Blog

Coding up a new section of the website to document and share some of the many quilts I’ve made over the years.

What are the purpose of statements? When do they have power? What is their utility? As professional organizations are called upon to put out statement upon statement, I’ve written a brief reflection on why I think they’re necessary and also whether they should be made as frequently as people think.

I connected my Strong app for powerlifting to Apple Health and learned all kinds of weird things about Apple Health’s design and assumptions.

In light of the 500th anniversary of the Anabaptist movement, I wanted to share my own story and how I came to join an Anabaptist (Mennonite) church as a young adult.

After last week’s talk on making use of the period between now and fundamental shifts in cataloging, regular expressions (regex) came up during the Q&A as one of the things I think it’s helpful for catalogers to learn. Afterward, one of the attendees emailed me asking for more specific recommendations on how to learn them. I’m sharing the resources I pulled together, since I think they could be of use to more folks.

At the end of August 2022, OCLC released a completely new WorldCat.org website. It looks better on mobile, but library information is now tiered on a pay-to-play basis and links intended to keep people within WorldCat.org are prioritized over links to get the patron where they’re going. In this post, I examine and analyze specific areas of concern for academic libraries.

The MARC 041$a may initially seem like an important field to index for catalog faceting or collection assessment. However, its use for handling optional dubs in DVDs, Blu-rays, and streaming media may confuse patrons if we index it at face value. It may also contribute to incorrect assessments regarding the languages of material held in our collections. This post provides further context and recommendations for assessing language of the media in our catalog.

The MARC field for Incorrect ISSN has ended up taking on two very different functions. This post explores both functions and their history a little and explains why they’ve made automated processing of the field completely impossible.

Links are to the publisher or author’s site or, barring that, to bookshop.org. In previous years, I’ve managed to write full descriptions book. 2023 has been its own difficult year, with family illness and the death of our dog, so I’m just listing the things I want to share. In some cases I could write a sentence or two, in others I couldn’t. But if they’re on here, I thought they were worth sharing.

Writing about an art quilt I made with reused textiles and what I hope it reminds us about the clothing that we wear and the people who created it.