Month: December 2008

Categories
Digital Culture Library Issues

ALA Presidential Hopefuls and YouTube

So the ALA is taking a hint from the US Presidential elections and taking questions from YouTube…with some caveats. Here’s the email that went out to ALA members:

Members Invited to Submit Questions to ALA Presidential Candidates via YouTube

Do you have a question you’re dying to ask the candidates for ALA President?  If you can’t attend the Presidential Candidates’ Forum at Midwinter, why not submit a question on YouTube?  It’s fun, it’s easy, it’s the new ALA way!

•       Questions should be submitted as videos and posted to YouTube
•       Maximum running time is 90 seconds
•       ALA members or groups of members may submit questions using your true name(s) (anonymous submissions will not be considered)
•       Video submissions must be tagged as ALAelection09 in order to be identified as questions for the ALA Presidential Candidates
•       Submissions accepted from Dec. 8 through Jan. 16

Six questions will be selected by a jury of past ALA presidents and presented to the candidates.  Candidates’ responses will be posted to YouTube and AL Focus prior to the opening of the ALA Election on Mar. 17.  The candidates for ALA President for the 2009 election are Kent Oliver and Roberta Stevens.  Questions will also be posed to any petition candidates.

For more details, go to http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/governance/alaelection/index.cfm

ALA is trying to get social media, but failing in significant ways. Why is it that only ALA Members can submit questions? The ONLY way that ALA is going to pull in the next generation of librarians is to show them that there is a benefit to joining…and withholding participation is so completely the wrong way to do it. The ALA should allow non-members to ask questions, in the same way they should start pushing conference content to non-members in a more robust way. Inviting virtual participation is a huge step…don’t screw up by limiting your audience, ALA. Change this requirement.

I also have a significant personal issue with requiring names to be attached to questions. The questions are being vetted anyway…what’s the harm in allowing anonymous questions? For a profession that holds privacy as high holy writ, to then disallow anonymous speech seems a bit hypocritical. The US Supreme Court has held that the right to free speech and the right to anonymous speech are the same…that “identification requirements burden speech”, as Talley v. California is sometimes expressed. I would love to see the ALA Board reconsider this requirement as well.

Categories
Brand_New_World Uncategorized

Happy Holidays



IMG_6846.JPG, originally uploaded by griffey.

Eliza had three, yes, THREE, Christmases. She got to open presents and eat wonderful meals at Pop and Nana’s in Georgia and also at Papaw’s house in Kentucky. And got tons of wonderful gifts (thanks, everybody!). Her favorites were, of course, all the new books she got. And two new baby dolls from Nana, including her first Cabbage Patch Kid.

Eliza did fine with all the traveling and sleeping in strange places. She also let all of the relatives hold her and play with her, even the ones she hadn’t seen in a while. Her favorite person of all was her four-year-old cousin, Hannah. She tried to indoctrinate Eliza into the ways of the Disney Princesses and My Little Ponies, but I don’t think it has had any lasting effect. We hope not!

Categories
Library Issues Technology

December Techsource post

In my December Techsource post, I decided to do my Year End Top 5 Technologies list. Head on over and take a look, and tell me if you agree. 🙂 Here’s the teaser:

In the spirit of the bazillion other  year-end lists you will see over the coming weeks, I decided to list my Top 5 Most Influential Technologies of the year. These are the technologies that I think librarians need to be aware of, examine, and find uses for in their library. Not all of these started this year, but 2008 was  the year they broke out and became necessities in many people’s lives.

Categories
Brand_New_World Uncategorized

Eliza is one!



IMG_6674.JPG, originally uploaded by griffey.

Eliza’s one year checkup was yesterday, and she apparently had quite a growth spurt recently. They measured her at 31 inches, which puts her in the 95th percentile for height!! Still around 75th for weight and head. So overall, a big, healthy girl.

She sort of enjoyed the examination, thanks to all the cool gadgets, cherry-flavored tongue depressor, and nice doctor. But the vaccinations were not fun. She got over them pretty quickly, but I hadn’t heard her cry like that in a long time.

More on our almost-toddler soon. Will post a 12 month “profile” in the next few days!

Categories
Brand_New_World Uncategorized

First Birthday Party!



IMG_6579.JPG, originally uploaded by griffey.

We had a small party for Eliza yesterday, and she had her first taste of cake. We baked a cupcake just for her, a smaller version of the big cake (yellow with buttercream frosting and sprinkles). It was a HUGE hit, and she ate every single bite and wanted more frosting. That’s my girl!

We had a great crowd, and everybody seemed to enjoy the festivities. Eliza had help opening her gifts from some two-year-old friends, and she seems to like her new loot. She got lots of books, bath toys, a stuffed seal from Daddy, a toy phone, a cool shape sorter, and a gorgeous handmade vest.

The big day is tomorrow, 12/15. One year old! None of us can believe it.

Categories
Library Issues MPOW

Live Desktop and Libraries

I hadn’t mentioned one of my favorite things we’ve done at MPOW here on the blog, because I assumed that it was an obvious thing to do. However, I’ve told a few people about it, and it seems not as obvious as I thought, so here ya go.

In trying to decide where our Meebo widget should live, I realized that it didn’t have to live on a webpage. That is, it does, but that webpage can be, on a Windows machine, part of the desktop. We have our student systems set up to use the Windows Live desktop functionality. We point the desktop at a page on our server, that we use to rotate banners, give instruction (Your files WILL be deleted when you log off) and other things. Since it’s a webpage, the Meebo widget lives happily among the other web content.

So students don’t have to navigate anywhere to reach us. The box is right there on the desktop. Putting the widget there has also increased our question count, and seems to be working really well for us.

Hope that’s useful for someone out there in library land!

Categories
Personal

Caga Tio

I thought that I had blogged about this before, but I can’t seem to find it in my archives, so maybe I’m wrong. One of my all time favorite Christmas traditions is from Spain, specifically from the Catalan region around Barcelona, and it involves something called Caga Tio.

I couldn’t make up a stranger Christmas tradition if I tried. Seriously.

Catalan families go into the woods and find a Christmas Log (Tio de Nadal) to bring into their home. It’s painted or otherwise decorated with a face, and wrapped in a blanket. Over the weeks before Christmas, the Caga Tio is fed sweets and other treats, in order to get him ready for the command performance on Christmas. After weeks of being fed, the Caga Tio is ready. He is then beaten with sticks by the children of the family until he poops out treats for the children, usually in the form of the Catalan treat called turron. Yes…the log poops out the children’s treats, which they then consume. Caga Tio literally translates into “Pooping Log”.

For whatever reason, the Catalan people are somewhat obsessed with scatology and Christmas. Their other big tradition involves the Caganer, a figure that is included as a part of the traditional Nativity display. As you can probably guess from what you now know about Caga Tio, the Caganer is literally a “pooper”, a figure that is caught mid-defecation. It’s actually considered an honor to be made into a Caganer figure, although it made news when President-Elect Obama was so honored in Spain this year.

There are dozens of videos of the tradition up on YouTube, but here’s one that is nicely put together that illustrates the tradition.

Categories
Legal Issues Library Issues

Google Magazines

Google is now indexing AND displaying magazines in Google book Search! Here’s the blog entry where they describe it:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/search-and-find-magazines-on-google.html

There’s no mention of a titles list, and there’s clearly some limitations on these (Check out Jet, for instance…they only have every 5th year of the mag). Popular Science is there in its entirety, but only 2000-Feb 2008.

But in any case…it’s an interesting development. If Google decides not to provide a titles list, is anyone interested in crowdsourcing it? Where can we dump the resulting data so that it’s harvestable?

Categories
libraryblogging

Online Information 2008

I had the pleasure of presenting for Elsevier at Online Information 2008 in London, England this past week, and have had some requests for my slides and such.

Here is my presentation, in a few different formats. Up first: video of the slides, with audio of me talking. This was recorded live, and the levels are a bit weird because of my walking to and away from the mic. I never really learned how to hold still and talk. You can listen here, or click through to Blip.tv and download the quicktime if you wish to listen to locally.

Next are just the slides, as a PDF from Slideshare. If you want to download the slides, this is the way to do it.

Online Information 2008 – Final Slides

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: onlineinfo2008 blogs)