Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Blogging For or From OCLC?

Our esteemed colleague in blogland, Jenny Levine, commented a few days ago about her surprise that more news had not appeared in her mailbox about OCLC's acquisition of 24/7 or the recent deal with Yahoo, either by conventional means or this blog. Well, that caused a fair wee bit of soul searching at OCLC, and the end of the story isn't written.

OCLC has several means of officially disseminating news but we are not yet using an RSS feed to let interested people get product updates, press releases and technical bulletins. We're working on it. (I know, you're thinking, how hard is that?)

And as this blog is a George, Alane and Alice production, (with full approval from our bosses--most days) and not an official OCLC vehicle, we quite deliberately decided not to use it as a platform to, um, flog OCLC services and products. Perhaps we're being too hands' off?

I am in Vancouver, British Columbia...as I have mentioned before, my library degree is from UBC and it is always a great pleasure to come back here. I'll be talking to the students in the library and archival programs at UBC on Thursday. Wendy McGinnis, the OCLC Director of PR, will be with me and we're hoping a Newsletter article will be the result--what are those librarians/archivists-to-be thinking?

I know I am thinking that I'm older now than half of my library school professors were!