WebScale

So many webinars, so little time. And so much unfamiliar lingo coming at me! You modern humans invent new words like you're inventing fire. Like your life depended on it.

Today I watched a webinar presented by that great god in the sky, OCLC. The webinar was titled "Your library at Webscale: How radical collaboration is redefining library management services." They kept  throwing that word around: "webscale." At first I got excited, thinking they were talking about a mighty Hadrosaurs, a dinosaur known to my people, that had both scales and webbed feet...but then I realized they were just jawing about computers again.

The OCLC elders have created something called WorldShare Management Services that will help your library to be webscale. I still do not understand this word. But from what I could glean, which --with my primitive, undeveloped cave intellect, isn't much --a webscale library is the universal mind we have all been waiting for. It is a giant, throbbing brain, with arms that reach all the way around the earth ball.

If you want your library to throb like a smart brain, you must let go of the old ways. That ratty old ILS your library has isn't good enough anymore. It is soooo 2005. You may as well rip the computer out of the floor right now and make your patrons sift through a dusty old card catalog, because their searches will amount to the same thing, if you do not go webscale. This is what I learned in the webinar.