I don’t know if it will help you get into shape, but at the least, you can marvel over the fabulous 80s fashions!
Category: libraries
Categories
Library sets up sex line
This is older news, but too cool to pass up.
A library in Vienna is setting up a sex phone line to raise cash.
Vienna’s City Hall has launched a ‘sex hotline”‘ to raise money for the capital’s main public library, officials announced yesterday.
I’m the deep dark jug: the leaf is a sunny afternoon / of my own dusky soul
It’s unusual, but it’s not particularly raunchy: Callers pay 39 euro cents (25p) a minute to listen to an actress read breathless passages from erotica dating to the Victorian era.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided that I’d start a collection of library smut. I’m simply fascinated by this whole “librarian as sex symbol” thing, and I think it would just be such a cool little collection to show off to people. I mean really, in our civilized society, how often do you get to show your friends your smut collection when they come to visit.
We aren’t in middle school anymore, after all.
Anyway, my point is, quite simply: please buy me some library smut.
The downside of this collection is that it’s difficult to track down. The upside is that it’s fairly inexpensive. I figure if people can just keep their eyes peeled, books like “Bang the Librarian Hard” are out there, practically falling off the shelves, just waiting to be found, fondled, and ultimately adored.
There is an excellent beginning list over at riverofdata.com called, simply, Librarians in Pornography. Alternately, you can do a “librarian” search over at PulpNovelProject.com (which is a fun site to check out all on its own, if still somewhat undeveloped). These are pulp novels, the very tamest of smut, so you needn’t feel any moral indignation over it or anything (unless you must, and then I suppose you must).
Come now, don’t act like an eager young librarian doesn’t get your pages turning.
Related links: Hot Library Smut (with pictures!)
“Libraries” by Candida Höfer
Jessamyn’s gallery of saucy bookplates (potentially NSFW)
Categories
Too hip for shushing
I can say, from experience, that the librarians of the future (e.g. my current classmates), are totally fucking rad.
Maybe one day we’ll even break the whole “shusher” stereotype. Read the whole NYTimes article here.
Why are people getting into this profession when libraries seem as retro as the granny glasses so many of the members of the Desk Set wear?
“Because it’s cool,” said Ms. Gentile, who works at the Brooklyn Museum.
Ms. Murphy, 29, thinks so, too. An actress who had long considered library school, Ms. Murphy finally decided to sign up after meeting several librarians — in bars.
“People I, going in, would never have expected were from the library field,” she said. “Smart, well-read, interesting, funny people, who seemed to be happy with their jobs.”
In more local “Ain’t the library cool” news, the Olympia Timberland Library had Boston-based punk band Harry and the Potters performing a show, just last night, as part of their summer events for teens program.
If that’s not cool then I’m a muggle.
Looking for the perfect IM client? Sorry, it doesn’t exist. Well, I don’t know. Maybe Adium is perfect, but it’s for OS X, so I’ll probably never know. In the meantime, here’s what my search has revealed (without value declaration or filtering). I’m specifically trying to measure things up to Meebo, and the MeeboMe widget, so I’ll start the list with that.
Meebo (& MeeboMe): I like the support for all the major IM services (including gtalk / jabber, which many others often ignore). However, I do wish that there was a downloadable client (all browser all the time sucks). The MeeboMe widget isn’t as customizable as I would like (particularly in colors / transparency). Some safety concerns, though you can make it more secure by using https:// if you want.
www.meebo.com
Wablet (in Alpha): Sign up to test it. Strange caller id feature, but the tech mags seem to like it so far. I’ve not yet received my invite to test it, so who knows.
www.wablet.com
Plugoo: Supports all the right clients, but you have to pick one of them. Also, you can only chat with one person at a time. Lame.
www.plugoo.com
GAIM / Pidgin: As of April 2007, GAIM is now Pidgin. Pidgin runs on a boatload of OSes, supports a metric boatload of IM services, and overall seems very cool indeed. Sadly, there is no widget support. Apparently, Pidgin is the Adium of Windows (or vice versa). Maybe they’ll develop some fun widgets, eventually.
pidgin.im/pidgin/home
Miranda: Miranda touts itself as the “smaller, faster, easier” IM client. Personally, I hate it. I guess maybe it’s just not for me (e.g. it’s for developers and skinners and the like), but I find it to be the most unintuitive and clumsy program of the bunch. If you want, you can get an Adium X skin for Miranda (http://aqua-soft.org/board/showthread.php?t=30032). Maybe that would help.
www.miranda-im.org
Trillian: I like Trillian, but it doesn’t support GoogleTalk, so it’s a bust. I’m firmly convinced that everyone worth chatting to must have a gmail account by now. Right? Right!? Also, no online widgets. Trillian is working on a very, very, very feature-rich new version though, called Trillian Astra. If memory serves, it’ll do everything for you except make you coffee in the morning (and still may not include an online widget). Whether or not the features are actually worth the cost of developing, I guess only time will tell.
www.ceruleanstudios.com/learn
Gabbly: This incredibly odd little app allows you to discuss any website with anyone else that wants to discuss that website. Simply put gabbly.com/ before any url (e.g. gabbly.com/ahniwa.com/blog) and you’ll see the website with an included gabbly chat box. You can chat with anyone else who did the same thing. Technically, this is more a chatroom than an IM, but it’s kind of neat. Someone noted in my web perusal that you could use Gabbly in an online learning environment by pushing Gabbly links out to a group of people, thereby jumping with an entire class (for instance) from page to page.
gabbly.com
eBuddy: Supports AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. So no GoogleTalk / Jabber, which is annoying. Also seems fairly commercial (i.e. there are a lot of adverts on the website). Sorry, that’s all I got. Doesn’t appeal to me.
www.ebuddy.com
IMHaha: Very similar to Meebo, except drop GoogleTalk / Jabber and add QQ instead. Claims to use https:// so that you can IM securely. I don’t see any mention of a widget, and the lack of GTalk is a dealbreaker for me, again.
www.imhaha.com
ILoveIM: Allows web-based access to any one service: MSN, AIM, Yahoo, GTalk. That’s it.
www.iloveim.com
KoolIM: Meh, same sort of deal. Supports the same four as ILoveIM, plus ICQ. They claim they’ll add SMS support “soon”, which would be neat, but looking at their set-up, I somehow doubt that it’s really gonna happen.
www.koolim.com
Chatango: Chatango is all widgety, which is nice, but only supports it’s own service. Which means, in the end, people can only chat with you through the widget. The library at Oregon State University is using it, and I was impressed with how nice it looked (and subsequently disappointed that it didn’t support any third-party services).
chatango.com
Snimmer & Interaction: Both along the same lines as Chatango, in that they’re web-based. Snimmer uses one of your choice of messenging services, whereas Interaction uses its own service exclusively.
www.interactionchat.com
www.snimmer.com
As far as embedded chat goes, MeeboMe appears the clear winner, despite its imperfections. Chatango and Plugoo are the runners-up. As for non-embedded chat, at least you’ve got choices! Unless you’re on OS X, and then your life is blessedly simple. Still, for windows, I’d recommend Pidgin. Trillian gets the silver.
As far as embedded chat in libraries, LibSuccess has a nice list of who is using what.
At some point I’ll try and clean this up a bit, add better links, and rate things in more detail (just in case people find it useful).
Library of Congress Subject Heading of the Day:
Dandies — Great Britain — Correspondence
Dandies in literature is also pretty great, and offers such great titles as Dandies and desert saints : styles of Victorian masculinity and Performing the dandy : Manuel Machado and the anxiety of masculinity.
Fun stuff.
Amazon.com now offers RSS feeds, based on tags that you choose. You can then aggregate these feeds to your site, and even keep them as affiliate links, if you’re into that kind of thing.
See: RSS web feeds for tagged products (syndication)
Three books I need to own:
Creating Database-Backed Library Web Pages: Using Open Source Tools — Stephen R. Westman
Because these are exactly the sorts of sites I want to, and will likely be able to, make.
The Wisdom of Crowds — James Surowiecki
Because this book is mentioned so often it has nearly become annoying, but I suppose I should read it anyway.
Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become — Peter Morville
Because in the world of federated searching, findability is a more interesting topic than ever.
Our library is currently investigating implementation of an electronic reserves system, in tandem with other academic libraries in the area. My involvement in the decision is one of my summer “Library Intern” projects.
Next week we get to demo two major ER systems:
- OCLC Illiad, Atlas Systems, Inc.: Ares System
- SirsiDynix, Docutek: ERes Electronic Reserves System
Since I’m a creature of the open source generation, it also behooved me to search out some OSS options, which revealed namely:
- GMUtant Software’s OSCR; and,
- ReservesDirect, which was originally developed by Emory University and just went open source last December.
If anyone has any experience with any of these systems, I’d sure love to hear your thoughts! I’m e-attending a presentation on Ares and ERes next Tuesday, so I’ll have a better starting point to compare after that.
Categories
Libraries, not obsolete after all.
33 Reasons Why Libraries and Librarians are Still Extremely Important
I especially like this bit in the conclusion:
Instead of regarding libraries as obsolete, state and federal governments should increase funding for improved staffing and technology. Rather than lope blindly through the digital age, guided only by the corporate interests of web economics, society should foster a culture of guides and guideposts. Today, more than ever, libraries and librarians are extremely important for the preservation and improvement of our culture.
Exciting stuff.
A group of scholarly societies is uniting to create more direct access to their collective content. In June, thirteen of the world’s leading science and technology societies will launch scitopia.org, a free federated vertical search portal that will enable users to explore the research most cited in scholarly work and patents in a single click. Scitopia.org will aggregate the entire electronic libraries of the leading voices in major science and technology disciplines. More than three million documents, including peer-reviewed journal content and conference proceedings, spanning 150 years of science and technology will be searched through this dedicated gateway.
Read the official press release: (it’s a pdf)
Sci-Tech Societies Unite to Create Super Research Site
Check it out: Scitopia.org
I recently wrote a few pages about Open Access myself, for a take-home test in my Collection Development course. Since I was writing at about five in the morning, it’s hard to remember if what I said made any sense (I tend not to look back over my assignments once I’ve handed them in). I do remember that my tone was very much pro-OA, and that my title was “Open Access (or Close the Door)”. If I did make sense, then I hope that my paper resembled somewhat the one recently written by Alma Swan for American Scientist Online.
Swan argues against the current way we disseminate research:
“But no one would say, “Hey, why don’t we only let some researchers see this stuff and see how science gets on?” Yet that is precisely where we are today, in a system where gateways limit access to research results, and as a consequence only a small fraction of the world’s research libraries subscribe to some journals. The gentleman’s club survives, if only as metaphor.”
Swan goes on to cite multiple ways in which an open access publishing model would improve scientific research. I’m sure it makes a bit more sense than my paper did, but the sentiment is very much the same.
Open access, or close the door.
Read the article:
American Scientist Online – Open Access and the Progress of Science
In my experience, LIS students are always concerned that the field is shrinking. So it’s nice to have a book like this talk about the options available, and offer some anecdotal experience too.
From liscareer.com
Many people, not just those new to the field of Library and Information Science, are curious about their career options. The editors of LIScareer.com have assembled 95 authors, each of whom describes a “typical” workday or work routine, sharing joys, sorrows, and annoyances in refreshingly candid fashion.
The Library of Congress celebrates its 207th birthday by … launching a blog! GNC reports:/
site: Library of Congress Blog
An blog devoted to library videos? You bet! Plus I get to test out Scribefire, another Firefox extension. Seems a bit more extensive than Clipmarks, though no more complicated. Hurray for fancy webiness.
I’m tentatively dipping my toe into the world of Firefox extensions, after being a longtime vanilla user. If I like how it works, expect to see more posts like this, linking to interesting stories from the interwebs. (edit: Due to its extensive use of divs and tables, Clipmarks posts are getting the thumb down. I do like Scribefire though, so far, so perhaps I’ll continue using that.)
From geek.lisnews.org
An Anonymous Patron writes ” *I want to be a librarian*. a music video (4:10) by New Zealand band HauntedLove, which performs ghostly pop tunes about werewolves, haunted museums, vengeful librarians, love inside computers, and ponies that just won’t go. Filmed on location at the Dunedin Public Library. Camera work by Claudia Babirat, direction and editing/effects by Don Ferns. Starring Haunted Love (Rainy McMaster and Geva Downey) and Henri Davidson…. YouTube, Apr. 9?
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the incredible number of library and library-related (and heck, information-related) websites out there, then perhaps libSite, which launched just today, will be able to ease your anxiety. Among the services it lists, libSite allows users to recommend sites, rate other people’s sites, save sites to a favorites list, create rss feeds and email alerts, and more. You can also create a libSite widget to put on your homepage, keeping you and your users up to date of the newest library-related sites to make the list.
It seemed a fitting diversion to stop in and mention it, since otherwise I’m sitting here trying to write a paper on what the next ten years hold for library services and collections. I don’t know if libSite is it, per se, but it’s certainly facing in the right general direction, plus you don’t have to wait ten years. That’s always nice.
Check it out now: libSite.org.
You can also check out the widget over on my sidebar. Neat-o.
Maya sent me two comics that are currently sitting over on the Salon website. If memory serves, Salon limits non-member access to fairly recent materials, so you should check them out while the checking is good (while noting that “if memory serves” is really the key operator here, and that memory, often, doesn’t).
The comics involve librarians, censorship, and a dog scrotum. In my book, that right there is what we call a winning combination. Oh, and it involves how nice librarians smell, which is always a plus (and totally true). They’re sequential, so read this comic first, and then move on to this one.
In other news that ranks similarly in awesomeness but has no other discernable association, Penny Arcade is going to have a video game, and there is a trailer for it that is very, very wangtacular (which is a good thing). I was heartened to see that the Fruit Fucker (that lovable little bastard) appears to have a fairly large role in the game, which pleases me to no end. If you’re not familiar with the FF, then you should start here, and continue onward if you’ve got the stomach. If you have a particularly positive inclination towards fruit, and might therefore have issues with its … violation, then you might want to skip that link. However, if you laughed during American Pie then you should know that you’re a goddam hypocrite.
That is all.
This week was my first week of assignments being due. The opening weeks of a term always seem a bit lazy; it’s easy to keep up with the reading (most of the time), but difficult to visualize where it’s all going. What it lack in actual workload, it makes up for in the absolute tedium of theory.
Monday, my group turned in our documentation of the presentation we did last week on collection development issues in public libraries. We talked about collection issues involving serials, government documents, electronic materials, and finished with some discussion on particular issues found in bilingual or francophone libraries. The presentation was fun enough, but I’m just glad to have it finished.
On Tuesday, Maya and I handed in an evaluation of a research article. Within our evaluation we had to answer four questions; involving previous research, statements of hypotheses, organization and communication, and problems within the research, including possible solutions. The research article was on transformed gaze conditions in a Collaborative Virtual Environment, particularly focusing on augmented gaze. If that doesn’t mean anything to you … well, you might be better off.
Wednesday I handed in a user needs assessment based upon an interview I did over the weekend. I had to pick someone who represented a user community, and based upon my interview, determine what sorts of information needs that community might have, what information seeking behaviors it exhibited, and possible obstacles the community faced. The interview was fun, and the write-up, once I figured out how to turn an interview into a needs assessment, went pretty smoothly.
Now I’m full swing into the term, with something new due every single week, it seems. It’s nice to have things spaced out a bit, though it means that there’s always a deadline looming, and that I have to stay on top of my work, i.e. I have to try and suppress my procrastinative nature as best I can. I have to prepare a strategic plan for next Friday. After that, we have a week off, and Abigail is coming to visit, so chances are I won’t be very productive. The following week I have a midterm, and then a couple weeks after that the next big collection development and information services and users projects are due.
It’s fun times, for me, despite my occasional proclivity to get involved in hallway conspiracies. But that’s an issue for another day. Things can always be better, but honestly I enjoy the things we’re doing, the multiple aspects of the field I’m in, and the direction I feel like this education is taking me. I admit I may be a bit of an optimist at times, but like Poe said: Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
The Maplewood Library, who I previously mentioned were planning on closing their doors immediately after school to cut back on “teen rowdiness”, has now decided to remain open, after a unanimous decision by the board of trustees just one day before the first closure was to take place.
Teens are a valuable part of a community, and of the library that serves it. Granted, they can be rowdy and tough to manage. I personally once had to break up a fight between two teenage girls right in front of the library, so I know how it can go, but I think the answer, rather than to lock them out, is to bring them in and to give them some outlet for their energies. The Lester Public Library in Wisconsin created a Teen Advisory Board whose job it is to do just that: arrange events for teens, by teens. I understand that not every library is going to have a librarian interested in playing DDR, or even having video games inside the library (feelings definately remained mixed on that one among professionals), but that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be something available, inside the library, to engage teens on a level they’re interested in.
According to this librarian’s story, it may be becoming one:
I recently spoke with a junior who was stressed about her decreasing ability to focus on anything for longer than two minutes or so. I tried to inspire her by talking about the importance of reading as a way to train the brain. I told her that a good reader develops the same powers of concentration that an athlete or a Buddhist would employ in sport or meditation. “A lot out there is conspiring to distract you,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “That’s your opinion about books. It doesn’t make it true.” To her, the idea that reading might benefit the mind was, well, lame.
On the one hand, I appreciate librarians using things like DDR to connect with teens, but I’m anxious that with more “engaging” (i.e. distracting) pursuits, reading will continue to be set aside, to our (as a society) long-term detriment.