I’ve got a ton of leftover stuff I still want to talk about from ALA Annual. Here’s my favorite vendor sign from the exhibit hall at ALA in New Orleans…
Large Print Audiobooks? Do they just talk louder?
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Blue in Kentucky
Most people have heard “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, but few have probably heard of the blue people from Kentucky. Seriously. Blue. People.
They’re known simply as the “blue people” in the hills and hollows around Troublesome and Ball Creeks. Most lived to their 80s and 90s without serious illness associated with the skin discoloration. For some, though, there was a pain not seen in lab tests. That was the pain of being blue in a world that is mostly shades of white to black.
There was always speculation in the hollows about what made the blue people blue: heart disease, a lung disorder, the possibility proposed by one old-timer that “their blood is just a little closer to their skin.” But no one knew for sure, and doctors rarely paid visits to the remote creekside settlements where most of the “blue Fugates ” lived until well into the 1950s. By the time a young hematologist from the University of Kentucky came down to Troublesome Creek in the 1960s to cure the blue people, Martin Fugate’s descendants had multiplied their recessive genes all over the Cumberland Plateau.
I grew up just north from Hazard and Perry County, and heard about these genetically interesting folks growing up. I never met anyone with this genetic quirk, but there are still some in the area. Here’s a really well-written story about them, how they came to be so blue, and how they’ve dealt with it. Story is old, but fascinating.
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Monkey Tuesday!
cue the theme music
From NPR, a fascinating story about a bonobo that seems to have linguistic skills far beyond any other non-human in history. From the story:
Savage-Rumbaugh made a decision; She would stop trying to teach words and sentences to apes. She would give Kanzi a reason to talk, and something to talk about.
“What I had to do is come up with an environment,” she says, “a world that would foster the acquisition of these lexical symbols in Kanzi and a greater understanding of spoken human language.”
…
Before long, Kanzi was doing many of the things humans do with language. He was talking about places and objects that weren’t in sight. He was referring to the past and the future. And he was understanding new sentences made up of familiar words.
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Website update #X
Well, we’ve decided to use Joomla in the library website redesign, and I’m in the process of messing with a raw template and pushing it into the direction we want to go. Found a really excellent template that is pure CSS…too many of the ones we looked at used Tables for structure. But I’ve got a pure CSS one that seems to render well in IE, and if I can just move it over to variable width rather than fixed, I’ll be set.
But the next week or two will be me = coding hell. Send cookies.
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So much stuff
I’ve just returned after a complete whirlwind of a week. I spent 5 days in New Orleans at ALA, then drove to Columbus, OH for the Origins game fair, the second largest gaming convention in the country. So much stuff to talk about, but I’m completely exhausted. So instead of writing, you all get: My Week In Pictures!
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ClaimID
If you are interested in Identity online (and I believe that this is the next big area of the net is identity management across platforms), ClaimID is now off beta, and available for signup. Check out Fred’s announcement for info on the launch.
I’ve been using ClaimID for some time now while it was in beta, and the development team has done an amazing job integrating information issues/needs into the tool. Take a look, play with it, and see if it does what you need.
Why Would Anyone Listen to These Three?
Originally uploaded by Wandering Eyre.
Great pic by Michelle Boule, just prior to the LITA presentation that she chaired and I, Karen Coombs (to stage left in the photo), and Steven Bell took part in. The presentation was titled “Next Step Blogging” and will be revealed in its entirety on LITABlog (as soon as Karen Schneider finishes it up…). My slides can be found here. It went remarkably well, with an absolute standing-room-only audience. Next time we need a bigger boat.
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Blogger Bash 2006
President-Elect of the ALA, Leslie Burger, had a wonderful gathering last night for Library Bloggers and librarians from the Katrina effected gulf coast. Hearing their stories, seeing their faces, and hearing the statistics (millions of books lost, hundreds of people without jobs, dozens of libraries destroyed)…truly sobering. The recurring message:
Do. Not. Send. Books.
They have more books than they can process…if your library is doing a book drive, stop it. Instead, send money…for repairs, for staff, for new buildings. That’s the need, and after having driven through the affected area, the need is more than I can say.
IF, and only if, you have to buy books, you should use the Amazon wishlists they’ve set up:
Dewey Donation System
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Gaiman!
Neil Gaiman @ ALA
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ALA Day One – Google!
Tales, Tips and Tools: Book Search, Scholar and the Library Team
Ben Burnell, Google Library Partnerships
Once more: notes in the form of a bulleted list!
- Larry and Sergey’s idea started as a library concept…digitize the library, make it rankable.
- Google
PrintBook Search divides books into three main IP categories: Public Domain (hey, I won a hat for knowing who Emily Dickinson was!), In Print, and “other”. - Here’s a sobering thought: over the Google 5 (the five libraries in the Book Print project), 60% of the books in the libraries are held in only one of the participating libraries.
- Another sobering statistic: of the Google 5, only 20% of the books in the library are in the public domain.
- Example from Google Book Search: Earl Robichau, in a picture in a book, is discovered when his great nephew find his name in Google Book Search.
- 5% of books are currently in print.
- The “snippet” view is designed to legally display and make findable the other books…those not in print and those not in the public domain.
- So there are three ways to look at a book in Book Search: Full Book View (Public Domain), Snippet view (Unknown copyright status), Sample Pages view (In Print, agreement with publishers).
- Will provide article results, book results, and citation results.
- Great quote: It’s better to be frustrated than ignorant.
- At AASL, Google handed out 200 invitations to the Google Librarian Newsletter…and got 3000 signups in a week.
Google Scholar