February 11, 2016

Roy Tennant

About Roy Tennant

Roy Tennant is a Senior Program Officer for OCLC Research. He is the owner of the Web4Lib and XML4Lib electronic discussions, and the creator and editor of Current Cites, a current awareness newsletter published every month since 1990. His books include "Technology in Libraries: Essays in Honor of Anne Grodzins Lipow" (2008), "Managing the Digital Library" (2004), "XML in Libraries" (2002), "Practical HTML: A Self-Paced Tutorial" (1996), and "Crossing the Internet Threshold: An Instructional Handbook" (1993). Roy wrote a monthly column on digital libraries for Library Journal for a decade and has written numerous articles in other professional journals. In 2003, he received the American Library Association's LITA/Library Hi Tech Award for Excellence in Communication for Continuing Education. Follow him on Twitter @rtennant.

LC Reviews its File Formats for Preservation Recommendations

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In an ongoing commitment to keep up with the changing world of preservation, the Library of Congress is doing it’s annual review of its “Recommended Formats Statement”. The stated purposes of the document are: One purpose of the Statement is to provide internal guidance within the Library to help inform acquisitions of collections materials (other than […]

The Canadian Library Association Votes to Dissolve

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As reported in this tweet, if not elsewhere, the Canadian Library Association has voted to dissolve. As astonishing as it is to write that sentence, this has actually been a long time coming. As long as a year ago a process was put in place that led to this moment. The document “Toward a Federation […]

Wikipedia: 1 Librarian, 1 Reference

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The Wikipedia Library is a project that aims to marshall library-licensed resources for Wikipedia editors so that they can add authoritative citations to Wikipedia articles. There are a number of things that they do, but an essential one is that they have arranged to make a number of article databases behind paywalls available to Wikipedia […]

Remembering PACS-L

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If you weren’t there in 1989, this is going to be very hard to imagine. But go ahead and try to picture this: the world without the web, without mobile (let alone smart) phones, without so many of the things that we take for granted today. The Internet was here, certainly, but only for some […]

The Things We Carry

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A long time ago I read the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. It is an eloquent and evocative account of the Southeast Asian War and how soldiers coped with a hell they could neither understand nor survive unscathed — if they lived at all. Today I am not writing about anything nearly […]

Only Good Enough to be Dangerous

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I feel like I didn’t really reach adulthood until I became a commercial river guide. There are a few reasons for this opinion. One is that you probably don’t really become an adult until you are responsible for the health and well-being of someone else. As a guide and more importantly as a trip leader, that […]

These Things I Will Do

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Recently in a conversation with one of my daughters I remarked that the only issue I thought might be more devastating to humanity than the status of girls and women in society is global warming. Upon reflection, I now feel that I was wrong. There is nothing more devastating to humanity than the status of […]

EBook Reader Ownership Falls. Duh.

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A Pew Research Center survey has discovered something that some might be surprised to read: “Today, about one-in-five adults (19%) report owning an e-reader, while in early 2014 that share was a third (32%).” This is quite a notable drop, especially considering that MP3 player ownership has dropped only slightly in the same period. One […]

Knowledge Continues to be Unlatched

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I’ve written before about two similar efforts to open up books by having individuals (Unglue.it) or libraries (Knowledge Unlatched) pledge money until a certain total has been raised. They both continue to work at these efforts, and KU recently announced a new offering for libraries to consider. The “KU Collection,” as it is dubbed, includes 78 new […]

Astonishing Public Service

Last night I dined at the bar of a run-of-the-mill chain restaurant. On the road for business this is my usual modus operandi, with the variant of dining in the hotel bar instead. You get the picture. So my bartender in this instance turns out to be flat out awesome. She’s there when I want her and not […]
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