Yes, we do. Long before the riots of 1969, there was a developer and a barbeque, and I'm just betting beer...I had to do a link:
Ocean Beach Historical Society
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Thursday, September 06, 2007
reminiscent of whom
Well, I've been on a bit of a carnival ride in my social software 23 things course. It does remind me of how I felt a few years ago when I discovered the biblioblogosphere. It was like I was no longer alone. There were other people whose ideas and thoughts were there for me to explore, AND I could talk to them!
Then I moved to California and became a branch librarian and my life changed. I could barely glance at LibrarianInBlack while on the reference desk, though I have staunchly kept her as one of my five Firefox home pages because she is a California public librarian! I should know what she says. But I often only get to read the subject and a snippet of a post. If there are links to follow, dollars to doughnuts a customer will come up with a question as soon as I start reading.
Therefore, I cringe to admit my Bloglines account has some 3,000 posts waiting for me to read. I keep trying to buck up, admit defeat, and delete some of the feeds, or at least clear the counters. But then I open it up and HAVE to read some Caveat Lector or Walt at Random or Tinfoil+Raccoon. I love Dorothea and Walt and Rochelle. And Meredith and the other Rochelle and way too many others to list. And this will NOT help me--I will just get seduced some more.
I keep wishing for better time management skills. However, the reality is that I spend much of my time as an extremely busy, extremely overpaid clerk. On top of customer needs, the fact is that I am not that speedy anymore. So that better time management desire translates into a need for more time.
Playing with web 2.0 stuff can lead to more time frittering, so I am trying for discipline. Unfortunately, for me, the techie toys are addictive. But I will be strong, and talk about a book.
It's the love of books that keeps me going. I finally got around to reading The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan, after having recommended The Omnivore's Dilemma to everyone in shouting distance. It was fascinating, well-written, and fascinating. Science and history interwoven with philosophy and agriculture. One reader on LibraryThing commented, "I will never look at a potato the same way again". I feel the same way. But I won't think any plant the same way again. I look out at the hybrid tea roses off our balconies. I am sure they are shaping my view of the world. My only action is to occasionally deadhead them; my landlady and the gardener take care of the majority of their needs. But they may be training us in some way.
Pollan closely examines four plants and their interactions with humans: apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes. Each section has revelations, none that I expected. Pollan is a gardener. I think he manages to get across the full spectrum of why we need plants in so many ways, and they need us. He probably makes the most cogent case I have heard for biodiversity, without starting with that intent or ever mounting a soapbox. I often read nonfiction to fall asleep, but I warn you, I found The Botany of Desire riveting. Thought provoking. Funny. Lyrical. Now there's a bunch of words that wouldn't make good tags!
(I also keep swearing to myself that I will clean up the tags on these the posts. Do you see how I get confused between de.licio.us conventions and Blogger? Plus these posts don't have subjects...didn't they warn us against indexing ourselves in that ASIS course I took??? OK, I fail some of web 2.0.)
(Some day, I'll stop using random lyrics or overheard comments and such as post titles. They are so utterly useless as jumping off or access points. Be grateful I don't list the songs that get stuck in my head.)
Then I moved to California and became a branch librarian and my life changed. I could barely glance at LibrarianInBlack while on the reference desk, though I have staunchly kept her as one of my five Firefox home pages because she is a California public librarian! I should know what she says. But I often only get to read the subject and a snippet of a post. If there are links to follow, dollars to doughnuts a customer will come up with a question as soon as I start reading.
Therefore, I cringe to admit my Bloglines account has some 3,000 posts waiting for me to read. I keep trying to buck up, admit defeat, and delete some of the feeds, or at least clear the counters. But then I open it up and HAVE to read some Caveat Lector or Walt at Random or Tinfoil+Raccoon. I love Dorothea and Walt and Rochelle. And Meredith and the other Rochelle and way too many others to list. And this will NOT help me--I will just get seduced some more.
I keep wishing for better time management skills. However, the reality is that I spend much of my time as an extremely busy, extremely overpaid clerk. On top of customer needs, the fact is that I am not that speedy anymore. So that better time management desire translates into a need for more time.
Playing with web 2.0 stuff can lead to more time frittering, so I am trying for discipline. Unfortunately, for me, the techie toys are addictive. But I will be strong, and talk about a book.
It's the love of books that keeps me going. I finally got around to reading The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan, after having recommended The Omnivore's Dilemma to everyone in shouting distance. It was fascinating, well-written, and fascinating. Science and history interwoven with philosophy and agriculture. One reader on LibraryThing commented, "I will never look at a potato the same way again". I feel the same way. But I won't think any plant the same way again. I look out at the hybrid tea roses off our balconies. I am sure they are shaping my view of the world. My only action is to occasionally deadhead them; my landlady and the gardener take care of the majority of their needs. But they may be training us in some way.
Pollan closely examines four plants and their interactions with humans: apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes. Each section has revelations, none that I expected. Pollan is a gardener. I think he manages to get across the full spectrum of why we need plants in so many ways, and they need us. He probably makes the most cogent case I have heard for biodiversity, without starting with that intent or ever mounting a soapbox. I often read nonfiction to fall asleep, but I warn you, I found The Botany of Desire riveting. Thought provoking. Funny. Lyrical. Now there's a bunch of words that wouldn't make good tags!
(I also keep swearing to myself that I will clean up the tags on these the posts. Do you see how I get confused between de.licio.us conventions and Blogger? Plus these posts don't have subjects...didn't they warn us against indexing ourselves in that ASIS course I took??? OK, I fail some of web 2.0.)
(Some day, I'll stop using random lyrics or overheard comments and such as post titles. They are so utterly useless as jumping off or access points. Be grateful I don't list the songs that get stuck in my head.)
Monday, September 03, 2007
telling ideas
While weeding at MPOW, I ran across a bunch of Ursula K. LeGuin titles that had been identified as not circulating well. I kept and reshelved the obvious classics. In weeding, there's always those niggling worries--am I weeding the right things? Am I keeping things just because I like them? Our weeding has been a bit draconian lately. We got additional fiction last year due to some accounting weirdness. Our system has been moving to centralized ordering. Unlike many of our librarians, I am greatly in favor, because any time I can get away from ordering lists is good. Even though the ordering is all done online (and no, I do not miss typing orders or typed order lists at all!), it is still very time-consuming. I do feel I am the best person to select adult materials for my agency, however, I am also thinking that perhaps I can train one of the technicians on my staff to assist. I would particularly like help on the CD and DVD ordering. I am well aware that I am not knowledgeable regarding selection in those areas.
OK, back to Ursula. I retained the obvious classics, which I can easily defend. But there were a lot of titles with which I was unfamiliar, and some of them had very low circulation. (For those not in the know, the number of times a book has circulated in the last two years is considered a key predictor for how many times it will circulate in the future.) The titles I was considering were barely alive. I withdrew a bunch. Don't worry, there are still copies left in our system. Failing that, there's interlibrary loan, which I LOVE at MPOW. It's very quick and now that we are part of the San Diego Circuit, customers can order from local universities themselves, and the books come in our regular daily delivery. It has opened up a stupendous variety of materials. The academic libraries like us for our popular fiction; we like them for the depth of collections they add. I digress.
I couldn't help myself. I helped myself to one of the titles as I marked it withdrawn. I figured I would read it at my leisure--no due date on that baby! So into my to-be-read pile (the one at work, not the one at home) it went, The Telling.
The Telling is a recent entry in the Hainish cycle, which uses scifi to explore anthropological questions. Sutty is an observer from the Ekumen on Aka, a seemingly monoculture planet that is putting all its efforts into technological advances, a "march to the stars." Sutty finds the culture deadening and depressing on every level--the food, the music, the architecture, the lack of connection between people. She has recently experienced a similar monolithic state on Earth, during a period of political unrest.
The Akan government, The Corporation, has outlawed all old customs and beliefs. Sutty studied the Akan language and literature that the Ekumen had before her voyage, but it is all gone, as far as she can tell. Then her supervisor gets permission to send Sutty to a remote area. Sutty finds that the old Akan culture is still thriving in the mountains, with an underground network practicing the old, unique religion, the Telling. Sutty joins in a trek to the high mountains, where what is left of the Akan libraries is hidden. Sutty discovers an Ekumen error, and finds hope for a reconciliation of the warring ideologies that have ruined so many lives, including her own.
The Telling was an engrossing read. I feel bad for weeding it. It's long past the point where I could go back and save the other boohttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifks I weeded and put them back on the shelf. They were boxed up and put on the truck to headquarters weeks ago. I am not at all clear on where they go from there. It is part of librarianship, deciding what to keep, and what to let go. There is no mythical place where we can keep it all. The reason for this blog is that I can't even keep half of what I read in my brain. And this only goes back a few years. And is transitory by nature. If I stop posting, Google/Blogger will get rid of it at some point, I believe. I should look at the Terms of Service sometime! Or if I decide to delete the blog myself, poof!
My daughter aka The Offspring has had a livejournal account for six years or so, I believe. I have really enjoyed and learned from the glimpses it has given me into her life. She has had some issues with lj, in particular over the pro-anorexia community. Yes, there are people in favor of anorexia, claiming it is just a lifestyle choice. Though lj has gone after some communities for not abiding by the terms of service, they are turning a blind eye to pro-anorexia. Here's a snippet about it:
When the Offspring told me she was planning to leave lj in response, I was kind of horrified. All those years of entries, pouf? I had to examine why I was horrified. It wasn't my journal that might be gone. She still has her site, with lots of artwork and her comic. But just at a glance, there are four of her lj posts in my Bloglines that I have marked as unread to preserve easy access. Most are of pix I really liked, but I see one is the precis of her favorite web comics that I never could get through. I guess I will now admit that I am never going to make it, since the post is from 2005. I've also discovered the oldest post I can find is 2003. So I can handle it if she wants to leave lj over their hypocrisy. I guess this is part of the 2.0 world. It's impermanent. It can go anywhere you go, or it can disappear.
I scanned all of the photos in my grandmother's album a few years ago, and placed them in an album on my family website. Big bro changed service providers, and the album went pouf. I have all the scans in two places. I don't know if I'll ever get around to reloading them though, unless they are somewhere where I have more control. Much as I love all the Web2.0 stuff I'm discovering in the class I am taking, I have to acknowledge that it is ephemeral. Links and bookmarks have to be updated religiously, or they die.
I want to go back and read more of Ursula and the Hainish cycle. It doesn't matter that much what library has it. The cooperation among libraries matters.
OK, back to Ursula. I retained the obvious classics, which I can easily defend. But there were a lot of titles with which I was unfamiliar, and some of them had very low circulation. (For those not in the know, the number of times a book has circulated in the last two years is considered a key predictor for how many times it will circulate in the future.) The titles I was considering were barely alive. I withdrew a bunch. Don't worry, there are still copies left in our system. Failing that, there's interlibrary loan, which I LOVE at MPOW. It's very quick and now that we are part of the San Diego Circuit, customers can order from local universities themselves, and the books come in our regular daily delivery. It has opened up a stupendous variety of materials. The academic libraries like us for our popular fiction; we like them for the depth of collections they add. I digress.
I couldn't help myself. I helped myself to one of the titles as I marked it withdrawn. I figured I would read it at my leisure--no due date on that baby! So into my to-be-read pile (the one at work, not the one at home) it went, The Telling.
The Telling is a recent entry in the Hainish cycle, which uses scifi to explore anthropological questions. Sutty is an observer from the Ekumen on Aka, a seemingly monoculture planet that is putting all its efforts into technological advances, a "march to the stars." Sutty finds the culture deadening and depressing on every level--the food, the music, the architecture, the lack of connection between people. She has recently experienced a similar monolithic state on Earth, during a period of political unrest.
The Akan government, The Corporation, has outlawed all old customs and beliefs. Sutty studied the Akan language and literature that the Ekumen had before her voyage, but it is all gone, as far as she can tell. Then her supervisor gets permission to send Sutty to a remote area. Sutty finds that the old Akan culture is still thriving in the mountains, with an underground network practicing the old, unique religion, the Telling. Sutty joins in a trek to the high mountains, where what is left of the Akan libraries is hidden. Sutty discovers an Ekumen error, and finds hope for a reconciliation of the warring ideologies that have ruined so many lives, including her own.
The Telling was an engrossing read. I feel bad for weeding it. It's long past the point where I could go back and save the other boohttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifks I weeded and put them back on the shelf. They were boxed up and put on the truck to headquarters weeks ago. I am not at all clear on where they go from there. It is part of librarianship, deciding what to keep, and what to let go. There is no mythical place where we can keep it all. The reason for this blog is that I can't even keep half of what I read in my brain. And this only goes back a few years. And is transitory by nature. If I stop posting, Google/Blogger will get rid of it at some point, I believe. I should look at the Terms of Service sometime! Or if I decide to delete the blog myself, poof!
My daughter aka The Offspring has had a livejournal account for six years or so, I believe. I have really enjoyed and learned from the glimpses it has given me into her life. She has had some issues with lj, in particular over the pro-anorexia community. Yes, there are people in favor of anorexia, claiming it is just a lifestyle choice. Though lj has gone after some communities for not abiding by the terms of service, they are turning a blind eye to pro-anorexia. Here's a snippet about it:
The communities have also gained a response among "anti-pro-ana" LiveJournal users who have started communities such as Ed_ucate, a play on the common shorthand for eating disorder, ED. The purpose of these communities is to inform pro-anas about eating disordered criteria and the health effects of disordered behaviors so that they can make informed decisions and not spread misinformation. They also encourage accurate self-diagnosis using the DSM-IV-TR criteria. One of the effects of this response has been an increase in awareness about ED-NOS because many pro-anas are told that they do not meet the criteria for anorexia. Some communities also encourage members of pro-ana to go into recovery. However on August 7, 2007, at least two people speaking in an official capacity for LiveJournal declared that pro-ana communities on the site "do far more good than harm" and that "it's not illegal to aspire to be thin" in response to a user complaint that pro-ana communities violated LiveJournal's Terms of Service[5].http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-ana
Pro-anorexia/ED has become somewhat of an underground crash diet amongst many teenage women who have not been able to properly stick to diets that have been healthy, or do not like the results they have had, thus they seem to falsely believe that emulating eating disordered behaviors will promote more weight loss, when really they are damaging their metabolic system and endangering their health. This is usually one of the common causes of upset amongst "anti-pro-ana" as, usually, this group of individuals have been diagnosed with the illness medically, and are long term sufferers of the illness. Thus when viewing the pro-anorexia movement, those with anorexia nervosa feel it is a belittlement of a fatal condition; hence the usually angry response that is produced.
When the Offspring told me she was planning to leave lj in response, I was kind of horrified. All those years of entries, pouf? I had to examine why I was horrified. It wasn't my journal that might be gone. She still has her site, with lots of artwork and her comic. But just at a glance, there are four of her lj posts in my Bloglines that I have marked as unread to preserve easy access. Most are of pix I really liked, but I see one is the precis of her favorite web comics that I never could get through. I guess I will now admit that I am never going to make it, since the post is from 2005. I've also discovered the oldest post I can find is 2003. So I can handle it if she wants to leave lj over their hypocrisy. I guess this is part of the 2.0 world. It's impermanent. It can go anywhere you go, or it can disappear.
I scanned all of the photos in my grandmother's album a few years ago, and placed them in an album on my family website. Big bro changed service providers, and the album went pouf. I have all the scans in two places. I don't know if I'll ever get around to reloading them though, unless they are somewhere where I have more control. Much as I love all the Web2.0 stuff I'm discovering in the class I am taking, I have to acknowledge that it is ephemeral. Links and bookmarks have to be updated religiously, or they die.
I want to go back and read more of Ursula and the Hainish cycle. It doesn't matter that much what library has it. The cooperation among libraries matters.
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