Archive for December, 2006

ALA 2007 early registration

Friday, December 29th, 2006

ALA Logo 2007 ALA Annual is being held in Washington D.C. this June and Preliminary Registration ends soon!

I’m required to submit a hard copy of my ALA registration instead of using the online registration. It drives me crazy when I am forced to print a PDF form and fill it in by hand not only because I have exuberant [illegible] handwriting but because it shouldn’t be that hard to create form fields on a PDF. Even if Acrobat doesn’t save the info, at least it prints out well enough for the recipient to read my long email address.

Here’s ALA’s Registration PDF [2.7 MB] with form fields added. I think it’ll work with most versions of Acrobat but unfortunately not Apple’s Preview. It probably needs a quick revision only for the support staff conference calculations; besides that, everything else seems to work fine. Let me know if anyone would like those fixed, it’ll just take two shakes of a librarian’s tail.

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Linux ILS solutions

Saturday, December 23rd, 2006

Linux.com has an article on the Evergreen ILS which is Open Source Linux alternative to the proprietary patron-unfriendly library systems. Evergreen serves Georgia’s statewide library service (GPLS), runs on Linux with Apache, a PostgreSQL database, Jabber messaging (how cool is that?!), and XUL. The catalog looks pretty good and offers awesome functionality especially with spellchecking and suggestions. From a financial standpoint it sounds great too.

[via Slashdot]

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Turn your favorite author into a dancing elf

Saturday, December 23rd, 2006

I couldn’t resist turning Meg Cabot into a dancing elf.

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5 Million Book ATM

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

On Demand Books is set to release their print-on- demand “totally automatic book machine” at selected libraries and book stores. The “Espresso” can print and bind paperbacks (limited to 550 pages) in a few minutes, according to their website. The machine costs about $50,000 and according to CNN the NYPL is going to get one this February 2007. Since it downloads the available books through public domain sources like the Open Content Alliance and Google, the content is technically free and the only other cost is the machine and supplies. A penny or two per page is probably the highest they could charge. My take: people will probably love it, publisher’s will love it if it guarantees a revenue stream later down the road for new releases, and most libraries will be ambivilent for years to come.

$50K isthe book budget of some smaller libraries and for some that justs covers the cost of processing books for a year.

CNN / Fortune Small Business article

[Via Engadget]

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Guitar Hero 2 takes the library by storm

Thursday, December 7th, 2006

Me playing GH2Guitar Hero 2 has seduced my coworkers with its guitar-lite, whammy bar, and star-power love action. 3 out 5 librarians at the library are on the GH2. I even gave it a try and got a lengthy BOOOOO & a hiss! That’s fine. I don’t need to rock at everything. I love the fact that you can play along with Danzig, White Zombie, and the Reverend Horton Heat!

Unfortunately, I’m going to miss our Guitar Hero Teen Program at the library on Friday. The Teen Librarian can handle it;she’s at Level: Freebird!!! We’re also having a Library Video Game night for adults only in January which will include Guitar Hero 2.

Here’s a picture of me sucking at Thunderkiss. What ever happened to Simon Memory Game? Now if only I could play Search and Destroy on Simon. lml

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The End

Wednesday, December 6th, 2006

I finished The End by Lemony Snicket last night. The unfortunate events don’t ever seem to end as the Beaudelaire orphans find themselves stranded on an island with their nemesis, Count Olaf, and a rather passive-aggressive cult leader named Ishmael. As usual, literary references abound, from Moby Dick to Heart of Darkness. The thrust of the narrative is borrowed largely from Shakepeare’s The Tempest. It’s all there, mutiny, rebellion, revenge, redemption, and a hatch. All it’s missing is a polar bear… or is it?

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Back from the dead.. finally!

Friday, December 1st, 2006

I finished and passed my MLIS portfolio last week. While I am not yet finished with the semester, I am happy to be done with that part of the program. Demonstrating competency in fourteen areas of librarianship was a huge amount of work. As a working librarian, I was able to use some projects that I created for the library. Overall, I used a combination of work experience, past school projects, and presentations created solely for the portfolio. It’s all very practical and can be a chance to show off those mad library skillz.

For any current SLIS student I encourage you to start early, because it really does take a lot of time of time choosing and creating appropriate demonstrations for each competecney. I felt it was a pretty rewarding experience, forcing you to evaluate and communicate your knowledge, skills, and your abilities. I have no regrets about not choosing to write a full blown thesis.

It was entirely an electronic portfolio and I chose to create a web site instead of using the provided Plone content management system. I needed some detox time from the computer, which is still kind of hard since I’m finishing up a data networking class.

Okay, back to work!

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