AskMetafilter recently had the following question posed which led to some great discussion.
Did libraries (public and university) stop requiring people to be quiet in the last few years, or is it just me?
At home on a recent break, I tried studying in a number of public
libraries and found that most were noisier than the local Starbucks. It
wasn't just the young people and cellphone talkers you might expect;
the worst offenders were senior citizens and a few librarians
themselves (one of whom read off the names of all the presidents over
the phone in a normal-to-loud voice.) Whispering seemed completely out
of place, the relic of a bygone era. The same is true of my university
library. I know there are a lot of librarians here; has there been a
major policy shift in libraries over the last few years, or have they
just given up? (Or am I imagining it?)
This site is one I rediscovered looking back through my MetaFilter comments. The author makes excellent use of brief MP3 clips to illustrate the various points. (Make sure you click through to Part Two linked at the top of the page as well.)
And here's a list I compiled a long time ago as the basis for a mix tape. I'd come across an article that ranked the Top 101 Beatles songs so I decided to rank my own favourites (with the article's rating in brackets.)
10. Please Please Me (24) – their first #1 is also one of their most exhuberant 9. Inner Light (-) – the best sitar song I've ever heard! 8. In My Life (6) – heartbreaking. And I love that piano solo. 7. A Day In The Life (1) – the top choice in this magazine's (and most) polls, it's definitely great and the story behind its creation is even better (and Wikipedia also makes me realise it was probably Mojo magazine where I first saw the article ranking the Beatles songs) 6. All You Need Is Love (28) – the ultimate musical message set to a universal nursery rhyme melody 5. If I Fell (43) – I love the obvious maturing when Lennon cites his earlier work “…and I found that love was more/Than just holding hands” 4. And Your Bird Can Sing (40) – a musical head rush, criminally underrated 3. Strawberry Fields Forever (2) – mystic artistic memory, haunting 2. Don't Let Me Down (-) – pure lust, love and naked neediness 1. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (19) – great sitar intro, get acoustic guitar, great cryptic story, great first line, great!
Tomorrow's the first day of Winter semester for FIMS students and I have to admit, I'm pretty glad I'm not there. You tend to get pretty wrapped up in things (for good and bad) while you're immersed in that environment. Then when you graduate, it all drops away…almost immediately. For example, I just realised tonight that I never updated the Spirit of Librarianship page with last semester's winner and a few other things I had wanted to add (a list of “rules” for the award that I developed with a couple other people plus the name of the up-until-now anonymous sponsor of the $50 CLA gift certificate that SOL winners can use to buy a student membership or other CLA swag. And don't worry, I asked his permission before naming him publicly.)
Anyhow, hope everybody back there reading this has a good semester!
This is both the worst and one of the best plays you'll ever see in the NHL. Former first overall draft pick,
Patrik Stefan of the NHL's Dallas Stars, gets an open shot at an empty
net with fourteen seconds left in the game…and misses. The Edmonton
Oilers regain control of the puck, make a long pass down the length of
the ice and score to tie the game with two seconds left!Too bad it's the Oilers with the comeback but at least they still managed to lose in overtime.
Found this via another site. It uses the number of sites linking to your blog to calculate a value for that blog. (I guess my IPO will be a bit longer in the making. LibrarianActivist on the other hand… )
Early in this blog's history, I came up with a little gimmick where I cover a bunch of miscellaneous things I've come across or want to talk about in conjunction with a holiday (search for “randomness” to see previous entries). I don't think I've done a “random” entry like this in awhile but the New Year provides a good excuse to clear up a few things I've had hanging around for the past few days.
CutePDF Writer This is a very useful little utility that allows you to easily create PDF documents as easily as selecting the “Print” option in any of your applications.
Saskatchewan: TV Hotbed CBC is getting a lot of publicity out of their controversial new series “Little Mosque on the Prairies” which, like Corner Gas, is set in a fictional Saskatchewan town. (In a semi-related point, I just watched Keith Ellison, the United State's first elected Muslim Congressman, being sworn in. There was controversy among the haters about him choosing to use the Quran instead of a Bible for his oath so he arranged to use a Quran that had been owned by Thomas Jefferson to make a point that people who have an issue with him using the Quran are morons. (I don't think those were his exact words.) I'd strongly suggest reading the article I linked to – all kinds of goodness including the fact that one of the main haters is a Congressman in what was once Thomas Jefferson's riding and also that the Library of Congress played a big role in making this happen. “The chief of the Library of Congress' rare book and special collections
division, Mark Dimunation, will walk the Quran across the street to the
Capitol and bring it back after the ceremony.”
Minnow Trap – Worst of the Year Recent MLIS graduate and soon-to-be-published novelist Corey Redekop, posted a list of his Best and Worst literature of the year out of the nearly 100 novels he read in 2006. You should take his recommendations seriously – Corey was also a long-time book reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press. I'm a bit embarrassed that “Minnow Trap”, a book I gave him as a thank-you gift after he did a Lunch Bucket presentation in the summer, comes in as one of the worst. I have to admit – I didn't put a lot of thought into the gift – I just picked one out of the pile of free books I got at BookExpo (hey, the Lunch Bucket had a budget of zero – what was I supposed to do?). I apologized to Corey on multiple occasions but he claimed to be quite happy to have discovered the book and he's had a lot of fun writing about it on his blog since then.
It Doesn't Get Any More “Saskatchewan” Than This I love how the Wheatland Library Region identifies the locations of their branches – instead of using street addresses for most of them, you have things like “in the old school”, “Main Street”, “Across from RCMP office” and the absolute best for the town of Plenty, “back of village”! This seems quaint but is a real issue in rural Saskatchewan. Our 911 service was moved to centralized dispatch a couple years ago so if you call up and say that your neighbours house is on fire, the dispatcher will want to know the street address and you'll (probably) only know “well, it's across from the Legion building” or whatever then the dispatcher will be unable to call for help and the house will burn down. (I'm not exaggerating – this happened in Fillmore soon after the change to the 911 policy.)
Sriracha Hot Sauce I love this hot sauce. They had it out as one of the condiments at the Grad Club so I got in the habit of using it instead of ketchup with my fries. Mmmmm!
Our Roots/Nos Racines This web site has digitized every local history book in Canada. Unbelievable resource. Plus check out the handsome young devil on this page (oops, not sure how to direct link to the page – follow that link then manually select page 425.)
SLIS Capping Exercise I may have linked to this before but I rediscovered it and am totally impressed. The library school at the U of A requires every student to do a capping exercise which is a web publication of their most outstanding work in the program. I wish FIMS would add this requirement – what an excellent resource for other students, both at the school and beyond, providing student-centered essays and projects that are otherwise all but impossible to find.
My Parents' “Christmas” Tree What else can you say about this…
I heard this story on the radio driving Shea to work this morning…
“Twins born in Massachusetts hold special distinctions – the last baby born in 2006 and the first baby born in 2007.
Not
a lot of time separated the birth of Jennifer and Scott Hoenig's
babies, but two minutes was enough to give these twins different birth
days. In fact, they have different birth years.”
This is a bit of an old story by now but Time magazine recently named “You” as their “Person of the Year”. Many people reacted to the decision negatively saying it was a cop-out and the ultimate gimmick to sell magazines from a magazine that arguably hadn't chosen the proper newsmaker of the year since 2001 when they picked Rudy Guliani over Osama Bin-Laden. That was my first reaction to me, but then, the more I thought about it, the more I realised this was a fitting, sensible choice, just as timely as picking “The Computer” in 1982 or “The Endangered Earth” in 1988. (The full list of previous winners is on Wikipedia.)
By “you”, doesn't mean anyone standing in line at Safeway looking at the magazine rack. They mean anyone who is contributing to Internet content and if you're reading this (or especially if you're commenting), you're part of that group. (So belated congrats on the award – hope you've put “Time Magazine's 2006 Person of the Year” on your resume. )
Why is it a good pick? I think of it this way – two or three years ago, when I wanted to find out about something using the Internet, I went to one place – a search engine. Today, when I want to find out about something, I have numerous options – a search engine is still a possibility but now, I can also go to Wikipedia. I can search Flickr for photos or YouTube for video clips related to the topic whether it is a person, place or thing. I can use a blog search engine like Technorati or Bloglines to see what other people are saying about the topic. I can read comments about the topic on community-based message boards like MetaFilter and Digg (and “message boards” completely under-represents what these sites offer.) And this is only the tip of the iceberg of the unlimited amount of information that can be found on various web sites across the Internet – from LibraryThing for tracking book collections to Facebook for keeping up with friends to E-bay and Amazon for not only shopping but finding out about all kinds of products – from the unique to the ubiquitous.
The common link? All of these sites rely on user-generated content to give them their value (even Google's database is an archive of sites that other people have created.)
Just as people don't like the choice of “You” as Person of the Year, they also react against the term “Web 2.0” which is now commonly used to define this new interactive web. Instead of being a method of retrieval (Web 1.0), the new web is about interactivity. (Some people are going so far as to use Web 3.0 to define the next step which includes the user-submitted content of Web 2.0 but makes it easier to find/use via things such as tagging, advanced computer algorithms and the sheer volume of people contributing to the content.)
If you accept that definition of Web 3.0, a prime example is the plan of Wikipedia to launch a search engine to compete with Google that will rely on volunteers, just as with their encyclopedia site, but which will bring a level of currency and accuracy that computers, no matter how advanced the algorithm, can match yet. (And if you're seeing library jargon in that list of advantages, you'll also realise why so many library schools are now “library and information” schools.)
So, what is the point of all this Web 1.0/2.0/3.0 rambling?
Here's Oscar making his contribution to the Web 2.0 world via a video clip that we've put on YouTube. This is my mom (also a nurse) using a Doppler device to find Oscar's heartbeat – it's clearest around the 32 second mark – on Christmas Day at the Indian Head Hospital. (My best present ever by the way! Sometime I'll write about our very disappointing first Doppler in London.)
It absolutely and completely boggles the mind to think how far computers have come since 1985 when I first started using them (Commodore 64 – those were the days!) and what the future may bring as the pace of technological advance continues to increase.
As you can see, Oscar had a pretty exciting New Year's Eve. Grandpa and Grandma Hammond were in town for a wedding so Shea and I went down to the Delta Regina to have a visit with them. They went to the banquet and we stuck around and had supper at the hotel then went in the pool where Oscar had his first ride on a waterslide. Later, G&G came and found us in their hotel room so we all decided to go over to Casino Regina where we took turns pulling the handle on a slot machine. Grandpa was the lucky one and managed to double our money so we quickly cashed out and walked away. We're back downtown early tomorrow for breakfast with them then we'll give them a lift to the airport before their trip to Cuba. (We, on the other hand, will be lucky to get to Elbow, Saskatchewan in the near future.) And speaking of trips, the Indian Head Lions Club does an annual raffle at Christmas for a trip to one of a variety of tropical locations and dad informed me tonight that my aunt won! That's pretty lucky for her. Anyhow, I think it's time for me to go to bed. Nothing wild and crazy tonight – must be turning into a dad myself!
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