Shelving books would never be the same...

Check out the winners of Overdue Media's Pimp My Book Cart contest. Overdue Media is the company name for the two guys who create the Unshelved comic that appears each day on the library's home page.

What do you say we give it a shot next year? I'll go look for my soldering iron.

A few unrelated things

First, the Online Gargoyle has a nice photo essay on yesterday's pinkness. I'm mildly jealous of Anna's tights.

Second, yesterday I received my first bonafide piece of wacko hate e-mail. Guess I've been lucky up till now. Here's the thing. The letter is so poorly written (and full of misspellings) that I can hardly make out what the guy is trying to accuse me of. If you're going to yell at me, please be articulate about it.

Third, I'm being totally distracted by some of the new books that have been coming in. My current favorite, if only for its title, is Tom Lutz's Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (174 L978d). From Samuel Johnson ("the busy idler") and Benjamin Franklin (the industrious dilettante") to Jack Kerouac ("rucksack wanderer") and the fictional Wayne Campbell ("slacker with a dream"). Not too many women in this book, though I did spot a little section on Anna Nicole Smith. Check out the cover art:

Showing our true colors

This is spirit week and every day has a theme. For some reason, today is Wear Pink day. We were happy to oblige:



What I'm really looking forward to is Thursday, which is pajama day, aka my favorite day of the year.

In the meantime, how did I miss this? U.S. News and World Report says that being a librarian is one of the top careers of 2007. That's because (some of us) get to wear pajamas to work.

Prize-worthy book titles

The topic of this week's RifRaf book club meeting was "strange and interesting book titles." Jenny supplied a prize (candy, of course) for the person deemed to have brought the best example. Hands down, the collective mind chose Charley's Charlie's offering of The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen, by M. T. Anderson. That's not to say there weren't a number of other good suggestions. For example, Martin brought out Book Lust, by Nancy Pearl (011.73 P316b) and Joy was rooting for Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, by Robert Olen Butler (Fiction B972g2001). Join us for next week's meeting when we discuss books that should win prizes for book award competitions that don't exist. Best dog book, best book that makes you cry, best depiction of a dysfunctional family -- post your contributions here!

Any friend of Tom's is a friend of mine

How clever can one guy be? My husband delights in showing me David Pogue's technology blog and videos for the New York Times, which always crack me up. Pogue has been on a real roll recently. There's his post on "6 billion degrees of separation," in which he describes an effort to test the Internet's power by seeing whether or not a man can be located if people only have his photograph and first name. Then there's yesterday's post about faked photos of upcoming Apple products, with a link to the Worth1000.com contest to create nonexistent Apple products. Finally, there's Pogue's ode to the RIAA, sung to the tune of the Village People song "YMCA." All together now:

Young man,
You were surfing along,
And then, young man,
You downloaded a song,
And then, dumb man,
Copied it to your 'Pod,
Then a phone call came to tell you:

You've just been sued by the R.I.A.A.!
You've just been sued by the R.I.A.A.!
Their attorneys say, you committed a crime,
And there'd better not be a next time!

They've lost their minds at the R.I.A.A.!
Justice is blind at the R.I.A.A....
"You're depriving the bands! You are learning to steal,
You can't do whatever you feel!"

Everyone's a star

Especially when you can have your own celebrity Read poster made at the Polaris Library Systems booth at the ALA Midwinter meeting.



Okay, it wasn't all fame and fortune. There was work to be done and even a bit of fun to be had. I blogged for fellow school librarians about a great all-day institute I attended on building teen communities online. And I got to go to a reception at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. Beam me up, Scotty.

On the road again

As I prepare to leave for the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Seattle, I'm taking a moment to share some interesting tidbits from various news sources.

A couple of items from this week's issue of American Libraries Direct:

A professor of philosophy at the University of California at Riverside has concluded that ethics books are more likely to be stolen than non-ethics books from a library's philosophy collection. In other words, "it seems indeed that ethicists do steal more books!"

And the gay rights movement has set its sights on a lofty new goal: the right to be issued library cards. (Spoiler alert: from The Onion)

On a more serious note, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the society has moved its atomic clock two minutes closer to midnight, "It is now 5 minutes to midnight. Reflecting global failures to solve the problems posed by nuclear weapons and the climate crisis, the decision by the BAS Board of Directors was made in consultation with the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel Laureates." This is a big deal. The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to indicate how close humanity is to nuclear war, and has been adjusted only 17 times prior to today's announcement. The last time was in February 2002 after the events of 9/11. Wow.

Your turn to rate websites

The folks at the Credibility Commons (run by the Information School at the University of Washington and the Information Institute of Syracuse University) are alpha testing a new Mozilla Firefox toolbar that allows users to access and add ratings to a database of website evaluations called CredibilityTalk.

Here's what it looks like:


It's VERY alpha, which they tell you right up front, but the idea is fascinating and, imho, full of promise. By clicking on the "Site rating" icon, you can see how others have rated the site (once others start rating). By clicking on "Rate site," you can rate it yourself. And by clicking on "Automatic Rating," you can see how their software does in evaluating the site. A number of more-or-less quantifiable criteria are used for that one, including whether or not contact information is available, if the site has been recently updated, if the links work, and so on. Hmm, my library site only got a "20% trustworthy" ranking...

Are you an overachiever?

The stars are in alignment. I had put a new book on my desk to blog about -- The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids, by Alexandra Robbins (305.2350973 R534o) -- only to discover that Andrea just wrote an article for the Online Gargoyle about this very same topic and links to the book's web page. Robbins is a journalist who went back to her high school and shadowed nine students to get a better understanding of the pressures they experience. The book is fast-paced, punctuated by section headings that name each student and label how each one is perceived. So, there's AP Frank, College Freshman, Perceived as: The Workhorse; Julie, Senior, Perceived as: The Superstar; C.J., Junior, Perceived as: The Flirt. And so on.



It's no secret that we've got plenty of overachievers in this school. I often find myself wanting to tell someone to relax, to chill out, to getsomeperspective for gosh sakes. I guess that Alexandra Robbins is an overachiever herself. Besides the web page, she's got a MySpace page just for the book.

You never know who will see what you post online

And sometimes it works out in really cool ways. Several years ago, we had a group of girls (with one in particular) who were really wild about Orson Scott Card and his Ender's Game series. OSC is perennially popular here, but this was a case of hard core fandom. Luckily for us, he visited our fair city in both 1998 and 2000 while on book tours. Both times, several of us trucked over to the bookstore to see him, get books signed and, of course, get our pictures taken with the man. The photos were then posted on our photo gallery.

Here's where it gets interesting. Some time ago, I received an e-mail from the folks at Enslow Publishers. There were preparing a biography of OSC and wanted to know if they could use one of those photos. I said yes, with the proviso that they send us a copy of the book when it was out. Well, now we've got it in hand: Orson Scott Card: Architect of Alternate Worlds by Edward Willett. And there's the top photo from the photo gallery, in living color, on page 89.

This one's for you, Jocelyn -

More music magic

Last May I wrote about Pandora, software that "learns" what music you like and streams it to your desktop. Human musician-analysts from the Music Genome Project listen to songs and hand-code them for attributes. In Sunday's News-Gazette, there was an article about One Llama, an in-development music discovery service that uses "artificial ear" technology to analyze music and categorize it. So -- computers rather than people. One Llama extracts 3,000 features from each song to measure similarity, as opposed to Pandora's 200 to 400 attributes. The differences are interesting: human judgment (also human error) vs. automation and a much larger database of tunes. I was excited to see that one of the One Llama team members is Amit Sudharshan, Uni High class of 2002.

A beta version of One Llama will be out later this month and you can sign up on the website to be notified when it's available. Even if you choose not to sign up, be sure to go to the website and take a few minutes to watch the little llama on the lower right hand corner go through its paces. Totally charming.

Money is a funny thing

We've been receiving books from a series called American Popular Culture Through History. One of the cool things about it is that each decade-based volume has is an appendix showing the cost of products during the time period covered. I was quite struck by some of the prices I found in the 1960s volume:

• McDonald's "Big Mac," $.45 (1968)
• Milk, $.48 per half gallon (1964)
• Cotton denim jeans (Sears), $3.47 (1966)
• Interest on savings accounts, 5.25-5.75% (1966)
• Chevrolet Camaro (base price), $2,466 (1966)
• Look magazine, $.25 (1964)
• Paperback edition of Catch-22, $.95 (1969)
• 23-inch black-and-white television, $260 (1961)
• Zenith 20-inch color television, $399.95 (1968)
• Boeing 747 (new), $21,000,000 (1966)

Wonder how much a Boeing jet costs these days? Don't think it's followed the same trajectory as those TV sets.

Mountain 'o mail

After any school break, comes an avalanche of mail. Magazines and newspapers make up the bulk of the mass. I now know for certain that I am Time Magazine's Person of the Year. But unanticipated items also emerge from the stack. My favorite from this break's batch is a catalog of prom and party items. Maybe they think librarians want to have more fun? In any case, I found myself fascinated by the variety of entire environments that can be purchased to transform a school gym into a themed paradise. A prom committee can pick among themes such as nautical, tropical, Polynesian, "Asian" (generic, I guess), disco, at the hop, the O.K. Corral, Las Vegas, Broadway, Hollywood, French Quarter, 1960s (complete with peace symbol), 1950s, the ocean floor, Paris, Venice (including a gondola), ancient Egypt, Central Park, and so on. These environments are largely formed from objects called "standees," life-sized cardboard replicas that are free-standing. A large number of standees are for picture taking. These are the things where you poke your head through a hole and come out looking like you are driving a 1950s car, playing a ukelele on the beach, or resting your mermaid body on a rock. Just think -- for a mere $49.99, you and your date can become, um, ... bowling pins.

Back physically, but not mentally

Because during the break I was at KlezKamp for a large and intensive dose of Yiddish music and culture. The KlezKamp blog captures the feel of the week quite nicely. You'll find evidence of my presence in the December 31st entry. I'm second from the left in the Fidl Kapelye (fiddle band) photo. We're having little musical conversations up there.

Okay, tomorrow I promise to return to my "normal" librarian self. Though I didn't stay away completely, having met two wonderful librarians at KlezKamp. Somehow we managed to keep the conversation away from MARC records and such.