Hiring Interview Committee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.