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It's hard to know whether to adopt a new web technology without kicking its tires. Which blog or wiki software works best for your library? What does a portal look like? Is a given app easy or hard to administer or redesign? How will you know, if you can't try it?

I suggest two ways of making your library a web-technology sandbox: building a test server, and signing up with a web-hosting service.

The title of this post is a fancy way of saying "we broke the site temporarily; sorry about that."

Some posts that had been categorized lost their categorization yesterday. TechEssence contributors

To anyone who was working in libraries more than a few years ago, the combination of widespread OpenURL support and smart link resolvers has an aura of deep magic to it. Add in a healthy e-journal collection and it seems almost miraculous, when everything works right. Vendor X has a link in their database going to Vendor Y’s resolver, which has a link to the full text on Vendor Z’s site (or tells you about ILL, document delivery options, or – heavens forfend! – print copies in the library). Seamless interoperability – just add good citation data.

As a library manager or administrator, you may find it tempting to make an executive decision when faced with pending deadlines, and say, "Just do the hack for now so we can get this thing out the door. We'll go back and fix it later." After all, you don't have the luxury of looking at the current project in isolation. You have to take into account the public relations aspects of the project, other initiatives that are depending on this one, funding issues, and a whole host of other things that the ability to balance makes you a good administrator.

Instant messaging, also called "chat," has been attracting a lot of attention as a vehicle for providing reference service and improving communication among library colleagues.

What is IM, and how does a library get started with it?

My TechEssence colleague Dorothea Salo recently penned "A paean to the text editor", a post with which I could hardly agree more. I happen to have a fondness for Pico, which dates back to my use of the PINE email system on Unix. To this day I install pico on virtually any Unix server on which I have an account, since it's brain-dead-easy interface does not tax my powers of concentration.

Being innovative in using technology with little money and staff is not a difficult thing. It requires:

1. an understanding that things change,
2. a commitment to spending time exploring new things, and
3. sharing what you have learned with your friends

Play is a good thing. It is not for children only. Innovation is play. Innovation is a process where you look at a number of seemingly disparate things and join them together to create something new. In our current environment it is as important to play as ever. People's expectations are changing. The economic environment decreasingly surrounds manufacturing. Information technology is no longer the realm of librarians and computer specialists.

Every librarian should get friendly with a text editor—and no, NotePad, WordPad (both on Windows) and TextEdit (Mac) don't count. Neither does Microsoft Word. A good text editor (sometimes called a "source editor" or "programmers' editor") is the Swiss army knife of software. It does a little bit of everything, and a lot of things surprisingly well.

The only thing that computers understand, fundamentally, is the difference between a one and a zero. Numbers. That's all. To express letters so that computers can manipulate them, each letter has to be assigned a unique number.

Self-evidently, the total of the world's languages includes a lot more letters than just the English alphabet, so when computers migrated out of Anglophone countries, letter-representation systems had to expand and adjust. The eventual result was Unicode.

A commenter on TechEssence recently wondered "...if knowing about metadata would make me a better librarian even if I'm neither a cataloger nor a repository rat." I'd vehemently argue that the answer is YES.