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A new web presence: transitions and towers

This is a new web presence for Lorcan Dempsey! My goal is to provide a contact point and to bring together various elements of my work, writing and career. In part I am influenced by the decentralizing impulse to control your own archive.
Lorcan 5 min read
A new web presence: transitions and towers

A brief tour

There are pages about writing, career and life, the usual stuff.  I especially enjoyed providing an overview of my writing, thinking about continuity and evolution. As I note, I hope to write more about social and institutional aspects of libraries in the future.

Writing
I have written widely over the years. Topics have evolved, but follow a general chronological arc from the technical, through the description of evolving digital systems and services, to organizational and institutional issues.
Career stuff
The career to date .. a bit more detail.
LorcanDempsey.net
Welcome! This is a place to bring together my work on library services and directions.

I have ported over the content from Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog, and say a little more about that below. Earlier manifestations will redirect to here, which is now where I will blog.

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I have implemented a membership feature. This is of course optional but you should sign up if you are interested in receiving updates or if you would like to comment on any entries. More details here:

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Membership - spread the loveWhy join? Only join if you wish to enjoy some additional features. Specifically, memberscan comment on posts and members can receive updates when significant newcontent is added. Signup to join. You can then opt in to receive updates. Once you are a member, you n…

Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog: Orweblog

Over many years, I accumulated a lot of content at this venue. Over one thousand nine hundred posts I discovered when we moved it. I am very proud of that achievement. Many posts are referenced and linked to in the literature and elsewhere. A variety of concepts was first introduced and explicated here, before being amplified in presentations, other writing and in my work generally. It stands as a record of many years of thinking and contribution.

Blogging has become much less frequent in recent years. In some ways, my trajectory has followed the trajectory of blogging generally, peaking some years ago. However, more recently, it has been interesting seeing the growth of Substack, Revue, Patreon and other manifestations of the independent creator trend, this time often accompanied by a revenue model.

I observed some blogging dynamics in this post a while ago:

Because I don’t blog all that often any more, I find that when I sit down to do an entry I have too much stuff to say. I end up writing a short article rather than a blog entry. Indeed, I have a couple of pieces that are lying around and have grown to several thousand words.

I do hope to recapture some of that blogging fluency here.

One handed writing - the blog
Recently @mishdalton [https://twitter.com/mishdalton] pointed me at an article[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/opinion/tips-for-aspiring-op-ed-writers.html?mcubz=1] about writing op-eds for the New York Times. I was immediately struck by howapplicable much of what was said was to blog writing.…

Some notes about the Lorcan Dempsey Weblog content on this site:

  • To facilitate redirection and also to identify it here, I have given the imported content its own path .. /orweblog/{entry}. It can also be seen in the navigation the top of the page.
  • I have also tagged some important or influential posts as '*Classics' to elevate them in the new site.
  • I have mapped categories in the older blog to tags here, which have a more prominent role in navigation. The mapping isn't perfect, and I have lost some definition. But it works well.
  • There will be occasional glitches with formatting, links, or missing images, but overall the transition has worked reasonably well once various issues were identified and addressed.
  • I am grateful to Brian Pichman of libchalk (who host some OCLC blogs) for the patient and expert support he provided as we moved.
*Classics - LorcanDempsey.net
Significant or influential posts. This selection is seeded by select posts from Lorcan Dempsey’s Weblog, my blog at OCLC.
Note 14 December 2022: I recently removed the 'orweblog' collection within this site. It was not needed for referral, and was really a distraction, albeit a minor one. URLs with 'orweblog' in the path should just redirect appropriately here. 

The Poolbeg Towers

I have always felt a touch of nostalgia when visiting Lorcan Dempsey's weblog – nothing to do with the content, but rather the masthead of the webpage, which carries a panoramic photograph of his home city, Dublin, resting on Sandymount Strand in the foreground with its two Pigeon House towers and sweeping across the sea to Howth Head at the other side of Dublin Bay. //  Rónán O’Beirne, Library and Information Research, Volume 39 Number 121, 2015.

Continuous with my blogging identity over so many years, I do carry over the twin towers at Poolbeg, an iconic Dublin landmark. These featured in the banner picture of Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog for many years, and are the feature picture of this post.

I am grateful to my son Eoghan for creating a mark for this blog which incorporates the towers.

Here is the picture from the original blog .. somewhat low resolution.

The towers have always been special, standing in the arc of the bay. At the foot of the South Great Wall, which stretches out into the sea. They look out over the city, the traffic of the port, and the emigrant ships. And in turn, they look back at the towers. In the time since we have left Dublin, they have become more pervasive as an icon and emblem of the city, despite also being threatened with demolition.

And as a special bonus here is Lisa Hannigan singing Snow. The towers are in the background.

Picture: I took the feature picture on Sandymount Strand in Dublin. Maybe I should find a better picture, but somehow the focus here seemed right. These are now much photographed.

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