Jason Griffey

TENN-Share, and thoughts

I spent last Thursday and Friday at the Nashville Public Libary attending a small conference made up of Tennessee Libraries called TENN-Share.

The venue was really quite nice…the Nashville Public Library is in a wonderful building. However, none of the technology worked as it should (basically all presentations were done without computer assistance) and when a major portion of the program is Federated Search, that’s an issue. Also, for a major metropolitan library to not have wi-fi? Whassupwidat? I had planned on live-blogging the sessions, but NO wi-fi left me in the technological dark ages.

There were a number of good sessions, especially the ability to see different vendor products and be able to ask questions about content and usage of those products. It was also a great opportunity to meet other Tennessee librarians and network a bit…something that I haven’t really had a chance to do yet here.

Due to the majority of Thursday being about federated searching, I learned a lot about a word that was unfamiliar to me. De-duplication. Possibly this is because I haven’t done sufficient real database work, but I had never encountered the word before. I’d used the classic deselect, a grand old library term for remove from the collection. Patrons tend to be less excited about that when you use a word they don’t understand.

Tags library

Personal

Me and Mom

IMG_0285

Originally uploaded by griffey.

Bets and I are going through our photos and choosing some to print and hang in our new house. Bets chose this one of my mom and I. Gotta admit…it’s a good shot. This was taken at Tim’s Ford Lake two years ago.

Media Personal

Another CAT 5

Ok…this is just wrong. Hurricane Rita is now a Catagory 5, and may strengthen further.

Two Cat 5’s in the Gulf within a month of each other? AND we’re about to run out of hurricane names…all we have left this year are Stan, Tammy, Vince, and Wilma. If that happens it would be the most active hurricane season in recorded history.

But global warming…nah, not a big deal, right Mr. President? I suppose the Salon article is right…if you can’t even admit that evolution is a fact, how can you possibly be asked to understand Global Warming?

Tags Media

Uncategorized

Testing

I just moved my blog and site from ibiblio over to LISHost (Thanks Blake!) and am curious to see if everything is still functional.

If someone wanders by, could you leave a comment? Or if you can’t, let me know.

EDIT: As far as I can tell, everything seems like it’s working wonderfully. I’ve set up forwarding via .htaccess on the old www.ibiblio.org/griffey/wp address, so you’ll still get forward if you have links to it. But if you can, swap anything over to the new official www.jasongriffey.net address. But the .htaccess should keep anything from breaking severely.

Images

Graffiti No. 2

Another graffiti picked up around the library. This one is a bit more surrealist.

Tags Images

Digital Culture Personal

Arrrr!

jolly roger

Today be th’ official Talk Like a Pirate Day. If’n ya be a scurvy dog n’ want to read th’ blog as it’s meant to be read, you can read the translation here. This is also the grand high holy day of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, be ye touched by his noodly appendage.

Avast! I’ve been re-christened with my true pirate name! What’s yours?

My pirate name is:

Dread Pirate Flint

Like the famous Dread Pirate Roberts, you have a keen head for how to make a profit. Like the rock flint, you’re hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you’re easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

For more pirate goodness: the Flickr tag for pirate.

Arrr!

Images

Graffiti No. 1

I’ve decided to start blogging the more interesting images that I find around me. My Razr has come in terrifically handy for capturing my favorites…mostly graffiti and signs that I find interesting/humorous/both.

Here’s one from my library, from one of the men’s restrooms.

Tags Images

Digital Culture

Katrina: The Gathering

Just funny, funny stuff (at least for us game geeks) from Broken Toys:

Katrina: The Gathering

Find Looters astrodome

Digital Culture Library Issues

LibraryThing

Aside from the not-so-hip title (seriously guys…LibraryThing?) and the needs-prettier-interface/UI, the tool itself rocks like Dokken.

LibraryThing

There are a few things I’d like to see happen with it, though (listen up, developers!): one, you need geographical information, or at least the ability to form groups so that you can keep track of who around you has what books. Second, you need the ability to check in/check out books to other users, with email ticklers for returning. Third, you need to be able to sort by some shelving order (ie: I shelf mine alphabetically, so sort that way, OR if I want to go full on Library of Congress, give me a shelving order for that).

That said, it’s a cool tool I expect I will play with. It also imports Delicious Library files, which is nifty.

Tags library

Digital Culture

Google University

Google launched a new “platform” page today, with Google University. Some of the interesting things about it: this is the first time that I’ve seen Google launch a page that simply collects their services for a certain demographic without adding any new services and this is the first time that someone can simply sign up for a Gmail account without and invite or a cell phone (although it does appear that the secondary account has to be from a .edu). Even more interesting to me is the order in which they’ve decided to present their services: all of the communication services (Gmail and Google Talk) first, mobile search (Google SMS, which rocks my face off), maps, and only then do we get down to Google Scholar, the only real search system of the bunch.

It says a lot about Google’s growth that they present a search engine 5th.