LISNews: Librarian News

I shouldn't care...shouldn't care about Karma (even the faq says so), but I rolled over to triple digits sometime last night. Whooo (no hooo). It's been fun posting to LISNews so far, let's hope for more.

She calls to renew the four books on her daughter's card. Two have already been renewed once, so I explain that they can't be renewed again. I have to explain this several times before the light comes on and she says, "Oh! So I have to bring them back?"

Well...the snow is almost gone. 4 inches come and go too quickly, but it was a freak storm.

On a side note, I'm really pleased with Gallery supporting our updated photo website. I've gone from plain HTML to Blogger to plain HTML to Gallery. Fantastic opensource project. Easy to install, but it will probably be more of a bear to configure it with a custom look and feel. ANy experience with Gallery out there?

I guess I was too skeeved at the rumours that he asked that women who applied to his library school to submit their measurements and eye colour to notice this before, but:

Melvil Dewey had a son. And was married twice. (Well, he didn't have the son out of wedlock. Actually, he didn't have the son ... his first wife did. Name of Anne.)

I guess I was hoping that the "Father of Modern Librarianship" was a metaphorical status.

This makes a good case for the 'ewww' factor, without even getting into the anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry ...

Just returned from a lovely short trip to Brussels and Amsterdam. Any other Jacques Brel fans out there? They worship him and his wonderful, complex "paroles"; no American singer/composer really compares. I sang an adaption of "Quand on n'a que l'amour" for friends--even though I'm not exactly a musician, they loved it. Amsterdam is delightful. Despite the pouring rain, they're riding their bikes, loaded up with one or two kids, parcels and umbrellas.

We moved to the PacNW to get away from the hot/cold extremes of Philadelphia, and we didn't expect to see much winter snow here either (Vancouver, WA), just rain. Well, the weather people predicted rain, rain, rain today, but the weather turned a little colder. We posted a few pics to our personal website at http://www.cheesegoblins.com/firstsnow2003. My daughter can't wait to get out into it before it melts.

OK, I've gone through ThinkGeek, Despair.com, and Archie McPhee. But now, in the low-rent office toy category is American Science & Surplus.

It even has the drinking bird!!! OMG. Even if I don't buy anything, I could easily waste a half a day just browsing through all the categories!

So, I just received two SPAM messages, and the subject lines for both started with:

Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8],

So, somebody's perl isn't quite up to snuff in their random email subject generation subroutine.

This month's D-Lib has an article on the DiVA Project. The name is reason enough for me to want to know more.

I have reg'ed and I've bought my plane tickets and I'm *this* close to formally requesting the time off work. But I haven't found a hotel room yet. All of the ALA hotels within walking distance are booked. And I've been too overwhelmed with other things to start looking off the beaten track yet. But there's one thing I need to know:

How is the social life at Mid-Winter?

This is my first ALA conference ... but I've been to a couple of SLA conferences. And as a member of the News Division, I've learned: be close to the hotel the Division suites are in. At SLA, I'm almost never back in my hotel room before 10 pm and a couple of nights, it's after midnight when I stumble back (because of my shoes, not the booze, thank you).

If there are going to be all sorts of receptions and open houses and gatherings after-hours, I want to be within walking distance of them. But if Mid-Winter is a business-only, daytime-oriented conference, I might just bite the bullet and stay out in the (relative) boondocks and do the ALA Shuttle, with an occasional cab for unofficial fraternizing events.

Your guidance/experience would be much appreciated ...

Well, I spent most of the afternoon tweaking my website. Mainly colors, content, and some image adjustments. I originally used a flash menu because it was fun, but just try to get flash to work properly under linux. Tried, tried, tried.

Least common denominator is best.

Slashcode comes with a nifty little stats area that spits out some interesting graphs. I'd love to be able to make them all public, but I fear the added load the scripts would add, so I'll try and post some of them here from time to time.
This all deal with moderation and comments for the past few months.

I really, really like Jabber (open source IM client), but I still have to open the others (AOL, MSN, etc.) when there are incompatibility problems. I still don't get it. Why do these companies not come to an agreement on a standard? Focus on getting subscribers by value-added features. I'm tired of it all. I'm going to delete these other clients and just stick to Jabber until the world determines the best way to implement the whole thing.

Art Carney died yesterday, may he rest in peace.
A friends comment upon hearing of his death --
"I'm surprised he was still alive." I think Art would've chuckled at that.

Yesterday's Overdue strip is all about me. In so many ways, I can barely keep track.

I'm responsible for tabulating the statistics every month in my library, but there's also the

• pedantic,
• sarcastic,
• and coffee

going with it.

I've been stealthily running Google Ads on the old LISNews pages (e.g. here or Here for about a month now, just to see what happens.
I'm suprised at the results, and so far I think it may let me run LISNews on a server alone. I only need to make $6 a day to have it pay for a decent server, and by just running the ads that may happen. I feel like less of a sell out running those ads for some reason. I guess because I don't actually sell the ads, I just make a few cents every time some does a clickity-click through.
With the number of pages we server, and the same click through percentage, LISNews could be a free service for me for the first time! Getting LISNews off of LISHost would make life much easier for me.

Anyone have any problems with Google Ads on LISNews?

11-12-03 7am: To answer tangognat & mcbrides questions below, yes, I've thought about Text ads ala Mefi or K5, my experiment started by reading Matt's Blogging for Dollars. I've often thought about selling text ads, but opted not to for one reason or another so far. Seems like alot of extra work?

I just returned from a training session for an ALA/National Video Resources grant program in Oakland, CA where 25 librarians and their 25 partner/scholars got tips and support for a new video/discusssion program on the Sixties. It's always good to get out of the home office and see what's going on in the larger world, but it was pretty stunning to talk to folks in different situations.

I'm a pretty experienced programmer and talked to a couple folks who were new to programming. I offered what I thought was pretty good advice about our standard practices for publicizing any sort of programs or services. But what my library considers basic PR is next to impossible for some (many?) libraries out there. I spoke with a librarian who said "we don't have a postage budget," after I told her about our mailing lists. When I gave her ideas for shagging flyers around town she said, "we don't have a paper budget." There were similar stories, all of which shouldn't have, but absolutely blew my mind.

I read, and even post the horror stories on LISnews.com. It was only after talking to people who live these stories that I made a connection to what's really happening. The training itself was fine and useful (and just plain fun). But I also left with a sense of sheepishness over any bitching I may have done about what happens (or doesn't happen) in my library. Like many libraries, we've been scrambling for funding, cutting corners and worrying about future budget cycles. It's damn sad that any librarian feels the need to offer a prayer of thanks for being able to print a flyer and having a stamp to mail it out with.

Hey journal readers!

I have great news, last month I accepted a full time position as a librarian for a library vendor. When it came time to give a presentation as part of the interview process, I decided to use my LIS article I had authored on Library Advocacy! The feedback from the topic and presentation was great. The audience found the topic unique and interesting, a welcomed break from the the usual fare of search strategies for the world wide web.

Thanks LIS News and LIS news readers for being a great sounding board!

The techs are here testing our wireless hub. I'm not sure when it's supposed to be installed, but when it does, the whole building should be a hotspot, and they'll be installing ethernet ports in the study rooms with wireless boxes behind them. This should be very exciting!

Am I the only one that uses that "Dissatisfied with your search results? Help us improve." link on the first page of Google search results? I find myself strangely motivated to tell them what's wrong with the really bad search results. I also find myself being disappointed more often than not lately. I wonder how many of those they read?