Literature Map (fun!)

Check out this interactive Literature Map - the tourist map of literature. You key in an author name and it shows other authors you might like, or that are similar. You can click on any of those names and keep going. Very fun. I find associative lists endlessly fascinating, since they are reflections of how we classify things -- there's more than just alpha order or LC or Dewey, as we know, so I love looking at other systems of relationships.

It is part of a Literature Site called Gnooks, which has an author recommendation engine too. You type in the names of three authors you like. I typed in Garrison Keillor, Lorna Landvik, and Elizabeth George, and it recommended Jon Hassler. A good recommendation, except I've already read all his books!

Gnooks in turn is part of Gnod, an AI project developed by Marek Gibney. Here's what Gibney says about Gnod:

Gnod is my experiment in the field of artificial intelligence. Its a self-adapting system, living on this server and 'talking' to everyone who comes along. Gnods intention is to learn about the outer world and to learn 'understanding' its visitors. This enables gnod to share all its wisdom with you in an intuitive and efficient way. You might call it a search-engine to find things you don't know about.

Gnod has recommendation engines for music, books, movies, and people.

90 Strong

I'm not in the library these days; I just started a job scoring standardized writing tests. There are 90 people in my group, and we all take breaks and lunches at the same time! As a library sub, I usually take breaks and eat alone--having someone else in the break room was a treat.

What a change!

Medieval Help Desk Video

Too funny! From the 23 Things on a Stick Ning.


Find more videos like this on 23 Things on a Stick

Goodbye until September 15

I don't post as often to this blog as I do to Paper Baubles. Most of my sub info and queries go directly to our wiki (Librarian Substitutes 2.0).

I'm racing to finish 23 Things on a Stick by the deadline of September 15, so I won't be posting here at all for the next few weeks.

See you after the 15th!

Mindset List 2008

It's almost fall, and the annual Beloit Mindset list is out. Beloit publishes this list to help college faculty and staff understand the world from the frosh perspective.

This year's list includes:

Gas stations have never fixed flats, but most serve cappuccino.

Girls in head scarves have always been part of the school fashion scene.

WWW has never stood for World Wide Wrestling.

Click the clipmarks icon (clipped from www.beloit.edu) to read the whole funny and enlightening list.

And a shoutout to Evan, class of 2012!

clipped from www.beloit.edu The class of 2012 has grown up in an era where computers and rapid communication are the norm, and colleges no longer trumpet the fact that residence halls are “wired” and equipped with the latest hardware. These students will hardly recognize the availability of telephones in their rooms since they have seldom utilized landlines during their adolescence. They will continue to live on their cell phones and communicate via texting. Roommates, few of whom have ever shared a bedroom, have already checked out each other on Facebook where they have shared their most personal thoughts with the whole world.

Ex Libris 2.0

Gratia Countryman on Outreach

I took a look at Kate Roberts' "Minnesota 150; the people, places, and things that shape our state," (2007) and found Gratia Countryman among the 150. The book quotes a 1935 Minneapolis Journal article, as follows:

"Minneapolis loves and honors Gratia Countryman most because she traveled and tramped its streets in the early days to study the reading needs of each of its little outlying districts; because she has had thought for the bedbound, the povertybound, and trouble-bound, and has offered them her greatest solace, books; because she has believed and still believes that taking books to people who need them is her job; because she does that job with the sympathetic understanding which makes a book a benediction."

Something to think about as we consider cutting the Children's Readmobile and some of the Outreach programs.

Everything is Miscellaneous

I was really taken with David Weinberger's book, Everything is Miscellaneous. Here are some quotations and summaries from the book.

The CEO of the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. . . found that wikis reduced emails about projects by 75 percent and halved meeting times.

Books externalize memory. Databases externalize factual memory. . . Third-order information externalizes meaning. The content and metadata are all digital. This enables us to bring any set of content next to any other, whether through relationships intended by the authors, crafted by the readers, promoted by the companies, or created by the customers. This makes the digital miscellany fundamentally different from previous miscellanies. The value of the potential, implicit ways of ordering the digital miscellany dwarfs the value of any particular actualization ...

Our assumptions about order: simple, uniform, comprehensive, orderly, explicit. Not in third-order order, web 2.0.

Jorge Luis Borges's essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins." He invents a Chinese encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, that divides animals into:

(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

Our assumptions about lists: that they have a purpose, that they have a similar relationship to the heading. (Borges list violates both assumptions.)

Everything is Miscellaneous

Click here to read my review of David Weinberger's book, "Everything is Miscellaneous," posted July 8 under "Oh, Freedom" on Paper Baubles, my other blog.

Information wants to be free? Weinberger says information wants to be miscellaneous!

World of 2.0

This is the greatest thing! You have to see it!

Ever wonder why you can't quite get your arms around what comprises Web 2.0? The applications, articles, and blogs proliferate at a rabbit rate -- it seems impossible to keep abreast.

Here is a great graphic, a mosaic of a world map, comprising 1001 links to Web 2.0 applications. Click on a mosaic square and you are carried to an ap. How cool is that?

World Mosaic of 1001 clickable Web 2.0 Logos

Go see it now!

2009 Budget Themes

The County-wide 2009 “Major Budget Themes” are Customer Service, Innovation and Business Improvement, External Partners, and Internal Collaboration. It strikes me that what we're trying to do with this wiki addresses customer service, innovation, and internal collaboration. How about that!

Midwest Library Tech Conference 2008

I had a lot of fun last week attending one day of the Midwest Library Tech Conference 2008.

The afternoon plenary session featured Rachel Smith and Alan Levine of the new media consortium, publishers of the annual Horizon Report. Which I confess I had never heard of, but now I have! Here's a link to their list of "Six Key Emerging Technologies."

The new media consortium, or nmc, focuses on education, but is completely relevant to libraries.

Here is a link to the Ning site for the conference, where presenters post their presentation materials and other content. It is a rich, rich site! You could spend hours clicking links. Later, I'll post some highlights from the conference, but not tonight.

And what is Ning, you ask? Click here for more information.

I added a lot of material to the Sub 2.0 wiki. Bookwormishnerd contributed a great list of things to note when you work in a new library for the first time. Click here to read it!

How are you doing?

How are you doing? Are you getting enough hours? Is subbing your main livelihood or do you have another job? Do you work part time at the library and fill in your week with sub hours? Are you looking for full time work?

I sub in the HCL suburban branches, but work there has almost completely dried up. I sub in the HCL urban branches, and downtown, but there too, there are never enough hours. I'm averaging about 20 hours a week lately. It's a nice time of year to have extra time off, but I wish I could get more hours. I'm perpetually on the fence about going back to Dolphin Staffing, my other employer, to see what they have available.

How about you?

Registration Reminder

Remember to register for "23 Things On a Stick" if you haven't completed it. Registration begins today.

Here's the link again: http://www.23ThingsOnaStick.blogspot.com

Go for it!

ALA Wikis and 23 Things on a Stick

The American Library Association has lots of wikis! Look at the ReadWriteConnect page for blogs, wikis, flikr, videos, RSS feeds, even ALA in virtual worlds like Second Life!

If we get our act together and want to take the show on the road, we can add a page for substitute librarians.

* * *

In case anyone didn't get the news: 23 Things on a Stick is back for Round 2, from May 15 to September 15! If you (like me) didn't finish the first time, here's another chance. From the 23 Things on a Stick blog:

"Registration for Round 2 begins May 15, 2008. You must register your blog by June 15, 2008 and then complete all 23 Things by September 15, 2008. Each person participating must have and register his/her own blog."

Librarian Substitutes 2.0 wiki launched

I've spent the whole afternoon working on the "Librarian Substitutes 2.0" wiki. It's fun, it's easy, and it's time consuming, especially on my (slow) home computer.

Go take a look. You will see that it is quite raw and new, with just a few ideas sketched out, but that was an afternoon's work, and I've got to go do whatever it was I was supposed to do with the rest of my day!

Everything I put into the wiki so far is available elsewhere, but the point is to gather it into a quick reference guide with the substitute librarian in mind. We are generalists, and when we want to make sure our skills are current, this will be a first place to look. We can also note specifics about libraries, including the all important where-to-go-for-lunch-or-coffee question!

I picked Wet Paint as the wiki site in part because it was recommended in Terry Burrows' Blogs, wikis, MySpace, and more; everything you want to know about using web 2.0 but are afraid to ask. However, I'm already heartily sick of the advertisements, so I'm open to a move to another wiki host at some point.

Patron or Customer?

Here's an article from Library Journal that I bookmarked some time ago but is perennially relevant: what do we call our guests/clients/patrons/customers?

BackTalk: Patron or Customer (and Why)? By Brent Wagner -- Library Journal, 7/15/2007

I'm always on the lookout for articles that support my belief that the business model is not the best model for non-profits. James Collins, author of Good To Great; why some companies make the leap and some don't, wrote a (great) follow-up which addresses this:

Good to great and the social sectors : why business thinking is not the answer : a monograph to accompany Good to great : why some companies make the leap--and others don't / Jim Collins.

Stumble Upon

Stumble!

StumbleUpon is a social and communication add-on for Firefox. It allows you to select a range of topics of interest, then finds web sites based on what you like. You rate each site with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and StumbleUpon learns your preferences. This is an example of "recommendation" software described by Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb in the article I posted on April 6.

You can share newly discovered sites with others, post them to your Stumble blog, or add them to del.icio.us or other sharing sites.

Most of all, it's really fun!

Here's a link to the StumbleUpon home. My Stumble user-name is MinnLib -- add me as your friend!

What's Next on the Web?

Here's a fantastically interesting article written by Marshall Kirkpatrick for ReadWriteWeb: "What's Next on the Web: a ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008"

Kirkpatrick describes five big trends that he's excited about for the web in 2008:

1. Open Data
2. Recommendations
3. The Semantic Web
4. Mobile
5. Visualization

He provides feeds and resources for each trend.

Don't know what some of those words or phrases mean? All the more reason to at least scan the article. If librarians are people who like to know a little bit about a lot of things, here's your golden opportunity to learn a little bit about these trends.

Read this for a peek into a future that's already begun!

Intermittent Dispatch #1

Have you been looking for a way to connect with other library subs?

Do you want to strut (or build) your Library 2.0 skills?

Are you looking for a way to showcase your particular skills and knowledge for others?

Do you want to collaborate with others to tackle library projects you might not do on your own?

Me too.

I've been looking for ways to get together with other library subs and share ideas about our place in the library world and how to advance our careers, to build community, share ideas, and just have fun.

Yesterday it hit me like a ton of bricks that the creation of a library wiki would be a fantastic opportunity to do all these things: develop and display our 2.0 skills, collaborate on projects, and connect with each other.

My first step is to set up this blog and e-mail the address to all the subs I know. Part-time workers might also be interested.

Next, I'd like to set up a wiki to share and develop our knowledge. The beauty of a wiki is that it is peer edited. We can avoid perfectionism and jump right in. Unlike a web site, which has a central control, everyone can contribute to a wiki.

For instance, I recently ran across a list of a dozen sites similar to del.icio.us and digg, but only knew three or four of them. It's tough to keep up! We can collaborate on this!

Please add your comments and ideas below, or e-mail me at a_pearson@visi.com.

I'll post again when I've set up the wiki -- or when I need help setting up the wiki! Please post or contact me if you have experience doing this! Thanks!