Daily Thoughts 9/10/2010 (Books, Ordering, Libraries, Newspapers)

Gustav Wentzel, norwegian painter, 1859-1927, Frokost II / Morgenstemning (breakfast II / morning mood) , 1885, National Gallery, Oslo. 




Daily Thoughts 9/10/2010

The Wall Street Journal is launching a book review section http://www.observer.com/2010/media/wall-street-journal-will-launch-book-review-section




The New York Times will go digitally only soon. I can see people paying for a print on demand if they still want a paper version, but mostly digital only. This is the wave of the future. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/09/arthur-sulzberger-we-will_n_710251.html

My book bag is full of books now.  I am still reading Common As Air, but I am also reading Self Esteem Third Edition by Matthew McKay, Ph.D.  This is mainly a workbook.  There are a variety of exercises on how to redirect your thoughts.  One of them which I liked quite a bit was to write down all the positive and negative aspects about yourself, then change the negative aspects into neutral factual statements, and finally combine everything into a more positive description of yourself.  I also have started on Social Media 101 by Chris Brogan.  I am reading three books at this time.  I have two more to read later, Rework by Jason Fried and  David Heinemeier Hansson, and Zero History by William Gibson.

Another book also came in for me to read, The Gaslight Dogs by Karin Lowachee it is a mass market paperback.  Jeff Vandermeer reviewed it in the New York Times Book Review.

I have been doing some ordering.  I noticed a few books of interest.  The one that caught my attention most was Djibouti by Elmore Leonard.  It is a crime novel about modern day Somali pirates.

On the way home, I read some more of Common As Air by Lewis Hyde.  There is a quote which I find especially interesting from Noah Webster in the book, "Nothing is more dangerous to liberty than the power of entailed art and ideas."

I finished adding August and September of 2008 book reviews to my book reviews list.

Daily Thoughts 5/5/2009

Elias P. van Bommel boekbinder 1898

Daily Thoughts

Today was another busy day. I spent more time examining the 700s. I finished making my first bookmark for the library. It is a bookmark on graphic novels. I am going to work on another bookmark on writing later in the week.

I also spent some time clearing off extra paperwork on my desk. I read the latest Kirkus Reviews and New York Times book review. I also did some minor cleanup with the displays. We have more shelving for the slat walls coming. I also checked the gift books for donated items that are worth adding and found a new calculus book and a current automotive repair book.

I am talking to the Baker and Taylor representative tomorrow. It was a nice predictable day.

I am reading Library 2.0 A Guide to Participatory Library Service by Michael E. Casey and Laura C. Savastinuk. While the ideas are interesting in this book, I don't agree with many of them. I still have some very traditional ideas about libraries in some cases. I also picked up Information Tomorrow Reflections on Technology and the Future of Public and Academic Libraries, Edited by Rachel Singer Gordon witha Foreword by Stephen Abram.

I managed to get ALA (American Library Association) Connect which is the site for social networking on ALA working. I joined a few groups. I noticed that the main groups on the bulletin board with posts are the Social Media, Gaming, and Second Life groups which is kind of interesting. There is a very large following in Second Life by librarians.

Daily Thoughts 4/11/2009

Bookplate of Edgar Rice Burroughs

Daily Thoughts 4/11/2009

I put The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines on hold. He writes humorous fantasy. This book was on the Locus bestseller list so I thought might be fun to read.

I am focusing right now on reading Fundamentals of Collection Development & Management by Peggy Johnson. The book is very nice general overview. It does not go into a lot of detail, but it gives you some guidelines about what a collection development librarian does. The book was printed in 2004, so it is within the last five years in terms of practice. I found an interesting quote which I posted on twitter in the book, "The high purpose of book selection is to provide the right book for the right reader at the right time." Francis K. Drury. I might replace the word book with either information or media to update it to current practices, but it is spot on.

I finished reading this book tonight. Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management was an interesting book. It told me much of what I might need to do in the coming months: put together a user survery, review the way our books are shelved, review collection policy, look at our standing orders, examine our holds reports to see what we need to purchase, think about a three year plan for collection development are some of the ideas presented which may be worthwhile. It also went over the history of collection development and a lot of theory.

What it did not do is show me in any way how to do collection development. This is a common problem with the professional literature of librarianship, the literature tells you what you should do, but not how to do it. There is an assumption that you will learn by doing in a hands on sense. It is very hard to find books that are oriented towards practice. Maybe I have to read more professional journals, blogs, and wikis to get the current practice part.

I am also reading We The Media. It is quite enjoyable. They already mentioned a book called The Transparent Society by David Brin. David Brin is one of my favorite science fiction authors. There seems to be a strong connection between writing about the intenet and being a science fiction author. Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross are both on the Locus Bestseller list for science fiction and are very involved in issues around intellectual freedom and the internet.

Merchandising

Merchandising

Our library is not particulary merchandised. Merchandising is breaking books into lots of small categories like in a bookstore. My boss resists the idea of merchandising the collection. He wants everything to be either alphabetical or by dewey number for the most part. It is very old fashioned. There are a few merchanised collections in my area, the job information center, the multicultural collection, the business reference, the mystery collection, the young adult collection, and the law collection.

The problem with merchandising is that it requires you to have a lot of people to put the books away. There are a lot more categories to put the books in and it is easier to misplace books as well.

The other problem which often happens is that people ask to have books categorized by race, ethnicity, or religion. Where are all the clean books? Where are all the black books? Where are all the hispanic books? Why aren't all the christian books separated from the regular collection? So far, we have partially avoided the hot button issue of separating books out by race, religions, politics, or ethnicity. We have a "multicultural collection" in reference.

We have not separated the urban fiction from the rest of the fiction collection. This is mostly black ghetto writing. There is some hispanic urban fiction, but not much. It is its own genre of writing. This might be a good category to "merchandise" because it is so popular here.

It is much easier to find and display books when they are merchandised. It also puts together similar materials. I am going to ask to have all the graphic novels merchandised so they are easier to find and manage.

I also think having a separate merchandised computer book collection would be better as well. There are computer books in several locations, Quicken is in the accounting section, Wordperfect is with the keyboarding books, digital photography is with photography, upgrading PC's is with the engineering books. It would probably work better if they computer books were merchandised.

Our collection really needs to be reorganized. I can see where we could do a lot more towards having some more categories of books. We would have to relabel the books, but that really would not be a problem.

Bridges Out of Poverty-- Workshop

Today, I was sent to participate in a workshop, Bridges Out of Poverty at the Hudson River Museum. The program ran from 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. it was presented by a lady named Terie Dreussi Smith. I got there in time to have a section of muffin, half a croissant, and a cup of coffee. Several of my colleagues also went. I often see these events as a chance to gab with colleagues and find out a little bit about libraries in different places. A lot of these events exist for networking.

As a presentation it was kind of interesting. The presenter suggested several books as she was doing her talk. Many of them are classics on poverty issues. I am going to list a few of them. Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities, Rick Bragg All Over But The Shouting, and Paolo Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed. She also talked about a book which creates a better framework for explaining poverty than the ones beings used now; The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can't Help the Poor (Hardcover)
by Charles H. Karelis.

We watched a few video clips as part of the presentation. One which was particularly entertaining was a clip on a movie on social class in the United Staes, People Like Us



I think the talk was aimed at administrators who were going to create policies or pick up programs to help poor people in their agencies. The focus of the program was not how to turn poor people into middle class people, but to help poor people improve their economic stability. I am really not sure how effective this would be.

We got a lot of statistics. One of the most striking is that 49% of poor people spend more than half their income on housing. Also poverty is increasing inside the United States. As more globalization and deindustrialization occurs there are less and less middle class jobs in the United States. Jobs are moving overseas.

Something else which she said was the need for sometimes extreme entertainment for poor people. Because so many people who are living on the edge are so close to losing the roofs over their heads, not having enough to eat, and they can't afford to buy a lot of things, they often turn to public sources of entertainment.

The public library gets a lot of people who are very poor. Some people will come in who appear to be on public assistance or disability, are retired and living on a fixed income. They often borrow four or five different dvds every single day and return them the next day.

I really am not sure what I will do with the information I received from the program. I am hoping that we will get back our GED program, the afterschool tutoring program for little kids and maybe some more programss on helping people get jobs. Hopefully the recent work on improving the Job Information Center might help.

Things are getting harder lately. Gas and food prices are rising. The middle class is struggling in the United States right now. For people who are already poor it is probably really rough.

There is a websites for the seminars. The seminars apparently were done at Brooklyn Public Library, New York Public Library, and Queensboro Public Library.
http://www.ahaprocess.com/

I have noticed that a lot of consultants have been moving into the nonprofit sector recently. Recently we did a film program with Healthfirst a Medicaid Part D provider.

Morning Thoughts

A lot of the teenagers have been coming in to read Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. He also wrote The Kite Runner which was another bestseller. This is being assigned to read in the high schools and colleges. I am going to read it because part of my job is to be in tune with what people are reading. I am not sure that I really want to read it. But, it is often hard to tell what will be decent that the larger population reads. Teachers are trying to find more contemporary books for people to read other than the classics.

Someone called in and requested A Thousand Splendid Suns for pickup. I have The Kite Runner on my desk. I am going to read it on the train home today. I read a bit of The Kite Runner on the train. For a bit, I pondered stopping reading the book, there are definitely pieces of the book I don't like. I thought it would be more exotic. I thought too much of the book was predictable and showed a stereotyped view of Afghanistan. I think I will finish reading the story. I am definitely not going to review it.

I was also looking through Locus Magazine. David Drake came out with his sixth book in the Lieutenant Leary Commanding Series, or RCN series. I rather like that the two main characters Lady Adele Mundy and Lieutenant Daniel Leary are close friends, not lovers. This does not usually happen in most military science fiction titles.

I ran into the usual request for me to get my own url. Supposedly, if you have your own url you will get more traffic, be more professional, and have greater control over your blog. I am using blogspot. I think there are different purposes with different blog services. For example, Livejournal, is a site specific designed for keeping a blog as a kind of journal. Ellen Datlow, a major science fiction editor has a blog on Livejournal which is very much in the personal journal style. http://ellen-datlow.livejournal.com/ .

Blogs and blog services serve very different purposes. For example, Typepad charges a fee to use their blog service. They offer a variety of special widgets and services found nowhere else. It seems that many professional publishers use typepad. Joe Wikert's blog, Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog uses typepad http://jwikert.typepad.com/

The main reason, I would switch from Blogger is if I needed my site to become much more general than just a blog. Jeff Vandermeer started his blog on Blogspot. http://vanderworld.blogspot.com/ . Then when he needed to have his blog become a general website about him, he purchased his own domain name. http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/ . This is a good example of a change from a blog to a more general site.

One of the main reasons that I use Blogspot, is that it allows me to use a variety of advertising and similar materials. Wordpress is not as geared towards advertising or commercial use as Blogspot. In fact, there are terms of service in Wordpress which limit advertising. Adsense is a major product of google and people are encouraged to include it in their blogs.

Another reason is that I am learning how to do blogging. I get suggestions on how to improve my blog and it is fairly easy to go into the CSS and change things in Blogspot. I added a footer, put in metatags, and now am considering altering the anchor text in many of my images so they will be more easily picked up by search engines. This is SEO (search engine optimization) stuff.

Todays Wandering Thoughts

I found a couple of books that seemed to be worth reading and placed them on hold. Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu. This book came out in 2008. I hope this book has a section on the famous book, Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Fredrick Wortham written in 1954 on how comic books cause juvenile delinquency. Just to give you an idea of where I stand, I really like the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, http://www.cbldf.org/

There is also a new book called The Philosophers Apprentice by David Morrow. It is science fiction book. David Morrow writes very interesting science fiction. There is a review for it in Locus Magazine already. I think my review will probably be a bit different.
http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/03/locus-magazines-faren-miller-reviews.html

I changed something with my link exchange. Money Saving Tech Tips was nice enough to include me in his list of choice links. He has been following my blog for quite a while. So, I decided to expand my link exchange to include sites other than books. http://money-saving-tech-tips.blogspot.com/

I think that the metatags and new banner have considerably improved my traffic. I have not done any keyword analysis of the subjects which I am attaching to my blog. Keyword analysis basically, checks to make sure you are using the keywords which get the most blog traffic. I think at times it can be dishonest. If I really wanted to get a lot more traffic, I would include words like sex, Madonna, youtube, batman, pornography, spam, and similar things. I think it will be better in the long run to just use the right words to describe my blog.

There are a few things I have noticed about keywords. If a keyword is capitalized it is less likely to be a high traffic keyword. Also, it is good to include plurals of keywords; library, libraries, librarian, librarians for example.

Two of my holds came in. The first is Predictably Irrational The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely. The second is a dvd, Wallace & Gromit, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The dvd case has some chew marks on it, probably left by a little kid. There are any variety of things you will find in library books; coffee stains, water damage, shopping recipts, bookmarks, food stains, and other things in library books when they are returned. Very rarely you find one dollar bills used as bookmarks.

I decided to add a list of a few publishing blogs which I found rather interesting with some unique professional content. It is on the sidebar.

I accomplished something I finished reading all seven of the books on the Mythopoeic Award Book Challenge. I also reviewed all seven of the books which is an interesting accomplishment. I rather liked doing the concept of a book challenge. I might even do the Graphic Novel Challenge, although, I have already read most of the graphic novels in the challenge already.
http://foxywriter.com/2007/12/27/mythopoeic-award-challenge/

I tried to read Predictably Irrational The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely, but could not get into the book. The subject was interesting, behavioral economics, but the writing was not. I tried the fifty page rule: read fifty pages before you put a book down and it still did not hold my attention. I will try something else tomorrow. I was surprised because the book reminded me slightly of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt which I liked.

Thoughts for the Day

Today has been a rather slow day. Two books came in for me, Teach Yourself Copywriting, 2nd Edition, by J. Jonathan Gabay and The Dreaming Void, a science fiction novel by Peter F. Hamilton. I finished reading Matter by Iain Banks on the train home. It was quite interesting with many nuanced levels of complexity.

I hope to learn a few things from the copywritng book; how to write press releases, choose title lines for articles, and write to sell.

Sometimes, as soon as I am finished reading one book, I start reading the second book. I prefer reading to looking at the other passengers on the train sometimes. The books are often more attractive than the smiling face of your fellow passengers. A lot of people wear sunglasses on the train, I prefer a book or newspaper to shield my eyes.

It is a very slow day today. I sorted some pamphlets, checked around to see if we had enough round footstools for the basement. There were quite a few in odd places. I also spent a decent amount of time on the reference desk. I also planned a little bit on what I was going to do next week, weeding, ordering career books, a business program, and maybe a visit to the local art gallery.

It is one of those days where I am not quite sure what to write about. One of the things I have been thinking about is the concept of what a professional blog is. Some people have complained that my blog does not look particularly polished. One of the goals I have in writing this blog is to learn to use the technology of writing blogs. This means designing my own banners, buttons, and similar things. It also means learning to upload pictures and video files.

I am trying to do all of this myself. This means, it will have a very personalized style. I don't expect everything to look perfect. In fact, that is one of the charms of blogging. You get to see a persons individual style.

Another reason I am reading the book Teach Yourself Copywriting is I am a believer in many cases of anti-consumerism. I believe there is an overemphasis on cheap unhealthful products for people. Some might call this Un-American. I call this a type of alternative thinking. This is one of the reasons I reviewed Debt Is Slavery earlier.

I think there is a thread of marketing and advertising which is not good for people in general. I will read material for consumer self-defense. It is not enough to just read on how to save money, but also how to protect yourself from advertising. Some people become overwhelmed by shopping and it destroys their lives.

Fuelmyblog and other social networking sites, Walking the Stacks, Jackie Ormes African American Women Cartoonist

Today, I am top blog on Fuelmyblog. It is one of those popularity contest things where you aim to get the most recommendations. Fuelmyblog is a type of social networking site. I enjoy looking at the different sites. They are identified by pictures. I like it when I get showcased. I hope it means more people will read my blog. I removed the link because it only stays up for the day you are featured.

I also changed the banner at the top of my blog after some not so kind complements on the quality of the banner. I used Microsoft Photodraw V.2 to create the new banner. Last time, I used paint. It was not that hard to figure out Microsoft Photodraw. I also created a new thumbnail icon for Entrecard.

Occassionally, I take the time to make a full circuit of the stacks or shelving to make sure everything is in order. I check for items that are lying on top of other books, misplaced books, sections that are out of order. I do a circuit of the area which I am in charge of business, law, reference to make sure everything at least looks neat and in order. If anything is slightly out of order, I let my library aide (they changed the name from pages) know where to put things in order. I also pick up loose material on tables and check to see that the public access terminals for looking up books are working. Adults and children like to hack into the catalogs for looking up books so they can get internet access without having to signup to use computers.

As part of this I take the time to look at the new books section every other day so I know exactly what is there without having to leave the desk. In addition, I occassionally look at what is being processed to go upstairs that needs to be added. Yes, we do see what is going to be put out before the patrons, so we can often get things before the patrons. I will also occassionally look around in the storage area, we have two floors of mezzanine (basement) where we work to look at the older books. There are a lot of really interesting older titles.

When I was looking at the new books section, I came across a rather interesting title, it is an oversize book. It came out in February 2008. Jackie Ormes, The First African American Woman Cartoonist by Nancy Goldstein. Jackie Ormes's work first appeared in 1937. It is the first time I have seen this. There apparently is an Ormes Society which supports African American women cartoonists. http://theormessociety.com/ . The comic is a title called Torchy Brown in Heartbeats, an African American romance cartoon. She also made the first African American character doll from comics, Patty-Jo. The cartoons are very interesting to look at.

Jackie Ormes The First African American Cartoonist is reviewed in the forthcoming March 30, 2008 New York Times Book Review on P.13. The review is worth reading, for the most part it is on target.

Thoughts for Today

I've been reading Superclass The Global Power Elite And The World They Are Making by David Rothkopf. It is about the elite of the elite, the 6000 or so most powerful, richest people on the planet earth.

Oddly enough, the author, David Rothkopf talks about chatting with Paulo Coelho at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Apparently, Paulo Coelho seems to have quite a bit of influence in world affairs. This strikes me as kind of odd. It is kind of like saying, Stephen King likes to visit with the United States Federal Reserve.

It made me want to get one of Paulo Coelho's books. After all, I am supposed to be tuned into what people are reading. I picked up The Witch of Portobello at my local library. It was translated from Brazilian Portuguese in 2007. I am hoping that it will be an interesting read. With the importance of biofuels and economic changes, Brazil is becoming much more significant culturally and politically in todays world.

I also paid my library fines for my local library. Yes, I actually do this. Sometimes, I return books late. Library fines go to your credit rating eventually if you don't pay them.

I spent about half an hour on the library computer as well. I know I have a computer at home, but library computers are different. They have a different IP address than my home address so the search results will be different from a public terminal than a home terminal. Google localizes its searches and often tailors searches to individuals, so does Yahoo.

I did a decent amount of walking today. I enjoy walking. I also got my haircut. I know this has nothing to do with books. I feel pretty good today. Better than most days.

I am going to do my laundry later. I will try to read in the laundromat. I know I keep on promising to do this. This time, I went shopping at the produce store and the Walgreens already so I won't be distracted by them.

Google and Libraries One Day Conference

Hello, today, I went to a one day conference. Google and Libraries, An International Conference Sponsored by the International Information and Analystical Center (ILIAC) at the Harriman Institute and Columbia Libraries. I took the #2 subway train up to Columbia University around West 118th street. Columbia University in New York is an edifice of brick and stone with very little greenery. It is in an exclusive area in the upper west side of New York.

The conference was on the fifteenth floor. They had coffee when I got there at 8:45 a.m. in the morning. The Metro New York Library Council listed the event. http://www.metro.org/

When I got there the room was full. It was rather interesting, because many of the people were from Russia or other European Union countries. There were four speakers that day. They covered a huge amount of material. I won't be able to even finish writing about it in this post, there was so much material covered. The four speakers were Yakov Shraiberg, Jill Cirasella, Laura Quilter, and Siva Vaidhyanathan.

They all managed to hold my interest for the whole conference. I found these particular things which they talked about in each session to be the best parts of the sessions.

Yakov Shraiberg in his session, Google and Libraries of Russia & the CIS quoted Larry Page with the following quote, "The best working search engine is the one that comprehends what the user is seeking and provides him/her exactly what he/she wants." In Russia, Google is the third most used search engine after Yandex and Ramber. http://www.yandex.com/ is completely in Russian, so is http://rambler.ru/

Jill Cirasella in her session, Reference Retooled: How Google Tools Strengthen and Streamline Reference basically spoke an ode to how useful Google tools are for the reference librarian. She mentioned a couple of new tools which I hadn't heard of, Google Suggestions http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en, a tool which comes up with suggested endings for searches, and Google Sets http://labs.google.com/sets, a tool which identifies words that part of a set. These are both example of where Reference often fails to clarify a question. They are both experimental search engines part of the Google Labs website http://labs.google.com/sets. I am not quite sure what this means.

She also showed the video which I have seen at many conferences, Information Revolution by Michael Walsh. The video is available on the internet, however, he specifically asks that you not post it on your website if you sell anything. I am not posting it here because of this. With this, she suggested that people read the article "Ontology Is Overrated" by Clay Shirky. http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

At this point after the first two speakers we had lunch. I chose vegetarian, because most take out vegetarian is better than ham and cheese sandwiches. They had a mozzarella, red pepper, and eggplant sandwich for vegetarians.

The third speaker,

Laura Quilter talked about Google, Digitalization Projects, and Library Contracts.

A lot of this was about how Google often presented difficult contracts for libraries to follow for digitization of their books. There are numerous lawsuits going on against Google Books, specifically, the Association of American Publishers, and the Publishers and Authors Guild concerning copyright. The lawsuits are focused on Fair Use. Google is claiming that Google Booksearch is a form of Fair Use, while others are claiming it is not.

In response to the Google Digitalization Projects, Microsoft has formed the Open Content Alliance, another digitalization project for public domain materials.

Apparently, many libraries that participated in the Google Digitalization projects are having difficulties with the contracts. There are often exclusivity clauses on how the scanned materials can be used. Also many libraries are reacting against the idea of turning what they consider public domain use over to a private company like Google. The issues presented were interesting. To find out more please look at her website http://lquilter.net/index.php

The last speaker was Siva Vaidhyanathan, whose presentation was The Googlization of Everything. What was very interesting was that he said that Google personalizes all of its searches to the individual based on the IP address or the log in to Google of the person in question. This mean different people get different results based on their search histories.

Siva talks about how Google is trying to become a "Universal library." Their mission statement is very similar to what librarians normally do. He quotes Google with this "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible." He also quotes the famous line attributed to the unofficial byline of Google, "Don't Be Evil."

He is also is quite critical of Google in some ways. He thinks of them as a private company moving into an excessively public space. The Google definition of "Fair Use" is quite expansive.
He has a blog http://www.sivacracy.net/ . Unfortunately, it was down today, Monday, while he was at the conference. He was taking notes though. I think he will post quite a bit.

I was surprised. You could almost say that Wikipedia is becoming all things to all people. It is part of the universal library concept. I have noticed that Wikipedia is increasingly showing up at the top of Google searches. They are becoming more and more popular. I like to think that some of the original founders who were part of the Dorsai Embassy, http://amanda.dorsai.org/ decided to get together and build the "Final Encyclopedia," a concept forwarded by Gordon R. Dickson as part of his Childe Cycle in science fiction. This is of course a silly rumor. Still, I hope it spreads a bit.

I use both Google and Wikipedia regularly. Google is my favorite for general searches, but for directory searches, I still like Yahoo. For concise searches, I often use Mamma. They are different tools used for different purposes. If I want to find web sites with databases built into them I use Complete Planet which is a site listing over 70,000 searchable databases. http://aip.completeplanet.com/

The one disappointment I had with this conference is that they did not provide me with a permanent name badge with the name of the conference. I would have added it to my bag of conference buttons. I got a staples peel off to put my name on. I have the conference program, I may save it. They also had a nice wall calendar in russian and english as a free giveaway.

I am very surprised at the quality of the conference. Very few one day conferences have interesting speakers for all four sessions.

Thoughts for Today

Hello,
Good afternoon to you all. I am a bit lethargic today. I have been so for the last few days. I took a look through a variety of websites. There were a few interesting articles which I saw while looking around the web.

The first is an article by Cory Doctorow, Put Not Your Faith in Ebooks. I found it quite entertaining. He correctly says that we should not put too much faith in ebooks being any more than a niche. Even regular books are increasingly becoming a niche products with many Americans not reading as much. http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/03/cory-doctorow-put-not-your-faith-in.html

I also was reading Library Journal online. They have an article about downgrading librarians pay. I think many things which are being said in the article are correct. However, I think the profession needs to take a good hard look at how it is being managed lately. There are a lot of problems. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6538702.html

I could not imagine being in their position. It would be quite hard.

I also took a bit of time to look at places to find books. I put Elizabeth Moon's new book on hold Victory Conditions. It is the fifth book in the series.

I have a bunch of new items to pick up. I will write about them later in the day.

Acacia Book One The War With the Mein by David Durham, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan, Blogging For Dummies, 2nd Edition by Susannah Gardner and Shane Birley, and Clear Blogging by Bob Walsh have come in for me to read. I am not sure which book I will start on.

There are not a whole lot of books available about blogging at the library. Blogging For Dummies seems to be the book which most libraries have. Some people hate the title of the For Dummies series and refuse to read the series. They don't like being called dummies or even better Complete Idiots, another series. Most people don't seem to mind the title, however.

I tried reading Blogging for Dummies on the train. I found it to be a little dry. It had all the things which you needed to know to start blogging, but it was not very entertaining. It was essentially a beginning technical manual for blogging. After a bit of time, I put it back in my bag. I am going to return it tomorrow. In contrast, after reading the first chapter of Clear Blogging, I found it very entertaining. It even had an interesting interview in the first chapter. I will continue reading it on my train ride in from work.

I did, however, learn a new term, evergreening. This is taking old articles that are generic like about your neighbors car, or your dog spot, or the history of pet rocks and putting them in your blog if you can't think of anything new to write. I promise that I won't do this. I am not particularly good at being generic; I don't have a dog spot, I don't like pet rocks or chia pets, and I try to write something new every day.

I imagine many of the big news agencies have filing cabinets full of these old articles kept in an abandoned missile silo in Kansas left over from the cold war. Whenever they need filler they call up a guy named Bob and he sends them an appropriately heartwarming article for the day.

Thoughts on Books, Missed Day

I missed a day for the first time. It was a chance to relax and recharge my batteries. I don't know if it had a bad impact for people.

Anyways, I recently chose not to read a couple books. I just could not get into the stories. I am getting more picky lately. The first book was M. John Harrison Nova Swing. I have got a bit tired of the science fiction book set in a bar. It has become too cliche. The original Spider Robinson Callahan's Crosstime Saloon was entertaining, but the opening gets a little old.

I am going to read Eats, Shoots and Leaves a grammar book which is supposed to be entertaining. It goes over the finer points of punctuation and how they can change the meaning of sentences. I just placed it on reserve for my library. I am surprised that someone came up with a suggested grammar classic for me.

I went to the library today and picked up Good-Bye Chunky Rice by Carig Thomson. It is a story of friendship set in a graphic novel. I also picked up Chicken With Plums by Marjane Satrapi who is the author of Persepolis, another graphic novel. Persepolis was recently made into a film which is supposed to be very good about life in Iran. Marjane Satrapi says she cannot go back to Iran because she is afraid she will never be able to leave if she goes back.

There is not a whole lot to say today. I had a cold today and stayed home from work. So, I am just going on and on.