As is surely the case with many of those who peruse this book, I have been reading Lorcan dempsey’s Weblog as long as it has been available as a public resource. Thoroughly rereading the 1,869 posts in the near decade from October 2003 through August 2013 has been an eye-opening experience and a trip down memory lane.

In working on this project, I have had the opportunity to reflect on how closely intertwined the milestones of my career and Lorcan’s weblog were. At every stage in my career, Lorcan dempsey’s Weblog has shone light on the emerging trends and the key areas of concern to our profession. The very first item, in October 2003 (the succinct “Hello...,” in the “Lorcan’s Picks” chapter), was posted to OCLC Research’s staff just as I was beginning my library degree at the University of Michigan. A year later, as I was weeks away from graduation, the blog became public. As emerging digital technologies and digital affordances have roiled the profession—whether those are the challenges of metasearch, the rise of web-scale discovery interfaces, the creation of large full-text repositories, the need for tighter integration of document discovery and delivery, or the emergence of the collective collection—the blog has neatly presaged the projects and challenges that would next face me in my professional life. In fact, it seems my career has been an endless attempt to catch up with the trends and directions Lorcan has, often presciently, described.

This book contains, in our estimation, the most significant posts from the past decade. Significance is partly measured by their impact on the profession and partly by the degree to which they reflect Lorcan’s thinking or show seeds of future ideas. We have tried to keep some items that feel dated now but, when viewed in the context of the time they were written, were of import.