Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Speechless

I'm really getting drawn into the wordless graphic novels. Amazing stuff some people are doing telling stories in ways that can't be done with words. I don't think the graphic novel format in general will ever be my favorite and I still don't enjoy the flying, tights, dragons and kingdoms. (The movies yes, on paper no. Probably makes no sense but what can I say.)

But the wordless ones, wow.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Now I have a craving for sprinkles

1. The ants are back - little, tiny, annoying

2. This weekend - yard stuff. Have a couple of plants that I hoped would come back better this year after last years April ice, but not looking good.

3. Been looking for a specific quilt pattern for curtains for the craft room. (Yeah, still working on it.) The thing about quilt patterns is each one can have multiple names. Tried Google. Tried looking in books. Finally, brought the picture into a quilt store. The real person had an idea right away of which books too look in, found the pattern and had suggestions for how to put it together. It may be trickier than I thought so will have to try some samples first. Information need filled by a real person! Independent store so bought the book, unlike .....

4. In my search for the pattern I also found some cool books at the big chain bookstores and fabric stores. Each had maybe one thing I liked. So I did what any good librarian would do. I wrote down the titles and ordered them from Interlibrary loan. Then I can just copy the project I want.

5. The book updates will now be in the Goodreads widget on the right. I still haven't created a good profile but I added the HTML to the right place in the template.

6. I don't really like chocolate donuts (one of the few chocolate things I can do without), but this works for me. Sprinkles, I like sprinkles.....




You Are a Powdered Devil's Food Donut



A total sweetheart on the outside, you love to fool people with your innocent image.

On the inside you're a little darker, richer, and more complex.

You're a hedonist who demands more than one pleasure at a time.

Decadent and daring, you test the limits of human indulgence.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Reading Update

Listened to: Fairest by Gail Carson Levine. Singing plays a major role in this story so the full cast audio breaking out into song seems to suit this format. The theme of character over beauty is obvious but doesn't overshadow the story too much. I enjoy most of the fractured fairy-tales and this spin on Snow White was pretty good but must admit the singing did wear on me after a while.

Read: Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher. This book uses a unique format to tell the story of a teen girl's suicide from her view point and one who knew her. While very compelling, it never over dramatizes which reinforces the fact that most come to this place quietly and internally as you slowly loose a sense of having a place in the world. Done with the right voices, this could be a good audio.

Read: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin. Naomi hits her head in a fall and forgets 4 years. You start out wondering what you would do with your life if you had no memory of the past, who would you be and end up thinking about what we forget and what we remember, getting over things and going on. A great girl book with a nice romance. Read it because the author's Elsewhere could be on my favorite book list, if I took the time to make one.

Saw: Persepolis Note: turn down your sound. The web page is in French but the movie has been re-released in English. No subtitles. Based on the graphic novels. Enjoyed it.

Professional Reading: Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger. Interesting. It's about the third order of order, organizing information in the world of bits, a world without the limitations of paper. The world of del.icio.us and tags. I get some of it but his business/marketing background comes through in the end when it becomes about how to maximize your business by taking advantage of the third order. Many of us resent the way any site we visit tracks what we do to use for their own purposes, an assault of our privacy that we pay to use the www. And while he mentions sites that help consumers, how are most of us going to find them to take advantage of them, not to mention that vast majority of average people don't know most of what exists out there, but do their own thing? There is still a digital divide, it just changes. And we do create meaning, but individually, and while there may be some overlap, I haven't reached the place where the big mess is helping me. He may say my world just hasn't become big enough or messy enough yet for the meaning to become clear. Right now I simply don't have the time or the interest to explore the broader social world of the social sites I now use and I just use them to create my own meaning with my stuff. If someone else uses my stuff, fine, I guess. My interests lie elsewhere. I will say I do like the way he explains this third order and how we use it or can use it.

Amazing how much you can read when there is no new TV. Next week things will change.

Reading next: the recommended One Whole and Perfect Day.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Play Day

So I've been out of the office for 3 days at a conference and stuff is piling up at work. Spent part of the weekend in Manhattan being nice to the kid and part doing belated birthday stuff (not mine) so the stuff at home is piling up.

So I planned in advance to take today off to deal with absolutely none of it.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

My First Library Conference

It was an interesting experience. I'm grateful to work for a system that does so much internal training and sharing that much of what I saw was redundant. Still, going to something like this does re-charge your thinking and gets you motivated to attack some new things back at work. (Does this sound like a warning?)

But later.

This morning, soon, off to the other end of the Flint Hills and Manhattan.

Wish it was warmer. And sunnier.

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Reading Update

This is where I'm at with the stack of books I have right now. I'll skip the summaries and give you just my thoughts.

Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians actually had some chuckle-aloud moments relating to libraries and reading for me but I do wonder if kids will find it amusing. It's one of those the author talks to you and the characters have clever names (in this case prisons) and unusual talents (such as breaking things) books. Nothing really wrong with it, just not too much to really recommend it either.

What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy has more to offer but won't have a broad appeal either. I enjoy his style but this may have gone on a little too long. It ends with a discussion about the story itself. How we often want to take the story past what we've been told. How a good story makes us ask questions, sometimes just about the story and sometimes about how elements of the story relate to our real lives. The kinds of discussions I like kids to have about stories. The kind that get them into the story more than the kind they may have in school.

And I spent some time just looking at what Amazon has done with it's books because of the online catalog things. This is what struck me today. There are communities you can join to interact with others on various books topics. There are 13,256 people in the Fantasy Community with 495 discussions about 20,415 products and the last post was 10 minutes ago. There are 332 in the Juvenile Fiction Community with 184 discussions, 684 products and the last post was 1 hour ago. There are lots of ways to spin this.

Saturday, April 05, 2008

So This is Really Fun

Penguin Books has this pretty cool thing going on. They have six authors creating digital fiction based on six classics. Clever stuff.

Of course, I enjoyed this one.

Relevance here - we are into creating our own web content.......

I Hate Men

OK, so maybe not all men, just a certain type. But when I read stuff like this, the fallout covers a wide area. So much so wrong!

In fact I was so upset I had to read this article to calm down.

BTW - when I was searching their website for this opinion piece and typed in Olathe Neighborhood News, the name of one of their inserts, the helpful search results asked "Did you mean loathe Newport news?" It didn't come up with it in a search of the authors name and it took some guessing for me to actually find it. Interesting experiment actually.

And vampires live in Second Life. I may have to rethink this whole thing. Edward.

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Choices

In my perfect world, technology would be more about choices. Technologies have the ability to do so much and there are new gadgets and applications all the time. Some look fun, some ridiculous. Like cell phones. It's nice to have one and I have one of the simplest models around. It still does more than I want or need it to do. I've been told when I buy technology to buy more than I think I want because the more I play with it and use it, the more I will want to do. Sometimes that's true. Hasn't been true of the cell phone. It still does things I don't want but I have to go through multiple menus to find the few things I do need. It's easier for me to turn off the phone than set it to silent. I know if I did it more, it would be easier but often, it needs to be silent right now so I just turn it off.

I know the economy depends on businesses selling stuff. One way they get us to buy stuff is to keep coming up with new versions of the same stuff we already have. They have to make us want to buy this stuff so we have advertising (marketing). It is too expensive to produce multiple versions of a particular stuff so stuff gets fancier and more complicated. Sometimes smaller. Often better. But if a person just wants a simple thing, like a cell phone, it gets harder and harder to find.

So here is where the choices come in. I had a PDA for a while. It was handed down to me from my kid. I played with it. I like planners with pencils/pens better. Maybe from habit. May go back to it at some point. But what was so cool about this PDA was that it had two screens of little icons for the stuff it could do and you could hide any of them. The applications weren't gone, but you could pick what you wanted, even just a few and see them alone on one screen. How nice it would be if I could hide the games and email and other features on my phone that I didn't need so it would be quicker to go through the menus. And even better, wouldn't it be cool if I could name the choices something that made sense to me. Technology with built-in choices. That would be cool. An option to customize. An option to simplify.

So what does this have to do with anything. Maybe this. We are looking for a new online catalog. Most of them have lots of features and social software interactive stuff. Some people would love it. The screens have lots of information and are very long. Just last week I taught a mom how to use the online catalog. She had never seen anything like it before. She loved it. But I wonder if she would have been so happy if I showed her one of these new things. I could tell her don't worry about this and this and this, what you need to find the book or place a hold is just this section right here. Daily we have someone who found the book they wanted in the catalog but say it doesn't tell them where the book is in the building. It does. It's fairly easy, but not to them. What would all that extra stuff do to them? Sure, I laugh and call situations like these job security, but I hope we aren't making people feel stupid if they can't figure it out and have to ask for help all the time. Yes, they do get better at it the more they use it, and maybe that also leads to my point.

Wouldn't it be cool if technology would give us the option to choose our screen. If we just want to look at the record to see if the book is on the shelf, a simple screen. If we wanted to add a book review or tags or create book lists or the multitude of other things available, we could click on an icon and the added stuff would be there. As patrons learn more and became more comfortable with the basic catalog they could do more. Or as patrons learn more about social applications in general from other sources and want to apply them to other areas in their life, like their use of the library, they would be there. Less is more and more is more all in one place.

This is going to be a difficult process for me because I deal with patrons daily who need help just using the catalog to find what they want, book, DVD, whatever. I have never had anyone ask about creating tags or adding book reviews although I have been told that is the current trend. Do we like the clutter on Amazon? Finding the balance is the trick. Of course, it would be best if we found a catalog that delivers accurate results from a search query, but right now it all seems to be about the extras.

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Library Get-Real.O

I use the social software - this obviously, meebo, LibraryThing. A least two years ago I went to our first training on all this stuff when we discovered it was out there and thought there would be a plethora of ways libraries could use them to connect to patrons and, even, connect staff. It's been played with and it seems the jury is still out. With all of our other programs we do evaluations and maybe it's time to do some serious evaluation of what we are doing and where we think we should go with all of our online programs and services. (ie. spend money).

Not being negative - look at this It's about making choices. It's about getting real about what works. It's about getting real about how much time we have. It's about it may be better to do a couple of things well and let the rest go because nothing is worse than "lonely" stuff. (see link above) Yes, we do need to experiment and keep up, but lets get real about what our patrons really want. Real patrons, the ones who come in weekly. I remember in library school a technology class professor told us libraries, especially public libraries, may not be the places to be early adaptors. We would be way ahead of the majority of our patrons. He was speaking of equipment and purchased programs when he said things filter out and get less expensive and public libraries are working with limited public funds so maybe it was in our best interest to wait. Similar thoughts should apply to what we choose to use and how much staff time we invest in them.

IM Reference is a good example. It was going to be the next big thing. All the teens were doing it so this would be how they would want to reach us. We had several branches pilot using it and it slowly became just a part of a centralized reference area and it seems to be fine there. It was difficult for those at desk in a branch to monitor when we are dealing with patrons, phones, planning programs, supervising teen volunteers and trying to decide when to ask a mother to take a screaming child outside. It seemed to filter out on it's own. Not the best use of staff time to have many people monitoring it for the amount of patron interactions we actually had.

Personally, I haven't found a good use for Wikis. It is still easier for me to use Word to create things like book lists and I don't need them to be portable because I don't work at home. And we have access to shared folders at work. One was used for system wide planning and it was a good way to see how the plan was progressing. Few staff comments were added, possibly because it is still work and you had to log in with your name. Not against owning up to what I think, but in writing, and possibly going against the grain at work. Get Real. (And speaking of that plan - remember this. I had the space concept down a year ago.)

We also need to remember we all don't have the same learning styles, or work styles or personalities. It does seem though that there is a preferred way of thinking about these things and even ways to use them. One advantage is that you are able to organize information in ways that are meaningful to you. We are attempting a departmental del.icio.us and I am part of a branch LibraryThing for our storytime books. It is interesting to see other ideas of tags that encourage me to see things in a new way. But they are also becoming more than I want to weed through to find my favorites. I like my own stuff more organized and easier for me to find. It was my idea to start the group LibraryThing and in many ways it works. We don't need the little pieces of paper anymore. But I have also found that there are ways I want to use it that don't conform to the group. And I'm experimenting with some things to see if they work before I try to explain or sell it to the rest of them. So I have my own storytime LibraryThing, too. I don't like to think of my way of wanting to organize things as an old way of thinking, but my preferred style. I need to use these programs in a way that is meaningful to me or what's the point. The new technologies should allow for more ways of use, open up new opportunities and allow for variations, not to make us think we have to conform to a new specific way of thinking or specific programs. That is 'old' as far as I'm concerned.