my favorite library moment

I think my favorite library moment from my youth has to be just a slight blip, but something that has stayed with me.
I was about 15. I had read, some months earlier, that one of the most stolen authors of all time was Charles Bukowski. I hadn't thought much of it. Then, someone recommended Ham on Rye and I went to the Cambridge Public Library to track down a copy. The stacks are really scary, with a grate floor. I remember wearing a skirt and feeling uncomfortable about the fact that people could see through the floor up at me.
Anyway, I couldn't find the book, so I asked a lady at the desk. She pulled it up on the (now archaic) computer system and said, "It appears that it's been stolen." I remember being struck by this turn of events, because it was one of the first times that I'd actually read something that proved itself. Now, I always see little signs in bookstores saying that if you're looking for Bukowski, you need to ask at the front desk. And I always think of the Cambridge Public Library.
So, I guess it's weird that my favorite library memory is actually one where they didn't have what I was looking for but I did have them order it from a different library in the city. And I returned it, too.

TaggedFrog

I wrote about this in our small group discussions, but it is worth mentioning here, too. The latest free software craze in my household is TaggedFrog. It's basically a way to apply multiple organizational tags to the scholarly articles you save for future use. As many articles can apply to many niche topics, you can use tags to suit your multiple needs in finding, retrieving and organizing the scores of documents you accumulate. Basically, you create tag clouds for each article that you can manipulate in various ways. This is an example of what Weinberger points out when he suggests that the use of tags is akin to placing one leaf on many trees (Weinberger 2007, 83). If you're like me, you have pdfs scattered throughout your computer that could possibly be of more use if you could only determine what they're about at a quick glance. My husband has basically been obsessed with this for the past couple of weeks. It is admittedly pretty awesome and I am looking forward to seeing what happens with my tag cloud as I collect more articles.

Quiz 2

Whew. I totally could be a google marathon runner. I can't believe I was able to do all that in an hour. Even if I didn't get the questions totally right (though I feel confident about my answers in a way I didn't for the last quiz) I am proud of my ability to find info, process it, and write a decent answer. Also, because we're working with CSS right now, I felt like I could answer those questions with more confidence. I guess I have a hands-on approach to learning or something.
I'm glad that's over with!

Fast Track

So, Fast Track weekend came and went. Aside from general test anxiety and a ragging migraine on Friday, all went well. It was great to meet my fellow classmates and put faces to names. Within a short time (a matter of a few hours) we bonded as any in-person class does, so that was kind of wonderful.

Because I live near Pittsburgh I’ve been in and around the city often. But I haven’t spent much time on campus. It was nice to actually feel like a student again (though there is the stress and there is the work, I would say that doing this online does not make you feel like part of the academe). I think this aspect of Pitt’s program is wonderful. I kind of wish it was a whole week, as it used to be. (Though my boss wouldn’t like that.) I loved chatting with classmates during a break. I kept thinking of Michael Chabon. I can’t wait for October!

And the Nesbitt Room. Hello, dream job! Nice to meet you.

dickens

Here is my Dickens page. I decided to try doing it in two tables to simulate pages. If I make the window smaller, it appears like an actual page of a book, which I find very nifty. I actually had to make myself stop playing around with this because it was actually really fun and I could have kept tweaking it for a long time. I liked finding new things to try in Kompozer. If I didn't have so much to think about, I might be way more excited about the next step to this!

html

I am playing around with the first leg in the Charles Dickens/HTML assignment. I am having HTML flashbacks to 12 years ago when it was really popular for high schoolers to have their own websites. I worked really hard on mine. I would put all of my really bad poetry on it. I thought I was pretty slick stuff, being able to do all that.

This assignment is different from a geocities website by far, but it really brings me back in a weird way.

I think it will be really challenging to make the page look like something from the 1840s, especially for someone who likes things to be just right (and lets face it, if we're in a library sci. program, we're probably all like that). All of the text I've seen from around that time has really funky layout stuff going on, and lots of little letterpress quarks, like ink blots, parts where the ink is heavy and parts where it's light, etc. Also, I'm not sure what the font is I'm thinking of, but I haven't really seen it on computers. I love being able to work with a text like this, though. What fun!

Evolution of Music

Here is an article from NPR's "Morning Edition" that I find really relevant to the concepts we've been looking at regarding copyright and intellectual ownership in LIS 2000. I highly recommend listening to the article, as it takes a sound from Lady Gaga, which is obviously derivative, and traces it back to chamber music. It really makes you appreciate humanity to think that everything is so connected.