website

well, I have a website, it's about as attractive as a stray alley cat, but at least it's there.  I don't want an A, I just want to pass!!!

I've found that hours spent tweaking html code is not that different from the hours I would spend in a dingy, smelly, poorly lit practice module cursing the name of Beethoven and wishing Oliver Cromwell would desend upon my university and abolish the music program

c'mon mom, just 5 more minutes, pleeeeeeeease

I can't wait to be finished with this blogging project, I look forward to erasing it with glee. (yeah I hate blogging). I'm honestly a bit concerned about all these accounts we've created through out this course, I don't remember the passwords to half of them and I don't really want people browsing through sites that I found interesting enough to tag/bookmark. In this crazy web 2.0 world, how much will browsing privacy matter, or be protected? Is it really a concern? Libraries (allegedly) protect patron records with tooth and nail, should Zoomclouds keep our tag clouds hidden in a vault that requires fingerprint and retinal scanning authorization, but does it really matter that I bookmark sites about apple computer, and tend to read every article on Google News (even though they tend to keep changing the particular edit of the same damn stories all day).

IM Reference

Having never used the IMAPITTLIBRARIAN instant messaging service, I'm curious; but it got me thinking (which is usually a dangerous thing)....

With the recent interest in telecommuting to work due to enviornmental concerns, IM reference would be a great way for the library to express their greeness. I'm not sure Al Gore has ever gone after libraries for killing trees to stock their shelves, but someone probably will. Libraries do consume a lot of energy, lighting all those shelves that get brwosed two times a year, heating and cooling a building, all those computers running.

Field experience (and not the reaping/planting kind)

What library doesn't love free labor (clearly they'd have to be insane not to).

So even though you aren't technically a librarian until you're, well, a librarian with a degree, how much will you really learn in your final 2 classes, could an almost a librarian intelligently and correctly answer reference questions? If so, then I think it'd be cool to have a field experience working for a local librarian as an offsite, electronic correspondence (IM/email/whatever) reference resource

iphone battery lawsuit

Ok, the battery slowly (a matter of perception I guess) loses capacity over time and performs at about 80% of original capacity after 400 charge cycles. No problem, every LIon battery does that.... but to waste all the time and money to file a class action lawsuit because the battery in the iphone is just like any other mobile or laptop... sounds to me like someone has too much time on their hands.

I think this is an example of how technilogical innovation has exceled in some areas while not other related areas... All this laptops that offer the performance of a desktop, but you can only use them for 4 hours on the go

whew

Well, hearing all of these working librarians talk about their libraries makes me feel a lot better, I can deal with budget problems, stupid rules, and unruly patrons or employees. What a refreshing chat, to hear some librarians that don't seem to think the physical library is on the verge of going the way of the Do-do.

oh snap!

If you would mosey on over to http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9745198-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20 you can see a lawsuit against youtube, but also apple as their iphone, since it plays youtube videos, that are illegal. I peronsally doubt this case is going anywhere, at least not against apple.

second nay third thoughts

Wow, all these conversations in class and I'm beginning to feel like I'm entering a soon to be extinct profession. If I have to go back to school and get certified to teach kindergarten because libraries evolve to function without librarians I'm probably going get down on the floor and kick and scream.

approachable or non-professional

Disclaimer: My blog is rife with grammatical no-nos, spelling fiascos, and general poor quality English language usage.

So, unless you use Firefox 2 or Safari 2 (love the mac I do) there is no built in spellchecker in IE7. So, when a blog contains grammatical errors or typos, and it is published by a professional, for the public, do such errors make the blog more human, more "I can connect, the blogger is a human too" or do misplaced apostrophes and reversed vowels say, "how unprofessional, how disgustingly disappointing"

Should professional blogs be as pristine as my 9th grade English Grammar and Composition teacher?

Zoom Clouds

Koha list

Palestrina / Cametti, Alberto,
The Age of Caravaggio.
The Age of the baroque in Portugal /
Oratorios of the Italian baroque /
Arcangela Tarabotti :
Art and pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque /
Arts & humanities through the eras.
Baroque reason : Buci-Glucksmann, Christine.
The art of allegiance : Schreffler, Michael J.
The baroque : Skrine, Peter N.
Court culture in Dresden : Watanabe-O'Kelly, Helen.
Over here : Kennedy, David M.
Roma barocca; Portoghesi, Paolo.
Aldus Manutius and Renaissance culture :
Artistic exchange and cultural translation in the Italian renaissance city /

iphone

Not gonna lie, I want one. I think it's rather a waste of technology, does a lot of nifty things, but still, I have my ipod for music, and my mobile to make calls. If I want to browse the internet I'd much rather do it from the comfort of my desk with a big widescreen instead of an index card sized handheld

All these doom and gloom books about how copyright is on the verge of smiting us all. I know libraries should be far more involved in the making of copyright law, but for now the status quo has left me highly functional. It's a piss poor attitude, but I'd just as soon ignore it altogether

Gr-Gr-Gr-Grazr

Behold, an interesting LOC blog post

http://www.loc.gov/blog/?p=149

<>

oh stop

I get so tired of trying to explain to people why I want to be a librarian. No one seems to understand that there is actually more to librarianship than "oh I love to read books too!" If you love to read books, go read them, Barnes and Nobel is probably the place for you. I also think that public librarians probably suffer a lot more of "I'm trying to find this book a friend told me about, I don't remember the title or author but it just came out a couple of years ago and it's about the lady who is a widow and lives on a farm by herself...." Maybe that's not the case, but I wish people would just realize that it's not necessarily about the books, but the information in them!

zotero to endnote

endnote seems not to care for most of the zotero templates I saved in, it would take journal article and webpage, but the other ones that I used were not imported.  I had to manually look up each address and capture it using ENW.  Honestly, if they're going to bother with this importing exporting thing, it should work all the time, not under very specific circumstances

Search Engine URL

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015051154572249430946%3Aufghgxzioz4

Scopus RSS feed

safari 3

well folks, safari 3 and the Pitt VPN work together about as well as anything else we've done.  It will pretend to log in, but just hangs.  Reverted back to Safari 2 and everything is just peachy.  Well, if the way things were previously could be considered peachy that it is

connotea

connotea is a horrid invention.  The conventions for entering an author into the field are wretched.  This program is an utter waste.

library channel

Digital cable has a channel for everything, MTV has about 30 channels, why isn't there a "Library Channel?"  

No idea what it might have as far as programming, but, surely there's plenty of educational programming available.  What ever happened to Reading Rainbow anyway?

all this talk about electronic documents - at work we have dozens of binders, each with smaller booklets on specific machines, full of all kinds of job codes and rules, they could be easily digitized, and probably exist in a digital format somewhere, but I think it's much easier to flip pages in a binder then scroll through hundreds of pages in pdfs.   

endnoteweb

Ew, I may have been dragging my feet, but I hate endnote, I will never use anything like it if not for a project. I really don't care for bookmarks, I have a few, and I just use google to find anything else, Wikis seem to be a much better tool to share info with than any of these other social bookmarking tools

blogger <3s Mac's Dashboard

I downloaded the Blogger widget to see if it was interesting.  I'm currently using it to post this particular entry.  It's a little light on features, no spell check, but you just type in this box, and you can either publish the post or save it as a draft.  If you take bloggin seriously, it's probalby not a great option, but if you just want to write a short little post, like I'm doing now, well, I'll have to see how it works out. 

translation online

At work we sometimes receive claims in Spanish & French. No one is truely fluent, although certain words are unique or cognates. Such as solenoid = solenoide.

Our solution: copy and paste the entire block of text into babbelfish or freetranslation.com and then do our best to decipher the resulting text.

Obviously manually looking up each individual word, online or in a reference book, would take an enormous amount of time. What can digital libraries and web 2.0 do to help remove the language barrier, not just for claims analyst's but for the public

social bookmarking

All of these social bookmarking sites, blogs, etc can be fun. However, while they may have a use in libraries now and in the future, I think because of the un-mediated nature, they can also be misleading and ultimately time wasting when they come up in search results. There are many other interesting technologies available, why the extensive focus on social bookmarking? (Yes I wouldn't even look at it if it wasn't required)

Analyze that

So, having officially been an analyst for 2 days, the way the records are managed is similar to the way our Endeavor Voyager records were managed. Every item has various different records, with different information on each item. The barcode on teh item record, the title on the bib records, the holdings record.... I realize there are advantages to spreading item information across more than one record, but it still seems to me it'd be a hell of a lot easier if all the information was on the same record.

Wow...

So, using my mobile phone, a transflash card inside the phone, imovie on my imac and my broadband connection supplied by comcast for the oh so bargain price of 39.99/mo and don't forget an overactive imagination coupled with an excess of time in the compact shelving of the archives.... I present me, as well, myself, kindly filmed by a nameless co-worker.

Youtube tom foolery

Card catalog to opac

I'll be in Bristol NH this weekend, so I thought I'd check out the library website. It took quite a bit of searching, but I finally found it. It looks like they have a single librarian and are open 5 days a week. One of the advertised features, however, was "3 computers now with access to high speed internet." I wasn't sure if I should chuckle or shoot myself, I've never gone 3 days without internet access since I was probably 12.

Obviously this is a small town public library, not an academic library at a college, but still, how much longer can small public libraries continue to be useful? With amazon.com and shrinking budgets, surely small public libraries cannot cater to the new book interests of everyone.

Are librarians faculty?

I had brunch with some tenured Enligsh professors today, somehow we got to talking about whether or not librarians should be considered faculty (in an academic/college library).

Their feeling was that, if there is no library degree being offered, they are not really teaching. They didn't consider the brief classroom instruction performed by the librarians to be sufficient. They said they have no problem with librarians being entitled to equal pay/tenure typed stuff, but that the title of faculty was not appropriate for the profession.

No more pencils, no more books

So, as a student supervisor in the library and graduate student in library science with a BA in music I've landed a job as an analyst in what I'll lossely call the insurance field. It is true then, that a degree in music is the fast-track to being a used car salesman or insurance broker. In two short (albeit they will feel quite the opposite I'm sure) years I can return to the library, but there will be no shelving of books or shelf-reading of the juvenile collection. Hopefully I'll be answering reference questions and asking student workers to go gather some books for me (I do realize there is a lot more involved, I'm just pretending there isn't)

happy birthday to me

So I have the luxury of this post because I pissed of my boss and rather then suffering a you need to set an example for your subordinates blah blah blah, I was like yeah, you're right, it's my birthday so I'm going home. Don't worry, I wouldn't play that card if I wasn't leaving the library forrrrreeeeevvvvveeeerrrr (as in the way the kids say it in the Sandlot) in a few short weeks

I hate to admit it, but I kind of enjoyed the Kuhn, once I got going. At first it didn't make any sense at all. I asked one of the librarians at work about it, and he said yeah, it's dry, but you should definitely read it, and then read it again because it does do a good job describing scientific discovery.

I guess I haven't thought this through very well; everyone at work convinced me to go to grad school for library science, sure, I like the idea,no problem. I still haven't received my diploma for my BA, I'm changing jobs, and I'm pretty much drowning in all this blackboard.

I'm still a little wary of blogs, the one faculty member I know started one, and got herself into hot water over the content because she was making waves in a place that didn't like them.

First blog

Really not a fan at all of blogs, but if that's what takes, I'll do it. Don't read it expecting to feel better when you're done!