Daily Thoughts 05/21/2012

Palmer Cox's "The Brownies" reading a book, from "The Palmer Cox Brownie Primer", 1906
Daily Thoughts 05/21/2012

I read some more of the Odyssey translated by Alexander Pope on the subway to work.  Today, May 21, 2012 is Alexander Pope's birthday.  http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/21/2012 Pope as Hedgehog and Monkey.

I updated the Twitter and Facebook account for the library this morning, checked the gifts, and the displays.  I also started doing a little more inventory in the mezzanine.  I am in the poetry section right now.  Sometimes you find interesting older titles like Poems of American Patriotism Chosen by Brander Matthews and Illustrated by N.C.Wyeth.

Part of this is keeping steady track of how things are going.

The shifting project in the oversize books is slowly moving forward.

I spent a little bit of time going over Evanced which is the system used for Summer Reading.  I will be working with Adult Summer Reading.  I also spent a bit of time looking at Bookletters which we use to generate our bestseller lists for the website.  It has a number of different bestseller lists on it including the New York Times Bestseller list.

I am looking at Library Journal Books Most Borrowed for May 15, 2012.  I also checked April and February for this.
http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2012/05/books/bestsellers-the-books-most-borrowed-in-u-s-libraries/

I spent a little bit more time on Codecademy learning CSS, I am totally stuck on Javascript.  It might as well be ancient Aramaic.  I have had a little bit of background with HTML and CSS.  What I might do is read a book on Javascript, finish the lessons on CSS then go back and do the exercises on Javascript.  I also spent a little more time on Lynda.com learning more about Dreamweaver.  The exercises are even easier to follow with some CSS background.

I checked out the book, JavaScript The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland.  Scripting languages are different than markup languages like HTML and CSS from my understanding.  I am going to find out the difference in a while.  The book is from Pogue Press which is an O'Reilly imprint.

Web Bits

Connecting The Dots: Linking Broadband Adoption to Job Creation and Job Competitiveness
http://www.twcresearchprogram.com/pdf/TWC_WijewardenaReport.pdf
This has a lot to say about job creation mainly focused on African Americans, however, a lot of it is applicable in general.  The report is written by Time Warner Cable and the National Urban League.  I think there will be a role for libraries in this kind of program.

Funding Free Book Distribution Protests Proposed for NYPL Cuts
http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/05/funding/free-book-distribution-protests-proposed-nypl-cuts/
Urban Librarians Unite is supporting these protests.  It is an interesting group.