Coffee Klatch

I don’t know how this slipped by me unnoticed for so long, but I just yesterday read Chad Boeninger’s post on Library Voice about the Meebo plugin for Pidgin (used to be GAIM). It’s the answer to our Reference Desk dilemma! Let me explain.

Last fall we implemented Meebo in a test mode as it were, to get the functionality of widgets on our web pages. One of the strengths of Meebo is their MeeboMe widget, which puts an IM window right on your web page, interfacing with the instant messenger at your own computer (in this case, at our Reference Desk). The drawback of Meebo is that it’s web based (a good thing), requiring you to always have a browser window open and dedicated to Meebo (a bad thing). If you’re on another tab in your browser, the only notification was the other tab’s favicon blinking, which is small and easy to miss.

Enter Pidgin. It’s a new and slightly improved version of GAIM, which is what we used at the Reference Desk before Meebo because it allowed us to connect with multiple IM accounts from one interface. And it’s open source.

With this Meebo plugin for Pidgin, you can just use Pidgin the way you normally would (complete with background running when minimized and popups when new messages come in) and still connect with your MeeboMe widgets. It’s the best of both worlds! I’ve tried it at our Reference Desk and on my personal computers and it works great!

As Chad put it, MeeboMe and Pidgin is like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups — two great tastes that taste great together!

Thanks, Chad!!

Today was our annual Library Staff Holiday Party, which ended with the traditional Duck Drop. That’s where we go up to the third floor and take turns dropping rubber ducks into the fountain down on the main floor (which is about 15′ by 10′). If you get it in the fountain at all, it’s 1 point, 5 points if you get it into the birdbath-looking bowl in the fountain, and 10 points if you get it into the various target rings set to float around the main fountain. Oh, and 25 points if you hit the big rubber duck with a target on his head and red rings all around his body, but people never really try for that one.

Everyone who scores above the median goes on to the second round. Same for the third and fourth rounds. Each round, though, involves dropping the ducks from a different side of the atrium, getting farther from the easier targets.

This year I won again! For the second year in a row, successfully defending my title! Woo-hoo!! And this honor also allows me to keep the King Duck in my office for another year. I *had* been telling people how much he loved staying in my office, so it’s only right that he gets to stay where he feels comfortable.

He’s a Rubba brand duck that’s really hard to find any more. His official model name is P.King Duck. You can still find him at RubbaDucks, though, which is nice. I’ve included his picture in this post.

Here are some other good Rubber Duck links. Who’d have thought there were so many varieties??

Rubba Ducks (there are ALL KINDS of really WEIRD ones too!)
RubberDuckShop
Rubber Bath Ducks
Lara’s Duck Collection

This was just TOO funny! It’s an spoof on graphic novels that was on display in a library–Attack of the Zombie Librarians!

I love that! “They are smarter! They are stronger! They are HUNGRY!”

The SciFi one’s okay, but it didn’t make me laugh like the zombie one did. Sure does make you want to go to your local library and check out one of those starring roles, doesn’t it?

Last week I found out about one of the coolest library technologies that’s come down the pike. It’s a Web 2.0 application designed for “Library 2.0.” It’s called LibGuides and it’s worth getting excited about. In a nutshell, it’s an online publishing system that’s very easy to use and has a Web 2.0 look and feel. LibGuides is a system for providing information and resources to library patrons in an engaging and organized way, but without the information providers (mainly librarians) needing to learn code or some complicated system.

The coolest part is that LibGuides interfaces with Facebook, allowing your students/patrons to browse your Guides, search your library catalog, and link to various resources that you provide on your library website, all from within Facebook. Librarians who use Facebook can even add the Guides that they’ve created right into their Facebook profiles!

I’ve done a longer writeup on my other blog, BiblioTech Web, so please click and go over there if you want to find out more about LibGuides. Thanks.

This is the week that classes begin here at Butler University. Classes start Wednesday as do our hours for staffing the Reference Desk in the library. So things are pretty busy with all the preparation tasks and scheduling and making sure everything’s ready. Making last-minute changes to web pages, getting procedures in place for things like Blackboard usage or Reference statistics, and communicating necessary things to the faculty are just some of these last-minute tasks that have me hopping this week.

A few weeks into the Fall semester and things will settle down into a somewhat regular routine, which will be nice.

Most people have some kind of method for attaining a sense of personal peace. I’m not talking about meditation but rather organization. When life seems out of control, most people have something they can physically do to regain a sense of balance and control in their lives. Often this takes the form of cleaning or organizing, which makes sense because if you can’t control some bigger things in life that are giving you fits (not Pfitz), exerting your control over smaller things can ease the stress.

For some people, it’s doing dishes. I’m one of those, because when you take a counter of chaos and transform it into organized cupboards and clean surfaces you bring order and prepare the potential for the next project in the kitchen. Plus, it looks so much nicer to see clean counters that that alone can increase your sense of peace.
Other people clean the house, do laundry, reorganize their clothes closets, and that sort of thing, which is their way of bringing order to chaos. So not only do they regain their inner sense of peace, but they also improve their environment, which helps the people around them. My wife is one for organizing the basement or garage (depending where we’re storing things). She has a theory that a cluttered and disorganized basement creates tension and disorganization in the house and the family living above it. By organizing and cleaning the basement, she brings a sense of order to the whole house.

This week I discovered just how much I benefit from another task I’ve been working on. Back over the Christmas and New Year holidays, I reorganized my personal library of almost 1,200 books by assigning each book a call number according to the Dewey Decimal System (no, I’M not a librarian!). I’m using LibraryThing, which I totally love, and which I blogged about last year and the year before when I first found out about it.

Well, I last week I finally took advantage of one of the great features of LibraryThing: I exported my personal library catalog to Excel. I’d actually done this before, and printed out a nice shelf list, but this time I was grabbing the call numbers, which I used to “mail merge” into a template in MS Word and then print out on labels. This last week or so I’ve been taking a little free time each day to apply some labels to their books. I’m about 3/4 done now and the books look great on the shelves. Clean and neat and organized. And if I or anyone else takes a book off the shelf, it will be clear where it belongs. (Yes, I’m teaching my children how to reshelve.) For some people, it’s no big deal to have books in loose categories on shelves or even just wherever they land, but that’s not something I can abide. It’s kind of like being in an auditorium and sitting behind someone who has their shirt collar tag sticking out. I just HAVE to fix it.
I’ve discovered that for me this is a great way to increase my sense of order and peace within the house and within myself. It’s almost a cathartic feeling to watch order being imposed on my bookshelves. (By the way, if you’re interested in the concepts of Order and Chaos, L.E. Modesitt, Jr. has a series of fantasy-type books called The Saga of Recluce, which introduces us to a world where order and chaos are the basis for magic. VERY interesting concepts and well-written books.) And for those of you who might be interested, here’s a link to my catalog in LibraryThing.

So, what do YOU do to regain a sense of control, order, and/or peace in your home? Leave a comment and share with us.

Back in October I blogged about flying your name to Mars. Well, I just got an email last night saying that the silica glass mini-DVD has been mounted in the Phoenix spacecraft, which has just been flown to Cape Canaveral, where it will begin final testing and preparation for launch.

Besides collecting names for the disc, they’ve also got “Visions of Mars” on there, which is a collection of art and literature written about the planet Mars.

The names and Visions of Mars were written to the silica mini-DVD by the company Plasmon OMS using a special technique. The resulting archival disk should last at least hundreds of years on the Martian surface, ready to be picked up by future explorers.

After the disc was written, a special label was applied to the disc to identify it for future explorers. Then, the whole assembly was “baked out” (to kill microbes and also to reduce future outgassing of the materials), and Lockheed Martin in Colorado installed it onto the spacecraft.

So you could say that this disc represents the first library on Mars! That’s VERY cool!

And my name’s on the disc! DOUBLY cool!

Yesterday was the big shindig day in our library. Every February we have an exhibit called the “Celebration of Scholarship and Creative Activity.” We solicit contributions from the faculty and staff of Butler of publications and works that they’ve done in the last year. Books, articles, book chapters, and other publications are included, as well as paintings, music (sheet and CD), concert programs, etc.

Since “scholarship” means different things to different academic disciplines, we welcome anything that is created, whether a scholarly article or theatre costumes designed for a play.

This year we had 56 different people contribute to this exhibit, which runs for the month of February. Almost 3/4 of the contributors were repeats, meaning they’ve submitted other things in previous years (this is the sixth annual), showing that continual scholarship is alive and well at Butler University. There were 155 items included in the exhibit this year, and only one of them was in last year’s; the rest were in the exhibit for the first time. Pretty cool!

Anyway, last night was the big shindig where we have a formal reception for faculty and staff to come, enjoy hors d’oeuvres and wine and conversation. People reconnect with each other and take a look at what their colleagues have been up to during the last year. Then there’s a featured lecture by one of our faculty, presenting on the research they’ve been doing. It always ends up being very interesting and cross-disciplinary, so everyone enjoys it and can relate to the topic on various levels. This year it was on the dialogical process that goes on as children learn to read. The description in our invitations sounded a little dry or maybe dull, but when you put the topic in the mouth of someone who’s passionate about it, especially a really good speaker, it comes alive and becomes very interesting. That happened again this year.

The faculty in particular really look forward to this event. With so many ways that things get trimmed budgetarily (is that a word?), they enjoy getting really good food and wine and atmosphere and everything, instead of good-enough-to-get-by. The faculty view this reception as a treat, or a reward for the extra work they do. And an incentive to continue, I think. A special time for celebrating the work they’ve done in continuing to contribute to their discipline. Except that many of the works included in the exhibit are outside the disciplines of the people who submitted them. That’s okay, of course, because it lets us see another side of our colleagues.

My role in this whole event is complete. It’s my “baby,” as it were. From working up the invitations that we get printed up and mailed in early January and soliciting contributions for the exhibit, to creating the menu for the soiree and creating the atmosphere with music, lighting, etc., to creating the printed bibliography of all the publications and works that make up the exhibit, every little detail is mine to do or delegate. Thankfully there are some very helpful people on the library staff and our marketing department and printshop always come through wondrously. That helps a lot.

So anyway, the big shindig is over now–went off superbly–and I’m taking the rest of the week off to recover from the cold I’ve been fighting.

Tonight was the world premiere of The Librarian 2 - Return to King Solomon’s Mines. I’ve been waiting for over a year for this movie to come out. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it’s a sequel to The Librarian - Quest for the Spear, starring Noah Wyle (of ER fame), Bob Newhart, and Sonya Walger. The sequel had Noah and Bob, but the female lead was Gabrielle Anwar (I remember her as Queen Anne from The Three Musketeers), who looked like she’d been struggling with anorexia a bit.

Funny movies, kinda Indiana-Jones-ish, but less serious. Not huge on the special effects, but the humorous spirit, inter-character banter, and Wyle’s way of using his knowledge of trivia to to figure things out made the movies quite enjoyable. This second was a bit different from the first one and maybe not quite as good, but it was still fun and interesting. Both movies are favorites of all of my kids. Even Camber, the 5-year-old, enjoys them. Just don’t take them too seriously or expect too much out of them, or you’ll ruin the effect. (And, of course, the sequel will make more sense if you’ve seen the original, but it’s not required, just recommended.)

It was a little more predictable than the first one was, but still interesting and enjoyable.

I won’t give any spoilers on the movie, but check TNT for listings, since it’s coming up again (e.g., Dec. 6 at 9pm and Dec. 9 at 4pm).

[tags]librarian, king solomon’s mines, noah wyle, movies[/tags]

Recently I blogged about LibraryThing on my BiblioTech Web blog, talking about how libraries could make use of this most excellent resource. (If you want to learn more about LibraryThing, read that post or the one I wrote last year about it.)

I can’t say enough good things about LibraryThing. If you haven’t checked it out, you really need to: LibraryThing.com

Getting beyond that, once you’ve entered your books in LibraryThing, you MAY want to actually assign call numbers to them, using either Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal Classification. I recommend Dewey for personal libraries, since it’s easier to use for smaller libraries. LibraryThing will show you the call numbers that other people are using, allowing you to use those for your own.

But if you’re like me, you want to do it YOUR way. For example, I USED to label my fiction books with small white labels with FIC and the first three letters of the author’s name. As I was looking at all my fiction (roughly 400 books, I think–I’m still not done entering them all), I thought that maybe I should make it the first FOUR letters of the author’s last name. But then, with using LibraryThing, I thought maybe I’d use something like FICTION ADAMS for the fiction books.

Then arose the perennial question. What about literature? Do I put Dickens under “Literature” or under “Fiction?” It’s really both. My decision: use Dewey the way it was made. Pulling fiction books out into a separate collection is what libraries often do to make it easier to access. But not all do, and there’s no reason I need to. Instead, I’ll use 813 for American Fiction and that will encompass most of my general fiction books.

Next question: If you use 813 for fiction, you need to have information after the decimal (thus the name) to differentiate between the hundreds of books. Enter the Cutter Number. Basically, a Cutter Number is used to designate an author or other information within the call number of the book. It involves using the first letter of the author’s last name, followed by several numbers representing the remaining letters. What results is a numerical representation of the author’s name. For example, A2145 = Adams, John and O5871 = O’Neill, Edward.

Using a Cutter Number means you can have separate numbers for each author, making it easier to alphabetize and track your books. But that can be a lot of work, creating numbers for each author. Wouldn’t it be easier and more useful to have some program create them for you? LibraryThing doesn’t do it (that would be TOO awesome!). So where do you turn?

OCLC is a worldwide library cooperative that is one of the biggest authorities on library-related topics. They have a tiny little program available for free (noncommercial use only) that’s called the Dewey Cutter Program. You type in (or copy & paste) the author’s name and it gives you the Cutter Number. Then you can easily copy and paste it into LibraryThing. Pretty cool, eh?

You can do the same thing for other forms of literature or for all your library. Whatever you like. After all, it is YOUR library. There are plenty of breakdowns of the Dewey Decimal Classification system online. Here are two good ones.

If what you’ve got is mostly English-language material, 813 is American Fiction, 823 is English Fiction, 811 is American Poetry, 821 is English Poetry, etc. There are other numbers for drama, essays, speeches, etc. Here’s a quick reference chart:

You probably don’t need to subdivide within these categories. A Cutter Number is probably sufficient. And if you want to look outside this area at other books (particularly nonfiction), you can view the book title in LibraryThing and click “Find in a Library,” which will search for the book in OpenWorldCat.

And there you go! Your own personal CATALOGED library! Now you can use LibraryThing to connect with other people who have similar interests (and who are also already interested in books) and to find new books or authors that you haven’t tried yet. What fun!

Current music: Rachmaninoff: Vespers

[tags]LibraryThing, libraries, books, technology, cataloging, dewey decimal, DDC[/tags]