Pompous Twaddle

So, according to the New Zealand Sunday Star Times, librarians need a makeover and they're unhappy about it! "Bookworms' backs up" says that a "style queen" will be at the LIANZA national library conference to offer attendees tips on how to change their "conservative and dated image". Uproar, as you may guess, has ensued. I'll be interested to read any conference blog entries about this session, if anyone attends, and how it goes... will attendees welcome the style maven with open arms, rotten tomatoes, or something in between?

92° and 23%Rh. Henrietta is headed our way (kinda) - no rain today but rain tomorrow, I'm sure!

Prim and Proper

Over on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Regis Behe writes about a batch of librarians who are not so prim and proper. It's another in an increasing series of "Look! This librarian also does X! Isn't that cool!" articles, and I find myself starting to be a tad bit annoyed by it all. Where are the articles about, say, nurses who also rollerskate, or attorneys who ride motorcycles, or the astronomer who plays saxophone in a jazz band? Why is it so noteworthy that librarians *gasp* have lives outside our jobs? Sheesh. (Seems Stephen Cohen over at Library Stuff, and his commentors, agree as well.)

The Librarian as “Professional”?

Found via the ever-reliable LISNews, this article over on Mere Comments (a blog for Touchstone magazine) titled "The Librarian as 'Professional' " had me alternating between annoyance and agreement. Reading the opening paragraph where the author, one S. M. Hutchens, asserts that the answer to the question "Is a librarian a professional?" is "...librarians like to think of themselves that way" without coffee was not the best way to start my day, but Hutchens then goes on to attack the "roaming librarian" concept and poor upper-management skills in a way that had me nodding my head in agreement. (Caveat: if you read this blog at all, you know I don't have a dog in that fight...just opinions!)

Read the whole thing - and be sure to read through the comments, as well, where the discussion continues. I'm still alternating between annoyance and agreement. It's an odd place to be.

It's Blog Day 2007!

"Blog Day was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On that day Bloggers will recommend other blogs to their blog visitors."

Here's my five (not necessarily library-related) blog recommendations; I'm violating some of the rules of BlogDay by not notifying the bloggers, but I suspect they'll live; also, these are not new, because the few new blogs I'm following are all humor-related (and not necessarily safe for work!).

• Lifehacker. Geek to live, baby - and get it done!
  
• Whatever. John Scalzi is awesome.
  
• A List Apart. A great resource on the neverending CSS hamsterwheel of learning.
  
• Stephen's Lighthouse. Always interesting insights on libraries, technology, and neverending worldwide travel.
• Because I Said So. Often-hilarious commentary from a mom of six. Not for the faint of heart.
  

Now, to read what some other BlogDay recommendations are!

"Librarian Hotties" Calendar Planned for 2008

Tip o' the calendar sheet to Virginia for this tip! Try as I might, I can't come up with anything pointed or witty to say about it... the fact that it's satire (don't miss that part, folks, it could be important) kind of wraps it all up for me.

(99° and no rain. Sigh.)

The End of an Era

Yesterday was my mother's last day of work in a library; today, she begins her well-earned retirement. After, um, forty-two years? Forty-three? More? Some amazing amount of time 'round about there - she was working in a library when she and my dad met, and next year is their fortieth anniversary. Over the years, she's done it all - cataloging, reference, technical services, serials management, research support, solo, team-based - and in every kind of library, too - university, elementary school, military base, public, community college. She spent her last several years being the Voyager systems administrator for her college, which took her in even more new directions.

I remember helping my mom alphabetize cards for the card catalog at the base library at Incirlik (I was 6 or 7) using one of those long flippy metal and plastic alphabetizing doohickeys - you know, the ones that were really long and narrow, with the letters of the alphabet on each of the pieces of plastic, and you could slide the cards behind the right letter and sort 'em all out? Those were brilliant. When I was in high school, my mom was the librarian for the base's elementary school, and the library was the only classroom with a computer; I will never forget the horrible voice of the spelling game program that the kids always wanted to play with! And she would always bring home new books to read to us over dinner. (Bear in mind this was to a family of two adults and two teenagers - didn't matter, we had children's books read to us at dinnertime!)

My mother has forgotten more about librarianship than I will ever know. Growing up, I'd always assumed I'd follow in my father's footsteps, but when that path was closed to me, discovering that my mother's was open was serendipitous. She was a great help to me in grad school, a soothing balm through some of the rougher patches of my professional life, and a cheerleader through it all.

Thanks, Mama, and happy retirement... Now the fun can begin!

It's Friday so it must be blog-reading day, right?

Well, no, not today. Dang it. Well, maybe this afternoon...

First (well, second, after the coffee brews) I have to rename a SQL database, which turns out to be nontrivial. And this is in SQL Server 2005, which I have just about 0.0001% experience in, so I'm just a tad nervous about it all. At least at this point if I screw it up it'll only take two or three hours to rebuild it and some shrugs from the few test users, instead of being faced with a lynch mob (as in, better now than later). Yes, this is related to the EDMS from Hell, although in all fairness this is because of my own mistake in not thinking a naming convention through. So, my mistake, my pain in fixing it.

Then I have a major software upgrade (on a package I don't actually use, I just provide admin support) to perform. The thing about this one is, since we installed this package over a year ago it's worked beautifully and has required no support. Which means I have zero familiarity with it. Hopefully, the upgrade will work as beautifully as the product has so far... fingers crossed.

Ah, the coffee's done. Now I can face SQL with caffeine-induced courage. Plus, I have a bonus donut... that always helps.

Chance of rain today! Yay!

A Return to Tradition

I have decided that I've had it with these dratted newfangled electronic document management systems and I want to go back to a 3-ring binder with green grid paper and a PENCIL! Arrgh! I don't care if it means more work for me to keep track of what state each document is in, it can't be as much work as this fardling program is right now. If I could get a good grip on my hair, I'd be tearing it out right now.

I've sent my formal help request to the support line, and I'm going to go play with Drupal for a while. At least there I'm making progress and having some fun, dang it!

99°, 28%Rh, lovely clouds over the mountains, but I dunno about rain today...

Embarrassment and Wonder

Looking at my ClustrMap, I see I have visitors from countries I can't identify. As someone who identifies themselves as globally aware, this is mortifying to me. (I'm off to get me some map learnin'!) I am also completely and totally astonished every time I look at it to see how international the visitors to this blog are. Hi, aloha, dag, hola, bonjour, hej, merhaba, and g'day to you all, and I'd love to learn how to say hello in anyone else's language if you'll leave me an instructional comment!

92° and time for bed.

QuickieBlog

Just a fleeting post today...

* Still having fun with Drupal. The joys of the last couple of days: URL aliasing, the glossary and swfupload modules, and figure captions. (OK, that last one isn't quite so joyful, but it will be soon.)

* I recently subscribed to the Journal of Web Librarianship (starting with Volume 1, Number 1, which I just finished reading today, just in time for Number 2 to arrive) and I luuuuurve it. I now aspire to publish in it someday.

* Also recently subscribed to, but I'm two issues behind on reading: Library Hi Tech. I fell in love with it just for their recent issue on content management systems.

* I've only just this instant realized I missed the deadline (it was Monday) for getting my slides in for the proceedings for Internet Librarian! AAUGH! Drat, drat, drat... AND I forgot to vote in the rain game today!

It's an even 100° and I'm going home now, dang it.

A short but very deeply felt rant

I really, truly loathe web registration forms that will not work in any browser except IE... and said loathing only deepens when there is no notification of such anywhere on the page, and you don't find out until after you've filled out the bazillion form fields and tried to submit it.

If I didn't have to use this particular company's site to request an upgrade for their product for work purposes (no, you can't do it via email, nor via the program itself), I'd refuse to, and send a nasty email to the company. Arrgh.

Zoomin' with Drupal

So... it's been a hectic week with a lot going on. But I'm not going to tell you about all that - I'm going to tell you about some of the things I've discovered about Drupal lately instead! I had some real breakthroughs last week that enabled me to really get cranking, and yesterday I opened up my dev site to my engineers for input and comments. (Let the flames begin!)

I wanted to share some of the things I've learned, though, because they weren't very intuitive (at least, not to me!), the help files were not always that helpful, and why not do what I can to keep other folks from beating their heads against the wall, too? This all applies to the NoProb theme (and my subtheme off of it).

YMMV with all this, of course -

* If you're using the TinyMCE editor and the IMCE image tool, you have to either globally set, or allow your users to set, their input format to full HTML. Filtered HTML won't cut it. I was going nuts trying to figure out why just a simple hard return wasn't giving me a visible paragraph break on a piece of text - it was marked as filtered HTML. Changed it to full, and poof, there was my paragraph break. Images were also displaying in the editing blocks, but not in the preview panels, for the same reason.

* Breadcrumbing locations are not controlled from the administrative settings, nor from the style sheet definitions; you have to tweak the template's php page for that. (Thanks to Cary for the info on the right way to tweak it!)

* To allow users to change the weighting of their book pages (as in, the order in which the book pages appear in the book) you have to grant permissions to administer nodes to the appropriate user role. <rant>On a related note: So far the only thing I've found that I really dislike about Drupal is the whole weighting thing. Don't get me wrong - I love the book content type and we're going to be using it quite heavily - but I quite snarl at the weighting process. If'n you don't use it, you end up with your book pages in alphabetical order, which is not what is always wanted. It's very nonintuitive - I thought it was just me but so far every one of my users who's signed up for an account has gone "Uh, what the heck is this?", and there seem to be a hefty number of postings about it on the forums as well. And where did a weighting of -15 to 5 come from? Can't we just go, say, 0 to 20 or something? Or even more - I can very easily see where there might be more than 20 "chunks" in a set. Sheesh!</rant>

* When creating profile pages (which we will be using for staff contact pages), if you choose to use a freeform list as one of your fields, you cannot use HTML (therefore you can't, say, link to a given talk or published paper). Go with the multi-line textfield. While you're at it, if you want a picture to be added to the profile page (but nowhere else), you have to enable picture support in the user settings, but do not toggle the user picture display in the theme controls. (I thought you needed both and ended up with photos all over the site!)

Still to come (amongst much more, I'm sure): Figuring out how to limit the content list shown to the logged-in user to their own content (as in, don't show my content to Bob, or Bob's content to Sam), and trying to get figure captions to appear under the figure on the web page instead of just as a floating title (which doesn't work on all browsers, it seems).

No rain. Just heat.

So, um, er...?

Interesting link from LLotD - almost passed it over until I heard from a friend that I really should check it out (thanks, Kathy!) - Christopher Brosius Limited's perfume scent "In the Library". I'm quite tempted to buy the little bottle just to see what it really smells like!

When will scents come to the Internet? (I'm suddenly having a flashback to Bloom County's Scratch-n-Sniff Bill... aack!) Then again, maybe I don't want random smells wafting out of tiny scent generators whenever I visit a web site... *shudder*

Sunny and 87°. Aaahhhh.

Sys Grunt

A day in the life of a systems librarian... with a tip o' the hat to Ref Grunt.

Make coffee.
Read and answer email.
Check status of user with new swap space definition (so far, so good).
Send copyright question for posting old hardware manuals to listservs.
Discuss problematic webcam with IT.
Send SLA meetup info to chapter webmaster.
Read and answer email.
Research some of the listserv suggestions on copyright issues.
Troubleshoot CAD crash issue with user.
Browser/mailer crash. Sigh..
More coffee, read Monday's and Tuesday's LISNews.
Tweak data archive request form.
Procure chocolate for IT guy who fixed webcam.
Blog posting: PCA Call for Papers.
Summarize copyright findings on blog, send to listservs with thanks.
Update billing info for Experts Exchange; renew membership.
Read and answer email.
Answer reference question about the "Eye of God" nebula, aka the Helix Nebula.
Rummage around for lunch.
Adjust settings for directory monitoring program on server after forcing an end-process to kill stuttering notifications.
Post report into archives, database, and web site.
Post new instrument information to web site.
Discuss future (if any) of long-ignored indexing project.
Burn archive DVD of document set.
Return indexed papers to originating scientist; vow to finish unindexed stack sometime this year.
Listen to user complain (at length) about application.
Start work on unindexed papers. Index, index, index.
Read and answer email.
Go home.

96° and 27%Rh. No rain today.

My Foray into Copyright

This morning's adventure is into the realm of copyright and operations manuals. We have a bunch of operations manuals from the 60s and 70s that are still in regular use at the telescopes; they're physically falling apart, so have been digitized for our use, but they're also used by observers to the telescopes. The companies that provided these manuals back in the day have since vanished. Could we, legally, post the PDFs of these manuals in our new online observer's manual? I had no idea - copyright is not my area of expertise by a long shot. (I know the basics, at least!)

So, I turned to my colleagues and posted an inquiry to some division listservs. Here's a summary of my responses:

* Information Outlook has a regular column on copyright, "Info Rights", by Lesley Ellen Harris - they aren't available online right now but had a lot of good suggestions and resources for frequent copyright questions and uses. (I'll be sure not to skip over that section anymore, that's for sure!)

* (Amended to include this item) CFHT's Liz Bryson maintains a rather complete list of copyright resources that's got a lot of good information.

* If you're affiliated with a university or college, chances are very high that they subscribe to a copyright clearinghouse like the Copyright Clearance Center - check with them, they might have the answer. Or, if you have a legal department, ask them. (Lots of folks suggested these.)

* Also, be sure to check the CCC and LOC copyright sites directly. I actually found the answer I was looking for on the CCC web site; according to the "What is Copyright" page, in the "Public Domain" section:

Public domain materials generally fall into one of four categories:

1. Generic information, such as facts, numbers and ideas.
2. Works whose copyrights have lapsed due to the passage of time or the failure of the copyright holder to renew a registration (a requirement that applies to works created before 1978).
3. Works created prior to March 1989 that failed to include a proper notice of copyright.
4. Works created by the U.S. federal government.

I called CCC directly, briefly explained my situation, and asked for confirmation that they would, in fact, fall under #3 above. (In this arena, I don't trust my own first interpretation.) The very kind rep verified that yes indeedy, they would, and that it would not be a copyright violation to link a PDF of the manual (in its entirety, including the cover page) to our online observer's manual.

So. This has been a good lesson for me on copyright resources and information - thanks so much to everyone who replied to me with suggestions! dPAM and dSOLO rock :-)

Call for Papers: PCA Libraries, Archives, and Museums Area

Call for Papers: Popular Culture Association 2008

Libraries, Archives and Museums Area

The Popular Culture Association will be holding its annual joint meeting with the American Culture Association March 19 – 22, 2008, at the San Francisco Marriott in San Francisco, California. Scholars from numerous disciplines will meet to share their Popular Culture research and interests.

The Libraries, Archives, and Museums Area is soliciting papers dealing with any aspect of Popular Culture as it pertains to libraries, archives, museums, or research. In the past this has included descriptions of research collections, studies of popular images of libraries or librarians, analyses of web resources such as Wikipedia and YouTube, and reports on developments in technical services for collecting popular culture materials. Papers from graduate students are welcome.

Prospective presenters should send a one-page abstract (with full contact information) by November 1 2007, to Allen Ellis, Professor of Library Services, W. Frank Steely Library, Northern Kentucky University (ellisa@nku.edu).

Drupal Subtheme Joy

Well, I did it! I successfully created a subtheme for Drupal, and it showed up in the administrative manager and everything! I haven't tweaked it yet - only on paper so far (I'm marking up the main theme's CSS with notes and stuff - I can't help it, sometimes I need paper and pencil), but I'll be trying that first thing tomorrow (after brewing some coffee, that is).

My plan for the coming weeks is to spend half the day on the EDMS (today I managed to create a batch file that actually works [after a couple of tries; gotta have those quotes in the right place!] to do all the "mkdir" commands to recreate the new, collapsed structure) and half on Drupal (see above). So far so good! Well, except for yesterday - my plan to work on Drupal in the afternoon was sidelined by a not-very-enjoyable vasovagal reaction to the hyalgen injections. (Yes, I passed out. A short-lived but exciting time was had by my husband and the orthopedist.) If it weren't for the fact that the last round worked so well for me... dang it. Ah well; it's the price you pay for having knees forty years older than you are.

Currently 92° and cloudy; it feels cooler than that, but the mugginess is not pleasant. How do folks on the East Coast live with this year-round?

Cranky Old Knees

So, we continue to have Fun with Monsoon Storms here in (usually sunny) Tucson - and my knees are telling me all about it. Today I have the first injection of the second round of hyalgen viscosupplementation - at least I know what to expect during the shots and what the aftereffects will be, and last round gave me 15 months of relief (which is a nice long time for this stuff, believe me!) - I hope for the same this time around. Whee...

In other news, we'll be testing a proposed SolidWorks assembly transfer process this week (if you rename a path in the filename of a SW assembly, it breaks the references and, thus, breaks your model - makes it very hard to transfer assemblies into a new directory structure). Keep your fingers crossed. And while that is going on, I plan to continue my assault on Drupal themes and modules - maybe I'll actually get somewhere this week (which would be nice). These two tasks will be my main focus for the month of August - we lose the test server on 1 September, and that's also my deadline for having a working web-CMS to present to the staff. More whee...

Time to jet to the orthopedists' office. It's still lightly sprinkling and a lovely, cool 74°.

Classic stereotypes? Nope!

Carol Petrowski shares some thoughts on the profession in her autobiographical article "Librarians don’t fit classic stereotypes" over at the Holmen Courier (Wisconsin). I like the opener:

"I was wearing my favorite T-shirt, the one that said 'U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D* LIBRARIAN' on it, when I had the hang gliding accident that smashed my wrist. (Now THERE’S an opening sentence you wouldn’t expect to see in a column written by a slightly-over-middle-aged librarian.)"

Nice musings!

Wait a second...

"So you're saying men can be librarians?" Check out "The Couch Dialogues", today's Penny Arcade comic (today being 2007/08/03 if you have to go back through the archives).


What do you think, guys, do you like "librarianman" any better than "guybrarian"? (How about Libratorr?)

No rain last night, very sad. Currently 86° and 50% chance of rain today.

Blogosurvey

Are you a librarian (or librarian-ish)? Got a blog? Go take Meredith Farkas' (Information Wants to be Free) 2007 Survey of the Biblioblogosphere. Go. Now. Thank you.

It's currently a sunshiny 92° - quite lovely. I hope it rains tonight.

Swamped...

...buried, inundated, overwhelmed...

In brief:

* We survived the last round of reviews. Yay, us!

* The Time Traveler's Wife is an awesome book. Go forth and read it now. (Thanks for the loan, David!)

* Check out the storm that walloped Tucson yesterday. (Links to MPG)

* I think we're going to be able to buy our own web server, which is good since one of our main ones went down again today - arrgh.

* Collapsing hundreds of directory structures for a new file structure is eye-strain-inducing. Bleah.

Currently a gloomy 90° with 48%Rh. I hope it rains again today!

Call for Papers: SWTX Popular Culture Association

Call for Papers: Libraries, Archives, Museums and Popular Culture Area of Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association and Southwest/Texas American Culture Association

2008 Annual Conference
Hyatt Regency Albuquerque - Albuquerque, New Mexico
February 13-16, 2008

The Libraries, Archives, Museums and Popular Culture area solicits paper proposals from librarians, archivists, curators, graduate students, faculty, collectors, writers, and other aficionados (yes! including people who use libraries, archives, and museums!) of popular culture and information settings of all types. We encourage proposals for slide shows, video presentations, workshop formats, and panels organized around common themes. Among recent presentations were a slide show on petroglyphs, a history of a museum of bad art, and a comparison of Holocaust memorials.

Some suggested topics:
* Histories and profiles of museums, archives, libraries, and other popular culture resources
* Intellectual freedom or cultural sensitivity issues related to popular culture resources
* Book clubs and reading groups, city- or campus-wide reading programs
* Marketing popular culture materials to library, archives, or museum users
* Collection building and popular culture resources
* Organization and description of popular culture resources
* New media formats and popular culture in libraries, archives, or museums
* Wikipedia, YouTube, social networking, EBay, and their impact on popular culture collections
* The Harry Potter phenomenon in library and museum programming
Other topics welcome!!!

Send a 200-word abstract to the Area Co-Chairs by November 16, 2007. Include your complete mailing address, school or other affiliation, e-mail address, telephone number, and fax number. Graduate students are encouraged to present, and to apply for the graduate paper prizes listed on the web site.

Catching Up: A Few Random Links

So I'm finally starting to dig out from this week's LISNews, LII's New This Week, LotD, etc - hopefully tomorrow I can spend some time catching up on blogs. Here's some things I've come across, or that have been sent to me, that I wanted to share:

* This awesome library poster posted by Flickr user Felicia... I'm seriously thinking of printing out one and posting it on my office door! (thanks Amy!)

* An interesting article about "Library Law: Library Dress Codes: Keeping Up Appearances" that includes court rulings and suggestions for library dress policies (via LISNews)

* Greg Schwartz's Uncontrolled Vocabulary blog and podcast is a great live (every Thursday night) discussion about hot topics in the library world today. One of these days - if I can stay up that late - I might even join in! (via multiple bloggers)

It's currently a lovely (well, for us at least) 85° with an active flood advisory in effect. Whee...

Thunder, lighting, and rain, oh my

Crazy last few days - quiet on the posting front because I've spent most of my time preparing for a series of big reviews that start tomorrow. Once they start, though, I can begin sharing my oh-so-insightful thoughts with you all again!

In the meantime, it is pouring here - yay for rain!

Currently, well, raining - and an amazingly cool 79°.

I Can Has Snarlz

So. Turns out that SLA - despite selections on the program planner and forms being filled out - did not, in fact, record my talk in Denver. They didn't actually record any of my division's sessions. (As you can imagine, my division chair is just a tad upset with them.) Arrgh!

Vendor Make-up

I spent the day with two representatives from the company that makes our EDMS (that we were having such problems with) and I'm quite pleased with the progress we're making. It is no longer unthinkable that we may be using the software again before the end of the year. Not only are we starting to get real results (as in, "hey, we could duplicate your problem here and found the cause" kind of results, although they would have been nicer to have last year when we had the problem) but they brought me a brand spankin' new Dell server to use as a testbed platform. (Pity I have to give it back in September!) I'm feeling very positive about what we've worked out so far and the progress we made today, and given that most of the engineers have stopped spitting whenever the EDMS is mentioned, I'm hoping things will work out all right. (I still believe in this product; eternally optimistic, that's me!)

It's currently a lovely 86° and we got 0.03" of rain today! Too bad I voted for no rain in our office pool... ah well, would rather have the actual rain than the points!

And now...

After
Originally uploaded by desertlibrarian

...I finally match my avatars!

The Expert: New on TV in the Fall!

USA Network has announced their 2008 slate of shows, and amongst them is The Expert, summarized as "A reclusive librarian with a unique condition called synesthesia works with the police squad to aid in their investigations. Synesthesia allows her to mix her various senses -- she smells sounds, hears colors and feels words enabling her to explore unconventional ways to pursue criminals." Should be interesting! (via LISNews)

It's 104° with a 40% chance of rain. Yes!

Modules & Themes

I am so pleased with how easy it is now to apply modules and themes in Drupal 5.1. Maybe it's just because I was on the steep side of the learning curve with 4.7, but it seems much more straightforward and intuitive (once you know the proper directory to put things into, at least) in 5.1 than it did in 4.7. I'm quite pleased. I've got a couple of new modules (namely front_page and image) and new themes (K2 and NoProb) and *poof* they were instantly on my module and theme administration lists, ready to be tweaked! Yay!

I still have a long way to go but I feel better now than I did a week ago... each time I install or configure something I learn a few more things. Way cool.

102.5° and plenty happening on the radar. Now if it would just head our way...

Updated: We're not what you think!

I first mentioned this site before this blog even existed, and just to get it in the local record I blogged about it last year, too - so here's a third go round! Librarians: We're not what you think! has recently been updated by John Hubbard (tip o' the hat to him for including YDLLaL) - the full essay is quite a read, and don't forget to check out the gallery. (Thanks to multiple folks for the heads-up.)

It rained last night! And it's gonna rain today, I'm sure of it. Even if it's only 20%Rh right now. (And a temp of 102°.)

Let the games begin!

According to the National Weather Service, we've hit our third day in a row of dewpoints above 54°; this means that the 2007 monsoon season officially started Sunday the 8th. And in other weather-wonky news, yesterday was our 27th consecutive day of 100° temps, but we broke the stretch today with a high of only 99°. I bet, though, we'll have another run at it -

What does this mean in the short term, other than muggy days and awesome lightning shows? Well, we here at MPOW actually start a contest to see who can predict rain the best. We vote every day by noon, you get 2 points for a correct yes, 1 for a correct no, and none for an incorrect guess. Competition runs high and hallway hassling is not unheard of. It's the highlight of our summers (sad, but true!).

Random Musings du Jour

Coffee is good.

The furor continues over the hip librarian articles. (Wow.)

Mother Nature can be a real bitch sometimes.

The Searcher's art just amazes me (both his imagery and his word-wrangling.)

Rain at 4am - even accompanied by thunder and lightning - is very soothing.

I like coffee. (wait...)

The Librarians Speak Up

Bet the authors of the NYTimes and NYSun articles previously mentioned didn't anticipate the reactions...and I have to admit, neither did I! (Maybe I need more coffee.) It's been quite interesting (and illuminating) reading what other librarians are saying about these articles:

* Caveat Lector says, "Talk about what we do", not how we spend our recreational time;
* Free Range Librarian says, "To be cool is to be young and male?" (The "guybrarian" thing is really not good; based on the comments, messages and IMs I've gotten, every guy I know who's a librarian is offended by it. Not to mention all the women who've said same);
* The Cool Librarian points out that the coolest librarians she knew were the older, more technically challenged librarians she first worked with, and they're why she went on to her MLS;
* Hedgehog Librarian points out the inadequacies of the salaries quoted in the articles (amongst other things);
* Information Wants to be Free is relieved she didn't end up quoted in the article after all (be sure to read the comments, too!);
* Pop Goes the Library wants to throw these articles across the room.

Wow!

As the self-styled Maven of All Things Librarian Image (*laugh*snort*), I just want to add two more cents to my earlier postings. (1) Both articles were in the, shall we say, "fluffier" sections of the respective papers, and I didn't expect anything serious at that point; (2) Sometimes just getting us out there in front of the public in a way that isn't behind the desk is good; (3) epithets are bad; and (4) I don't expect these articles will do much to affect the overarching image we have to Joe Q. Public. On the other hand... small steps, people, small steps, and the more of them the better - maybe J.Q.P will surprise us!

Hipper Shushers?

(thanks, Kristie!) The New York Times published an article yesterday titled "A Hipper Crowd of Shushers", about the same Desk Set librarian crowd I mentioned earlier. Excellent marketing, you guys! This article's a bit deeper than the earlier one (IMHO), and this one mentions the label "guybrarian". The male librarian in the article doesn't like being called that - I'd be interested to hear from other male librarians, what do you think about that tag?

Monsoon's not here yet but it's right around the corner - hot and muggy is the plan du jour!

Rain and the Catalinas

Bring it on!


Image from the Arizona Webcam, a few buildings over from me.

Oh, to be a librarian in Brooklyn

I'd definitely want to join this group of "new-look librarians"! "Although 'hip' is not an adjective generally associated with librarians, a stack of archivists, publishers, illustrators, librarians, and other bibliophiles called the Desk Set is out to challenge their image as staid." It sounds like they're not only having a lot of fun, they're thumbing their nose at a lot of outdated imagery as well! (via LISNews)

We just hit 100°.

Do we need libraries anymore?

Hell, yes, we do!

I've been following the postings on this article (and other blog articles about it) for a while, but only realized this morning that I didn't mention it here, and I think it deserves a mention because too many people (and sadly, some of them are in charge of library funding issues) think that the Internet is the death knell for libraries.

Written by Marc Fisher on June 22nd, this article in the Washington Post poses the title question, and asks, "Have you seen your use of libraries drop off since the computer became standard equipment at home and at work, and what would you want from libraries in the future?" Reading the answers has really cheered me up, since reading the article is a bit of a downer (Mr. Fisher seems to think the answer to his question is "No") - my favorite response has been that of "G", who replied "Are you insane? Yes, there's data on the internet, but how much of it can you trust? You can't beat a library!" Yes, G, yes!

Drupal and Themes

So, I'm now running Drupal 5.1; I started this project at 4.6, and I have to say, WOW. I'm very pleased with the improvements, especially relating to the administrative interface. It's a lot easier - either that or I've finally learned all the steps! - to install and enable modules. I know there are more modules to be installed but I have TinyMCE and IMCE reinstalled, and it was easy. I can only hope the rest of this voyage of discovery goes as well!

I've been looking for two themes I can use for my templates - one for the front page, and one for the rest of the site - so I've spent a lot of time browsing the Drupal Themes directories. My consultant dude said it's much easier to tweak an existing theme to what I want than to try and write it from scratch, which is what I was trying to do. (It seems I have a tendency to start at the hard end of a task, sigh.) I think I've found two that will work, and my goal for today is to get the front page module installed, and both these themes, and then figure out what to do next.

Thunder and lightning and roaring wind last night, but no rain... at least not at my house. Sigh. It's 97° now with a 40% chance of rain - fingers are crossed!

Shelf Check

So, there appears to be a new library comic in town (thanks, Stephen!) - Shelf Check. There are only 14 comics right now but they're worth checking out. (#9 made me laugh out loud!) Here's hoping creator Emily Lloyd (aka Poesygalore) starts sharing them a bit more often with us!

Currently a nice, even 100°.

The monsoon is coming! The monsoon is coming!

Break out the raincoats, the monsoon is coming!

OK, maybe not so much. But for the first time in AGES there's a teeny tiny chance for precipitation forecasted for the next week. I know the NWS is just using climatology and has no real idea what might happen, but hey, based on years of what happened on the next few days we might actually get a drop or two of rain soon. Can't come soon enough... my fingers are crossed for a nice, messy, fill-up-the-rivers season this year! Plus, the temps are coming down - it's strange to live somewhere where you get excited that the temps are dropping down to 100°...

Holy Cow, Part 2

So, American Libraries also wrote me up in the June 20th issue of AL Direct, in the Actions & Answers section. Wow! Bummer that I can't subscribe to it directly, not being a member of ALA, but I'm going to start reading the web page regularly - there's good stuff in here!

Currently 103° and very sunny.

Bombshell Librarians

The emails with new suggestions and info just keep coming! Yay!

Kathe has been kind enough to re-introduce me (thanks!) to Helen Marsh Shandy, the "blonde bombshell of the ALA". She and her husband Peter are the stars of a mystery series by Charlotte MacLeod; I'll be loading yet another book on the request pile at my local library and will be starting with Rest You Merry, the first in the series.

Romantic Librarians

Auburn dropped me a line (thanks!) about another book featuring librarians that I'd missed in my talk: Josephine Carr's The Dewey Decimal System of Love. The reviews I've read make it sound like one of those perky-yet-depressing (IMHO) "she was celibate for years but then found her true love and nothing would keep them apart" kind of books, but Booklist said "much of the pleasure in this wonderfully amusing novel comes from Carr's realistic depiction of the everyday pleasures and occasional downsides to working in a library." I may have to look for it at my own library and give it a read - it is summer, after all!

(Currently 99°.)

Librarians and Time Travel

Ramona dropped me an email (thanks!) to tell me about another book featuring a librarian: The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffeneggar. (Unbelievably, I couldn't find this book at LibraryThing thanks for the correction, Tim!) Anyway, this tells the story of Henry De Tamble, "a rather dashing librarian at the famous Newberry Library in Chicago", who finds himself unstuck in time. It's a love story, since Henry meets his soul mate on one of his journeys, and the tale tells of their times together at various spots along their disconnected timelines. (Apparently there's a movie in pre-production, as well, with Eric Bana tapped to play Henry.) I'll be checking this out from my local library!

More Librarians in Comics

Thanks to August for telling me about another librarian-related comic: the Jack of Fables. But it seems the librarian's the bad guy this time around; August says, "In it, the character Jack of Tales is captured by a nefarious Mr. Revise and his team of Librarians and taken to the Golden Boughs Retirement Village. It seems Mr. Revise wants to 'retire' fables so that they will fade from popular consciousness and so lose their magic." It's one I'm off to investigate!

(Currently 96°.)

One for the Solar Folks

OK, so my day job is with a solar observatory, and my educational background is in astronomy; and (thanks to a Twitterfriend) I've recently discovered Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Blog. Great stuff! A recent posting both made me laugh and shake my head... sheesh, what were these people thinking? Go forth and check out "Is the Sun from another galaxy?", enjoy the illustrations (I've actually printed out the Evil Sun sketch), and bask in the well-written smackdown. (OK, well, I basked in it. Love it when folks can smack a stupid idea down without being our sounding stupid themselves.) And - get this - Phil posts again today with a followup about the attention he's been getting, and a correction to something in his original post. Great stuff!

Almost - but not quite - 106°.

Holy Cow!

The June SLA Connections put my talk down as the first link in the "Outside the Box" topic area! w00t! (This would explain the sudden increase in my mailbox...)

103° and there are clouds over the mountains! (The webcam will probably change, but at 2pm there were clouds, dang it!)

Weather Wonkiness

So, it was 83° when I woke up, and 92° when I got to work. The monsoon moisture is starting to flirt with us, but not enough to really kick off the monsoon season (dewpoint right now is only 47°) - although we're seriously considering starting our Monsoon Madness game next week (average start date is July 3rd). The forecast is all hot, all the time, with no rain in sight...


This week is Thunderstorm Safety Awareness week - not a bad idea to plan ahead, and here's hoping we get a truly real monsoon season this year!

Waiting on the Press Release

(A dip into my secret life of archaeology fascination!) Archaeologists think they've found Hatshepsut's mummy. She was a truly fascinating pharaoh, and Dr. Zahi Hawass discusses the long search for her tomb at his web site. I can't wait to hear what he announces at the press conference today in Cairo. (More about Hatshepsut at Wikipedia.)

Update on the 28th: Yep, it's her!

Absolutely Still Vital

USA Today has a short article titled "Librarians: We're still vital in the digital age", about librarians attending ALA volunteering in the area over the course of the conference - very cool, you librarians, you rock! - and working towards dispersing the idea that we're unnecessary in this digital age. At the time I read the article, there were two comments, both of them rather depressing - and exactly why we need to make sure folks know that just because "it's all on the Internet" doesn't mean you don't need libraries, or librarians!


Found via Jill's twitter about this - she's quoted!

Save Net Radio

Today is net radio's Day of Silence, and boy, is it loud. Royalty rates for webcasters have been tripled; not only that, but tripled and made retroactive for 18 months, effective July 15th! What does this mean for you? It means the best music online will effectively be stopped - Pandora, Shoutcast, EpiphanyRadio, basically any streaming radio station not backed by the big bucks of the RIAA. I don't know about you, but I love my net radio stations - considering the dearth of decent non-mainstream radio where I live - and life would be a whole lot blander without those choices.

Contact your Congressperson (I did) and ask them to support the Internet Radio Equality Act (S. 1353 and H.R. 2060, already introduced). Please. We as librarians are supposed to stand for freedom of speech, and freedom of choice - that should extend to music as well as to books and web sites.

Reviews of The Hollywood Librarian

Folks are starting to post about the premiere of The Hollywood Librarian at ALA last week; not having been able to go myself, I'm quite appreciative of these posts!

* The Hollywood Librarian: Nice Idea, Jumbled Execution, Dubious Marketing Plan over at the LJ Insider
* The Hollywood Librarian World Premiere at the PLA blog
* The Modern Librarian: A Role Worth Checking Out at the Washington Journal
* Hollywood Librarian: World Premier at Tinfoil+Raccoon

There are also starting to be a lot of photos of the event posted over at Flickr.

Updated to add Free Range Librarian's Constructive Suggestions, as well.

Beehives and Buns, or, Comics du Jour

The May 2007 issue of American Libraries (thanks, Mom!) has an opinion page titled "How the World Sees Us" with a panel from a WayLay comic, that states, "And I never should have drawn a librarian with a beehive or a bun, although I understand they might wear sensible shoes." Of course, I had to go looking for the original sources... the page, which includes a bunch of quotes about libraries and librarians, isn't on the AL website (at least, not for us non-members) but if you access it via a database, it's page 38.

So, hopefully you're familiar with Carol Lay's "WayLay" comics; it also helps to be familiar with the whole "Higher Power of Lucky" thing that went embarrassingly kablam a few months ago to get this. She wrote a comic, "The Word", about the whole thing, and then a second comic to apologize to librarians, called "A-Mends". (The comics don't seem to appear on her site, but they appear freely on the Salon site.) While I agree that not all librarians are like that, I hope she didn't get any rude messages about it...

Fun for Friday

(This has absolutely nothing to do with librarians!) A friend forwarded this to me; considering that (in my mis-spent youth) I've been in clubs with folks who dance a lot like some of his segments I had to laugh! Check out the Evolution of Dance over on YouTube.

It's a toasty 106° today.

Advantages to Dating Librarians

Today's xkcd cracks me up! (I must admit to my own twitches.)

Twit, twit, twittering along

ok, so I've taken the plunge into a social networking tool that most of you have probably heard about, Twitter. I've been hearing so much about it for the last several months that I finally decided to try it out... so my TwitterID is desertlibrarian. I've invited the one person I actually personally know on Twitter to be my friend, I just hope I did it the right way - I haven't found anything that allows you to "Add other Twitter friends", only an invite to join by email. Maybe Chris can help me with that... if he wants to be my friend :-D Come be my Twitterfriend! (I did add a Twitter app to my Facebook account... quite addictive... danger, Will Robinson, danger!)

All this is because I don't want to tackle what to do with a bunch of drawings that have already been assigned numbers, and exist, but because our subsystem assemblies have just been rearranged, those numbers are no longer correct *sigh* it's a big mess, and one that the folks who muck about with the WBS don't think about - they just go "Sure, make this change!" and then I have to actually fix all the various places that refer to it. (Arrgh. OK, I'm done whining for now.)

We're up to 98° now.

Morning Musings

At this point in my life there are few things greater than a big, enthusiastic and somewhat slobbery smooch from my kid, followed by "I love you Mommy!" as he runs off to his school class. One of the few things greater is his holler of "Mommy!" and a charge from across the room for a huge hug when I go pick him up.... aah.

Today is brought to you by the letters CMS and the number 3, as in third time's a charm and I'm back on the Drupal project. I've had an unfortunate encounter with SELinux and now know more about touch autorelabel than I ever did before...although I still don't know what happened to set it off (well, I do know what happened, the file system renamed httpd with a _t suffix, which is bad. What I don't know is why it renamed it.) Today I hope to get the Drupal service back up and delivering base data, then I'm off to find a theme that's close to what I want the site to look like. (This is my homework from my Drupal consultant, after getting httpd back running again!)

Currently only 86° but the heat advisory warning stays in place. I actually find myself anxious for the monsoon to start, even though I know we'll all be miserable in the humidity. Give us some rain, Mother Nature! (Please?)

Marumushi Newsmap

Now, this is just cool; the Newsmap is "an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator". It's customizable - so if you aren't interested in, say, entertainment or sports news, you can deselect them - and you can choose countries as well. Interesting to see how different stories have different interest/importance levels in different places. (found via the SLA-IT Blog)

Today: Sunny and 102° with a heat advisory in effect for tomorrow. (I'm glad I don't live in Phoenix, where there's an extreme heat advisory in effect!)

One for the Guys

Wow. Pity Guy Robinson Robertson (my apologies; corrected to proper last name!) ... or give him a really, really big stapler. In this month's Feliciter (from the Canadian Library Association) he writes a feature article titled "Keeping Up Appearances: Looking Like a Librarian in an Age of Paranoia." (If you can't get at it via a CLA login, try your library's Ebsco database.) In it, he describes the denial of his work visa by a customs official who determined that Guy didn't look like a librarian, so must have been lying about his reasons for entering the USA...

I hope he meets with more success in future attempts. This kind of thing is just... well... embarrassing. Thanks to Laurel for sending me the article!

(Sunny and hot. Yes, again.)

It's a Start

After a couple of months of feeling like we were the purple pony in the room, a couple of folks from the vendor for our data management system made a site visit today. I have to say, I'm encouraged, and once again feel a small flicker of hope that we can get this fixed and working again. It wasn't wine and roses, but I'd say it was at least beer and daisies :-D and a very good start. Fingers crossed!

So far today: sunny and 103°. Our AC at work is a bit overenthusiastic and I had to actually go outside twice today to warm up... one thing about 103°, you warm up pretty quickly!

Haiku

Cicadas are loud;
One hundred and two degrees
Finally, summer.

Old & Cranky

Well, it's been ten days since the fantabulous Gold Digger's Ball at SLA in Denver, and my knees are still giving me fits. I guess it might maybe kinda sorta be time to admit that no matter how much fun I have, and how much I adore dancing, it's perhaps time to not dance quite so long, or so enthusiastically. Sob...

104° yesterday. Currently only 89°, but supposed to hit 106° today. Thank god for low humidity. Wonder when the monsoon season is going to start? Our dewpoints are still way below the criteria (54°) ...

Spectacles Talk Now Online

The web version of my SLA Conference Session "Spectacles: How Pop Culture Views Librarians" is now online over at "You don't look like a librarian!" (Audio file will be linked in as soon as I get it from SLA.) Thanks again to everyone who came - without you, it wouldn't be nearly as much fun!

Back at Work

First day back in the office, the piles aren't too high, thank heavens... today we have almost Denver-like weather, it's grey and cool (77°) and cloudy, and it might even rain today! (Fingers crossed, we could sure use it.)

The web version of the talk is done, I just have to link in a few more images and then verify everything; it'll be posted today. And, hey, Dick Kaser wrote a brief blurb about the talk over at the Infotoday Blog - thanks very much, Dick! (Thanks to Chris Z for letting me know; catching up on blogs isn't going to happen for a few days yet!)

SLA: Day 4

The final day of the conference came very, very early for those of us who'd closed out the Gold Digger's Ball on Tuesday night... groan! But we were perked up pretty quickly by an amusing (but, sadly, generic) talk by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. He's a funny speaker - vocal disorder notwithstanding - I just wish he'd tailored it a bit to his audience. With all the Dilbert cartoons featuring librarians, he didn't use a single one...

Afterwards I attended the Astronomy Roundtable I (but missed II, so I hope someone posts a summary someplace!). Later in the evening I went on the tour of the historic Chamberlin Observatory (photos coming soon!). What an amazing opportunity this was - I work mostly with new telescopes, and the chance to see an antique still in use (albeit for public viewing only) was just cool. In addition to a brief history of Chamberlin, we were given the opportunity to view Saturn through the telescope. Squee!

Then it was time to stagger back to the hotel room, finish packing, and try and get some sleep.

SLA Day 3: After PM

After recovering a bit from the Spectacles session, I met with the PAM Book Discussion Group at the Colorado History Museum. As one of the folks who didn't actually finish the book, I didn't have a lot to share, but what I did hear from others makes me determined to finish it!

Then it was back to the Hyatt for the IT/PAM Gold Digger's Ball (my photos here and here). What a blast!

Curse of the Hotel Wifi

Yes, the curse continues to follow me, sigh - now that I'm back in the land of solid Internet access I'll have several more blog postings and pictures coming today, to catch up on the latter bit of the conference. Stay tuned!

SLA Day 3: PM

"Spectacles: How Pop Culture Views Librarians" is now over, deep breath! The talk with all the links will be on the web site by Monday.

To the 120+ people who came and shared some time with me, THANK YOU! You were a great audience and I'm glad I was able to provide a break from the conference seriousness. I will be checking into the information that some you came up to share with me afterwards; expect to see future blog postings on them!

To the folks who requested "more analysis" and "more detailed results", I would like to invite you to check out my earlier talks, "You don't look like a librarian!" and "Where's the librarian?"; both of them deal with survey results and data analysis.

And for all of you who've made my head swell with your very nice remarks (Fun! Excellent! Well done!) - Thank you!

Time to go decompress....

SLA Day Three: AM

Well, I just finished up with the annual Business Meeting, which is always a good way to find out what's going on with the division at large. Our chair surprised some of us with thank-you certificates and pieces of fossilized dinosaur bone - very cool!

While there are events going on between now and Spectacles, I'm not going to go to any of them - I'm going to go back to my hotel and run through the talk a couple more times, do some final tweaking, etc. I'm meeting my moderator at 2pm to walk through the introduction and make sure the tech support for the projector is in place, and then it'll be TIME.

Then I can decompress afterwards - woo hoo! Drinks of some type with Stephen Abram (probably coffee), then the book discussion group, followed by the Gold Digger's Ball (for which I am now a greeter!)

(Gonna be 103° back home today, but only 81° here in Denver. I love the heat, but it's lovely here!)

SLA: Day Two

After the synergy session today, I spent some time in the exhibit hall and then headed to the PAMwide Roundtable, which I was moderating. I won't post much (it was great, ha ha!) but I did get a great photo of the speakers. Then I was faced with two conflicting sessions: one by Roy Tennant, and one from Google. I started out in one and ended up in the other, then I ran back to the hotel to drop off my out-of-power laptop (I'd forgotten my power cord) and grab some paper.

Back to the conference center for the Technical Support roundtable, which was very valuable and I deeply hope will be on the schedule next year in some form.

Now I'm off for dinner with the Hawaiian Librarians, then plan to split my evening between the PAM Open House and the SciFi Open House... unless I decide to come back to the hotel room and obsessively rehearse my talk one more time...

SLA: Synergy Session

I took much more detailed notes, but I just posted a summary of the opening general synergy session on PAMblog. Now I'm off to try and talk to Clifford Lynch about how we at MPOW utilize the concept of virtual organizations, one topic he brought up and said we need to be working towards. He said he'd welcome examples, so I'm off to give him one before the PAMwide RT starts!

SLA Day One: Sunday

I'm having problems getting access in my hotel, so posts may appear the day after from the lovely Blogger's Lounge that SLA has so kindly provided...

Sunday was taken up with the Newcomer's Lunch (nicely attended in the beautiful historic Brown Palace Hotel), followed by the opening of the exhibits and the PAM board meeting (many board-y things were discussed). The opening keynote session by Al Gore was quite cool - who knew he was so darned funny? And he did a very good job of talking to his audience - no canned speech here, but a speech (primarily politics and the climate crisis, which we were expecting) sprinkled throughout with references to libraries, librarians and our importance in the coming information economy. (Lots of applause there!) I was very impressed with his speech, as were many others (given the many effusive postings on the SLA blog). The evening ended (for me, at least) with the Early-Bird Dinner at the Wynkoop Brewing Company. Tasty wheat beer!

Denver, Day One

So, I'm in Denver now...

After an unfortunate misunderstanding in the TIA airport I missed my scheduled flight; thankfully there was another one to Denver that they were able to get me on. Arrived OK, but too late for the Denver City Tour I'd signed up for with SLA - ah well.

I'm staying at the completely cool and very funky Curtis Hotel on the Sci-Fi floor - I highly recommend this place to anyone who needs to stay downtown! I ventured forth to the 16th Street Mall, randomly turned left, and started walking - and lo and behold, the Denver institution of the Tattered Cover bookstore appeared before me! So I, of course, had to spend some time browsing. They recommended Dixon's for dinner, and I had a very tasty steak there. Then I walked back along the very bustling mall, stopped in to say hi to Kathleen and Terese, and then crashed back at the Curtis.

An unfortunate start to the day, but a very satisfying one.

I'll actually write about today's events later - no weather wonkiness this week!

Old Fashioned Words

Scott Adams - who we will be hearing give the closing keynote at SLA on Wednesday - apparently thinks "library" is an old-fashioned word, and the days of libraries are coming to an end. Sigh.

Can't do much more with the talk or for the session I'm moderating now, other than show up and do it. Woot!

It's sunny and hot. Yep, that about sums up the weather report for the next three months.

No, no, no, no, NO.

OK: Nothing to do with librarianship per se, only tangentially as it (hopefully does not) affects new librarians coming into the fold. Please, tell me not all twentysomethings think like this; it just seems wrong to me. "In Praise of the Helicopter Parent" discusses parents being involved in millenials' job searches... to quote, "These parents feel they have the right to call their child’s company to discuss benefits and relocation packages and even negotiate salary. I think this is great."

*sigh*

OK, I'm not an HR person, not in a position to hire someone in any way - and I acknowledge that "who you know" (including your parents) is a very accepted way to get your foot in the door someplace - but if the parent of someone I was interviewing called me to discuss benefits and negotiate salaries, that person would immediately be off my list. And much as I love my parents, if one of them were to call someplace I was interviewing I would pass out from embarrassment, I think. Maybe I need to do some more research on this whole "helicopter parent" thing because I always thought one of the main jobs of being a parent is to prepare your child to go out in the world and stand on their own two feet. Sheesh!

OK. Enough ranting, back to tweaking the talk. (Shameless self promotion! Come hear my talk at SLA on Tuesday at 2:30, CC 704!) I'm enjoying the lovely 85° weather, thankful I have a window that opens!

Random Musings on Comics

* Questionable Content (home of the "Blinded Me with Library Science" Tshirt) does it again, asking "Have you ever seen a gaggle of drunken librarians?" The answer made me laugh, especially since I'm wearing my "Don't make me use my Librarian voice" Tshirt today (thanks, Mom!)

* Support your local comic book store! I've been unable to find Rex Libris locally so have been ordering it online, but these folks not only ordered the latest issue for me, they've set me up with a continuing subscription - for free - where they'll order it and pay for shipping, then call me when it's in. Awesome!

This constant state of single-digit humidity is wreaking havoc with my sinuses. It'll be cooler - and moister! - in Denver next week (mental note: pack a jacket).

Oops, er, great!

So, apparently there is someone other than my mom (hi, Mom!) checking out my web site You Don't Look Like a Librarian - because this weekend I exceeded my traffic quota for the site! (Should have checked my home email address yesterday....) So, um, er, it's unavailable right now. Should be back up within the next 24 hours with a nice, improved, doubled quota. I send thanks to the Librarian in Black because I think the traffic spike is due to her mentioning it on her blog. (And this is serious, Sarah, thanks for mentioning me!)

Random Musings du Jour

First off, in this post-Memorial Day posting, I'd like to say that I'm honored to come from a line of military members. If things had been different in the summer of 1988, I'd have most likely made the third generation in the Air Force. I have many friends in both the Army and the Air Force, and my thoughts are often with them, especially those who are in theater.

OK. Today's Random Musings are:

* A nicely-written ode to a place I spent some time: "Hilo: Hawaii's Forgotten City" (thanks, Liz!)

* This is just too darned cool: Google Launches Streetside View! I can only assume Tucson is way down the list, but it's pretty nifty as it is. I just got a look at the Denver Convention Center, where I'll be next week!

* An amusing mashup if you like Monty Python and Star Wars: King Arthur Vs. Darth Vader.

* OK, this one really is about librarians! Leonid Mamchenkov has his librarian stereotype shaken up. (Good!)

95° today but it doesn't seem that warm. Maybe it's the whole 9%Rh!

Danger, Will Robinson

OK, I have to admit it, I'm a fan of Google. It's not the only search engine I use, but I do use it (via iGoogle), and I make heavy use of GMail, alerts, Google Calendar, and Google Groups (and am seriously contemplating dipping my toes into GSpace for storage). But this article (found via Lifehacker) worries me... a lot.

"Google’s goal: to organise your daily life", an article over at Financial Times, quotes Eric Schmidt as saying " 'The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ '" I'm not sure I want Google to be able to answer that question for me...

Does this make me hypocritical?

It's another lovely moderate day, 90° and sunny... I love having office windows I can open!

YADU

That'd be "Yet Another Danged Upgrade". I've spent the last two days wrestling with a recalcitrant PC, reformatting it and reinstalling Windows and Office. (Good gravy, there's a ton of updates to do when you do that!) After much swearing and growling, it finally dawned on me that the CD/DVD drive was dying... once I replaced that things at least went a bit faster! Feel a bit abashed that it took me a day to figure it out - sigh.

I have to say, HP does a very nice job on the internal arrangements of their workstations. Easiest side panel to remove I've dealt with lately, and all the bays have snap handles for their slots (no screws or wrestling with rails, just pull a nice bright green tab and pop, it's out - or pop, it's back in!) There's also enough space to actually get a hand in to fasten connectors, which is always nice. (Can't say that about my old Vaio desktop, I don't think you could fit a cat in there if you tried.)

In between swearing, rebooting and feeding disks, I've been working on my talk for SLA. Time for more shameless self-promotion! Please come participate in my talk on Tuesday the 5th, 2:30pm, Conference Center 704... yes, I won't just be talking at you, but with you, so come join the fun!

A Good Monday

Well. This morning I was finally able to get the Drupal backup module installed and working; nice module package, I have to say, although if you follow the instructions in the install file, it doesn't work! (ARRGH. Thanks for the straight info, Cary.) And the upgrade to CentOS 5 has gone extremely well - although I ended up not exactly doing an upgrade, but doing a reinstallation (thanks, Mike, for the info) so that I could keep the data on one partition untouched (kind of crucial if you don't want to lose all your stuff). Would be interested to try an upgrade in the future to see if it gives the option to leave one partition alone, but I just wasn't interested in trying that path today, just in case.

Final package updates are installing now, and I'm feelin' pretty pleased!

It's been a lovely day weather-wise, too - our high has only been 90° and there's been a light breeze all afternoon. Aaahhh....

Upgrade Hell... again

Yep, I'm back struggling with upgrades, this time on the web dev platform. I want to upgrade to CentOS 5, as a test for our main server, but before doing that I want to be sure to get a backup of what I've been able to set up so far in Drupal. But I can get neither the command-line mysql backup nor the within-Drupal backup module to work... ARRGH.

It's now officially too late on a Friday afternoon to spend any more time beating my head against this. (Yeah, it'll be SO much better on a Monday morning....)

Looks like we're only going to get up to 96° or so today... with a whopping 7% Rh! (Yeah, yeah, "dry heat", blah, blah...)

Internet Librarian, Here I Come!

So, Information Today accepted my speaker proposal for Internet Librarian! I'll be speaking on a panel regarding Content Management Systems on Wednesday, October 31st. Woo hoo!

Casanova was a Librarian

A new book on the image of librarians has just been published! By Kathleen Low, "Casanova was a Librarian" "provides a peek at the lighthearted, humorous, sexy and intriguing side of librarians. In addition to information about famous librarians, you’ll learn about librarians in politics, porn, poetry, song, movies, and the comics. Librarian humor, librarian recreation and health, librarian underwear, outerwear and other merchandise designed just for librarians are just a sample of the information you’ll find in this book." Sounds right up my alley - I've already ordered my copy!

More Rex!

Rex Libris #8 is now available; continue the adventures of the World's Most Kick-Butt Librarian (apologies to Andrew, the original Butt-Kicking Librarian) in this "all-action-all-the-time extravaganza"! I found Rex's home page as well, and I really encourage all librarians to read about the Ordo Bibliotheca :-D

As well, I've just learned that Warner Brothers has optioned Rex for the big screen!

Conference Plug: I'll be talking about Rex (and a whole lotta other librarian pop culture stuff!) on Tuesday, June 5th starting at 2:30 pm. I hope you'll join me!

Feh... it's only 94°. Guess our heat wave is over... for now!

Trading Images

Laura Wilkerson wrote a letter to Library Journal that was excerpted in the April 1st issue's Feedback. Her husband worked for the Indiana University in the library, and was told by his supervisor that he'd never get promoted as long as he had long hair and dressed the way he did (Dockers & button-downs, surely not at the forefront of challenging attire). It's a depressing story, especially in how it ends.

As Laura said, "Many who hold these stereotypes are librarians in positions of power. Nothing will change until they do." Are you holding any hidden issues about image?

30% chance of rain today... please!

The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice

He's back... again! Noah Wyle is reprising his role once more as Flynn Carsen, The Librarian, in "The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice", aka "Librarian 3". (Nothing on TNT's site yet.) It's due to start filming in September of this year, in New Orleans. Gleaned from various sources and rumor-mills, it seems this time around Flynn is up against a group of baddies searching for an artifact that could resurrect Vlad Dracul (yep, it's a vampire story!). I'm sure the zany librarian fun will continue -

90° and, unsurprisingly, sunny.

Happy Birthday, Blog!

Wow! A year and a week ago I started this blog... hard to believe it's been a year already! Thank you, dear readers, for letting me share my musings on image, systems librarianship, and desert weather with you! (Speaking of which, it's up to 87° now.)

Ice Break: Update

"At 1:44 PM MST on May 11, 2007, Tucson International Airport hit the century mark for the first time in 2007." That just kicked off our first triple-digit weekend; we hit 103° Saturday, but were back down to 100° Sunday. Hello, summer!

The Anti-Stereotype Sterotype

Found via an email discussion, "The Anti-Stereotype Stereotype" over at Blisspix is an interesting post from 2003 that is probably just as valid today. Fiona makes some good points, and ones I must admit I'm guilty of violating sometimes... It is about the values, skills and abilities of librarians, regardless of what we look like or what we do in our spare time - but I believe strongly that our visual impression also has an impact on our patrons.

I hate to say it - and it's why I keep this site going - but the trend continues that when a student walks up to a reference desk to ask about something related to the computer (even if it's just for help with Google), chances are they're going to approach the more "hip" of the librarians behind the desk, regardless of skill set. I see it in my campus library, I see it when I'm in my public library after work, and family and friends report it happening in their libraries.

I'm absolutely not saying my mom (the sysadmin for her library - hi, Mom!) should run out, dye her hair purple, and get a nose stud so the students will talk to her more. But I am saying I still see the stereotypical effects out there. I think if we swing too far the other way - towards the anti-stereotype stereotype - we'll be in exactly the same situation. But if we can keep convincing people that we do know what we're talking about, whether we've got a grey bun or a green mohawk, then we'll be on the right track.

I think we're on that track, and going in the right direction. Let's keep it up.

Institute for Librarian Evolution

Found via one of those random link wanders, the Hedy Siroty Institute for Librarian Evolution is a fun look at the change in the outlook, adaptation and habitats of librarians over time. (Be sure to check out all the tab options, as several have multiple subsets.) Fun!

Currently 93°; today's fun desert weather fact is that at midnight, it was 82°!

lolbrarians

Ha! Boy, this one's taken off like a shot... the LiveJournal lolbrarian group. (Slightly NSFW in the title.) Like the always-amusing (to me, at least) lolcat meme, or the highly-creative error messages some web sites provide (i.e. Twitter and Bloglines), only this one is even more inspiring. Sooner or later (maybe sooner!) I'm-a'gonna do one of my own.... heh.

Updated about 5 minutes later: OK, so I did one!



Feh... it's only 95°.

Ice Break on the Rillito

Well, it's that time of year again - the forecast is for our first 100° day tomorrow, and it's supposed to be 100°+ all weekend long. Wonder when we'll actually break 100?

Ah, summer's here!

"The Hollywood Librarian" Trailer

The trailer for the much-anticipated "The Hollywood Librarian: Librarians in Cinema and Society" is now available for viewing! The World Premiere of the movie will be at ALA in June.



Read more about the Hollywood Librarian project!

Updated to actually include the link for those reading this in a feed... sorry 'bout that!

What kind of information user are you?

The folks over at Pew Internet Life have posted a quiz that allows you to "place yourself in one of the categories in the Pew Internet Project's Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users." I, myself, come up as an "Omnivore" (thought I'd be a "Connector", instead!). Where do you fall in these categories? (found via Free Range Librarian)

Overcast and, a few minutes ago, it was gently raining! Yay!

Super Librarian vs. The Virus!

"When villainy threatens readers, Super Librarian springs into action." Thus says the new comic book from the always-amazing New Jersey State Library, released May 5th (Free Comic Book Day). Wish I could get my hands on one!

It's a (very) cool, beautifully sunny 71° this morning.

Oh, I WANT one....

(Yes, the post title is a recurring theme.)

Star Wars Flash Drives. Yes! (I can't decide between Chewie and R2D2.) I can only imagine that owning one of these would up my Geek Score. found via Folderol

Web Design Survey

"People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession." Want more data? Then contribute some data! A List Apart's first annual Web Design Survey is now available - go take it!

I want... to be a... librarian...

OK, late off the block but I just have to share this: Librarian, by HauntedLove. Every librarian stereotype, rolled up into one cheezy-yet-catchy song! The ending made me laugh out loud...

My favorite line is: "Don't you find me appealing, in a nerdy sort of way?" Ha!!

It's a lovely, sunny 86°. Aahhh...