Cycho Librarian

I have something obscene sitting on my desk at work. Shocking, I know. But there it is. Or at least according to these fine, upstanding citizens it's obscene. What is this obscenity? Shield your eyes children, for here it is:  Yes, it's a graphic novel. Personally, I'd maybe call this one R-rated. But apparently a couple library employees in Kentucky felt it was their duty to shield the community and an 11-year-old from being exposed to this execrable work, which was given a starred review by Publisher's Weekly and named as one of the 10 best graphic novels of 2007 by Time . Indeed, it was so insidious that it was necessary to pray over the reader to prevent the images from penetrating the purity of her mind. It's utterly laughable to me that a few drawings of boobs and copulation without parts visible would cause this sort of reaction. Don't get me wrong, I don't think an 11-year-old should read this. And having read the book myself, I don'...

One of the many things I love about my job is how varied it is. The "public" part of "public library" means that we see all sorts, and see the best and the worst of people every single day. A few events in the past two days really brought this home to me. Yesterday I had young woman come up to me to get her library card number, having lost the card. This is a completely normal transaction 99% of the time, but this time was in that 1%. As soon as I looked up her account I could tell there was something seriously wrong. Looking at the notes on her account I saw that there had been issues with reserved items going missing, and materials adding up to almost $800 checked out in February that hadn't been returned. The notes indicated that we needed to find out what was going on. So I started to ask about what had happened. As I asked questions the girl became visibly upset. When I asked what her current address was, she told me that she had been kicked out and...

One of our administrators added a bonus challenge onto our 23 Things : Tell everyone 10 random things about yourself. That's wonderful, really. But I have 2 minor problems. First, I have an unfortunate habit of thinking that everyone already knows everything about me. After all, since I know it surely everyone else does too, right? The other problem is that I like to tell stories, so I've totally lost track of which stories about me everyone's already heard and which ones are new to people. So chances are I'm going to bore you with at least half of this post. Hopefully the other half will make up for it. 1. I was born in Cincinnati but moved to New Hampshire before I was a year old, so I'm a New Englander at heart if not by birth. It's a complete coincidence that I'm back in Ohio. 2. I've been a Red Sox fan since I was at least 6 (my favorite player was Jim Rice). My mother is a professional singer, and sang at an annual charity event where she w...

We have come to the end of the 23 Things , although hopefully not the end of Learn & Play @ CML . There's no question in my mind that this is one of the best things the library has done to train staff. Not only did it take much less time in the long run than it would have to bring every employee into a classroom to be spoon fed this information, it also brought so many staff across the system closer together. I constantly hear about how people felt like they got to know their co-workers better and felt closer to staff at other locations than they ever did before. Since CML has been battling some provincialism among the branches for years, this alone could have made the entire project worthwhile. I can't help feeling that there are a couple of things missing, though. Unfortunately, to get this project to work we couldn't make it mandatory. What sort of "play" experience is required? But staff who didn't participate have lost out in so many ways. Not...

After our video Thing , we come to our audio Thing : Podcasts. I don't know why, but for some reason podcasts make more sense to me than video blogging. Maybe it's because I was raised on NPR, so audio broadcast of information just clicks with me. I'm also used to listening to NPR while I'm doing other things, and podcasts let me do that as well. So I'm a big fan of podcasts, even though I've never used them in the truest sense of the term-- that is, automatically downloading them onto my iPod. Usually, I just stream them as I need them. Naturally, being raised on NPR, my most common source of podcasts is NPR . Not only can I hear articles that I missed and share articles that I especially enjoyed, NPR also offers other streams that I really like, especially their " Song of the Day ." This has helped me discover all sorts of new music that I might not have checked out otherwise. The other musical feature that I really enjoy is the full-length st...

YouTube is awesome. I know, a lot of people see YouTube as the next great time waster on the web-- people spending hours poking around for videos of bikini-clad exhibitionists or public brawls. But as with so many of the complaints about the Internet, the salacious anecdotes overshadow what's truly remarkable about this sort of website. Many of my views about sites like Flickr and Wikipedia and YouTube have been influenced by Clay Shirky's book " Here Comes Everybody ." The overall theme of the book and what links these sites together is a sort of economy of scale. Whereas in the past it took a great deal of energy to spread any sort of information, now it's easy for anyone to put any sort of information out into the public square. These sites are essentially information aggregators on a scale that has never been seen in human history. The scale is so vast that we tend to miss what it is accomplishing. In the past, it would have taken the few people who wer...

Yes, I need to apply myself. I've consistently been behind on my 23 Things , and now I have less than a week to complete them all! So I'm going to knock out Things 17 , 18 and 19 all in one post. Shocking, I know. But there is a consistent theme here: Apps. Especially with the iPhone we've all been hearing a lot about Apps lately, but what's most interesting to me is how the concept of apps has completely taken over computing. When I first started using computers, it was all about just running individual software. You bought the program, stuck the disk in the computer, and ran whatever program you wanted to run. Windows began the change away from this restricted view of what the computer was capable of. Suddenly you could run more than one program at once! What's funny is how much this seemingly simple change began to change how we thought of the computer. Computers stopped being tools that could only do one thing. They started being nexuses where many thi...

Things 15 and 16 bring us to "wikis." Once again, we have a term that's probably become so over-used that it will eventually be meaningless. But the concept behind it is brilliant. Everyone knows about the biggest wiki out there, Wikipedia. Wikipedia has generated plenty of controversy on its own, but one thing that seems to be constantly overlooked in the criticism is the fact that it's actually pretty effective. So why is Wikipedia effective? Surely if we turn the entire world loose to edit an encyclopedia however they see fit we'll have information anarchy! But as with all things Internet, the answer lies in the scale. For every vandal, there are hundreds of people who care enough about the entry to fix it. Basically, why would a vandal want to waste their time messing with an entry that will be reverted to its original form seconds after it was altered? In this large example there are several clues as to why wikis are a good idea generally. First, any...

So for Thing 13 we're investigating the revolution that is tagging through del.icio.us . I remember when del.icio.us first came on the scene, and the extent of my thoughts at the time were "isn't that a clever way to use a .us domain name." I really didn't think anything of it until we were changing computers at work and I was worried I'd lose my bookmarks. So I created a del.icio.us account and moved all my work bookmarks in there. Turns out my bookmarks all transferred anyway, so I haven't really used my account since. Once again, this is largely a matter of convenience. Since I'm at the same computer at work each day and the same computer at home each day, I almost never have to access the bookmarks on one computer from another. So I never really had the need to use del.icio.us. I could see myself using it instead of bookmarks if Firefox has a del.icio.us add-on that functions like the bookmarks do, but until I need to access my bookmarks fr...

Now a month behind, we come to Thing 12 : Twitter . I honestly can't remember when I discovered Twitter, but the first time I tried playing with it was to see if I could find a way to quickly share information across the entire library system. Twitter seemed like an ideal way to do this. If we created location-specific Twitter accounts and then had everybody follow each other, then when we needed to share information quickly between locations we could just "tweet" it. Power goes down at some location? Our infoline tweets it and everyone knows. Staff member goes home sick and you need emergency coverage? Tweet it and someone who can spare a person rides to the rescue. You get the idea. The catch was that there needed to be a way to see the tweets other than on the Twitter website. The Twitter website doesn't automatically refresh, and it's not sitting on top of your desktop. So the whole "quick notice" idea kinda goes out the window. I played w...

Once again I'm behind in my 23 Things , but this time I think I have a decent excuse ... Thing 11 is to investigate Library Thing  (I know, that's an awful lot of things for one sentence).  Well, according to my profile I apparently first investigated Library Thing on July 24th, 2006.  I have a sneaking suspicion I found out about it in one of my graduate school classes.  Apparently I went in and cataloged seven books that I had read recently, and then abandoned it.  It's not that I didn't see how this could be useful, it just didn't grab me for some reason. As I'm looking at my account now, I think I know why that happened.  First of all, the interface is really complicated.  There's too much to do on the main page of your account, and no obvious way to isolate just your books, or just your friends.  It puts everything that you can do on the site out there at once.  The thing is, I'm not using this site for all those other things.  I'm using it to t...

A quick post today on image generators for Thing 10 . First, my lovely new logo courtesy of CoolText . Next, just like everyone else in the world I created my own manga avatar . But I'm so attached to my current Triplets of Belleville avatar that I couldn't bear to replace it. So here's an excuse to share the manga one (since it came out so well, IMHO). Moral of this post? There's so many ways to manipulate images and text online, why bother with the software?

On we plunge into the wild and wonderful world of RSS feeds! I first discovered RSS feeds about 4 years ago when I was recommending an online comic I had discovered to one of our tech folks at the library. I was looking for library-related cartoons for a PowerPoint presentation and stumbled across a fun and quirky daily cartoon about a library called Unshelved . It spread like wildfire through my branch, with several of the staff going back and making our way through three years of archives to get caught up on the misadventures of the Mallville Public Library staff. After shooting the ones that we found especially funny back and forth by e-mail for a while, I thought it would be cool to share it on our staff intranet, so I sent the information off to the person in charge of the intranet. She responded saying that it looked like we'd be able to embed the RSS feed into the intranet. I had no idea what that meant, so I poked around. Turns out RSS is a Really Simple way to Syndic...

I've now fallen a week behind in the 23 things, so in a desperate attempt to catch up I'm going to try to write the three posts I need to catch up over this weekend. First off, I'm supposed to write something, anything about technology. I've actually been thinking about writing this post for a while. A few months ago it dawned on me that cell phones are no longer just phones. The first inkling I had about this was the first time we took my stepdaughter to a rock concert about 6 years ago. When the obligatory slow song came along, instead of lighters all over the arena, everyone held up their cell phones. My initial reaction was to laugh, but then I began to think that it made a lot of sense. Smoking isn't allowed indoors in most places anymore, and only 1 in 5 people is likely to have a lighter on them, so why not cell phones? I started wondering who the first person was to do this, especially since only 6 years before that I distinctly remembered being at a ...

Here we are at the end of week 3 , and I'm just getting around to posting now! In my defense, I've been a little busy since last week with getting my stepdaughter off to college. Conveniently, our task this week is to investigate and play with Flickr, which I was doing anyway in order to document the move in. I've been a little slow to get on board with the photo-sharing movement. Mainly that's because I don't normally have a lot of photos to share. I've been aware of Flickr for some time though, so when my brother and sister-in-law had their baby, I immediately went to Flickr in order to share the pictures from her christening. Since then I've mainly been using it to keep my family up-to-date on what's happening. So conveniently, here's what I've been busy with since last week: Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR . The only downside to Flickr is that there's a monthly limit on how much you can upload unless you pay. I suppose th...

I admit I've gotten a bit behind in the 23 Things . Technically I was supposed to blog about this last week, but I figure since the things for this week are to create and register my blog (which I've already done) that I can avoid any penalties. Our task for last week was to view a tutorial on lifelong learning. I'll be honest, I hate the term "Lifelong Learning." It's another one of those catchphrases that gets overused to the point where a lot of people start tuning out. That certainly doesn't mean I don't think it's important. I've always tried to live by a statement Socrates made in his last defense before the Athenians: This is usually translated as "the unexamined life is not worth living." But the Greek is actually much more interesting. The direct translation is more "the unexamined life is no life for a human." In other words, what it is to be human is to constantly explore and examine everything about the...

I know, I know, the whole "2.0" thing is way over the top at this point. It seems like just about anything new with the web has to be 2.0 or it's just not cool. Well, bear with me on this. My library has embraced the idea that if we don't get on board with all the innovations that the constantly changing online world provides us, we're going to get left behind. If you read back through some of my entries you'll see that I've been preaching this for a while. How we create, get, and interact with information is changing drastically, and if libraries are going to survive we need to adapt to this new world. So what are we doing about it? For the next 9 weeks staff at my library are encouraged to try all the different things that are available online that are changing the world of information. There are 23 things to do over these 9 weeks, and if you do them all you'll have a much better understanding of how the world is changing and how libraries can...

After hearing an interview with the author on this past week's "On the Media," I am now anxiously awaiting my copy of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody . The book discusses how the ease of access to information is lowering the bar for who contributes, and as a result there is more power in numbers online than any other force. In media like television and radio, the producers and advertisers call the shots. But online, no matter how much "official" outlets and advertisers may try to shape the direction things progress, ultimately it's people who make things happen. The interview has some interesting examples, but you can already see it in things like iTunes, YouTube, and even Wikipedia. Their prevalence is entirely due to the number of people who have hopped on board, thinking they're good ideas. I think the biggest proof is in Google. Page rank counts for everything in Google, and that's directly related to how many people are clicking t...

Now this is an interesting concept... Okay, first I have to say how cool is that return system? Seriously, that's the sort of stuff those of us who run circulation dream about at night. Yes, I know I'm a pathetic nerd. Now on to the meat. Honestly, the first thought that crossed my mind was that I could think of two people who would probably sign on in a second. One of them would probably try to put on 3 different banners, the other would probably try to sign up as a Republican just to mess with people's heads. Being the intellectual East-coast liberal that I am, I thought this is a great idea. What's better than people sitting down in civil conversation, trying to get to know each other and understand each other? Then I remembered that I live in the U.S., and not Europe. If we tried this here, the Transvestite would probably wind up trying to strangle the Conservative with her pantyhose while the Gun Rights person reached for his AK-47. But seriously, this is ...

My brother (I would insert a link here if he had his own blog) asked me a while back to post something about the new librarianship. I usually don't take requests, my reaction normally being "get your own blog" (sensing a theme here bro?), so I begged off saying that I couldn't write coherently about my own profession. That's not entirely untrue. Librarianship is undergoing a massive change as the world begins to feel the full impact of the information revolution. I'm at as much of a loss to describe it as anyone. Honestly, I don't think anyone in the profession has quite realized yet just how big a deal this revolution is going to be. Hell, I don't think anyone in any profession has quite realized how big this is. Information has never been more readily available, and it has never been easier to let everyone in the world know what you think about any given topic. We've barely scratched the surface of what technology can now allow us to do. T...