Ab’s Blog

At a recent training session, some of the attendees got a little restless and found the “just for fun” links off the student gateway page. Since I was conducting the training, I didn’t have the luxury of checking the sites out myself, so it was not until today that I finally experienced the 30-Second Bunnies Theatre Library. (Try the James Bond Medley.)

Closer to home, Lorcan Dempsey has written recently about the network reconfiguring the library systems environment.

The Thingology blog has a nice visual post about tag clouds and the concept of “fauxonomy”.

Going back a few weeks, Meredith Farkas wrote about listening to our patrons and actually addressing their concerns, illustrated with a story about Car and Driver magazine.

If you need another diversion, please see my own standby, National Geographic News, for giant squid. Or check out some smart cars.

I think I first read about Twitter on Creating Passionate Users, but soon thereafter it started popping up on a lot of library blogs I read.  I didn’t want to get crushed in the stampede, so I waited out the buzz until this weekend when I got talking about it with a friend and decided to set up an account.  If you’re interested, you can find me at acbtanya, but be forewarned: I have no idea how or how often I’ll use it.

Rachel Singer Gordon asks, “What do people read outside the library field?”

• dooce - “I’m Heather B. Armstrong. This is my website.”
• A List Apart - “For people who make websites”
• Church of the Customer - by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, authors of Citizen Marketers and Creating Customer Evangelists
• National Geographic News - Jurassic crocodiles, interspecies mating, “Toyger” kitties.
• desire to inspire - “This blog was started so that we could share our favourite inspirational design photos with you”

My last day in the office is tomorrow and then I tackle the job of moving in earnest. I expect things will be quiet here for a while. I’m cleaning out my del.icio.us bookmarks as well as my files; here are a few pages for your amusement:

Yahoo! vs. Google search results - visualize the difference

Talk to a person - “The gethuman project is a consumer movement to improve the quality of phone support in the US”

Moosewood Restaurant recipe archive

The Vermont Country Store

My SUNY colleagues in Oswego have found a professional use for all that snow they have: send the newest librarian up to the top of a very large snow bank and take her picture! Emily Hart, reference and instruction librarian and native Oswegonian, reports, “I’m not sure how tall it was…big! There was a significant drop on the other side :o” Will this trend catch on at libraries across the midwest and northeast?

If you are in the Philadelphia area between next Tuesday and June 3rd, may I suggest checking out Bryn Mawr College’s exhibition on bookbinding, curated by the College’s honorary curator of bookbindings, Willman Spawn?

I was lucky enough to work as an intern in Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections department, full of beautiful bindings, and to learn a little from Willman (all, alas, now forgotten). The combination of Bryn Mawr’s collections and Willman’s curation should make for an exhibit not to be missed. The focus of the exhibit is 18th and 19th century bindings, but the Library also has a stellar collection of incunables, which are in the exhibition area, unless things have changed since I was there last.

If you go between March 30th and May 11th, you can see a companion exhibit of contemporary artists’ books in the Canaday lobby.

Details at the BMC website

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.”

It’s my birthday, which means it’s time for another diversion.

This guy (girl?), a Yariguíes brush finch, comes in my favorite colors and lives in “the last remnants of a remote Colombian cloud forest,” according to the National Geographic News article.

For a Monday morning diversion with a grain of truth see What does your browser reveal about you?

“You really don’t care if FF is faster, or safer than IE - you would use it even if it performed 10 times worse. “

You betcha!

Found via Library Garden.

This American Life just repeated its episode from 8/5/05, which includes an act about rock concerts in Michigan public libraries. The theme of the episode? “Stories of people and institutions who are worried about what the world thinks of them, and who take action, decisive action.”

Streaming is free, podcasts are not.