Data. The final frontier.
Connecting real books, metadata and people I spent one day in the stacks of the off-site central storage facility of the Library of the University of Amsterdam as one of the volunteers helping the library perform a huge stock control operation which will take years. Goal of this project is to get a complete overview of the discrepancy between what’s on the shelves and what is in the catalogue. We’re talking about 65 kilometer of […]
On Sunday December 27, 2009 I was in the opportunity to visit the, otherwise closed, library of The Netherlands’ oldest museum Teylers museum in my home town Haarlem, together with a small group of Dutch library twitter people. We were very kindly shown around by librarian Marijn van Hoorn, who explained to us the library’s history and collection. Now I’m not going to say something about the pleasant real life consequences of getting to know […]
Will library buildings and library catalogs survive the web? Some weeks ago a couple of issues appeared in the twitter/blogosphere (or at least MY twitter/blogoshere) related to the future of the library in this digital era. There was the Espresso book machine that prints books on demand on location, which led to questions like: “apart from influencing publishing and book shops, what does this mean for libraries?“. There was a Twitter discussion about “will […]
Henk Ellerman of Groningen University Library writes about the “Collection in the digital age” reacting to Mary Frances Casserly’s article “Developing a Concept of Collection for the Digital Age“. I haven’t read this 2002 article yet, but Henk Ellerman goes into the problem of finding a metaphor describing collections that for a large part consists of resources available on the internet. Henk says: “…the collection (the one deemed relevant for… well whatever) is a subset […]