An exercise in futility?

Having spent months trying to decide if, then what, eBook reader I might purchase, I've just come across one on Summer Sale at a local purveyor of such electronic devices. Even better, they were running a competition to actually win one! "In 25 words or less, tell us why you want ..."

I wish I had an eBook,
Like all my librarian friends;
Then I'd read a thousand tomes
And other odds and ends.

I did try for something in Iambic Pentamiter, but it was a little too difficult to stay under the word limit, get some rhyme happening, and make any sense. But still, this isn't too bad, is it? And only 22 words. Bet there's more than a few recipients of my more formal correspondence that wish I could be as brief and to the point with them.

Anyways, the downside of it is that if I should happen to win the competition, the prize - according to my employer's Code of Conduct - goes to my employer, as we are only allowed to "accept" prizes up to the value of $50.

Ah well, maybe they'll let me use it over the holidays or visit it or something. The CofC doesn't say who would actually get to hold the eBook reader in protective custody, in order to save me from being open to possible allegations of corruption. I must check into this, in the unlikely event that I win.

So much to do, so much of it most probably pointless. Sigh.

Comic Sans Criminals - help is available

If my faithful reader has font-related issues, particularly the overuse of Comic Sans font, they could do worse with their time than pop over to the Comic Sans Criminal website. If you've wondered when you should - or perhaps should not - use that popular font, a ready reference guide is available.

The site promises other resources, such as other 'comic' fonts, and 'dislexia fonts', but as I didn't check those out, I can't rightly say if they're easy to download, install, use 'n' such. But you're bright folk; I have every confidence in your ability to check it out ... and if necessary send me a stern (but hopefully gently) missive of 5,000 words or less.

Advertising and Librarian Image

Once again, the advertising on Facebook has proven more diverting than some of the "apps". It's interesting to see this offering from 3M's advertising division, showing happy - but very professional - information and literary gurus in a modern brightly lit setting. Now I'm wondering if what our profession actually needs is not demonstration of the value we add to society, commerce, government, and education, but perhaps an actual advertising campaign of the Madison Avenue variety.

Goodness knows, we've been providing proof of both the pudding and research types, for (literally) millenia. And we're still fighting the same battles with the same result ... because we're using the same methods. Someone famous (you look it up, I'm on holidays) once said something along the lines of if you want a different result, you have to do it differently.

But of course, it always comes back to who is going to do the "organisation" (produce the tender document, vet the submissions, oversee the campaign, etc), plus who/how is going to finance the strategy ... not to mention how the success will be measured.

Are we there yet?

Stumper: The fowls of the heavens?

Serendipitous discovery landed me on the page Spiritual Meaning of Birds, Fowl, where I was surprised to read that at least Biblically "birds signify things rational and intellectual"; OK, owls I can accept - from at least the literary point of view - but the average garden-variety chicken?

Which then made me wonder where/how the acceptance of "bird-brained" (as in silly, of limited attention span, etc) came about, as opposed to the intellectual quality of your basic fowl. Of course, like all good cliff-hangers, I'm not going to reveal the specifics of which particular "bird-brainism" was engaging me at the time.

Nevertheless, for my own protection, I must point out the reference to "AC" on the above-mentioned hyperlink is not me. I did not put the reference there. I do now know who did. I have not gained any monetary or other benefit from the "AC" link on the Bible Meanings page.

Curses!!! I didn't mean to wreck the cliff-hanging experience for my reader. Sorry about that ...


Anyways, as an aside - it being the holidays 'n' all - this is an image of Keuleman's Laughing Owl, courtesy of Wikipedia. It is reproduced here under Creative Commons licence.

"This image is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. This applies to the United States, Australia, the European Union and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 70 years."

So if you're resident in another country that possibly does not apply the Rule of The Shorter Term, I guess the answer is to not look at the image?

However, a really fascinating fact about the Laughing Owl is that it hasn't been seen since 1914. Which I guess is about the last time anyone heard someone whistling a tune for no apparent reason. Now that's going to be a really hard one to research! Good luck with that.

And so it continues ...

Yesterday finished up the stock take of Classics; not a huge collection, but with more than half of the books requiring catalogue corrections, the "clean up" took more time than the actual inventory process.

Today was Professional Development day; ditto for tomorrow. Then it's 5 weeks annual holiday, where I plan to once again to bring order to the chaos currently known as the Home Office. Do notice particularly the word "plan".

I'm at the stage where I'm almost prepared to "do a deal" with a Teacher Librarian Colleague whereby I will go do their stock take for them at their library, in return for them coming and doing a heavy "weed" of the Home Office.

Only problem is, of course, that they're likely to throw away all my useless little treasures, souvenirs, miscellaneous documents ... and all that realia that is currently clogging up a whole room. Wait a minute! If I didn't have that stuff, I wouldn't have the problem. Hmmm ...

Stock take and Other Duties ...

Finished inventory on Fiction last week, today it was the Reference collection, Visual Texts and the "Quick Reads". No library work tomorrow, it's the school's "Big Day Out", where I'm going to be supervising students walking from the school to the railway station, on the train, then to the theatre for three hours of Harry Potter, then to the Food Court for Lunch, then back to the station, another train, then the walk back to school. Heavy rain is forecast for the day.

And I actually volunteered for this. I did have the option of skipping "Big Day Out" and continuing stock take.

So all those folk who claim I'm crazy can use this as evidence ...

A Nice Letter, but too little, too late ...

Dear Webmaster,

While browsing the web I noticed that you maintain a list of Library Skills resources here:

http://warriorlibrarian.com/ARCHIVE/00archives.html

LessonCorner has organized a collection of Library Skills lesson plans and worksheets.
If you would like to link to them please use the following url:

Library Skills Lesson Plans - http://www.lessoncorner.com/Reference/Library_Skills

In recognition for your work helping teachers find online resources, we would like to offer
you a free lifetime premium membership to LessonCorner. To enjoy this offer simply sign
up for a free membership - https://www.lessoncorner.com/signup/
Then reply to this email with the username you chose and I will
activate your lifetime premium membership.

About Us: At LessonCorner our goal is not only to create the best
collection of worksheets and lesson plans on the web, but also to make it free.
Our freemium business model allows all users to access many of the site's features.
In addition, users can receive a free 1 year premium membership by sharing
their lessons and worksheets with the community.

Thank you for your time,
Kathy Johnson
- LessonCorner.com
support@lessoncorner.com

Yes, it's another website ...

Visually pretty good, nice design and easy editing ... but let's see what unfolds at http://amandacredaro.webs.com/

Library Laughs

I read today of the Zen Librarian, who searched the Internet for nothing and got 20 million hits on Google.

Currency parity and your home library

Yep, my AUD$50 worth of books arrived from Amazon yesterday. The AUD$48 freight I had to pay meant that I would have actually been ahead if I'd bought the books here. The only advantage is that I only had to wait 3 weeks instead of the 8 weeks if I'd ordered them through my local bookstore.

But then again, I'd have been able to buy twice as many. Hmmm ... there's a moral in there somewhere.
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A landmark day!

Today, as far as I know, I didn't get into trouble. Of course, I may well find out differently tomorrow. Sometimes I don't find out for several months, which I guess illustrates that old saying about ill winds and blowing no good. Or maybe it's the silver cloud thing? Although at times ...

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. " Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

Although London and Sydney are half a world apart, I guess wind is wind. Excuse me.

How important is the truth?

From the diary of SAM (Sydney [University] Alumni Magazine) is January 14 2011: Festival Cafe ... a glass of wine, a bite to eat and an animated discussion on a recurring them of the (Sydney) Festival theme: When we tell a story, how important is the truth?

Tickets from usual agents. Over 18s only. (It doesn't say why .... too much cheese? Or too much animation?)
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The Worst Librarian Ad Ever?

Facebook can be interesting from a wide range of angles, including the auto-feed advertisements. These are "tailored" to each individual log-in and supposedly "smart" from the perspective of AI. The ads are selected on the basis of keywords that a user ... ummm ... uses.

So my log-in produces a side bar of ads for items such as shoes (who'd have thought?), books (duh!), hugely expensive holidays in exotic places (a girl's gotta have dreams, right?), and now, through the power of Artificial Intelligence, programming algorithms, and probably a splash of witchcraft - I'm now getting fed ads on becoming a librarian.

OK, we can all do with professional developing, and there's always new fields opening up in cataloguing (yep, that's a pun). But I'd be hesitant to rush off and sign up for anything as a result of this particular ad. I did check into the identity of the advertisers, and was more than a touch surprised. You'd have thought They could have done a little better in the PR department.

Just a thought.
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Column 8, Strike 3?

From Sydney Morning Herald of 24th November 2010



From Sydney Morning Herald of 23rd October 2010




From Sydney Morning Herald of 24th August 2010


That's three times in four months (twice as the lead); is this a record? Will they offer me my own regular column? The great Erma Bombeck started with the obits ...
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A news clipping for Jay ...

Back in the day, they used to say "4 out of 10"; so what's going on? Less adherence to the MHA? Less tolerance? Better diagnosis? Worse employment outcomes due to poor corporate administration - by folk who are even more nutso?

Color me surprised ...

Recognise anyone here? (Click image for larger version)

Information Literacy and Real Life

I've been spending a fair bit of time developing a new set of lessons around the topic of "research", now that is has become "problematic" to use the existing set of online, interactive, self-paced lessons. For the next two weeks, in which our 'graduating juniors' prepare to move into Senior mode, they'll be revisiting a number of topics such as sources of information, assessing quality of information, you-know-the-rest.

It's lunchtime now, but I'm just having a quick cruise through news sites to see what current items I could work into the presentation and accompanying worksheets.

There still seems some debate as to whether or not restricting research to a single source was responsible for our Australian (southern hemisphere, big island-y thing on maps between the Asian sub-continent and Antarctica) prime minister being represented wearing an Austrian (central Europe, landlocked country near Switzerland) milk-maid outfit.


When I originally heard the breaking story this morning - yeah, OK, things are a little slow down here at this time of the year - my first thought was that the confusion of Austrian and Australia was due to geographical illiteracy. Maybe we'll never know.

Still, it's a nice example of what can happen when aren't sufficiently information literate. With the Internet (and yes, I still capitalise it as the proper noun that it is), now the whole world can squirm along with you when you achieve a Fail at this level.


Photograph above by Ray Strange. http://www.news.com.au/

When the pen is as mighty as the sword

Here's something else for my very long list of things I didn't know. According to a reasonably reliable website, but not citing any references, I read that "Julius Caesar was assassinated by Brutus and his associates, using sharp shorthand styluses meant to be used with wax tablets."

I guess that would make the 'pens' as mighty, not mightier, than the swords? Although they had to use pens because if they'd taken swords their plot would have been foiled. (B'hahahahha. If you don't get the pun, go look up 'foil'.)

Me bad. Apparently.

Image sourced from http://www.thisnext.com/tag/dead-fred/

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This is what they mean by "me time"?

I'm at home for a few days, following some minor-ish surgery whereby a large chunk of 'meat' was removed from my personage; 8 stitches were involved. It's all covered up with tape etc, which is sort of a shame in a morbid sort of way. How in the name of all that is self-serving can one get any sympathy unless there is visible evidence of bodily damage? It's not like I've got anything in stiff plaster or slings, or crutches or anything. Still, I suppose that's why we have blogs, isn't it? When ya just gotta get the message out there!!!

So anyway, now I'm home with instructions not to do anything that might tear the stitches open. I'm not doing the website any more, so there's several days worth of entertainment down the drain; even watching the TV is limited by how long I can 'lounge' before needing to turn over - without twisting anything. Shopping is "out", which from a financial perspective is probably a good thing. Needless to say, anything in the way of housekeeping, cleaning up, etc is completely out of the question. Some would say "luckily". Back to the Good Doctor tomorrow for a change of dressing and an update of stuff.

Thanks heaps to all those that enquired if I was dead. Obviously, not quite yet.

Image above from http://www.elfram.com/blog/glenyce_right_cheek_for_blog.jpg

Cinemagraphic Bacchanalia

Watched Balibo last night on the TV (remember that piece of technology?!) and just returned from seeing Social Network - which cost the exorbitant price of 20 bucks (because, I am told, it was on the iMax screen) ... in a nearly empty cinema.

Yep, both good movies, although Balibo with its heavy political theme it sort of Missed The Boat in not mentioning the government cover-ups etc. Social Network was a quite different story (no pun intended) in exposing a few ugly underlying truths.

Interestingly (at least for me, and since this is my blog, this may possibly be the last place on earth - or in cyberspace - where my opinions actually matter) were the trailers. Coming soon the next Nania, Harries Potter, plus sci-fi Skyline.

Walking through the foyer, one couldn't help but not Harry Connick Junior's upcoming Date Due. Wow! At last a library flick? Sadly not ... the time frame referenced relates to child-birth.

Sigh.

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