IT, Free Kittens, and Free Beer

I highly recommend Karen Schneider’s TechSource blog post about IT planning. If only for reading the first couple paragraphs that aptly describe what library IT operations are likely to have on their plates. Next time you see one of your library’s IT professionals, thank them for all their work!

A couple choice quotes:

If idle hands are playthings of the Devil, we’re the epitome of virtue. And this is a fairly calm period.

Find five technologies you like; focus on three; implement one…. The less-is-more approach also introduces newer librarians to the radical concept that a really good idea should be honored with the time, training, tools, and attitude it deserves.

It’s a good post for reminding us that, as fast as things are changing, we still need to plan and that sometimes the things we need to do the most aren’t the sexiest or most exciting.

Passing Time with the AADL Catalog

I’m in the Atlanta airport for a good while, waiting for my flight to San Antonio for Open Repositories, so I shelled out for wifi access. And now that I have, I’m going to find things to do online until the last possible minute or until my battery dies!

One good way to pass time online today is to head over to the Ann Arbor District Library’s fabulous catalog, which is newly enhanced with the ability to tag, review, and more. John Blyberg describes his work on the development here. Be sure to look at the catalog cards, too, if you haven’t yet, and at their website in general, which won LAMA’s 2006 Best in Show award for library websites in its budget category.

Articles on Managing and Career Development

Boxes and Arrows, a web zine about design and information architecture, has two articles about making career choices in its current issue. The first offers some tips for deciding whether or not you want to manage and the second looks at the “three-pronged fork in the road,” reminding readers that managing isn’t the only option when it’s time for a change (“guruhood” and reinvention are the other two). While some of the content is design-specific, both articles are worth a look, and while you’re there you can ooh and aah over the brand new site design, also definitely worth a look.

Don’t Click: Choose or Use

It’s easy for those of us who use a mouse or trackpad on a daily basis to forget that many people use computers without them. If you maintain web pages and are still looking for a New Year’s resolution, please consider working to eliminate “click” from your lexicon.

In most cases, you will find that it’s pretty easy to substitute “choose” or “use” for “click.” For example, “To look up an electronic journal, choose ‘metaLINK’ on the Libraries’ home page, then ‘Find e-Journal.’ ”

In other cases, no substitution is needed at all. Instead of, “Click here for more information” you can simply drop “Click here for” and make “More information” your link instead. Besides making your pages more inclusive, they will instantly look like they were created sometime after 1999, even if the content has been around a while!

I know I have pages out there that still say “click” and I’ll be trying to eliminate it from them all in the coming weeks.

5 Things

OK, OK, I haven’t been especially inspired to blog for a while, but this is an easy one.

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Me

1. The first thing I wanted to be when I grew up was a veterinarian.
2. When I was in first grade, I had a lot of warts on my face. I went through a lot of traumatic procedures to have them removed, but what finally did the trick was Jafra’s Malibu Miracle Mask.
3. I was once almost charged with stealing an air conditioner. It’s a long story. (For the avoidance of doubt: I didn’t steal the air conditioner.)
4. I share a lantern color with Katharine Hepburn.
5. I am from the East Side of Cleveland, which is the best side, as all reasonable people know. The quiz below is right on, except that when I got to college I quickly switched from “pop” to “soda.”

What American accent do you have?

Your Result: The Inland North
 

You may think you speak “Standard English straight out of the dictionary” but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like “Are you from Wisconsin?” or “Are you from Chicago?”  Chances are you call carbonated drinks “pop.”
The Midland
 
The Northeast
 
Philadelphia
 
The South
 
The West
 
Boston
 
North Central
 
What American accent do you have?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Signing up, Signing in, and Searching

I finally started cataloging my books on LibraryThing over the holiday break. Two things struck me immediately.

1. Library Thing is better than any other website I have ever used. Why?

Create an account or Sign into your account (this is the only step)

The sign-up process is identical to the sign-in process! What a concept! Reason enough to upgrade to a paid account and support them! No e-mail address, no birthday, real name, state of residence, areas of interest, name of pet, or favorite color! I’m way over my personal quota for exclamation points. The only hitch in the sign-up proceedings was me pausing to read the text several times and thinking, “yeah, right, I wonder what will happen once I click submit.”

Of course, once you have an account, you can provide more information, including an e-mail address, which, as LT points out, may be useful if you forget your password.

2. On a more sobering note, there is no comparison between the search results for the two most prominent data sources in LibraryThing, Amazon and LC. Search for 1984 and 8 of the first 10 Amazon results are for the book by George Orwell (the other two are for Cliffs and Spark Notes). Even after viewing complete information for the first 10 LC results, I couldn’t always figure out why the item made the list. There was nothing by George Orwell on the first page. At the other end of the spectrum, a search on “lear nonsense” (without the quotes) brings up a relevant but solitary result in the LC catalog, while Amazon’s first 10 results are all–surprise!–Edward Lear’s nonsense poems and drawings. Guess which source I try first?

NYPL Database Access

Did you know that any New York State resident can apply for a free New York Public Library card, which allows you to access some of their electronic resources from home? Among the databases are Ulrich’s, Rosetta Stone’s Online Language Learning Center, Library Lit, a bunch of Ebsco databases, and the Columbia Gazetteer, my personal favorite. The link above leads to an online application, which was pretty painless to complete.

(Reminder via Librarian Avengers.)

User Experience and Choice

One of my favorite blogs right now is Creating Passionate Users, by authors of O’Reilly’s Head First series.

Yesterday’s post led me to Choice = Headaches at the blog Joel on Software. The entry is about the obscene number of ways to turn off a Windows Vista machine (up to 15 by Joel’s count), but it’s really about interface design, user experience, and choice, and there is a lot in there that we librarians would be wise to take to heart.

LibraryThing UnSuggester

I’m fascinated by LibraryThing’s new UnSuggester, unveiled Sunday along with their “real” recommender system. UnSuggester gives you opposites instead of similar titles.

the selfish genewild at heartFor example, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky overlaps least with Daughters of the Moon by Lynne Ewing. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins overlaps least with Wild at Heart: Discovering the Passionate Soul of a Man by John Eldredge.

It could make an interesting collection development tool–or at least a fun way to expand your horizons a bit, even if you don’t read the opposites.

You can read more about UnSuggester and BookSuggester (the actual recommender system) at the LibraryThing Blog. And you can try them out for yourself even if you don’t have a LibraryThing account.