Phone Books

The latest edition of the Williamsport phone book arrived, as did the big bins for recycling the old phone books. I stopped using phone books for a few years, instead looking everything up on Yahoo Yellow Pages. But I've come back to them. I like that we don't have to pay for it, nor any other service to allow us to use it. I like that it's limited to our geographic area, and that it allows you to browse if you didn't spell something right (a common problem with me). It also always seems to have more options for any given Yellow Pages category than the online version seems to.

Of course there are advantages to the online one, like links to Web sites and maps and full mailing addresses. Plus it doesn't kill as many trees. But I still love quaint, old-fashioned phone books.

Taking 2.0 to the Faculty

We read a good, brief article called "Taking 2.0 to the Faculty" for our instructional librarian meeting this morning. I thought it was a great article, and particularly relevant to me since I'm the 2.0 person of the group.

I think every public services librarian should make time for blogs. I don't understand how you can run programs and improve on instruction without reading what other people are doing. I find blogs to be so much more helpful than formally published articles. You miss so much of the practical stuff that doesn't get put into the scholarly literature. It makes me sad for people who don't create the time to browse other librarians' blogs from time to time.

Helping faculty

One of the biggest faculty users of Turnitin.com just called because she forgot the class password and can't find it on the new interface. I can't find it on the new interface either, but as the administrator, I could look it up. I read it off to her. Her response was, "Who the f&#% came up with that?!"

I cracked up. It wasn't the response I had been expecting.

So Let Just Not Talk About It?

This is an old example of censorship, but illustrates previous points I have made on the issue of censorship of books like Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird. It seems to me that the teacher led an excellent discussion of the book and the use of racial language. Yet a student wants to take this discussion out of the classroom and never be able to talk about it. How is anyone (particularly Caucasians) ever supposed to learn when you censor the hard truths of the not-so-glorious past? And if 1/3 of their school is African American, they must hear racial slurs over and over again in the hallway and in their community. Shouldn't they know the history of those words?

I'm sure I have many ideas that are offensive to other people on the issue of race and ethnicity... maybe even just the fact that I'm white. But why can't we push forward with open, un-censored talks so that we can all learn what's offensive, why, and take the fear out of the issue? How can we move on from where we are now to something better without these talks? How is this desire controversial? It's a sincere question that begs for comments from any readers who have more experience than I do.

Reference Question Stumper

I just had a student at the reference desk whose professor is offering extra credit if they can figure out what the significance of the number 39 is in the movie Blow-Up. He said there's a book in the library that will tell them. She had already searched out a dictionary of symbols, and we looked through some others. I also used Reference Universe. When I write out "thirty-nine," it returns several reference articles on the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. She read about them in one of our reference books, but doesn't see the connection. I didn't know what else to try, and am not having any luck on the Internet either...

A little while later...
With some tweaking of the search terms in Google, I found the number thirty discussed in a book called After Hitchcock. It's either a reference to Hitchcock's 39 Steps, which has similar themes in its plot, or that Antonioni was living in Europe in 1939. Long live Google Books. Now if they'd only let me print a page or two...

Countdown Begins

I set up a countdown widget for myself to remind myself how much time I have left before Harry Potter Night. It's my big event for the year. This clock goes onto my iGoogle page, which I use as my home page. I may put it on the library's Web site, too, but I'll have to wait until the week of for that...

I need to pick a topic for a panel on Web 2.0 technologies. I'm thinking of talking about widgets, and how they do really cool stuff without needing to know any programming languages or even much about Web sites other than where to place your code.

First step to Seattle

I bought my plane ticket to Seattle for ACRL in March. There was a flight for $300 including taxes, and I know if I waited until a reasonable time to buy the ticket, it would cost $900, which I couldn't afford. I got some money from the provost's office, and it will cover my plane ticket now and early-bird registration, with just $5 coming out of my pocket so far. Everything else will be my expense, but I have a place to stay in Seattle (and people to see!) and that's the biggest expense.

So ACRL, here I come... though it would be nice if you would let me register to keep our business office happy...

On a side note, I'm a little disappointed on something. One of the other librarians runs the local chapter of the honor society Phi Kappa Phi. It seems to be a big headache for her, so I contacted the Miami U. chapter to see if I was eligible. Each chapter has its own rules, and Miami doesn't allow alumni to join. That's fine. But I hate that the national standard is the top 10% of graduating class, but Miami's chapter says only the top 5%. I wasn't in the top 5%, but I was probably right around the top 10%. IU's cutoff for Phi Beta Mu was higher than the national cutoff. Though satisfying that was not a problem.

Thinking about this, I just realized I don't have any of these on my staff page...