a comment, and as William Denton notes in a discussion of... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

I was looking at the Vufind implementation of the Yale University Library catalog - yufind - and was interested to see that it implements a link to OCLC's xISBN service to pull together other editions of a displayed result. Here is an example where several versions of Krapp's Last Tape... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org

Franco Moretti has an interesting short book called Graphs, maps, trees: abstract models for literary history. He proposes a way of reading literary history which involves abstracting patterns across large stretches of a literary field rather than examining "concrete, individual works". In particular, he works with three organizing models: graphs,... dempsey http://orweblog.oclc.org