So, commonplace.net….

Permalink: https://purl.org/cpl/150

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I have had this domain name for a long time, before I started working with digital library systems, even before I knew about them. It was January 2000, at the peak of web 1.0.

My main motive was that I wanted to have an email address that I would not have to change every so often because of disappearing free email providers (my first email address was something at crosswinds.net). But I also wanted to create some kind of bridge or virtual meeting place for the different fields I was interested in, art, history, IT, etc.
There were no blogs or blogging software or any modern web2.0 tools, I had to do everything with HTML and CSS.

A funny thing is that Pam’s Paper Pills blog (© photo) compares old “commonplace books” with “modern blogs”.

My first real project that attracted some attention was my “Short guide to free email” .

A couple of years later I found myself kind of “in between careers”, moving away from IT and system development into what I then expected to be arts and humanities. I actually found myself somewhere in the middle in the end (where I still am right now).

I started adding more “literary” and “historical” texts to my website.But I never really got it going.

Until web 2.0 came along. First I moved everything to a WordPress environment, but I still did not have real content. I played around with a couple of different approaches, finally I decided to start a blog on digital libraries. One of the many 😉 but it would automatically be part of the current “virtual community” of the blogosphere and the web at large.

It took some time to think of topics that are not really covered by other well known bloggers. Matters were complicated by the fact that I also have another site, that I had started using for a kind of “personal” blogging (http://lukask.blogspot.com).

But I think the next couple of years I may have a lot to blog about. I will be heavily involved in the implementation of Aleph at the Library of the University of Amsterdam, I have just been elected as member of the Steering Committee of  IGeLU (International Group of Ex Libris Users), we intend to get involved more in the new Ex Libris developers platform, and of course there is Ex Libris‘ new URM/URD2 strategy to follow.

So, I hope this will be the first of many library2.0 blog posts.

Lukas Koster