Walt at Random

That’s right–the last* Cites & Insights** will be appearing well before ALA Annual: Based on other uncertainties, I’ll say “no earlier than Wednesday, June 14, and no later than Tuesday, June 20,” with the most likely dates being Thursday, June 15 or Sunday, June 18.

*This will be the last C&I with a masthead saying “written and produced by Walt Crawford, a senior analyst at RLG.” RLG’s members approved the merger, so my last day as an RLG employee will be June 30–because that’s the last day RLG will have employees. Don’t cry for me, whether in Argentina [46 readers so far this year] or elsewhere: I’ll start working for OCLC on July 1, going back to full-time from the 75%-time position I’ve had since last fall. Sure, I lose more than 1,000 hours of sick leave in the process–but that’s a tribute to my general good health, and would happen in any job change.

The bad news: I have to change health providers, I drop back to no accumulated vacation (but get paid for the vacation I had), I’ll have to reacclimate to full-time work, I’ll miss some of the great RLG people who aren’t signing up for the transition, and the initial period–the “transition” of RLG services and stuff to OCLC–is likely to be somewhat difficult, just as the last month has been difficult. The good news: In the long run, I think there’s a good chance I might be working with (and certainly working for) a broader range of libraries, including the public libraries I admire so much–and that I might even have a job that’s a little more in line with my professional activities. And, to be sure, there are great people at OCLC as well.

**This will be the last substantive issue for this academic year. I’m sticking with the plan I announced a couple of months ago. Balance in copyright was last issue’s primary theme. Balance in libraries and librarianship–which you could consider a contribution to the ongoing discussion of web services and other new library tools–is the primary theme of the forthcoming issue. I don’t intend to have an issue as big as the Midwinter issue, although I’d love to have that much readership; at the moment, though, I have more text in the four draft essays (not including Bibs & Blather), so I’ve got a lot of editing to do. The August issue will be one most readers can cheerfully skip, a probably-short issue devoted to typography and design issues.

***What? You actually thought I was shutting down C&I just because of job disruptions? Or maybe that OCLC frowned on the publication? Wrong on both counts–and I know I have loyal readers at OCLC, as I apparently do here (this blog shows 1,613 sessions from oclc.org since May 1).

I can’t say for sure how things will go over the next months and beyond, but I’m pretty nearly certain that “regular” C&I issues will resume in mid to late August, that is, with a September issue. And I’m only a little less certain that the September issue will feature Looking at Liblogs, a new take on last year’s single most discussed article.

Coming soon: A post regarding that probable feature and what you can do now to help (or at least clarify) it.

[Modified to break up a ridiculously long paragraph. No text changes.]

This work by Walt Crawford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 10th, 2006 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Cites & Insights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.