Branches and Rain

Free E-books Are A Mixed Bag

2012-01-31T02:00:00.001-05:00

I am learning a lot in the process of moving e-books I had downloaded to my desktop computer over to my Sony Reader.

Most of these I downloaded as text files. When I read them, (rarely), I had used an application called yBook. But on the Sony Reader, text files are not ideal. They are readable, but the text doesn't "re-flow" to make attractive paragraphs.

There is another program, Calibre, which lets you convert a text file to a much better-looking EPUB format. But it will not have the hyper-linked table of contents that the EPUB format is capable of. So I find myself looking for EPUB versions instead. And I have found that I have to inspect them before I put them on the Sony Reader.

For example, I looked for an EPUB version of Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. The Project Gutenberg EPUB version was awful. It looked like it had been derived from an HTML version, with coding for italics and links showing up in it as text. The EPUB version at archive.org was uniquely awful as well. It had been made from an OCR scan, and was full of corrupted text.

I found a very nice EPUB version of Religio Medici at the University of Adelaide.

Why You Should Read "A Dance to the Music of Time"

2012-01-30T01:58:00.000-05:00

Posted on The Millions blog, Seven Reasons to Read A Dance to the Music of Time, by Marjorie Hakala. Thanks to the AP List.

Late in life, I've discovered an appetite for monumental works of fiction. I recently finishedWar and Peace, at 1200+ pages. But my longest non-series read has to be Anthony Powell's Dance, at twelve volumes. As I approach 60, I have begun to appreciate how choices and consequences play out over decades, all the time receding into the past, while a new cohort mounts the stage and we look on, older and wiser.

These works take some patience to get into. Dance, War and Peace, or Trollope's Barsetshire Chronicles, to which I am returning now, need a book or three just to set the characters in motion. But after that, A Dance to the Music of Time is nectar.

Umberto Eco on European Identity

2012-01-27T00:14:00.000-05:00

In The Guardian, Umberto Eco: 'It's culture, not war, that cements European identity', by Gianni Riotta.

"When it comes to the debt crisis," says Eco, "and I'm speaking as someone who doesn't understand anything about the economy, we must remember that it is culture, not war, that cements our [European] identity. The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other. Today, we've been at peace for 70 years and no one realises how amazing that is any more. Indeed, the very idea of a war between Spain and France, or Italy and Germany, provokes hilarity. The United States needed a civil war to unite properly. I hope that culture and the [European] market will do the same for us."

It is hard to believe that he is 80. In addition to The Name of the Rose, which is in one sense about a library, and Foucault's Pendulum, his delightful send-up of the occult undergound, (years before The Da Vinci Code), I remember him for his brilliant essays, Dreaming of the Middle Ages and Living in the New Middle Ages, in Travels in Hyper-Reality, (1986). It is time to read them again.

Sony PRS-T1 Reader Up And Running

2012-01-25T00:40:00.001-05:00

My new Sony e-book reader came last Thursday. It took me a few tries to get it working, but by Sunday night I was able to successfully borrow and download a library e-book from OverDrive, and transfer it from my PC to the Sony Reader.

I have been telling inquirers at the library that they must install Adobe Digital Editions, (ADE), on their computers to download and transfer e-books in the ePub and PDF formats from OverDrive. The walk-through for Sony Readers in OverDrive's "MyHelp" presentation doesn't give any indication that it is any different for the Sony PRS-T1.

Install ADE, says MyHelp, get an Adobe ID for your computer, plug in your Sony Reader, and ADE will ask you to authorize the device. Your reader will then appear as a "bookshelf" in ADE to which you can drag books from ADE's library.

I've had ADE on my PC for a while, and I had already added a lot of PDF books to it that I had gotten from Project Gutenberg, Google Books and elsewhere. It is not bad for reading them on my PC.

On Thursday night I unpacked the Sony Reader and plugged it into my PC to charge the battery. This took a couple of hours. I looked at the menus on it, set the clock and language, tried some different fonts and sizes on the sample e-books that came on it.

Friday night I sat down to get it working in earnest.. I opened ADE and plugged in the reader, setting it to "data transfer mode". Nothing happened. ADE did not ask to authorize it with my Adobe ID. It did not appear in the ADE "bookshelf" list.

The reader's Quick Start Guide said that I could access Sony's Reader Store by installing Reader for PC, (RFP) using the installer on the device. I wasn't interested in shopping at the Reader Store, and the reviewer at the-ebook-reader.com had been unimpressed with Reader for PC, saying that he preferred using Calibre to manage his e-books. I had thought I wouldn't need it. But now I thought it might help me somehow.

I opened Windows Explorer, found the installer on the Sony Reader and launched it. It installed RFP on my computer, updated it, and then updated the firmware on the reader. I was prompted to create an account with the Sony Reader Store. I started ADE again. Nothing happened. I tried opening an ePub book from Project Gutenberg, and noticed that it opened with RFP, rather than Adobe Digital Editions, (the reviewer was right, the display with RFP was inferior). I changed the file association for ePubs back to ADE and tried opening the book again. It opened in ADE, but there was still no prompt to authorize my reader with my Adobe ID. I had to work Saturday, so I gave up and went to bed.

Saturday night I tried again. This time, when I plugged the reader in, RFP opened and asked to authorize it, as ADE had been supposed to do. I successfully authorized the reader with RFP. Maybe now ADE would detect my reader, but no, it still would not.

I opened Windows Explorer and dragged a PDF book, Abandonment to Divine Providence, from a My Documents folder to the reader. It transferred fine. I opened it on the reader. As I had suspected, the print was too small on the reader's 6-inch screen. I changed the font size, and the reader handled it well, but I found that when you change the font size for a PDF, the reader has to reformat it every time you turn the page, which takes a couple of seconds, and is a nuisance. Another PDF book, Lord Dunsany's Tales of War, looked fine. It had been printed with large type, generous line spacing, and wide margins.

On Sunday, at work, I did some searches for Sony Reader and Adobe Digital Editions. I found a couple of posts on the Adobe forums which confirmed that the PRS-T1 is not recognized by ADE, even though Adobe lists it as a compatible device. Then I found a post by a Mac owner with the same problem who claimed to have gotten ADE to authorize her reader by transferring an e-book from the ADE folder with RFP.

Finally, I found an OverDrive FAQ on another library's web site which stated plainly that Sony Reader owners needed to use Sony's Reader for PC to download and transfer library e-books. Well, well. Was this in the OverDrive FAQ in our OverDrive page? Yes! In the Digital Help FAQ for Adobe EPUB e-books, it said:

Can I transfer Adobe eBooks to a Sony® Reader?
Adobe eBooks can be transferred to most Sony Readers. In order to transfer Adobe eBooks to a Sony Reader, you need to have the Sony Reader™ Library software installed. Some Sony Readers require a firmware update in order to support Adobe eBooks.

If OverDrive's MyHelp had mentioned this, it would have saved me a couple of days of confusion. But the "dance" was over. Sunday night I checked out, downloaded and transferred a library e-book to my reader using Reader for PC easily, with no workarounds. A nice feature with the Sony Reader is that in your list of e-books, library books have a little clock symbol with the number of days left until the due date.

I was off on Monday. On Tuesday I brought my Sony Reader to work and tested the wireless and browser. It connected with no trouble, I navigated to Project Gutenberg, and downloaded a book directly to the reader.

We had a number of inquiries about e-books today, for the Kindle and for an iPhone. I felt so much more confident, now that I have configured my own e-reader.

Hiring Interview Committee

2012-01-20T00:40:00.001-05:00

I spent the afternoon interviewing applicants for the position of bookmobile library specialist, a job I held from 1992 to 2000. We interviewed four candidates between 2:00 and 6:15, with time at the end to discuss our selection.

I am often called upon to participate in hiring committees because they must be balanced in composition, and as a male librarian I am a rare bird. You wouldn't think that interviews are much work, but they are exhausting. Maybe the emotional state of the interviewees charges the situation. They are performing for you, and for them so much is at stake. And no matter how they look on their applications and résumés, the chemistry of the interviews can change everything.

I couldn't help remembering the day twenty years ago when I sat at that same table in the library board room, selling myself with all I had for the same job. I was 38, with a string of bookstore jobs and a year as a Montessori school teaching assistant, (where, providentially, I had driven the school bus), to my credit, and was then a clerk in the circulation department. I wept for joy in private when I got it. It was the beginning of my true vocation. I would be a librarian.

A Day Without Wikipedia

2012-01-19T00:33:00.000-05:00

I knew that Wikipedia was going offline today to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act, but I did, absentmindedly, click on a link to it once, I can't remember what for. I found what I needed elsewhere.

What I would have missed is Google. I can't remember when I last used another search engine. What would I have used instead, Bing? Yahoo? Remember AltaVista, MetaCrawler, Lycos?

Our public-access users are offered Bing by default in the Internet Explorer search box. I sometimes have to help them choose the authentic link among the commercial results of their searches. A search for where to apply for "food stamps" may steer them into confusion if they don't know how to distinguish the state agency link from the others.

Google also places commercial links at the top of search results, but not as much as Bing. We have an open-source operating system, (Linux), and an open-source encyclopedia, (Wikipedia), but there is not yet an open-source alternative to Google. And perhaps that is to the credit of Google, which is about as public-spirited a corporation as you could hope for.

Sony Reader On Order

2012-01-16T01:24:00.000-05:00

I should have a Sony Reader PRS-T1 soon. Clearing off her desk at work, R. found an American Express Rewards catalog . We had more than enough Rewards points to order one, and it won't cost me a penny.

Why the Sony? From what I have read, it's supposed to handle PDF's better than the other e-readers, and alone among the non-tablet, e-ink display, wi-fi e-readers, it has a fully-functioning browser, which should allow me to "accept" the Internet policy screen at the library and get wireless access.

It has a "touch" interface, which lets you "swipe" the screen to turn a page, and "pinch" to change the "font", (type face), size. I'm afraid this goes against the grain for me, continually smudging the screen with my fingers. I think you can do these things with the buttons as well.

The wireless access is not very important to me. I do not have a wireless network at home, and I'm not a business traveler who needs hot spots in hotels and airports. In fact, before R. found the Rewards catalog, I was looking at the non-wireless, and very cheap, Slick 50 e-reader, which is sold by Sears. I even went to the local Sears store to see if they had one to look at, but they didn't.

It is not a touch device, and it has a larger, 7 inch, display than the other e-readers. But because it can play video it has a back-lit screen, like the new Kindle Fire and the Nook Color.

I don't watch movies and listen to music alone. I mostly watch television or listen to the radio with R., as a shared activity. Reading is what I do alone, and I really wanted to try the e-ink display, though it seems to be losing ground with Amazon and Barnes & Noble chasing after the iPad with their latest offerings.

At any rate, I should soon have the Sony, and begin to get some actual experience with an e-reader. I have gone about as far as I can go just reading about them.

Nick Lowe: A Melancholy Smile

2012-01-13T01:45:00.001-05:00

Nick Lowe got my attention when he performed Lately, I've Let Things Slide a couple of years ago on Prairie Home Companion. Pain, the seduction of numbness, hope for a new beginning. He spoke my language.

A Librarian's Downfall

2012-01-12T01:37:00.000-05:00

Interesting story Wednesday in Disunion, the New York Times Opinionator blog about the Civil War, Anna and the Librarian, by UT history professor Adam Arenson. "Did Anna Ella Carroll save the Union, or just destroy an aging librarian’s career?"

Johnston was born in Virginia in 1799, and as the war began he was a bespectacled gentleman much esteemed in St. Louis; his 1859 catalogue for the St. Louis Mercantile Library collection was the first anywhere to use subject classifications, and it became a regular reference in the Library of Congress before they developed their own system. Yet Johnston was also unabashedly pro-Confederate...

Stop The World

2012-01-10T01:19:00.000-05:00

I found myself humming this as R. and I drove home from Siam Sushi Friday night. A great tune from the golden age of music videos. 1983: I was twenty-nine, and we had just moved to Austin, Texas. And now, twenty-nine years later, I am "embedding" the same music video on my blog.

I am indeed stopping the world, taking eleven days off from work. On Saturday, we took down our Christmas lights and decorations, and took a car load of electronic devices, (parts of an old IBM PS/2 system, a VHS player, a dead coffee-maker and an old toaster oven), to a hazardous waste collection event at the county operations center.

Today I raked leaves from around the house, moving them to mulching areas, swept the driveway and back porch, wiped the mold on the bathroom ceiling and shower curtain with bleach, took Claudius the cat out.

I'm reading War and Peace., which is a change even from another 19th century novel, Barchester Towers, which I just finished. In the recent Pevear & Volokhonsky translation, the first part of book one, which is almost entirely dialogue, is largely in French, with English translations in footnotes. I respect the translator's reasons for rendering it this way, but it does get tedious.

This evening we watched The Journey Home on EWTN. The guest was a man whose father had been a missionary for the Reorganized Church of Latter-Day Saints, a different group from the Utah Mormons.

Paul Johnson On War Novels

2012-01-02T23:34:00.002-05:00

In Standpoint Magazine, Novelists at Arms, by Paul Johnson, posted on the Anthony Powell Discussion List.

It is a curious fact that, in the competition to produce the great novel about the Second World War, the two most obvious candidates, Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene, did not even enter...

150 Years Ago Today

2011-12-31T01:19:00.000-05:00

The New York Times blog, Disunion, "revisits and reconsiders America's most perilous period - using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded."

In "A Sad, Fearful, Raging Year", Adam Goodheart collects some reflections at the close of the first year of the American Civil War.

Nuns With Cat

2011-12-26T23:49:00.000-05:00

Mother Dolores Hart, who exited Hollywood in 1963 to become a nun, is back in the spotlight trying to raise $4 million for renovations to bring the Abbey of Regina Laudis up to code.

Slide show of Mother Delores, the nuns, & a cat.

The Uncertain Status of E-Lending

2011-12-26T00:46:00.001-05:00

Randall Stross has an interesting article in his Digital Domain column in Sunday's New York Times, Publishers vs. Libraries: An E-Book Tug of War.

Worried that people will click to borrow an e-book from a library rather than click to buy it, almost all major publishers in the United States now block libraries’ access to the e-book form of either all of their titles or their most recently published ones.

I had the opportunity to play with a new Nook Simple Touch e-reader that has been provided to us for training, but I got stuck in the set-up phase. The Nook wanted to register itself with Barnes & Noble, but was unable to connect using the library's wireless network, which, though open, has a library-access policy click-through page that the browser-less Nook can't render. I was told that someone with a basic Kindle had the same problem recently.

Higher-end devices like the Kindle Fire have browsers that can display the click-through page. M. said she would complete the set-up on the Nook at home. Then we'll see. The Nook Simple Touch is attractive, and feels good in the hand. But, as with the Kindle, it presents itself as a container for content from a single source. "Congratulations, Nook Owner! Now let's go buy some books from Barnes & Noble!" Library e-books will have to be downloaded and transferred from a PC to the Nook Simple Touch over a USB connection, apparently.

A couple of people have told me that, due to the small screen on a typical e-reader, the frequency of paging becomes tedious. M. said that it's even worse reading on a smartphone. I am beginning to think that the codex will continue to hold its own for a long time to come.

I am currently reading Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers, in a cloth edition published in 1989 by Oxford UP as part of its World's Classics series. It is finely printed and bound, a delight to hold and read. It is one of several Barsetshire novels that I added to the collection from donations in 2006.

E-Readers for Seniors, continued...

2011-12-17T01:29:00.001-05:00

MK, a colleague at my library, in a comment, makes a good point in favor of the utility of e-readers for seniors:

In defense of e-readers for older patrons...most e-readers have the ability to enlarge the size of the type, turning all e-books into large print books. Consequently, e-books allow libraries to increase their large print collection without having to pay extra for a special copy of something they probably already own, and patrons who need large print aren't restricted to just the (relatively) small collection of books available in large type.

I had also decided to look for some data about who is using e-readers. I found a Nielsen survey from last August that does not bear out my concerns. Changing Demographics of Tablet and eReader Owners in the US shows that by the second quarter of 2011, an impressive 30% of e-readers were owned by people aged 55 and over. Only 18% of smartphones were owned by the same age group. And whereas the majority of tablets, (iPads, etc.), are owned by men, and smartphones are evenly split between the sexes, a solid 61% of e-readers were owned by women, which shows that they have a unique appeal.

This survey predates the launch of the Kindle Fire this fall, with which the e-reader morphs into an all-purpose text/music/video/gaming digital entertainment tablet. Barnes & Noble and Sony are in the race as well, with the NOOK Tablet and the Sony Tablet S. It looks as though these products are no longer primarily e-readers, as they seem to have back-lit displays, and not the reader-friendly "e-ink". I doubt that our Old Women will opt for these over a dedicated e-reader. Book readers are small potatoes. Book publishing has always been a marginal industry. They have decided to challenge Apple, and to compete for the music and video market, where the real money is.

I have to confess that my reservations about e-readers for older readers are in part due to my own frustration with taking calls asking for help using them. It is like not knowing how to drive a car, and trying to answer questions about driving by referring to the driver license manual. I try to talk them through the "dance" using the OverDrive help, but I don't have a picture in my mind of what they are seeing on their device. I don't own a "portable device" of any kind, be it a mobile phone, a Blackberry, an MP3 player, a tablet, or an e-reader. I don't even wear a watch. I use a desktop PC at home and at work.

And, dear reader, I too am, at 57, a "senior". I'm not alone, among librarians my age, in finding the whole digital scene too much to take in. There is a bewildering variety of devices; smartphones, iPods and other sound players, tablets, older e-readers that need to be loaded from PC's and newer, wireless ones that can download directly. All of them need different "apps" and set-up to work with our library audio books and e-books. I am grateful that we have some younger staff who are more able to help.

But I think the time has come to shop for an e-reader, late-adopter though I am.

Are E-Book Readers Suitable Gifts For Aging Parents?

2011-12-14T01:58:00.000-05:00

People are calling the library with this question this holiday season. Should they buy their old mom or dad an e-book reader? What does the library have to offer? Which reader is most compatible with the library's e-books?

Last week, a quite elderly man came in, an "eighty-something", wanting to get some library e-books for his Kindle. He seemed to think that he could check out a stack of e-books, take them home, and put them on his Kindle to read. Where was his Kindle? It was in his car. There was no way I could give him the help he needed. I was simply too busy. So I sent him down to KH, our e-media expert at the Media Desk, after calling her first. She was also busy, but said she'd do what she could.

Today, a man called from Boston, wondering about giving his father, who lives in our area, an e-book reader. I explained that the library currently offers fewer than a thousand e-book titles. Until recently, the Nook seemed to be the most commonly used reader, but that our vendor, OverDrive, had recently done a deal with Amazon to provide e-books for the Kindle. But Kindle owners had to have an Amazon account as well as a library card, since OverDrive will send them to Amazon to get the Kindle version of the e-book.

Did his father do e-mail? Many of the library's e-books have waiting lists, and users are notified by e-mail when their e-book is available. Yes, he said. Well, that was encouraging. Once the reader is properly set up to work with OverDrive, it should be pretty painless, I said.

The more I thought about it, the more I was filled with doubt. I remembered how we had given my parents DVD's we'd thought they would like, only to find them still in their wrappers when we visited. My parents had been unable to make their DVD player work with their new cable box, and had actually lost their remote controller.

These Boomer adults have gotten the impression that, if they buy their parents e-readers, the library will be able to supply their parents' reading needs with free library e-books. And at this point, that is just not realistic. Even if learning to use an e-reader is not too steep a learning curve for their parent, libraries don't have the funding to provide e-books in the same numbers as they do hard copies.

I've delivered services to senior communities, and I know how much they read. Assuming that they become comfortable with downloading e-books to their readers, they will very quickly read through our current selections. They will be able to get the most popular authors from the library, provided they are willing to wait. But they will also have to purchase additional titles on their own.

I guess I would ask a couple of questions when people call, wondering if an e-reader would work for their parent. Is the parent already computer literate, and using e-mail? Do they have any experience with portable devices, such as an iPod or a smartphone? If not, an e-reader may be outside their comfort zone,and will likely stay in its box in a closet.

People Look East, An Advent Carol

2011-12-12T00:55:00.001-05:00

We sang this lovely carol at mass this morning. I'd never heard it before.

1. People, look east. The time is near
Of the crowning of the year.
Make your house fair as you are able,
Trim the hearth and set the table.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the guest, is on the way.

2. Furrows, be glad. Though earth is bare,
One more seed is planted there:
Give up your strength the seed to nourish,
That in course the flower may flourish.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the rose, is on the way.

3. Birds, though you long have ceased to build,
Guard the nest that must be filled.
Even the hour when wings are frozen
God for fledging time has chosen.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the bird, is on the way.

4. Stars, keep the watch. When night is dim
One more light the bowl shall brim,
Shining beyond the frosty weather,
Bright as sun and moon together.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the star, is on the way.

5. Angels, announce with shouts of mirth
Christ who brings new life to earth.
Set every peak and valley humming
With the word, the Lord is coming.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the Lord, is on the way.

"People, Look East" was written by Eleanor Farjeon(1881-1965) and was first published as "Carol of Advent" in Part 3 of"Modern Texts Written for or Adapted to Traditional Tunes" in TheOxford Book of Carols, 1928. Farjeon, a native of London, was a devoutCatholic who viewed her faith as "a progression toward which her spirituallife moved rather than a conversion experience." (The PresbyterianHymnal Companion, p. 323) She achieved acclaim as an author of children'snursery rhymes and singing games, and is best remembered for her poem"Morning Has Broken."

Source:http://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/Hymns_and_Carols/people_look_east.htm

NYPL & OWS

2011-12-06T23:46:00.001-05:00

A couple of interesting articles linked to on Arts & Letters Daily, the Chronicle of Higher Education's free aggregator of news, reviews and essays. I read the CHE's daily updates at work by virtue of the library's subscription to the print edition.

From The Nation, there is Upheaval at the New York Public Library, by Scott Sherman. Clearly the NYPL has it's own unique set of issues, but it made me think about the struggle over what a public library should be: a quiet temple of learning, (the traditional idea), or a lively community center with mass appeal.

Sherman catalogs the budgeting woes of public libraries in general. It is in the interest of library directors to increase the door count and circulation numbers. They are an index of community support. Our own library system has done comparatively well in recent years by welcoming all comers: doing away with the no-food policy, offering free printing from public computers, allowing cell-phone use, building a large DVD and audio book collection.

Inevitably, perhaps, the pendulum swung too far. Quiet areas are now more rigorously enforced, those with hot meals are asked to eat them elsewhere, and free printing may be limited in the near future.

From The New Criterion, Commune plus one: On Occupy Wall Street & the legacy of the Paris Commune, by James Panero, makes a doleful connection that I have not seen elsewhere, but which seems obvious once it is made. Live and learn, kids.

"French Wedding Cake"

2011-11-28T23:59:00.001-05:00

It was the worst time to take a serious reference question. Right after opening, this Monday morning, a young man asked for help finding information on the "French Wedding Cake".

Monday mornings at the main library begin with a rush of people wanting Internet sessions and the daily papers, and with a flurry of phone calls.

But you take it as it comes, and at least we had three librarians on the floor. He and I looked in the cake books in the Cookbook section. Nothing on French wedding cakes. We looked at the books on weddings, some of which had good chapters on choosing a cake. None mentioned a French cake. Had he looked online? Yes, but he wanted more. He was enrolled in a culinary course at Keiser College, and had to research the topic for class.

We had spent ten minutes looking, and already I felt the need to get back to the desk. We checked the reference collection, looking in Larousse Gastronomique without result, though it referred to the wedding cake, as such, as an English creation. He showed me the printout from his online search. Aha! His cake was a croquembouche, and for that we found an entry in Larousse. It was not a cake for weddings only, but it might be served at one, and at other special occasions as well, such as baptisms and first communions.

By now I really had to cut him loose and go help at the desk. Could he check the cake books for croquembouche on his own? He thought he could. Poor MF seemed a bit mauled when I got back. I apologized for being away so long, but I also felt bad about having abandoned my patron to his own efforts. Triage, I guess.

It shows how misleading a reference question can be. Neither he nor I knew how ethnically English the idea of a "wedding cake" was. Looking at home, I find in Google Books that Wedding Cakes and Cultural History, by Simon Charsley, (1992), expands on this:

Viewed from the European mainland this wedding cake has always seemed a peculiarly English development. In periods of Angloniania' such as the 1890s in France, it might be viewed with friendly amazement. Montagné in his great Larousse Gastronomique, originally published just before the Second World War, is more guarded. He identities it as based on the distinctively English plum cake, by then marginally incorporated into the French and Belgian confectionery range. The wedding cake itself is 'a monumental cake', 'a symbol rather than a delicacy, a tradition handed down from one century to the next, whose origins are lost in the mists of antiquity.

If the French. Dutch, Germans, Italians or other continental Europeans were to celebrate marriage with a cake of some kind it would be altogether lighter. It might share in the tendency to rise high and to be relatively large, but the standardisation and specialisation which are such marked features of the British cake developed much more hesitantly.

In France and Belgium there were two main styles. Regarded as the more traditional was a giant croquembouche. This is a cone, wide at the base, built up of small round choux pastries which are filled with confectioner's cream and dipped in hot toffee. As the toffee cools it solidifies, making a light brown glossy construction. This can then be decorated with ribbons and sugared almonds, birds and flowers, and often, for weddings, a small bride-and-groom mode on the top. For baptisms, first communions and other events, a similar though probably smaller cake may also be prepared with slightly different decorative motifs. Each guest will be served a number of choux broken out from the whole as a sweet course in the wedding meal.

At home tonight, over supper, I told R. of my search for the French wedding cake. "Oh, a croquembouche!", she exclaimed, "You should have called me." We had watched a program, years ago, in which Martha Stewart and a quite elderly Julia Child each made one. Martha's was, of course, perfect, while Julia's was more, well, rustic.

Blogging Reference

2011-11-19T10:00:00.001-05:00

The Reference Desk

10:00 Open

He wants Batman and Superman novels, not graphic novels. "I call 'em comics!", he says. Find him Batman: No Man's Land by Greg Rucka, Batman: The Ultimate Evil by Andrew Vachss, Batman Forever by Peter David, and Superman Returns by Marv Wolfman.

It's Homecoming weekend for FSU, with the Seminoles playing the Virginia Cavaliers tonight. A beautiful day, bright and cool, perfect for a football game.

Do the Dewey numbers in the reference collection match the ones in the circulating collection?

Stapler.

Open conference room for Sister-to-Sister Support Group. She wants to post a flyer. Tell her where the community bulletin board is.

Stapler.

Where can he check out a netbook? Media desk.

10:45 S. has to see a doctor. I have the second floor to myself for a while. It's quiet, but all public PC's are in use.

Do we have a study guide for the Commercial Driver License? Yes, for in-library use.

Mr. Ellis says he wants to find out who has died, and may he see the Thursday paper? Thursday? Yes, that is when the black funeral homes publish their obituaries. I've wondered why the Thursday paper goes out so much, and occasionally goes missing.

Cartoons by Charles Addams. Find her The World of Chas Addams, Night Crawlers, Drawn and Quartered, Creature Comforts.

Phone: Mr. L. wants contact info for The Minka Group, a lighting company.

PC 45 has a fake antivirus virus. Power off and restart.

PC for Ellery

Phone: She wants Prison Writings: My Life is My Sundance by Leonard Peltier. Both copies lost.

Help woman find articles on end-of-life care for the elderly in Gale.

Today's NYT.

Mr. Ellis trades Thursday's paper for today's.

PC's for Marvin, April.

11:34 NYT comes back, WSJ goes out.

DC introduces me to her sister, down from NJ for the holiday, and may they have copies of Sunday's and today's NYT crosswords?

PC for McKnight. He doesn't like the location, turns it down.

Teen boy doesn't know how to work copier, make copies for him.

Show man how to upload résumé to a job application.

Phone: How to spell "Cheyenne", as in Wyoming. Put Mr. L. on hold. S. is back, yay!

Books on liquidation and corporate taxation. Sorry, try FSU.

12:50 Back from lunch. Holding a book for Shapiro, Call Center Success. He goes down to check it out.

PC for Isaiah. PC's for Samuel, Dante.

Call Audrey D. back. She wants to donate books to the troops. Suggest Operation Paperback.

Where is program room? Tallahassee Authors Network is meeting.

PC for Lamont.

Today's paper.

He wants Facebook & Twitter for Seniors for Dummies and Easy Computer Basics. Just returned, find in check-in room..

S. goes to lunch.

Returns paper, how can he get a library card?

Phone: She wants The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Pull, place hold, take to circulation desk.

Does he need a library card to check out books? Yes, tell him where to get one.

Restart her PC.

Jeff returns USA Today, gets PC.

2:08 PC for Eric. Check sound for another man.

Holding The Friday Night Knitting Club for Carol G., who is here to pick it up.

Mr. Ellis is dismayed. He is writing a paper on territorial Florida, and has discovered that someone has already written on his topic, 70 years ago. He must take a new tack, but it's due Dec. 1.

Help her find articles in Gale on budget issues for non-profits.

He needs to pick a play for school. Take to shelf.

Do we have A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael by Elisabeth Elliot? No, offer interlibrary loan. She doesn't have a card yet.

PC for Yolanda.

Job listings? He is a carpenter. Has he ever done a job search online? At Workforce, the state employment agency, but I can see in his face that he's not "computer literate" I give him the Sunday classifieds. Later, he wants to copy an ad for an apartment. I show him the copying machine, but he says he doesn't know how to use it. I'm helping someone else, but S. does it for him.

He gets to talking with S. He's 54, has his wife and kids in a motel room. The children are in school, at Cobb Elementary. "They didn't ask to be brought into this world. I'm out here for them", he says. He must earn at least $45 a day. He wants to get them into an apartment. Says he'll do anything. It breaks my heart. But I see hope and determination. St. Joseph, pray for him, a good father.

3:51 Just had a flurry of ILL renewal requests. Girl asked for anything on "Juneteenth", the celebration of Emancipation Day. She's looking through the Black History vertical file now. Tallahassee's local celebration is earlier, in May, Juneteenth having originated in Texas.

Phone: How can she get to the Favorite Authors Notification page. The FAN club lets people "subscribe" to new hardback releases for bestselling authors. Talk her through the links to it.

PC's for mom & daughter, Bridget & Shyla.

Today's paper.

4:30 30 minutes to closing.

Another Working Day

2011-11-16T23:33:00.001-05:00

By Wednesday, the press of need at the service desk that we see at the beginning of the week slackens, and today I caught up with the requests queue. In the workroom, I boxed Baker & Taylor lease book returns, marking them on my inventory list.

I had a request from a journalist in New York for Associated Press football polls ranking small college teams in 1967. He had been unable to get them at the NYPL or from AP, and somehow found that they had been published in our local newspaper, the Tallahassee Democrat. They appeared here because Florida A&M was one of those small colleges. I found all the polls he wanted save one on our microfilm, scanned them, and e-mailed them to him. The missing one I found in the Billings (Montana) Gazette, using the Access Newspaper Archive.

A grey-goateed father approached. He needed The Lady and the Tiger, by Frank Stockton, for his daughter, and couldn't find it in our catalog. It rang a bell. The title was actually The Lady or the Tiger? And Other Stories. Another student had asked for it in the last year, and I remembered that it was a tattered paperback shelved in the paperback fantasy carousels. It is not really fantasy, but a fable and a puzzle. You can read it at Archive.org if you are curious.

The Call of the Desert

2011-11-12T23:07:00.001-05:00

I have formed the habit, in recent months, of roaming the world's deserts online, using Google Maps, Google Earth's simpler, in-browser cousin. I turn on Terrain and Photos, and search for desolate vistas that people have uploaded with Panoramio. This image of La Sierrita Ojinaga in Chihuahua, Mexico, was uploaded by rrca8. There is something about deserts that soothes my soul.

I lived on the edges of the desert in the '80's, in Albuquerque and Austin. There are only a few livings to be had in the desert: rancher, storekeeper, scientist, artist, and tour guide. There is not much call for a librarian in the desert.

Lately, my viewing has narrowed to a couple of areas on the edge of the great Chihuahan Desert: the "boot-heel" of New Mexico and Southwest Texas, around Alpine. R. and I camped in the Davis Mountains one night in 1981 on our way to California.

It was a happy coincidence, searching for titles for a "Cozy Mysteries" display, to discover Allana Martin's Texana Jones Mystery, Death of a Saint Maker, set in Presidio County, Texas. Martin draws a fine portrait of life in the border country near the Texas Big Bend. Texana Jones runs a trading post, and is married to a veterinarian.

A bonus, for me, is that she is a Catholic. As a nervous passenger in a light plane, she says a Hail Mary. She goes to Mass.

Nothing much happened on Sunday. I went to Mass, prompting a remark from Clay that my unaccustomed piety wouldn't impress the watchers from the DEA. I laughed at the joke, but my purpose was serious. When the world closes in, nothing expands the horizon like reflections on eternity.

She burns a candle to St. Jude. It might not seem like a big deal, but evidences of religious faith are rare in mainstream fiction. Yes, "Christian Fiction" has its own genre now, but how often, outside that genre, does anyone routinely go to church?

Blogging Reference

2011-10-29T23:23:00.000-04:00

It's another Game Day Saturday, FSU plays NC State at noon. The weather is overcast and cool. The vane on the cupola of the old, WPA-built post office, (now a bankruptcy court), is pointing North.

The self-checkout machines are not working. Not sure what's wrong. Normally, if the library system is up, they're fine. I'll try again in a little while.

10:00 Open Phone: Rose C. wants to know how to dance the Tarantella. Don't find a "how-to" right off. The International Ency. of Dance has good article. "The figures of the tarantella...may be executed in any order..." Will mail her the article. Lots of YouTube videos are out there, but I don't think Rose is a computer person. She sounds quite elderly. Says they want to put on the dance at an Italian festival in February. She has a friend who says she knows how to do it, but is too old to actually perform it now.

10:24 The computer reservation system isn't working either. They're rebooting it. Our systems people were doing some work overnight.

He's doing a report on several species of rhinoceros. All I can offer is Grzimek's Animal Ency., our reliable fall-back.

There, do you see? I've use two print reference works in the last 30 minutes, and was glad to have them!

DC says all working now.

Old woman with no teeth wants a telephone book, wants to know if tote bag at Florida Dept. of Health "Food Safety and Temperature Control" display is free to take. Yes.

Phone: R. has bought me a sandwich at Crispers, is about to bring it.

Copy tarantella article to mail. Also mailing haiku poem, Springtime in Edo, to Ann P. Was published 2006 in Japan in a limited ed., but no libraries own it, so can't ILL it. Poem commemorating 300th anniv. of death of Kikaku, disciple of Basho. Found it online in the journal, Simply Haiku.

Today's paper? Sorry, was not delivered this morn. Takes Friday's. We've called the delivery man, should be here later.

11:36 Quiet. Here's the deputy. A little schmooze.

Process some requests.

Phone: number for Mike Shannon's Steaks and Seafood in St. Louis.

Phone: She wants video, Helping Your Child Sleep Thought the Night. Not on file. Try author search. No. Is she sure? She checks, it's Baby, not Child. Yes, is on shelf, transfer her to Media desk.

12:11 Lunch.

12:59 SE gone to lunch, DC sitting with me at the desk. It's cleared some outside. Sunny and still cool, a perfect day for a game.

Quiet, do some requests.
Explosive Eighteen, place hold.
Smokin' Seventeen, place hold.
Ego, Hunger and Aggression by Frederick Perls, place hold.

Today's paper? Don't have it yet.

Phone: how to renew her books with the new catalog.

He wants books on the mysteries of the pyramids. Have several, take to shelf.

The Distant Hours by Kate Morton, place hold.

Magic Graves by Jeanine Frost & Ilona Andrews; is e-book only, can't supply.

Two ladies, elder mom & middle-aged daughter want Kill Shot by Vince Flynn. Release date is Feb. '12, but can place request. Also want to know about getting library e-books on Kindle.

Can he get PC 64 again? No, give him another.

His computer shut off on him. Give him another.

Where does this computer print from?

Curran by Ilona Andrews; is e-book only, but send her link for free download.

Fathers and Sons by Ilona Andrews; is e-book only, but send her link for free download.

On Sparrow Hill by Maureen Lang. Send to Purchase/ILL.

Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly, place hold.

Break a $5 for Gene the Englishman.

PC for James.

House of Secrets by Tracie Peterson, place hold.

Sweet Sanctuary by Sheila Walsh, send to Purchase/ILL.

Phone: ILL renewal request for The Chief: Art Rooney and his Pittsburgh Steelers.

Pale, mumbling high school boy wants something about the "end of days" The end of days? "The popolips", he elaborates. Ah, the Apocalypse. We look at several titles, and he settles on Tim LaHaye's Are We Living In The End-Times?

She's writing a report on the Wesley brothers and the Methodist reforms. Give her a biography of John Wesley. All of our books on Methodism are on its history in the United States.

Copier is out of paper.

She wants Halloween Cookbooks. Surprised to find hardly anything in the catalog.

Fade to Blue by Julie Carobini, place hold.

The Herodian dynasty, show him entry in Ency. Judaica and v. 2 of Graetz's History of the Jews.

There's a problem with a woman's place on the reserve list for a book. She is sure she was next in line, and now she's number 64. She's upset. Call Super to hear her story.

PC for Eric.

Phone: it's DT in Youth Services. Is Super still there? No, she's gone away now.

3:16 PC for Dexter.

Facing the Giants by Alex Kendrick, send to Purchase/ILL.

Courageous by Randy Alcorn, send to Purchase/ILL.

PC for Jim. He can't believe they are supposed to get snow in the NE. And they just had a hurricane not long ago, I add.

Born to Die by Lisa Jackson, place hold,

PC's for Andrew, Marcus.

Where are vegetarian cookbooks? Take her to shelf. She has been diagnosed with gout, she says, and can only eat four ounces of meat per day. What else is there, she wonders?

Do we have today's paper yet? Sorry, no. Takes USA Today instead.

Hush by Nancy Bush, send to Purchase/ILL.

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater, place hold.

Where can she get library card?

He says the urinal's not working in the men's room. Seems ok. It flushes somewhat weakly, and complaints are not unusual.

Make copy for him from the World Aircraft Ency.

Standing Against the Wind by Martha Lou Peritti, place hold.

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan, place hold.

Mudroom by Hillary Jordan, must mean Mudbound, place hold.

World Aircraft boy: may he take scrap paper home to make paper plane models? Yes.

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman, place hold.

The School of the Seers: A Practical Guide on How to See in the Unseen Realm by Jonathan Welton, send to Purchase/ILL.

I've Got Your Number by Sophie Kinsella, standing order author, send to Purchase.

Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult, standing order author, send to Purchase.

4:17 He wants books on "corporate governance, boards of directors." Show him business management section.

Where can she get a library card?

One Summer by David Baldacci, place hold.

The Book of Mahjong by Amy Lo, send to ILL.

Show her how to renew materials online.

Show her the quilting section.

30 min. to closing. Signing off.

Back in the Land of the Living

2011-10-26T01:30:00.000-04:00

I got sick while I was in New York at the end of September. A cold, allergies, "The Crud", as local doctors name it. It's been going around Tallahassee in a big way lately. Only this week have I begun to really feel better, apart from a lingering cough. Sitting on the front porch with my coffee this morning, with the rising sun shining through the pines, I was thankful for the new day.

With the two new library branches opening up, promotions have meant a round of interviews for positions vacated. I am on the hiring committee for a part-time Sunday IP position in Youth Services. We interviewed three candidates today, and will interview another three on Wednesday. We are fortunate to have some good applicants.

Sitting at the reference desk with MK this morning, I heard a strummed guitar from the first floor. It was the Story Time Halloween Parade, led by Gary C.! I called M. to the stairwell to watch as moms & tots processed. We saw a monkey, a bee, a princess.

I have been reading through Barbara Cleverly's Commander Sandilands mysteries. They are set in the 1920's, in India at first, and moving to England and the Continent. They are very well written, with an impressive depth of background and strong characters. I found I would have to wait for Folly Du Jour, and I had "cannibalized" a dog-chewed copy of Patrick O'Brian's H.M.S. Surprise, applying its bar-code and cataloging label to a donated copy. So I took the old copy home to read again.

I read the whole Aubrey/Maturin series a few years ago. What a pleasure to revisit O'Brian. I used to have a patron, a man who would only read Louis L'Amour westerns, over and over again. Maybe this is a particular pleasure for old people?

In a similar vein, I was rereading my Winged Chariots: The Popular Art of Early Flight post, which continues to get hits, and I thought it was time to revisit Red Baron 3D, a flight-sim game I played some years ago. I fired up my old Windows 98 Athlon PC, which I had fitted with a Voodoo 5 graphics card specifically to accommodate RB's Glide graphics, whereupon I lost interest in the game around 2006. The sound and modem didn't work, and I had to re-seat the sound and modem cards to get them working.

Red Baron 3D opened fine. There was was my last campaign, just as I left it. Of course, I've forgotten the keyboard commands, but I tried a "Fly Now" mission, flying a Nieuport 17 against a German Halberstadt D-II. Oh well, I am no better a pilot than I ever was...

Manhattan Trip 2011

2011-10-11T01:03:00.000-04:00

Our flight was delayed for several hours in Charlotte due to the weather. We landed at LaGuardia at sundown.

A little park we found on the way to the High Line. Washington Common Park, I believe.

It was a good thing we did the High Line on Friday, as the rest of our visit was cloudy and wet.

R. shopping at Anthropologie in Chelsea Market under the High Line.

Pigeons roosting in the trees behind Abingdon Guest House, where we stayed.

Looking toward the Upper West Side from the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park.

Attractive gate to a children's playground by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We spent our time in the galleries devoted to 19th and early 20th century European paintings. Lovely to see the Cézannes.

The Elephant & Castle, where I love to have breakfast.

Union Square.

Blogging Reference

2011-09-17T22:34:00.000-04:00

10:51 Very quiet so far. It was cool and overcast as I rode to work. Now the sun is out. There is a huge football game here today, FSU plays Oklahoma. It's thought that up to 35,000 people will come from out-of town. The Goodyear blimp has been droning around since yesterday. The "Downtown Get-Down" street festival suffered a drenching rain last night. A good day to lie low if you are not going.

A flurry of requests this a.m. for Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman, whose PBS program, "3 Steps to Incredible Health!" has been broadcast.

Also a lot of interest this week in Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, edited by Caroline Kennedy and Michael Beschloss. It's being heavily promoted, Caroline Kennedy appearing on The Daily Show:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

MC groaned when I mentioned the requests. It is a slipcased book/8-CD set, a fragile format for libraries, and pricey at $60.

He wants books about African Americans in television. Couple of titles by Donald Bogle, Blacks in American Film and Television: an encyclopedia and Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television.

Someone donated a box of new-ish poetry, all published by the local Anhinga Press. Maybe we can use some of them.

11:44 Made a round of the second floor. Still quiet. Came back to find E. the retired cataloger telling SE about his e-book reader again. He's just thrilled with it.

12:40 Back from lunch in the park: a ham & cheese sandwich and The Palace Tiger by Barbara Cleverly. Hoping to get a shot of the blimp, I took my camera, but no.

It's a little busier, but there are still public PC's open. SE goes to eat. I've got the floor to myself for a half hour.

Phone: Anything on flag football? Flag Football by John Ferrell, a YMCA Skills Manual in junior non-fiction. Transfer him to Youth Services.

Young man in garnet & grey FSU hoodie, sleeves pushed up, dyed-purple short mohawk haircut, grown out blond on the rest of his head, pale complexion, stubbly beard.

South Asian man shows me CD set of Dead Watch by John Sandford, wants the book. Take to shelf. "The lady downstairs said I can listen to it in the library. I listen on my own computer", (patting his bag). He goes to a carrel. Must be learning English.

Woman wants information about parking in our auxiliary lot for jury duty.

Process some requests:
Working South: Paintings and Sketches by Mary Whyte. New, 2nd request for this. Send to purchase.

The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL by Eric Greitens. We own, place hold.

The Race by Clive Cussler. We own, place hold.

The Lazy Couponer: How to Save $25,000 Per Year in Just 45 Minutes Per Week... by Janie Chase. New, send to purchase.

Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President by Ron Suskind. New, send to purchase.

Your Self-Confident Baby: How to Encourage Your Child's Natural Abilities -- From the Very Start by Magda Gerber. 1997, send to interlibrary loan.

Walk-up: Martha S. wants Isak Dinesen: the life of a storyteller by Judith Thurman, and From Where You Dream: the process of writing fiction by Robert Olen Butler. Place holds.

He needs help finding his computer, signing on. Then requests Astronomical Papers of the American Ephemeris by S. Newcomb, (1888), and Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity by S. Weinberg. Send to ILL.

Edwin asks how I am doing, reserves a computer.

2:15 Still no rush.

He wants to find the name of a doctor who treated his wife 15 years ago. Show him the old city directories and telephone books.

CD stops in with his "super awesome dog". He is our Adult Services game-goer.

Printer is printing ascii garbage. Cancel job.

Phone: Carolyn from branch, woman coming to get our copy of the Torah. Pull, trap hold, take to circulation desk.

Repair manuals for hybrid cars? Only the Auto Repair Database, no books, I think, but S. finds the Chilton annual volumes for 2010 and gives them to him.

She wants a book about the missionary, David Livingstone. Elspeth Huxley's Livingstone and his African Journeys is available. Take to shelf.

Dad & son pass by heading downstairs. Boy has short hair on top combed up with some kind of gel into a not-very-convincing mohawk look. "Scalp 'em Noles", I guess.

He wants The Executive Dilemma: handling people problems at work by Eliza Collins. Take to shelf.

He wants a book on learning Portuguese. There is nothing on the shelf. He doesn't have a library card, is staying at the homeless shelter, so I can't reserve materials for him that are checked out or at branches.

3:30 An hour and a half to go.

She thinks the copier has taken her dollar. It's on stand-by, wake it up.

Phone: questions about the cast of the television series, The Big Valley. Did Victoria Barkley ever get married on the show? According to Wikipedia, her husband died six years before the series begins, but I don't have information about whether she might have been engaged or married later.

This happens a lot. People are at home, watching television, and they get to wondering about the show they are watching. I most often get questions about soap opera episodes.

Woman asks to see Consumer Reports on cars. Show her the annual April car issue.

Torah Woman is here, wonders if The Torah: a modern commentary by Gunther W. Plaut can be checked out. No, is a reference book. She takes it to a table to read.

Phone: The Big Valley again. She saw the name Eugene Barkley in the credits, who was he? According to Wikipedia, for what it's worth, (no citation): "The youngest Barkley son was Eugene, a medical student studying at Berkeley, played by Charles Briles...He was seen sporadically in only seven first season episodes and then written out... In real life Briles was drafted and sent off to Vietnam."

4:19 Park Avenue is lined with cars of game attendees heading to the stadium on foot. The game is at eight.

Phone: Ann P. wants Deviant Children Grow Up by Lee N. Robins and High Risk: Children Without Conscience by Ken Magid. Don't own, create requests with delivery at the Parkway branch.

4:52 Finally got our rush at 4:40. That's it for today!

Codices and Daleks

2011-09-15T02:00:00.001-04:00

I attended an online course today, with a bunch of other librarians, about OverDrive Mobile: installing and using the OverDrive Media Console "app" on Apple, Blackberry and Android devices to download OverDrive e-books and audiobooks directly, without a PC.

At the beginning of the class, the instructor asked how many owned smart phones. A little over half the attendees owned one. Smart phones are projected to outsell PC's in 2012, and many more readers of e-books will read them on these devices than will buy a dedicated e-reader such as a Kindle or a Nook. DS joked that she had a "dumb phone" that only made calls. I don't own any kind of mobile device.

It was interesting, then, to read Lev Grossman's piece in the NYT Book Review, From Scroll to Screen, a capsule history of the book. While accepting the inevitability of the transition to electronic formats, he maintains that an e-book is more like a scroll than a codex of bound pages, losing non-linear reading functionality:

Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It’s no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That’s the kind of reading you do in an e-book.

The Guardian has a story, Dalek collector enters Guinness World Records. Over twenty years, Rob Hull has collected 571 Dalek models.

Hull, from Doncaster, South Yorkshire, said: "I've never been a fan of the show, but I have been enchanted by the Daleks ever since I saw one in a toy store as a child. "My mum wouldn't buy it for me, but I swore at that moment that I'd have my own one day." He said he bought his first Dalek at the age of 29 and since then they had slowly taken over the house.

But his 43-year-old wife, Dawn, will not celebrate her husband being the newest record-holder. She said: "I hate the bloody things and I've got a feeling this is only going to encourage him."

I was mildly bitten by the Dalek bug when I discovered a cult of hobbyists who build full-scale Daleks. But I resisted the temptation to buy a Dalek model. The only thing I collect are editions of the Rubaiyat. Daleks are quaint, compared to today's computer-generated nightmares, with their toilet-plunger arms.

To Largo Once More

2011-09-06T01:25:00.002-04:00

R. and I returned to Largo on Friday for the memorial mass and burial of her Uncle Ray, who died last Tuesday. We joined R.'s Aunt Pat, in the company of her extended family, in honoring the passing of this kind and generous man. He was remembered as a pillar of the Church and as a military veteran.

We stayed again at the Hampton Inn. I brought my camera, but I didn't have the leisure to take pictures. I would have liked to get some shots of the quaint old cinder block and stucco houses in the neighborhoods of Largo, with their sandy yards and tropical plants. These views from our fifth floor room at the back of the Hampton, looking out on Missouri Avenue, will have to do. It is common in the St. Pete/Clearwater area to find northern place-names, such as Missouri. Many retirees from the north and mid-west have settled there. Mobile home and RV parks often fly Canadian flags. We passed one place called the "Empty-Nester Diner".

After the mass on Saturday morning, we took part in our first ever funerary motorcade, processing from the church to the cemetery, which was a lovely park with old water oaks shading the burial site.

Afterward, everyone wanted to change clothes before gathering at Aunt Pat's, and we went back to the hotel. The staff at the hotel recommended the Thirsty Marlin, nearby, for lunch. I devoured a cheeseburger, fries, and a large slice of dill pickle.

We went over to Pat's house, and sat with her on the back porch, along with R.'s uncles Art and Ernie and their wives, drinking sweet iced tea. After a couple of hours, everyone was clearly flagging, and we took our leave. Back at the hotel, I had a nap. R. went online in the hotel's computer room and found a local Italian restaurant, Alfano's . We went there for supper, and it was excellent.

We wanted to get an early start Sunday morning, so we went to the eight o'clock mass at St. Cecilia's, checked out, had breakfast at the Largo Family Restaurant, and were on our way out of town by 10:30. We took the causeway over Tampa Bay and got on the Veterans/SunCoast Parkway, a toll road that lets you avoid the sprawl of Highway 19 north of Clearwater. Up to Homosassa Springs, through Crystal River, over the barge canal bridge and out of Central Florida altogether. Through Chiefland, Old Town, Cross City, Perry, and into the hills, Lamont, Capps, and Waukeenah, where roadside stands sell fresh pecans. And home to Tallahassee, our Shangri-La.

It wasn't long after that the rains of tropical storm Lee arrived. R. baked a frozen lasagna and made a salad for supper. We said the rosary, and settled in to watch an Inspector Lewis mystery on PBS, retiring to bed for a soothing rainy night, and looking forward to the Labor Day holiday on Monday.

Blogging Reference

2011-08-27T12:44:00.186-04:00

College students have been moving in all week, The Fall term at FSU and FAMU starts on Monday. It's a good day to stay away from the universities and popular restaurants.

It's a clear day, and expected to be hot. You'd never know a hurricane is churning up the Atlantic coast. I shouldn't joke, but I feel a little left out. We haven't had a tropical storm here in a few years. Maybe I should watch Key Largo.

Another Saturday morning with the A/C down. They seem to have gotten it going a little.

10:00 I open the doors at the 2nd floor entrance.

PC for Cheryl.

Phone: She got a notice for a book she returned. Can I look for it? Grrr, we're not supposed to get these calls, but I'll handle it. Not on shelf, find Rick Steves' Prague & The Czech Republic on a cart in the circulation workroom.

Phone: Is Joyce M. Wants address & phone for a company named Santana. Has no idea where it is. Try Switchboard, Google. It's not enough to go on, sorry.

Today's paper.

Where to get library card?

10:26 Still have about 8 PC's free.

PC for Michael.

She wants The Territorial Papers of the United States, vols. 22-26, covering the Territory of Florida. After a couple of tries, I find them in the catalog, and there they are in the reference collection. She remembered them from years ago, before we moved into this building in '91. Embarrassing to have never noticed them, over all these years.

Do we do phone reference? His library in Memphis did it too. He says he stumped them twice, with "How deep is the sand in Saudi Arabia?", and "Why are salmon and mackerel cans smaller on the bottom than on the top?".

PC for Miller.

PC for Jeff.

Where is PC 56?

The floppy drive in PC 52 can't read his disk. Give him another PC. Advise him to move his files to a USB drive.

PC's for Vincent, Jason, Brittany.

Long schmooze w E., who retired as a cataloger from the FSU library, about e-book readers. He is pretty sold on them. Has a Nook, but thinks Kindle may be a better choice. Nook can't zoom maps and diagrams. He likes that you can change the type size. No need to buy a large print edition. Mostly reads ePub versions of free books from Project Gutenberg. Has issues w e-book pagination, which plays hell w citations, and w current state of "digital rights" for e-books. I am hearing good things from serious readers about these e-book readers.

How to find McDonald's web site to apply for job. Bing is confusing.

Any more titles in Molly MacRae's Lewis Wilder mystery series after Wilder Rumors? No. Do we have The Terrorists, by Maj Sjöwall? Is on hold. Is the hold for her friend? She will get it from her.

Phone: The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. Place hold.

Do we have more recent issues of Value Line reports? Not yet, show him online access through the library web page.

Check the materials request database, (MRD). It's up to 54 new, but only 22 book requests, the rest media. Can get to them later.

11:58 Time for lunch.

12:43 Back.

The NYT.

Today's Democrat.

Print out 1040EZ tax form for a man.

Phone: It's Florida P. Who won the 1998 World Series? Yankees.

Where are books on psychology? Take to shelf.

Her PC is not on, Have her press power button to turn it on.

Today's paper.

Refill CD's Southern Gothic Fiction display.

Can she have scratch paper?

1:19 SE is back from lunch.

Where to get library card?

It is very quiet. Plenty of people. Quiet people, reading. It's nice...

She is here for a meeting. The Greater Tallahassee Section of the National Council of Negro Women is meeting in program room A on the first floor.

Does the library have food vending machines? No, sorry.

Where to get library card?

Tarot Woman walks by.

Might as well work on requests,

Try to show self-check-out machine, but her card's not in the system. She must go to circulation.

MRD: The Forgotten Locket, by Lisa Mangum. New, juvenile, redirect to Youth Services.

SE is making Grisham/Baldacci readalikes display. I'm alone for a little while,

Has anyone turned in a flash drive? No. Is WiFi available on the 3rd floor? Yes, but public not allowed up there on weekends. Can she print from the 15-minute PC's? No.

She's here to pick up On Human Nature, by Edward O. Wilson. Was on 24-hr. hold at refdesk, but she couldn't get here. We still have it.

He can't find The 7th Victim and False Accusations by Alan Jacobson. Go back to the shelf with him and find them.

Repair information for 1989 Saab 9000 CD. Mitchell doesn't cover Saabs. Auto Repair db has only service bulletins. Have only annual all-in-one Chilton tune-up book for imports. They'll take that.

Do we have Pharmacy Technician Certification book? We had a different one from the one he wants, but it's now lost.

She wants books in Spanish by Esmeraldo Santiago. Place hold on Conquistadora.

Today's paper.

Mom w 2 little kids wants Run, Baby, Run by Nicky Cruz. Take request for ILL. Anything on the West Memphis Three. We used to have Devil's Knot by Mara Leveritt, but all copies are lost.

Phone: Mrs. Rounds wants Escape by Barbara Delinsky in large print. Do we have Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner in large type? Not yet. She'll take regular print then.

Phone: Joyce C. wants Smokin' Seventeen and Explosive Eighteen by Evanovich. Place holds.

Show Democrat on microfilm. Demo viewer.

DC gives me a break.

GED book? Copies for in-library use, or can reserve copy for check-out.

PC's for four kids.

Phone: Rosa B. in Lloyd wants contact info for Ruby Kisses. Made by Kiss Cosmetics. E-mail only on web site, not listed in Dun & Bradstreet directory. There is a store locator. Give her three local stores.

Phone: Joan C. wonders why ducks removed from Lake Ella, popular walking location in mid-town. Muscovy ducks, threat to local species, aggressive, leave "unsightly waste".

3:26 So much for quiet time to process requests!

Mom & teen son. How can he volunteer at the library? Show VolunteerLEON web site.

PC for Dave.

Books for Bolivar. Also wants The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, Not a Suicide Pact by Richard A. Posner, In the Shadow of Death by Elizabeth Beck, and The Little Book of Restorative Justice by Howard Zehr. Take to shelf for Rape, don't have the others. For a course? Yes. criminal justice, so don't offer ILL.

PC for Matt.

4:00 SE takes discards and books for bindery up to Collection Management.

MRD: Surrendered :the rise, fall and revelation of Kwame Kilpatrick by Kwame Kilpatrick. Send to ILL.

MRD: Eviction Notice: A Hood Rat Novel by K'wan. New, send to Purchase.

MRD: 3 X 33: Short Fiction by 33 Writers, Mark Winegardner, ed. 2004, $100!, send to ILL.

MRD: The Hot Zone by Preston. We own, place hold.

4:27 Phone. Hurricane Tracking Man wants particulars from the National Hurricane Center's 2:00 advisory on Irene.

MRD: The Most Dangerous Thing by Laura Lippman. New, received, in process. Place hold.

Show her how to reserve PC w her card.

Dave asks if we have an envelope. No, sorry.

30 min. announcement. I think that's enough for today.

Summer Break Is Over

2011-08-17T01:13:00.002-04:00

After weeks of sweltering days and nights, the morning was cool, with a mackerel sky. I wore a windbreaker on my scooter ride to work. Autumn is still a long way off, but it looks like we can expect arid, if still hot, days and cooler nights.

It has been the most serene summer break that anyone can remember at the main library. Not that it hasn't been busy, but we haven't had the numbers of unsupervised children and teens this year that we've had in the past.

I can only guess why that is so. The nearby Life Skills Academy, which was a program for teens ejected from the high schools, is gone, I heard. The city buses have new routes that don't involve transfers at the old main terminal across the street. Several library branches have more public access computers now, (the contrast between Monday, when the branches are closed, and Tuesday, was noticeable this week). The shift of Internet traffic from PC's to portable devices, chiefly "smart phones", may be a factor too, though iPhones and Blackberrys are rarely seen on the premises. I wonder whether the Web has simply lost its novelty.

Whatever the reason, it's been a pleasant surprise . The library has been more like a library ought to be than it has been in a long time. People are coming in to use it, not to see if their friends are there. When we are needed, it is to help people do their work, not to make children behave. It wasn't what we expected over the summer break.

The Marines of the Library

2011-08-14T01:46:00.004-04:00

I don't know who came up with this name for bookmobilers, but it always made me feel good to think it of myself, when I ran the library bookmobile in the 1990's. The idea is that bookmobiles establish "beachheads" for library services, regular stops in places, often rural, that will someday be succeeded by permanent branch libraries.

A bookmobile librarian is a librarian who is also a truck driver, an odd combination. When I applied for the job, it mattered that I had once driven a school bus.

It is a lonely job: only you and your assistant, without the larger crew of a branch or a department to help out, and your work is invisible to the rest of the library. It is physically demanding: heavy canvas bags of requests and returns must be handled, and at senior communities an indoor service desk and collection must be set up and taken down several times daily.

The hazards of the road, mechanical breakdowns and severe weather, are facts of life. The hardest times were in winter, driving in from miles out in the cold and dark, wanting only to see the lights of the truck route, Capital Circle, that would signal I was almost home.

And yet I used to tell myself, rolling down a leafy country lane on a beautiful day, to remember it, that I was privileged to have such freedom, such close friendships with my readers, and to be so relied upon for books to read.

The opening of two new branch locations this fall, in Woodville and on Pedrick Road east of town, will mean the end of two of the remaining rural bookmobile stops at Woodville and at Chaires. The old stops at Bradfordville and at Fort Braden were replaced by branch libraries years ago. Only the double stop at the Miccosukee Land Coop and Miccosukee proper, and the newer stop at Southwood will remain of the rural stops.

The old bookmobile frontier is just about over. Bookmobile services will be devoted increasingly to senior communities and assisted living facilities.

Raise a glass to all bookmobile librarians! But for them, many readers would have nowhere to turn.

Shot of Love

2011-08-08T01:24:00.002-04:00

Sunday Mass, how grateful I am to be there after another week in this old world of trouble. The Gospel reading is the story of Jesus walking on the water. Father Holeda likens the fearful disciples in their storm-tossed boat to ourselves in these uncertain times, when the news only seems to go from bad to worse, and we have so many worries about our work, our families, and what the future holds. "Be not afraid", Jesus says. Pope John Paul II often repeated this. "Be not afraid, I am with you."

It is my turn to serve as a eucharistic minister today. As I present the cup, Y. approaches. "The Blood of Christ", I say, and she takes the cup, a glance between us acknowledging the grace offered, and received.

Y. used to run the library's Apalachee Parkway Branch, when it was nothing but an old bookmobile up on blocks in the corner of a shopping center parking lot. She left us for the State Library in the early '90's, but the collection she had assembled on that bookmobile was for a long time the last resort for anything obscure, literary, or in translation. I didn't see her for many years. I had heard she had retired. Then, one morning a few weeks ago, I turned at Mass to pass the peace, and there she was. She had come home.

We had planned to see a movie, Beginners, at the Miracle, but when we got there we found that it had already started. The time in the paper had been wrong. So we went home. R. made a lasagne, I washed a load of whites.

R. tried calling her Aunt Pat and Uncle Ray, but got no answer. A few minutes later, Ray called back. He was doing well, with no pain, only some tiredness when he over-exerted himself. He had started two new paintings.

We sat in our reading/radio-listening chairs, reading the Sunday New York Times. Our cat, Claudius, sat nearby on the fireplace. A jazz program was on the radio. And joy broke in. I kissed R., and said I was not sorry we had missed the movie. Nothing could be better than this: to be reading the Times together on a Sunday afternoon with our cat, and jazz on the radio. I felt like crying, so sweet was my release from care and sorrow.

Heat is Austerity, Cold is Misery

2011-08-02T01:31:00.003-04:00

...Swami Bhaktivedanta Prabhupad, the guru of Krishna Consciousness, was supposed to have said. Gerald Ensley, a columnist for our local paper, devoted his space today to hot weather being a fact of life in Tallahassee in the summer.

And it seemed appropriate. There is really nothing else happening here at the end of July. I worked this weekend, but it would have been a waste of time for me to do a Blogging Reference post. The streets were empty. If it were not for the people coming in to access the Internet, the library would have been almost completely quiet.

R. attempted to go to Governors Square Mall on Saturday, and couldn't find a parking space, so I guess that is where everyone was, if not at the beach or out of town.

I did have a man come in first thing on Sunday, looking for reviews in Consumer Reports for HVAC units. But CR doesn't evaluate them, nor any one else. I think that there are too many variables. So much depends on a competent energy audit and the installation of the right unit for the house in question.

At some point, air-conditioning became a requirement for life in the South. When I arrived at work Saturday morning, the A/C was off. A county technician got it going before the library opened. The idea of being without it was too uncomfortable to contemplate, though the library does have windows that can be opened if need be.

Until the age of eight, I had little experience of A/C. We, and no one I knew, did not have it at home. On hot summer days, we went swimming for relief. In 1962 we moved into a new house in Maitland that had central heat and cooling, but the new school I attended there did not. Open windows and fans kept us cool.

In 1969 I entered the eleventh grade at the new buildings for Winter Park High, which had sealed windows and an HVAC system. Attending FSU in the '70's, the classrooms were air-conditioned, but the dorms were not. Large fans were something everyone brought with them as incoming freshmen.

Now we expect it. But if air-conditioning the Sunbelt were to become unsustainable, I think most of us would adjust to it. And for those who found it unbearable, perhaps they would return to the Northern states, leaving Tallahassee and the South to return to its hot, slow, pace of life.

Hard Times

2011-07-28T00:51:00.000-04:00

You can't help feeling it, if you work in a public library as I do, where so many come for help: a sense of desperation.

A man who remembers me, though I don't recognize him, asks if we have case law bulletins. No, we don't have any case law, just the Florida Statutes and the Rules of Court. I suggest the State Supreme Court library, down the street. He says he has lost his job with the Department of Revenue. He had thought he was safe. He looks about my age, in his fifties. Who will want to hire him? A lot of people here in the state capital are sharing his pain now, as cuts to state agencies take effect.

Outside on the first floor landing, I overhear a black woman shout into her phone, "I have zero in my bank account! Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero!"

I remember telling the man cutting my hair back in the mid-nineties, the Clinton years, that we would remember those years as the good times, and I was right.

To Largo And Back

2011-07-21T01:21:00.003-04:00

On Sunday the 10th, the day after my last post, while I was at the library, R. called her Aunt Pat in Largo, down in Pinellas County, north of St. Petersburg. Uncle Ray was in the hospital again, and it didn't sound good. We must go down for a visit.

We left on Tuesday morning, driving down out of the red hills of Leon, joining Highway 19 at Perry for the long ride south through a monotonous corridor of pine trees and cabbage palms. The great majority of traffic south uses harrowing Interstate 75, which goes down the middle of Florida, through Lake City, Gainesville, and Ocala, before turning west towards Tampa. I like a more relaxed pace, preferring lonely Highway 19. Its 65 mph limit seems plenty fast for me.

We stopped for lunch in Cross City at the Cypress Inn, pulling in among enormous pickup trucks. Workingmen browsed the buffet, crews eating together. The burgers and fries were passable, the service was good. The Cypress Inn is the only place I've ever actually seen Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast on a menu. I've forgotten why Americans are supposed to be mad at the French. Rural Dixie County is the whitest county in Florida, and one of the poorest.

We arrived in Largo around 3:00 pm, checking in at the Hampton Inn. R.'s Uncle Art, Pat said on the phone, had arrived from California early that morning, and was resting up at the Hampton. Ray was out of the hospital and at home. We all met at Ray and Pat's at 5:00, and after some conversation, Pat fixed supper for us: pot roast, mashed potatoes, and vegetables, with brownies and ice cream for dessert.

We returned to the hotel, and walked at sundown in Largo Central Park, across the street. It was a beautiful park, but it was so hot that I was sweating by the time we got back to our room.

Largo was very familiar to me. It was much like Maitland, a suburb of Orlando where I grew up, with modest, (by today's standards), residential neighborhoods and schools, built in the '60's to house us boomer children and our parents, now showing their age. I felt a sense of appreciation for what our parents built, coming to Florida after World War Two, and raising new towns on the Central Florida scrub land. Hard to believe that was 50 years ago.

We visited again the next morning, and returned to Tallahassee later that day. We were glad to be back home, and our cat, Claudius, was happy to see us.

Back at work on Monday, my week has been all about broken equipment, reporting copiers with problems, PC's with sound issues and browser search hijack viruses, a printer with a paper jam. I've often said that they didn't tell us in library school how much time we would spend keeping all the machines in working order.

Blogging Reference

2011-07-10T01:40:00.002-04:00

I didn't blog live today. It had been a long week, and I didn't have the strength. I rode to work under an overcast sky. The prediction had been a 70% chance of rain, but the day gradually cleared to partly cloudy and very humid.

I noticed, after opening the conference room for a group, that the large print section was a shambles, so I spent some quiet time in the morning straightening it. I discovered a half dozen DVD's that someone had hidden there behind the books.

Our afternoon was dominated by two young, apparently single, mothers, each with two small children, who were collaborating on a school assignment online. They had deposited the children at a table with some children's books while they worked on a paper for over two hours. They really did try to mind their children while they worked, but the tots were unable to restrain themselves from making a lot of noise. We sympathized, and remarkably, no one complained. Here were two young women, already mothers, with no fathers around to help, and no money to pay a babysitter, attempting to make a future for themselves. That is what the public library is all about.

An older man, possibly a retired attorney, wanted to find a list of courses at the FSU law school in the fall. He wanted to take a course on tax law. I went to the FSU law school site, and navigated to the fall 2011 course listings, which I printed out for him.

He was astonished. What had he done wrong? He had done a search for "Florida State University Law School courses for fall 2011", and spent an hour looking, with no success. He was too specific, I said. The reference librarian decides where the information is likely to be found, and goes from there. Google is not magical. Even the best search engine still does poorly with natural language queries.

My July Fourth

2011-07-05T02:30:00.003-04:00

Up at 8:45. Coffee, cigarette, morning prayer. Shave; egg & toast & fruit salad that R. made for breakfast. Strip the bed & launder sheets, mow front & back lawns, hang up sheets to dry.

Shower & eat lunch, chicken salad sandwich R. has made. We listen to Fresh Air on public radio, an interview of country music singer Rodney Crowell about his memoir, Chinaberry Sidewalks.

Now what? Take a walk? It's too hot. We decide to go to Governor's Square Mall, where we both buy new clothes at Dillard's. I need new shorts, and we find pairs in khaki and blue in the Daniel Cremieux department.

Home. Make the bed. What shall I read next? I had read about half the stories in William Boyd's collection, Fascination, before they became tiresome, Boyd seeming preoccupied with what Crowley naughtily referred to as The Three Kings, (Smoking, Drinking and F__king). If sex is the "theater of the poor", I think it must be the church of the intellectuals.

I had enjoyed Alan Bennett's biographical essays in Writing Home and Untold Stories, so I decide to begin reading Anthony Powell's memoirs, To Keep The Ball Rolling, in four volumes, beginning with Infants of the Spring. Powell writes such delicious prose, with his endearing habit of describing something by what it is not:

If the Powells knew little, and cared less, about their annals, that was not equally true of the Wells-Dymokes, who were not at all disinclined to congratulate themselves on selected aspects of their lineage.

The July Fourth gathering in Tom Brown Park is notorious for being rained out, and though there was only a 20% chance of rain today, the sky turns dark, and at 5:15 the showers pour down. We had planned to grill a steak for supper, with baked potatoes and salad. The rain lets up in time for me to light the grill. I grill the steak while R. makes a salad of tomatoes, lettuce and artichoke heart.

We watch The Journey Home on EWTN. Tonight Marcus has a military chaplain, who reminds us of our new parochial vicar, Father Tim Holeda, a former Marine. Then we say the rosary. We watch Steve Martin play his banjo on PBS's Capitol Fourth, but we have to turn it off when they bring on performers from American Idol and Dancing With The Stars.

Stan Rogers - The Jeannie C.

2011-07-02T23:43:00.002-04:00

We were enjoying The Midnight Special this evening, a folk music program on public radio, and this was the final selection. I had never heard of Stan Rogers, a Canadian singer/songwriter who died tragically in 1983, but his marvelous voice made me sit up and listen.

We'll Meet Again No More

2011-07-01T01:10:00.001-04:00

We had a party today to celebrate the retirement of K. and M. in Collection Management. I didn't know K. well, but she had been a cataloger since the '70's, at FSU and then with us. Her extended family seemed to fill half the room. I had been close with M. in circulation when I started at the library in '89 in the former J. Byron's space at the Northwood Mall. We used to smoke together in the mall parking lot. The library moved to the new building in '91, I left circulation to run the bookmobile in '92, and M. escaped to Collection Management some years later.

I spent most of the afternoon moving 40 cartons of rental book returns down to the parking garage for pick-up next Wednesday. Good to have them out of the workroom.

A woman wants the "Book of Thomas", says it addresses the childhood of Jesus. She can only mean the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which is readily available online. But since she doesn't have an e-mail address, I send a request for The Apocryphal New Testament to interlibrary loan.

MC departs for a much-needed week off at Chincoteague Island in Virginia. I must stand in for her at the weekly management meeting next week.

I am enormously enjoying William Boyd's novel, Restless. There and in Any Human Heart, Boyd displays an understanding of the revolutionary currents of the '70's.

Blogging Reference

2011-06-18T23:53:00.003-04:00

Most Holy and Adorable Trinity, I praise you and give you thanks for all the favors you have bestowed upon me. Your goodness has preserved me until now.

Summer. I scooted to work through empty streets. A very hot, dry spell has been broken by brief thunderstorms this week.

10:00 Open.

PC for Nathan.

Where are Christian books? Anything by James P. Knox? No, but show him the section.

PC for Larry.

Ron K., (retired colleague), says hello. Was disappointed by The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips, in spite of the good review in the NYT. He had not seen a NYT in a while. Just buys the Summer movies issue. Was surprised to see the new e-book bestseller lists.

Make sound work on his PC.

Where is Henderson Room? Is meeting people to study chemistry. Make sure room is open.

She wonders if Alice Bliss by Laura Harrington is available in large print. No, just regular print.

PC for Monea.

Do our netbooks have CD drives? Call SW in Media. No.

PC for Sonya.

Can he use his own card stock in our copier? Not a good idea. He wants to make 2-sided Father's Day cards.

Today's and Friday's newspaper.

What time do we close?

PC's for James, Ron.

He wants two new Cussler titles, The Kingdom and The Race. Place holds.

Where is Consumer Reports?

When does issue of Forbes on best mutual funds come out? I try at Forbes online, our db's, do searches. Come up empty. Embarrassing...

Where are books on CD?

Returns USA Today. Likes my shoes.

NYT.

Today's paper.

Why can't she print? Her browser has crashed.

12:50 Back from lunch. Started The Grass Harp by Truman Capote.

PC for Patrice.

Phone: Where do they give the GED test in Gadsden County? She wants to help her cousin, who dropped out of school.

MF goes to lunch.

Where is a water fountain? (Our water fountain on the second floor broke.)

How to spell magnolia.

Can he have some glue to repair his book? Give him my bottle of Elmer's and some rubber bands.

Where is her print job?

Glue man wants to see Bible reference works. Take him to the section, and when we get there, another man looks lost. He too is looking for the Bible section.

PC's for Andy, Gene.

Phone: Where can she get an analog converter box?

He says the sound and USB ports in front don't work. He's got his stuff plugged in back. Need to test it later.

PC for Chloe.

He can't find Spymasters by W.E.B. Griffin on the shelf. It isn't out yet. 2012 pub date.

PC's for George, Johnny, Lee. Johnny and Lee have just come from Washington. Lee can't believe how hot it is, is happy to be in the air-conditioning.

Can she renew her interlibrary loan, Living Out Loud: Activities to Fuel a Creative Life by Keri Smith? Send the request, ask her to call Monday and talk to K.

PC's for Chulesia, Deb, Robert. Deb says she's freezing! I know, it IS cold.

Phone: The number for Haverty's Furniture

Phone: What is ethnic origin of Jackie Evancho, child star? Ukrainian or Slovak, people say.

How can he find dissertations on ethics and sports?

"My mouse froze."

Tell Susan she has to wait 30 min. to get another PC. She is online all day when we're not busy, watching political speeches by President Obama and others.

PC's for Michael and Mike.

PC for Vincent.

PC for Daniel.

He wants to check today's newspaper.

Phone: Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson. Copies available at branches. Place hold for pick-up here.

PC's for Cameron, Janet.

Deb wants Wite-Out®. Give her Liquid Paper®

PC for Alex.

If she checks out a book from the second floor, does she have to let us know before she takes it down to check out? (No.)

Mom w stroller wants books on childbirth and parenting. Take to shelf.

Show him where his printer is.

PC for Brett.

Fill printer with paper.

PC for Vincent

4:00 Finished inputting today's materials requests from our database. These are requests, submitted online by web form, for materials not in the library catalog, to be filled by purchase or by interlibrary loan. It's a new responsibility I've taken on since DL retired, trading it for the job of AskaLibrarian virtual reference coordinator, which had become wearisome after eight years.

PC for Kay.

Make round of floor. Straighten 338's. Tarot woman is back to using her old, large Celtic Sacred Circle deck. She had bought a new Hanson-Roberts deck. Push chairs into carrels. All quiet.

4:22 Check out three books for my week off: The Grass Harp by Truman Capote, Not Untrue & Not Unkind by Ed O'Loughlin, and Netherland by Joseph O'Neill.

PC for Scott.

PC for Antonio.

Complaint that iBoss, the county's new Internet filter, is blocking MyYearbook, a social network. Yep, it is. MyYearbook looks ok to me. Apologize for the inconvenience, tell him they are still working out the kinks.

30 min. announcement.

Another Virus Attack, WORM_OTURUN.ASH

2011-06-15T00:46:00.000-04:00

We had to shut down all the public PC's again this morning, for about an hour and a half. This was a new one. Rather than disguising itself as an anti-virus scanner, it prompts users to install a "browser update", (in poor English). A user asked for help with it, and as I was showing it to MK, another user got it. MK called downstairs, and it was popping up there too.

I wished I had taken a picture of it, but I found the above image online, from a June 2nd warning to users at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. There is a good account of this virus at the TrendLabs Malware Blog from June 8th, The Worm, the Rogue DHCP, and TDL4, with a handy Infection Diagram.

Apparently, it often propagates via removable Flash drives. Staff received e-mail afterward cautioning us not to put users' Flash drives into staff PC's. (Sometimes people will ask if we can print something out for them when they are in a hurry and there is a wait for a public PC.)

Questions to the Answer Squad

2011-06-09T01:39:00.002-04:00

I don't know who came up with The Answer Squad as the nickname for reference services. It is on our business cards, and it is the signature for our e-mail reference service, which I handle most of the time. It's been a busy week for Answer Squad e-mail reference. We do what is called "ready reference". That is, we don't have the time for in-depth research. I can only give 10-20 minutes to a question. The more open-ended a question is, the more I will try to just point them to some promising sources or links.

>>> 5/29/2011 12:35 PM >>>

I am trying to find what years - say, from 1950 through the present - were the best for safe, sound home construction. For instance, after Hurricane Andrew it was found that codes for homebuilding were not up to standard. Also for instance, I have a friend who has a house built in the fifties that is very sound, and apparently was built better than homes in the '70s and '80s.
I am trying online, but haven't found a way to make a good search. Any links or hints would be welcome!

Thanks for your question. I have done some looking. The best results I have gotten are some forum discussions, in which the question seems to be debatable.

The best discussion is at MetaFilter, Modern vs bygone home building techniques . The search string was "era of solid home construction".
Another one is The era of the quality home . The search string was "era quality home construction".
I hope this helps.

>>> 6/2/2011 8:46 PM >>>

Hi, I am a master's student at Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL. In order to complete one of the courses I am taking I need to complete a bibliography of ten titles. The assignment requires that I compile a list of books on any topic. I have chosen the topic of “Cinderella tales from around the world” I need to find ten different Cinderella stories from anywhere around the world. I was hoping that you could help me understand how to write an optimal bibliography. I also need help locating 3 more titles. I have thoroughly searched and have found 7 Cinderella stories from: the Caribbean, the Dominican, Korea, Persia, Middle Eastern, Egypt, and Mexico. I was hoping that you could help me locate a title from Africa, Europe, Spain, or anywhere else. Thank you so very much for all your help.

Thanks for your question. While I don't have the time to research for you, I can point you to a couple of things.

A good way to get started researching a topic is to find an encyclopedia entry that includes a reading list. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales has a good entry on Cinderella that mentions a number of versions of the story, with print references for further reading. Your FSU library will have or be able to get them for you. We have this book in our reference collection.
On writing bibliographies, see the page at OWL, the Perdue Online Writing Lab, Annotated Bibliographies .
I hope this helps.

>>> 6/7/2011 6:30 PM >>>

Can you find out all (or at least most) the newspapers that printed the old 1944-1946 Wonder Woman comic strip in their papers? So far I only know that the New York Journal American printed. What other newspapers printed this comic strip back in 1944-1946?

Thanks for your question. I am unable to answer your question with the resources at my disposal. Wonder Woman: The Complete History, by Les Daniels, says on page fifty that the strip was syndicated by King Features, and made its debut "in papers including the New York Journal-American on May 8, 1944, but a year later she was gone. According to comic strip historian Bill Blackbeard, the strip simply wasn't picked up by enough important papers, and lacking the distribution, 'it never made money.'"

Daniels doesn't cite his sources. Other web results such as the Wikipedia entry on WW simply refer to Daniels.
You might try sending your question to Andy Mangels at the Wonder Woman Museum, webmaster@wonderwomanmuseum.com .

>>> 6/8/2011 11:35 AM >>>

I am seeking information about women in the workforce, all about their lives and how they became equal to men from 1900 to 1960

Thanks for your question. The library has plenty of books and information about women in society. A few titles are:

America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, by Gail Collins

Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America, by Sara M. Evans

A Century of Women: A History of Women in Britain and the United States, by Sheila Rowbotham

The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History

The World Split Open: How The Modern Women's Movement Changed America, by Ruth Rosen

These are all in the Sociology section at 305.4.
Online, you could start at the Resource Center page of The National Women's History Project.

Ways of Escape: Books in Prison

2011-05-29T17:03:00.001-04:00

Reading Journey Into The Whirlwind, Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg's classic account of her years in Soviet prisons and labor camps, I read of her boundless gratitude for books and reading, when they were available to her. I thought of my best thank-you note ever, which I received from an inmate at the Leon County Detention Center when I ran the bookmobile program. 1084 pages, he says! I am pretty sure that I had brought him Atlas Shrugged.

In the same vein, there was this story on prison libraries today on NPR's Weekend Edition-

A new sub-genre: Nazi Noir

2011-05-23T01:46:00.003-04:00

I was in the middle of David Downing's final novel in his John Russell series set in WWII Berlin, Potsdam Station, when I read Bill Ott's excellent round-up of World War II crime fiction, A Hard-Boiled Gazetteer to World War II, in the May 1st issue of Booklist.

I made a display a couple of years ago, noticing the trend, not limited to WWII. I called it "Murder in Wartime", and I included recent crime fiction set in wars going back to the American Civil War.

There weren't many surprises for me on Ott's list. I had at least sampled most of them. Alan Furst deserves the credit for opening the vein of Nazi Noir with Night Soldiers, (1988). Philip Kerr followed soon after with March Violets, (1989).

Not mentioned by Ott is Rebecca Pawel's Sgt. Tejada series set in post-civil war Spain, beginning with Death of a Nationalist, and also Winter in Madrid by C. J. Sansom.

Virus Panic Shutdown!

2011-05-21T02:34:00.000-04:00

This was the scene Friday afternoon, after a rapidly propagating "fake virus alert" program called "MS Scanner" prompted the county's computer techs to take down all public -access PC's at the main library: Internet workstations and catalog computers alike.

These viruses have become more formidable over the last year or so. Disk protection software that wipes all changes on reboot is no longer sufficient. The new viruses log a PC's IP address, and continue to send pop-up windows to "warn" the next user about non-existent infections. Any interaction with the pop-up window, even clicking on a "do not install" button or closing the window will enable the program to install. We've had a lot of trouble with programs called something like "XP Antivirus". And many of our public-access users are so innocent, believing that these messages are real.

"MS Scanner" is a new one. According to the techs, it can find the IP addresses for other PC's on the same network once it gets a foothold on the first one. Only the wired, fixed workstations were affected. The library's WiFi service was not affected, so patrons with laptops and users of our library netbooks were fine.

Meet the New Optimists - Newsweek

2011-05-17T00:39:00.000-04:00

Meet the New Optimists - Newsweek

How about some good news? I couldn't resist posting this. Isn't that a beautiful photo?

As the United States struggles through its worst economic crisis in generations, gloom has seized much of the heartland. The optimism that came so easily to many Americans as the new century dawned is significantly harder to summon these days. There is, however, a conspicuous exception: African-Americans, long accustomed to frustration in their pursuit of opportunity and respect, are amazingly upbeat, consistently astounding pollsters with their hopefulness. Earlier this year, when a Washington Post–Kaiser–-Harvard poll asked respondents whether they expected their children’s standard of living to be better or worse than their own, 60 percent of blacks chose “better,” compared with only 36 percent of whites...

Certainly, the Obama presidency has fueled euphoria in black circles. But even before Obama came on the scene, optimism was building—most notably among a new generation of black achievers who refused to believe they would be stymied by the bigotry that bedeviled their parents. Obama’s election was, in effect, the final revelation—the long-awaited sign that a new American age had arrived. “It blows away the nationalist argument that the system is white and racist and won’t ever change,” scholar Manning Marable told me shortly before his death.

I see this every day at the main library downtown, where many of these young "black achievers" do all their coursework on our public-access computers, and increasing numbers of them are coming in with new laptops to use our free WiFi.

The Professor's Picks

2011-05-09T01:45:00.001-04:00

I've written about The Professor before, how I was relieved when he returned to the library after an absence. Since the retirement of DL last month, I've been helping with book requests, and I came upon several from him. As usual, they were for books about the Holocaust. He has his own library card now. I was curious to see what kind of presence he had online. Was he a published author?

What I found right away were his postings on Amazon: a profile, Amazon reviews, and a book list. Of himself he says:

I am not a "typical American", loathe football, violence, SUVs, big-screen TVs, and Christian religious fanatics, especially creationists. I consider myself a secular humanist, and I believe in the Enlightenment values of reason, human rights and universal equality. I love Paris above all cities, for its culture of enlightened hedonism. I love the sea, strong European coffee, and hotels with great room service. I love to read challenging fiction and literary criticism, (Eric Auerbach's "Mimesis" is one of my favorite books.) I also love film especially French, and books about film, as well as modern history and psychology. I used to teach writing, and now write myself.

He reminds me of my French history professor, Paul Halpern, who believed that the best of all worlds would be to have lived in Vienna or Paris at the end of the 19th century, (presumably as a professor).

In 2009 he posted a "literature lover's" list of "The Best: Books You Will Come Back To":

This is my list of favorite books which are so rich I return to them again and again. They are that "cut above" ordinary literature, either because of exquisite writing or deep ideas or both. Some are well-known, some hard to find but worth it. Take a chance and challenge yourself! You'll be glad you did.

It's a good list, and an original one. I noticed Grossman's Life and Fate, about which he says:

The epic Russian novel of the 20th century, following the fortunes of one family through revolution, civil war, brutal purges, disillusionment, and the monumental struggle of war with Germany. Lyrical, realistic, clear-sighted but never cynical, Grossman never loses his moral compass or his humanity. An amazing book.

I knew the book, and I decided to read it on the strength of his recommendation. What an interesting list, the fruit of one man's reading life. Check it out.

Home Alone

2011-05-04T23:57:00.077-04:00

Almost midnight and R. is still at the capitol. And now she's just called to say she's on her way home.

I couldn't have asked for better company this week than the memoirs, diaries and essays of playwright and actor Alan Bennett, in Writing Home and Untold Stories. Someone donated Writing Home, and finishing it I found we had Untold Stories in the collection. I have spent the long evening hours alone this week reading them.

I didn't think that I had heard of him, though I realized as I read that I had seen a couple of things by him, The Madness of King George and An Englishman Abroad. And he had played Sillery in the television production of A Dance to the Music of Time, which I have on DVD.

I can't entirely connect with his stories of the theater and of the worlds of art and music. To read his appreciations of this or that performance or exhibit only makes me aware of how little experience I have of those things.

In late middle age, as he deals with the deaths of his parents and of his mother's sisters, he reflects on his family and his childhood in Leeds, and it is these pieces that I most enjoy. There is something about stories by writers who have "escaped" from gritty working-class worlds in the north of England that attracts me. The Nottingham of Alan Sillitoe and John Harvey. Bennett's account of his uncle Clarence, who died in the First World War, is especially fine.

Last Week of Legislative Session!

2011-05-02T01:18:00.003-04:00

The end of the most grueling and trying session of the Florida Legislature that my wife can remember for 20+ years is upon us. If all goes well, Friday will be the last day. I ate supper alone all last week, and probably will this week too. Unbelievably, R. didn't have to go in this weekend, so we got to be together. She bought groceries on Saturday, and took a nap in the afternoon. We went out to Ted's Montana Grill, luckily going early, before parties arrived from FSU and FAMU graduation ceremonies. On Sunday I did laundry and took Claudius the cat out, while R. prepared a casserole for the coming week. R. took another nap. For supper I grilled the steaks she had bought, while she made mashed potatoes and a salad. We walked around the block. I took the garbage bin to the curb, and we cleaned up the kitchen.

EWTN was rebroadcasting the beatification of Pope John Paul II at 8 p.m., so we settled in to watch it. I was baptised as an adult into the Episcopal Church in 1980, and I might have been content there, had not John Paul II summoned me in a dream in 1985. He handed me a book, while looking at me doubtfully, as though I would be unable to profit from his gift. In 1989 I was received into the Catholic Church. Some years later, I again dreamed of him. I looked on with the Virgin Mary as he seemed to be wracked with suffering, in great distress. In waking life I found John Paul II intimidating, too demanding, in the way an Anglican might with a fanatical Pole or Spaniard. But when he died in 2005, we were in awe. Clearly, he would be John Paul the Great.

Webinar: Empowering the Reader in a Digital World

2011-04-28T01:19:00.004-04:00

We had hoped to have a group of IP's, (information professionals, what librarians are called these days), attend this, but it didn't work out, and I was asked to go alone and boil it down for everyone else.

The hour-and-a-half presentation by Al Carlson and Chad Mairn was an overview of the e-book phenomenon with regard to libraries, and was aimed at librarians with little assumed knowledge of it.

It's not as good as hearing the presentation, but the slides and notes can be viewed here:

http://www.slideshare.net/chadmairn/empowering-the-reader-in-a-digital-world-7312595

Carlson and Mairn believe that, "history suggests that eBooks will rapidly invade the codex space", and that, increasingly, library web sites will be the way services are delivered, rendering physical circulation of materials, library locations, and courier deliveries obsolete. But they point out a number of ways in which current e-book technology and distribution models are problematic for libraries as well as for publishers.

What does a library actually buy when it purchases an e-book from OverDrive or NetLibrary? What about the profusion of file formats and proprietary DRMs, and all the different e-readers and other devices people want to read e-books with?

They conclude,

ePub offers huge benefits to public libraries, but also some threats to libraries as we now envision them.

We need to figure out how to exploit ePub’s power without being destroyed by it.

Use the Force, but don’t go over to the dark side, even if they offer you candy. ___________________________________________________

Are Carlson and Mairn right? Will e-books replace printed books as DVD's replaced VHS cassettes? The analogy is not quite parallel, since DVD's are still physical containers, whereas e-books are digital. The library owns DVD's outright, whereas it only buys access to download e-books from a vendor, for as long as that vendor has the right to provide it. But I am inclined to agree that they will, over time, for certain kinds of books. The New York Times's addition of an e-book bestseller list lends weight to the prediction. Still, for libraries and for publishers, the current e-book distribution model is seriously flawed.

My Lenten "Vacation"

2011-04-26T01:26:00.001-04:00

Back at work today, after taking most of Holy Week off. Several people asked whether I had a good time off. Of course I said yes. What use to bother them with what the end of Lent is like?

I was glad that R. was able to come with me to all the Triduum rites: The Lord's Supper and the Washing of the Feet on Thursday night, the Stations of the Cross on Friday afternoon, and the celebration of the Lord's passion and death, with the Veneration of the Cross.

We usually go to the Easter Vigil on Saturday evening, a long service, not heavily attended, when the new fire is lit and candidates are baptised and/or confirmed or received into the Church. This year, we were scheduled to serve as eucharistic ministers at the SRO Sunday 10:30 Mass, with babies, Easter outfits, and people lining the walls. I think I must have gotten a lot of the standing crowd, because I was the last one left distributing hosts. At least I didn't run out.

As of Sunday, I had gone 22 days smoke-free. I had observed my "smoking devil" building a case for smoking again after Lent, but I was amazed at the struggle I had to put up to overcome the temptation. I felt hungry for tobacco smoke, as if it were a food I was starved of.

Richard Klein's book, Cigarettes Are Sublime, is just about the last word on cigarettes, "with its origins in the author's urgent desire to stop smoking."

This book attributes to the cigarette a certain philosophical dignity that derives from its being considered a symbolic instrument, and lends it the poetic qualities of a sacred object or an erotic one, endowed with magical properties and seductive charms, surrounded by taboos and an air of danger, a conduit to the transcendental, and a spur to repression.

Blogging Reference

2011-04-16T16:56:00.003-04:00

Rain early this morning. It's clearing now, in good time for the Art In The Park festival downtown. I had to detour around it to get to the library.

Two weeks smoke-free, and I still feel like Gollum without his "precious". Shouldn't be surprised. I smoked for years and years. Sigh...

10:00 Open

Is the book shop open today?

Where is tax help?

PC for Josh

Here's Ron K., retired colleague. Needs help copying entry for Reds from The Motion Picture Guide. Says, "Don't ever let them get rid of this!"

Where is tax help?

Woman says man has USB device plugged into back of catalog PC, thought I should know. I go to look. A man is charging a phone and an iPod.

Where is tax help?

Where are tax "booklets"?

Deputy sheriff stops by to ask how my quitting smoking is going, gives me a thumb-up.

Man has read Mr. Hooligan by Ian Vasquez, wants author's two previous books, Lonesome Point and 2008 Shamus Award winner In the Heat. Place ILL requests for him.

Police officer asks for deputy. They take a young man at an Internet PC into custody, walk him downstairs.

Today's paper.

Couple of women looking for The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. Take to shelf. She asks me to show her how to use self-check machine, but her card's expired. Have to send her to circulation.

"Could you direct me to the tax assistance?"

11:18 Make round of floor. All is well.

Police officer goes back out 2nd floor exit, Young man they were talking to comes back up, gets back on Internet PC.

"Do y'all have a stapler?"

"Yeah so where's the Henderson Room?"

Go to pull more humor for my display.

11:50 S. goes to lunch.

Phone: Darlene wants Bullet by Laurel Hamilton. Find on new shelf, put on hold.

DT from Youth Services asks who on staff does the African-American BookLetter. I say I believe it is done by BookLetters, is not a staff production.

Phone: Jolene wants to know what was the sitcom with Kevin James. Was it King of Queens, 1998-2007, with Kevin James, Leah Remini, and Jerry Stiller? That's it.

Where are meetings rooms A and B? Tallahassee Authors Network is meeting there now.

Where is tax help?

PC for Sadie.

12:18 Watching people going about using the library: browsing, working at tables. No one seems to need my help at the moment.

Phone: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Circulating copies are lost, but have in reference collection. Can he photocopy? Yes.

PC's for 3 boys.

Phone: He needs a couple of tax forms, schedules C and SE, will come in.

1:04 Back from lunch. Sandwiches in the gazebo with David Downing's Zoo Station, a very readable suspense story set in Germany in 1938. It's got that feeling of creepy paranoia and danger, like Philip Kerr or Alan Furst. Great atmosphere.

Woman wants to know more about how she could listen to the OverDrive downloadable audio book of Suze Orman's The Money Class. Could she download it to a floppy disk? How about a USB drive?

Dad w 2 girls wants The Greek Way, Emerson's Essays, Robert Lowell. Take to shelf.

She wants geometry, trigonometry. Take to shelf.

Christy from tax help stops on way back from restroom."Only one more day!"

Help girl restart her PC session.

Baseball books, take to shelf.

Here's Jerry to research online racing forms. A betting man.

Help w printer jam.

Her reservation expired while PC was hung rebooting. Persuade man to let her have his reservation for that PC, get him another, thank him, get her logged in & happy.

2:22 We got off easy today. A lot going on, Art In The Park, the Garnet & Gold game over at the stadium. Tomorrow's Palm Sunday.

Phone: She wants Atlas Shrugged. Can't find our copy. Checked in from "Discard" on 1/3, which is odd. Is copy at branch. she asks me to reserve it, she'll pick it up there. Call branch, they trap it.

Phone: S's husband.

Ruby walks up. Called yesterday with unemployment questions. I had printed out eligibility requirements for her. Says they told her she couldn't draw unemployment and go to school, but wouldn't give her chapter and verse to support it. Get her to WorkForce Innovation and Florida Statues sites on PC. Ruby can be demanding. I always feel a shiver of dread when I see her coming.

Woman needs to see the Florida Statutes and Administrative Code. We have the statutes in print, but she'll need to go online for the Administrative Code.

3:17 PC for Kendrick.. PC for Kometrius.

Do three more things for Ruby, who wants to get her nephew a Bright Futures scholarship.

Woman complains about guy next to her watching music videos. She's trying to work. Give her another.

Where is PC 45?

PC for Bryan.

Couple of young black men wearing rosaries around their necks ask for PC's. I've been wondering what that's all about. Found a number of forum discussions, often heated. Catholics don't wear rosaries as necklaces. Found a story about it from 2008. Apparently they are worn for protection. But police have been finding gang-related signals in them as well. The first story is three years old, but I didn't start seeing them here until last year. Possibly adopted from use by Hispanic youth.

4:05 GRE test prep book. When she tries to use the self-check machine, her card is blocked. She must go to circulation.

Phone: Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown. Hold for Kevin.

4:30 30 min. announcement.

Help w copier. Help w self-check machine.

Refill humor display.

Books about Stonewall Jackson. He hasn't been to the library since he was in middle school. I say, "Welcome back!" He's been watching the PBS series on the Civil War by Ken Burns. He takes Stonewall Jackson: the man, the soldier, the legend by James I. Robertson, and Henderson's Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War.

5 min. announcement. Time to go.

On Quitting Smoking, and on Too Much News

2011-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00

I was sorry to say goodbye to my Camel Lights. It came to me in prayer during Advent that I needed to quit, and I thought I had better listen and obey, for my own good.

The hard parts were letting myself actually run out of cigarettes, and then a week later on my Saturday off at home. That night and Sunday morning the craving was intense. In church I was afraid I might faint. And then after Mass the craving eased.

There is so much to keep you busy when you smoke: all the "moments" when it is time to have a cigarette. Quitting was like being out of a job, with so much time on my hands.

So Jules agrees, there is too much news! I just do not want to hear about every disaster on the planet 24 hours a day. And I do not feel obliged to care about all wars and disasters on the planet. I say to myself, "No one is forcing you to read the news every day." I guess that's true, though I have to handle several daily newspapers at work every morning.

I guess I could just tune out more than I do. When you use newspaper archives as I do, you realize that the news doesn't change very much over the years. Look at the microfilm from the 1970's and you will see that.

B&R Roundup

2011-04-12T00:21:00.004-04:00

Sorry, I haven't posted anything substantial this month. I've been absorbed with personal and uninteresting stuff: being a "legislative spouse" for my wife, who has been chained to her desk at the state capitol during the two-month legislative session, and Lent, quitting smoking at 57, (10 days smoke-free so far). I've also grown weary of the recent news topics. I wish I lived in the days when it took weeks to hear news from distant places.

I'm reading Red Jade, the third of Henry Chang's crime novels featuring Detective Jack Yu. This is a great series, with a unique, insider's portrait of New York City's Chinatown.

My turn for a book display last week. April is National Humor Month, says Chase's Calendar of Events. Dave Barry, Kevin Nealon, Roy Blount, Paula Poundstone, other recent stuff from Dewey 814 to 818. When I came in today after the weekend, everything I'd pulled was gone. Work the comic novel angle, pull Jonathan Coe, James Wilcox, Stephen Fry, and others.

Public Access Internet: it feels like we've pretty much caved to the amazing resistance to or inability to apply for a library card. If they don't have a card, we ask their name and issue a guest pass. It is not worth making a fuss about whether they've already had a session, when they can go back and forth between Media on the first floor and us in Adult Services.

The Bibliophile's E-Reader...

2011-04-01T11:59:00.000-04:00

The Library Thing-e "patented “LikeaBook®” casing feels like fine morocco leather and emits a faint “old book” smell."

Blogging Reference

2011-03-26T23:26:00.002-04:00

Working w MF today. Azaleas are in full bloom. It's overcast w a chance of rain.

10:00 Open. Not many waiting.

Which way to do income taxes?

Just the regulars take PC's: Freestone, Myrna.

Lady in motorized chair, "Where is the tax assistance?"

Older couple, "Where they doin' the tax help?"

Phone: What Color is Your Parachute? She wants at branch.

Where is Henderson room? (tax help)

Can't find his PC, point him to it.

PC's for Homer and Peter.

PC for Jerry.

Why doesn't copier work? Is "asleep", wake it up.

Jerry having trouble w #36. It's sluggish. Give him another and test it. It's got the browser hijack bug.

Copier needs paper.

Now another person has complained about #36. I guess I'd better shut it down, put in a call.

Couple want to renew interlibrary loan, The Man God Uses by Henry and Tom Blackaby. Send renewal request to lending library, tell them to check next week for new due date.

Where is Downtown Market?

Woman on #58 has got virus, restart PC to wipe.

His music download window is frozen, restart PC.

Where can he search for warehouse jobs online? Show him our Job Search Center. He says he'll just buy a newspaper.

Wall Street Journal.

Today's Democrat.

Phone: When is today's FSU baseball game? What was the score from last night's game?

He's new in town, on unemployment, living at the Shelter, wants to get job training. Give him info on Lively Technical Center.

Where is PC 63?

Tax help man says hi, says it's been slow.

L. is here, time for lunch.

Tuna sandwich & Kristin Lavransdatter.

Back, M. goes.

Edwin wants to see what we have by Joyce Meyer. Reserves Power Thoughts: 12 Strategies To Win The Battle Of The Mind.

Returns copies of Democrat.

Man is being sneaky about printing, sending jobs to printer, walking away to reading area, coming back to get them. I catch his eye to let him know I'm on to him, and take the paper from the printer feed tray. He packs up and leaves.

Lit crit on Harry Crews? Show Literature Resource Center.

M. is back from lunch, going to clean off her desk, I'll stay out here.

Phone: Gators are playing Butler in NOLA today, where is Butler University? Who named for? Is in Indianapolis, founded in 1855 by abolitionist Ovid Butler.

Different Seasons by Stephen King, take to shelf.

Mom and son: have we received Scorpia Rising by Anthony Horowitz yet? Not yet, on order. How will they know? Is first time they've reserved a book. Set her up for e-mail notification.

1:52 Cloudy and breezy out.

Can she check out DVD's up here at the self-check machine? No sorry, books only. Says they won't check her out downstairs, she's already got her limit of DVD's checked out. Sorry, can't help her, what they say goes.

Man wonders if I can name a song if he sings a bit of the melody. Doesn't ring a bell. I tell him I'm not much help with current music, unless he knows a line of the lyrics I can search on. He says he had the iPhone app that can identify tunes, but he accidentally deleted it.

When he leaves, another man tells me the man was following him around. He seemed a little manic, but was friendly enough. He's gone now.

Last Sunday's real estate section from the paper.

Phone: Eat Right 4 Your Type by Peter D'Adamo. Find on cart, put on hold for her.

PC's for Josh, Carol.

Today's NYT.

Returns Democrat.

He can't find Final Exit by Derek Humphry on the shelf. Only copy at this location is in Large Print, take to shelf. He says that will do.

Books on meteorology? Take to shelf.

Phone: It's Not Me, It's You by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor. Is in transit to main from a branch, where it was turned in today. She doesn't want to reserve it, will come in Monday.

Where is public phone? Make change for a dollar.

PC for Antoine.

3:00 L. leaves. Her last day with us as a volunteer! She got a position at one of the branches. We'll miss her!

C., a tax help volunteer, leaves us some Krispy Kreme donuts on her way out. Give them to M. to take down to Circulation

"Something's wrong with this computer, I can't get the Internet to go!" She wants to go to Google. Get her to Google.

Books on personality types. Find him several based on Myers-Briggs test.

3:30 Somewhat quiet.

NADA Official Used Car Guide, will use at desk.

Help her open and print an e-mail attachment.

Do we have a pen? Hers ran out of ink.

PC for Cheryl.

Where is stapler? Attachment woman thanks me.

The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. Take her to shelf.

3:58 Thunder.

Phone: Wants to know about calcium silicate, an anti-caking additive to salt. An older man with a "New Jersey" accent, he goes on to talk at length, comparing local health food stores, asking about my work, It's quiet, so I indulge him for ten minutes or so.

It's raining, 30 min. to closing.

PC for Kashika.

Rain has stopped.

PC for Ruby.

Help man w e-mail. "Send" in his courseware e-mail launches a spell-check window that instantly minimizes to taskbar. He needs to reopen it, approve or skip changes before he can send.

Help woman w self-check station. Use library bar code, not bar code on back cover.

Help woman print PowerPoint handouts. When opening .ppt in browser, rather than natively in PowerPoint, File>Print will not offer PowerPoint options like handouts, (6 slides per page). She needs to right-click on slide and choose Print to get those choices.

15 min. to closing.

Books That Disappear

2011-03-25T01:16:00.001-04:00

I ran across a story at Mainstreet.com, a personal finance portal, The Most Stolen Library Books, by Jeanine Skowronski, whose informal survey of librarians is pretty accurate. My only quibble is that the books in question are not so often stolen outright as they are legitimately checked out and then not returned. In our system they are more often marked "assumed lost", rather than "missing".

Someone has gone to the trouble to get a library card to check out the one book that they need or want, and when they don't return it, they forfeit their library privileges. I've always felt that this is a class issue. People who are living hand-to-mouth, with little disposable income, and more chaos in their lives than the well-off would believe, will accept their loss of library privileges before they will pay for a lost book. I often sense that this is the real story behind the "I have a card, but I left it at home" excuse that we get from people asking for a computer guest pass.

This is borne out by Skowronski's selection of test prep books as one of the most stolen classes of books. In fact, the test prep books that go missing are the ones for low-level entrance or certification, for the GED, the ASVAB, and the TABE. Higher level test prep books, for the GRE or the LSAT, do not get lost nearly so often.

The article mentions Zane, an author of explicit black erotica. These titles disappeared so quickly that we simply gave up buying them. And Dave Peltzer's A Child Called It: yes, I am always looking for donated copies for replacements.

We had students from a local university, FAMU, repeatedly asking for David H. Jackson, Jr.'s A Chief Lieutenant of the Tuskegee Machine: Charles Banks of Mississippi . We don't take requests for university course materials, but inevitably one got through to interlibrary loan, and was then lost, which cost us dearly. Our solution was to purchase a copy, held at the reference desk, for use in-library only.

Another title we had to purchase for in-library use only, after many lost copies, to forestall interlibrary loan requests, is Behold a Pale Horse, by William Cooper, a conspiracy book about the "New World Order".

The Domes of Baggins End

2011-03-17T00:10:00.000-04:00

I visited an old friend in Davis, California in 1981, but I never heard of this cooperative community on the UC campus there until I read about it in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week. There is a struggle between the student residents and the school over the future of the domes, which are showing their age. They were built in 1972.

Yes, a vintage hippie commune, still here in 2011! It seemed so sweet and pure to me, with it's vegetarian pot-lucks and government by consensus: a rarefied idealism that thrives best among care-free students or the highly committed.

Back in the '70's, when these domes were built, choosing an intentional community was a serious option for people who identified with what Theodore Roszak named the Counterculture. And I guess it still is. For myself, when the '70's came to an end and I married R., I no longer cared for such togetherness.

Still, reading about the domes brought back good memories of coming together with others, of sharing all in common, of the magic of a simple life, experiences that left their mark on me to this day. There are more pictures here.

Virtual Reference: Behind The Curtain

2011-03-05T23:37:00.003-05:00

If you have been following this blog, you will know what we do at the reference desk, where I spend most of my work day. It is when reference librarians are in the workroom that our work is specialized. One will process requests for materials, another will work with books to be mended, discarded, or sent to the bindery, and so on. I am our library's coordinator for a small crew of IP's, (information professionals), who help with a statewide virtual reference service called Ask a Librarian.

Ask a Librarian started as a project funded by the State Library of Florida with a nucleus of community college libraries, but our library joined early on, in 2003. The idea was to establish an online presence for trained information professionals who "can guide you to the answers you need in minutes rather than your wasting hours navigating hundreds of unhelpful and irrelevant web sites." Today, Ask a Librarian has 119 participating community college, university, and public Florida libraries.

Virtual reference was conceived as a screen-sharing experience. The user and the librarian would share a browser window and a chat box, with the librarian "escorting" the user in a search for answers on the Web, while conducting the "reference interview" with chat.

From the beginning, this approach presented problems. The shared browser window did not work reliably, owing to the great variety of operating systems and browsers in use. Many librarians were uncomfortable "escorting" users while they searched the Web for good information for them, (a sometimes uncertain and time-consuming process). They preferred searching outside the shared interface and pasting worthwhile links in the chat box. Some users were uncomfortable with librarians sharing a window on their computer. It felt invasive to them.

Ask a Librarian initially used a console called Docutek VRLplus. The only screenshot I have is from an error report.

Do you see? There was a problem with the shared browser window on the right. Docutek in the end made browser-sharing optional, and enabled posting hot links in the chat box.

In 2008 Ask a Librarian migrated to a new product, Instant Service, which added an e-mail feature for libraries without their own reference e-mail arrangement. Screen-sharing was still an option, but pushing links in chat continued to be the overwhelming preference, and now Ask a Librarian has dropped the screen-sharing component entirely. Instant Service has since become ATG Live Help.

Here you see a frivolous request. Details show neither a user-name nor an actual question. It's not unusual to get empty or idle requests from bored schoolchildren. We were once bombarded with silly questions from a classroom in New Zealand.

Here is a chat session in progress. Roberto from Miami asked, "How can I borrow books that are not in the system?" (We can see which library web site they have come in from.). I had to go to the web site of the Miami-Dade Public Library and figure out where patrons can request new materials and interlibrary loans. I found a link under More Library Services, Suggestions for Purchase, which takes you to a web form that doubles as an interlibrary loan request form if you check a button and agree to pay $2 per request.

I had a good hour at the Collaborative Desk this week. I was able to help Roberto find out about interlibrary loans at his library. Another man who came in through the State Library's site needed to know how to get a copy of his Florida birth certificate. When I found out that he was now in Tennessee, I sent him a link to the Florida Vital Records Office in Jacksonville.

Users going to Ask a Librarian from their library's web page see a notice that their question will not necessarily be answered by staff from their library, but often they think that we are in their library, and can help them with reserves and patron account issues. Sometimes we have to suggest that they use the e-mail option, (which goes to their library), but we do the best we can, helping them navigate their library's catalog or databases.

You can see the address box and "Push" button above the chat window that lets us send the user a link which opens a new window on their desktop. This shows in the transcript as Sending: http://www.mdpls.org/catalog/suggestion.asp.

Ask a Librarian added the functionality to receive and reply to text messages last year. I haven't seen many yet. Testing our library's texting address was comical. The reference staff are all too old to have any experience with texting, and it took some asking around before we found someone who knew enough to send a test text message on their mobile.

The Sound Of My Own Wheels

2011-02-28T02:54:00.001-05:00

Came in for a landing on a wing and a prayer today, after a couple of weeks in a strange bardo of self-doubt, regret and paralysis, unable to put my shoulder to the wheel.

John Reimringer's novel, Vestments, was just what I needed. Set in St. Paul, Minnesota, it is about a young man sorting himself out: about his difficult father, about his calling, about his confusion. When I finished it this afternoon, I felt myself again.

Quiet Week

2011-02-25T02:28:00.001-05:00

Suddenly, the library has been eerily quiet in the last week or two. I credit it to a combination of factors: mild weather first, with highs in the '70's, and second, recently completed branch expansions at two locations, with more public-access PC's to draw people away from the main library.

Beyond that, are there other reasons, such as the increasing use of portable wireless devices; smartphones, tablets, and e-book readers? Five years ago, the library was a Mecca for after-school teens wanting to access MySpace. Now, boisterous teens are scarcely to be seen. Has the public-access desktop PC become outmoded, used only by device-less travelers, the poor, and wireless device owners who need to print something? I don't know.

Maybe it's just the weather.

Catholic Herald Digital, Skirmish Magazine

2011-02-19T01:21:00.002-05:00

I've had the British Catholic Herald on my Bookmarks toolbar for a long time. It is the only Catholic newspaper that I read regularly. It is not a mouthpiece for any political ideology, left or right, being simply loyal to the Holy See and dedicated to promoting the Church. As a former Episcopalian, too, I have been following the the progress of the ordinariate for Anglicans wishing to enter the Church with their own traditional liturgy.

But I've only read what is available on the web site. I was reading columnist William Oddie on the new English missal tonight, and he wrote, "...if you don't take the paper, either online or in print, you should; this homepage gives no more than a taste of what you could have: it's worth the price of the paper for the columnists alone."

I've never wanted to subscribe to the Catholic Herald paper edition. Subscriptions from Europe by mail can be very expensive. But I thought I would check to see if they had a digital edition now, and they do, with a promotional offer of a year's subscription for £10, (about $16 US), a very good deal. So I subscribed.

The digital edition is available from Exact Editions, a vendor of digital magazines, and I noticed that they also offer Skirmish Magazine, "the world’s leading multi-period historical re-enactment and living history magazine." I've written about re-enacting here before, most recently in my Frontierland post. You can view a sample issue. I don't think I'll subscribe, but it is amazing how much re-enacting is going on out there.

The sample issue of Skirmish includes an article on a film about the 1863 siege of Vicksburg, which doesn't seem to me a good battle for re-enacting at all. The Rebs at Vicksburg were blockaded and shelled by gunboats until they surrendered. What would you do as a re-enactor, live in a mud-hole and eat rats? My great great granduncle Lacey Castleberry may have been at Vicksburg, where his regiment, the 46th Alabama, surrendered and was paroled.

On Reading Manuals

2011-02-17T01:36:00.001-05:00

A co-worker told me today that she had figured out what the "F" in RTFM, from the title of my previous post, meant. Yes, "Read The Fucking Manual." She'd never heard the expression. She'd never heard of the BOFH either. Talk about a nerd generation gap.

Hacker's Dictionary aka The Jargon File, to the rescue:

RTFM /R-T-F-M/ /imp./
[Unix] Acronym for `Read The Fucking Manual'. 1. Used by gurus to brush off questions they consider trivial or annoying. Compare Don't do that, then!. 2. Used when reporting a problem to indicate that you aren't just asking out of randomness. "No, I can't figure out how to interface Unix to my toaster, and yes, I have RTFM." Unlike sense 1, this use is considered polite. See also FM, RTFAQ, RTFB, RTFS, RTM, all of which mutated from RTFM, and compare UTSL.

Yes, RTFM is rude. It comes from a time before the Web, when if you were even in a position to ask how to use a computer application, it was assumed that you were in a university setting, that you would know enough to read any instructions provided before asking for help. Access to the Internet was provided for university students in the form of a UNIX shell account. I had such an account at FSU in the '90's. UNIX help was provided with the MAN pages. If you asked for help without having read the relevant MAN page, you were wasting someone's time.

Ok, we can take the "F" out, and RTM is still legitimate, and more polite. Read The Manual. We do a lot of hand-holding at the public library, (with MS Word, for example), but are you doing them a favor if you fix their problem for them, and don't show them how to use the "help"? Yes, it's less trouble, but they will profit more if you let them control the mouse and talk them through a search in the "help" for their answer. Don't protect them from the learning curve.

Digital Media: RTFM

2011-02-15T00:09:00.000-05:00

I've been replaying in my mind that 75-minute phone call Saturday, in which I helped a woman get OverDrive audio book downloads working on her PC and her iPod. As good as I felt being able to talk her through it to a satisfactory result, I now think that was the wrong way to handle it.

I broke our rule: when the desk is busy, it's not fair to our coworkers to spend more than about ten minutes with someone before we break off and offer to get back with them later. We used to have an IP who drove me crazy that way, spending a half an hour with someone while I had to scramble to handle everything else. And on some level I knew it was busy while I was on the phone. When our volunteer, L, left, she seemed drained, eager to get away. She and SE had to handle all the other traffic for that 75 minutes.

The thing is, I realized as we went along that the woman had not bothered to read any of the excellent help that OverDrive offers on their page: the Quick Start Guide, the Digital Help FAQ, the Check Out Assistance. She had tried to download an audio book without having installed the OverDrive Media Console first. I should have begun our reference interview by asking her whether she had read the help, and if not, to do so and then call with questions. The help I provided was basically to read it for her. I may have been seduced by a desire to play the guru.

It is easy to tell by the number of OverDrive titles that have waiting lists that our digital media are heavily used. Calls for help are relatively rare. When they come, they often will be from someone who has leapt before they looked. An audio book must be like a podcast, they assume. You just download it and play it. But it's not that simple, because of Digital Rights Management, (DRM). You must install the OverDrive Media Console to track your downloads, get licensing permissions, transfer the files to portable devices. And with Apple devices, like her iPod, you have to change your iTunes configuration as well, to "manually manage music."

She could have saved our time by taking the trouble to read the help. I could have saved our time by finding out up front whether she had done so.

Blogging Reference

2011-02-12T22:55:00.002-05:00

This was a peculiar Saturday. Instead of lots of short transactions, I got people who needed lots of help: with newspaper databases, with microfilm, with online food stamp renewal, with digital media downloads, each taking about twenty minutes, with a marathon phone session lasting well over an hour helping an older woman who was very intelligent but a digital media neophyte get started with OverDrive. I don't think I have worked so hard for my pay in a long time.

10:00 Open. A crowd of people spills from the stairs, all rushing to be first in line for AARP tax help.They are soon out of sight. Only a handful of Internet users take seats this early on a Saturday morn.

PC for Josh.

Where are they doing the taxes?

Where is tax help?

Phone: Mr. L. needs contact info for Guilford of Maine, upholstery fabric mfgr.

She wants to know status of request for The 17 Day Diet by Mike Moreno. Requested back in Dec.. Her request is still pending, pub date is 3/15/11. Says Dr. Phil is "really pushing it."

Phone: She wants tax help info.

11:15 Helped man reapply for food stamps, showed another man ProQuest and NewsBank newspaper archives, gave woman lists of black authors, showed Cathy how to turn on numpad,

Phone: Rosa from Lloyd, wants obit info for Marvin Sease, recently deceased R&B singer, also what kind of peppers mentioned on CBS Early Show Valentine's Day Brunch segment this a.m.

Piquillo Pepper: The name piquillo means "little beak." Traditionally, piquillo peppers are grown in Northern Spain and are hand-picked, then roasted over open fires. The peppers are then peeled, all by hand then packed in jars or tins. The roasting of the pepper gives it a rich, spicy-sweet flavor. (Source: GourmetSleuth.com)

PC's for Kasia and Katrina.

11:47 Demo'd microfilm, show woman how to sign onto PC w card, PC for Ian.

Woman says she's going through a situation with her daughter missing, can she have forms faxed to her here? Sorry, no.

Following up on e-mail request for autobiog. of singer formerly known as Vanity, Denise Matthews. After a career of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, she got a new liver and religion. She self-published Blame It on Vanity in 2004. It's not available from Amazon and no libraries own it. Now she's put out a new, deluxe edition, available only through her web site for $50.

Phone: She wants Frankenstein or, the modern Prometheus, but her child's teacher has specified the Oxford World's Classics edition. We got plenny Frankensteins, Dover, Bantam, but not that one.

12:05 About lunch time, as soon as L shows up.

1:06 Back from lunch. I got delayed helping Asian woman download audiobooks to her Olympus Digital Voice Recorder. She'd been trying NetLibrary. Didn't want to fool with NL, so showed her OverDrive. She caught on quickly, was very proficient w her device.

PC for Carrie.

Where to make PC reservation, where is tax help?

She can't find Outliers, by Malcom Gladwell, Find on shelving cart.

1:30 Noon rush is over. Several PC's are open. No book browsers.

Phone: She wants I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou and The Poems of Phyllis Wheatley: a Native African and a Slave. Don't have Bird on the shelf at main, copies at branches. Wheatley is out & couple weeks overdue. Says she'll call back, doesn't want to place holds.

3:12 Spent about 75 min. on phone w woman doing OverDrive support. Got her from ABC to having audio book transfer from PC to iPod in progress. She'll call back if she has any more problems. Thinks she'll be all right. She was downloading the audio book of Caged Bird, coincidentally. Maya Angelou spoke at a black history program at FAMU last week.

Girl needs When History is a Nightmare: Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina by Stevan M. Weine, and Bosnia: A Short History by Noel Malcolm. Take to shelf.

L is gone.

Microfilm demo.

Phone: What's up w his request for Pain, Pain, Go Away by William Faber and Morton Walker? Is on order from Ingram. Also wants info on prolotherapy from Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide by Burton Walker.

Give out plastic bags for books.

PC for Ivan

4:04

Phone: Mr. L. wants address for the Baptist Press. Not a publisher but a news bureau for the Southern Baptist Convention. Web site has only e-mail contact, no address, no phone. Not in Gale Media Directory either. No luck w Google. He says he'll try SBC on Monday.

Shelve a few K's from old display. Between Kellerman, King, Koontz, and Krentz, the K's in fiction are very konstipated, little room.

30 min closing announcement.

How can he find a play by John Millington Synge? Give him The Complete Works of.

Where are self-help books? Take to shelf. Show inspirational books too.

Has PC reservation downstairs. Can I cancel it? Wants to be upstairs. Is Learning Express appropriate for his high school student, for SAT prep? Yes, give him helpful bookmark.

She wants nursing assistant exam test prep book. Place hold.

She can't find Sliding Into Home by Kendra Wilkinson. Find on New Non-Fiction shelves.

Tax form questions, which 1040? Show handy guide on how to choose.

On Reading the NYT Business Pages

2011-02-07T15:48:00.001-05:00

I've read the New York Times for years. My oldest online account is for access to the NYT, registered at the dawn of the Web in the mid-'90's. We subscribe to the paper Sunday NYT.

For years I threw out the Business section without a glance, until I noticed that it contained some of the best technology reporting on new products, Internet ventures and competing platforms. I began to get a better understanding of companies like Google and the "social networks".

Guess what? They are businesses! Long before a story appears in the Style section about why everyone loves or hates Twitter, you will have seen a thorough profile in the Business section: who came up with it, who's backing it, how they plan to make a profit, who the competition is.

There are three tech stories in the Feb. 6 Sunday Business section. Who's the Boss, You or Your Gadget?, a front-page story, polls corporate executives on how they balance the need for family and down time with the need to be always connected to work. One woman carries an amazing four devices, "an iPhone and an iPad for family and social life and a Blackberry and a laptop for work."

Why Some Twitter Posts Catch On, And Some Don't is pretty interesting. It is about a study of "the 500 most popular Twitter hashtags among more than three billion messages posted on Twitter from August 2009 to January 2010." The article talks about how metrical analyses of Twitter messages and blog posts can offer valuable insights for digital marketing. If you studied bibliometrics in Library School, you will have a point of connection here.

This week's Digital Domain column, Online Courses, Still Lacking That Third Dimension, by Randall Stoss, talks about how even the very best online course cannot replace a relationship between a student and an instructor, and a classroom experience. This is one of my favorite soapboxes, but the exciting information I took away from this piece is that many universities are putting lectures and courses online for free use, (but not for credit). Academic Earth, for example, offers 150 courses!

Right away I see several history lectures I'd love to listen to. It's what I miss most about college, hearing Professor Horward speak knowledgeably and entertainingly about the Napoleonic Wars, or Professor Halpern on the revolutions of 1848.

A Gift From My Past: Compass Rose

2011-02-05T00:53:00.099-05:00

Sitting in my green leather armchair, I turned the last leaf of an honest paper book last night, Compass Rose, by John Casey, beautifully made by Knopf. It is the sequel to a novel Casey wrote over twenty years ago, Spartina (1989), about a Rhode Island fisherman who builds his own fishing boat. Spartina won the National Book Award.

I read Spartina because Donald Abrahamsen, who came to my bookmobile stop at Chaires, had requested it and recommended it to me. Like the characters in Casey's novels, Mr. Abrahamsen was a New England Yankee. If you asked him how he did, he would always say "nevah bettah!" He had "Yankee ingenuity", and could make almost anything of wood or metal.

Mr. Abrahamsen had sailed a boat to Brazil, where he ran a factory that manufactured screws, and where he took a Brazilian wife of good family, lovely Cecilia. He had owned an Indian motorcycle. He was a mysterious man. I imagined that he might have been in the OSS during WWII. He would only read novels written by men. The Australian Jon Cleary and Nevil Shute were two of his favorites.

He invited R. and me to supper once. He had built his own house, out off of Miccosukee Road past the Interstate 10 crossover. He gave us a tour of his formidable woodworking shop with its saws and lathes. He had built the house into a hillside, with the sleeping quarters eccentrically on the first floor, (where they would be cooler), and the living spaces above. After supper, we four sat in their very formal parlor on the second floor to talk. It had dark furniture and red walls, with pictures in heavy, ornate frames. Old World.

I had to fight for Compass Rose. It was thought John Casey's other novels had not circulated well enough. I put in my own request for it, with the memory of Mr. Abrahamsen in the back of my mind. One copy.

When it came down on hold for me I only felt obliged to read it. But when I began to taste it, I realized I was in for a profound reading experience. Compass Rose is full of earned truth and arresting description. I was so caught up and moved by the end that I read the first couple of chapters again, and have not wanted to start another book for a few days, to savor the echoes of it in my mind.

Dominique Browning wrote a good review for the NYT, The Lay of the Land. But read Spartina first. I am going to have to read Spartina again.

Sweat of My Brow

2011-02-01T00:42:00.002-05:00

A weekend of mild and dry weather let me finally begin to dispose of the carpet of leaves around my house. I raked them away from the outside walls into piles, to let the rain drain away quickly into the soil and keep the damp away from the house. Some I spread as mulch around shrubs, and others I carted to a large pile under the sweetgums and the high ancient ligustrum hedge at the back of my property. I decided to take the suggestion of my neighbor Greg and not bag leaves to send to the landfill.

There is nothing I like better than working in my yard: using simple tools, feeling my body move, refreshing myself with lemonade, turning my face to the sky. I pruned the dead branches from the frozen cardinal guard and lantana, and cut back the rose bushes. I pulled up the wilted, dried stalks of ginger plants that grow up in the azalea hedge. I put our statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary upright. She had begun to lean, one of her brick supports having sunk into the soil.

Here in North Florida we are on the periphery of the icy blizzards that have been blanketing the Northeast as far south as Atlanta. They get buckets of snow, we get rain. It looks like we are in for more rain this week. Robins have been feasting on the berries of my camphor trees.

R. prepared a wonderful supper of steaks, baked potatoes and brussels sprouts Sunday night, and we settled in for the conclusion of Downton Abbey on Masterpiece Theater. She kids me that I am like my mother, fretting over the marriage prospects of housemaids and debutantes. I suppose I am: my inner old woman, nibbling chocolate truffles with a cat on my lap, endlessly entertained by the ruination of the British Empire.

Monday morning got off to a rocky start. It looked at first like I would be minding the second floor alone in the morning. A couple of full-time people were sick. Then staff showed up we'd thought were off, and it wasn't so bad. Still, long hours at the service desk today. This is when having knocked around as a young man pays off. My worst day as a reference librarian is still going to be better than my best day at some other jobs I've had.

Recent Acquisitions

2011-01-28T02:21:00.007-05:00

Ancient Iraq by Georges Roux, Third Edition
I've been working my way slowly through Lawrence Boadt's excellent Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction. It's the kind of book that needs to be read with other books: the Bible, of course, but also other works on the ancient Near East, like Seton Lloyd's The Archaeology of Mesopotamia and The Oxford Bible Atlas. Consulting Roux's Ancient Iraq, I noticed its 1964 pub. date and wondered if it had ever been revised. It had been, twice! I ordered the third, 1992 edition, a Penguin paperback. Alas, it is missing the color plates of the first edition, so I will keep my 1964 World Publishing hardback.

Light of the World: The Pope, The Church, and the Signs of the Times: A Conversation with Peter Seewald, by Pope Benedict XVI
Seewald is a German journalist whose two previous book-length interviews, with then Cardinal Ratzinger, were published as Salt of the Earth (1997) and God and the World (2002). If you have been keeping up with Pope Benedict's speeches and writings, you will not find any surprises here, but it is a pleasure to see him unwind in an informal setting.

What I'm waiting for is the sequel to Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus of Nazareth: Part Two, Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem To The Resurrection, is due out in March from Ignatius Press.

Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, Anonymous, Afterword by Cardinal Hans Urs Von Balthasar
Long-time readers of this web log will know something of my history with the Tarot. Honestly, it surprises me to have these cards reappear in my life unbidden. Well, all right, I wrote the post about my car wreck in 1977. That was what started it.

Still, early Tarot decks had Christian qualities that were altered in English versions influenced by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and those that followed. The fifth of the twenty-two major trump cards, for example, was renamed in the Waite-Coleman deck, and in decks that followed, from "The Pope" to "The Heirophant."

Meditations on the Tarot is translated from the original French, and derives from the French school of occultism, as did the first book I ever read about the Tarot as a teenager, The Tarot - A Contemporary Course on the Quintessence of Hermetic Occultism, by Mouni Sadhu, (Mieczyslaw Demetriusz Sudowski). I was interested to learn that Sudowski asked Thomas Merton to write a forward to his 1965 work, Theurgy, (Merton declined), and remained a faithful Catholic until his death in 1971.

Meditations on the Tarot is notable for its approving blurbs by several authorities on contemplative prayer, Fathers Bede Griffiths, Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating, and by a cardinal of the Church, the theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Thomas Keating says, "This book, in my view, is the greatest contribution to date toward the rediscovery and renewal of the Christian contemplative tradition of the Fathers of the Church and the High Middle Ages."

So I will give it a chance. What I know is that no private pursuit of hidden knowledge can take the place of a personal relationship with God. He wants to know us and to be known by us. We must not hold Him at arm's length with the idea that He is hidden behind a veil. That veil was rent by the power of the Cross.

Memories of Aviation in 1940's Bridgeport Ct.

2011-01-25T17:11:00.002-05:00

My wife's uncle, Ray Hansen, has pursued a lifelong interest in flying and aircraft. He is an experienced pilot, and he builds and flies scale models as well. Ray was moved by my album of postcards of early flight to put down his memories of working in a Corsair fighter factory as a young man.

During the Second World War, in the early 1940's, the Chance Vought Corsair was manufactured in a relatively small factory in Stratford, Connecticut, across the road from Bridgeport Airport. The people in the Bridgeport area took pride in knowing that family members or friends were helping to produce such a beautiful plane. So, when it was suggested that the people in the area could chip in to buy one of the planes for the Navy, the people gladly reached down in their pockets to donate toward the plane.

I have attached a picture of a certificate, similar to those that were given to people in the Bridgeport area who contributed to the purchase of a Corsair. The plane used to cost $100,000. I can recall two drives and I can recall looking at and feeling the certificate the family got.

During the summer of 1944, during the summer vacation from high school, I got a job in a branch of the engineering department at the plant. The engineering building was a separate building from the production building. I would go to work early and spend the time before work and on my lunch break out where I could get a good look at the planes as they came off the assembly line.

The next year I was drafted and spent two years in the Army. But as soon as I came home, even before I was officially out of the Army, I was back at Chance Vought riveting the aft sections of the F4U-4 version of the plane. Along with many other people, I can honestly say I loved that plane.

The other picture is that of Igor Sikorsky flying an early model of one of his helicopters. If you will look at the tail rotor you will see it rotates in a horizontal plane and not the vertical plane he later found out gave him better lateral control. The caption on the picture says it was taken in Stratford. I was not there when it was taken, but I am sure that the picture was taken as he test flew this model just off the beaches of Seaside Park in Bridgeport. This model was not all that stable and he would have had to fly from his small factory at the end of Seaside Park, the whole length of Seaside Park, about one and a half miles, then over the mouth of the river and a little of Long Island Sound at the entrance to Bridgeport Harbor, and then fly over a residential area for two or three miles before he could get to Bridgeport Airport.

Let me give you a little background of what I just wrote. When I was in high school I played shortstop for the baseball team. High schools today have everything for the kids. Central High School was one of three high schools in Bridgeport. The only one that had a football field was Harding. None had a baseball field. So Central had to go all the way to Seaside Park for practices and games. Seaside Park was long and narrow, about 200 to 300 yards from the water at the widest part.

So when Mr. Sikorsky would test fly his latest version, it was very easy to see him sitting out there in his business suit and fedora hat. We all thought it was a stupid thing to be working on because over at the airport the Army had fighter planes that could fly over 300 mph.

He was smart about how he went about testing the crafts. He would fly at a height of less than 100 feet just off the beach. A truck drove on the road along the beach at the same speed he was flying. If he had an emergency, he could set the copter down in the shallow water with very little chance of damage to him or the craft. And the men in the truck would be there in an instant.

One other summer job I had while in graduate school was at Sikorsky overhauling transmissions.

Blogging Reference

2011-01-22T23:33:00.007-05:00

9:29 30 min. to opening. Cash drawer, door count, log in staff PC's, make out-of-service sign for yet another public PC, (22 out of 64 down), test sound on #55. Newspapers.

V's Democrat-mobile got totaled yesterday, same spot where a van hit R. in our Tercel Wagon back in '90's, Duval & Pensacola. V. is all right, thank God, but she'll have to buy all new bumper stickers.

Cold this a.m. Fried eggs & samosa. Wore new "Rustic Navy" Ralph Lauren Polo Cotton Mesh Full-Zip Hoodie under MC jacket & helmet, warm ears! It's "finished with utility-inspired trim for heritage comfort."

Heritage comfort, is that comfort like rich folks used to have in the good old days? Or comfort you'll be able to pass on to your children? ?? [Edit Jan. 25: been wearing it all day today, as it warmed up a little. I love this hoodie. I think the "utility-inspired trim" refers to the shoulder and elbow patches. It wears like something I've had for years. I'm down with "heritage comfort".]

10:00 Open. Both Democats, NYT go out right away.

10:12 Here we go.

Phone: Tax forms? We'll put them out on the 1st of Feb.

He's taking electrician exam, needs wiring book. Take to shelf.

Tax forms?

Help w sound.

Her browser's frozen.

Phone: It's MD, one of the old reference crew, needs Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral by Thomas G. Long.

Funny, RK gave me a wave 5 min. ago, also of the ancient crew. They both retired shortly after I came in.

Phone: Boy's voice. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Place hold, trap, take to hold shelves.

Where to take DVD's that didn't work? Where is 11:00 story time?

Phone: Rosa in Lloyd. Where can she buy Episencial skincare products? Afraid we are in Episencial-less black hole. Nowhere closer on company's "store locator" than Mobile, Columbus Ga. or Ocala Fl., but in Mobile it's Target that's listed. Maybe Target here has?

NYT comes back. Where is Book Review from Sunday ed.? Fetch from workroom.

Today's paper.

11:08

Stapler needs staples.

Scratch paper & golf pencil.

See a number of library netbooks in use. MC says all 50 at main will see use in the course of a day now. 1st real incentive for non-book-readers to get library cards: they don't have to wait for desktop PCs.

Quiet.

Tax forms? Says he doesn't see 2010 1040 form at irs.gov. I try to check, can't even get in. IRS must be getting hammered.

PC's for Cathy, Cory, Calvin.

NYT Book Review comes back.

Tax forms?

V having trouble forwarding GroupWise e-mail. I try, w no problems. Hmm.

She wants books on pipe cleaner crafts, also called chenille stems or sticks. Can't find anything. Call JD in Children's, nothing.

(Tiara, Harry Potter glasses)

Print out a half dozen ideas from the Internet, do interlibrary loan request for Pipe Cleaners Gone Crazy by Laura Torres and Michael Sherman.

Topo map for Tallahassee? He remembers old Map Center, which we got rid of years ago. What did we do with the maps? Discarded, I admit ashamedly. Bit my tongue at the time. Download map from USGS, seat him at staff PC to view.

12.54 Back from lunch. Amy's tortilla & black bean casserole. Finishing Peter Temple's Australian crime novel, Truth.

Volunteer L showed up. Wasn't on schedule, so is special treat. Yay!

Staple remover.

MC pops up,will I return TV-DVD player to Media when Daughters of Isis in conference room are done w it?

PC for Terry. Says he has the flu. Give him Wet Ones® antibacterial wipe.

Books on writing screenplays. Take to shelf.

Picture books of Georgia for her granddaughter to photocopy. Not much o/s. Try children's.

Returns Democrat.

Returns WSJ, unsure about his PC reservation. Thought he had 15 min. wait, but it's 50 min. wait.

Cancel his reservation, thinks can get one sooner. Sure? Ok.

Where are cookbooks? Just wants call no., no hand-holding.

Where are encyclopedias?

1:29

Map to homeless shelter.

How to get library card? Is under 18 w/o parent. Give him handout.

J. K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2011. Only bought reference copy this year. Still have 2010 at desk. Find 2011 on shelf. Yellow dot it to keep at desk, retire old ed., take his card.

Library is buzzing, people everywhere. One table is piled with volumes of Florida Statistical Digest and Florida Almanac.

2:00 Walk floor, all fine, no shenanigans. First e-book reader I've seen in use here. Help woman w microfilm.

J. K. Lasser's man asks me to shush woman on mobile. Hmm, not that bad, but admonish her gently. Walking away, hear her say to boyfriend, "They always shush me, but..." She's chronically shush-worthy, apparently.

Returns paper.

Daughters of Isis having trouble with VCR, C goes to help.

Returns Florida reference books for ID.

Where are GMAT test prep books? Take to shelf, show online Learning Express test prep.

Phone: Elderly blind woman trying to contact LM, yet another of the old ref. crew, now at a branch. Give her branch number.

Tax forms?

PC's for Shani, Kianna.

What's he need for card?

3:00 Walk around before L leaves. All is well. Tarot woman is laying out spreads. Ask her which deck she's using. Celtic Deck, she says. Looks like the Sacred Circle Tarot to me, after a search online. I'll have to follow up. Says the only other one she'd use would be the Thoth deck, (Crowley). Find map of Florida torn out of Frommer's Guide to Florida.

Why is his card expired?

PC for Jerald.

Old man, a regular, says "Not too crowded today, but all of the good spots are taken." Can't find an electrical outlet for his laptop.

She's got a list of novels about abused girls and rape victims:
Perfect Liar by Brenda Novak
Through the Cracks by Barbara Fister
When Morning Comes by Jackie Rennick
First Impressions by Jude Deveraux
Left Overs by Laura Weiss
Girls by Frederick Busch
Child of Grace by Lori Copeland
The Fifth Angel by Tim Green.
Take to shelf.

How can she reserve a room? Wants one tomorrow. Studying for LSAT, frustrated with noise level. Send her to super, VB.

Wilson wants PC. Says he hasn't had one today, (right). C says don't. Let C be decider. PC's are booked 'til closing.

4:03

The Daughters of Isis are through in the conference room. Disconnect & roll equipment on elevator, down to Media workroom.

K, workmate of R's at the Florida House, needs article from the American Journal of Economics and Society. Check Gale db's. Gale has blah blah and Sociology? No, citation says Society. Hmm. Get no results for that in OCLC FirstSearch. Look in our old set of Ulrich's. No listing for blah blah and Society. Citation has got to be wrong. Sure enough, find article in Gale.

4:49 Time to go.

A Fresh Take on the Western Novel

2011-01-17T13:08:00.004-05:00

Jennifer Schuessler notes the appearance of Charles Portis's True Grit at No. 11 on this week's NYT trade fiction list, thanks to the new film adaptation currently in theaters. I wonder how many libraries were blindsided here? We had only a couple of ancient, grubby copies when the hold requests began to pile up.

I wonder now whether my previous blogpost, Frontierland, was anything more than a reaction to the mind-waves of all those people going to see True Grit.

I've never read it. I do have a favorite Portis novel though, Masters of Atlantis, which I have mentioned here before.

Scheussler draws some original insights from a column by Allen Barra in The Daily Beast, Who Is the Best Western Novelist? Barra questions the standing of Cormac McCarthy and briefly discusses a number of other contenders for the title, such as Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Ron Hansen's Desperadoes (1979) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983), and Pete Dexter's Deadwood (1986). The list here would make a good start for a book display that would have appeal beyond fans of the Western genre.

Something about McCarthy has always put me off reading him. I think Barra has put his finger on it:

McCarthy's prose is so rich and gravid with metaphor that many have been willing to overlook his shortcomings and excesses. In McCarthy's West, no one knocks at the door of a lonely cabin in the wilderness to ask for a drink of water without getting a treatise on the meaning of life and death. Every other prostitute is named "Magdalena." (Has there ever been a creditable female character in any of his books?) Mexican pimps are as portentous as Death in a Bergman film. Characters you might think would be as inarticulate as the cast of Jersey Shore say things like "I came here as a heretic fleeing a prior life" (The Crossing) and "Your world totters on an unspoken labyrinth of questions" (Cities of the Plain).

...It's not difficult to see why Blood Meridian is such a hit with high falutin' critics like Bloom. Consider enigmatic passages like this: "For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by slight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies."

Looks as if somebody's been readin' The Portable Nietzsche by the camp fire.

Frontierland

2011-01-14T14:55:00.003-05:00

"There's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive."
-President G. W. Bush, Sept. 17, 2001

A couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran an opinion column by Frank Rich, Who Killed the Disneyland Dream?, referring to a now famous home movie of a family's visit to Disneyland in 1956, Robbins Barstow's Disneyland Dream.

I was fascinated to see that the family put on homemade "Davy Crockett" jackets for their visit, with the boys reserving their coonskin caps for wear only in the holy-of-holies that was Frontierland.

R. loves to tell the story of how she made a trip to Disneyland happen with a fervent wish. Her father was a buyer of mens' & boys' clothing for Maas Brothers department store in St. Petersburg. Ron had his own story about Davy Crockett, how he took a gamble on a large order of coonskin caps, put them in a display with a recording of The Ballad of Davy Crockett playing non-stop, and they flew out the doors.

My family never went to Disneyland, but we had our own Western attraction near Ocala, Six Gun Territory, which was very much like Frontierland. My friends and I loved to go there.

Lostparks.com has a virtual tour of the old attraction, and Florida Memory has a tour on film.

I've been reading Historical Reenactors and the "PERIOD RUSH": The Cultural Anthropology of Period Cultures by Karol Chandler-Ezell. She describes her work among three parallel cultures or paracultures, "tightly knit groups such as historical reenacting which make their hobbies intense, shared 'cultures' that saturate much of their daily life and self-identity while operating parallel to mainstream life." There are sections on The Society for Creative Anachronism, Renaissance Faires, and Civil War reenactors.

I bought the book because it had the term "period rush" in the title. I first came across period rush in the book Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz, (1998). Horwitz describes the extremes reenactors go to in pursuing this trance-like state in which they feel transported to another time. Says Chandler-Ezell,

Reenactors are about participant observation and cooperative play. ...reenactors were really attempting to participant observe or 'method-act' their way into the emic (insider) perspective. ...The period rush seems to be a type of transcendent experience where the reenactors loosen the stresses or constraints of their real or daily persona and as a result gain feeling of rejuvenation, relaxation, and brotherhood.

(We are in for a lot of CW reenacting in the near future, by the way. 2011 is the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War.)

Do theme parks like Frontierland and Six Gun Territory appeal to us because they offer a kind of second-hand period rush, a ritual rehearsal of the primal scenes and deeds of the pioneers?

When I remember the things my father liked to share with us, camping, hunting, gun shows, family history, (he spent many years writing two books about our family), I think that these were his way of rehearsing and passing on to us something important about who he was, and where we came from. In all the times I went hunting with him, we scarcely ever actually bagged any game. Nevertheless we must "hunt", live rough, go armed, rise before dawn, far from the cities, as our fathers did in the Alabama hills.

Here are my parents, having fun with some reenacting of their own at the Rough Riders Hotel in the Dakota Badlands in 1992:

Frank Rich, while remarking on the unalloyed whiteness of the Barstows' world, uses Disneyland Dream to draw a comparison between the economic prospects of the Barstow family in 1956 and those of today's middle class, but I don't want to go there.

It's the whiteness, White World, the world I grew up in. In the South, it's a world of families who have been here about as long as mine has been. Frontierland is a cartoon version of our lived history. The Revolution, the settlement of the Cherokee lands, the Indian wars, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, the Alamo, the Civil War, the works. We were there.

It's not my world anymore, really. We get all sorts at the library and at Blessed Sacrament Church, and that's the way I like it. But don't kid yourself, White World is still there. Or worlds, there are many. In fact a black man, Rich Benjamin, recently wrote an entertaining book about them, Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America.

Once in a while I stumble into my white world, as a guest at a country club or at Wakulla Lodge for Thanksgiving dinner. It's an unmistakable feeling when I am among my own kind, to know that I've passed muster without much being said. If I talk to anyone, they will probably try to work out whether the people they know with my surname are related to me. Short answer? Yes. Do I know them? Probably not.

On Thursday nights at the library the county's Adult and Community Education has an ongoing class in English for Speakers of Other Languages, (ESOL). I love to see the students come down the stairs from the classroom on the third floor before the library closes: people from around the world, learning English together and laughing with new friends. What will they make of Frontierland?

In their own way, they are pioneers of a kind, far from the lands of their birth, upsetting the natives sometimes, looking for elbow room, strangers in a strange land. They have come to America. They want to be free. Let's make room around the campfire and pass them the peace pipe.

Winged Chariots: The Popular Art of Early Flight

2011-01-10T23:53:00.002-05:00

It is an utterly frigid, wet, gray day, that begs no apology for spending an afternoon at the computer. My cat lasted about two minutes outside, and now sleeps under the lamp by my desk.

I've always been enchanted by the early days of flight. I read Nordhoff & Hall's Falcons of France and watched the films, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and The Blue Max on the big screen as a boy. When I finished graduate school in 2001 I devoted several years to playing the WWI flight sim, Red Baron 3D , and reading all about those wonderful winged chariots and the men who dared to fly them.

Early flight was a popular subject for posters, postcards and cigarette cards. In-flight photography was in its infancy, and miniature paintings were often used. Most of these images are from Rosebud's WWI and Early Aviation Image Archive. They are all, to the best of Rosebud's knowledge, in the public domain. I've had them on my hard drive for years. I actually thought Rosebud had vanished.

Early peacetime examples are of a strange menagerie of aircraft, of rallies and competitions.

With the coming of war in 1914, the romance of flight was used in appeals for national service.

Military aviation at the beginning of the Great War was strictly for reconnaissance, the "eyes of the army." Aircraft had no armament, and seldom encountered their opposite numbers at first.

The Rumpler Taube (Dove) was a graceful-looking, but in fact ungainly bird. It looks lovely in these postcard paintings.

Many German postcards pictured their pilots high above Paris:

Those solitary flights above the battle, in communion with heaven, would soon end.

Attacks on dirigibles and observation balloons were a popular subject.

I close with some striking examples of Futurist-influenced poster art that brush aside entirely the gentleman hobbyist's notion of flight as a solitary idyll, embracing the dynamism of killing machines, of war as creative destruction, ideas that the early Fascist and Communist intellectuals would share: total war as the midwife of the New Man.

Update on Self, More on E-Readers, Tablets

2011-01-07T17:52:00.005-05:00

Now that the holidays are over and the mom-librarians are back at work, I am taking a vacation. Although FAMU and FSU lurched into the winter term this week, I will mostly avoid dealing with students asking whether the library can supply their textbooks, and consuming reams of paper printing out their assignments and PowerPoint outlines.

Firearms Useless, Says Zombie Expert
I had some reader feedback passed along to me on the question of arming oneself against zombies. I'm told that KH, who works in the library's Media section, and who has seen many zombie films, believes that arming oneself is ultimately futile, and only delays the inevitable zombie triumph.

Mr. Claudius Stretches Legs, Christmas Over
After a late breakfast of scrambled eggs, rye toast and pink grapefruit juice, I took Claudius the cat out. He was so excited when he realized I was going to stay home today, galloping around the house in anticipation. He darted out the door. It was quite cold. Gusts of wind set the bronze bell on the front porch ringing and sent oak leaves sailing across the yard. Claudius chased leaves and went tearing around the lawn. But it was so cold that he wanted to go inside after twenty minutes.

I took the four white Christmas globe lights down from the front porch roof and put them back in their box. I took the fir wreath on its hanger down from the front door. I removed the bow and ornaments that were wired to it, tossing the wreath in the trash bin. The phone rang. R., who's been suffering with a cold all week, was packing it in at work, would be home early.

Now Claudius was recovered and ready for more, so we went out for another twenty minutes. Back inside, I picked up the new issue of Linux Journal, to which my friend Frogola kindly bought me a gift subscription. The February issue is a "desktop" issue.

I was ready for some lunch. I was about to make some instant Thai rice noodle soup when R. rolled up, bearing the remains of a flatbread pizza she'd ordered at Steel City, so I ate that instead.

Linux Dudes On Tablets, E-Readers
I paged through Linux Journal. I haven't used Linux in ten years, but I recognized the names of familiar graphical desktop shells as they were trotted out in their latest versions, Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, FTCE, AfterStep. Most of the articles were way over my head, as was Linux itself, really, when I tried it, knowing almost nothing about systems or networks or programming.

Toward the back I found an amusing piece, Tablets: Who Wants One?, in which two guys "debate" this month for a regular column, Point/Counterpoint, about the utility of tablet PC's, including the iPad. You can't read or link to new articles in Linux Journal until they are archived, but I'll give you a taste:

BILL: ...A laptop or Netbook is the tool of choice for content creation, but for content consumption, I think a tablet might be the way to go. I know more often than not I'll reach for my iPhone if I need to check mail real quick. It's just faster and more convenient.

KYLE: See, that's just the point, I think the tablet has long been a solution in search of a problem. Now it has to compete with a smartphone for portable, underpowered computing, a Netbook for inexpensive portable computing, and a laptop or desktop for full-featured computing. Having a large fruit-named company create one (and new companies throw cell-phone software on their tablets) doesn't change that. I had a hybrid laptop that could rotate into tablet mode, and I think used it maybe a handful of times, and even then, it was just as a novelty e-book reader.

BILL: I remember, but that laptop wasn't exactly a powerhouse either. And if I recall, it was running stock Ubuntu, which is not a portable-optimized OS like Android or iOS. I think your definition of computing is different from that of a lot of folks, Kyle. As a system administrator and writer, your use case depends on having multiple windows, a full-size keyboard, and the storage and horsepower of a conventional laptop. However, as iPad sales prove, there's a huge segment of the population who just wants to surf using tablets and play Angry Birds.

KYLE: Unless you are wearing some interesting jeans, a tablet isn't going to be any more portable than any other similarly underpowered Netbook, but you'll pay a premium for the fingerprint-smeared touch screen and the lack of a keyboard. I think even surfing suffers on a tablet. However hyperlinked the Web might be, these days, people keep talking about everyone "contributing to the conversation" and other Web 2.0 terms. It's hard to do that just by touching and dragging on a screen.

Kyle evidently shares my low opinion of touch screens. Bill is not entirely convincing as a potential iPad owner. I'll insert the link when I can. Looking around at Linux Journal online, however, I found some interesting comments to a poll of how many Linux users own an e-reader. Given the knowledge about computers these people have, I enjoyed their remarks about various e-readers. What separates the better e-readers from their tablet cousins is the electronic ink display, which several people have told me proved to be a surprisingly satisfactory experience compared to the usual backlit screen on a PC or mobile phone.

And yet I remain unpersuaded. A paper book is about the most "open" standard in the world. It needs no expensive and inevitably obsolescent device to use it. I can get almost any paper book I want at zero cost through interlibrary loan if the library does not own it.

Scott Inauguration Parade Marchers Gather, Eat Lunch.

2011-01-05T00:53:00.000-05:00

I took these photos on my lunch hour outside the library. Click on the image to view the album.

Gubernatorial Inauguration Parade Bands

E-Readers and the Great Eyeball War

2011-01-03T01:59:00.003-05:00

The first e-reader big push, in the '09' holiday season, had little discernible impact at the library, probably because the library had little to offer in the way of e-books. Demand for digital media until then had been focused on audio books. Of our two digital media vendors, NetLibrary and OverDrive, the library offered NetLibrary's e-books only in an online version, not the pricier downloadable Adobe PDF version that could be used with an e-reader, and OverDrive was then almost completely focused on audio books.

A year ago, OverDrive was preoccupied with addressing the iPod market-share for audio books, following Amazon's lead by offering them as MP3's in addition to the Windows WMA format. Since then, OCLC has sold NetLibrary to EBSCO, where it seems to be dying on the vine, (regrettably, because NetLibrary has an excellent collection), whereas OverDrive has been exceptionally aggressive in adapting to new digital media trends, partnering with Adobe to offer e-Pub and PDF e-books, and adding the entire public domain Project Gutenberg collection.

Last week patrons began to e-mail, call, and walk in to get help with the e-readers that they'd gotten for Christmas. My impression was that they mostly had Barnes & Noble Nook e-readers, though I was told someone had an Amazon Kindle. No one had a Sony Reader. Our information was that OverDrive's e-books would work on Nooks and Sony Readers, but not Amazon Kindles. Then we heard that OverDrive's Gutenberg e-books would work on the Kindle.

I found an interesting article, Ten Predictions For The E-Reader/E-Book Market In 2010, that makes the point,

Most consumers don’t read enough to justify buying a single-function reading device, and according to Forrester’s data, more consumers already read e-books on mobile phones and PCs than on e-readers.

From what I have observed in the library, people who come in to use the Wi-Fi have a laptop and a cell phone. People who come in to use our public access PC's usually have a cell phone. Our crowd does not have expensive devices like iPhones or Blackberries.

So there are all these portable devices: iPods, iPads, iPhones, Blackberries and other smartphones, MP3 players, netbooks, e-readers. And they all want to be people's primary devices, offering "apps" for things they weren't initially designed for.

Look at OverDrive's current FAQ for an idea of how complicated it's become for librarians when people ask for help with digital media. Libraries are not, and will never be "cutting edge". They cannot afford to be. Capital proposes, the consumer disposes, and libraries must wait and see.

In Case of Zombies

2011-01-01T02:17:00.002-05:00

The lighter side of SHTF HD, (shit hits the fan home defense), a fun thread at Shotgun World:

Arming yourself against zombies- pick your 3 best guns.

I don't know much about zombies, but since they are supposed to be already "dead", I'd guess that large caliber weapons, more likely to immobilize them, would be the way to go. So out of what I have on hand:

1. 12 gauge 9-shot Mossberg Persuader pump riot shotgun.

2. Charter Arms .44 Special Bulldog revolver.

3. 8 mm. vz. 24 Czech Mauser rifle.

Intercalary Days

2010-12-30T00:24:00.004-05:00

It's a time I look forward to, these days between Christmas and New Year's Day. I have always labeled them the intercalary days, though where I got that I am not sure. It's nothing to do with the Christian liturgical calendar. Liturgically we are in the 12 days of Christmas, although the 12 days this year will be only 8 days, with the Feast of the Epiphany, (when the Wise Men showed up), disappointingly moved to Sunday the 2nd in the U.S., instead of the traditional date of January 6th.

Top Google results identify the term as a Baha'i concept, but I have some idea that I got it from the Egyptians or the Mayans. Still, the Baha'is have pretty much the same idea that I do, though their intercalary days precede the Spring equinox, not New Year's Day.

The intercalary days of Ayyami-i-Ha “stand apart from the ordinary cycle of weeks and months and the human measure of time... Thus Ayyam-i-Ha can be thought of as days outside of time, days that symbolize eternity, infinity and the mystery and unknowable Essence of God Himself.”

We sense the stillness of the pole, around which the great world revolves, that does not itself move. It's a time for silence, recollection, rest. Dreamtime.

Libraries do a kind of "stand-down" during the Winter break, largely because the schools are closed. University libraries typically suspend interlibrary loan during this time. Public library bookmobiles are often off the road for a couple of weeks. Program rooms are mostly unscheduled and empty. Many librarians, of course, are mothers with children out of school or home from college, so libraries tend to have "skeleton crews" during the break. As a recognition of this, these are dress-down days. Many of us are in jeans and sneakers.

In the Wake of the Flood

2010-12-24T02:54:00.001-05:00

Off Monday and Tuesday, after working the weekend, then at work Wednesday and Thursday. Picking up the pieces after the New Carpet Laying. We spent Wednesday and Thursday getting our equipment reconnected and functioning. Tonight MC and I reshelved special reference collections: Small Business, Consumer, Investing, Florida, local directories. We won't get everything back in place until the new year; many staff members are on holiday.

I've been thinking all week about what to bring to confession for Advent. I've been a Christian for thirty years, and a Catholic for twenty-one, and I find myself at a loss just now to accuse myself of anything very damning. But then I think, "What does the Pope confess?" What do the legion of devoted and faithful churchwomen confess? What did St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila confess?

I remember my first talks with Father George Kontos, the Rector of Holy Comforter Episcopal Church, when I began to seek baptism. He talked to me a lot about brokenness. Sin is about being broken, about your life not working. It is a lot more helpful to think about how I am broken than it is to work up a list of sins; about hidden wounds so painful that I don't want anyone to touch them.

Reading Around East Anglia

2010-12-21T00:49:00.001-05:00

Following my nose, as I so often do picking books to read, I've been taking a tour of East Anglia. I started with Jim Kelly's Philip Dryden crime novels set around the Norfolk town of Ely. Now, with Esther Freud's The Sea House, I am a stone's throw away, Google Maps-wise, in Suffolk.

The story is set in a fictional coastal village, "Steerborough", (probably in the Minsmere area), which is near the fictional once-great wool-trade town of "Eastknoll", (clearly Dunwich), on the Suffolk coast.

East Anglia oozes history. Kelly and Freud both write about its Anglo-Saxon past and archaeological finds. It appears to be the produce capital of the UK.

Blogging Reference

2010-12-18T23:20:00.065-05:00

10:12 A misty, sodden morning. It was raining when I woke up. Tender shrubs ruined by the freeze. Lantana like dark wet paper on sticks. Working with CD today.

Power outlet to security gate has gone dead. Report and run extension cord to next hot outlet.

Dad & son want books on the pirate Henry Morgan. Show them Empire of Blue Water : Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catas by Stephan Talty, and others.

The movers and carpet-layers have moved on to the fiction wing, from which I can hear the floor scraper whining.

Phone: Is the library open? Do the public computers have printers?

The ranges in non-fiction and reference look like they've been shaken by a tremor. The books have fallen sideways, and there are gaps where the movers took shelves out to fit their machinery. The catalog PC's sit inert, their cables piled in tangles. I straightened the new books shelves before opening, will do more when our volunteer gets here at noon.

11:15 Been putting shelves back. Now one of the moving guys has started doing it, so I'm taking a break. It's pretty quiet. Still, as tables and carrels are again available, their regular inhabitants are soon installed at them.

The Stamp Man wonders where the 2010 Scott Specialized Catalogue of United States Stamps is. He didn't see it on the shelf. Find on shelving cart.

Man asks CD for help with his "Wahoo" mail.

12:05 Waiting for L. to show. It's raining again. Patrons are starting to roll in.

MC appears w samosas! Says L. won't be here today. No L.

Going to lunch. Leftover lamb vindaloo goes fine w M's samosas. Reading The Sea House by Esther Freud, a book that has whispered to me in the stacks over the years.

12:45 Back
Today's paper.

CD gone to lunch.

Phone: Mr. L. wants a string of addresses for hotel chains that takes me about 25 min., during which I put him on hold to: show a man Ann Rule crime books, show mom & daughter Kennedy assassination books, show another man how turn on his numpad, assign PC's to Sean and Bryan, return ID for newspaper, tell another man about JD's handmade books display.

1:24 PC's for Willie and Christy.

Phone: SB at branch wants MC. I think she's left, but see her browsing new fiction.

Bespectacled woman w brown bob & pink blouse is helping Ethiopian law student here on break from Miami to find financial aid. Show them school money books. Seeing 2010 on one of them she says to me, "In Ethiopia it's 2003." I say that they must be using the Julian calendar. Her eyes widen, the Ethiopian nods, she gives him an I-told-you-so look, says "He's a reference librarian!"

He wants his ID back, but doesn't have the newspaper to return. Says he already brought it. I don't see it w our papers. He goes back to the reading area, returns with it, says "Sorry."

Big crew cut man in black cowboy shirt w red panels on breast wants book on house wiring, preferably something recent. Give him Black & Decker's The Complete Guide to Wiring, (2008), from new non-fiction. It's perfect, says he, he'll look there some more, didn't know we had new books.

Returns USA Today.

PC for Kaya.

Man from Facilities here to look at dead security gate outlet.

New York Times.

Woman w list of "ancient astronauts" titles she copied down from the History Channel: Andean Awakening, The Gate of the Gods, The Knowledge Apocalypse, The Gods of Eden, The Egypt Code, Markawasi: Peru's Inexplicable Stone Forest. Also books by David Sedaris and Florida Panhandle mystery writer Glyn Marsh Alam. Don't have any of her History Channel books, tell her about interlibrary loan. Show her "ancient astronaut" readalikes: Zachariah Sitchen, Graham Hancock, et al. She seems happy with a couple of them. Then show her Sedaris and Alam.

Returns NYT, takes WSJ.

NYT goes right back out.

NYT in.

Where is a working catalog computer? First floor only right now, sorry.

2:33 Today's Democrat.

WSJ returned.

Security gate outlet is fixed. I thank him, say I'll put the extension cord away.

Dad & daughter. Can she donate math textbooks? Have them complete donation receipt form, make copy. Thank them, send copy to admin.

CD wishes they had donated Furry Freak Brothers, tells me about shamanistic eco-tours you can go on.

NYT out.

It's quiet, so I take a cart and hand truck down to store in the Media workroom in preparation for the carpeting of the Adult Services workroom in the coming week.

I escort a very frail old couple down on the staff elevator. (The public elevator is being overhauled.) Did they find something to read? She exclaims that she did not know what an excellent library this was. He says he is running out of westerns.

Today's paper.

Phone: It's Chattahoochee Man. Addresses for Dillard's headquarters and for the Agency for Workforce Innovation.

Where are books on writing poetry? Take to shelf.

KP, a shelver, says her back hurts, is going home.

Phone: Number for Lowe's of N.E. Tallahassee.

3:33 Still cold, wet, heavily overcast and misty out. It will probably start raining again when I leave. [It did.]

Very little printing at the public PC's today, a sign that the universities are closed. Patrons have thinned out. No wait for a PC.

Where can they sit and talk? She is practicing Vietnamese with a young Vietnamese man in preparation for a trip.

Times Crossword Woman wants City of Night. John Rechy, I think? Surely not. No, Dean Koontz.

Talk about food w CD. We both like to get Phö at Far East Cuisine.

Help w copier.

Take my framed print off the wall above my desk and store in Media w my other stuff. Take some pictures of desk & carpet laying progress.

Attractive older couple. Do they live in the Kleman Plaza condo? (See photo at top.) She's new to the library, can't find anything. I apologize for the mess, fetch her books: A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo, First Do No Harm by Lisa Belkin, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, and A Dangerous Fortune by Ken Follett. The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein is out, she'll wait on that one.

4:42 Time to wrap it up.

New Carpet: Day Two.

2010-12-17T00:06:00.000-05:00

They were about half done with the east wing today. I added new photos to my Facebook album here.

New Carpet in Adult Services

2010-12-16T00:23:00.000-05:00

This is pretty boring. I put it up on Facebook, but if you are not my FB "friend" you can see the first photos here.

Cobra Mole Pod

2010-12-15T01:42:00.004-05:00

Browsing a toy display at the discount outlet, T. J. Max, while my wife looked at clothes, I found Hasbro's G.I. Joe figures. Joe has been through many mutations since I owned the original Vietnam era version of him in the '60's. Nowadays "G. I. Joe" is the code name for an elite operations team fighting Cobra, a ruthless terrorist organization.

I was drawn to the Cobra Mole Pod, because it looked so much like old illustrations of the "iron mole" from Edgar Rice Burroughs's first Pellucidar novel, At the Earth's Core.

Sean Long has an amusing demo of the Cobra Mole Pod:

Sean Long likens the Terra-Viper action figure to Darth Vader. I am at a disadvantage, not having seen the film G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009), but I have to wonder why the Rise of Cobra's bad guys have such an odd, fantasy-rpg/Star Wars/Ninja provenance. Oh G. I. Joe, how thou art fallen!

I didn't much care for Burroughs's most famous creation, Tarzan, but I loved his Martian Barsoom novels. The "hollow earth" Pellucidar books I mostly remember for their gorgeous Ace paperback covers by Roy Krenkle. The "iron mole" has been rendered by several artists:

From the 1976 film with Peter Cushing:

Moles are technically named Tunnel Boring Machines, (TBM's), but in real life these are unmanned. I'd rather call the Cobra and Pellucidar machines Subterrenes.

The oddest result I got searching for this was a man who built a "giant steampunk drill" in his yard for Halloween this year.

Stories featuring TBM's are a small subset of Hollow Earth fiction.

Bring Back the CD-ROM Station?

2010-12-11T23:15:00.001-05:00

I suppose I must have noticed that our 2007 copy of the Florida Statistical Abstract was out-of-date before now. It is seldom used, but when you need it, nothing else will do. It's not available free online, as the United States Statistical Abstract is. By November of this year, now two editions behind, I made a fuss. The 2008 and 2009 editions were duly ordered. The 2010 was available on CD or as a download, but not yet as a printed book. Were we interested?

I thought we should wait for the book. It needs to be available for use by patrons, not only librarians. The only way a CD or download would work would be to have it on a dedicated public-access PC, like the pre-Web CD-ROM stations of yore.

Back in the 1990's, the library made a number of programs available on offline CD-ROM stations: Car Shop, American Business Disc, Phone Disc, Family Tree Maker, Bible Explorer, Discovery encyclopedias of Native American and American History, a job-search app.

As the Web grew, the CD-ROM stations were used less and less, and they were converted to additional public-access Internet PC's, for which there was a greater need. All the vendors wanted to migrate to a web-based, online format, and to sell libraries on providing their products remotely to users at home.

InfoUSA combined American Business Disc and Phone Disc into a single, web-based app, ReferenceUSA, designed for remote access through libraries at a breathtaking higher price than the CD-ROM products, many thousands of dollars. The web-based Ancestry for Libraries replaced Family Tree Maker, also at a steep price. When times got tight, these pricier web-based resources got axed from the budget. Now the library doesn't have them at all, in any format, and is the poorer for it.

The Foundation Grants Index disappeared as a fat, printed volume and went web-based only, which the library declined to subscribe to. For a while we were able to refer people to the State Library down the street to use it, but then they dropped it. There is presently no place in the Tallahassee area for people starting a non-profit to do free grant research that could bring money and tangible benefits to the community.

I think a case could be made for dedicating a few PC's to provide single-seat licensed, in-library access to worthwhile information resources which the library can't afford otherwise.

Hail Holy Queen

2010-12-08T11:31:00.004-05:00

The Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary

The Ghost of Internet Future

2010-12-06T00:48:00.007-05:00

The Searls quote below, with its link to an article from last June, The TV in the Snake of Time, was from a more recent article, Rethinking network neutrality. It put me in mind of of an old, (in Internet years, 1999!), piece by Andy Oram, The Ghosts of Internet Time, which was the inspiration for a paper I wrote in graduate school, Paradise Lost?: Geeks and the Opening of the Internet. It's a take-off on the prophetic visions of Scrooge in Dickens's A Christmas Carol.

Andy Oram is one of the Old Guard, much like Howard Rheingold, from the days before the WorldWide Web gave the Internet mass appeal. Even now, Ghosts retains the simple text look of a Gopher page. The pioneers who built the Internet had high hopes for it as a force for good, but they worried, as it began to take off with the Web, about whether it would remain free and open, and this is what Searls is talking about, eleven years after Ghosts.

“Oh Ghost of Internet Future,” I cried, “show me what glories the medium has still to offer!”
Someone grasped my arm and dragged me running through mazes of clattering streets under gray skies, where no creature tread and no breeze stirred. “Where is the Internet Future?” I yelled. “Where did everybody go?”
“The Internet is gone,” said my companion, stooped and hoary.
“How could that be—what could replace its bounty?”
“The international financial institutions have a proprietary satellite-based network, imposing and impenetrable. The entertainment companies put out 6500 programs a week, all strictly metered by kilobyte and filtered to isolate controversial content. The electric companies—which always controlled the ultimate pipe, and therefore ended up controlling the medium—run the network that activates devices in the home. Everything the vendors want is built into powerful circuits costing a thousandth of a penny, making software and the culture that accompanied it obsolete. So there are many separate networks, each specialized and tightly controlled.”
“But what about democracy? What about a public space? Is there no forum for the average citizen?”
The old Ghost’s wrinkled face cracked in a sputtering, hollow laugh. “Forum? You want a forum? I’ll give you a million of ’em. Every time Consolidated Services, Inc. or Skanditek puts up a new item on their media outlets, they leave a space for viewers to post reactions. And they post, and post, and post. Nobody can track the debates…”

And this years before the walled social networks of "Web 2.0". Perceptive, no? Look at the hundreds of comments to a single article on CNN or any major news or political web site. All for naught, pointless sound and fury. But Searls is optimistic in the long run. Yes, now there are lots of people using the Internet to shop and watch videos and television. But all the idealistic, non-commercial stuff is still going on. It's there if you look for it. You may not even realize that you are using it, (e.g. Wikipedia).

IMO web logs, (blogs), are a legitimate offspring of Usenet. If you really have something to say, and want it to persist online, create a blog and start linking to like-minded bloggers. Blogging is the fulfillment of Rheingold's vision of cyberspace homesteading.

Searls on the Future of Television

2010-12-04T17:40:00.000-05:00

Great quote: "TV is the elephant about to be digested in the Internet’s snake of time."

A Ginkgo Tree On My Street

2010-12-04T17:31:00.006-05:00

Ginkgo is a genus of highly unusual non-flowering plants with one extant species, G. biloba, which is regarded as a living fossil.

Let All The Earth Keep Silence

2010-12-03T01:17:00.004-05:00

Steerforth, at Age of Uncertainty, reports his son's words when they were snowed-in in Sussex, England, "This is Heaven. No traffic. I wish it was always like this."

When I came in to work Monday morning, after a week off, several librarians told me that the Internet had gone down last Wednesday afternoon from about 2:30 until closing, which had been early, at 6:00 p.m., on account of Thanksgiving the next day. They all had the same joyful reaction, "It was like a library again!"

It's painful, and kind of heartbreaking, to get back for 3½ hours something that's gone forever. When the Internet goes down, the library clears out quickly. Only readers of printed books remain. We try our best to regret the inconvenience to our users. Public-access computing is a good thing, and people depend upon it. But inwardly, we can't help feeling deeply relieved and grateful for the gift of a little while off the grid, an eclipse of the noise.

By "noise", I don't necessarily mean actual noise. 80 or 90 people working online generate "noise" even when quiet. And then there is the actual noise: people doubling up on a PC, people taking calls while online, people watching music videos with cheap headphones or earbuds that leak sound, people with unhappy babies and small children who wait and wait while their parents try to focus on their online tasks.

Steerforth's son, and my forlorn librarians, are on to something true. Our souls are starved for silence.

Reader Advisory

2010-12-01T01:01:00.004-05:00

Another working day, doing what needs to be done. A co-worker is out sick. The departure of one of our best shelvers is beginning to tell: the stacks need tidying badly. Six of our aging public-access PC's on the second floor are out of commission due to a faulty switch in the network, making waits longer for a session. You shrug it off, put on a smile, and make yourself useful.

It was refreshing, then, when a man asked me to recommend some good "mysteries". (There is a debate over what to call this genre. Reviewers tend to use "crime fiction" nowadays.) I asked him what he had read and enjoyed, crossing my fingers. Would I know his "flavor"? Would I have to resort to the print resource, Genreflecting? I used to do a lot of reader advisory when I drove the bookmobile, because my collection was so small. Here in Adult Services at the main library, I've gotten rusty.

He said he like mysteries with an international flavor and interesting locales. He reeled off a string of authors, all of whom I knew and liked: Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano mysteries set in Sicily, Ian Rankin's Edinburgh stories featuring John Rebus, Colin Cotterill's Dr. Siri novels set in Laos, Henning Mankell, whom I've not read, but whose television adaptations starring Kenneth Branagh I've seen. He had read the old Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.

I would not need Genreflecting after all. I offered Marshall Browne's The Wooden Leg of Inspector Anders and Michael Dibden's Aurelio Zen series, both set in Italy. He might like Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series, set in Yorkshire, and John Harvey's Charlie Resnick Nottingham novels. For Mankell "readalikes" I gave him the list of authors at Scandinavian Crime Fiction that I used for a very successful display last year. I also suggested Chinatown Beat, by Henry Chang, but he'd read it, and Death of a Nationalist by Rebecca Pawel.

Returning from a browse in Fiction, he said he'd go with John Harvey for now. He gave me a tip too. Camilleri's cop is named after a Spanish author, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, whose Barcelona-based Pepe Carvalho mysteries are not well-known here, but some of which have been published in English translation.

Franklin Folger's Girls

2010-11-27T00:50:00.005-05:00

(From the preface.)

"People were not meant to be hurt."
Those seven words describe Franklin Folger's feelings toward his fellow men, or to be more exact and relevant to this book, toward the ladies he draws. And that's why, by reviewing their absurdities not with scorn but with gentle humor, Folger has made The Girls so delightful, engaging and winsome. You may shake your head over the naivete of the real-life counterparts of Folger's ladies but it's hard not to chuckle over the often subtle twist of their artless simplicity into downright cleverness, even wisdom.

Before he conceived the idea of The Girls, Franklin Folger had prepared for his career by studying painting, commercial art and cartooning at the Cincinnati Art Academy. He was a successful free-lance illustrator and cartoonist and even now, in addition to his six-a-week cartoon of The Girls, he draws and sells a dozen or so cartoons a week. Cartooning is his vocation, his avocation, and he has no other hobby.

Folger's gentle cartoons about his ladies are distributed by the Sun-Times—Daily News Syndicate and appear in over a hundred newspapers. His fan mail takes almost as much time as his cartooning. We hope this collection, the second in book form, will please his old fans and make many new ones.

Doubleday published seven collections of Folger's Girls cartoons over a decade, 1961-71. Folger's "Girls" were middle-class housewives before the women's movement, who took home-ec and had high school diplomas: Lucy Ricardo, June Cleaver, earnest and wide-eyed. Women who wanted careers were expected not to marry.

Upgrading My Bible Study Tools

2010-11-24T04:16:00.004-05:00

Every Tuesday night at 10 p.m. I spend an hour at Adoration of the Holy Eucharist in the chapel at my church. Blessed Sacrament is the only church in the area to have Perpetual Adoration.

People do all kinds of things at Adoration: contemplation of the Sacrament of the Altar, the Rosary or the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, the Liturgy of the Hours, the Stations of the Cross. Bookish man that I am, most of my hour is devoted to study; of theology, scripture and church history, in the way that a Jew goes to his synagogue to study the Torah.

Having worked my way through the entire Catechism, a number of works by Pope Benedict, and several dense works of theology by Jean Daniélou, S.J., I found myself led to tackle what are known as the books of the Former Prophets, Joshua through Kings, also called the Deuteronomistic History. They have always been mysterious and baffling to me. Religious skeptics love to quote them, with their deeds of blood and wrathful judgments, as evidence for the prosecution of God in the dock.

I observed a couple of weeks ago that my reference books for Bible study were pretty old. I bought many of them in the '80's when I was a new convert and an Episcopalian. My Jerome Bible Commentary dates from 1968, and I have known for years that there is a newer edition (1990). My Oxford Bible Atlas, (3rd edition, 1984), was superseded by a 4th edition in 2007. Our RSV Catholic Edition Bible, which we've owned since the early '90's, was copyrighted 1966, and a 2nd Catholic Edition was released in 2006, with maps of the Holy Land, which I've missed in the old edition.

So I splurged. In these days of online book-selling, you don't usually have to pay full price for a new book once it has been out for a while. I ordered the Ignatius RSV Study Bible, 2nd Catholic Edition, the New Jerome Biblical Commentary, and the Oxford Bible Atlas, 4th Edition. I also ordered a couple of study guides, Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction by Lawrence Boadt, C.S.P., and You Can Understand The Bible: A Practical And Illuminating Guide To Each Book In The Bible by Peter Kreeft.

Blogging Reference

2010-11-20T22:59:00.002-05:00

10:00 Open. Working with MK today, VB is Super. FSU's away at Maryland, FAMU is playing at home at 2:30. Quiet day? Knock on wood.

Running clean-up, check-disk, defrag utilities on workroom PC's: Have they ever been run before? Literally gigs of files in recycling bins, temp folders.

PC for Monica.

PC hung at policy screen, reset. Other PC freezing, give him another.

PC for Ronald.

Phone: Betty wants Evanovich, 7,8,9. Fetch them from bookmobile.

Paper comes back.

We've been getting calls from people who want to reach Representative-elect Steve Southerland, who beat incumbent Allen Boyd for a seat in the US House. Problem is, he hasn't been seated yet. The new members don't have offices yet. All we can do is give them the number for his campaign.

Nice pb copy of Brideshead Revisited in the donation bin, in the 1999 Back Bay Books ed.

PC for JD. 15 min. wait.

11:00 Workroom PC's defragging.

Make round of 2nd floor, stopping to straighten shelves. Deputy Marvin passes me on his own round. All quiet.

Paper comes back.

Man got overdue notice for ILL copy of Juliette by de Sade. Can he renew? It's 2000 pages. Send renewal request, tell him to call KF on Monday.

Boy wants Halo movies. We don't appear to have any. How about Halo books? Find some, all lost, checked out or on hold. Finally find one in YA Fiction. Send him downstairs.

Betty comes w hubby and little daughter for her Evanovich books. Sweet young family.

Phone: the library gave away The Things They Carried by Tom O'Brien, (this year's Big Read selection), at the Veterans Day Parade. Do we have any copies left? I think so, tell him to call DC in Admin. on Monday.

Man wants a book with something about building a shelter for feral cats. I'm doubtful, nothing indexed for "feral cats", but show him cat section. Too late, I find lots of plans online, but he's left.

Betty again. How to find books with "B" in call number. Show her biographies.

12:09 L. not here yet. Guess I will have lunch.

12:56 Back. L., our volunteer, never showed. No L, No L...

Woman wants some Left Behind, (by Tim LaHaye), books.

PC for Ron.

Took her to the shelf. She wanted the later ones in the "Before They Were Left Behind" series. She couldn't find The Rapture, though catalog shows 7 copies.

PC 64 hung at blue screen. Hard power off/on.

Found The Rapture in overstock. Observed that Left Behind section was heavily depleted, refreshed from overstock.

MK gone to lunch.

Where is Consumer Reports on cars? Where are copy machines?

Sound trouble on PC 45. Control Panel shows sound device installed. Test w our phones, sound is there. His headphones are the prob.

MK and I were talking about interest in the Left Behind books, and in religion generally, as an index of social anxiety.

Man says he got a "security threat" on PC 38.

Break a $5 for Consumer Reports woman.

Woman wants TABE test book. Only one remains out of many original copies. Place hold. Wants books on writing biography, take to shelf.

How can she stop print job?

PC for Fatima.

Petite older woman w short silver hair in red Taoist Tai Chi Society sweatshirt says her reserve on Sizzling Sixteen disappeared. Find copy on New shelves for her. Lively trade in Evanovich today.

PC for Darryl, who wants to apply for a job online & needs help.

Young blond boy w grandfather wants Godzilla: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters by William Tsutsui. Take to shelf.

MK back. Whoof! I've been busy!

Can he turn in DVD's here? Wants to watch them get checked in. Send him down to Circulation.

Get Darryl to start page for Sam's Club job app. He says he can type.

1:50 Smoke break. When I get back, it's quiet.

Lunchtime reading is The Torch Bearers by Alexander Fullerton, book five in the Nicholas Everard WWII Saga. Only one more...

Mom w daughter writing paper: order The Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Susan B. Anthony Reader : Correspondence, Writings, Speeches from branch for her, show women's section in sociology.

She can't find A Thousand Years of Good Prayers : Stories by Yiyun Li on shelf. I find it, misshelved.

Phone: BJ at branch, pull Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat, hold for patron driving here.

Two high school girls want: The Gilded Age : a history in documents by Janette Thomas Greenwood in reference coll.; America's Gilded Age : intimate portraits of an era of extravagance and change, 1850-1890 by Milton Rugoff, is out, they don't want hold; Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age by Larry M. Bartels, find on shelving cart.

Gone with the Wind on DVD, place hold.

Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit by Francis Chan, place hold.

Hervé wants Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick. Tells me about Dick cult in France. Find copy on shelf.

2:44 Web is spotty, lots of users getting browser error pages. BB from branch calls w same problems. ML calls too, says they are down as well. Make report to Super, need to call MIS.

Couple want adoption books, Dune Messiah. Take to 362 for adoption, he'll pick up Dune Messiah at branch.

Phone: Address & phone for Heritage Oaks retirement community.

Taken by Midnight by Lara Adrian. Is available at branch, she'll go there.

PC for Mike

3:30 Library Web page is down, but users can navigate to other web sites.

How to find schools with dental hygienist programs? Show directories of two-year and technical schools.

She says we're holding Boone's Lick by Larry McMurtry at the refdesk.

Directory of four-year colleges.

Today's paper.

PC 51 has blue screen.

Round up books on slavery and racism for college girl. All "buffalo soldier" books missing.

She wants Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart in regular print. Only large print here. Reserve branch copy. Is anxious about pickup, will be gone for Thanksgiving. Suspend hold for a few days to give her more time next week.

Phone: MIS calls, want to talk to Media.

Out for a smoke. 4:25, it's almost over. Mercy. I think I'm done here.

Branches and Rain

Free E-books Are A Mixed Bag

Why You Should Read "A Dance to the Music of Time"

Umberto Eco on European Identity

Sony PRS-T1 Reader Up And Running

Hiring Interview Committee

A Day Without Wikipedia

Sony Reader On Order

Nick Lowe: A Melancholy Smile

A Librarian's Downfall

Stop The World

Paul Johnson On War Novels

150 Years Ago Today

Nuns With Cat

The Uncertain Status of E-Lending

More on E-Book Readers

E-Readers for Seniors, continued...

Are E-Book Readers Suitable Gifts For Aging Parents?

People Look East, An Advent Carol

NYPL & OWS

"French Wedding Cake"

Blogging Reference

Another Working Day

The Call of the Desert

Blogging Reference

Back in the Land of the Living

Manhattan Trip 2011

Blogging Reference

Codices and Daleks

To Largo Once More

Blogging Reference

Summer Break Is Over

The Marines of the Library

Shot of Love

Heat is Austerity, Cold is Misery

Hard Times

To Largo And Back

Blogging Reference

My July Fourth

Stan Rogers - The Jeannie C.

We'll Meet Again No More

Blogging Reference

Another Virus Attack, WORM_OTURUN.ASH

Questions to the Answer Squad

Ways of Escape: Books in Prison

A new sub-genre: Nazi Noir

Virus Panic Shutdown!

Meet the New Optimists - Newsweek

The Professor's Picks

Home Alone

Last Week of Legislative Session!

Webinar: Empowering the Reader in a Digital World

My Lenten "Vacation"

Blogging Reference

On Quitting Smoking, and on Too Much News

B&R Roundup

The Bibliophile's E-Reader...

Blogging Reference

Books That Disappear

The Domes of Baggins End

Virtual Reference: Behind The Curtain

The Sound Of My Own Wheels

Quiet Week

Catholic Herald Digital, Skirmish Magazine

On Reading Manuals

Digital Media: RTFM

Blogging Reference

On Reading the NYT Business Pages

A Gift From My Past: Compass Rose

Sweat of My Brow

Recent Acquisitions

Memories of Aviation in 1940's Bridgeport Ct.

Blogging Reference

A Fresh Take on the Western Novel

Frontierland

Winged Chariots: The Popular Art of Early Flight

Update on Self, More on E-Readers, Tablets

Scott Inauguration Parade Marchers Gather, Eat Lunch.

E-Readers and the Great Eyeball War

In Case of Zombies