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
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).
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).
Friday, October 5, 2007
#15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0 ...
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
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
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!!!
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!!!
Thursday, October 4, 2007
#13 Tagging, folksomonies & social bookmarking in Del.icio.us
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?)
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?)
