Friday, January 25, 2008

Random Thoughts.

Andrew Carnegie, Patron of Libraries

I am going to start reading the Djinn In The Nightingales Eye by A.S. Byatt on the way home on the train tonight. Hopefully, it will be well written like most of A.S. Byatt's work.

Today is library tour day. I had to walk a couple people around the building and show them things. I showed the whole building top to bottom. This includes all the nooks and crannies. Where I work is a very old building it was built in 1904, it is a giant old Carnegie building which has truly seen better days. If you walk downstairs we have two floors of mezzanine with many last copies of books from the last hundred years. The building has a kind of creaky character all of its own.

The train is on a repair schedule, they are putting in new signal equipment, so I have to leave a little early today. It gives me a longer time to read, but it also takes longer. I can't stand it that they have to repair things while people are on the same line. The conductor announced the train will be continued to work on until February 29.


I put in my professional association memberships. ALA-- American Library Association, with the subdivisions RUSA-- Reference and User Services Association, IFRT-- Intellectual Freedom Round Table. I also joined my local library association. I am debating whether I should shell out money and pay for the CBLDF-- Comic Book Legal Defense Fund membership http://www.cbldf.org/ . It is a rather unusual organization. Their website is really interesting. They document all of the legal cases against comic books which are occurring all over.

Of the organizations, I have found RUSA to be the most useful. They have a nice magazine which they put out every quarter-- Reference and User Services Quarterly, and they also have various online classes for improving reference and collection development skills that are inexpensive. My particular strengths in librarianship are reference and collection development.

I really enjoy looking through catalogs of books to order. I like the feeling of looking in the Baker & Taylor ordering system. Book catalogs have a nice glossy feel to them.

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Today, I am trying out a new advertising system. I wonder if it will work. The advertising is based on bidding for spots on my website. I put four spots up. The site is called Project Wonderful. Currently, the ads at this point cost nothing.

Right now, like most of the stuff I have for advertising purposes it is in the experimental stage. I am cheering for an initial 75 cents so I can buy a can of selzer from the staff vending machine.

2 comments:

Colin Campbell said...

Mr Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, where my dad grew up and my brother lives. Just up the road from Kirkcaly where Adam Smith grew up and where my mum grew up. Quite a large impact on the world for such a dour working class part of the world. It is the only place in the UK that has ever had a communist Member of Parliament.

Book Calendar said...

It is amazing how hard headed capitalists can come from such working class backgrounds. Carnegie gave to libraries because they helped him develop his steel making processes. Sadly, libraries today aren't so technically oriented. Adding a bit more science and trade material to public libraries would be a good thing.