Carp diem : Fish of the day

e-Book Reader trial at ADFA

2011-06-03T15:23:00.002+10:00

My notes on a webinar I was at by Cathy Burgon on 07/04/2011.

Background
A project was undertaken to review several e-book readers and decide which one to purchase and loan to students. The material on the e-book reader would be determined by the capabilities of the device and the student need at the time.
The e-book reader would need to be able to access:

Course reading lists online
E-books from the catalogue in various formats
The UNSW catalogue through Primo
Databases via Sirius (UNSW database gateway and authentication system)

The project is still underway and, although they have purchased the devices, they are not currently borrowable to students.

Devices
3 devices were analysed, plus a later analysis of the iPad.
The devices were analysed based on:

Could they access the following file types?

PDF with no Digital Rights Management (DRM) and no text (such as digitised chapters from Course Reserve material)
PDF with DRM (such as material from EBL)
Online e-books with no software reader required (such as websites, or e-books from Hein Online)
Online e-books requiring a software reader or applet (such as material from Ebrary)
EPUB format without DRM (such as those from Project Gutenberg)
EPUB format with DRM (such as those from ebooks.com)

Usability?
Could they connect to ADFA’s wifi to allow access to online materials?

Results

	DreamBook 8 or 10	Dreambook A10	BeBook Neo	iPad
PDF no DRM	Y	Y	Y	N
PDF DRM	Y	Y	Y	Y
View online	Y	Y	N	Y
View online, with applet	N	Y	N	N
EPUB no DRM	Y	Y	Y	Y
EPUB DRM	Y	Y	Y	Y

DreamBook 8 or 10
Operating System: Android
PDF with no DRM: Transferred to device with a USB. Can be read with Adobe Reader (Android version) or other PDF apps.
PDF with DRM: EBL Platform

Need Adobe Digital Editions on a PC to download the DRM PDF
Need TXTR installed on the PC to upload the PDF to the DreamBook
Need TXTR Android Reader installed on the DreamBook
DreamBook TXTR needs Adobe credentials in its settings
TXTR Reader can read uploaded DRM PDFs.
Once set up, this is a very easy process.

View online: Can read on website through the Android browser
View online with software/applet: Ebrary.

User can only access the quick view on the webpage

DreamBook ePad A10
Operating System: Windows. This device runs exactly the same as a PC.
PDF with no DRM: Transferred to device with a USB or downloaded. Read with Adobe Reader.
PDF with DRM: EBL Platform. Need Adobe Digital Editions on reader to download the DRM PDF.
View online: Can read on website through a browser
View online with software/applet: Ebrary. Latest java update needed to view.

BeBook Neo
Operating System: BeBook system.
PDF with no DRM: Transfer to device with a USB
PDF with DRM: EBL Platform

Need Adobe Digital Editions on a PC to download the DRM PDF
Need to authorise the BeBook Neo with ADE
Transfer to device with a USB

View online: Cannot be done (cannot connect to ADFA Wi-Fi)
View online with software/applet: Cannot be done (cannot connect to ADFA Wi-Fi)

iPad
Operating System: iOS
PDF with no DRM: Cannot be read. Unable to just copy files to iPad, connect to a computer and it does not appear as a USB disk. Some time researching did not yield a solution. An IT worker suggested Google Docs but was placed in the too hard basket.
PDF with DRM: EBL Platform

Need the Bluefire reader
Purchased from iTunes
Adobe ID required in settings to read DRM PDFs
View online: Can read on website through a browser
View online with software/applet: Ebrary. Items downloaded for Macintosh come in .DMG which will not run on an iPad. User can only access the quick view on the webpage

End Result
The DreamBook A10 was chosen for purchasing. As it was the same as a Windows computer, it was a familiar interface for people and they could begin using it straight away.
ADFA were still working out issues with preventing users from editing the system. As the computer is a Windows-based system, it is easy to make changes. Unfortunately it doesn’t sync with ActiveDirectory, which would help prevent changes.

Social media in and out of the university classroom

2011-04-12T16:44:00.004+10:00

My notes on a webinar I was at by Howard Rheingold on 29/03/2011.
Twitter hashtag: #smuni

About Howard Rheingold
Howard is an expert in social media. He initially began teaching social media issues by using social media because there wasn’t much theorising about it going at the university he worked for.
Twitter: @hrheingold
Video Blog: http://vlog.rheingold.com
Website: www.rheingold.com

Background
Howard began teaching using social media in 2006. He used wikis, an e-forum, Drupal blogs and lots of different apps to teach. Using a number of different applications to do something is a very Web 2.0 way of doing things, no single program does everything.
From the initial teaching, feedback complained about the multiple logons and passwords to do anything, and the need to mix and match the media to accomplish tasks.
Howard experimented with Drupal to see if he could design a uniform interface for the products. He entered a competition from HASTAC and won a cash award to pay a Drupal programmer to develop a social media classroom that was free and open source. From this came The Social Media Classroom (www.socialmediaclassroom.com)

The Social Media Classroom
www.socialmediaclassroom.com
The website contains information on how to download and install the Social Media Classroom (which includes a Drupal installation), how to get a hosted installation and instructions on how to use it.
The website links to a number of participatory media lesson plans. Howard attempted to document his teaching so other educators could introduce what he had. His idea for lessons is to build a conversation around topics, not just teach at them during class and then force them to regurgitate during tests.

For teaching using the Social Media Classroom, things like the syllabus and learning expectations are placed into a wiki. This wiki is enhanced by staff.
In 2008 a page was created with chat services for student feedback. Nowadays, twitter is used and chat is considered archaic. The chat page was replaced with a page on mind maps.
The most exciting part of the project was that students were telling each other what was happening with them, and thus they collaborated more. Because of this, there were more opportunities for inquiry and collaborative learning.
Student-centric ideas are not new; there has been a lot of theory around this in the past. Social media has made it much easier to put this theory into practice.
The teaching centres around students inquiring about the facts, rather than just acquiring them.

After asking for feedback on his teaching methods, students said they’d rather do presentations towards the start of semester instead of at the end. Students were deemed ‘co-teachers’ for that lesson. Themes were written up at the start of the course and students were asked to cluster around a particular theme that attracted them. These groups became the ‘co-teaching groups’. He explained that 99% of the course was about cooperation and 1% was about competition.
Each tean was asked to do a 5 minute media presentation that utilised anything except MS Powerpoint.
Co-teaching teams would then make a mindmap of their presentation and this would be presented at the beginning of the next session.
The co-teaching teams would then identify words/phrases in the readings. These would be put into the classroom’s wiki during the class. During the week, everyone was required to fill in the definitions using the wiki. Students were not used to this, as there was no one name on the work. Instead, Howard encouraged the students to look at the discussion and changes pages so that everyone can see what work has been done by whom.
His initial forays into the work were not very successful as he was requiring students to learn and present all the material. Ensuring that students concentrated presentations on one area of learning but contributed to the other areas helped.
The class is not designed to give students a body of knowledge, instead it aims for them to see social media in a number of different ways.
The syllabus is presented on the wiki, as well as in a content map and also as a Presi presentation. Each student has a different way of accessing material and Howard wished them to find their own way to access, understand and use things.
Tests are open to what the student has learnt during the course. All tests are ‘open book’ and computers and the internet are allowed. Each student then writes one of several narratives using as many terms from the wiki and use their own definitions in context.

Problems and issues

Although each student had a laptop and all could send an SMS without looking at the phone, that doesn’t mean they are well versed in web technologies and social media. Although they could text and used some social media sites like Facebook, a high proportion didn’t know what a wiki was or about blogs.
Students have limited credibility detection skills. They don’t know if something they view online is from a credible source and it needs to be taught early. All could get an answer to a question, few could verify if that answer was correct, and fewer still knew to find the author and search about them to check if they’re any kind of source.

The blog post Crap Detection 101 is a good introduction to the issues http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?entry_id=42805

The teacher needs to be as interesting as the entire internet to keep the student’s attention. On the other hand, students need to learn mindfulness about what they’re doing.
- Howard conducted an experiment whilst teaching one day. He placed a camera at the back of the classroom to record what students were doing.
- One student watched a video on YouTube that was being presented at the front of the class. He’d rather watch it there than look up at the front. He then switched to looking at Howard’s website, then read his email. This student got very high marks in the class.
- Multi-tasking research says most people cannot multi-task well, but some students can do this and shouldn’t be excluded because they don’t appear to be concentrating.
Social media literacies are taught before/after class, not in the classroom.
Students need to learn about collaboration. Social media relies on collaboration to work effectively.
We have moved into an age where people carry the internet around with them in cheap devices. Students are learning the different aspects/problems of living in a networked world accidentally (power/reputation/identity/presentation of self). This isn’t being taught well in classes, and people are learning it when things go wrong.
- e.g. Awareness of privacy implications in Facebook differs greatly in users.
The technological divide is changing from the have/havenots to the know/knownots. Most can afford a mobile internet device, but not everyone can utilise it to find the information that others can.
Assessment is difficult to implement but still be easy for a teacher to mark within a timeframe. This is an ongoing problem for Howard, assessment should be about learning. He currently asks students to reflect through an e-portfolio in the Social Media Classroom. This portfolio amalgamates the bookmarks, posts, edits, blog posts, wiki edits and discussion posts into one. Students set a learning goal at the start of the semester and this is analysed to see if it has been achieved.
- Contract Grading + Peer Review: Here’s how it works
- Students are used to the ‘banking’ model where they pay attention to stuff that will be on the test and ignore the rest. They need to wake up from this.
There can be barriers at an institutional level to using non-sanctioned software. There is a natural department between IT departments and innovators. IT are charged with security and support of products.
Students are not media-savy enough for social networking tools in teaching. Don’t friend students on Facebook until they are ex-students. Boundaries are important.
Accessibility issues haven’t been a problem for Howard.
Students think they know everything because they know how to use the devices/programs/technology. But students can write by the time they are 10 years old, that doesn’t mean they don’t have more to learn.

Not every teacher in every subject needs to use social media. Teaching with social media takes a lot of time and causes more work. But it is exciting. It can ignite a student’s enthusiasm, and this is a huge payoff for a teacher.

Further sites
Part of Howard's presentation (with captions)

EBL-James Bennett Textbook panel

2011-02-22T17:21:00.000+11:00

I attended a discussion a few weeks ago on the possibility of e-textbooks being sold to libraries. Currently publishers will not sell electronic versions of textbooks to libraries because of the significant loss of income it would mean to them. The discussion panel was created so that both librarians and publishers could understand the other point of view in regards to the want and need for this kind of material.

There is a pdf of some of the powerpoint slides presented. I’ve summarised the speakers and issues below (with help from Bee at work).
The crib notes version basically says: “the e-textbook will not happen for a long while as publishers are not prepared to lose that income stream” (Lim, 2011)

Library Speaker 1 – Pam Freeland – University of NSW Library
UNSW have an e-preferred policy. Academic material is finally starting to show up in e-format, but not a lot of it. There are differences in the term ‘textbook’ in each discipline and the JISC study recognises this. The USA is more prescriptive over what goes into a textbook than UK/Australia is. We’ll use anything as long as it has the information we’d like (and is by a recognised group/author, etc).
Various studies have been done. Major ones to watch out for are:
Australia – Quloc study – a large study with 2000+ respondents. Talks about the difficulty with e-texts from a user experience. And most students said they wanted print and e versions of the textbooks.
Australia – Latrobe University study – small group of nursing students. Found that e-books and DRM are confusing and difficult to use for most students.
Overseas studies – she ran out of time here, but mentioned the importance of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) study from the UK. www.jiscebooksproject.org is their site and they have lots of information.

Library Speaker 2 – Susanne Dowling – Murdoch University Library
Susanne talked about what we do and don’t want in ebooks. Read the pdf to find out these things. Her main argument seemed to be that librarians want e-textbooks more than students do, but students would like the choice.

Library Speaker 3 – Jinny Jones – University of Melbourne Library
Does not have a powerpoint presentation. Jinny spoke about the level of use that textbooks get and the impact this is having on OH&S for staff. Jinny mentioned that they did a survey of 19 titles. These 19 titles had 241 copies held all up in their library. These 19 titles were loaned 13,000 times in a year. That is a significant amount of handling, reshelving, etc. It was very interesting hearing that some libraries (Monash University) can purchase up to 45 copies of a single textbook, so for one textbook item with all 7 day loans, it could possibly be reshelved 10 times in a semester, which is 20 handlings (10 shelving, plus 10 loans). Multiply this by 45 copies and you have 900 times handling the one textbook in a semester. Multiply this by the number of high use items in your short loan area and it is a significant OH&S worry.
If textbooks were to move to an electronic format, that would effectively remove this OH&S problem overnight. Although you’d still need to purchase a limited number of the books, the e-copy would take the bulk of usage.

Publishing Speaker 1 – Elizabeth Weiss – Allen & Unwin
Also does not have a powerpoint presentation. Elizabeth was quite blunt and gave some background on Australian publishing. Australia doesn’t have the large base of users that somewhere like the US does and publishers struggle to make money producing Australian editions of textbooks. If a library buys one e-textbook, the publishers could lose up to 100 sales. This doesn’t sound like a lot but when you only sell 600 copies of a textbook, that’s quite a dent in your profits.
Allen & Unwin sell e-textbooks via ebooks.com but don’t sell many. I wrote that this was probably because it’s not widely advertised, but that’s just my personal view. She also mentioned that many students resist e-texts anyway.

Publishing Speaker 2 – Maryce Johnstone – Gale Cengage Learning
Maryce talked about Gale Cengage’s experiences. She mentioned that although a library would buy up to 40 copies of a physical text, they’ll only buy a single copy of an e-text and expect that it has rights for everyone to use simultaneously and at a similar price to the physical book. This is an unsustainable model for the publishing industry. GaleCengage are trialing with UK publishers and libraries a model where libraries pay a cost somewhere between what the book costs and what the publishers profit would have been (ie between £20 and £10,000). The total cost to a library would never go above £1000. This sounds like a lot, but if you’re a library who buys 45 copies of a $100 textbook, you’re saving money.
The publishers are interested in ways to not lose money like newspapers have. In fact, they’re very worried about the newspaper model which has coloured what people expect to receive online for free. Although they want to provide services to stakeholders, they do need to recoup costs.

Publishing Speaker 3 – Lucy Russell – Wiley
Lucy talked about the costs they want to recoup. She was a figures lady and her presentation was good for me (who is a figures man). Wiley are big enough that they can afford to offer e-textbooks and not lose huge margins. Instead, what they do is provide ‘addons’ to their textbooks. In the US market they must make their textbooks attractive to educational institutions, otherwise they’ll have no profit. Ie First year Psychology textbooks are all very similar, what Wiley do is create online videos, tutorials, exercises, etc that go along with the book and make it more attractive to lecturers. This increases the attractiveness of a book.
Wiley spends between US$50-$200,000 on developing a textbook and up to an extra US$75,000 developing the free addons
For a brand new book:
If there are 1000 students in a course:
Year 1 – 700 units sold (new book with no secondhand copies available)
Year 2 – 400 units sold (as people buy last year’s second hand copy)
Year 3 – 300 units sold (lots of second hand copies now available).
So for a potential of 3000 students, they sell 1400 copies.
$130 new x .909 (GST) x .667 (33% bookstore discount) = $78/copy
Total revenue = US$109,220.
This is the cost we need to make up for that textbook if we offer it free to everyone via e-copy.

ACOC 2010 - Describing resources in a web services world

2010-10-22T16:59:00.001+11:00

The Australian Committee on Cataloguing (ACOC) 2010 seminar was held on October 21 at the National Library of Australia. I've summarised each of the talks below.
Papers, presentations and audio are available at http://www.nla.gov.au/lis/stndrds/grps/acoc/papers2010.html

Keynote Address – David Lindahl – eXtensible Catalog
http://www.extensiblecatalog.org/
This very interesting talk focused on an Open Source product called XC or the eXtensible Catalog.

The development team for his company is made up of an anthropologist who studies librarians and library users, a librarian and an IT expert.
The software is designed to empower users to study their clients as well as the way they use library systems
XC is an Open Source catalogue or OPAC which is designed to link in with all major library systems. It has been developed on the Open Source platform ‘Drupal’ and is easily customisable without having to know any coding. It looks similar to what the current EBSCO interface looks like, but as it is easily customisable, it could look like basically anything we wanted. A sample look of the opac is available in the powerpoint presentation.
Kyushu University has an instance called Cute.Catalog http://search.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/catalog/en . A results set showing how a student can limit their result is available at http://search.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/catalog/en/xc_browse/search/7/%20%28murder%29%20_rows%3A%2820%29?search_type=browse
XC also provides a ‘Metadata Services Toolkit’ module which presents a faceted browse/search of problems with data. It was very interesting in that it could pick up various coding problems and then tell you similar records with the problems. You could then use the facets to see if there was a particular ‘theme’ amongst these problem records so you could perform mass changes. The facets also helped visually view problems such as spelling errors.

Cataloguing in a ‘Discovery Layer’ world – Karen Stone – State Library of Queensland (SLQ)

Karen talked about ‘Discovery Layers’, a single source/page/search engine that will search across lots of library holdings. An example would be SerialsSolutions which searches across a number of our database platforms (although they aren’t as seemless as some others).

SLQ implemented OneSearch from Primo (I think). She talked about their experiences.
Mentioned that data quality is important when implementing a platform like this, all kinds of coding errors stood out (very obviously).
Mentioned problems when having local solutions that were non-standard, such as coding a set of databases in a certain non-standard way which caused them all to be displayed as ‘books’ in the system. Also mentioned not performing changes on old records when major areas changed (ie when the form subdivision in subjects changed from $x to $v).
There are ways of finding such things in the local system and doing mass changes, but these are very time consuming.
She also mentioned that the TAFE libraries in Qld would never be able to do this due to what they include in their catalogue data, but that SLQ had a history of high quality data and this was essential for successful use of this program.
The entire talk questioned whether we should catalogue things differently to work with a discovery layer, but her opinion was that we should catalogue correctly and to standards in the first place and that things will work out.

Making the most of your metadata, and cataloguing in a web services world – Monica Szunejko – State Library of Western Australia (SLWA)

A rather ‘interesting’ talk on having your users contribute catalogue records. I could feel the tension in the room as people listened to her. I thought it had merit though.

Library catalogues are not where people go for information because it is out of date and the terminology is bad. Also mentioned that no thesaurus is neutral and that our library catalogues are filled with loaded terminology, so why not embrace this and use common terminology instead of our unwieldy thesauri?
SLWA have created a site where their users can catalogue their ‘artefacts’ directly into the system. They fill out a form, select some dropdowns and tada a marc record is created in the background. Use of extensive notes fields combined with URLs to link pictures to catalogue records.
Shown an example of someone who uploaded 6 personal photos in a series and annotated what the photos were about. The annotations showed ‘voice’ and depth to the information that would have been lost if catalogued by a librarian.
Interesting example of people powered cataloguing of indigenous artefacts at www.irititja.com

From container to context: how cataloguers can drive a fundamental and necessary change in resource description – Kent Fitch – National Library of Australia (NLA)

Another ‘interesting’ talk, this one on the uselessness of LCSH and other major thesauri out there. Less tension as he was incredibly amusing, but still quite controversial.

Search engines are wonderful because they allow users to type random words in a box and receive help.
Google pre-empts the search of a user (as if by magic) and that’s what library users are beginning to expect. Google also answers simple questions quickly, but doesn’t do so well with the more complex questions. Library catalogues are worse at it (if you are looking at the slideshow, see the pages on railways society mid west nineteenth century
Library catalogues need to increase what’s in their catalogues.
Presented findings from a paper by Cory Doctorow in 2001 who said that metadata was metacrap, due to:

People lie
People are lazy
People are stupid
Mission: Impossible (aka people lie, are lazy and stupid)
Schemas aren’t neutral
Metrics influence results
There’s more than one way to describe something

Showed examples of a book having 4 subjects in a library catalogue, 7 in Wikipedia, 40 tags in LibraryThing and 29 tags in Amazon (plus reviews, plus references to citations), then google scholar had references to even more citations
What do we do? Stay in our small insular world with LCSH and RDA or expand and embrace new things (tagging/open source/having clients do descriptions)

RDA Update session – Deirdre Kiorgaard – NLA

No plan for a national licence of RDA
RDA records may begin appearing on OCLC soon, we need to watch out for them
Training materials for RDA will all be on the ACOC website at http://www.nla.gov.au/lis/stndrds/grps/acoc/rda.html
RDA implementation has been pushed back until second quarter 2012.
NZ cataloguer’s wiki will also have some information – http://nznuc-cataloguing.pbwiki.com/RDA-page

Koha and Kete non-English implementations – Irma Birchall – CALYX Information Essentials

Koha is an open source library management system, Kete is a commercial addon for Koha

CALYX have integrated Google Translate into an opac. Standard Koha allows you to customise the interface to be in different languages, but this doesn’t alter the catalogue data. The Google Translate widget allows the full details to be translated (by machine) including all bibliographic information.
Example is Emmaus Bible College’s catalogue at http://library.emmaus.edu.au/ - they joined with a Korean school and this allows some level of usage by the 100% Korean speaking students
Very easy to embed a widget with Koha and this was demonstrated
Also mentioned Forvo, this is a translation pronunciation tool. Native speakers record themselves saying a particular word, and then it can be embedded into catalogue records. Alliance Francais’ catalogue has this feature in some parts of it.

Using the library as a central repository for the parent organisation – Sharron Zuodar – University of South Australia (UniSA)

Sharron proposed advertising library services to the parent institutions such as:

Inventory control for the AV department
Software tracking for IT
- Create brief bib records for software
- Use fields to represent usage
- Loan it out to IT staff if they have it so it’s easily traceable
Registering copyright material (ie docuteck)
- Create bib records containing all needed data
- Ie illustrations/length/pagination
- Ensure it is standard
- Easily pulled out for reports at audit time
Photography department
- Inventory
- Asset control
- Holdings are suppressed from display
- Records photography equipment as well as an inventory of important photograph collections held
Artwork department
- Register artworks (ie create bibs)
- Link to pictures
- Have locations for which stores they are in or where they are being displayed
- No accessible opac due to copyright of images
Talked about supporting the parent institution in whatever they need to do as the library has the skills and software needed.

Web transaction log analysis – Brad Cummings – Music section of the NLA

Brad talked about analysing web transaction logs to work out what a user of the system has been doing. This is a project the NLA is working on and they are not finished.

The NLA collects multiple logs (catalogue, web, content, user database) so this makes it difficult to track things
Once you screen out all the noise (downloading images, requesting style sheets, search engine crawlers) you are left with quite specific data on what a user has done
Can work out where they’ve come from, what they’ve clicked on, types of searches they’ve done, if they’ve been to other parts of the website, sometimes even where they’ve gone to
When aggregated can see what users are commonly clicking on (or never clicking on).
It involves a lot of work and a high level of experience in coding.

Recent developments in cataloguing/marc – Catherine Argus – NLA

Multilingual dictionary of cataloguing terms and concepts has been developed (I didn’t see by whom, sorry)
008/23 and 008/29 have new fields for electronic resources to describe databases vs websites
Cookery subject heading has gone (YAY!) to be replaced by cooking. See www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/h1475.html (Kath sent an update about this but I must have missed it, it is very exciting for me coming from a public library background).
Library of Congress Genre and Form Thesaurus has been created. This will go in to 655 #7 |aFORM HEADING|2lcgft . These will be authorised headings for the format of items, instead of the free text 655 that most people seem to use.

Recent developments in cataloguing/Dewey – Anne Robertson – Australian representative Dewey Decimal Committee

DDC 23 is being released mid next year. It will be tangerine in colour
Major changes to law (340) and religions (200).
Law has been changed to reflect differences in European vs British vs Australian vs US law. Updates to areas that have common terms that don’t mean common things.
Religion will have some changes to Islam currently, but a supplement will be released after DDC23 incorporating major major changes such as equalising the number schedule to include all major religions and removing the huge Christian bias.

Using my phone for work (not as a phone)

2010-07-05T09:00:00.000+10:00

Recently I purchased a brand new HTC Desire phone. It's like an iPhone but doesn't allow me to access Apple's iStore. The software in the phone is called Android and has been designed by Google. It's quite swish. HTC (and Telstra) have both modded the phone though so it now has some fancy HTC usability features (woo!) and some useless Telstra marketing things I can't get rid of (less woo).

Apart from being able to look up restaurants and know the weather at a glance, the phone has some interesting apps which I was able to download to help me at work. One of these apps is a barcode scanner that uses the camera to 'scan' the barcode. I can then transfer my scanned barcodes to my PC.

Now this may not sound that exciting to most people. But anyone who has had to fork out hundreds of dollars for a wireless barcode scanner can probably see where I'm heading with this.

Picture me standing in a bunker. The bunker contains a compactus. The compactus contains books. Some of these books have a barcode. Now, instead of me having to write down the barcodes of these books onto a piece of paper, and then typing them into a computer (or taking a laptop down there and typing them direct), I just whipped out my Desire, pressed 'barcode scanner' and merrily went scanning things. I still have to write down the numbers on books without a barcode (although I should look at some kind of OCR thing that would scan the printed numbers) but I'm still doing things a lot faster and more accurate than if I had to write/type these numbers into the system.

I love my phone...except that I linked it to my work email and now it bings at me every time I get one...I should undo that. Otherwise all good!

Interesting theses

2010-04-30T16:28:00.003+10:00

So I've spent the last few weeks faffing about in our archives doing a stocktake of our pre-1990 theses collection. In 1990, the Canberra College of Advanced Education (CCAE) became accredited as a university and tada, the University of Canberra was born. My task is to work out what CCAE materials we had and ensure we had a copy in our archive and one that was loanable to students. It turned out to be a lot bigger than I thought and I've spent ages fixing mistakes in the catalogue.

Anyways, in my travels, I have come across a number of interesting papers (well, interesting titles anyway). And due to the wonderful power of the interweb, I can share them with you.

Horsies
We all love horsies. Some people love them so much that they write all kinds of things about them, from gambling to sexism, we have it all (well, not all, there's only a couple really). My favourite is Burr, Sandra : Women and horses : a study of Australia's recreational horsewomen . I love the picture of the horse ring.
Boring reading
Don't you hate it when you're teaching a class to students and they all doze off because the textbook chosen is boring? Well someone studied that in 1982. Newton, P. V. : An examination of reading material used in year 11 with special attention to social science texts. Only the abstract is there but the full report talks about ways (that could be exploited by a computer) on making the textbooks more usable.
Enjoying your job
I cannot find the text, but one work I was looking at was asking the question "How much do librarians like their jobs?". It examined government librarians and surveyed them to see if they were bitter. The results said no. Ooh, found it. Barnes, Helen : The work attitudes and job perceptions of Commonwealth Government Libraians : with descriptive data on Commonwealth Government librarianship as an occupation

That's enough for this time. Enjoy!

University of Canberra Libraryland

2010-03-03T19:12:00.002+11:00

Wow, university libraries are so different. I've been here a few weeks now and am amazed by some of the differences.

1. People are quite happy to listen to instruction.
Me: Well I know you need to know about how feminist theory has destroyed micro-lending schemes in Cameroon, but did you know you can find this all out yourself?
Student: No, really? I'd like to learn that.
Me: Really? Where's the hidden camera?
Student: What hidden camera? I'm very excited about finding journals through your databases.

2. They write all over the toilets. Whole stories. With drawings. And people add comments. It's like a web 2.0, except in the toilets, so would that make it dunny 2.0? Social looworking :)

3. The crazy people are intelligent. They can actually prove that the aliens are reading their mind (although I must admit I've not really had crazy people here, everyone is quite nice).

4. Staff talk at a much higher level than what I'm used to. Who uses 'ennui' these days? And when talking to people? Pfft. I'm going to need to buy a dictionary to translate what some of the academics here say.

5. EMBATAPLH - even more bloody acronyms than a public library has. There are so many of them that they gave me a glossary of UC library acronyms when I started. I had to carry it around for 2 weeks to work out what was going on (add to that the point above and it's like I'm talking to someone in German... I can understand every 8th word, but most of that is the word 'the').

And some of the non-differences.
1. Still a bureaucracy. The IT department and most HR functions have been outsourced to India because it's cheaper. So if I have a problem with my pay or my computer, I ring Mumbai.

Actually, come to think of it, the bureaucracy thing covers all the non differences. Tasks are a tad less fluid than a public library and I'm always worried about overstepping my authority or stepping on someone's toes, but at least I usually know who to send things to.

All in all I'm enjoying things. All of the stuff that I was worried I wouldn't be able to do, I'm allowed to do. I've done training (a little anyway), reference stuff, research. I'm even in charge of two subject guides (software engineering and information systems). Oh, and I don't really even have to catalogue (much). It turns out I'm in charge of copy cataloguing...and I can copy well!

If I remember, I'll write my next blog post on some of the odd things that people write their theses about (being in charge of them is quite amazing).

New Library (details)

2010-01-12T15:17:00.005+11:00

Interesting development in my new library job. I was going to start working at the University of Canberra as a Librarian/Information Officer. The position descriptions for the library are all left very vague so that you don't really know what you'll be doing, but from questions I asked, I knew I'd be working with the Academic Services Team. This would mean I'd be doing some reference work, some training (woo!) and a bunch of other stuff that I'm a bit hazy about. Unfortunately the Cataloguing, Theses and E-Document Coordinator got a promotion. Unfortunately because it means I now have to learn how to catalogue again.

That's right, due to generic position descriptions, my background as technical services team leader for a bunch of libraries and a merit-based job system, I was assigned the job. Honestly, I don't mind doing the job. I'm just a bit worried I'll end up typecast as a technical services librarian...you all know the type, hair in a bun, twinset and pearls, etc (although I must admit, if I had enough hair to put it into a bun, I bet it'd go fabulous with my twinset).

From a management point of view, having generic position descriptions is great...it means you can move staff around to places where they'll be more productive (or less productive if you're vindictive and want to get rid of them). But I haven't even started!!!

It's nice to be wanted...but I really really really wanted to do information literacy training.

Oh, and for you all (click for larger copies):

New Library (already)

2009-12-29T14:07:00.003+11:00

Oooh, talk about slack! Since I've been at Yarra I've posted 5 blog posts. That should equate to nearly one a month, but seeing as the last one was July...it doesn't. Now, at prompting from Heather about being slack, here's a brand new post!

Big news from me; I'm leaving City of Yarra Libraries to go work for the University of Canberra. Woo me!

Hopefully (and I cannot guarantee anything) I will post more from Canberra. After all, I currently know 2 people up there and what else will I spend my time doing? Chances are I'll become addicted to TV shows about crime (CSI, CSI:NY, CSI:Miami, NCIS, NCIS:NY, Law & Order, Law & Order:SVU, Law & Order:The Other One, etc) and my only salvation will be writing on my blog about them. Ooh, maybe my blog can go from being a whingey librarian one to one complaining about episodes of CSI! I might have to start liking CSI though. I could even go as far as getting Foxtel so I could watch the Crime and Investigation network and have even more crime shows, except real life crime ones.

Somehow I don't think any of that will happen. I'll try and think of something interesting to post for the next installment of my life though.

Statistics: What to collect?

2009-07-28T10:30:00.000+10:00

As Technical Services Team Leader, one of my jobs is to gather the statistics we collect to prove that we are doing our job well (or not so well). When I started at my last job, statistics was one of the very first projects I was given. Basically I was told 'We don't trust these numbers, make some better ones'. After talking to everyone in management about what they wanted to collect, I designed a series of linked spreadsheets which all fed in to each other. It was quite complex and one little nudge would break them all. Also, if someone went in and fiddled, it would upset the numbers on other sheets. As a way around this, I ensured that the linked sheets and the LMS all fed in to one 'collection' sheet. This collection sheet was used once per month to copy the gathered statistics together. These would then be manually copied to a separate data spreadsheet using the 'Paste Special'. These figures were then 'prettied up' with charts and whatnot in a linked summary spreadsheet which divided up between the 5 physical branches, the virtual branch and CALD data. It also meant that management would only ever access one spreadsheet, the one that was pretty and had all the correct figures on it.

Moving to my new job, I have realised that, although the library branches are very separate from each other, there are library 'teams' that mean that the above approach will not work as well. Previously, if someone was at a branch and hosted an activity or program, they would then go straight to the branch report spreadsheet and enter the details and figures. Here, they don't do that. Everyone keeps an individual report of what he or she does and, every quarter, they are all collated together. This may be collated through the team leader in charge of the team (ie Reference or CALD) or through the manager in charge of collections. Having separate teams can cause some duplication. To me, a bilingual children's storytime should be counted in both CALD and children's areas. It should be marked so that we don't count the figures twice when totalling, but it should still go towards both areas. Here, because of the different teams, it depends on who initiated the event.

That being said, it seems that very little in the way of stable statistics has ever been kept here. I have historical figures for the KPIs here, but nothing else to support these. The only collection figures are high level loans and reservation numbers (I know that xxx CALD items were loaned this year, but I cannot tell in which language sets). This is all changing.

When I am back from Europe in September, I will be re-working nearly all of the statistics. I have already started by creating the data and summary sheets for people to view. Management seem to be interested in having a single point of reference for all statistics and everyone has given me ideas. The information that is needed here is somewhat different to what I would have thought, but I can see how it is needed. I will also be working on a list of sheets which measure the 'flow' of each of our collections (do our Junior Chinese DVDs move at all or are we wasting money? are they being used more at one branch than another? do we even have Junior Chinese DVDs?)

I would absolutely love to know how everyone else organises their statistics. Actual examples of the sheets would be even better. If people are interested, I can post our data/summary sheets so you can see how things are organised.

Upgrade upgrade upgrade

2009-07-14T14:05:00.002+10:00

Well we performed Yarra's fastest ever IT upgrade this week. After some mis-communication (I read something differently to my boss, and we were both wrong with how we read it anyway) we found out on Thursday afternoon that our library system's database was going to be upgraded on Tuesday morning. This meant we had to install a brand new library program on every library computer across our council (about 50 or so). And as I am not allowed to install/uninstall/touch anything on the computers, I told the IT guys they had to do it.

Our timeline kind of went like this (you need to imagine the annoying music from 24 playing).

Thursday
2.45 - Christian hears 'bing' and notices there's an email
2.46 - Christian reads the email saying "I hope you've all upgraded your software because this is happening" and thinks a bunch of words starting with F.
2.47 - Christian realises that the library system won't work at all without the upgrade and says the bunch of words starting with F and decides to go speak to his boss.
2.50 - After explaining the situation, Christian's boss says a few words (none starting with F) and rings anyone with any IT skills who she knows.
3.00 - IT ring back and we explain the situation
3.05 - Still explaining, stressing that the library cannot function with no system
3.10 - Still explaining, this time just stressing
3.11 - IT mentions that the last upgrade took a month of testing before it could be rolled out
3.12 - End of phone call with a meeting booked for 9am next morning.

Queue the tense music from 24 that probably plays when someone is about to have a meltdown (having never watched more than 2 minutes of 24, I am assuming this exists, they can't just play that tick-tock countdown sound for an entire show, can they?)

Skip ahead to 9am the next morning. Both Christian and his boss now have stomach ulcers.

Friday
8.55am - Arrive at Collingwood town hall (where the department is located)
9.00am - Arrive at the IT area after getting lost going through 53 flights of stairs and 218 office spaces (some in cupboards)
9.01am - Begin grovelling to IT manager
9.05 - still grovelling
9.06 - he gets sick of grovelling and sends us off with an IT bloke
9.07 - I hand over the software upgrade for them to install on a test machine
9.10 - Software installed, so I start testing
9.11 - Check out a book. Check in a book. Place a hold. Add a user. Change some details. Perform a search. Catalogue an item. Check our home library service users. Run some reports.
9.30 - Testing finished (note how this didn't take a month).
9.31 - Leave office.

(more dreadful music, this time showing a montage of a drive back to Collingwood with my boss, then more statistics and some budget forecasting)

11.00am - IT bloke arrives with install disk and starts testing the install in the live environment on one of our PCs.
11.15 - Install finished, PC up and running, everyone happy.

(more music)

5.00pm - Install completed on the front desk at Fitzroy and on the front desk at Collingwood.

Monday

8.30am - Arrive at work to find that the computers that were upgraded could not access circulation over the weekend
8.40am - Figure out that I need to physically go to every computer and change a setting because I'm the only one with the admin password
9.00am - Realise I cannot be bothered doing that and give the admin password to the IT guy who is installing stuff on every PC (I'll change it later)
9.02am - Watch IT guy begin to install on the backroom computers at Fitzroy
10.00am - IT guy says 'bye' and heads off to another location to install.

(music)

5.15pm - Finally decide to call IT guy to see if he's finished.
5.30pm - After talking to staff at every branch (4 of which I now know are upgraded, 1 who are unsure), call the IT department to find out where he is.
5.31pm - He's gone home.
5.32pm - Decide to go home myself.

Tuesday
8.15am - Arrive at work and put things on every computer so noone logs in.
9.00am - Tell a staff member off who logged in and buggered their computer.
9.15am - Receive a message that it should all be good.
9.16am - Discover I cannot log in but everyone else can.
9.17am - Begin to call branches to let them know.
9.25am - Finally talk to them all.
9.26am - Find out Richmond hasn't been upgraded, frantically call them to tell them to log out.
9.27am - Call IT, get hold musak.
9.30am - On hold.
9.31am - Find out person is in a meeting and leave an urgent message.
9.32am - Call Richmond to get them to ring IT because I'm supposed to be in training.
9.55am - Call Richmond because training was a bit boring and find out that they will have to go in to offline mode until IT show up (he's on his way).
9.56am - Find out that computers at Fitzroy, Carlton and Collingwood are also not working.
9.57am - Decide that training is slightly more fun than this and let my second in charge know that she'll be doing the ringing around to get IT to come out and fix those computers as a matter of urgency.

All through that there was the annoying music from 24.

And you all thought I was being slack with my posts...look how long this one was?

All in all, the upgrade went fairly well (especially given our limited timeframe). It would have been much easier if I was able to install the software myself, but, over time, IT may relax around me and allow me to do some things.

Finger's crossed.

Wasting time on YouTube

2009-07-11T13:51:00.002+10:00

I'm sitting here at home a bit bored and thought I would post onto my blog. This is totally non-librariany but it's my blog so I don't care.

I've just spent the last few hours searching YouTube for clips of old songs I like from obscure artists who noone really cares about. And I found some!

Móa (or Móei∂ur Júníusdóttir) was an Icelandic electro-funk-ish singer in the 90s. Joy and Pain was a song I heard once (just once) on MTV about 10 years ago and periodically get it stuck in my head. I have finally found a low quality version of the clip and am hooked again. Imagine the love child of Bjork and Shirley Bassey. See below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf8Yt4gLDnc&feature=related

Another I found was a clip by Sissel and Warren G called Prince Igor. It was on the Rhapsody album that was, supposedly, a cross of rap and classical music. The clip is brilliant; a story of a woman found singing on the moon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XceVdo9IVQo

Gosh, I just realise that I spent hours looking at two songs (okay, and I may have watched an episode of Lady Lovely Locks and a few episodes of Superted but that's due to boredom, honest).

Also, as a plug for a mate, have a look at his daily twitter posts. He is doing a twitter story a day based on a picture that is stored at TwitPic. http://twitpic.com/photos/hiddensounds

Dealing with IT departments

2009-06-30T15:32:00.002+10:00

Well my first whingey post at my new job. I have to say that it is incredibly frustrating dealing with an IT department that do not want to let go of control.

I understand that security is of high importance. I also understand that some staff should not be trusted to install local software (I've seen cases of people screwing up their computers by installing things they shouldn't have, I also know that people are likely to install illegally acquired software if they can). These things aside, it is frustrating as heck to me that I am not allowed to even install an update to the library system.

Being part of a consortia, an upgrade to the library system's database means that the new software needs to be rolled out as close to the upgrade as possible. Using old software on a new database (with a potentially new data structure) is potentially dangerous to the database. Having to schedule someone from IT to physically come to each computer to upgrade it seems to me to be an incredible waste of time, especially as the library network is totally seperate to the staff network and the PCs are unable to have software installed remotely.

I think that I am going to have to demonstrate to our IT department that the library is not only forward-thinking in terms of computing, but also that we have a high level of skill in this area and certain people can be trusted to install software.

That being said, it is actually quite exciting for me. I think that the library here has never really shown what we are willing to do in this field. With my boss (who is new) and myself here, I really think we'll be demonstrating a much higher level of IT expertise to the IT department than ever before, and developing a higher level relationship will probably mean we'll be given more lee-way to do the kinds of things we should be doing.

As an aside, does anyone have any ideas on how to butter up a bunch of people to get them to do stuff? ;)

Job change - starting again

2009-06-10T20:11:00.003+10:00

I've been away for a little while from my blog (mostly being a slacker). But I'm back!

I've recently changed jobs and said goodbye to Brimbank Libraries. I'm now working in technical services at the City of Yarra in Melbourne's northern suburbs. Yarra is a very small municipality with a very different demographic to Brimbank; lots of rich people and lots of not so rich people in public housing.

Currently I'm finding out about getting the following for our libraries:
Wireless internet with authentication. Yarra currently offers wireless for the public through wireless routers in the libraries - no authentication or any kind of limiting. I'm suprised we can afford it (must be a great deal).
A computer booking system for the computer. Yarra currently has no real system. They use an online database to book the computers, but there is no control software at all on the computers.
An events booking system. There is currently one in place but I'm implementing a new one (it was purchased before I started).

Plus all the usual stuff like building a relationship with IT (called Information Systems or IS just to confuse me), moving servers and dealing with the company that runs our ILS. More about the ILS another day though (Sirsi-Dynix's Symphony system).

Just thought I'd post an update for you all!

RFID Wand / Magic Wand Comparison

2009-02-24T10:30:00.005+11:00

We are currently testing a magic wand (aka RFID wand) from FE Technologies. I have also tested the one from 3M and seen one from Bibliotheca and one from QLS (which was made by a Scandinavian company whose name I cannot remember).

It is interesting how the different companies have designed their magic wands.

Bibliotheca Wireless Inventory Wand
Bibliotheca have had their wand around for a while and you can see that in the design. Bibliotheca's design incorporates a giant battery pack which has a strap so that you can carry it like a handbag (if your handbag was filled with bricks). It then has a funky little PDA containing the software and a paddle that you wave at the books to detect it. Depending on which way you hold the paddle determines how accurate the scan will be, using the flat side gives you a wider scan, the sharp side (or even the point) gives you a more detailed scan.
Pros: PDA means that it could easily be installed on any kind of wireless computer device (or a laptop if it comes down to it). The software is easily updated by docking the PDA. Also, the wand is quite long which means you don't have to bend down to reach books on the bottom shelf or reach high to get ones at the top, you just wave it like a light saber.
Cons: Big-arse heavy bulky battery pack.
(note: I didn't actually get to use this as Bibliotheca were not currently supporting my tag format, the usability of the program did seem quite logical though...even if it was in German due to being the test model)

3M Handheld Inventory Tracker /Digital Library Assistant
This was the first RFID wand I had used and I was suitably impressed at the time. It is compact, light, and quite easy to use. It is an all-in-one unit that does not need any external battery support or even an external computing device (ie a PDA). You install a program onto a computer, upload a file of the items you wish to find to that location, it then pulls the items into the RFID wand and away you go. The file format is simple, comma seperated file with 4 options. First one was the barcode. Third was the call number. Fourth was the title. The second allowed you to enter something 'secondary', ie, the word missing if you wanted the device to tell you that the item went 'beep' because it was missing. It was a while ago now, but I do remember it being easy.
Pros: Lightweight. Easy to use, the screen was easily visible.
Cons: The size meant that you had to bend to do books on lower shelves and reach up to do higher ones. Battery life wasn't great (although you could have multiple batteries and they were very easy to change).

FE Technologies Portable Scanning Unit
This is my most recent device for testing and is quite new to FE, I don't know if they've actually sold any off yet and I know that they are very interested in the results of my testing to find out how to improve the unit. The unit itself is a swish looking black box with a screen. Attached to this box is an RFID antenna that looks like a handle with a squared off piece of metal attached. The box is operated by means of a special pen (which retails at $75 so I warned all of my staff that they'd better not lose it). The device itself contains a computer, battery and small RFID reader inside the black box (I asked). It can be set to run through a wireless network and will automatically download the update files that you ask it to. This was the only one of the units which I have seen which will actually update the status of items that it wands (if you want it to). For example, I could use this unit to change the security status of my DVDs to 'secure' if I was so inclined. It also works very fast, a heap faster than the 3M one did.
It operates in an interesting way. It has a dump file of all of the LMS items in it and uploads updates to the device overnight. When it scans items, it checks this dump file to see if the item is included and, if we wanted it to, it checks to see if the item is within a certain call number range, location or collection. It works with all/any of our collection codes too, very fancy (also very useless for our library service which has floating collections so nothing is really located in only one spot). It will also alert you to tags which are not 'in' the dump file. This would mean that they had previously been withdrawn and were still sitting on shelf. You can turn this off.
You upload items into it by means of a CSV file, similar to the 3M method it allows you to enter a reason that the item is being detected, unlike the 3M method you don't enter any title details, these come from the local dump file.
Pros: Fast and accurate. The antenna/aerial allows you to stand at one height and scan items on the top/bottom shelves. The thin design allows you to 'shove' the antenna between books to get greater scanability on thin items (where the RFID tags shield each other to a greater degree). Also, being in production means that if I have any issues at all then I ring them and they alter the software for us...I love testing.
Cons: Still quite heavy, similar to the Bibliotheca model (although not that cumbersome). We got around this by placing the device on a small trolley. Also, the device has no way of attaching a keyboard, mouse or, well, anything. This means that the only methods of altering stuff on there is either via the annoying Windows On-Screen Keyboard or via a network. If they gave it a USB key and allowed me to upload the CSV file from there, I would be happier.

RFID self-check machines

2009-02-17T10:30:00.001+11:00

I have been analysing our brand new RFID self-check machine that we are planning to install at our latest library to be RFID'd. It is quite interesting how the different vendors program their RFID machines to work. I know that we have some say on what screens come up and in what order, but some of the vendors offer more options than that.

We have used 3 RFID companies in our libraries. Checkpoint were our original RFID vendor, we then moved to 3M and we now use both 3M and FE Technologies. It is funny, FE are a relative newcomer to the RFID world and, probably because of this, are more than happy to alter things for us. 3M, not so much. They have a huge market share so don't really see any point in changing software that works for the masses, I understand their outlook actually, why change something that works?

With the FE RFID self-check machines we have near total control over the interface. Each page of the sequence is an html page with javascript buttons. We can add buttons and remove them, totally revamp the interface if we want and they even have an option so we can translate everything - pages, RFID popups, even the messages coming through the SIP connector. Quite powerful actually.

Even so, there are some things with FE's self-check that are irritating. What will be good though is their responsiveness. We're only just starting our look into altering the interface though so I don't know if they'll be as quick to make changes as we'd like, but here's hoping!

m-Cat - a view to the future?

2009-02-10T10:30:00.003+11:00

Following on from my post about my mobile library catalogue the other week, I had comments that some screenshots may be nice. Now I warn you, it ain't pretty. Being a catalogue for a mobile device, my entire aim was to make it:
a) fit on a small screen
b) resize if they had a larger screen
c) use very little bandwidth (which ain't cheap in Australia for mobile devices)

Problems I am having are mostly resulting in 'set' code from our library management system. Code is spat out of the system that I cannot change (ie on the patron details page, I cannot change the default text that is generated).

1. Search window

2. Results window

3. Availability window

4. Customer details window

"For Librarians" page

2009-02-03T10:30:00.000+11:00

I was sitting around the other day and thinking "I know a bunch of libraries that provide fantastic open-source software and enhancements but I cannot find anything on their websites about it" and then decided I'd make a page for librarians who were looking at us.

On this page I am going to release a bunch of stuff that we make/edit/create so that anyone can download it and have a play around. This will include:

Our facebook application to search an Amlib catalogue.
Any/all of our customised Amlib reports including the RSS reports and data export reports.
Our booking system for events (which also keeps our info request statistics).
Any/all of our Joomla! enhancements.

I do not know if this would be of use to anyone, but I would be interested in making this page as a kind of "look at what we do" page for other librarians. Offering the software and also some instructions on how we did things may also be a drawcard to the site.

Does anyone else know a library that offers this kind of information on their website? It doesn't have to be in English. Anyone? At all?

m-Cat - the mobile device catalogue

2009-01-28T15:14:00.003+11:00

Although I have not posted for 2 months, I haven't actually been on holiday. No, I have been working so hard I haven't had time to post.

A few things have been going on which are very uninteresting to people outside Brimbank: new multi-function devices (which I got roped into organising), an sms/email notification system for our patron reservations/overdues, testing and installing of the RFID self-check system (still underway) and just general 'fix this' type stuff.

One of the projects I have been working on in my spare time (aka the 30 minutes before I go home when I am bored with the above work) is a mobile device catalogue. This catalogue would work on PDAs, mobile phones and the like. To download the entire site (including all pictures and the like) would be 22.8kb, it is as streamlined as possible.

I am hoping to get a test version of it up and running within the next week so that I can test it on as many mobile devices as possible (and see if it actually works, until I get access to our public web server, it is all currently theoretical).

I thought some of you may have been interested in hearing about that.

Unsolicited library donations from odd places - Агенција за иселеништво

2008-11-27T10:30:00.002+11:00

Being a library, people think that we are a dumping ground for books they have lying around. They don't have to be in good condition or current, the library will take them.

I wonder if that says something about the library, do our collections look so old/tatty/moldy that people think we want their unwanted crap?

Today's case, the Agencija za Iselenistvo of the Republika Makedonija (aka the Agency of Emmigration of the Republic of Macedonia). Within a three week period I have received 2 parcels from them containing books. Not just any books, boring books. They were all in Macedonian and mostly about Macedonia. From a critique of Macedonian philosophy at a level which most of our readers would have trouble understanding (even if they read Macedonian) to an entire book dedicated to analysing the poetry of an obscure (and quite dead) Macedonian poet to the history of Macedonian fantasy fiction (which, for what it's worth, is a lot longer than I would have expected).

Firstly: They're all old-looking books. I don't know if it is the paper the items are printed on, the bland covers or the fact that they're mostly 5 or 6 years old.
Secondly: They are not suitable for a public library. I know that the concept of a 'free public library' is different from culture to culture (and, honestly, I am unsure if Macedonia has a public library system), but why on earth would you pick a small library service in the middle of nowhere to send your crap to?
Thirdly: I don't want donations! These books are all freely available for me to purchase through our suppliers. If we thought they were worthy of adding to the collection, I'd have added them to the collection.

Donations are a wonderful thing when they are done right. We receive a heap of Mills and Boon style romance books from readers who read the book once and then think "I'll never read it again". These books are immaculate and we have our own special collection of them (all catalogued with a title of "Romance paperback" and a call number of PB ROM).

Honestly, I am just a bit confused as to why a government department in Europe would be sending libraries around the world books that they may not add? Postage is not cheap, especially for heavy items like books. We've received letters from them before in the past, they never mentioned they would send us anything.

All of this aside, I did actually add a number of the books to our collection. A book of short stories, some things on Macedonia which would be of interest to ex-pats living in Australia, those kind of things.

Ah well, that's my rant for today. (Can you tell I was struggling for something to say this week?)

Standards, guidelines and recommendations

2008-11-20T10:30:00.002+11:00

After my whinge last week about the building audit's recommendations, I am back with yet another document to complain about this week! (aren't I great?) It's not really a complain thing, more of a comparison thing I guess.

Living Learning Libraries: Standards and Guidelines for NSW Libraries was released recently and is now available from the State Library of NSW website. The report provides target figures for different areas of libraries, including membership per capita, opening hours per capita (or per number of branches), number of internet terminals, number of programs run, etc. It gives 3 levels of figures; a baseline figure (all libraries should meet this); an enhanced figure (you're a good library if you meet this) and; an exemplary figure (you're a brilliant library if you meet this).

What is interesting about this document is that it provides you with an 'out' clause for each of the target figures. For example, if you have 4-7 library branches then you should have a total opening hours per week of at least 238 hours (we have 5 libraries and 242 so yay to us). It says that this number may vary depending on staff numbers, the location of other community services, the structure (ie central library + mobile libraries) and the size of each library and the communities surrounding them.

I had a look at some of the different targets and compared my library service's performance against them. I even followed the definitions they provided (ie an active borrower in Victoria is someone who has used the library in the last 3 years, in NSW it says 2 years). It turns out we're a tad (actually a lot) under their benchmarks in a few area but that we rock in terms of internet access and program numbers. One of our main problems is that we have a very large populace with very low literacy and mobility. Also, our residents are quite transient and will often move to our area from overseas and then find work (and better living conditions) elsewhere so they'll move there. Many don't stay long, they are just there to bolster numbers.

Part B of the document refers to guidelines which libraries should follow in order to implement the standard targets. An interesting guideline was that it recommended the Library Manager be "an appropriately qualified librarian". I don't actually believe that we actually need a librarian to run the library service, especially in an environment where you have qualified librarians managing the librariany stuff. Running a library service is very similar to running any other kind of business, the only difference is that we don't make a profit and that we share information with anyone who asks for it (instead of trying to steal it from our competitors).

One of the guidelines that I understand (but find frustrating) is the guideline saying 'Based on knowledge of particular cultural needs and trends, a collection exists for a particular language when there are 500 residents speaking that language as their major language at home'. Lucky for us (with our 18 languages) we collect in a lot of languages. Unlucky for us, there are 26 languages with more than 500 speakers in our area. Some of these (ie Dinka and Samoan) have so few items published in them that there is no way we could support a collection even if we wanted to. Others (such as German and Spanish) are either leaving the area or dying off. That being said, our council area has 151 different languages spoken at home so I think we're doing well to collect in 18 of them.

The guidelines also refer to People Places, the document I complained about last week (it was the one that our building audit referred to when criticising our collection space in libraries). I actually found a copy of it online (click here to view) which, one day, I may read.

Building audit

2008-11-13T10:30:00.002+11:00

The Building Audit of Victorian Public Libraries 2007 was a report created to get an overview of public library buildings in Victoria. At 258 pages it's a bit lengthy so I must admit that I just read through the presentation available at http://www.libraries.vic.gov.au/cgi-bin/infonet/org.cgi?detail=1&id=40 and attempted to formulate some ideas.

The report uses a benchmark (People places) to identify where we're going wrong.

One of the things that got my goat about this report was that it bemoaned the fact that our collection areas in general are too small. I think this is very backwards thinking. Sure, a library has a physical collection. People come in daily to browse through our shelves and pull off what they want to borrow. But we are so much more than that. We have a virtual collection (which doesn't need floorspace). We encourage people to meet in our libraries by providing community spaces such as tables and chairs, lounge areas, cafe areas, study areas. Why on earth would we want to be increasing our collections at the expense of the things that draw people in?

At a time when traditional library usage is declining, I honestly don't believe that we should be limiting ourselves in this way. We don't have a huge amount of people coming in these days to ask us reference queries (of course, with the demographic of my library community, we probably never did). More people come to us because they can borrow (for free) movies and reading material for pleasure. To get people to borrow our items we are offering other services: a safe space; a friendly ear; someone to help you with finding information to solve your problems.

Pfft to reports trying to make us into scary places with tomes of wisdom.

Really Dodgy Archives (aka RDA)

2008-11-06T10:30:00.000+11:00

RDA just clicked. The little man who turned the lights off in my head at the ACOC conference the other week decided to come visiting and turn them back on. Thankyou little man.

Okay, if we ignore authority data (which we shall), here is how things stand.

Currently most library systems have two types of records, a bibliographic record and a holdings record.

The bibliographic record contains all data about the 'thing'; title, uniform title, author/s, contributors, language, date published, etc etc. The holdings record contains data about the individual copy of the 'thing'; the barcode number, the unit price, the date added to the system, etc.

Good still? Good.

What RDA plans to achieve is four types of record; work, expression, manifestation and item. Using a direct comparison between what we currently have and what RDA wants us to have, the bibliographic record correlates to the manifestation record and the holdings record correlates to the item record.

Still good? Me too.

Because we have all these fancy, intricate ILS/LMS/library systems at the moment, we are stuck into the current way of thinking (bib record + holdings record). Therefore, what RDA are going to do as an interim step is combine the work/expression/manifestation records into one file (the MaRC file) and the item into the holdings record. This interim step allows for everyone to think what we would like for the future.

Because of this, it appears that we are walking forward in the cataloguing world at the pace of a relaxed snail. In reality, we are laying down the foundation for the next generation of cataloguing (which will be integrated into the next generation of ILS/LMS/library systems).

I'm still not terribly excited, but at least I understand what is going on.

The acronyms of doom, part 2.

2008-10-30T10:30:00.000+11:00

I may have fallen asleep in a lecture or two at university but I don't recall ever snoozing during a professional conference. Unfortunately the recent ACOC conference seemed to have that effect on a few people in the audience.

It was hard going. There was an expectation that everyone understood FRBR (either pronounced "Ef Are Bee Are" or "Fur-burr") and not everyone did. In fact, I think a lot of us didn't. If you didn't understand these core principles then the rest of what they said made little sense.

I went along as a representative of the public library sector, there weren't many of us there. Cataloguing seems to be the domain of the academic library. It's like the Hindi caste system.

Brahmin = national and state library cataloguers (all hail us)
Kshatriya = academic cataloguers (if you want to be a REAL cataloguer, you should work in a university)
Vaishya = vendor & special library cataloguers (our cataloguing is of decent quality and we know what we're doing...in our own special way)
Shudra = public library cataloguers (me! the unwashed masses who use the beautifully created records of the upper-classes).

I suppose at least I'm not an untouchable (the highschool and primary school cataloguers, cataloguers whose opinion seems to mean little to those of our upper castes). Bah.

Anyways, rant aside, the conference was hard going. I thought I knew what was going on until just after afternoon tea, then it all fell apart in my head.

In my last blog post I talked about the 4 levels of RDA - work, expression, manifestation and item. I found out at the ACOC conference that all catalogue records being created were at the manifestation level with extra details from work and expression levels. I glossed over the fact that there were two types of MaRC records, one for catalogue records and one for authority records.

According to the powers that be of RDA, there will still only be two types of MaRC records, one for catalogue records and one for authority records. How on earth does that work when there should be at least 4 levels of records? There should be a MaRC format for authority records, that is seperate. There should THEN be a MaRC format for each RDA level; work, expression, manifestation and item. There won't be...just the one MaRC file which will include everything.

I know I'm not explaining myself well, but I am:
a) Venting
b) Confused myself
c) Aware that noone reads this

It was frustrating sitting there and aware that I understood the theory of FRBR and even the theory of RDA...the implementation just didn't seem like it would follow the theoretical model they were proposing. Maybe I missed something.

End rant.

RDA and the acronyms of doom

2008-10-23T10:45:00.000+11:00

It's like a brand new Harry Potter novel: Harry Potter and the acronyms of doom.

Synopsis: Harry is forced by his evil muggle foster parents to attend a cataloguing conference provided by ACOC, one of the older acronyms of doom. Whilst there he learns about RDA, FRBR, JSC, FRAD, FRSAR and the other new acronyms of doom. He witnesses a fight between the new acronyms of doom and the old acronyms of doom (MaRC, AACR2, CAVAL, NLA) and realises that whoever wins, everyone loses. Can Harry overcome the evils of acronyms or will he be defeated by his archnemesis, He Who Must Not Be Catalogued (otherwise known as HWMNBC)?

*insert dramatic musak*

Tomorrow I will be in amongst the acronyms of doom at the latest Australian Committee on Cataloguing (ACOC) conference in Sydney. There I will find out all about Resource Description and Access (RDA) which is the brand spankin' new cataloguing structure all of us poor little cataloguers will have to follow. The goals are admirable. A record's linkages will be logical with each record having four levels.

Example (errors are my fault, sorry!)
Work: The Bible.
Expression: English Language version of the King James Bible.
Manifestation: 2003 printing of the King James Bible, Large print edition.
Manifestation: 1999 audio copy on 12 CDs of the King James Bible.
Item: The copy I have in my hand.

This is how I understand things. That means, if I want to reserve a bible (any bible) then I can reserve at the Work level. If I want to reserve an English language version of the King James Bible then I can reserve at the Expression level (I may receive a printed copy, I may receive an audio copy...there may be a way to set this by format, I guess it depends on the system's implementation). If I want to reserve a particular manifestation (ie the 2003 printing only) then I can reserve at Manifestation level. If I want to receive the copy where I highlighted the passages that I needed then I'd reserve at the Item level.

All very nice. Unfortunately we've had a good 20-30 years of having a catalogue record (an amalgamation of the Work + Expression + Manifestation) and a holding record (the Item). This means that every system we use is geared towards this two level structure and will need to change. I don't really seeing that being cheap. If all of the major institutions (State Libraries, National Libraries, Library of Congress, etc) all implement this and force their vendors to allow it to be implemented then MAYBE us libraries with poor vendor systems will get the trickle down effect...maybe not. There are still library systems out there that don't use MaRC, the main exchange format for library records.

Let that bun-fight begin!
Image courtesy of http://www.imagesofthepast.co.uk/ , (c) 1902

RFID : 3 down, 2 to go

2008-10-16T10:45:00.001+11:00

I may be slightly premature here (I am writing this in advance) but, finger's crossed, by the time this post goes to air we will have 3 of our libraries RFID tagged up. This has involved lots of work (particularly for other people).

Isn't it exciting?

MODS

2008-10-09T10:45:00.000+11:00

Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) is a schema for a bibliographic element set that may be used for a variety of purposes, and particularly for library applications. The standard is maintained by the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress with input from users

It is funny, I recently joined an Australian listserv for librarians interested in library systems and library technology - aliaLIBSYSTEMS. It was thought that all the other standard listservs were aimed more at US librarians and US libraries and that we needed something specific to us. I think they're right.

Of course, just after I signed up to this, one of my other listservs, NGC4LIB simply exploded with discussion. NGC4LIB (or Next Generation Catalogs [sic] for Libraries) talks/complains/discusses/bemoans the new generation of catalogues and opacs that are available for libraries to use. Mostly I just watch them all complain about how noone does anything and then they have discussion on ways we could fix stuff and then it peters out and starts again. The past little while has had an absolute heap of emails revolving around how MaRC is an antiquated format and should be bought into the new era (and why it hasn't been and etc etc).

Being a cataloguer I am aware of what MaRC's history and how it has (or hasn't) evolved. What I really wasn't aware was of some of the projects out there to 'modernise' MaRC and bring it into line with what the world is currently using, xml based schemas. The currently MARCXML scheme is a tad crap.

100__$aWest, Christian,$d1982-.
245__$aThis is my title /$cChristian West
650_0$aBiography.

Becomes:

<record>
<datafield tag="100" ind1=" " ind2=" ">
<subfield code="a">West, Christian,</subfield>
<subfield code="d">1982.</subfield>
</datafield>
<datafield tag="245" ind1=" " ind2=" ">
<subfield code="a">This is my title /</subfield>
<subfield code="c">Christian West.</subfield>
</datafield>
<datafield tag="650" ind1=" " ind2="0">
<subfield code="a">Biography.</subfield>
</datafield>
</record>

Which, logically, makes sense. It's just HUGE, sizewise, in comparison to the MaRC part and rather hard to read if you're not a computer (MaRC is also hard to read if you're not a computer, just not as hard as the MARCXML bit).

MODS is a way of simplifying this by using actual terminology in the tags rather than the MaRC numbers which, although nice for their day, are a bit passe in terms of the way we currently code.

From what I gather, the MODS record will look something like the below:

<titleInfo>
<title>This is my title /</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart>West, Christian</namePart>
<namePart type="Date">1982-.</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm type="text">creator</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<subject authority="lcsh">
<topic>Biography.</topic>
</subject>

This seems a bit easier to me to read, especially if you're a programmer. You don't have to worry about what all the numbers and indices refer to. This wouldn't matter if you were programming in a vacuum, but if you want your records to be used by nerdy young people programming at home, this is probably the best way to go about it. You instantly know that the 'topic' of my book is Biography. You many not know what the lcsh 'authority' for it means, but you get the general gist of the whole thing. It is still pretty big, granted, but it is a lot easier to understand.

Anyways, that is my rant for today. I was just very fascinated when I had a look at MODS and thought I'd share.

Web 2.0 program for one of our libraries

2008-10-02T10:53:00.001+10:00

Although we completed the Learning 2.0 program at the start of the year, one of our branches is currently making a big push for their staff to complete/start the program. I am actually really happy that this has happening. Although half of the staff had already completed the lessons, the others had really only reached activity 4 (the one about posting a message to your blog and registering it).

Because extra staff are now doing the program (or finishing the program) it has again generated a buzz of excitement in the branch about these kinds of technologies. I get to monitor the program (now that the official one has finished) and it is interesting to see what other people are writing about in the Learning 2.0 blogs.

Korfball anyone?

Picture courtesy of Wikipedia - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/DSCF0090.jpg

Brisbane City Library - Built from Lego Blocks and steel

2008-09-25T14:18:00.003+10:00

Oooh, pretty. According to one of the staff at the library (I took a tour), this is one of the top 5 buildings in Brisbane that people 'love to hate'. It reminds me of the Ernst & Young building in Melbourne, a giant mass of glass and steel that is on top of something else (in the case of the E&Y building in Melbourne, it's propped up above the old Herald-Sun offices by yellow poles; in the case of the Brisband Council City Library, it's propped up above some Lego blocks by grey poles and then propped up AGAIN above the grey box by some yellow poles).

The library inside is fascinating. It is over 3 public levels (as well as a basement level featuring a $2mil book sorting machine which is reminiscent of a mail sorting machine). They force all new members to go to an obscure corner of the top level to join, thus ensuring that they give themselves a tour on the way up. They also have all kinds of funky interior features such as glass meeting rooms which made me feel like I was having a meeting in a fish bowl (designed to prevent people shooting up/having sex in obscure meeting room corners) and neon lit shelf ends ("the non fiction section is in the hot pink area next to the go-go dancers").

Interestingly enough, although they have a heap of self-check machines and a giant book sorting/automated returns machine, they don't currently use RFID. Reasoning for this may have something to do with the cost (if you have 32 libraries I am guessing that tagging all of your items would not be cheap).

An interesting thing to note was that they receive all of their items totally shelf ready. Some items (ie some LOTE items) were sent from the supplier to an external cataloguing/processing agent and then to the libraries. I wonder if Brimbank could possibly do something similar, especially as we order some of our stuff direct from the country of origin (ie our Maltese DVDs come to us direct from Malta). That being said, Brisbane's LOTE collection was tiny compared to ours.

Holidays and the drive through library

2008-09-22T14:04:00.002+10:00

My last post was sent whilst I was away on holidays. I cheated and wrote it beforehand and scheduled it to 'post' itself whilst I was away. The beauty of technology.

Whilst I was sunning myself in Queensland I had a chance to visit a few libraries. At one library I had a tour of their absolutely fantastic building (I am sure it is worth squillions of dollars). At another library I snuck in and looked around without anyone being any the wiser.

The 'snuck around' library was the Logan Hyperdome Library at the Logan Hyperdome shopping centre. The only reason I went there was it had a drive through. I'd never experienced a library with a drive through before and I was very excited. I have determined that the drive-through is only there because they have no parking and it is better to have people queue in a car to return/pick up items than park illegally.

Interesting concept though. According to their advertising, you can go into the library, select your books and set them aside to pick up later through the window. Nearly every library I've worked at has been of the opposite persuasion...take your books when you select them cause we don't have room to store them.

I'll write about Brisbane City Library (the squillion dollar one) next time.

Why use barcodes?

2008-09-11T15:48:00.002+10:00

Brimbank Libraries are considering stopping the use of barcodes. Fairly soon we will be totally RFID and, when that happens, we don't see the need to have barcodes AND an RFID tag on the book. In fact, the only things we are looking to stick on our items are an RFID tag and a call number sticker. No more stamping and spotting and stickering for us! Our RFID tags will be printed with a pretty design and come with a barcode number printed onto the tag itself. We will then pop that tag on the outside of the item so that the book is 'branded' as one of ours.

There are some problems with this. Our vendor have given us dire warnings about sticking the tag on the outside of the book. They believe that the constant rubbing of the book against other books (and in bags, etc) will damage the tag beyond belief. We are testing this currently and, after heaps of tests, the only thing that seems to kill the tag is if the tag is bent in the wrong spot (which will occur whether it is stuck inside the book or outside the book) or if you scour the small chip in the middle of the tag with something sharp.

Honestly, our items are only meant to last between 5-8 years anyway so it's not going to cause untold grief if they die early.

I think that I must be missing something important though. I have not been able to find another library that has stopped using barcodes because they are using RFID tags. 3M (our RFID vendor) know of only one other library in the world who don't use barcodes, and they were a library that went direct from a card catalogue to RFID...they are also a special use library in a government department and don't have our turnover issues.

If anyone out there can think of any other negatives to doing this then I'd love to hear them. Currently, all I have are the fact that RFID tags could be damaged on the outside of the item (even though I will cover them with contact or some kind of plastic laminate) and that our RFID tags will have numbers printed in a range and we won't have duplicates (so multi-part sets in Chinese or Vietnamese will not have an RFID tag on each item). I am getting around this second bit by probably buying a Brother P-Touch printer to print up labels with the barcode number on them. We will then stick these to items such as mutli-part sets and onto part of an AV item.

Amlib goes to OCLC and our catalogue comes underway

2008-09-04T15:14:00.006+10:00

Hello all, today is a good day. Yesterday Amlib (our library management system) announced that they had been acquired by OCLC. Lucky Amlib! I'm a bit suprised actually, Amlib is quite a small LMS compared to, well, OCLC's company size. I know that they are interested in AmlibNet, the online version of Amlib. They're possibly interested in it because you can change everything about the interface. That would mean they could use the one piece of software and port it over to many different language groups. A Chinese language version of Amlib could easily be created by an enterprising customer (or, as OCLC have just purchased it, probably by an enterprising staff member).

Some other good news is that I am going on holiday for 2 weeks on Monday. Yay to time off work!

Some updates from work. I am still creating our library catalogue. I have posted some screen shots below to show you what it will look like. The 'New Books' box on the right comes direct from an rss feed and scrolls whilst you're looking at it. Results are grouped and I'm still working on neatening some things up on that page. Enjoy!

The catalogue search page

The results page

Slackers update

2008-07-28T16:05:00.003+10:00

Hello to the few people left who check this.
Sorry I've been away from blogging for 2 months. I am a slack-arse.

Let us see, what has happened in the past few months?
1. http://www.brimbank.vic.gov.au/ got launched. We have met mostly positive feedback from the public. Staff have had mixed reactions, mostly to do with not being able to find things. The speed is an issue too, we have too many style-sheets and they all take AGES to load in IE (not so bad in Firefox for some reason).

2. I finally got rss feeds working from Amlib using very hack-ish methods. I edited a report file to be in rss format (which took ages I can tell you, stupid validators). I then ran the report to create a file called maltese.rss.txt (because Amlib wouldn't let me call it maltese.rss). I then upload the file to our server and alter the name of the file in the process.

Currently all of the above is happening manually. I am working on getting it all happening automatically. I can definately run the report and create the maltese.rss.txt file automatically. My only problems is in the auto-ftping (and that is to do with network restrictions more than anything else). I am planning to sweet-talk IT around tomorrow, so here's hoping.

3. I began creating the shell for the new Brimbank Libraries Catalogue. Oddly enough, it looks very similar to the website and uses the same style sheets (which of course means it initially takes ages to load). I've popped a screen display of it at http://www.tas666.com/library/brimbank_netopacs/MainMenu.htm . None of the links work really so don't bother with those. And things will look odd in certain parts as I adjust them. Feel free to comment on it if you hate it (or love it).

How's that for an update?!

Brimbank launches trial website

2008-05-14T12:05:00.002+10:00

That's right, after a month or so away, I've finally updated and with news this time. If you all head on down to http://development.brimbanklibraries.vic.gov.au/ then you can give comments and stuff on our website. I'd appreciate it if anyone who reads this did.

Some things to note, I've FINALLY gotten around to doing some multilingual things. If you go to Services and then Collections you'll see some of what will happen for the live website. Click on the Dinka button (err, Thuɔŋjäŋ in the top right) and the page should translate. You'll also see that some of the menu items will translate too. If you go back to English they'll go back. Eventually the whole site will translate. I don't think I have funding to get the alt text for images translated just yet but I will in the next fin year (come on July!).

Also look at the quick pick section (ignore the animation, we're working on that)...I finally found a use for a reading blog! Noone will go to it if we advertise it as 'reading blog' but if we stick it on every page as a review of our material, hopefully people will go to it. I'll just have to remember to put links in so that people can reserve the items.

That's all for now. Enjoy peoples!

Translating a library webpage

2008-04-11T11:53:00.002+10:00

Everyone has told me that setting up translations for a library webpage is difficult and involves a lot of planning and careful consideration of blah blah blah. Maybe I missed something but I have found the translation part of our new library website to be one of the easiest parts (so far).

Here are the steps I've followed.

Step 1: Make a website.
Step 2: Decide that you want the entire website to be in this alternate language (with the exception of news items which will be translated into alternate languages at different times).
Step 3: Copy all of the text you want translated into a Word document.
Step 4: Send to accredited translators.

The only real problems I have had with this is creating some language-specific content for each of my key languages. ie finding online resources to link to in the website links pages. Apart from that it all seems quite straightforward.

Using the above, I have translated all of the menus, all of the image descriptions and all of the content. The only pages I have not translated so far are topical news articles that won't be around when we launch the website. Instead I am going to write up some articles specific to the communities that read these languages and use those instead. Oh, I also haven't translated the minor language specific pages I have (ie I have a list of languages that we collect material in, each of those languages has a brief description of the library services we offer and then our standard brochure translated into that particular language).

To get all of this done, I have used a Joomla tool called Joom!Fish. It is marvellous. It allows you to easily translate a webpage without changing the structure of anything OR having to re-create your entire website. The program does not automatically translate things (like Google Translate or Babelfish) but instead gives you a box containing the current page data and then another box where you type in what you want to appear in that language. So when my patron looks at our website and changes it into Dinka, the main page will contain Dinka language translations of everything I've translated. I could also, if I wanted to, change pictures and applets to be Dinka specific. It's quite clever.

Joom!Fish, relies on a language file being present which contains all of the default text that Joomla supplies translated into different languages. For example, when you try to log in and the password is incorrect, Joomla supplies a message saying "your password is incorrect". The language file changes that to "blah blah blah" in whatever language it is for. Unfortunately I'm having trouble finding a Dinka language version (which wasn't unexpected) and an MSA/Arabic version (which was unexpected). Ah well, if it comes down to it I'll just make one.

The Library Science collection

2008-03-25T18:02:00.004+11:00

A bit off topic for this week I guess (seeing as it's not to do with my website project) but I am currently weeding our library-science collection and, well, I am starting to wonder what other libraries have in their collections.

A list of some of the less relevant things I have:

Library Service in Victoria produced by the Library Council of Victoria in April 1970 (and purchased later that year). Rivetting stuff. Highly relevant to a library in 2008.

Stress Control by Steve Bell. We actually have a large number of books on controlling stress, it doesn't really invite confidence in me having a good working environ here does it?

The Publishing and Review of Reference Sources which was published in 1987. Again, highly relevant, especially with the chapter on modern publishing methods such as the optical disk and those expensive online databases such as DIALOG.

In all honesty, the vast bulk of the collection has not been touched since the books were intially purchased. All of our library science periodicals are accessible online through our virtual resources. Currently these periodicals sit here and our staff can reserve them to read. Noone does. Instead we are going to make a push for staff to be notified by our databases when new issues of each LS periodical comes out and they can read them online (Dear Bob, The latest copy of inCite is available to read, isn't that fun? Lots of love, EBSCO).

I'd love to know what other libraries have in their collection though. So far I have kept a single book on building a library (it goes through how much space you should assign for each collection and I really haven't seen much else on the topic before) and reports that staff refer to frequently such as our annual report and a couple of years' worth of the survey of Victorian public libraries. Most everything else is available online, it's not like we need much of the book trends stuff in hardcopy anymore.

Photographs in the library

2008-03-18T17:46:00.002+11:00

We've decided to hire a professional photographer to give us some good quality images of our community using our libraries (instead of buying stock images). I imagined it would be a doddle; hire a photographer, line a bunch of people to come in, allow 10 minutes per person, tada, photos. Mostly it was easy, I'd just kind of forgotten about the people element of things.

1. Finding a photographer. We sent out three requests, two came back. Of the two one was better than the other. (easy).

2. Line a bunch of people to come in. I contacted a key representative at each of the branches doing this. They 'enthused' the staff to contact people they thought would be good in their photos from a wide range of backgrounds, nationalities and age groups. This didn't work too bad. (moderately easy).

3. Allow 10 minutes per person. Ha! You look at all those glamour shots in the glossy magazines and think "well, they probably took 50 photos in quick succession, picked the best one and then photoshopped the crap out of it". I can tell you not at all.

a) Lighting - it changes. It's dark. It's light. It needs a flash. A lesser flash. No too little. A bigger flash. Flashity flash flash flash. It's actually quite impressive, the camera's flash is connected wirelessly to every other flash in the building (two ones with umbrellas and a hand-held extra flash) and so when you click 'take photo'...FLASH!

b) Backgrounds - blurry, not blurry, wide lens, angled badly, move the furniture, lift the couch, stand on phone books, sit on phone books, how about we use the encyclopaedias to bolster up the wheely chair. But, having looked at the proofs, it's amazing what you can do with two phone books and a bit of focus.

c) People - they don't do what they're told (I'm one of them by the way, it turns out that move right means move right, not turn to the left).

d) Parents - 'why isn't my child featured more?' 'she smiles all the time, I don't know why she's crying now' 'she's so cute when she's throwing the $10,000 camera around isn't she?'.

4. Photos. These came out brilliantly. Some photos looked a bit boring to me (yup, it's a building, woo) but others came out amazingly good. There is one of a guy sitting on a couch reading a book. When the photo was being taken I though 'ho hum, very ordinary' but, when I saw the low quality proof I was sent, it's amazing. Also, the one of a guy with dreadlocks dropping books onto the head of an Italian man was very funny.

When our new website is launched I'm going to feature these photos all over the place. I'll post here to let everyone know. It's been an experience, I can tell you that.

Oh, and for anyone deciding to do this in the future. If your library has a steady stream of visitors coming in, I'd suggest not trying to do a time sheet beforehand unless you desperately want certain faces in the photos. Because of the time taken with each person (and the fact that people coming into the library are interesting and are very photogenic doing what they normally do), you can cause much angst to people who are on the time sheet and are either unphotogenic, unhelpful or impatient.

Facebook and my ILS

2008-03-03T18:27:00.002+11:00

Now maybe I'm just having a bit of a whinge (okay, I'm having a lot of a whinge), but a certain ILS that I have used was very keen on becoming a next-generation-style ILS. They were open to any ideas from us (the ILS-using customers) about how they could integrate the ILS into other areas of our library, aka Web 2.0. Why is it then that they won't allow me to integrate into Facebook?

I suppose my biggest gripe is probably with Facebook actually. I designed a small applet that would plug into Facebook and search our catalogue. Easy. It uses a custom-made form that sends the request on to our online catalogue. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't really like me using my form and adds a bunch of gobble-de-gook into the form to kill it. This extra data is very important (from Facebook's perspective) in that it allows me to keep track of who is using my applet and, maybe, store their data so that I can market to them. Of course this extra data is in no way compatable with my ILS' catalogue.

I sent off an email explaining my plight "Dear ILS, Please let this work. People won't click on a link that says 'search the library' but they might fiddle with a box that allows you to search the library. Hugs and kisses, C". Unfortunately they said "nup, can't be done, besides, people who want to search the library will click a button, just make it a link". I think the help people missed the point, I want LESS steps, not more. If I wanted more steps I'd put in a wizard.

Step one: Click "Search the library"
Step two: Choose what kind of item you want and click "Continue"
Step three: Select which library you want your item to be located at and click "Continue"
Step four: Choose the language you want your item in and click "Continue"
Step five: Choose what colour you would like your covers to be and click "Continue"
Step six: Type in what you would like your item to be about and click "Search" or choose from our predefined searches in the "Predefined Search Wizard" which has an easy 65 steps.

Maybe I'm too picky...and a minimalist. Less is more (more or less).

The hyperlinked library

2008-03-03T18:17:00.002+11:00

I had the pleasure of attending two excellent professional development thingymabobs last week (aka I sat and listened to people speak but calling it training would imply I had a formal-ish teacher).

The first one was called The Hyperlinked Library and was held by Michael Stephens of TameTheWeb. What a fascinating day. Not only did everything he said ring home, I also got to shmooze with other library staff who are interested in the Brimbank Libraries website which is being developed in Joomla. I got plenty of business cards and, unfortunately, have managed to lose the one I got from Michael Stephens. Ah well, he's easy enough to find an email address for.

It turns out that other libraries have tried using Joomla for their website. One lovely lady from *unnamed country library* did not like it at all. She'd used an older version of Joomla and remembered only problems in creating a community portal. After 3 months of glaring at Joomla, I'm apt to believe her. But I will make this work if it kills me (or, more likely, if it kills my job-share partner Andrew).

In Brimbank-Joomla news, we finally have a visa card which we can use to order things online. I don't think council appreciated us asking for a cheque for US$2 for our hosting for one month. Ah well. Visa it is! Huzzah! Because of our Visa, we now have a lovely new location for our Joomla site (previously we were using the boss' webspace).

For those interested in having a squizz : http://www.brimbanklibraries.com . Isn't it wonderful? Tricked ya! Maybe by the time someone reads this post I will actually have the website there, but currently it's a splash screen. We have a sandbox with the actual trial website on it.

The second personal development thingy was a leadership forum where library 'leaders' spoke about what they had done and then we split up into little focus group-esque things to talk about the issues that leaders face. It sounded very much like something I could have slept through but actually turned out to be very exciting. Hurray for training.

The TREVOR Awards

2008-02-04T18:17:00.000+11:00

For those of you who missed me speaking at Gulliver, let's just pretend I was awesome. In reality I was suprised that my voice lasted as long as it did (I'd been sick with a cold and, well, Friday I sounded like a frog with laryngitis). I think I owe my clearness to numerous cold and flu tablets and lozenges. Thankyou Cepacol.

Anyway, the talk didn't go as bad as I expected, I even got questions! I was nowhere near as good as Deb from Casey-Cardinia Library Corporation who 'wow'ed everyone with props and funny anectdotes, but noone fell asleep.

Luckily I stayed around after the forum for the presentation of the TREVOR award (presented by Alan Brough who, funnily enough, is about to start studying to be a librarian). The TREVOR (which stands for Trophy Recognising Excellence in Virtual Online Resources) was won by two libraries, Wellington Shire won the country award and Brimbank Libraries won the metropolitan award. I was shocked. As was the woman in charge of databases for Brimbank Libraries who had said earlier in the day "oh well there's no chance we'll win that!"

The trophy itself is a monument to bad taste. Imagine a netball trophy covered in those 'wow' stars from powerpoint presentations (sparkly blue of course) with a billboard on the top saying TREVOR.

Ah well, we won it though. Our patrons are learning. Next maybe they'll start joining our Facebook profiles and we'll have a gazillion friends and have MEGA events. 900 people at our storytimes, etc.

Gulliver's travels

2008-01-28T19:42:00.000+11:00

Guess who will be speaking at the Gulliver Forum this Thursday? That's right, it's me! By speaking I mean I'll be doing a short presentation on how I found the Learning 2.0 program. By presentation I mean some powerpoint slides whilst I cower behind the lecturn. (I hope there is a lecturn).

I probably should have written this earlier so you could all organise to come and listen to fantastic me. Ah well, I'd actually prefer there weren't too many people there, my public speaking skills are a tad rusty.

I am probably going to speak about how I enjoyed the program but, as an organiser for my library, found that most of our staff were either slightly under-confident about their skills or found it difficult to get time at work to do the program. In fact, the vast bulk of people who completed it did the majority of work from home.

Anyways, just thought I'd let you all know. The forum will be held at the Rendevouz Hotel in Melbourne on 31 January to 1 February from 9.30 onwards. I will be speaking the afternoon of the 1st (again, by speaking, I mean 5 minutes of me bitching about the negative aspects of the program and then closing on an inspirational statement about how it was all worth it because RSS rocks!)

Ye olde antique laptope

2008-01-16T21:38:00.000+11:00

Look at this laptop? I want one.

It's called a Steampunk Victorian Laptop.

Translation tools

2008-01-08T10:50:00.000+11:00

I hope everyone is having a lovely summer (or winter for my one non-Australian reader). Some of you have time off (and are gloating to me about it) and others are working through like me.

For those of you working through, this week's topic will be translation tools. ie Babelfish/Worldfish from Altavista, SysTranBox or Google's fancy ooh-la-la Language Tools.

I've always been a big Babelfish person myself. It is powered using the SysTran language tools and was one of the earliest big online translation tools. It uses SysTran software to power it and is rather good in European languages. It also contains the CJK languages.

SysTranBox (being powered by SysTran) has the same functionality as Babelfish but also contains translation in Arabic (but no CJK).

Google Language Tools is perhaps the most interesting tool though. It is fairly new but very comprehensive. It translates in the major European languages in addition to Arabic and the CJK languages. What is interesting though is that it allows you to perform searches in one language and have search results in another. It translates my search term, performs the search and then brings results back translated for me.

iePicture this: I am at the reference desk in my big armchair with a daiquiri in one hand and a Mills & Boon novel in the other when suddenly a young woman comes in wanting recipes in Arabic. Having the l33t cooking skills that I do (I can make porridge and I can sometimes not burn toast) I know that I will have to consult the internet. Onto Google Language Tools, I type in 'recipes' and tada, I have one column for Arabic recipe websites and another column of English translations to them. I can look through my column to see if there is anything that stands out as being useful and, once I have found something that seems good, I click on the Arabic result and my patron has her recipes. She then proceeds to worship me as the god of knowledge that I am.

Ah, I love my dreams. A shame I don't like daiquiris or Mills & Boon.

The worst thing about all of this is that none of the major tools translate Vietnamese. For that I use VDict Translation. It translates. It's quick. You can also roll over words with the mouse and it gives you brief definitions...lovely.

MySQL and Unicode (or the lack thereof)

2007-12-24T15:49:00.000+11:00

AARGH! I have just spent an entire day reading about how to get my website to go from "Trang chủ" to "Trang chủ". Did you know that the version of MySQL that I'm using is non-Unicode compliant? I did, I discovered it last week. I thought that this wouldn't cause too much grief, a random tag here and there not changing or something. I didn't realise that it meant that I could not translate ANY frigging headings/labels/site names/etc. I've got NCRs all over the place (no, I don't know what NCR means, something character something probably, I just know that the ủ thing is an NCR, &# defines it's an NCR, the number is the actual unicode code for the letter and the ; closes it off).

Anyways, what I have to do is convert the entire database into a new format (a unicode compliant one) which sounds like it'll be a nightmare. I read quite a number of articles on how to do it and usually got stuck after it said "step one". Ah well.

On a lighter note, all of you who are using RSS feeds will have just been re-sent ALL of my blog posts. Why this is I do not know, but har har.

Happy Festivus all! It's the festival for the rest of us!

Joomla! content management system

2007-12-17T18:06:00.000+11:00

Everyone lately seems very smitten with OpenSource software. I understand the lure, it's free and your support comes from the people who use and mantain it, not from the most holy of holies, the programmer.

I recently became one half of the Online Community Development Officer and, as such, have been having a bit of a look at OpenSource Content Management Systems (CMS). We are planning to use Joomla!.

Joomla is supposedly great. It does everything from a to z and will even wash the dishes (ha!). In reality I'm finding some quite critical flaws in it. The biggest flaw for me is it's un-Unicodeness. I don't know to what level of compliance it currently has, but it's not 100%. I read somewhere that the next version will be fully compliant but, well, I'm not using that one! It's not even doing some Vietnamese characters correctly. Liên lạc ended up as Li?n lạc. Also, the ạ went odd, in the title bar of the page it displays with the coding instead of the character.

Another bad thing is the difficulty in actually putting content into it. I don't know if it's just because I'm used to a different system that has a tree structure, but it's quite difficult for the novice to just enter the stuff they need...and why do they need different terminology to everyone else???

The good things though are very good. I am very easily able install new components that have been designed by others. I even created my own component by following the steps (so now my webpage searches my library catalogue directly). And there are a LOT of components out there that I can download, sometimes I think a few too many (because I don't really know what is good and what isn't). So now I have a website with Google maps, LibraryThing things and an events calendar. A pity it's still in super-beta (alpha?) so I can't show you all...and I'm pretty proud that it translates three words on the site into Vietnamese (hey, I'm getting there).

Hope this doesn't bore you too much until next week! I'll try and be less technical then.

Pharos - Print management for patrons

2007-12-11T14:11:00.000+11:00

I like Pharos. I've used to work for a place that wrote all of the internet bookings on a big arsed piece of paper and then took money at the desk for each printout. If someone claimed they hadn't had their allocated internet time then they would bitch and moan and generally annoy others.

Enter Pharos.

Pharos allows patrons to make their own internet bookings. Currently they can do it from our internal catalogue (looks the same as our external catalogue but doesn't show web results) but not our external catalogue. I think that the reason it's not external yet is due to the fear that it might not work and then people will expect us to make it work (bad excuse I know).

Pharos controls the length of time a person can use the computer (you can have a maximum of an hour service-wide, that means you can have 60 one minute sessions or one hour session) and gives warning when time is nearly up. It also allows us to specify which computers have which length (multimedia PC = one hour, quick internet = 15 minutes) and lets patrons book their own session or just hop on to a free PC.

Pharos also controls the printing. Patrons can put money onto their card via a coin loader (or we can do it at the desk for them) and then, when they print, it subtracts money based on what we tell it. It stores the print jobs in a queue that the patron has to release themself (they scan their barcode on a machine next to the photocopier and enter their pin number). This also means that Pharos controls photocopies, you just scan the card and tada, you can photocopy.

Bad things from my point of view - it doesn't allow you to set limits for branches currently. ie if we set an hour limit, it is service wide. I cannot set an hour limit at Deer Park and then a two hour limit for the Word Processor and have them seperate. It also means we have no coin boxes at our photocopiers so that we have to put money on to a card every time someone wants to photocopy. Similarly, there's no 'guest' login for tourists (although we have a bunch of 'guest' card numbers that we give to patrons on a little slip of paper).

I know there's a whole bunch of these out there, some are better than others. I quite like Pharos (although I find the interface to actually book a computer a bit confusing).

That's all til next week!

LibraryThing for Libraries

2007-12-03T16:33:00.000+11:00

Whilst doing statistics in Amlib (my Library's management system), I found some data corruption and decided to fix it. Deciding to update the 50,000 borrowers listed as belonging to Sunshine all at once was probably not my smartest ever idea. Due to this, I now have quite a bit of time to kill whilst the system does its thang.

I am lucky enough to be in charge of Amlib at Brimbank. I get to do exciting things like running reports, pulling out statistics and deciding whether or not we have the ability to do x, y or z. I also have the lovely task of fixing it when I screw it up (not if). Due to this, I went to an Amlib usergroup meeting last week at Cheltenham Library.

One of the items I was fascinated with was integrating LibraryThing data into our online catalogue. The demonstration by Kingston Library was VERY impressive. For quite a low cost, LibraryThing will show various 'user-created' items such as tags and links to similar items. This wasn't that impressive (Global Books in Print will do that). What was impressive is that it will only show similar books that are already held by the library. I honestly can't remember if it did this by searching the catalogue for the books (z39.50 protocol) or by uploading a list of the books each week. If it's a list of the books then I might have to get off my arse and get the LibrariesAustralia deletions working (don't ask, LibAust irritate me sometimes).

If you're interested in having a look, head to the Kingston Library Catalogue and perform a title search for the book jPod. If you click on the title of the book, you will be taken to the full catalogue record which SHOULD load the LibraryThing data. Unfortunately Kingston's catalogue is rather slow so it may take you a while to get there (and then, today, it wouldn't load the LibraryThing data). Impressive nonetheless.

I won!!!!!

2007-11-26T16:28:00.000+11:00

I won! I won!
فزت!
我赢了!
Ooh, and the page even does non-Roman script. How good is today?

Just to gloat a bit further, I just won a joystick, dual controls and steering wheel control set from the Learning 2.0 program. I have not a clue what that really means and I think I may possibly have to 'acquire' some kind of computer game to play it (not that I am condoning piracy of course). I'll take a pic and post it when I get it :)

Are you free Mrs Slocombe?

2007-11-26T15:11:00.000+11:00

In my last post, someone left a comment about libraries having Mrs Slocombe type people. For those of you who don't know, Mrs Slocombe was woman in a show called Are You Being Served? (and it's crappy sequel, Grace and Favour). She was rude and rather arrogant and always thought she knew better than the customers.

Unfortunately this seems to be a common stereotype of librarians. Imagine a tiny little old woman with her hair in a bun. A nice calming stereotype. Then ensure that she's a Nazi sadist and that's what some people think of librarians.

When I tell people that I'm a librarian they somehow feel guilty. It is as if, by telling them I'm a librarian, I am secretly saying "YOU DON'T READ AND I CAN TELL BECAUSE I KNOW ALL OF YOUR DIRTY SECRETS YOU EVIL LITTLE NON-READER". I'll often get the 'oh I last went to a library in 1942 and still have the book out' or 'oh I never go to a library, I like to buy my books' or, worst of all, 'oh, a librarian, do you know the book Life as a Vapor as it changed my life and of course you've read it because you're a librarian and...what? You don't know it? How come? It won the Mumphmudge Prize for Literature' thus making me feel as if I've failed in my many years of librarianing because I haven't read some obscure book on the development of my soul.

Oops, lost my point...stereotypes. I wonder if we're the only profession with our panties in a twist over the stereotype of us? As a whole I don't think it's TOO bad (a helpful little old woman is a nice stereotype...of course the evil school librarian stereotype isn't so good, nor is the stereotype that because you have an overdue book we are going to beat you with encyclopædias if you ever step into our library).

Anyways, what does everyone think about our stereotypes?

Non-Learning 2.0 posts!

2007-11-08T11:14:00.000+11:00

Well I've finished Learning 2.0 and I'm going to try and post semi-regularly (unlike Zoya who is posting daily).

This post is actually going to be along the same lines as what Zoya has been posting this week on her blog Zoyasstuff, it is going to be about getting patrons to serve themselves instead of being chained to us.

At Sydenham Library we have implemented self-check units so that patrons can issue items to themselves. This isn't a new concept, I've worked with them at a few libraries (from Narre Warren library where it was a computer in the line at the circulation desk and people had to queue past it, to a private library in Sydney which is unstaffed and had 100% self checkouts). What seems to be the new concept is moving away from the idea of forcing our customers to come to us to be served. Staff seem to be very resistant to this. And it's not that they're resistant to self-checkout, they're resistant to making the customers use it at the cost of using us.

I see both sides of the argument. I've worked in customer service. I liked working in customer service. In fact I take pride on the fact that I can converse with pretty much anyone whilst working in a library (apart from Evil Gypsy Woman of course).

Arguments against forcing patrons to do self-checkout.
- Not everyone wants to do it. Some people are very resistant to the technology and would rather go to the desk. Some just would like a chat.
- We lose the personal touch of physically eyeballing all of our patrons.
- The technology doesn't always work.

Arguments for forcing patrons to do self-checkout.
- It reduces queues. It is cheaper to have 6 self-checkout machines than 6 staff members. In fact, it's cheaper to have 6 self-checkout machines for a year than 3 staff members.
- It gives people more autonomy in what they are borrowing. Although we encourage people to borrow anything, how many people really want a librarian seeing that they are borrowing a book on erectile dysfunction or divorce?
- The staff are not always as approachable as we make ourselves out to be.

See, my three points play off against each other.
Not everyone wants to do it, but most people don't want queues. We lost the personal touch but people don't always want that (and I'll comment on the personal thing below). The technology doesn't always work but, then again, neither do the staff.

With the personal touch thing (which, personally, I think is the biggest issue with forcing people to do self check), this can be acheived in other ways. Staff who are not forced to sit at a desk and wait for people to come to them can be utilised in other ways. Firstly, station someone near the self-check machines to talk to people as they use them. It is like the idea of a 'library greeter', someone whose job is to greet people as they enter the library and direct them to places, except that this person would be able to deal with the machines not working and take money for fines. Also, if someone wanted a staff member to issue their items for them, they can walk to the self-check machine and do that.

Why not roster staff to monitor different areas of the library? Instead of being at a desk, staff could wander around offering help to people who look lost and just generally talk to people (it looks like you're borrowing A Wizard of Earthsea, did you know she has a new book out?). We'd have to teach staff to do this well, we don't want them harrassing people! Also, to make staff approachable in this way (and to differentiate them from customers), we'd need some kind of uniform.

Also, just so people know it does work, the private library I mentioned above is in a member's only club in Sydney. The library is open 24 hours a day and is unstaffed. Most of the members are men aged 50+ and are resistant to using computers. Previously the members wrote their membership number and the number of the book in a little booklet and this was used to ensure everyone returned their books. When they went to using a self-checkout system, there was quite a bit of resistance but, after a while, the members saw the benefits of simply scanning a barcode (much easier than writing it in all honesty). Although there are some members who would rather the good old days, in general takeup was good and it did wonders for advertising the library to the rest of the members (look at the wonderful things they are doing, come have a look at their resources, etc etc etc).

There, I think I've written enough for today. Comments are appreciated, like Zoya, I like hearing everyone's opinion.

#23 Is this really the end? Or just the beginning ...

2007-10-26T14:56:00.000+10:00

I've finished. Woo!

Reflections:
RSS rocks for work-purposes! I was never able to understand what it could really be used for or anything...I love it! I leave it open in a FireFox tab whilst I'm working and check it twice a day (or more if I'm a bit bored).

Blogging is interesting. I tried taking my blog a few different ways and someone had a criticism about each of them (one rather public one too). The only one that everyone seemed to like was me gossiping about myself and I'd run out of ideas too quickly...I'm just not that interesting (although I have to admit that yes, I am the father of Hooba-Jooba Spears, Britney and I did the deed and now I'm forced to pay maintenance to her even though she earns a squillion dollars and I am a public librarian). Honestly I don't think my blog will continue much longer after this program, I'll try...but I couldn't even keep a diary (and I've tried that too). Maybe I should set a time aside once per week to write what I've done and learnt, someone might care (or not).

I've also learnt that history is more interesting than blogs. Out of all the blogs I've read for this program, this is by far my favourite.

Criticisms:
The way that we ran the program left some staff disinterested. I know that we're only half way through the program currently, but there are a number of staff who have made their blog and nothing else (or not even made their blog). Finding time in each day to do the activities is very difficult. Personally I did a lot of the work and readings at home. I think it may have been better if we'd organised some 'groups' of people to go off-desk at the same time and do the activities together. This would have motivated people more and also stipulated a time where they could 'play'.

Part time library staff are also at a big disadvantage, it's difficult to do all of these activities in 15 minutes a day when you work 2 days per week and the entire shift is spent on the desk.

Congratulations:
I'd like to congratulate everyone who made this program possible, especially Helene Blowers for putting it together and Lynette Lewis for going through the 800 or so blogs each week. I'd also like to congratulate anyone who has attempted any of this, just think of all the things you've learnt!

#22 Audiobooks (or "The end is in sight ")

2007-10-26T14:19:00.000+10:00

HAHAHA. Oh you have to do this.

I listened to the start of David Copperfield done by some computer voice. It's rather funny. Click on cprfd001.mp3. It contains the contents of the book. For example; ''Tommy rattles, ex ex vee eye eye" hehehe.

I think that computer-generated voices will need a bit more work. Without tones, the book sounds ridiculous and boringly read. Good audiobooks are read by good readers. Compare the above against Briar Rose read by a human. Her voice and tones aren't fantastic, but at least she knows where and how long to pause.

Anyways, this activity was supposed to be about audiobooks. I think it's a very good idea for them to be online (maybe not in my library's area where home computer usage is very low, but in general they are a fantastic idea). In fact, I've mentioned LibriVox before. LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Unfortunately the files are not streamed like those from Project Gutenberg and I had to download individual chapters to my computer...but it's still free!

I think these would be great in the catalogue. If I could (somehow) link the 505 Contents note to the actual chapters of each of these e-books, I'd love it. I'm listening to Three Hundred Tang Poems, Volume 1 in Chinese. It's recorded in Mandarin and Hokkien, with some chapters in Taiwanese or Cantonese. I wish I could do it...hmmm...nope, not easily I can't. Bugger.

#21 Podcasts, Smodcasts!

2007-10-26T13:43:00.000+10:00

Hmm, I didn't go so well with this exercise. I am not really an 'audio' person. I don't listen to the radio and would much rather watch something than listen to it (ie I'd rather read a book than have someone read it to me).

I did a search of Podcast Alley for Liechtenstein and came up with a 'school' in Liechtenstein that supposedly does them. I am a tad confused as to what the school is though because, after watching the podcasts (which all turned out to be videos), it looks like it is a school for Jonny Knoxville wannabees. Ah well.

The search engine sucks, I tried finding a podcast on Dana International (an Israeli singer) and ended up with all the podcasts with the word Dana OR the word International in it. I couldn't figure out how to get only the ones with both.

I then just randomly clicked on one of the podcasts on the front page (some Harry Potter one called MuggleCast) and the first entire minute and a half was taken up with ads...one for something called GoDaddy.com with some lecherous sounding man...ugh.

Just a note...the size of some of the podcasts is HUGE. The one I started listening to was 24meg for 44 minutes. I guess that's not too much really...not compared to video files.

If I see podcasts of things I'm interested in then I might listen to them, otherwise I don't really see myself doing this on any regular basis.

For a library, I think it would be good to podcast interviews with local residents for a local history project, or even podcasts of speakers that come to the library (if you can get the permission of the speaker that is). I've seen some libraries do podcasts about their libraries...'the reserve collection is kept on the second floor of the Dumbledoor Library'...that kind of thing (yes, I'm still listening to the H.Potter podcast). I'm not sure about this, I guess for people who are more audio-based it would be a good idea.

#20 You too can YouTube

2007-10-25T19:47:00.000+10:00

I love YouTube. I use it to watch music clips and parts of old comedy shows (like FastForward). I am quite glad that they merged with GoogleVideo (as having it compete was a bit silly when they did the same thing but YouTube's interface was better).

For a library website, I really like the 'Related Videos' feature. We could use that in the catalogue for related books. Or we might even catalogue YouTube videos. If there was anything of value to my community, I cannot see any reason we wouldn't catalogue the media. We could possibly even embed the player in the catalogue record (although what MaRC tag I'd use for that I don't know!). Maybe I'll try it and see what happens. Wish me luck!

I've tried to embed one of my favourite YouTube clips below...hopefully it works! All I've done is copy the 'Embed' text below.

#19 Discovering Web 2.0 tools

2007-10-21T22:11:00.000+10:00

I was going to pick LuLu as my tool for this activity. It is an online publishing house that (I think) is going to revolutionise the publishing industry. It allows ANY writer to self-publish and LuLu will only print the copies that you pay for (so if you only want to print 12 copies of your work, 12 copies get printed). It will also sell your books for you so, if it costs $5 to print a book, you can charge $10 through LuLu and make a profit. Nice huh?

I've chosen not to do LuLu though because I've known of it before. A friend of mine was looking for somewhere to publish a book that he made and I gave it to him then.

Instead I have chosen Care2, a 'global network of organizations [sic] and people who Care2 make a difference'. My first comment is that the site is VERY full of information, a little too crowded in my opinion. In fact, finding out exactly what the site was was rather difficult. As near as I can gather, it's a 'profile' site for people who 'care' (like MySpace or Facebook where you advertise yourself for friends instead of to find someone who wants to help you change things).

Good things: The interesting search ways. Instead of just 'searching' for something you click on a term which brings up more terms for you to click on. After a while you receive a list of members. http://www.care2.com/c2c/people/tag/books/Gone+with+the+Wind <--that is a link to all people who like the book Gone with the Wind. I clicked on 'find people', then chose 'interested in books' and then 'Gone with the Wind'.

The site itself is very similar to any other profile site (ie MySpace) but you can give other users butterflies for being a Care2 member (ie you earn them for being good).

Finding petitions to sign is also very easy. You can create your own (ie Landrights for gay sperm whales), advertise it and have people 'sign' it online. Most of the petitions seem to be American based (about the US president or US politicians).

Bad things: Crowded, crowded, crowded!

VERY American based. I don't know if that's a cultural thing, but it's a tad daunting.

To do anything you need to sign in (I hate that kind of stuff, but that's a personal thing).

#18 Web-based Apps: They're not just for desktops

2007-10-21T21:55:00.000+10:00

Let's see, signing up to ZoHo was fairly easy. I entered some details and they sent me a confirmation email. I didn't even have to access the confirmation email to use it either (which, as I'm doing this whilst watching tv on my couch, is quite good as I sent it to work).

Saving documents was easy, as was posting them to Blogger (in fact, it was MUCH easier than from flickr which required me to set up a whole bunch of things). I don't know if that means ZoHo has a better working relationship with Blogger or they're just better hackers.

Features-wise...all the standard modern word processing stuff is there; styles, headings, etc. Personally I like Google Docs better, maybe because of their spreadsheet capabilities.

Evil Gypsy Lady

2007-10-14T22:48:00.000+10:00

Certain people have made comments about my inability to blog regularly. If my memory serves me correctly, these may be the same people who insinuated I have too much time on my hands at work for blogging too much!

Anyways, it is a Sunday night and I am watching the end of Mr & Mrs Smith (average action film starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pit). Whilst watching Brangelina argue and shoot things is fun, I thought I might blog a bit too.

The topic of today's blog is Evil Gypsy Lady (EGL for short). EGL was a patron of mine when I worked at a certain library service. She seemed to take great offence to the fact that I was:
a) male
b) not going to pull every Jackie Collins novel ever published out of my ar$e for her to borrow.

I remember asking someone else to serve her one time. I then felt really guilty for asking Ms. Librarian to do this as I knew it wouldn't end well. EGL proceeded to call Ms. Librarian a 'b!tch' and tell her that she 'hoped she got lost in the desert with no camels or water'. She then proceeded to use a four letter word starting with f (not fork) in front of children at the top of her voice and had to leave. I believe she received a politely worded letter from our CEO telling her not to come back.

EGL is easily distinguished by the tea-cosy she wears on her head and the shawl that she wears. She hates male librarians and is in love with Jackie Collins. Her nickname came about when she 'cursed' Ms. Italian for not procuring an early Jackie Collins novel. Poor Ms. Italian (who, by the way, is living more happily than ever...which just goes to show that EGL's cursing powers were rather bad).

#17 Playing around with PBWiki

2007-10-14T22:34:00.000+10:00

Hmm, added my link. I like the WYSIWIG editor but it failed on me when trying to add the link (error in the page) and I had to go to the old-fashioned editor.

Our library is going to be using a pbwiki wiki (because of the WYSIWIG editor) for an 'Ideas box' where staff can log ideas and discuss them in an online environ. I am hoping it might get ideas floating across the entire library service instead of keeping them confined to a branch. It will be confined to library staff and password protected, even just to view it. I'd like to have it hosted on an internal server, but I don't want to spend money on something like this if it turns out staff are notgoing to use it (and I can just convert it across if it works well).

Because of the Ideas Box, I've had a bit of a play around with wikis. I even tried setting one up on my webserver (it comes bundled with it) but it had WAY too many options that I had not a clue about (and the server is slow). Honestly, I bought the space just so I could have my email address...one day I might put something on there, but mostly I just use it to test stuff for work.

#16 So what’s in a wiki?

2007-10-10T17:13:00.000+10:00

Wiki wiki wiki! I quite like wikis, in fact I've editted some things on wikipedia. Not much, but a few things.

Looking at Library Success, there are a couple of things that caught my eye.

Services in a multi-lingual environment.
Very interesting for Brimbank as we're a community that has a very strong multi-lingual focus (we collect in about 16 different languages, the newest being Bosnian). Some of the information about brochures and the like was interesting, I might even make some editings on there if we do anything fancy.

Staff training.
Also interesting, more because of the programs that were implemented (although no mention of the Learning 2.0 model on there)

That's all for now.

And here's to you Mrs Robinson...

2007-10-07T14:50:00.000+10:00

Guess who is pregnant? That's right, it's Mrs Robinson and she's pregnant to me!

I love library gossip. Let's see some of the things I've been gossiped about since I started working in libraries.

1. Who I sleep with (men, women, no-one).
2. That I'm a virgin.
3. That I'm a giant ho (same person who thought I was a virgin changed their mind and decided I was a ho).
4. That I'm dating/sleeping with:
a) Monica (Library Tech Extraordinaire)
b) Tracy (bet ya didn't hear that!)
c) Ruth (80 year old Doveton woman)
d) Perren (a friend from highschool)
e) Paul the shelver
f) Steven the lecturer
g) Suzie (cataloguer at Latrobe Uni)
h) Eda the fashionable librarian
i) Mrs Robinson

Actually, that's about it. Why do library staff need to know who I'm sleeping with? It's not any of them! (I have a policy of never dating a co-worker).

Although, finding out that Mrs Robinson is pregnant was new. And if she's pregnant, I must be the father because we've talked on the phone and I called her Honeypie (Lucy, if you're reading this you'll know that my swear-jar is empty if I'm honeypie'ing people). Just for everyone else, honeypie is what a former co-worker used to call people who irritated her on the phone.

Example:
"Look Honeypie *grinds teeth*, if the power is out then your computer will not work no matter how much you yell at me...no, not even if you plug it into another powerpoint".

Gnoos

2007-10-07T13:53:00.000+10:00

I've just registered for Gnoos. It's an aussie blog search engine. Kind of like all of the other blog search engines we've been using but only for Australian content. It's worthwhile looking at if you want some local blogs.

Also, in response to my last blog post, I stick by it all :P Technology is fast advancing and we've not really had anything like this since the industrial revolution. It will take at least a generation for all of the new gizmos and gewgaws to infiltrate right through. I may not see it in my life, but I believe it's inevitable. Inevitably inevitable (Team America quote for those of you who know it).

#15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0 ...

2007-10-05T20:00:00.000+10:00

I found this exercise fascinating. The very first thing I noticed was, of the five speakers listed in the exercise, only one was female. For a female dominated industry, I find that quite sad. Why aren't more females spouting the crap that us males spout? Equal rights rah rah. I find it even more pathetic because all of the strong advocates of Web 2.0 technologies in libraries that I know are female. I liase with librarians in New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria, and only two male librarians spring to mind who advocate this, the other 20 or so are female. (Maybe it's because the only people talking about this are either academic librarians who have to justify their employment with innovative research or upper management of IT companies wanting us to use their products...or is that just my jaded view?)

Back to Library 2.0. The most interestesting article to me was 'To better bibliographic services' by John Riemer. As a cataloguer, he talks about using existing metadata (our library catalogues) to enhance our collections. This is something close to my heart, I believe that all libraries do way too much duplication and that there should be easy ways of acquiring all kinds of things. Book data is very easy to acquire (log in to LibrariesAustralia, edit my holdings and ta-da, I have a catalogue record for my library) but data for other media are lacking. Even something as commonplace as a Naruto DVD required me to make the record myself (we are a small, poor public library, we do title cataloguing for such works and I wouldn't even bother making it available to everyone else, it would be lovely if someone did full cataloguing with tables of contents, etc). Even better would be linked tables of contents/chapter listings. With audio this would be brilliant and could link to snippets of the music that are available on various CD sites. I understand there'd be copyright implications, even for 10 second snippets of music, but it would still be nice.

Sorry, got distracted (it happens so easily). Actually, the distraction works for me. One of his 'hints' is to adopt web features...things like linking in to data that is already available (ie snippets of music). Maybe even link to reviews. We're hoping to get something similar working at Brimbank Libraries with a link to LibraryThing. Hopefully, we'll be able to get LibraryThing to connect to our data and give suggestions for other books to read. This is currently available in things like Bowker's FictionConnection but, well, this doesn't integrate as easily as LibraryThing would (and costs a crapload more).

I also thought Wendy Schultz's article 'To a temporary place in time...' was interesting, mostly because I don't really agree with her forecasting. Firstly, she assumes that libraries will be a quiet place in the future (ha! I wish they were quiet now...has she ever been in a public library?) and that just got my goat. I don't want my library to be quiet. Quiet areas, yes. Comfortable, yes. Quiet everywhere? No. I'd rather my public library be comfortable and cosy, like a living room. I want couches. I want a fireplace. I want someone to serve me a hot chocolate and bring me the latest Who Weekly and call me sir. Personally, I think libraries are going to end up as entertainment only venues. We'll have free gadgets (virtual reality spaces), free reading material (the latest Virginia Andrews books, sure she'll be 986 years old and dead for 900 of them but she'll still churn them out) and somewhere you can dump the kids whilst you go shopping (storytime 7.1). Our specialist skills will all fall flat, very few people go to a public library to get research done. Academic and school libraries will still exist (if only to help teach scholars proper was to search the Googlenet) but public libraries won't be for that kind of stuff.

I was interviewed recently as part of a research project looking into the library services for Baby Boomers and I think I'm quite jaded. If the physical library exists at all in 100 years, it will be as a data storage centre. Although people say they can't live without books, in all honesty, they're going to all die off soon enough (myself included) and new technologies will emerge that supercede paper. They can already create a screen that is as thin as two credit cards, and technology will only get better. I'm fairly certain that I'll see something that supercedes paper as a reading medium in my lifetime. After all, I'm young enough that I don't need a book to do anything really, sure I don't like reading for fun on a computer, but I'd much rather read a recipe on one than store 600 cookbooks on a shelf in the kitchen.

Maybe I'm just too jaded today.
/end rant

#14 Getting not-so-technical with Technorati

2007-10-05T18:39:00.000+10:00

Today's post comes courtesy of my friend's laptop and is made using Windows Vista. An interesting experience which involves lots of pretty (but useless) things that slow down my 'computer experience'.

Anyways, today I looked at Technorati. Oddly enough, a search for Learning 2.0 (in the blogs tab) does NOT bring Helene Blowers blog up first. Luckily it's on the first page, but LibraryBytes is down the bottom of the first page when I performed my search. She's lower down because she has less 'Authority' (click on the word to read Technorati's definition).

Because Library 2.0 is kind of boring to search for (I think I've had enough of it for this week), I searched for Liechtenstein (bet you didn't see that coming!). As of today (October 5, 2007), there were 3663 blog posts about Liechtenstein (the first was a Runescape guide of all things), 33 blogs about Liechtenstein (including one called the Liechtenstein National Blog which wasn't in any of the languages spoken in Liechtenstein) and some videos and photos of Liechtenstein which were mostly crap. For some reason, a lot of sites on Liechtenstein are in Japanese...I'm wondering if it's a popular Japanese tourist destination...then again, one of the sites was on getting an internship in Liechtenstein so maybe Japanese bankers want to work there due to the lack of tax.

With the search results, they seem to be chronologically ordered for blog posts and popularly ordered for blogs. Great for blogs I guess, bad for posts. The Runescape thing only mentioned Liechtenstein because Runescape now has more players than Liechtenstein has residents (34,247 residents of Liechtenstein according to the CIA World Factbook entry.

All in all, I think Technorati is probably the best blog search engine of them all (even if it's not the most comprehensive, it was very easy to use) and I've signed up and all so that other people can read the boringness that is my life.

Speaking of my life, hi to all the CCLC readers out there!!!

#13 Tagging, folksomonies & social bookmarking in Del.icio.us

2007-10-04T21:05:00.000+10:00

Maybe I'm too much of a cataloguer, but I like tagging stuff with uniform tags. I understand how tagging works (and I quite like the idea of people tagging within a library catalogue), but I do understand that it needs a wide userbase to work (ie, of the 60,000 active Brimbank borrowers, I doubt any more than 200 would add any tags to our catalogue, this wouldn't be very helpful). Tagging in a union catalogue would be of more use if all of the member libraries had access to the tags.

Anyways, an online favourites thing like del.icio.us might be of use, I update some of my favourites every time I log on (ie for webcomics where I read them sporadically, they have to be updated to the last time I read them) and I didn't see that as very easy with del.icio.us.

Umm, it's rather late and I'm a tad uncaring about this at the moment (bad I kn0w) so I'll natter some more tomorrow.

Oh! I added a 'search Brimbank's catalogue' thing to my sidebar. I always wondered if it would work so I want everyone to search for a book in our catalogue. Go search. Now. (Although it's possibly screwed because our webserver is cracking the irits this week). Try anyway!

(I also have a del.icio.us tag in my sidebar...gee that word is hard to type)

PS Library User Calculator. Cool (although none of our magazines are $2...and who buys a movie for $4? Are they only buying crap?)

#12 Roll your own search engine with Rollyo

2007-09-28T12:02:00.000+10:00

Firstly, let me just say thankyou to Jewinda of Library Shenanigans for her idea to add StatCounter to my blog. S/he doesn't know about me at all but I liked the idea after reading her blog (I'll be able to see where in the world people are coming from!). Her blog is very amusing, I LOVE the review of The Post-Birthday World (The characters were self-indulgent, boring twats...bland, bland, bland).

On to today's activity...Rollyo. Rollyo allows you to create a customised search engine. I had a search using the Public Domain E-Books search engine for Alice in Wonderland...the results weren't anything special and the paid ads that are popped in the middle of my results are hard to distinguish from the actual results.

I registered and, when I went to create my search roll, I found no way to use a generic *.xxx type thing (ie a search roll that would search all Victorian government sites would be *.vic.gov.au). I looked for the non-existant help files for a while...naughty naughty naughty! Help is always good. Finding the search-roll after I'd created it wasn't too easy either.

AHA! If I type in .li as the website, it finds anything in Liechtenstein. Although I just found out that it ONLY searches top level domains, so if you find a subdirectory you want to allow your search engine to search through...tough (ie a wikipedia article or the cia's Factbook).

Rollyo is a good idea but I'm not too keen on the limitations.

PS I do love how I can make the widget search my blog though!

#11 All about LibraryThing

2007-09-26T21:28:00.000+10:00

I've used LibraryThing before so it was a quite easy activity for me to use it again. I had 25 of my own books on there already and added a few more so I could write about it on here. I think it's quite a good idea but honestly can't see the practical use of it for most people (maybe apart from the Suggester). I do like how it can link into the opac of a library catalogue and 'recommend' books, and I suppose that really wouldn't work without all of us people out there making catalogues on there.

I did like it how it told me that I had a duplicate in my library already. But, when I searched for new books, there was no way of clicking on the book to see if it was the right one (especially as my covers were different to the ones I found).

Anyways, it's available at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/tas666

#10 Play around with Image Generators

2007-09-25T19:00:00.000+10:00

Haha I really enjoyed this. I concentrated on 3D Stereogram which allows you to draw a picture, press the generate button and then it does one of those 3D eye puzzle things. I found it really easy to get it to work on my laptop monitor (much better than on paper when I tried doing the in that book thing). It turns out I suck at drawing with a mouse but the below picture should say 'tas666'. Click on it to get the full picture (it doesn't work so easily small). You have to look through the picture...ie look at it unfocused and then slowly bring your eyes back into focus.

PS Bah, just realised that that's as big as the picture gets. Sorry!

#9 Finding Feeds

2007-09-25T15:01:00.000+10:00

Hmm, this didn't go so well either (probably because it is to do with rss which stands for either Really Stupid Stuff or Randomly Stuffed Scribble...I can't remember which).

I started by picking websites I sometimes go to. None of them had rss things on them...not that I could find them even if I wanted to as the symbols are always tiny!

I then tried searching Google Blogs thing. It searched the contents of blogs (great for if I wanted to find a post) but not the general topic...all I wanted was a blog on Liechtenstein (maybe just a news blog...I couldn't find an rss feed on the Liechtensteiner Vaterland which just goes to prove that I am destined to be rss-less).

Next step...Feedster. Same problem as Google Blog Search.

Topix on the other hand...I searched for Liechtenstein. Not only did it do the above but it also recommended that I look at the Liechtenstein News page which was just what I wanted. Down the bottom in tiny little letters was the rss area. Did you know that Prince Hans-Adam II von and zu Liechtenstein is worth US$4.5 billion and is the 6th richest royal in the world? Lucky bugger.

With Technorati I did like the tabs that let me filter my search from blogs/videos/etc (even if all the photos were holiday snaps of people I didn't know).

With the database search, I found an orange button and clicked it (which turned out to be an rss button luckily). What I am sent daily is a list of articles relating to my search term. I can click on a button to access the full text (which hopefully means I won't need to log in...I will have to try from home).

Daily book installments via rss

2007-09-24T12:22:00.000+10:00

Okay, I just got excited. Whilst looking at rss stuff, I stumbled across DailyLit, a site that sends installments of books to you via rss or email. It's really cool! I am now getting Alice's Adventures in Wonderland sent to my rss feed reader daily. I can read a chapter a day! Hmm, 9 books of the bible there and no Qu'ran. Ah well.

Also, I found a free online audiobook service where volunteers read out-of-copyright text into a microphone and then it is made available. LibriVox is the name of the site. I'm considering volunteering...not because my voice is anything special, just because I am quite keen for mass digitising of audiobooks to take place. Although I'm having trouble listening to any of them...it may be due to our firewall at work though...I'll have to try from home.

Lucky last link, Fokus Deutsches - an online video instruction series for learning German. Exciting! There's a few languages there actually, all European though (I guess learning to speak tonal languages wouldn't be so easy online!)

#8 Make life "really simple" with RSS & a newsreader

2007-09-24T11:21:00.000+10:00

It's amazing how you get really excited about something, hit one stumbling block and then all of your excitement vanishes in a puff of smoke. I have that with RSS, I do not know why but even the term makes me want to fall asleep.

Anyway...I set up my account on bloglines and have subscribed to a few feeds: 025.431: The Dewey blog and Librarians' Internet Index being the two top ones. The Dewey blog seems really interesting, they talk about crap and then DDC it. One of the latest entries was about the drought in Australia, the USA and Bulgaria and how you'd assign items to do with it. i.e. I'd assign a work on monitoring and predicting drought around the world at 363.3492963 - Droughts + Surveilance (not that we'd ever use such a longwinded number). Although they do get a lot more longwinded - 796.510979589 which is backpacking in Deschutes County, Oregon, USA.

The Librarians' Index is a tad different, they seem to post an interesting webpage/topic each day. Seems like way too much to read to me but I can flick and ignore at will!

My subscriptions are available at http://www.bloglines.com/public/tas666

Oh, and I found it very difficult to figure out how to create the above, I had to fiddle with my account to make it public, then choose yet ANOTHER username (even though I have one) and then find a way to the bloglines homepage and click on Blogrolls (which I guessed was what I needed). Ah well, all done now!

Teehee

2007-09-21T17:37:00.000+10:00

I love this ad.

PS I yoinked this from YouTube using ZamZar. It converts all kinds of files...docs to pdfs and Word 2007 docs to Word XP docs!

#7 Blog about technology

2007-09-21T15:55:00.000+10:00

Hmm, a technology blog? What to pick? What to talk about?

I think I might talk about IMDB. Personally, I LOVE the Internet Movie Database. I get lost in it. All I want to do is find out who Joe Bloggs was and, after 3 hours of clicking on different names and going 'oh, he was in THAT', I realise it's possibly time to go back to what I was originally looking for. It's also helpful for verifying things, whoever is entering these entries normally enters tonnes of information. Unfortunately they rarely enter the caterer (the poor forgotten caterer).

Not only does IMDB have information about the movie, there are also reviews from people who have seen the movie...not paid reviewers but everyday people.

If I'd been smart enough to look at the IMDB entry for Lady Chatterley, I would not have wasted an hour of my time seeing it (and yes I know the movie goes for three hours, after nodding off during one of the 'love' scenes, I left). At least one person mentioned that I would have fallen asleep if I didn't like DH Lawrence (which I don't...but some of the movie adaptions of his novels have been good).

Hmm, as I'm typing this I just realised that technology could be outside the internet realm. In that case then I want robotic vacuum cleaner...one of those ones that sense furniture and vacuum around it. Sure it wouldn't do the corners well but it would do the rest of the carpet. (Although, if the Choice Magazine tests are anything to go by, it doesn't do that so well either). Ah well.

Putting internet images in your blog

2007-09-19T14:33:00.000+10:00

I have also created a document on linking to flickr images in your blog. You can use this process to link to almost any online image available. Remember to mention where you got the image from though and don't claim it as your own!

The document is available here in pdf format.

Logging in to blogger

2007-09-19T14:31:00.000+10:00

Just to let everyone know that webgurl from Eastern Regional Libraries has put together some instructions on getting a blog started on her 23squared blog.

Click on this link to view them.

#6 More Flickr Fun

2007-09-18T10:00:00.001+10:00

More Flickr Fun was a bit of a lie this week I think.
Link number 1 was to MappR. This might have been nice to use, I don't know though because the page doesn't work (I've been trying for 24 hours now).
Link number 2 was to Flickr Colr Pickr which loaded the page but not the Flash movie (possibly to do with our firewall).
Link number 3 was to Montagr. This loaded a single image in the top left hand corner of the screen and then did nothing else. My 'dog' mosaic was more a dog image (although there were 1032 pages of single images).

This is not fun.

ALTHOUGH...that being said, after about 40 minutes on the phone to the lovely Anthony in IT, he enabled Flash movies temporarily on my computer and I had access to Flickr Colr Pickr. It's COOL!!! (a bit odd in the colours it picks sometimes...but COOL nonetheless). I've seen colour search engines before but this is the prettiest by far (which may have something to do with me not looking at any of them since I was at uni).

And whilst I was on the phone I did this (I couldn't leave the phone and I'd finished all of my spine labelling and I didn't have anything else close...I was working... honest!)

#5 flickr

2007-09-17T16:14:00.001+10:00

Teaching myself to play piano
Originally uploaded by tas666

This is my first post uploaded from my new flickr account. I am possibly going to have to edit it when it gets over to blogger.com. It took me AGES to do this because the stupid work firewall kept asking me to authenticate my details in the middle of uploading the picture and, after I'd authenticate, it would crash the browser.

Ah well, it's up now. I hope to never do this again from work, I think I'll just do it from home if I need to upload to here again.

What did I learn? That flickr is tied into Yahoo! so that Yahoo! can have more members who all have useless email accounts that mean nothing (or, if Yahoo! was my major email account provider then all of my services would be linked together with the one username...but I know that is not going to happen because blogger.com belongs to Google).

Oh, and the PictureAustralia site was interesting. I especially loved the picture of Sunshine Library's librarian in 1965. <-- this used to be a link but it died. Bah. Go to Picture Australia and type in 'Sunshine library 1965' as a search term.

My ideal place

2007-09-16T18:48:00.001+10:00

http://www.landesbibliothek.li/ *drool* A library...in Liechtenstein. I want to work there.

#4 Register your Blog

2007-09-14T14:20:00.000+10:00

I am sorry but my posts are going to have bland titles from now on. Part of the program says that my titles MUST have the name of the activites on them. Pfft (it's probably so they can use a program to only pull out the blogs they want to read in an effort to allow me to win 'Fabulous Prizes'...maybe a trip to Liechtenstein!!! but I doubt it).

This post is about registering my blog.

I came. I made. I registered (and someone left me a lovely comment).

Oh, and an exciting link for you all... BOOK VENDING MACHINES! Woo! Wouldn't they look good at Ginifer Station (pronounced gin like the start of gimp, not gin like the drink).

My first Friday post

2007-09-14T11:16:00.000+10:00

Seeing as someone (who will be known as The Lady Scarlett) told everyone about my super-secret blog, I've decided to post another entry. I really have nothing to say but that doesn't matter.

Someone sent me a cool link yesterday (possibly an ALIA list because that's the only place I get library stuff) :
http://www.curiousexpeditions.org/2007/09/a_librophiliacs_love_letter_1.html
It features pretty libraries from around the world. What is it about wood paneling that makes people think something is beautiful? Honestly, the Stahov Theological Hall library has a stunning roof but would you really want to work under that all day? My favourite was either the Handelingenkamer Tweede Kamer Der Staten-Generaal Den Haag (although spiral staircases are bad Feng Shui) or the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (which was mentioned in a post - http://www.bibalex.org/English/gallery/index.htm)

Oh, I also changed the name to Carp diem : Fish of the day. It's a Buffy thing for all you Buffy lovers out there.

#2 Lifelong Learning

2007-09-10T14:15:00.000+10:00

Introduction

Well, I've just started the '8 and a half' week course Victorian Public Libraries Learning 2.0 Program arranged by the State Library of Victoria in order to teach 1000 library staff across the state about emerging technologies that may be of benefit to libraries and their staff.

Some of the stuff seems interesting (photos & images and podcasting), some rather boring (RSS) and some I have already had a play around with (online word processing/spreadsheet tools...I love you Google docs!) Although it sounds the most boring, I'm hoping to learn a bit about RSS because I have not the faintest what any of it means...here's hoping I learn!

Hopefully I won't embarass myself too much by sounding like a bit of a dumbarse (or a lot of a dumbarse)...I know a little bit of most of the Web 2.0 stuff but nothing in depth.

Week One Work

My first task was to listen to the 7 & 1/2 Habits Online Tutorial which was all about how I could do things to encourage myself to learn.

The thing I think I'll find easiest is the play part (habit 1/2). I'm quite happy to play around with online tools with little or no instruction in what they can do or how to use them. Look at me, haven't read any of the blogger stuff and already I'm typing away (hopefully it'll look good...I'm shallow enough to want it all pretty, even if there's no content).

The hardest part for me will be keeping myself motivated (well, actually it is habit 2 which is 'Accept responsibility for your own learning' which actually means 'Do the work and stop whinging about how boring it is'). I did my Masters degree by distance education and I found that motivation was by far my biggest obstacle. Even when I enjoyed the material, I'd usually find an aspect that I didn't enjoy so much and that was the end of that. Assignment time = clean house. Exam time = mowing/spring cleaning/autumn cleaning/learning how to cook Moroccan food/etc. Hopefully I'll feel a bit more motivated to do this because I'm scheduling some time each morning to do a little bit instead of attempting to write an assignment the day before it's due.