One Big Library.

I am now a columnist.

What's *really* cool about this is that I get to be published in the same magazine as Library Web Chic and The Liminal Librarian.

Thanks to InfoToday's liberal licensing policy I've retained numerous rights after a 90-day post-publication window, so I'm collecting it all and plan to republish them down the road a piece. I don't think they'd mind a little tease though, just to introduce the premise. The column is called "Libraries in Computers." (Get it?)

"Imagine we're starting a library from scratch—no building, no staff, no budget, and no shelves, books, databases, or servers. All we start with is a community—a group of people connected to each other like any library user community might be connected to each other, whether for geographical, educational, corporate, or other reasons. Members of this community would probably have lots of computers and music players of their own, and lots of their own books, magazines, and videos, and lots of other random things collected over the years. What if we could instantly turn all of this into a library?"

With each subsequent column I'm taking this premise apart bit by bit to identify today's technical challenges and recontextualizing them with what we librarians already know. It's a fun way to find angles between hot topics and the little bit of old knowledge I've managed to pick up along the way, and I hope at least a few readers will feel the same way.

Want to read the rest? CiL is available through EBSCOhost, but this new issue doesn't seem to have shown up online quite yet. Reports from home indicate that the paper copy has arrived, though, so if you have a paper subscription you can read it for yourself. Or, stop by your neighborhood library and pick up the print copy, which should be on the shelf already. Or, better yet: buy yourself a copy. :)