Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Burger on Banned Books and Thomas Frey


Leslie Burger is a guest blogger on the Google Blog today. Coooool. She's hyping Banned Books week. Plenty of people have given Google the eyeroll because of Google's censorship issues in China, but on balance it's great to see Google and libraries sharing the same pulpit.

And banned books are great, don't get me wrong. There is even a bracelet. Whoah, I might have ordered it if I could find one with adult titles on it. Oh wait, different part of the site: here it is.

I might have liked to push the envelope a bit further on one of my personal soapboxes, the "your library has more than books" theme--but I'll settle for "your library is a little bit subversive in a really nice way" with the carnival theme. Not sure what the carnival theme has to do with banned books (the books are like snarling tigers?)...anyway.

The Google blog let me to The DaVinci Institute, which led me to Thomas Frey, which led me to his ideas about The Future of Libraries.

Some great ideas here. Ideas we've all been talking about for years now. Has anyone heard him speak on libraries? As a futurist, (as is our resident OCLC futurist, Alane) he can help us outline our possible future options in order to make smart present-day tactical decisions.

If there's one thing that was burned into my head from Good to Great, it's that Getting the Right People on the Bus in the Right Seats is Most Important in order to go from Good to Great as an organization (or an industry).

Thanks to Leslie for driving the bus this year.

2 comments:

Rosario said...

And speaking of Thomas Frey, he is going to be one of the featured speakers at a one day conference sponsored by the Colorado State University Libraries' Employee Enhancement Committee entitled "Library Renaissance: Perspectives for the Digital Age." Along with Frey, OCLC's own Lorcan Dempsey will also be a speaker. Unfortunately, the conference is by invitation only. With these two great speakers, let's hope they make their presentations available. And what a great program for the CSU folks to put together for the library staff.

Alice said...

Awesome news! Thanks Rosario. Anyone who goes to the conference, you'll have to blog your insights for all of us.