How Internet Infrastructure Works
I found this to be a very interesting and easy to read series of articles. I now feel as though I have a better understanding of how the internet works, and how things work when I'm using the internet. Very helpful.
Dismantling Integrated Library Systems
This article was interesting, but more difficult to follow than the previous articles regarding internet infrastructure. The thing I thought was most important was the fact that there is interoperability between systems, sometimes between the same vendor's systems, and sometimes between the library systems and the vendor's systems. This makes it difficult for patrons to have complete access to everything that they may need, and this could be problemmatic.
Inside the Google Machine
Wow--this video was fabulous. I was amazed to see the globe mapping all of the places using Google at any given time. It was amazing. Google seems like a great place to work. They really seem to care about their employees, and try to make their working environment as pleasant as possible. I really liked the 20 percent idea, where they are able to use 20 percent of their time working on things which are important to them. Perhaps more employers would benefit from using some of their practices!
The article on ILS was, I think, deliberately written to be long winded. Vendor's tend to make systems they think we need. Or they try to sell us systems that won't really work for certain libraries, but because they are the cheapest, we end up with that system. Case in point: in Baltimore, we had a system that was geared more for school libraries than public, so there were certain functions we never used because of that.
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