Watching the rescue of the trapped miners in Chile over the past 24 hours, I thought it might be interesting to try to rank the most engrossing TV moments of my life.
I’m obviously thinking of news events so “Canada wins Gold in hockey” and “First Survivor Finale” don’t make the cut.
The rescue of the miners is pretty fresh but I could see it taking over the fourth spot on this list after some time for it to sink in.
RPL hosted a workshop with well-known library consultant, Rachel Van Riel of OpeningTheBook.com today, the only Saskatchewan stop on a cross-Canada tour that will also take her to Alberta and Ontario. The information presented was excellent and I’d highly recommend her to anyone looking for ideas on how to improve their libraries.
As always, a patented list of my random thoughts, jots and impressions…
– the Just Returned cart is one of the only (maybe *the* only) way that patrons have to communicate with each other. Knowing that someone else has taken out a book or DVD is like a vote of confidence.
– you can do more with this idea – why not have patrons return books to bins/carts named “Liked It” or “Didn’t Like It”
– her company designed a web site and campaign called “Take a Break” where people could specify what they needed a break from – kids, e-mail, life in general – and get recommendations. It was particularly interesting to hear that they included an option for a “Surprise Break” where patrons would have a random book put on hold with them which they’re never told the title of until they pick it up from the hold shelf.
– much frivolity was had when she asked us to do a partner exercise with a series of questions about where we read, (mostly on the bus to and from work, at lunch time and also before bed), how much we read at one time (usually 2-3 books on the go at any one time), what time of year we read more (year round I think I’m pretty consistent), if we ever skipped pages (no but I’ve only recent begun to allow myself to not finish books that are boring me or that lose my interest), the first book we remember having read to us as a kid (maybe Aesop’s Fables at my grandma’s house?), who we talk to about books (Shea, co-workers, friends, Internet book sites like Good Reads, Amazon, etc) and which books we snuck peeks of to get to the naughty bits when we were young (I don’t remember the name of it but it was a mass market paperback – maybe by Harold Rollins or Judy Collins or somebody like that – about how the Russians manage to install one of their agents as the US President, with the Second President’s wife using all of her charms to get him into that office. Er, thanks mom for reading such smut! ;-))
– another idea for helping readers communicate is to put a paper in each book asking people to write “mini-reviews” (not sure how workable this would be but would be an interesting experiment)
– also likes the idea of Opinion Boards the entrance to libraries where patrons can communicate (if memory serves, the small town of Oxbow Saskatchewan used this technique.)
– on those last two points – first, I think they’d probably work better in a smaller town and second, in a weird way, they seem to be ways to re-create some of what users can do in various online forums to the real world
– a good program idea – “What books should you buy for Christmas gifts this year?” (This would be an excellent partnership between the library and the Sask Book Awards who’s event is held at the end of November, in large part to capitalize on the Christmas buying season. Many other provinces hold their awards in spring to keep to a Jan-Dec entry cycle but that’s too bad because SBA helps sell SO many books with the timing of its awards – even if the entry deadlines are somewhat weird.)
– instead of not being able to afford big name authors or having smaller local authors who don’t draw crowds, you could have a “Perfect Pairings” event where you have local celebs (or patrons or staff or whoever) read excerpts from books from certain regions and pair this with wine tastings from those same locales.
– she points out how the library can be “all things to all people” but you can get into trouble if you don’t differentiate your audience. She doesn’t advocate only letting certain people in the library at certain times but suggested thinking of swimming pools which usually have certain times of the day dedicated to certain groups – fit swim, family swim, public swim, etc. – and that libraries could also focus certain times on certain groups (we probably do this already to some degree – storytime is in the morning, adult programs happen in the evenings)
– lots of people who are pushing libraries to change say we need to start following retail models. I was happy to hear her say that we shouldn’t do this – at least blindly – with lots of examples of how libraries and bookstores differ interspersed throughout the day. One thing she said we should do like retail is offer fully stocked shelves – 90%+ full is ideal. I’ll have to think more based on what she said but this is one I tend to disagree with – I’m a fan of shelves that are 60-75% full so that you have room for staff to shift books more easily, have display options at the end of each shelf and room to add books as well. I also like the ideas of Barry Schwartz in _The Paradox of Choice_ and particularly the idea that having too much choice actually induces a kind of paralysis in people. (I saw this first hand when one of my small libraries in Southeast took a bunch of older, worn or simply less popular books off their shelves. They didn’t have permission to weed so instead, they put them on shelves in the back room – ready to still fill holds if needed. They took out maybe 20% of their books and their circulation went up more than 20%!) I know that’s only one example but it’s a pretty powerful one for me.
– finally, one other note I made is she said libraries spend the majority of their time selecting, acquiring and cataloging books (say 80%) and only 20% doing things to make the books move once they’re on the shelf – merchandising, displaying, featuring, etc. She believes these percentages should be switched.
Here’s more from Barry Schwartz on the Paradox of Choice:
Hockey The Flames got spanked in their first game of the season against the Oilers (who almost made me want to cheer with them with what a dynamic young team they’ve assembled. But then I remembered that only could happen after they’ve sucked for much of the last decade so the feeling passed.) Topping the game off, the Oilers goon (who happens to be a Saskie boy) absolutely destroyed the Flames goon. (TSN’s Bob McKenzie has a good column expressing the ambivalance he feels towards fighting in the game.) At any rate, the Flames are doing better tonight – up 2-0 against the Kings with ten minutes left in the game as I type this.
Libraryland CBC’s Canada Reads 2011 contest has opened itself up to nominations from the public (I’m not sure but I think this is the first year they’ve done this.) They’re also posting daily summaries of some of the submissions which makes for an interesting recommendation engine. (And if you’re a librarian, you could support one of our own by taking a moment to nominate Corey Redekop, author of Shelf Monkey.)
Pace Cuteness
Today, while preparing the turkey, Grandma T. slipped Pace one of those small Halloween chocolates that come wrapped in tinfoil. I made some joke about that being “turkey poop” and that’s become a recurring joke throughout the day as Pace has repeatedly asked for “more turkey poop chocolate, please!”
Random Link(s) Somehow Relating to Popular Social Media Site The Wilderness Downtown is a cool Google experiment with HTML 5, best viewed in Google Chrome, featuring the music of Arcade Fire.
A recent study found that 80% of kids have an online presence by the age of two. I’m not sure how they define “online presence” – it could be anything from “someone uploads a pic of a new baby to Facebook” all the way to “parents create Facebook profile for their newborn!” (although obviously a lot more likely to be the former than the latter.)
That’s why articles like these always irk me – they inevitably have this undercurrent of “technology is bad” and “you must be afraid” with their talk of privacy settings and security worries rather than the positives of having an online presence for a child (connection to distant relatives right up to the potential of your child being the next Justin Bieber.)
The reality is that there is a huge disconnect between what parents are afraid of with regards to their children (abduction, school shootings, terrorism, strangers, drugs) and the reality of how young people actually get hurt or killed (car accidents, homicide, abuse – both of these by individuals known to the parents in most cases, as well as suicide, drowning.)
The reason parents fear the first five makes sense – all of them are external and/or catastrophic events, outside of a parents’ control. The five things parents should be scared of are closer and often within a parents’ ability to influence/recognize/control.
I don’t get it as much as I used to but I once got lots of concerned comments when people saw or heard that Shea and I put pictures of Pace online. “We’re more worried about somebody grabbing him when we go to the mall then some stranger on the Internet seeing his picture among the millions that are out there, tracking us down and coming specifically to do something nefarious” was my standard reply. (Well, okay, maybe I didn’t say “nefarious.”)
There are also interesting questions about consent – Pace hasn’t given us his consent to document his life online but as his legal guardians, I see this decision as no different than a parent’s decision to, for example, let their kid’s photo appear in a newspaper story or whatever.
And with that, here’s a picture of Pace enjoying the jet tub at Grandpa & Grandma’s this weekend…
Not sure where I came across it but Atdhe.net allows you to watch a variety of programs online and for free. I feel like I’m missing something about this site but at any rate, enjoy it while you can – these types of sites rarely stay around long.
Stephen Silberstein, the founder of Innovative Interfaces, a company that supplied computer software for the automation of college and city libraries, also contributed $50,000 to the Prop 19 camp in October, according to filings with the California Secretary of State.
If you didn’t know, Innovative Interfaces is the company that the Saskatchewan Information and Library Services consortium selected to provide the ILS software that now drives our province-wide library system which is the largest in the world, both by geography and number of individual sites.
(It’s also the software used by London Public Library if you’re tuning in from London or as a FIMS grad.)
I’ll try to resist making jokes about how people who contemplate projects this complicated must be high! Oh-oh, too late. 😉
Instead of doing a traditional book review though, I thought I’d do a list (big surprise there!) of some of the reasons why it hit me so strongly…
– The book profiles the parallel lives of two young people, Dex & Em, who meet on the night of their college graduation in the UK, sleep together (but no sex) and simply connect in a way that makes them lifelong friends. Lifelong friends with all this entails – growing together, growing apart, sometimes supporting each other, sometimes tormenting each other.
– Some reviewers labeled it “chick lit” or “beach reading” (the bright pink and neon orange cover doesn’t help) but I agree with those who said there’s something deeper to this book and less disposable as a profile of youth, aging, changing societal mores and so on.
– The book has a gimmick and though sometimes that can lead to disaster, it can also be highly effective. In this case, the gimmick is that each chapter of the book describes events on the same day of the year (July 15) from 1988 to 2006 as the two grow, age, fall in love (with others – mostly), aren’t successful, become successful, lose that success, struggle with hope and dreams and loss.
– I guess the biggest reason the book resonated so strongly is that, though the characters are a few years older than me, the book basically chronicles their changes from idealistic college students to parents who occasionally feel like they’re making it up as they go along over roughly the same timeline as my life. (Spoiler alert – I’m not saying they necessarily have kids with each other! Or that both start as idealistic new grads either for that matter.)
– Earlier this week, I mentioned my latest musical discovery, The Submarines, whose album “Declare a New State!” was created after the two main members dated, broke up, discovered they were writing songs about each other and ended up getting back together with their first album being created and mastered for them as a wedding present by a friend. With subject matter like that, the album made a perfect soundtrack for this novel and I seriously hope the movie version uses some of my favourite Submarines songs on the soundtrack! (Gotta admit I’m a bit nervous about the movie’s casting though. Hope I’m wrong.)
– I’m a bit of an Anglophile so I love a lot of British culture – the music, the books, the movies, etc – but also just some of the way that Britain feels slightly different but so familiar too. This book is just another part of that for me.
– it’s not just that the book is British but many of the references – pop culture and otherwise, – are things I remember from my own semester in the UK in 1995 and then closely following UK’s news, popular culture and so on for for many years afterwards. I mean, do most people in North America know who Kula Shaker or Shed Seven are?
– There are a lot of big twists in the book including at least one that is what I call a “Grey’s Anatomy” twist. That’s because I know it’s been a particularly emotional episode of that show when Shea comes to find me, tears in her eyes, to tell me “I can’t believe they did that!” or “I don’t know why that happened.”
– I don’t read non-fiction exclusively but the split is probably 80-20 between NF and Fiction. Yet, if I listed my 10 favourite books of all-time, more than half would be fiction. So I do appreciate fiction’s ability to make you feel emotions and be transported in a way that non-fiction rarely does.
– I’ve done this a bit with movies and music but this was the first time I can remember *really* going all Web 2.0 on a book I’d just read. I looked it up on Google and read reviews from book blogs. I went to Good Reads, I went to Library Thing. I went to the book’s official site. I searched Twitter to see who else was reading it *right now*. I “liked” it on GetGlue. I read the Wikipedia articles about both the book and the author. I watched the four short promotional clips the publisher had produced and uploaded to YouTube as well as an interview with the author and a fan review. (Don’t do this if you don’t want to have some of the book’s surprises spoiled!)
Great book. What else can I say? 😉
soon became romantically involved, and toured Europe together as members of each others band. The relationship lasted for four years, but ended in the fall of 2004 when the pair moved to L.A.[1] After the break-up, both Hazard and Dragonetti continued writing songs, and because Hazard still recorded her music in Dragonetti’s home studio, the pair quickly discovered the songs they had written were about each other and their sadness in having broken up. Knowing this, the duo decided to work on a few songs together and eventually got back together. The songs that they had worked on together were mastered for the couple as a wedding present, and those tracks eventually became their first album.
Just as TV and video games are changing the neural pathways of kids, I think having a blog has had a similar effect on me.
Throughout the day, I frequently think “Oh, that witty comment is something I should blog about” or “Hmm, that idea I came across on Huffington Post deserves sharing” or “I could really go on a rant about this!”
99.9% of these post ideas never come to fruition and often, when I’m at home watching TV while trying to think about what today’s post will be, my mind often goes completely blank. So I thought I’d try to do a sample list to capture some of the things that struck me as potential blog fodder today:
THINGS I CONSIDERED BLOGGING ABOUT TODAY
1. Something about how much time is wasted by people who ride the bus but simply sit there – not reading, not listening to music, not surfing the Net on their smart phone, not talking to someone they know.
2. How much I’m enjoying the book “One Day” and a few reasons why that’s the case.
4. Pace’s new daycare (which is just a newly opened satellite of his current daycare, this new one is walking distance from our house, has all new toys and furniture and many of his favourite staff who moved over from his old daycare when this one opened last month.)
5. How good it feels to be told you can do something when you expect to be told no and some thoughts on creating a culture of “yes”.
Another in the long list of “Things I Should Post About” is a in-depth exploration of my own views on copyright, piracy and the impact & actions of the various related industries. But for now, I’ll say that sometimes it’s the exact opposite of what the RIAA would have you believe.
For example, I watched this video for a Mozilla concept smart phone and the soundtrack only added to the blow-me-away/drool! aspect of what I was seeing (dual pico projectors!)
A quick Google search using a couple of the lyrics and I found out it was a song called “Modern Invention” by a group called the Submarines. I read that the album that contained the song was a concept album based on the true-life dating-breakup-eventual-reconnection-and-marriage of the group’s two members and, being a sucker for bands and artists with cool autobiographical works (I’d link to the Sam Baker page I created on Wikipedia but the bastards deleted it!), I went to iTunes and bought the album.
