Daily Thoughts 3/4/2010

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, directed by Tim Burton and starring Mia Wasikowska as Alice and Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, opens this Friday, March 5.

Daily Thoughts 3/4/2010

Today has been quiet and steady. I have had a chance to print up my suggested orders for the meeting today. I also checked on the shifting. They moved the African American fiction and the urban fiction to a new location today. Things are moving along. I did some more weeding in the mezzanine and worked a bit on the a Women's History month display. I'll finish working on a flyer tomorrow.

Tomorrow, I think they are going to send a pdf certificate for the completion of my online course, Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management. If you are not a member of ALA Connect and are a member of the American Library Association, I recommend you should join the social network. We used it for the class and many committees of the American Library Association use it for committee work. http://connect.ala.org/

On the way home, I read some more of The Mindful Path to Self Compassion. I am a rather driven person. Some of the concepts in the book are new to me. I learned that there is another reaction to stress other than the fight or flight response; it is the tend and befriend response. Some people when stressed look for allies or tend to their family. I rather liked this idea. Also, there is quite a bit on how to take care of your own emotions; basically how to like yourself better and be less hard on yourself. There is quite a bit on both loving kindness meditation, a form of buddhist meditation focusing on being compassionate to other people, and mindfulness meditation. The author combines with psychology.

Daily Thoughts 3/1/2010 (The Marketplace of Ideas)

This set of images was gathered by User:Dcoetzee from the National Portrait Gallery, London website using a special tool. All images in this batch have been evaluated manually for evidence that the artist probably died before 1939, or that the work is anonymous or pseudonymous and was probably published before 1923. Pseudonymous, circa 1900.

Daily Thoughts 3/1/2010

I finished reading Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas. Another interesting concept came up reading this book, the idea of academic freedom in universities. Academic freedom tends to protect the individual professors beliefs. In contrast in libraries, there is intellectual freedom. The American Library Association focuses on the freedom to read which is focused on texts. It tends to protect the work more than the individual providing the work. This is partially because librarians usually don't create the works they are providing.

This work creates a nice contrast in my understanding of the creation of ideas. Libraries are storehouses of knowledge. Universities tend to focus more on creating and producing knowledge than storing knowledge. This book has made me think.

On the way home from the dentist, I read some of The Mindful Path to Self Compassion Freeing Yourself from Destructive Thoughts and Emotions. This is a book which combines meditation with psychology. The author, Christopher K. Germer, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and a founding member of the institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. There are often religious or spiritual aspects which combine with psychology.

Last night, I took a break from deep thought and watched Scooby Doo and The Samurai Sword. It is a new release. I rather liked the older version of Scooby Doo better. It reminds me of when I was a kid. Shaggy and Scooby seem to me to a bit like Abbot and Costello. It is a way to stop thinking too much. We get a lot of people who come in and check out dvds to just relax and not think too much.