Thursday, October 26th, 2006

Overheard at IDEA2006

From Bruce Sterling’s Wired blog post, Overheard at IDEA2006:

“They’re able to do things I’ve never seen any library do. LibraryThing moves at the speed of light.”

Well, whoever said that—even if you didn’t mean it—you made our week!

UPDATE: Aha! We found it. It’s from a talk Ed Vielmetti (Superpatron) gave at IDEA2006. The full quote is:

“LibraryThing moves at the speed of light compared to library vendors … [They’re] able to do things that I haven’t seen any library do.”

Also nice:

“Most library catalogs are not fun to browse through—you can sort of struggle to find what you want. I can spend hours on LibraryThing and come up with a huge list of ‘Oh, I wish I’d read that,’ ‘Do I have that book or do I need to check it out from the library?’ .. There’s a big opportunity for systemmatic change within libraries, to incorporate some of [these] ideas.”

Wow, and the admiration flows both ways. Wouldn’t it be great if every library in the country had someone like Vielmetti?—an unpaid, expert, passionate patron helping to move the library’s technology along. It’s almost unfair he’s in Ann Arbor. Without him they’d still be one of the most technologically vibrant libraries in the country. When the Revolution comes, comrades Vielmetti and Blyberg will be redistributed!

Labels: Uncategorized

0 Comments:

Comments are closed.