This video was
created for library staff in service day at the St. Joseph County
Public Library in South Bend, Indiana. Set to Madonna’s “Ray of Light,”
and inspired by the video of the song, this video details a day in the
life of a thriving public library system, highlighting the faces and
places that make the library the library. (Wow – who wouldn’t want to
work at a library that promotes itself like this?)
There's a tradition at small town weddings that, at the end of the night, a bunch of the young guys will buy a table full of $1 drinks just before the bar closes down to take advantage of the cheap alcohol.
That was the thought in my head at the end of the SOGS Mixer tonight at the Grad Club when, having given us nine drink tickets each (true, mini-beer samplers but still…) and only two hours until the bar shut down, myself and an unnamed PhD student cashed in our cache of drink tickets from professors and fellow students who couldn't stick around so that we had 30+ drinks sitting at the end of our table.
The rest of the night was fairly enjoyable as you can imagine with dancing, drinking, meeting strangers and “strange”rs as the assembled grad students shook their brainiac booties.
Here is a list of Firefox extensions I have installed on my computer:
DOM Inspector – inspect web page information
FoxyTunes – allows you to control multimedia functions within your browser
GooglePreview – shows screenshots along with Google searches
MetaFilthy – tracks which threads you've read on MetaFilter
ColourfulTabs – makes tabs more readable
SearchEngineOrdering – allows you to easily sort Firefox searchbox extensions
WizzRSS – an RSS reader
CustomizeGoogle – extends your Google searches
GDirections – allows easy access to Google maps from any web page
TabMixPlus – one of my favourite extensions, it allows tons of options to be set for Firefox tabs
Answers – one-click access to definitions of words, etc. on a web page
DownThemAll – download all links on a page
Delicious – extension to simplify bookmarking to delicious
Foxylicious – haven't used it yet but came across it today as an extension to sync delicious bookmarks with local bookmarks
Videodownloader – allows you to download clips from YouTube, Google Video and other video sites
AdBlock – blocks ads
Performancing – blog entry assistant though I haven't figured out how to configure it to work with my account yet
CopyURL+ – copies the selected text plus the URL for pasting into a new document
Greasemonkey – to install various scripts to modify/improve web sites
Screengrab! – allows you to capture an image of an entire web page, not just what's visible on the display
Why do I know this? My Firefox croaked unexpectedly today so I had to re-install each of these extensions. <sigh>
Classmate of the Day: Melissa McQueen hosted a very fun trivia night at hte Grad Club tonight. Dylan from first term and I won a $10 gift certificate in the first round, promptly spent it on a pitcher and never won another round. I challenge everyone reading to come out next week and see if you know the names of the four characters on “Sex in the City” or what the name of that little bone in your ear is. (Hint: it's not “ear bone” which is what all three teams answered.)
I hope the formatting for this comes out okay. I'm cutting and pasting from a Word doc. Thanks to Lynda Kirkham over at LPL for passing these along to me!
London Public Library – Ontario Public Library Week – Libraries: The World at your Fingertips
Date
Event
Details
October
14
Computer vs. the
Librarian
2:00-4:00 pm Film
“Desk Set”
Westmount
Branch
October
14
Fifth Anniversary
Cherryhill Branch
2:30
pm to 4:00 pm, short program, cake and live music. – Cherryhill Branch
October
14, 17, & 18
Behind the Scenes
Tours
October
15
Sunday Hours
Commence
1:00
pm to 5:00 pm, Central Library
October
16
“The World At Your
Fingertips” – Media Conference
10:30 am Central Library
Public Launch of
e-newsletters and LIBSAT (customer satisfaction survey),
Telling our Stories
contest announcement
Wireless pilot to
commence
October
17, 18, & 19
All Candidates
Meetings
Series
of all candidate meetings co-sponsored by LPL and the Urban League, check Access
for details
October
17 to 21
Rave Reviews!
Book
Reviews by 7 to 13 year olds, Sherwood Branch
October
19
Every Kid a Card –
Wrap Up
10
am Wolf Performance Hall
October
19
Canada Post
Literacy Award
10
am Wolf Performance Hall – program to commence immediately after Every Kid a
Card Wrap Up
October
20 to 21
Friends of the
Library Annual Booksale
Special
Events Building
Western
Fair
October
20
Official Opening-
Job Connect
11:30
am to 1:00 pm
Official
Opening of Fanshawe College Job Connect Program, 2nd Floor Central
Library adjacent to ERC, Hon. Chris Bentley M.P.P. to attend
October
24
Donor Wall Update
Passageway,
Central Library, 12 noon, recognition of major gift donors over the past year
October
24
Employee Recognition
Luncheon
Stevenson
and Hunt Room, Central Library, 12 noon to 2 pm
From CLA: The
Canadian Library Association (CLA) is pleased to announce that October
has been designated as Canadian Library Month! The idea for a month
dedicated to library and information services in Canada was developed
by library partners from across the country to help raise public
awareness of the valuable role that libraries play in the lives of
Canadians.
Canadian
Library Month will be launched October 3, 2006 and will be celebrated
under the theme ” Libraries: the world at your fingertips / Les
bibliothèques : le monde au bout des doigts. ”
So we were doing our tour of the LPL today and I was formulating an updated “Things I Like/Don't Like About LPL” post in my head all afternoon.
But then Linda introduced me to the Coordinator of Children's and Youth Services so I could give my spiel about about Art Slade coming to FIMS on Oct 23 at 12pm in NCB285. “So anyhow, I was hoping that some of the LPL librarians could join us.” “Oh, I knew about that already,” she said. “Oh?” goes I, wracking my brain. “Did I send you something? Did someone tell you about it? Do you know about about my blog too?” “No, I was on Art's web site last week and he's got it listed in his upcoming appearances.” “Oh…cool.”
How's that for synchronicity? Plus all of LPL's branches are closed on Mondays (which normally I'd list as a “don't like”) so that might free up more librarians to come than would've been able to otherwise. Awesome!
My hometown was featured in a special advertising supplement in the Regina Leader Post newspaper recently. Check it out for a taste of life in a small prairie town.
Vote Jim Holmes, executive member of the Friends of the RPL, for mayor of Regina. A friend of mine in Regina has been doing a great job of tracking some of the improprieties of current mayor, Pat Fiasco Fiacco on the “Politics 'n' Poetry” blog (and yes, those two things do go together and should go together more often!)
Speaking of the Friends of the Regina Public Library, their story is a great one. In April 2004, the Regina Public Library board announced plans to cut three branches (mostly in inner-city locations) as well as the Dunlop Art Gallery and Prairie History Room, both of which were housed in the central library. The board planned to move from the current nine branches to a model with a central library and four branches in each quadrant of the city, preferably tied to shopping mall locations. A Friends group sprang up and “In only 85 days, 26,048 Regina citizens signed our petition in support
of increased funding for library services. That's more people than
voted for all ten city councillors combined in the last civic election!”
The drive was successful and nothing was closed. How frickin' cool is that? In our “Public Libraries in the Community” course, we're learning about the importance of friends groups and I think that story brings it home like no other (although our instructor's story of a group of seniors storming a public meeting when a branch that was popular with seniors was threatened is pretty cool too!)
The vast majority of people I talk to who have recently started blogs all seem to say the same thing: “I don't really like blogs but I decided to give it a shot.” This instinctive reaction against blogs is interesting – why is there a natural resistance to blogs? (Going way back to entry one you'll see that I shared that feeling myself.) Probably because there's (still) a misconception that blog = online diary, because they're now “trendy” and maybe because they're associated with amateurish, informal writing?
Somebody asked me recently why I started blogging. I list a few of my reasons in that first entry – the realization that the library blogosphere was both huge and something I wanted to be part of, to keep people at home up-to-date on my life and as an easy way to modernize the existing home page I had. Have any other reasons come up in the past eight (wow!) months I've been at it?
I guess that one big reason I've kept it up is that once I found a niche writing about my experiences and thoughts at library school. I realised this could be valuable to students who come later and are increasingly going to turn to the web for information. I remember how disappointed I was that I couldn't find a blog or web site that had a student perspective specifically on UWO's library school when I was accepted so, just as the best writers “write the book they want to see on the shelves”, I turned this blog into the web site I was looking for when I was accepted here.
I think I've mentioned previously that I actually got an e-mail over the summer from someone who was accepted to start this fall. She said how helpful my blog has been and asked if I would mind helping provide any tips for finding housing. I didn't mind, knowing this is something that's not available via either the FIMS or the Student Council web site (well, it is but that's a private site so she couldn't get to it.) Receiving that e-mail was one of my proudest moments in my brief blogging history as it meant that this goal was being achieved. <Jason resists urge to make Management jokes about purposes and goals.>
Why am I thinking about this today? I have a list of about 10 classmate blogs I check regularly and another list of about 20 or so that I check less frequently (update your blogs, people! Aim for the first list! ). Another strength of blogs that I rarely think about is the interlinking of ideas and commentary that happens. In the last few days, I've seen a couplepeople who've put best wishes about our pregnancy on their blogs. How cool is that to know that complete strangers who visit these people's blogs will know about this happiness in our lives and may even visit my web site to find out more? (Quinn has a friend who visited my site via a link on his blog and apparently told him “I don't know why but I find myself still going back to your friend's site.”) And the more incoming links that happen, the more people that will find your site over time. (I know that I still get hits from people who linked to my Alberta user fees essay five months ago for instance.)
The other thing is that, as of today, September marks the first month that I actually met my goal of posting at least once per day (and knowing what the next nine months eighteen years have in store, will likely be the last time I hit this goal..)
Oh, and the other semi-related thing that I've always wanted to do was to take the time to pick out some of the funny/interesting referral messages I get. The stats available for this particular blog hosting company are decent but not great. But one of my personal highlights is looking at the sites and web search terms that brought people here. The following are all things that brought people to my site in September: “Supernova + Lukas Rossi + Fan” “Support your troops in Ontario Red Fridays” “How to Print a Little Booklet” “libraryschool” tag on Delicious “Are institutional paper towels better than kitchen rolls?” “On a MAC computer, what is the equivalent of the Windows start button?” “Sarnia Couple Swingers” Master of Library Science Degree + Cleveland “Places to cruise for sex in London Ontario”
