May 27, 2008

Librarian Glasses...

Tatty Devine necklace
...on a necklace! Interesting. From Tatty Devine, via Shiny Shiny. (Not sure I'd want to spend $44 + S&H on one, though...)

Twitter Away at SLA

SLA is officially encouraging twittering at the annual conference! Nifty. Read the details over at Daniel Lee's blog (he's from the SLA Innovation Laboratory, amongst other places). Hopefully by the time the conference starts, Twitter will have sorted out the problems they're currently experiencing... Follow along on the SLA2008 twitter feed.

Currently 92° and sunny.

May 23, 2008

Random Friday

A random collection of things I've been keeping lying about:

* Changing from Dewey Decimal to Library of Congress? Ha! (thanks to Jeff)

* Bookhunter. "The year is 1973. A priceless book has been stolen from the Oakland Public Library. A crack team of Bookhunters (aka. library police) have less than three days to recover the stolen item. It's a race against the clock as our heroes use every tool in their arsenal of library equipment to find the book and the mastermind who stole it. "

* Weirdly addictive, is Typeracer; also kind of fun to see my wpm score. I cannot imagine the 149wpm current high scorer; does s/he burn through keyboards on a regular basis? (I'm a bit more prosaic at an average of 84wpm.)

Cold, grey, and rainy today. Hard to believe we hit 103° three days ago; we haven't even hit 70° yet today.

May 19, 2008

Library War: Summaries

Library War logo
Thanks to the most excellent TangognaT for posting episode summaries and a few screen captures! Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 are done and I'll be watching for more.

Ice Break on the Rillito: 2008

Yep, today's the day, folks: we've just officially hit 100°F for the first time this year. I believe we're going to actually go past it a bit - last forecast I saw was 103° - but today's it. Bye, bye, spring - hello summer!

My prediction, not that it's very difficult to do: another 100 days of 100+ degree weather. Not starting just yet, but in, say, another month? Yep.

May 12, 2008

Old Maids, Policeman, and Social Rejects

In the latest version of The Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, v.9, no. 1 (Spring 2008) is an interesting paper by Maura Seale titled "Old Maids, Policeman, and Social Rejects: Mass Media Representations and Public Perceptions of Librarians." Some serious analysis went into this research paper, which discusses the "five categories" of represented librarians (the old maid librarian, the policeman librarian, the librarian as parody, the inept librarian, and the hero/ine librarian). After reading it through, I have to say Ms. Seale is spot on; although almost of her references are older ones (late 90s-early 00s) I can find examples of each and every one of those categories in a media bit presented within the last year. I also have a few new articles to go check out, thanks to her reference list!

It's worth a read - check it out! (Originally via popculture-l; thanks to all the folks who also sent it along to me.)

May 9, 2008

Scary

There's a nice little meme going about the biblioblogosphere to make a square for a library-themed Passion Quilt. This is my contribution... As usual, I'm late to the game, and everyone I would have tagged has already done one, so check out http://tinyurl.com/4h8qtk to see 'em all.

Urban Dictionary: bite me.

(Note: Links will more than likely contain NSFW language.)

So, thanks to Library Bitch, I was introduced today to the Urban Dictionary's definition(s) of "librarian". While I quite like Definition #1 ("One to be worshiped") I can't say much for #10 ("a librarian is a weird usually older(middle aged) lonely woman"), or many, many others. Read through 'em and be sure to cast your vote.

89° and slightly overcast. Whee.

May 1, 2008

More Made of Win

If I can keep knocking out the small-yet-annoyingly-frustrating issues like this, I'll be golden!

Today I figured out the display ordering rationale in the image gallery module. It's such an easy module to use that I didn't want to discard it in favor of custom-built views for every single gallery every time one was created or modified, or (and I admit it) learn how to modify the php template, but not being able to display the images in the order I wished - or use a specific thumbnail to identify a gallery - was really getting on my nerves. So today I played around with a test gallery, tested file name, title, etc etc - and finally realized it sorts in an absolute, last-in-first-out order. Now that I know that, I can work around it; I just have to remember it down the line. As usual, it's a very small thing that was causing my much larger frustrations... but now I've gone into all my galleries, rearranged them to the engineers' satisfaction, and it's all good. Hurrah!

I've also taken the "oh, boy, here we go" step of sending a final review statement out to all the staff. We are, finally, approaching the last step before going public with this and being done with this task! Woo hoo!

79° and sunny. :-D