This particular assignment asks us to make use of directories like Technorati and Feedster to locate feeds we want to subscribe to. I’m going to not do that, since I already have more to read than I have time to read. In any case, those tools have not been particularly useful to me in the past. I tend to find new feeds through links from the ones I’m currently reading.

Tags: better greader, greasemonkey, techlearning 2008

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Sorry it’s so short — I just got a new camera and didn’t have anything more than the tiny 32MH MMC for storage. It has since been replaced by a 4GB SDHC and I promise to get a full recording next time.

Tags: capital ale house, karaoke

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Over the years, have had to cull my feeds periodically. There are several news sites or blogs that I would love to be able to keep up with, but I don’t have the time to process the volume of content they generate on a daily basis. Currently, I have about 231 subscriptions, several of which are for dead feeds that I haven’t cleaned out yet.

I am perpetually behind on reading all of my subscriptions. There are a few that I hit regularly, but the rest are saved for times when I need to take my mind off of whatever problem I am working on at the moment. With this many feeds, RSS is a time shifting or bookmarking tool, and I’m okay with that. Twitter has become my source for the latest OMG news.

Tags: google reader, opml, techlearning 2008, twitter

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The rules:

1. Write your own six word memoir
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to the original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
4. Tag five more blogs with links
5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

I am tagging my fellow TechLearning companions who have their blogs linked from the site at the moment: Andy, Betty, Carol, Catherine, Crista, Leigh, Linda, and Rochelle.

I am also tagging you. Yes, YOU. Do it.

Tags: hemingway, memoir

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I’ve done this several times using Excel, and often I find that there are too many things to tweak to do just a quick and dirty graph or chart for a meeting/presentation. With Widgenie, I found the opposite to be true. Cell formats are limited to text, number, and date/time, and for the life of me, I could not get it to show data for resources over a period of time (i.e. one year of use stats for a collection of databases).

That being said, the tool is in Beta, so it’s possible that greater functionality will come. For now, though, it’s probably useful for only simple graphs and charts, such as this:

Tags: techlearning 2008, widgenie

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For me, doing the basics was nothing new, so that part was… well… boring. However, it leads into thing six, which is to explore Flickr mashups. I made this using the Spell with Flickr tool:

I have played with Tag Galaxy before, and I have an old Librarian Trading Card. I decided to make a new card, and I’ve bookmarked the color pickr for later use.

For my fellow TechLearners and anyone else out there who cares, I suggest you don’t use Flickr’s Uploadr if you need to upload a bunch of images (as in, more than 10). Something broke with version 3.0 and more often than not I get upload errors when I try to use it. I have not tried it on the Mac, so it’s possible that my problems are Windows-specific.

Tags: color pickr, flickr, mashup, spell with flickr, techlearning 2008, trading card

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Tags: bagel, flickr, food porn

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I have been treating RateYourMusic as a LibraryThing for music, which it pretty much is, without all the flair and design and integration that LT currently provides. My personal rule (a.k.a. thinking like a librarian) was that I would “catalog” what I owned, not what I wanted or had previously owned. That’s how I roll over at LT, and for my book collection, it makes a lot of sense.

My music collection, however, is much more fluid. I’m less likely to hang on to a CD once I’ve grown tired of it, so I regularly trade out “old” albums for “new” ones. A while back I started tagging albums as “used to own” rather than completely de-accessioning them. Because I’m regularly acquiring new music, I need to know what I’ve already evaluated and passed on, and this is one way to do that.

I should have know that this would be the slippery slope that lead to… a wishlist. Sure, I have wishlists all over the place, from Amazon to the various swap sites I participate in. However, RateYourMusic is supposed to be a catalog, right? And a library catalog doesn’t have wishlist items, right? (Well, unless you count those books that never show up from the publisher/jobber/vendor.)

This is the point at which I stopped thinking like a librarian and started thinking like a user. Having a wishlist mixed in with my have and use-to-have lists means it’s all in one, indexed collection. It feels freeing to let go of the “rules” that keep me from using all of the tools available to me!

Tags: cataloging, rateyourmusic

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In that job posting and many others, the most attention paid to subject expertise (in the form of a master’s or Ph.D.) is a brief mention in the list of “preferred” qualifications. That is a strong indication that the hiring institution will settle for less — much less. In fact, I’m told that in a number of recent hires, Ph.D.’s and M.A.’s — some with years of professional experience working in top academic libraries in addition to having an MLIS — have been passed over in favor of candidates straight out of library school whose only previous degree was a bachelor’s.

Were they passed over because they asked for more compensation than what the institution was willing to pay? I suspect that may play a much larger role than what Mr. Gilman is giving it.

Libraries are usually the first target for budget cuts, and one of the biggest expenses in a library is staff salaries. Someone who has post-graduate degrees beyond the MLS will likely expect to be compensated for the additional skills and knowledge they bring to the job. University administrators either don’t understand or don’t care about the value that these folks add to collections and instruction, and as a result, they are unwilling to meet the compensation demands of these “better qualified” candidates. Recent graduates in any field will cost the university less in the salary department, and that short-term benefit is the only one that (mostly short-timer) administrators care about.

Given all that, would you go through the trouble of getting a second master’s degree or a doctoral degree, knowing that unless you are already in a tenure-track position with fair compensation, it is unlikely that you’ll be payed any more than you are already? Probably not, unless you were particularly passionate about research in your field of study.

Even so, that research might not help you with tenure, as some colleagues of mine discovered when their institution’s tenure requirements changed so that scholarship in their primary field (read: library science) alone counted towards tenure and post-tenure review. Nevermind that they focused most of their scholarly research in their secondary subject specialties.

All of the above is why I took myself out of the tenure-track world. I have no interest (at this time) in becoming a subject specialist in anything but what I do every day: librarianship. I’m happy to let others make decisions about content, so long as they let me focus on my areas of expertise, such as delivery platforms, access, and licensing issues.

Tags: scholarship, tenure

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Ladytron - Velocifero

The second track is the album’s lead single, “Ghost,” and it’s easy to hear why that was chosen. The song’s pulsating beat and repetitive chorus are addictive and likely to be club favorites. “I’m Not Scared” follows with a relentless grind and power rock chords that touches the musical soul and compels the listener to crank up the volume a little bit more. With the attitude and energy level of the album set within the first few tracks, the band takes a moment to give the listener a breather before launching back in with the electronic wave assault prevalent in most of the rest of the tracks.

Rosemary & Thyme - The Complete Series

An aspect of the show that I find very appealing is the relationship between Laura and Rosemary. Early on in the series, they addressed the social perception that the only reason why two grown women could care about each other is because they are romantically linked (”Arabica and the Early Spider”). With that bigoted and misguided stereotype thrown out the window, Ferris and Kendal set out to develop their character’s friendship to be something deeper and stronger than what is usually shown on an episodic dramedy television series. The interplay between the two went from merely comedic to the kind of inside joke humor that happens only between very close friends.

Jaymay - Autumn Fallin’

It’s difficult to peg this album into any particular genre. There are elements of folk, pop, and even touches of the wall-of-sound aspects of electronica, although no processors are used in the creation of the music. And, just when you think you’ve got a label, with gusto she throws in the ragtime-style song “Hard to Say.”

That’s all for now! As you can tell from my sidebar, I have a few items that I’ll be working on this next month, although one is for a print publication due out later this year or early next year.

Tags: blogcritics, jaymay, ladytron, reviews, rosemary & thyme

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