picture

They took pictures of all of the library liaisons last week to put in a brochure for our faculty (see upper left corner of this page). I had just arrived to work the morning my picture was taken, and so that is why I look slightly disheveled and a little red in the face. Part of my “workout routine” is to walk the quarter-mile to work instead of driving it.

live@your conference

Wanna see me in action? I will be doing a presentation on my library’s implementation of SFX at the Kentucky Library Association‘s fall conference in Louisville this October. My session is at 10:10am on Friday, so you’ll even get to sleep in a little.

One small complaint about the conference organization: I was never notified that my proposal had been accepted. I found out last night when I received the conference brochure in the mail and read through the presenations. In any case, I had already planned on giving the presentation, so I was happy to find out that they were planning on it, too.

powerpoint

Perhaps it is because my first real experience with a PowerPont presentation was in my MLS program under the capable hands of Dr. Jeng. Or perhaps it was because I have only been subject to a few PowerPoint presentations that were meant to cover the presenter’s lack of content, but only succeeded in amplifying their lack of presentation ability. In any case, this PowerPoint presentation exemplifies why using technology for teaching purposes should never replace a good lesson plan.

what i’ve been reading

BookCrossing got a mention on LISNews.com on Thursday. I know quite a few librarians are BookCrossers, but I hope this encourages more to join in on the fun. As for LISNews — I can’t figure out how Blake has time to be posting several stories an hour!

Two of my e-friends from Where’s George? are blogging also, which makes me happy. Agent Splat (aka Marc) is a volunteer for an EMT in Wisconsin, and Idiot from Iowa (aka Chad) is a high school student in Iowa and is the only blogger I’ve read who wrote an entire entry in haiku.

a light at the end of the tunnel

When I returned to work on Monday, I had recovered from the frustration and stress of the previous Friday, so fixing all of the problems I had encountered with SFX was a much more feasible task than it had seemed before the weekend. In fact, with a clear head and a few MySQL passwords, I was able to get most everything done that wasn’t working for me before. As it stands now, pretty much everything is working as it should be. There are still a few more bugs, but I expect those will be cleared up within the next week or two.

Ever since I discovered the joys of keeping up with several weblogs through my RSS aggregator, I have been doing a lot of reading, but not so much writing. Not that I did all that much writing before, but for instance, this week I didn’t write anything at all, and that was mainly because after reading blogs, email, books, and journals, I didn’t have the energy to think of something of my own to say. So, here I am at 1:30am on Saturday, typing away.

lessons learned

I have re-learned something today: technology never works in a live setting quite the same way it works in a test setting. Also, if anything can go wrong in front of a group of twenty collegues, it will.

Today (actually yesterday, as I am typing this well past midnight), my library was to go “live” with our new SFX service, or at least as “live” as we could so that the Research and Instruction division could get prepared for teaching it to our students and faculty before the semester begins next week. I have been working with a team of librarians representing all areas of the library as well as our systems administrator to get this service set up. All of us have been working hard this summer on this project, but since I am responsible for our electronic resources, I did most of the work with the knowledge base and configurations. That being said, it was incredibly frustrating that when we finally were able to share this product with the rest of the library, nothing worked the way it was supposed to. Arg.

Lesson learned — hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst.

dark enough for you?

I received this amusing forward in my email this morning:

NEW YORK (Aug. 14) – A huge power blackout hit U.S. cities spreading from New York to Cleveland and Detroit and north into Canada Thursday afternoon. In New York City, the blackout had a significant effect on the public library. None of the Internet terminals or other computers in the New York Library system were functioning, but the novels and non-fiction books somehow remained operational, according to patrons on the scene. Older reference librarians were able to switch to print sources in order to maintain services, preventing any disruption. Seekers of pornography crowded the reference desks asking for help and were referred to a list of bawdy novels and assorted men’s magazines.

dubya action figure

I can’t believe it! Well, actually, I can believe it, because people will buy anything. Not only did a majority of Americans buy that pseudo-patriotic crap with the “President” landing the aircraft on the aircraft carrier, but they’ll probably fork over more money to buy this so-called action figure! I’ll bet that none of the soldiers who were delayed in their return home by that PR stunt will be spending their hard-earned cash on this frippery.
http://eclecticlibrarian.net/blog/2003/08/
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