"Raunchy books"

A coworker forwarded me a post linking to this particular article: Raunchy books pulled from NYC school. I'm glad to see book banning is alive and well. I love that detailed instructions on French kissing are so taboo!

And I don't know if it's an unfortunate wording in the article, but I wasn't aware that one really needed instructions on homosexuality.

[Found by my coworker on LISNews.org]

HUZZAH!

Blogger has finally deemed me cool enough to allow me to upgrade to blogger beta. Too bad I have to go Xmas shopping or I'd monkey around with it all afternoon. :)

I got tags! Woo hoo! Of course, I have no idea what tags to assign to this post. Hmmmm.

Where, oh where, has Kat been?

I haven't been so good with this blogging thing as of late. Things have been busy. Then again, when are they not?

Most recently I have found myself with four less teeth. That was a wondeful experience.... The drugs weren't nearly as fun as my friends promised they'd be. It actually went pretty well, as it is only the 5th day and the swelling is already nearly gone. I return to work tomorrow and it is nice to know that I won't look too terribly much like a chipmunk. :) I could very easily get used to the whole 5 day weekend thing though. Too bad it has to end so soon.

Now the Christmas holiday is drawing close and I have yet to do much Christmas shopping. Ooops. I always put it off though, so this is nothing new. Hopefully I'll get a decent amount accomplished today.

Perhaps I'll return to blogging with a slight bit more regularity at some point in the future...

[And if anyone needs a good oral surgeon in Zanesville, I highly recommend Larry Towning. :o) He rocks!]

What Kind of Reader are YOU?

Someone named Kate (not me, unfortunately) made this awesome quiz:

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Literate Good Citizen
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

[Found on Annoyed Librarian]

Cheaper Road Runner

This is not necessarily the most relevant post I've ever made, but then again that's really not that unusual for me.

Yesterday, I called Time Warner Cable to find out if something called Road Runner Light really exists. It does. And it is a lot cheaper than regular Road Runner. $26.95 a month as opposed to $44.95 a month. Supposedly, it is slower than regular Road Runner, although I was assured it is faster than DSL. It probably makes a difference if you do a lot of downloading or streaming, but since I don't do a whole lot of that, it doesn't seem any different to me. Plus, I used to have DSL and loved it.

So, if you have Time Warner Cable, and you are looking to reduce the amount you have to spend on it per month, ask about Road Runner Light. I actually almost like Time Warner Cable now, because the switch was so easy, you just ask and they do it and it takes place immediately.

Moral of the story: "beep beep!" can be cheap... -er. :)

A Use for Recycled Books

A friend (thanks reyn!) forwarded this website: This Into That. It belongs to an artist who turns old books into shelves and furniture. The gallery of funniest shelves are entertaining. And I really think I need to make me one of those bookcases.

I already use 4 discarded books to raise my monitor to eye level. Old books do have good uses! :)

We ZAP 'em at the library!

Bad library press. Sigh.

I heard this on the radio up in Cleveland last week - one of the local rock stations was having fun bashing the incident. Then, one of my coworkers forwarded the story around.

Apparently UCPD felt it necessary to taser a guy for not showing ID at the UCLA Library. Well, okay, I'm sure there is more to it than that.

I watched the YouTube video that one particularly quick student created. I love how everyone else just flocks to watch, too. The tasered individual was "leaving this godforsaken place" - what a great library description. More details here.

Good grief.

Cranky thought of the day

We lose students to Google as a result of lethargic library databases - lengthy loading times, etc. When it's slow, it's irritating... it's like being on dialup (*GASP*). We are losing them because Google is faster, even on its slowest days.

Of course, this is just a cranky thought without a suggested solution because I'm not sure what needs to be done to remedy this. Is it bandwidth? Server space? I have no idea. I'm not even sure where the problem is. Is it primarily a local problem? Or is it consortium-wide? Are our databases just too "heavy" and it's the fault of the providers? Yeah, no clue.

But what I do know is that I just love promising students that "it really will load eventually. Really."

Studying while driving

What do you think about students who study for a test while driving? Who spend more time looking at their notes than the road? And can't maintain even a remotely steady speed? And weave erratically?

And scare the crap out of the poor librarian who just wants desperately to pass said student?

At least it took the monotony out of my 25 minute commute to work this morning.

Yesterday morning, I saw a lady with her hair in curlers driving on the freeway. That was entertaining. :)

Bewildering Unpreparedness

What does it say for the current state of higher education when students arrive for class with absolutely nothing but themselves, their jackets, and their cell phones? At least, I'd assume they had a cell phone in a pocket somewhere - they can't seem to go anywhere without that.

No bookbag, no textbooks, no notebooks, no folders, no pieces of paper.

Not even a pen or pencil.

incest, necrophilia, and seduction

Just when I think I've seen it all....

I am slowly working my way through the reference collection, weeding out tons of books. I thought I would have already seen the most bizarre but today I discovered Show Me the Good Parts: The Reader's Guide to Sex in Literature.

This extremly useful book provides the page numbers and brief annotations of sex scenes in various books. For example, the annotation for Call Me Mistress by Tomlin Rede is as follows: "The heroine ends up with the guy who first took her innocence from her some 10,000 intercourses ago."

Or in The Devil in Bucks County by Edmund Schiddel, "A 16-year-old girl from one of the fine families gets mixed up with the town's aging delinquent. This s.o.b. leaves her with an ugly memory of her first experience, which will take a lot of sundaes and church socials to wipe out."

This book is clearly a must-have for every library. It is divided into chapters by type of sex scene, thus the title of this post. I wish I could personally thank the ingenious male librarian who wrote this book. I am surprised it hasn't gotten more use in my library.

No More Typing

In the interest of spending less time typing, since most of my day is spent in front of a computer (both at work and at home), I recently purchased some software that will type for me.

It's called Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 Preferred. I don't know if I really needed the Preferred version, but it was what was selling on eBay. I have only just begun to use it, but I can already tell it's going to be a challenge. I think it's just that there is a learning curve and that you need to have the patience to "train" the software to recognize your voice, as well as to learn the commands to make the software function as best it can.

The most annoying thing about the software is that you can only put it on one computer. I find that really irritating because I am the only one using it and I would like to be able to use it both at work and at home. gar.

Anyway, as time goes on and I slowly become accustomed to this program, and it becomes accustomed to me, I will continue to post as to whether or not this is a good product. I have to say that I was very frustrated with it earlier today but then decided to "train" it some more, and it is already doing a much better job of recognizing my speech. So far I'm pretty impressed.

Browser Wars

I was checking out my stats earlier and it is finally the case that more of my visitors use Firefox (57) than MSIE (39). The other 4 used Safari, Netscape, or Mozilla.

The free version of StatCounter only tracks the most recent 100 visits. Then again, it's probably taken me weeks to amass the above 100 visits....

Podcasting: What, How, and Why

...is a presentation Andrew and I gave waaaaayyyy back in August at the OLC Children's and Young Adult Services Conference (see Andrew's post here). Andrew is good with the technical aspect of podcast creation, and I'm a podcast listener/subscriber (or was, haven't had much time lately). Plus, I worked in a public library for years (during high school and college), which was helpful given our audience. Basically, combined we are an awesome team. :)

Our presentation had excellent attendance (owing partially to the fact that the seating was very limited, so all presentations were well-attended). The audience was great, and overall it went really well.

Podcasting really is pretty easy. We ran through the entire process, complete with various options, in our allotted time period. In addition we covered possible uses, why you should podcast, how to listen/subscribe, publicizing your podcast, various challenges to podcasting, and finally briefly touched on the ways you can go beyond podcasting (vodcasting and screencasting).

The wiki for our presentation is here (the powerpoint is available there as well). A list of ways to use podcasting in children's and young adult services is here.

Sexy Librarian Search Interface

The Laughing Librarian has a post about Ms. Dewey, a new search engine that is highly entertaining. Who knows if she's useful but it sure is fun to think of clever questions to ask her because her response varies based on what you ask.

She's getting criticized in various articles, such as this one and this one, but I don't care. Even the fact that she's a Microsoft creation isn't enough to make me dislike her! She's funny and sarcastic. However, I do agree that she needs a longer loop of her impatient activities. Her cackling about ruling the world is pretty funny but I could probably only take that about 15 times before I got a bit irritated.

Seriously though, she's a sexy librarian with attitude. How could you go wrong with that?

I suggest you check her out. ;o)

Gadget Love

I've found another online whositswhatsits that I'm just in love with. It's called coComment and has been around way too long for me only to be using it just now. It lets you track the comments you leave, so you can see when someone adds a comment after the one you left (perhaps the blog author responding to your comment - I always forget to check back and see if they've done that!).

How handy!!! I love it!

And you don't really have to do anything because it just recognizes that you are leaving a comment and keeps track of it for you. As long as you use Firefox anyway.

Woo hoo!

Yoo hoo, Academic Librarians!

Not that many academic librarians read my blog, but whatever.

I was catching up on my blog reading today (how on earth do I always manage to get so far behind? Oh wait, I know, 3 weekends in a row of weddings, two of which I was in. Yeah, that will do it), and I came across a post on ACRLog asking where the academic librarian bloggers are and why they hadn't yet added their blogs to The Academic Blog Portal.

So I promptly added my blog to it. If you are a blogging academic librarian, please add yours too. :)

I suppose I should make a wiki page for my blog, too, but, well, I'd forget to update it.

And I know this is not really relevant, but it's Friday and I'm in a goofy mood, so I'm going with it: how does one say "ACRLog" anyway? ACRL-og? A-Crlog? ACR-Log? ACRL-log?

IM @ Your Library!

Back in early August (yeah yeah, I’m behind, I know), I co-presented with Andrew at the OPAL (Ohio Private Academic Libraries, not to be confused with the other OPAL) Conference (see Andrew’s write-up here – he includes the powerpoint and handouts).

The SpeedUPdating setup for the presentation is a really neat idea - good for us Millennials with short attention spans. There were five different sessions, each lasting about 12 minutes. Everyone was divided into 5 groups and rotated around to each session.

Our presentation was called, “IM…Your Students Use It, So Why Don’t You?” I talked about why a library should offer IM Reference, the advantages over Chat Reference, the lingo and other etiquette information, and challenges. Andrew discussed the different IM providers, usage statistics, how to set it up and market it, and the different types of questions we have received at Muskingum.

In true Andrew and Kate form, and in tribute to the “speed” in SpeedUPdating, we talked as though we were on speed in order to cover everything in our allotted time period. Needless to say, after 5 sessions in a row with very little break in between, I was pretty exhausted.

Overall, though, it was a fun experience, and I would definitely do it again. The disadvantage to presenting, however, is that I didn’t get to see the other 4 presentations.

And, of course, I highly recommend using IM at your library!

Our Stats are on the Rise!

I've been meaning to write this post for a while but have been putting it off. However, an article in the Chronicle that details reasons why professors may not include a library research session in their class has spurred me on.

At my place of work, we have seen an increase in many types of usage this Fall. Examples include:

• In about 5 week's time, we have done more one-shot instruction sessions than we did all of last year.
• Our database usage stats are way up, probably a result of more instruction sessions.
• ILL borrowing is up. This September saw more than twice as many ILL requests as last September.
  

Possible reasons for the increase, many of which were Andrew's ideas:

• Presentation to the faculty. Andrew and I were given the opportunity to present an update session at Fall Faculty Conference. The session was given twice and we had a large percentage of the faculty in attendance. A lot of changes took place over the summer, and the faculty were impressed with both the changes and our succinct presentation of them.
• Faculty guides to library resources. Last Fall each faculty member received an individualized print guide to the library resources useful in their discipline. Many of these were presented in person.
• Freebies. Every year, we have pens made with our URL on them that we give out during the First Year Seminar library visits. This year, we added our IM name. These pens were also given to all the faculty, along with pads of sticky notes with OhioLINK's info on them.
• Revamping instruction sessions. We now use problem-based learning in our instruction sessions. We create a problem tailored to the class or assignment, have the students research it while we walk around to observe and help, and then go over everything.
• Odyssey. ILL use is probably up because we are promoting it more and we now use Odyssey to receive many of the requested articles much more quickly.
  

It's an exciting time here, and I hope we continue to see increases in usage!

[As an aside, I don't really agree with the paragraph in the article that poses "simple questions" that students don't know the answers to. I don't really think they need to know the answers to those, except for popular vs scholarly. They need to know that they can't look up journal article titles in the catalog, but they don't really need to know why, unless that's going to help them remember that they can't do it.]

Banning Fahrenheit 451

I took down my banned book display this morning (*sob*). Then, this afternoon a friend [thanks Paul!] sends me this link.

Yes, let us please ban a book that is about censorship. Ah, the irony.

It's not the first time. Damn those dirty words of yours, Mr. Bradbury. To hell with them! :D