The hills are alive with the posts of Stephen Abram!

"Welcome to Stephen's Lighthouse where I'll muse about things library and librarianesque.

The lighthouse theme is based on what lighthouses do - shine a light on the waters and/or sound a horn to help ships navigate the course. They don't always stop the ships from crashing onto the rocks but they help most of the time."

Highly recommended reading (RSS feed here). Why? Because Stephen will be using his blog to explore "the really big picture" in that [excellent] way that only Stephen can.

"I like to consider the big picture - the really big picture. These technolgies are not just about serving up our reference services virtually. They're about putting the librarian back into the virtual space! Think about it. We are rapidly moving to the time (if some libraries are not already there) where the vast majority of our interactions with our users will be virtual - website hits, patron driven ILL, remote database searching and on and on. Loads of this happens with very little (or no) interaction with the humans in the library - librarians, information professionals and library workers - that improve the service. While our virtual services deliver information quickly, they don't improve the quality of the question which has been reference librarians' stock in trade for more than a century. If we want to improve, remain and stay relevant, we have to discover the virtual reference modalities that work. That requires a lot of experiemnentation, sharing and cooperation. It's an exciting field right now as technology moves into the user space more and more."