On Cafes

The lesson I take from this blog post on a coffee shop in a bank is, A coffee shop will make lots of people like you -- and it's a chance to drum up business. Bank staff are stationed there (only sometimes, I'd guess?) to, you know, help you with bank stuff.

I haven't studied it too hard, but I don't know of library cafes where the baristas can also do readers' advisory, or charge your fines and your chai to your VISA card.

NP's Birthday Party

Bother! I forgot to take a picture of the cakes!! Oh well. Maybe you will like these.

Practicing with New Camera!

Hmm. I saved the pictures I liked better as BPMs and Blogger doesn't want to upload them.
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Ah. Here we go!

Happy talk Like a Pirate Day!










Still Life: Lisa's Desk









Still Life: S's Desk










Still Life: R's Desk










H & C

Covers

I've been following the conversation about how the cover of Liar, by Justine Larbalestier, doesn't match the way the main character describes herself. Don't we all hate that? Not surprisingly, Larbalestier herself writes the best synopsis of what went down. Well, more than a synopsis -- a good think piece, really.

The cover that annoyed me recently? The smiley girl on Paper Towns, by John Green. RPL had the darker cover, which seems more appropriate than the sunny one here at my branch.

UPDATE: the publisher changed the cover!

Manga Workshop at NP

Web 3.0

Google's Wave platform promises to break down the walls of the social web. WIRED says,

"If Wave turns into the tsunami that Google hopes it to be, then for the web of the future you will truly need only a single log-in."

Read more about it here.

Free

This PW interview with Chris Anderson, about his new book Free: the future of a radical price, works as Cliff Notes -- read it if you think you won't get to the book. Read it to understand the value of free as a price point and a marketing tool (e.g., read chapters 1 - 5 online, get sucked into the plot, by the book).

(Rats. That's not the whole interview. Go to your paper Pub Weekly for May 18, page 22.)

Chris Anderson "discovered" the long tail, a concept I totally dig.

Talking about Book Talking

Part One: Ethics
Is it okay to book-talk books I haven't read?

If I already book-talked a book, do I have to finish it? It's sooooo girl-drama.

Part Two: Lists
Books Book-Talked at WMS this month (I get credit for circ stats on all copies this summer, right?):

Step to This / Nikki Carter
No Way Out / Peggy Kern
We Are the Ship / Kadir Nelson
Slam Dunk / Sharon Robinson

I talked about those consistently. I displayed these and/or mentioned these to some classes:
Postcard / Tony Abbot
Burger Wuss / M.T. Anderson
A La Carte / Tanita Davis
Scat / Carl Hiaasen
InuYasha Rumiko Takahashi
Hip-Hop: A Short History / Rosa Waters


See my LibraryThing to search for books by tags when kids say "this lady came to our school and talked about a baseball book" or whatever.

Week 12, Part 2

Week 12: Fun Potos

If a Reference Question Falls in the Forest

If my friends email me or Facebook message me with questions - about books, about free chicken from Oprah, about job searching - do I count it in ref stats?

Week 11: Online Productivity

Emily Format toured me through her iGoogle page a couple of weeks back and it struck me as a useful tool for the family. There's a shared calendar, a "to do" list, news feeds, weather and more. We can post documents on GoogleDocs, too. A drawback is that since Google has become a bit of an empire, I have three or so passwords Blogger -iGoogle -Gmail know me by. When I paused in this writing to check the iGoogle page, I needed to sign out of Blogger. Not convenient.

Like any web tool, it will only be useful for keeping the family on the same page if everyone opens it daily and looks at it. When I told her about my experiment, an experienced parent said to me, "Let me know that works out for ya. . . "

GoogleDocs would be useful in a setting where something like the z: drive did not exist; it, too would be a way to have my work available at any desk.

Fresh Podcast

The inevitable: Twilight.

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Free Comic Book Day Celebrated Saturday!

Nothing New Under the Sun

A number of early motion picture shorts from the Library of Congress are now on YouTube. Clearly people have been into lol cat-type humor for nearly 100 years.

"Teen Appeal"

Author John Green declares "teen appeal" something that "sounds to me like the name of the worst magazine ever" and he implies that it's used in the dumbing-down process, and shouldn't be. After all,

I may be alone in thinking this, but I believe that teenagers are far better readers than we often assume. (For example: I have received hundreds--not an exaggeration--of emails from teenagers telling me how much they love Octavian Nothing. You will recall, as I do with considerable consternation, that I did not write Octavian Nothing.)

More here, his blog entry for the Battle of the Kids' Books.

Week 10: Tagging

Tagging can play a useful role in finding stuff.

Controlled vocabularies save the day in nuanced cases (to differentiate a synonym of "floodgate" from "Watergate Affair 1972-1974"), but what speaker of American English will think of the search term "cookery" to get herself to the 641s? If members added tags to our OPAC they could find things using terms meaningful to them. Subject tracing would remain, of course, for authority on the item's "aboutness."

If HCPL YA staff shared a common Flickr account for posting images on our YA webpages, we would tag pictures. That way, we could create a slide show of, say, Free Comic Book Day activities across the County.

A while ago, Platinumb showed me how she used delcious to keep sites handy for use at the reference desk (DU's bookmarks). Eventually, I started one for North Park. I add sites at least once a week using the buttons I added to my browsers, but I consult it only once every ten days or so. I don't think the rest of the staff find it a useful tool, so it fails to bring together the little gems each of us know.

As we did this exercise, Platinum cued me in on some advanced techniques like bundling ("broad terms" for you fans of cataloging) and networking. I networked Norton Park (in my mind that's what nortpark means, but that's a whole 'nother story) to DU and TW. Norton hasn't tagged anything "demographics" but those libraries did. After a search of our bookmarks got no hits, I clicked "network" just under our name and got suggestions from colleagues! Way cool.

North Park's reference staff tags posts in our blog so we can get back to them quickly. A common FAQ: how do I fix it when the image on a public PC's monitor gets rotated 90 or 180 degrees?

In the last 5 - 6 years, tagging has gone from a "controversial" topic in library school classes to something I do daily.

Did You Catch the Rainbow?

We sure did at NP!

Clean Windows?

Short AP article here on some Windows 7 features. A theme seems to be that they "mak[e] Windows 7 quieter than Vista" and trust people to do things like right click to see what an icon can do.

Week 9: Social Networks

What I did this week:

• Used LinkedIn as a test case for a feature I don't often use -- the one that checks my email address book for people I know. I wasn't surprised that it turned up only one person: I was surprised by who it was.
• Read the tips for using Facebook professionally -- I am test driving the To Do List app.
• Noted for the umpteenth time that "personal" and "professional" use of Facebook (FB) intertwine. College classmate / YA author Leigh hipped me to a virtual YA event. In any 2 week time span, nearly every librarian friend posts a link or an article of professional interest.
  
• The Top Ten FB Apps for Librarians mostly look like tools I would use if HCPL had a FB presence.
• Signed up for Shelfari app for FB without reading all the comments first: oops. If the only thing folks have said for 3 days straight is, "hey it won't show up on my profile!" then there's no point to getting it.

A conversation the other day with Helen emphasizes how FB could be a PR machine for HCPL. We had been talking about Etsy, then looked at Style together (because FB told me someone I know is in this issue). On our way to the right page, Helen noticed Etsy's logo in an ad and I recognized the graphics for the ad -- because my FB friend is contributing to the craft event it advertises and I had seen the event's graphic attached to my friend's name on FB.

By promoting her involvement with the event, my FB friend helps create buzz about it: not only have I seen an ad, someone I know is involved and suddenly I am thinking about going. How great would it be if library events had that buzz and cache? If people friend (it's different for places / businesses than people, but I'll use that word) the library, then we would promote events to them. If someone indicates they are attending an event, then everyone they know would see our logo and a message like "attending book club tonight" or "going to environmental film program at Tuckahoe" and a whole new image of who we are and what we do emerges.

PR always means getting your name out via different media: an article in the paper and TV coverage; a listing in Connections and a flyer posted in YA. Social websites are just one more format. (More on branding with FB, here.)