A crafty holiday season

05Dec11

I made this wreath out of cardboard, wrapping paper, and lots of staples. It even looks lovely in the glow of christmas lights. It was fun to make and only took an hour or so. Here’s a similar project from MarthaStewart.com but the one I used as a guide is here.

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Tags: crafts, decoration, holiday, home decor, makin things

Furniture makeover

26Nov11

I’ve always been a fan of before and afters, especially those that show up on design*sponge, and now I might be ready to take to the world stage with my makeover of this “disgustingly hideous” table from Goodwill:

Before:

After:

From abomination to festive home for our Christmas tree. Success!

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Tags: crafts, decorating, furniture, good job me, projects

Trombones and trains.

09Sep11

This blog has died because I got a new job. I guess I have bigger fish to fry now but I do miss having the time to blog some nonsense now and then. I’ve.migrated from the world of libraries to that of
information and referral.
And I work in the Strip now so when I walk to and from work I see things like trombone playing older gentlemen and trains overhead. And fountains.

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Tags: career, downtown, life, Pittsburgh, work

Goodbye, academic libraries

05Jul11

4 coffee stirrers left for each of my 4 days left at the University of Pittsburgh…stay tuned for what comes next.

also pictured: my Business School mug -"it's not business as usual" - and ref desk schedule

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Tags: career, life changes, sayonara, work

bite-size

02Jun11

Interesting readings from around the web:

“Because wide-spread full text indexing abounds, the problem of find is not as acute as it used to be. In my opinion, it is time to move away from the problem of find and towards the problem of use. What does a person do with the information once they find and acquire it? Does it make sense? Is it valid? Does it have a relationship other things, and if so, then what is that relationship and how does it compare? If these relationships are explored, then what new knowledge might one uncover, or what existing problem might be solved? These are the questions of use. Find is a means to an end, not the end itself. Find is a library problem. Use the problem everybody else wants to solve.”
-Eric Lease Morgan, “Next-generation library catalogs, or ‘Are we there yet?’”

“My favorite worlds have always been natively game-like. In their basic world rules you immediately want to interact with them. When you know that Anne McCaffrey’s Pern has five types of colored dragons, you immediately want to match yourself to one. When you know that in Piers Anthony’s Xanth every person has a unique magical talent, you want to pick out a talent for yourself. These rule structures are very game-like and enhance the poetry of a world. In addition to making it accessible, they give you a framework that exposes the theme and meaning in a world much more clearly than worlds that do not have these structures. Character classes are extremely powerful things.”
-author and game designer Erin Hoffman in an interview with Clarkesworld Magazine

“It’s strange, but start talking to hard-bitten, seasoned executives about information in the enterprise and they automatically switch off their critical faculties. They’ll believe anything. Really. Like, information and how it is used in your organisation can be understood by a piece of software, out of the box. Like, you don’t need to actually understand your information environment in order to manage it. Like, the best people to ask about making your information generally accessible, are narrow subject matter specialists. Like, you can fix your information environment once, and it’ll stay fixed forever without paying any more attention to it. In this article we explore three fairy tales about taxonomies that executives seem particularly prone to believing:

1. That you don’t need taxonomies if you get a good search engine;
2. That taxonomies can look after themselves or can be delegated piecemeal to non-taxonomists;
3. That the best people to advise on taxonomy development are subject matter experts.”

-from Innotecture, citing Taxonomy Times No. 6, April 2011

Filed under: cataloging + indexing, information science   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: games, indexing, information retrieval, seaching, search engines, taxonomies, video games

Visualizing the LCSH: May 2011

23May11

150 Ice cream trucks [May Subd Geog] [sp2002009439]
* 550 BT Food trucks
* 550 BT Trucks CANCEL

150 Mixed media painting [May Subd Geog] [sp 85086321]
* 550 BT Mixed media (Art)

Bouquet Anvers by Ger Van Elk

150 Nineteen ninety‑three, A.D. [Not Subd Geog] [sp2011001971]
450 UF 1993 A.D. 450 UF Nineteen hundred ninety‑three, A.D.
450 UF Year nineteen ninety‑fthree, A.D.
550 BT Nineteen nineties

Windows 3.11 screenshot, from Wikipedia

150 Islands—Macedonia [sp2011001898]

It seems there’s only one island in Macedonia, so it probably slipped through the cracks until now…but in that case perhaps there should be a new heading that reads “Island — Macedonia”?

click me!

150 Rainbow in art CANCEL 150 Rainbows in art [Not Subd Geog] [sp 85111207] 450 UF Rainbow in art [EARLIER FORM OF HEADING]

150 Steel sculpture, Chinese [May Subd Geog] [sp2011001979]
450 UF Chinese steel sculpture

150 Tiles in art [Not Subd Geog] [sp2011001832]

Persian Warriors from Ishtar Gate, Pergamon Museum (wikipedia image)

150 Trails—Iceland [sp2011001987]

click to enlarge

150 War horses in literature [Not Subd Geog] [sp2011001805]

150 Children—Bolivia [sp2011001984]

from the Church collection at Brown University Library

Filed under: visualizing the LCSH   |  1 Comment
Tags: 90s, art, dogs, geography, horses, Library of Congress, maps, photographs, puppets, sculpture, subject headings, theater

Too many books

12May11

I’m almost done with (and thoroughly enjoying)…

 but it is too heavy to carry on the bus, so I checked out…

but then I realized I could download the Overdrive app for my phone, so I electronically borrowed…

But then a co-worker who knows I love sci-fi adventures with female protagonists brought me…

And then today when I was shelving newspapers I saw and had to grab…

And my office shelf is still holding…

But I don’t really want to beat a dead horse, as the saying goes, so I haven’t been motivated to read it, nor have I sunk my teeth into…

and I should really just give up on…

I feel like I check out library books the way some people take in stray cats. Maybe that’s why the stereotypical librarian is always a cat lady too?

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Desktop wallpapers #4

12May11

finally, it’s spring. or more like summer, but whatever.

gulls by opwierde

leaves against a blue sky by bertvthul

opposite colours by hakze

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Tags: architecture, birds, desktop wallpaper, nature, photography, plants, summer

Historical Issues #2: Soviet Film

05May11

There are such treasures hiding in the stacks, and really, they don’t make journal covers like they used to.  I coincidentally found these journals the same week that the Russian Film Symposium is happening in Pittsburgh, so I knew it was fated that I should share some of the images.

1978:no. 10 (257) Actor Oleg Yankovsky

1978:no. 9 (256): Actress Svetlana Toma

1977:no. 8 (243): Komaki Kurihara and Yuri Solomin in “Melodies of the White Night”, a Soviet-Japanese co-production.

1976:no. 11 (234): Sergei Bondarchuk on location during the shooting of “Steppe” based on the story of the same title by Anton Chekhov.

1975:no.8 (219): Actress Natalia Varley

1972:no.2 (177): Asanali Ashimov, the Kazakh actor who played in “Crossroad”, “The End of the Ataman,” “Kyz-Zhibek”

1975:no.4 (215): Film actress Ludmila Gurchenko (“Carnival Night”, “Girl with a Guitar”, “Baltic Sky”, “Factory Town”, “Open Book”, “Vaniushin’s Children”, “Old Walls”, and others)

1972:no.1 (176): the Ukrainian actress Larisa Kadochnikova

1969:no.7 (146): Actress Tatyana Doronina

Sorry about the weird image quality.  If anyone knows how to fix that or make it so the scanner doesn’t put those wavy lines in, please tell me for next time!

See also: my previous “Historical Issues” posts

(I provide a link because, for some reason, WordPress insists on the “Filed Under” link below not linking just to my blog, but to the entire world. psh.)

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Tags: 1970s, actors, actresses, film, images, journals, movies, old stuff, periodicals, Russia, Soviet, USSR

We can do it

13Apr11

I’ve been tracking IT and web design-related jobs in libraries for a while now, but this is the first one I’ve seen that stands out as being so focused on user experience, they even want a terminal degree in HCI or a related field. And just yesterday I was reading the most recent issue of Library Hi Tech (v.29:no.2), which focuses on usability testing. One of the articles in that volume discusses the quality of research being done on user needs in the LIS field. The author, Elke Greifeneder, concludes:

These papers show that the quality of user research in our field is rising, that researchers know how to label and use methods appropriately, and that they are using a greater variety of methods. Finally, researchers seem to acknowledge that user research requires one small step after another. Instead of painting a big picture with a single user study that has many research questions, they do multiple smaller in-depth research projects, which can be interconnected like one big picture puzzle that might, in the end, give a better impression of how our users actually behave and what they really need.

Isn’t this exciting? I hope to see more jobs like the one Purdue has posted. To me, it’s a sign that libraries are finally moving towards seriously integrating UX into all our digital products and services. Maybe one day more than 28% of the major databases we subscribe to might even be accessible to people using adaptive technology?

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Tags: accessibility, assistive technology, change, HCI, jobs, libraries, research, usability, user interface, UX