James LaRue - myliblog

I am thrilled to announce my candidacy for the 2016-17 Presidency of the American Library Association. Those of you who know me, know of my deep and abiding passion for libraries. You also know that I've worked -- with many others! -- to make them better. As I've often said, this is the most exciting time in the history of our profession, and we need every live mind and spirit we can find. But the more I have thought about the state of libraries in the US today, the more concerned I have become. Support for public and academic libraries - measured in terms of public willingness to fund them - has been falling for decades. In too many states, our school libraries are in a state of crisis. Many are on the brink of extinction. I know most librarians to be conscientious and thoughtful stewards of public funds. Too, I know them to be, in many, many ways, staggeringly effective. Why then, are we losing support? And more importantly, what can we do about it? Here's what do...

I get sick very seldom. But after a recent drive over to the Western Slope of Colorado, I found myself dropping off to sleep one night (in a straw bale casita made by my friend Paul) - then was suddenly very awake and unwell. Unwell here just means knife-stabbings inside the throat when I swallowed, a fever, and headache. A cold, I guess, or rhinovirus - maybe this respiratory thing that has been flying around Denver. So I drove back home the next day so as not to infect the various people I'd been hoping to consult with. The trip wasn't bad, what with the glorious Colorado landscape, and even the rain was nice, like  driving through Scottish hills, migrating clouds, and mist. And I managed to wrap up the "Order of the Phoenix" CDs. Ms Rowling is a compelling storyteller, even when you know it comes out. When I got home, Suzanne had made chicken soup (she's been brutalized by all this for a week or more), and I was in bed by 6 or so. And slept through till aft...

A very cool new program: Mindscope . There are a couple of ways to describe it: a pinboard, a way to enter text, drag it around a screen, nest other text under it (so that clicking an underlined entry opens up a new board with new text), draw arrows connecting things. It runs on iOS. Here's a picture from my iPad: As you can see, I just set up a very simple grid that allows me to track some of this week's projects. It's really easy and simple to set up, drag things around, file when you're done. For those of us who sometimes need a couple of systems to stay on top of our world, this one is a keeper.

On my main laptop at home, I have long been running Windows 7 (which it came with), and using a program called wubi to dual boot into Ubuntu 12.04 (which means I had to decide when I turned on the computer whether I wanted to run Windows or Linux, and usually picked Linux). Ubuntu has worked pretty well for me. But I saw that it had come out with another Long Term Release, 14.04. So while I was doing other things, I said, sure, let's upgrade. As is so often the case when things go wrong, it was almost certainly my own fault. I'm not sure that I had a fully updated system before I started. I failed to back up a couple of files. I didn't read screens all the way through. I am, in fact, an idiot. The upgrade went through, but I didn't have menus at the top of the screen. That's a problem that the Internet has located, and several solutions were offered. I tried a couple of them, and it's possible I screwed that up, too, just by being impatient. Bottom line: I t...

Way back in the 70s, I happened across the book "Worlds in Collision," by Immanuel Velikovsky. It was a thick, sweeping, highly detailed book in which the author, a noted scholar (psychologist) advanced a theory of celestial catastrophes designed to explain various world myths (like the flood, the plagues of Egypt, and so on). It was absolutely absorbing and fascinating. And virtually everything about it has been rejected by scientists, often savagely. As a work of comparative mythology, it was compelling. As a work of science, not so much. Even Carl Sagan took pains to refute most of its core claims (although he did chide academicians for their unwillingness to at least examine the claims first). Well, I was taking a couple of long car trips, and checked out the 11-disc audiobook set called "The Lost Empire of Atlantis," by Gavin Menzies. Menzies, a former submarine commander, was decidedly not a member of the Atlantis-as-spacemen crowd. But he came to believe, a...

Here's a brief introduction to the top candidate for Douglas County Commissioner. Do NOT forget to vote in the primary!

It happens that I serve on an advisory committee for an IMLS grant on Open Government. Crafted by the good people at the University of Albany (NY), the grant is about encouraging public libraries to contribute to the open government trend. That trend seems to comprise several other things: - the rise of e-government. More and more governments use new technologies (mostly web-based tools) to make it possible to retrieve information that used to require office hours and staff assistance. - Transparency. Tyranny and waste thrive in secrecy. If government operates in the light, at least in theory it should be easier to detect misbehavior. (On the other hand, it may be that we can have governmental efficiency, OR government transparency, not both.) On the other hand, transparency might lead to something more positive: citizen contributions, and if not efficiency, at least effectiveness. - Civic engagement. And here the idea is that real citizenship or democracy depends upon...