Adelaide Hanscom and Blanche Cumming Earth Could Not Answer Omar Khayyam, tr. Edward Fitzgerald: “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” (1905, 1912) Earth could not answer; nor the Seas that mourn
In flowing Purple, of their Lord forlorn;
Nor rolling Heaven, with all his Signs reveal’d
And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn
Daily Thoughts 3/18/2009
Today started out well, I have been transferred from reference to collection development. This is a nice first step towards my goals. This means, I will be doing more ordering and working more closely with the material in the collection. It also moves me closer to the publishing side of librarianship. This puts me in a really good mood.
I read some magazines this morning. I found a very nice title in Publishers Weekly, March 9, 2009 issue. Sometimes, you notice that people write titles that grab your attention immediately. There is a magic in having the right title to a book. In The Land of Invented Language: Esperanto Rockstars, Klingon Poets, Logian Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language by Arika Okrent. Notice how land and language match nicely. Also, the use of two word descriptors is evocative. We are ordering the book.
This afternoon I spent some time putting paper slips with descriptions for books for a cataloger who is supposed to visit on Friday. We have a decent amount of uncataloged books in our processing area. On Monday, a representative from Baker and Taylor is visiting with us to discuss our back orders.
I spent some time looking up pdfs of library surveys on google. I am looking at possibly creating a short, simple user survey of two to three pages for ourlibrary. Something with checkboxes that is easy to fill in. I used the search string: "public library" AND "user survey" OR "community survey "AND filetype:pdf in google to pull out examples of surveys. Then I eliminated a few of them. I am looking at five of them right now.
On the way home, I read some of Social Software in Libraries. I rather liked the site http://www.libworm.com which is a rss search engine for library blogs.
2 comments:
It's interesting to read about the activities at different libraries. At my library most all reference librarians regularly participate in collection development...ordering, weeding. We also have a full time cataloger as part of our staff. I didn't realize there were roving catalogers.
We are part of a library cooperative instead of a system. There is a central office which maintains the common catalog and interlibrary loan in our county. But our budgets are separate and many other things are separate.
People come to us from the headquarters which maintains the computer catalog and interlibrary loan.
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