We did a day trip across the border to Williston, North Dakota on Wednesday (it's a long story as to why we had to go mid-week, I'll tell you over a beer sometime) and the highlight for me was finding an old department store that had been converted into a place that sold all kinds of antiques, collectibles and souvenirs on the main floor. As for the basement…well, the sign said “books downstairs” so I was expecting a few old copies of Readers Digest Condensed Books, maybe a bunch of shelves stuffed full of tattered Harlequins.
Instead? The entire massive basement was crammed with books of all shapes, sizes and ages. Although it was lacking in newer books, the selection of strange and obscure older titles more than made up for it. Plus (and this is huge), there was not a single employee in the basement at all so I had the equivalent of the entire basement of a typical city department store (think of the Bay or Eaton's that every city in Canada has downtown for an idea of the size) all to myself! (I'm honestly surprised I'm not still there.)
This is a photo from the stairs leading to the basement. It's a bit dark and doesn't really do the place justice but hopefully gives you a small sense of what I'm talking about.
They sold their books by the pound on a sliding scale – up to 5 lbs was $0.99/lb. 6-10 lbs was $0.89/lb. 11-15 (which is what I walked out with – hey, no different than carrying Pace, I figured) was $0.79/lb. In their language/books/writing section, I found a number of old LIS textbooks which are all pretty cool to page through.
Here's a sampling of the titles I bought… “Intro to Cataloguing and Classification 5th Ed.” – Wynar (1976) “Planning College & University Library Buildings” – pamphlet (1981) “So You Want To Be A Librarian” – Wallace (1963) “Guide To The Use of Books and Libraries 3rd Ed.” – Gates (1974) “Supervisory and Middle Managers in Libraries” – Bailey (1981) “Library Work With Children” – Broderick (1977) “Educating the Library User” – Lubans (1974) “Building Library Collections” – Duncan-Carter (1969)
Total damage for all of these plus a bunch of other books on everything from parenting to philosophy to non-fiction classics such as Studs Terkel's “Working”? $12 and change.
Oh, and the teasing title for this post about every librarian's fantasy? Just a little theory I came up with at FIMS and which was fleshed out by many of my colleagues I tried it out on, namely that, just as every English major is a closet writer, all librarians secretly want to own and run a used bookstore.
The end of the semester at FIMS looms and for various students, the end of the program is near as well. On that note, Michelle L. has a list of Library School Advice from an Almost Librarian that's worth checking out.
Congrats also to Barb Janicek who won the Spirit of Librarianship Award for the Summer 2007 semester. (That's a nice segue because Michelle won it the semester before and now I have double the reason to finally update my Spirit of Librarianshippage!)
Hearing the news is also kind of bittersweet in a way – Michelle and Barb were two of the closest friends I made at FIMS but after next semester, my connections to the place will be all but done as I'll have been away from the place for a full year (!) and so, for the first time, will not know any of the incoming students.
Okay, that's not completely true – I'm (virtually) meeting the occasional incoming student who stumbles upon my blog and contacts me. I'll also have connections via various part-timers who are still around. And even the line of close friends winning SoL might not end – I've got high hopes for the newly minted Master Philosopher, the returning Quinn Dupont to sweep to SoL glory in his final term at FIMS!
TinyURL is a useful site that helps convert some of those mega-long URL's that some web sites give to their pages into something that's way more manageable.
The site doesn't re-use their shortened versions and doesn't delete them (although some you click on may be expired at the source) so naturally, somebody has come up with an algorithm to view random TinyURL pages
After five random tries (not counting expired pages), I got:
1. a Bible passage about adultery
2. a guide to shopping in Dallas, TX
3. an aerial photo of a beach in Spain
4. a job posting at Cornell University
5. an E-bay auction for a Dell laptop
It's a great time waster to see all of the pages that people are converting (often to e-mail to others). If you like looking in people's windows late at night, you'll enjoy this site!
I'm standin' on the corner of a pair of country roads I am carvin' out my daddy's name on a little stone And though I couldn't always talk to him, but if was here today I think I'd know exactly what to say
CHORUS: I'd say the weather's been hot The hay is almost in And if it holds my next week We'll be bailin' again The wheat is good The corn is high Sure could use your advice On how to raise a couple o' kids I'm tryin' to raise 'em just the way you did
I'd tell him 'bout that early frost early last fall And how for awhile it looked like we wouldn't make it at all I'd tell him how it all worked out just this past spring And if he was here I'd tell him everything
CHORUS
My daddy never said goodbye One day he just up and died and left me here to go it all alone And sometimes I wish I'd hear his voice Helping me to make that choice between giving up and carrying on
CHORUS
I'll try to raise 'em just the way you did.
(Disclaimers: My dad's still alive, I do talk to him regularly and I'm not actually a farmer in any way, shape or form. But I love this photo and thought the lyrics were a good match.)
Shea's been resisting for a long time but while attending a 65th birthday party last night and hearing various parents discuss whether or not they should join Facebook like their kids, Shea decided she'd rather lump herself with the younger generation than the older one and has thus, finally joined Facebook.
I was happy to see her do this, at least partly for the completely selfish reason that it gave me a reminder of the initial sign-up process I went through over a year ago when I first joined (back in the good old days when only people with official college e-mail addresses could join! </snob>)
I don't really remember much about when I signed up (not realising the transformative power that Facebook would hold over our entire society just over a year later ) but a few things stood out as Shea went through the sign-up process…
– the privacy settings are right there during the set-up to be configured as tightly as you want although, to be honest, the defaults are probably a bit “looser” than they should be, especially that default that anyone of your friends AND anyone in your network can see your profile. When you're in a network the size of a city, that's a lot of people who can peer at you!
– I could've sworn there was a menu of choices for “Religion” just like they have for “Political View” but nope, religion is fill-in-the-blank. (Maybe politics should be too?)
– having been a bit overwhelmed lately with all the apps I see on people's profiles (including my own), it was pretty nice to remember how clean a Facebook profile is when first created. Since the launch of Facebook Applications, the site is like MySpace Lite in terms of the extraneous crap that's all over it (and frankly has lost a bit of its appeal in my opinion because of this.) If you feel the same way (and use Firefox), the Face Off extension might be of interest. It removes all third-party applications from any Facebook profile you view.
– the biggest change I noticed was that Shea had to provide a mobile phone number to authenticate her account. Until she did that, she was having to fill out a captcha every single time she added someone. I'm pretty sure I never had to do this when I signed up so that's a major shift and quite a frustrating one too – maybe everyone in the Facebook target demographic has text messaging access (but I doubt it.) And up until a couple weeks ago, we didn't have a cell phone either so would've been out of the loop on this feature completely (okay, we could've “borrowed” the text-messaging feature of somebody's phone easily enough to get our confirmation password. But the point stands – not everybody has a text-enabled cell phone – even in this day and age – so why not provide an optional way to confirm that you are indeed a real live person?)
– It was interesting to see how Shea, as a female and as a mother and as a medical professional, handled some of the decisions about what information to list versus decisions I made with my own profile/account. She didn't list her current or any former workplaces for instance and tightened up some of the security settings from their defaults as well.
– a couple of the failings of Facebook I knew about but which weren't as much of an issue to me jumped out when Shea created her profile. She used the workaround of creating an account with her maiden name listed as her middle name to help people who knew her before she was married to find her. That works if you're already married when you create your account but what if you're single now and get married someday? Or reverse it – what if you get divorced? You've got this profile you've likely invested a great deal of time and energy into building and now, you're unable to change your name on it?
– the other issue that jumped out was multiple schooling locations which again, wasn't an issue for me since I went to Indian Head schools all through my life. But Shea did her schooling until Grade Nine in a small community called Creelman then went to Weyburn for high school. Facebook makes it difficult (though not impossible) to add multiple schools to your profile, especially if they're not already in their database (which Creelman school, now closed and with a total village population of 87) definitely isn't.
– I briefly thought about creating an account for Pace but realised that they only have as recent as “2006” for the years you can choose for your birth date. (Oh, also that this would be a cute idea initially but is probably pretty dumb otherwise.) But yeah, why would they allow accounts to (conceivably) be created for one year olds but not babies born within the last year? Strange. I expected the cut-off to be 13 years old for new accounts (1994) as I think that's the age commonly used in US law for young people to create their own accounts with online services. (If somebody wants to try an experiment, try to create an account as if somebody was born in 2006 and see what happens!)
Okay, those are some random thoughts. If you're on Facebook, feel free to add Shea – she thinks she can catch up to my num
ber of friends within a week or two. “Plus they'll all be real friends, not like all the “Facebook friends” your account is full of!”
Instead of relying on your friendly local library (who, let’s be
honest, often has a policy of not letting patrons know about overdue
books until, well, until they’re overdue), Library Elf
is a neat little service that helps you track your due dates, holds and
more. You can configure the service to notify you via e-mail and/or RSS
about the status of your library account, track multiple library
accounts (ie. for your whole family) and more.
[Edit: Just playing around with the latest version of Macromedia Contribute which has a “post to blog” feature but which I also apparently have some work to do before it is configured correctly.]
