RE: Seeking contributors for a new Against the Grain column: "How=09 We Done It Bad"

["Mcsean, Tony (ELS)" <T.Mcsean@elsevier.com>]

Tales from the crypt

It's not new but it was a shambles, and if you can find a copy of
this citation:

KUMISKI, Dariusz; McSEAN, Tony, BONNETT, Penelope.
Using new telecommunications technologies to bridge the information gap:
satellite-based document delivery between London and Warsaw.  In:
Information transfer: new age  - new ways. (Proceedings of the Third
European Conference of Medical Libraries). Bakker, Suzanne, Cleland,
Monique, editors. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993.

then you will have a good laugh.  The NLM will have a copy, but
sadly mine has gone missing.  It was an early attempt to deliver
scanned documents by satellite and despite a huge amount of
effort and top class technical wizardry, it never really worked.

You're welcome to use it, and if you're really keen I could fill
in the "now it can be told" gaps in the paper.

Regards,

Tony McSean
Director of Library Relations
Elsevier

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Rick Anderson
Sent: 26 July 2006 01:07
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Seeking contributors for a new Against the Grain column: "How We
Done It Bad"

* Please excuse cross-posting *

All of us are familiar with the "How We Done It Good" article, a
piece in which a librarian writes about a project that he or she
has recently completed successfully.  Sometimes the successful
projects involve refinements of old practices and workflows, and
sometimes they are experimental new practices that have proved
effective.  In both cases, the point of the article is to share
the good news and the details with colleagues, who might be
inspired to try something similar in their own institutions.

For a new column, to be published irregularly in _Against the
Grain_, I would like to invite submissions with an opposite
orientation: the column will be called "How We Done It Bad," and
it will feature stories of projects and experiments that went
wrong -- maybe even horribly, tragically wrong.  The point of
these articles won't be so much to provide amusement and/or
provoke sympathy, but rather to share lessons learned.  How can
_AtG_'s readers benefit from mistakes that all of us have made?
Can we save each other some wasted time and embarrassment (or
worse) by sharing our own stories of wasted time and
embarrassment?

Please send ideas and proposals to me at the email address below.
I look forward to hearing from you!

(And yes, if you'd prefer to publish your experience anonymously,
that's a definite possibility.  However, please volunteer only
your own stories -- not those of others who you feel have failed
in some way.)

----
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
rickand@unr.edu
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