Today has been a pretty good day.
1) After battling the front page display of my new web site for a while, I threw it out to a local CSS expert (thanks, Mark!) and to the Drupal4Lib community. (I wanted dual background images, one at the upper left and one at the bottom right, and no matter what I did the front_page module was only showing one image.) I got a lot of great suggestions to fidget with things and arrangements, which led me to think about swapping which images were called from where. When I flipped the body and wrapper background images, it worked! Not only did it work, it works across every browser I've tested so far, even IE (!!!!), and under both Windows and Linux. (I'll test from the Mac when I get home, but I expect it'll be fine.) Needless to say, a happy dance was performed :-D
2) I got to play with javascript and replaced the static image on our main web page with a script that randomly displays one of eleven images. Makes me happy, and more importantly, it seems to have made the scientists and directorate happy. Thanks, JavaScript Source!
3) I get to shop for all the table decorations for the big "Under the Sea" party at SLA. Hee hee!
Currently 84° and sunny. (expect to see that a lot in the future, ha ha)
A blog to supplement "You don't look like a librarian!"...plus whatever else grabs my attention in the world of libraries.
April 24, 2008
April 22, 2008
Social Events at SLA
The calendar is rapidly filling up:
* PAM Book Group, Monday evening
* Blogger's Social, Tuesday evening
* LSW Meet-up, time and date still TBD.
Plus open houses, early-bird dinners, and the much-looked-forward-to Under the Sea PAM/IT dance! Thank heavens we'll be in the City of Coffee...
* PAM Book Group, Monday evening
* Blogger's Social, Tuesday evening
* LSW Meet-up, time and date still TBD.
Plus open houses, early-bird dinners, and the much-looked-forward-to Under the Sea PAM/IT dance! Thank heavens we'll be in the City of Coffee...
April 15, 2008
Random Video
Busy, busy, busy - here are some things to keep you occupied...
* Thumbs down: Erik the Librarian. Seen around the net, and in Library Journal...4 episodes posted so far. The summary says "Erik is a reclusive, introspective, yet very vocal librarian on a perpetual quest to make himself understood." LJ said "...it's a low point in the ongoing wars against the librarian stereotype. [...] Actually, he's obnoxious, manic, grating, and aggressive to the point of stalkerish." And, you know, I just can't top that. (I also couldn't watch anymore past about halfway through episode 3...blech.)
* Thumbs up: Library War. "The action comedy anime adapts Hiro Arikawa's popular novel about battles fought to preserve libraries when a new law threatens to clamp down on freedom of expression in 2019." I watched the video (no, I had no idea what they were saying) and just hope it gets released here with subtitles! Reminded me a lot of Yomiko Readman, aka The Paper, from Read or Die. (Watch it, if you haven't!)
* Two Thumbs Up! "Blood In The Stacks: Ravaged By A Vampire Librarian." (No, really, it's totally SFW.) Since even my stick people are sometimes unidentifiable, watching this vampbrarian (ha, ha) come to life was wild!
* Thumbs down: Erik the Librarian. Seen around the net, and in Library Journal...4 episodes posted so far. The summary says "Erik is a reclusive, introspective, yet very vocal librarian on a perpetual quest to make himself understood." LJ said "...it's a low point in the ongoing wars against the librarian stereotype. [...] Actually, he's obnoxious, manic, grating, and aggressive to the point of stalkerish." And, you know, I just can't top that. (I also couldn't watch anymore past about halfway through episode 3...blech.)
* Thumbs up: Library War. "The action comedy anime adapts Hiro Arikawa's popular novel about battles fought to preserve libraries when a new law threatens to clamp down on freedom of expression in 2019." I watched the video (no, I had no idea what they were saying) and just hope it gets released here with subtitles! Reminded me a lot of Yomiko Readman, aka The Paper, from Read or Die. (Watch it, if you haven't!)
* Two Thumbs Up! "Blood In The Stacks: Ravaged By A Vampire Librarian." (No, really, it's totally SFW.) Since even my stick people are sometimes unidentifiable, watching this vampbrarian (ha, ha) come to life was wild!
April 14, 2008
18 Sexy Trips to the Library Stacks
Entertainment Weekly celebrates National Library Week in their own film-based way.
Spring is on the way out; today it's supposed to hit 95°. Thus begins summer's approach...
Spring is on the way out; today it's supposed to hit 95°. Thus begins summer's approach...
April 3, 2008
What She Said
Y'all know my stance on the whole MLIs-librarian versus non-MLIS-librarian thing. But Mary Carmen really hit it with her post "You Call it Being a Professional; Some of Us Call it Being an A$$hat". She links to several other blogger's posts as well, and I certainly can't say it any better.
My mother forgot more in her 37 years as a non-degreed librarian (and yes, I believe she is now a retired librarian, not a retired paraprofessional library worker, dammit) than I will ever know. She, and librarians like her, taught me a lot about how you should treat fellow workers. I hope I live up to her lessons.
My mother forgot more in her 37 years as a non-degreed librarian (and yes, I believe she is now a retired librarian, not a retired paraprofessional library worker, dammit) than I will ever know. She, and librarians like her, taught me a lot about how you should treat fellow workers. I hope I live up to her lessons.
April 2, 2008
A Librarian at War
I found Shelby Monroe while researching a different topic, but I have to mention her here, and what she's doing. Miss Shelby, as she is known, is a librarian embedded with a division in Iraq. (Yes, you read that right.) She decided it was important to tell the daily stories of the soldiers in Iraq, and show pictures of the regular citizens, so she quit her library job and shipped out. Miss Shelby blogs about her experiences, and shares her photos, over at "101 Days with the 101st Airborne" and "Heads Down, Spirits Up!" (subtitled The Adventures of a Restless Librarian in Iraq).
What she's doing takes a huge amount of guts. HUGE. If you've read this for a while, you know I have a military background; IMHO it's one thing for a prepared (or semi-, as the case has been) soldier to go into a battlefield, but it's quite another to quit your quiet life far away from that chaos and willingly put yourself into it, then share the day-to-day realities of that chaos. I'm in awe.
Miss Shelby, thank you.
What she's doing takes a huge amount of guts. HUGE. If you've read this for a while, you know I have a military background; IMHO it's one thing for a prepared (or semi-, as the case has been) soldier to go into a battlefield, but it's quite another to quit your quiet life far away from that chaos and willingly put yourself into it, then share the day-to-day realities of that chaos. I'm in awe.
Miss Shelby, thank you.
Random Things
Lots going on, very busy; just wanted to share a couple of things with you!
* Philip Flick emailed me last week (and I'm sharing with his permission): "I was closing down a bank account in one town because I was moving to another town where I was just hired to work at the public library. He asked me what my occupation was and I told him librarian. He offered the title, "media specialist". Then he commenced to say that sounded much better than librarian, because of all those things you (are supposed to) think of when you think of the term 'librarian'. I am sure I did not provoke him to this, all I wanted was to close my bank account, not hear some discourse on what stigmas there are associated with being a librarian. One thing about the incident that I thought was weird was that he never even bothered to 'catch himself' in the process of his insult. He just carried on and thought that his assessment of the profession was the norm." So, yeah, there's that image thing impacting our daily lives again...
* Judith Seiss (yay, OPL!) alerted me to "What is it about librarians?", a brief discourse from Millard Filmore's Bathtub on "racy" librarian blog titles.
10:30am, 71° - yay spring!
* Philip Flick emailed me last week (and I'm sharing with his permission): "I was closing down a bank account in one town because I was moving to another town where I was just hired to work at the public library. He asked me what my occupation was and I told him librarian. He offered the title, "media specialist". Then he commenced to say that sounded much better than librarian, because of all those things you (are supposed to) think of when you think of the term 'librarian'. I am sure I did not provoke him to this, all I wanted was to close my bank account, not hear some discourse on what stigmas there are associated with being a librarian. One thing about the incident that I thought was weird was that he never even bothered to 'catch himself' in the process of his insult. He just carried on and thought that his assessment of the profession was the norm." So, yeah, there's that image thing impacting our daily lives again...
* Judith Seiss (yay, OPL!) alerted me to "What is it about librarians?", a brief discourse from Millard Filmore's Bathtub on "racy" librarian blog titles.
10:30am, 71° - yay spring!
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