TangognaT

even more del.icio.us

I was playing around with del.icio.us some more today. Some things that struck me--

It brings the whole process of making a bookmark up a level. I often bookmark things, but I don't always take the time to sort and categorize them. I think this is partly because the way bookmarking or favorites are displayed when I work with them using a web browser is that I can only have so many before they just degenerate into a sludge of links and folders. This is why the date based display combined with the subject tags in del.icio.us is really useful, when I look at my page sometime in the future I can remember that today was the day I was clicking around trying to find examples of how library services were integrated into university portals.

It looks like you can also turn your del.icio.us page into a sideblog. Which makes sense, since it doesn't seem to be all that difficult to display a RSS feed on a web page if you have the right tools. This might make me finally start experimenting with movabletype plugins. Maybe this weekend. Oh, who am I kidding, I'm probably going to just go to the movies and shop.

del.icio.us

So I've been playing around with the collaborative bookmark management system del.icio.us, I'd heard of it but when Greg and Steve started raving about it I decided to actually take the step of checking it out. I am a follower, not a leader. Those guys are like the library blogging Kirk and Spock and I am one of the hapless red shirted crewman stumbling around on the web, soon to get crushed by a styrofoam avalanche.

Can you tell I watched way too much Star Trek in my formative years? I'm sorry!

Anyway, I'm seriously enjoying del.icio.us, the collaborative nature of the system means that often when I visit the page and see the bookmarks that other people have added, I think "Oh right, I need to read that!" and I can add it to my own bookmarks. I do like some aspects of the categorization, if you click on a category like RSS you can see other bookmarks from other users who use the same tag. I seems like you have to have single word tags though. I tagged a couple items as "library instruction" and instead of that phrase being a tag, I got two tags, one for "library" and one for "instruction" which wasn't exactly what I was going for. So I renamed those items with the more jargony "infolit" because I wanted those things to be in a different category than any general library links I might bookmark. I've added links to my del.icio.us page and the rss feed over on the left side of my blog.

who to vote for

I do regret that since he is dead, I can't vote for Frank Zappa for president.

I can't vote for Lex Luthor, since he is evil, fictional, and already won.

The First President of Japan probably doesn't fulfill that pesky "born in the USA" rule. And is also fictional, as is Wesley Crusher.

If I wanted to vote for a non-human, I could vote for Cthulhu

Cusack stopped the Cusack for President campaign.

Maybe I should just pray or fast instead of voting. But what about Satan?

Or I could turn to Dave Barry.

Or Ronnie James Dio!

wat up library dawg?

The Dig Ref listserv debates the use of "dawg" in virtual reference transactions. Here's a good example of a transcript of a librarian doing virtual reference who is comfortable dealing with someone who uses a ton of slang.

Monitoring an academic queue gets me fewer opportunities to provide virtual reference to users who type "yo!" every few minutes, but at least if someone is typing "yo dawg" it sounds like they are anxious to get an answer to their question. Nothing wrong with that!

TTFN!

cerebus rip

Cerebus R.I.P, overview of the series from a fan who actually stuck with it, via Unqualified Offerings

And here's another overview, Cerebus:An Aardvark on the Edge

pure unadulterated evil

Early morning committee meetings are the work of the devil. Who has to meet at 8? Couldn't one person meet at 8 and decide everything? Why force anyone else to do anything at such an early hour? I just woke up and I'm already looking forward to a nap. Maybe I can nap during the meeting!

teaching the teachers

Classes started today, so at the reference desk I got to experience the influx of students expecting that the library would have copies of their textbook available for someone to check out. Also I had someone wanting an official time estimate on their research project involving 40 things that they needed to look up on microfilm. Like number of minutes it would take per item to retrieve. And this is just the type of question that is sort of unanswerable because it depends on so many factors like, are you using microfiche or microfilm? How familiar are you with the microfilm readers? How fast can you scan things that you read? Does seeing a ton of text whiz by on a screen give you motion sickness? I was able to tell him that it would take more than a morning, and he wouldn't be able to only spend 1-2 minutes per item to look it up and print it out.

Anyway one of the things I've been obsessing over at work is the creation of stable proxied links to individual articles for instructors who use our university's course management system. So I taught a workshop on how to do this last week and it was fun because I was teaching a group of faculty who wanted to be there and had tons of questions. In contrast I do think that some freshmen composition students, when given the choice between library instruction and a sharp poke in the eye would pick getting poked in the eye.

I picked an article to demonstrate this proxied link building process that would be in line with the research interests of one of the less technically adept attendees, prompting a little mini-discussion in the back of the room:

"Oh, I've read his stuff!"
"Really?"
"Yes, his specialty is mumble mumble"
"Uh huh?"
"He's a good historian!"

But it was nice teaching a more engaged class, it is something I have to try to replicate in the classes I usually teach.

feed demon

I have found my RSS reader of choice and it is feed demon. It is just so easy to use, and I love the "auto discover" feature that keeps track of the feeds of some of the sites I visit as I'm browsing around, so I have a list I can go back to add new feeds at my leisure.

I can see why RSS cheerleader Steven "librarystuff" Cohen always seems to be saying "soandso should add a feed!". Remembering to work through a list of bookmarks to check to see if some of the sites I like have updated just seems so antiquated. Unfortunately there are many sites that I like to visit every day that just don't provide a feed. I need to look into what I can do to make feeds for myself for all the library or comics blogspot-type sites that I like to keep track of. Maybe that would be a good weekend project. I know how to party!

march of the sinister ducks

Neil Gaiman is hosting an mp3 of Alan Moore's song "March of the Sinister Ducks." There are no words.

battle royale

So I finally saw battle royale (the first movie not the sequel), and it made me wonder what on earth I was doing in high school English class, debating the symbolism of the conch shell in Lord of the Flies, when I could have just watched battle royale instead. I learned the valuable lesson that if I ever have a kid whose high school teacher looks like 'Beat' Takeshi, I should enroll that kid in survival/weapons training right away.

I also wondered how to extend the set-up of battle royale to the library. Perhaps instead of teaching a class on research, you could strip mine the library, give each student a randomly selected resource (one would get a volume of the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, one would get a Hungarian-English dictionary, one would get an obscure congressional hearing) and then they would be told to RESEARCH OR DIE! I think that the students who survived would be very information literate, if somewhat traumatized.

Which Battle Royale Character are you?

I'm Mimura, hacker and chemical weapons expert :)

"It's time we started our own struggle."
- #19 Mimura


Which Battle Royale Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

library dreams

Last night I dreamt I was on the reference desk, when a strange man with a mustache came up and needed help researching an obscure Russian scientist. He was carrying a stack of ripped up pages from a Superman comic book and when I asked him how to spell the Russian last name he started ranting about people who lie to him.

great calendar

I got the best calendar on sale for $3, the Lemony Snicket Series of Unfortunate Events Calendar 2004. It now hangs proudly in my cubicle at work, inspiring me with quotes scattered around on random dates, like this one for yesterday:

"It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice."
-Wallace Stevens

Followed with this tidbit of information for today:

"Like many poets, Wallace Stevens is dead."

I picked this up going to the bookstore, with my primary goal just being to buy a couple of cheapo calendars, but of course I bought another volume of Kare Kano and an Erica Sakurazawa volume, Angel Nest, which features a storyline where a woman's life gets destroyed but a silent gin drinking angel mysteriously appears in her apartment.

I also added to my shelf of unread books the novel Watch Your Mouth written by Daniel Handler, the man who mysteriously appears at Lemony Snicket's book signings with an accordian.

career advice for librarians

On tomatonation's "Ask an Expert" series, advice on interviewing.
Also on AskMetafilter.

where comics and hockey collide

I hadn't realized that Eugene Volokh wrote the amicus brief for the McFarlane/Tony Twist case that the Supreme Court refused to hear.

hockey names

Why, why, why, do the Mavericks keep losing? Where was my team from last season? Why did they lose to Detroit? Why was Michael Finley only shooting 2-10? Who on earth decided it would be a good idea to let Antoine Walker take 5 3 point shots in one game (it goes without saying that he missed them all). WHY WON'T THEY GIVE THE BALL TO DIRK MORE?!!!!

In order to distract myself I'm going to blog about hockey. I think that in all of sports, hockey players have the best names. I can see why Todd McFarlane (who designed the Edmonton Oilers third jersey) turned to the rich world of hockey when coming up for a name for a character in Spawn, Tony Twist.

Here are my favorite hockey player names, in no particular order:

Kimmo Timonen, say it soft and its almost like praying! No, I have fond memories of this name because of all the magic marker fumes I inhaled while making a "Go Kimmo Go!" banner to take with me to the Russia vs Finland game in the Winter Olympics.

Radek Bonk, what a great last name.

Todd Bertuzzi, I think once on NHL tonight they had a scary Elvis impersonator singing a song about Bertuzzi. I really hope they did, because otherwise I have no reason for thinking about Elvis whenever I think about Bertuzzi, which I must say is not very often at all.

Keith Tkachuk, because Tkachuk sounds like something hitting something else.

Teemu Selanne, another great Finnish name, go Avs!

Miroslav Satan, I know his name isn't pronounced like the devil, but "Satan" is just a cool name to have on back of your jersey.

Here's an ESPN Page 2 list of hockey player nicknames.

books in the house

I was able to free up an extra bookcase in my house by buying some cheap shelves for my dvds (I was holding the camera crooked, it doesn't actually lean):

I was able to do some shifting around, and I now actually have a few inches of empty space on a couple shelves, and instead of having my unread books arranged in piles on the floor, I now have an unread books shelf!

For a librarian, my personal library is extrememly chaotic. There is no alphabetical order, but somehow the Jim Thompson books all end up lumped together on the same shelf. Non fiction has its own area. Mass market paperbacks are stacked up horizontally. Childrens and young adult books have their own general area, as do books I like to read if I have the flu (Little Women, Hero and the Crown, and I Capture the Castle). Poetry books and graphic novels get their own bookcases. Other than that, anything goes.

How is your home library organized?

fangirl: a memoir

Some of the recent topics in online comicfandom “trades vs monthlies,” “what to do about the kids” have got me reflecting a bit.

I think only in comics would you find people suggesting that customers have an obligation “to the industry” to purchase product in a certain format (monthly form as opposed to trade paperbacks) or that if you purchase both monthlies and trades you have claim to some sort of moral superiority over lesser fanboys/girls.

I started thinking a a bit about my own buying habits...

I tend to buy a mix of monthlies and trades. I try to support my local retailer, but they don’t always have what I want (not enough manga). So I also get trades from amazon or bookstores. I have a pull list at the store, I go every 2-3 weeks. I only buy trades of monthlies I already own when I miss some issues. Then I sometimes recycle the monthlies by giving them to my little sisters, which is why they have 6 of the 8 issues of the first 2 of hopeless savages series or random issues of hellboy

The most happening store I’ve been in recently that sold comics I went into when I was hunting down Alice 19th, and there was a giant banner across the entry to the store that said “Toys! Action Figures! Games! Manga!”. Inside most of the monthly issues had been shoved to the back of the store. The front of the store was filled with displays of LOTR action figures and video game stuff. A little further back was a huge section of manga, followed by the traditional waterfall displays and bins of your usual comic book shop. And since it was in a high traffic mall, there were quite a few people in the store, including some parents with their kids.

I didn’t have to buy comics because they were already sitting in my house, (yay! Avengers, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Captain Marvel, Hulk, Defenders, Doctor Strange, Batman, Superman, Conan, and X-Men.)
When I got sick when I was a little kid, my mom would bring a Supergirl (Daring New Adventures of Supergirl series) comic home for me to read. I always thought it was really cool that Supergirl had a magic comb that would transform the straight brown hair that she wore in her secret identity into blond Supergirl waves with one swipe. And then they killed her! Crisis on Infinite Earth bastards!
Also, I read Power Pack and I liked it! I was 9, shut up. Also, my little sisters read it when they were around the same age. You may slam Power Pack if you wish (June Bridgeman did), but sometimes I wonder if the way to get more kids to read comics is to actually attempt to make up new characters instead of retelling spiderman’s origin over and over again just because Spiderman 2 is coming out soon. Call me crazy.

When I was in middle school, my friends all loved Elfquest. In my geeky social circles it was cool to love Elfquest. Just like now, it is cool to love Yu-Gi-Oh or Naruto.

I was an X-Men junkie during the height of all the confusing crossover series during the mid 1990s. I collected a ton of the monthly translations viz put out of Mai the Psychic Girl and Area 88, and read Grendel and Cerebus and Zot.

Towards the end of the comic book boom, I got fed up and stopped buying any comics at all. I was sick of spandex and the portrayal of women in comics.

So my prescription based on my highly scientific study of my own memories for the always on the edge of the American comic book industry is anyone who wants to create more young comics fans should breed them themselves! Because it is going to take a long time to catch up to manga in the bookstores.

It’s nice that Marvel is trying, but I love this quote on the new marvel line, “It might have a little bit of a manga feel, only because right now that’s the ‘hot’ style in the current market for Marvel Age’s demographic, and we’d like to capitalize on that, but it’s not a manga line – it’s geared to getting new readers by offering the best stories and art that is the best match for both them.”

I think most kids in their demographic might be able to tell the difference between manga and “a manga feel.” And it will probably take a long time for the American comics industry to muster up the buzz, cool factor, and presence in chain bookstores that anime and manga currently has.

refgrunting on memepool

Via Waxy's links, refgruting is on memepool.

Wow, we are so trendy!

pop stars and manga

Tokyopop has their web page up for Princess Ai (via Shawn Fumo) the manga series that features some sort of connection with Courtney Love and character designs from Yazawa Ai. Ok, we have "co-creators" and character designers but WHO is acutally writing and drawing this volume? I'm curious. My curiosity will probably extend to reading it in the bookstore, but I'll admit I'm curious.

I'm just finding the prospect of a tatu anime movie more than a little disturbing.

ipod lust

I've decided that having an ipod would make me a better librarian. I don't know if I want one of the pretty tiny colorful ones or one of the older models. Having an ipod would make me a better librarian because I listen to music all day at work (not while I'm on the reference desk) since the set-up of our office area is a office space like sea of cubicles. I'd save valuable minutes by not having to switch cds, leading to greater efficiency!

tom cruise, iron man?

I hadn't realized that Tom Cruise still wanted to be Iron Man. Eh. I'm not a fan of Mr. Cruise, and I hadn't pictured him playing Tony Stark/Iron Man, inventor-alcoholic-Vietnam Vet-millionaire playboy.

Well, I've never been all that fond of Iron Man anyway, but part of the problem is that I think I already cast the movie in my head, with Nick Cage playing the role.

It is a good time to be both a comic fan and a movie fan, but it is also a case of "careful what you wish for!" They are making so many comic book movies, I'm waiting for the announcement that Psi Force is being made into a movie. Wow, I had no idea Kyle Baker inked the first issue.

refgrunting and Mr. Bloom

I posted a grunt at refgrunt.com

One of my friends (who should be blogging) e-mailed me to say:

"Also, it's swell that Orlando is doing a READ poster, but doesn't his neck look unnaturally long and skinny and like he's Rubber Man or Plastic Man or something? And where the hell is Viggo's poster??"

Orlando's neck does look a little wonky. I don't think he could pull off Plastic Man's red jumpsuit and shades. But I'm sure putting the poster up in the YA section of your library will make a legion of pre-teen girls happy.

I want Viggo's READ poster too, though!

library blogs

RetroGirl has a great, positive "Open Letter to Library Bloggers" as her latest entry. Walt Crawford revisits the topic of library blogs as part of his latest column (via Library Stuff). It'll be interesting to see what the library blog landscape looks like in a few years. It feels like there's been a tremendous explosion of library blogs (or maybe it is just that since I'm blogging myself it is easier for me to keep track of them) recently. I'm curious to see how we'll all evolve over time, but there's not much to so about that but sit back and wait...

fun with comics

Aww, one of my favorite comics blogs, Journalista, linked to me! This is just the first step in my master plan for total media domination. No, I'm really just surprised and happy that anyone named Dirk has read my blog, even if it isn't a certain Dallas Mavericks player with bad ankles who I am not obsessed with at all : )

Via wannabegirl, a flash quiz that has you identify 12 pixel torsos of comic book heroes. I'm sorry to say I got a perfect score, but it isn't too hard to identify a pixelated hulk torso.

Marie Claire inflicts fake PDA on NYPL

In the Feb. issue of Marie Claire, they conduct a sociological experiment where a couple is sent out to the wilderness of New York to make out in public places until they are asked to stop. They time how much smooching they are able to fit in. The longest they were able to last was 37 minutes in a hotel bar, but the Rose Reading Room at NYPL was the runner up for longest undisturbed PDA at 15 minutes:

"We realize we... were being systematically ignored. The people stacking the books wheel right by. The academics keep reading. The security guards couldn't care less. For God's sake, librarians barely blink. I've gotten into more trouble in a library for chewing gum."

New Year

Happy New Year! I'm glad that 2004 is here and the holiday season is gone. I sometimes feel a little disconnected during all the seasonal merriment, not belonging to one of the more dominant religions. Yay 2004, bring it on!

I don't tend to do New Year's Resolutions. Usually my resolution is to not make any resolutions. Or to wear more lipstick so I can pretend to be a glam librarian. There are a few things I feel like doing, so these are a couple of my New Year's Vague Intentions:

Keep track of what I read: I'm a little jealous of people being able to know what they've read for an entire year. I tend to read very quickly, thanks to the excellent visual training I got by working through the comic books sitting around the house when I was little so the list will probably be long and scary.

Less Clutter: I've already started this a bit by organizing my dvd collection : )
And I have a bag of books to donate to the public library and have mentally set aside some of the things in my closets for goodwill, so I just have to actually get rid of it!