There’s a new listserv called Techie Librarian up for librarians of the technogeeky variety. It originated, I am told, as an offshoot of the nexgenlib list, which I would myself have joined if I were not (I note with some amusement) too darn old—they only want the under-30 set.
Get in on the ground floor, why don’t you?
As usual, Simon St. Laurent tells it like it is. He should know. He’s an editor himself.
(And yes, I’m linking back because he linked to me first. So it goes.)
What it amounts to? Really? You can’t do it with robots, for any reasonable value of “it.”
Folks who know me know that I have an almost supernatural awe for editors. I’m not the only one.
Over and over I?ve heard the same complaint about these projects, “Turns out, after all the budget and time we spent, we really didn?t need a content management system at all. We just needed some editors.”
Heck yeah that’s what’s needed.
I present this rip-roaring Unicode rant so that it gets play outside the world of the linguistibloggers.
My only added note is that this is a harder problem than in print. In print, you can hack your typesetting system all kinds of ways to get a glyph that looks right. (I can’t, personally, but I was perpetually in awe of the unlikely contortions the Penta system could be made to perform.) That won’t fly on the Web, because rendering is distinct from authorship, and because a hack that gets the glyph looking right may render it unsearchable.
Tough stuff. Glad it’s one facet of electronic text I’m not personally working on.
There’s a fantastic interview with Douglas Bowman (of the Wired website redesign) over at Digital Web Magazine.
I especially liked this bit:
As I mentioned earlier, I think an underplayed analogy with CSS is a correlation with style sheets used in print design and production. Designers and production artists have long been familiar with the concept of style sheets, popularized by desktop publishing apps like QuarkXPress. Even common word processing apps make use of global style-formatting features, and have for years. So the base concept of CSS is already a familiar one to many people.
Never had occasion to mention that connection before, me. Nope. Never. Why on earth would I ever think that typesetters and Web design people have anything at all to say to each other?
I’d work for this guy or his “bossman” in a hot minute.
I’ve had the top-down hierarchical manager from hell. Twice. Both times I left. Quickly. (The “from hell” bit has to do with micromanaging and interference. I can work with somebody who has to be top dawg as long as top dawg leaves me the heck alone to do my job, treating me with reasonable respect in the meanwhile.)
I’m not going to get into that situation again if I can possibly avoid it. Best for me—and best for who’s hiring me, too.
A SLISmate asked me a while ago whether TAG did web design. I shook my head. “No good at it,” I said. “Give me a design and I’ll code it up, but that’s different.”
I am in awe of good web designers. Wow. Markup is easy. What they do is hard.
Every once in a while I run across a design that makes me wish my site looked like that. Happened just today, as a matter of fact.
That’s just beautiful. Wow. Love it to death. And it ain’t table cruft under the hood, either; View Source and see for yourself.
My remote blogroll just added Our Life in Michigan, by another new library-school student. Terrific stuff, especially the rip on critics of critics of the Patriot Act.
Oh, but I’m afraid I’m all sulky over this blogger because he works where I want to. (But then, he can give the lowdown on what working conditions are like. Never a bad thing to know.)
His program appears a good deal more academically rigorous than mine thus far. I am, however, somewhat encouraged to realize that (taking into consideration differences in what classes we’re taking) I don’t seem to be learning any less from mine than he from his. Honey and vinegar, folks, honey and vinegar. This fly likes honey just fine.
Another bit of Ashcroftiana making the library rounds.
Right, right, officer, I’ll go quietly…