Good Afternoon

c1918

Good Afternoon

I am sitting here wondering why I am writing anything at all. As one of my colleagues said, why did you come in yesterday, you are off tomorrow. I felt I had to in order to make things proper. Logic is not one of my strong points sometimes. I am off today, because I am working on Saturday.

Anyways, I am going to Bridges Out of Poverty Part 2 tomorrow at The Hudson River Museum. The train ride is rather pleasant. You ride past a large lake which is rather picturesque. I went to Bridges Out of Poverty Part 1 over a year ago, somehow, now I will be able to claim I will have gone to both sessions. I hardly remember the first session. Anyways, that belies the major purpose of these workshops which is to drink coffee and talk to your colleagues.

Right now, I am about half way through Reading The OED. I am up to the letter M. The book of course is in alphabetical order. Ammon Shea has a website conveniently listed on the back flap of the dust jacket along with his photograph. http://www.ammonshea.com/

On another work related thought, I have found http://www.zoomii.com/ to still be quite useful. Many of the things I am ordering now simply will never have reviews. Intellectuals rarely review books on lathes, concrete, computers, or career books. They are not filled with words to be analyzed. They are practical, something which few intellectuals are. I guess this might be one of the reasons I am currently reading Reading the OED.

Often, the only way to know which books to order is to visit bookstores and libraries and look at what they have. This means physically examining, handling, and reading portions of the books. After a while, you grow to enjoy this, especially if you are as obsessive as I am.

Right now, I think I am going to take a break and boil some water for more tea.

After reading Ammon Shea's book, I find him to be a true Vocabularian (n.) one who pays too much attention to words. (P.134) Reading The OED. The book is still simmering in my brain. I'll probably write a review of it while I'm on the train to the Bridges Out of Poverty Workshop.

Sometimes while you are going through checking for people who have linked to your page, you find the oddest things. I have a new idea to add to the Super Librarian concept, the Jedi Librarian. Maybe I should get out my lightsaber. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jedi_librarian May the farce be with you.

Afternoon Thoughts, Be Thankful

An Image of A Black Hole. We Could Have Been There Today.

Afternoon Thoughts

I spent some more time looking at Zoomii, I tried the different categories for social science books. I found that an awful lot of the books were textbooks which is not good for a public library. There of course was a mix of classic titles and new titles. I think that I found a few more books to order after looking through the storefront.

Our collection development meeting was cancelled this morning. It was kind of frustrating.

I also did some more weeding this afternoon. I constantly do weeding. I know it sounds tedious and it is, but it is something that I will be doing every single day for a long time. De-accessioning items is quite frankly a bit boring.

There was absolutely nothing interesting in the bestseller lists which I wanted to read from Publishers Weekly, or the New York Times Bestseller List. Sometimes these things bore me. I occassionally get that contrarian feeling where what is popular is not necessarily good. There is an awful lot of popular trash in the world.

How do you like the new font and font size? I am not going to center the header, I am going to resize the width so it fits better on the screen. It might take a bit for me to do it right.

Be thankful today that the day did not end in doom. We could have been swallowed by a giant black hole. But we weren't so breath a sigh of relief. :)

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-fermilab-explainer_bd07sep07,0,1577860.story

Zoomii (A New Format For Online Bookselling)

This is a weblink to a new form of online bookselling. It sells Amazon books on a bookstore map which is very browsable. You can search the covers by subject or browse around the online store. It is very interesting to me. I intend to spend some time looking at the different sections. It looks like pretty much all the selections are new material on popular subjects. It might be useful to use it as a selection tool.

I intend to spend some time writing about it some more tomorrow. I liked the resolution of the covers. I think it will take me a while to get used to the navigation.

The cover search engine is the best feature so far. I like it much better than the storefront. I think it is quite interesting. You put in your keyword, look at the bookcovers, then click on the cover to get a description of the book.

There are a lot of categories of books that are never reviewed and you have to look over the books to buy them. This is especially true of subjects like home improvement, electronics, plumbing, hvac, and other technical books. So, this could be potentially very useful. I may use it to look up these kind of subjects.

http://zoomii.com/#home