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Pegasus Librarian Posts

Introductions

Published by Iris on Friday, December 15th, 2006

I’ve never introduced anyone before, and now I’m trying to come up with something cogent to say about a guy who’s coming to our campus on Monday. What’s more, I have to say whatever it is that I come up with not once, but twice, since this guy is speaking at two separate events on Monday. I’ve heard him speak once, and I use his online resources a lot… but that doesn’t sound like enough of an introduction.

Of course, these are both pretty informal events, so I keep telling myself not to stress about this. Not that this tactic EVER helps me not to stress about stuff. But I try it all the time anyway: “Now Iris, it’s just a [fill in the blank here]. This is nothing to worry about. So what are you worried about? It’s STUPID to worry about this stuff! GET A GRIP!!” You see how it goes. Does this sound calming?

I didn’t think so.

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Round Up

Published by Iris on Thursday, December 14th, 2006

I’ve been oddly busy lately. I can’t exactly figure out what’s been taking up all my time, but what with one thing and another I’ve been getting behind on my blog reading. Consequently, I’ve got a tremendous backlog of “to read” posts piling up.

But tonight I made my way through a few of them, and here are some of the more current posts that caught my eye:

And now on to some of the older reading…

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Open Book Cover Images?!?

Open Book Cover Images?!?

Published by Iris on Thursday, December 14th, 2006

The amazing people who actually contribute to NGC4lib (as opposed to pure lurkers, like me), got tired of talking about license agreements, money, license agreements… oh yeah, and license agreements when it came to getting book cover images into library catalogs. So they’ve decided to create an open database of book cover images.

At first, when they put together a wiki page to think about the project and then started thinking about how to match images with books, I figured it would be like most of the other discussions that happen on listservs: it would unearth a whole bunch of interesting questions, start a plethora of interesting discussions, and then die a slow and painless death.

But then Tim Spalding from LibraryThing and Rob Styles from Talis both offered to host the database. Spalding is checking to see if he’d be able to contribute his hundreds of thousands of user-generated images to the database, and everyone is talking about easy ways for libraries to contribute new images to the database. This could happen, folks! And if it does, I would LOVE to add images from it to our catalog.

[Update: Since this remains my most frequently visited blog post, I thought I’d just mention here that as of 8/7/2008, LibraryThing is offering free user-generated book cover images to libraries and bookstores. See the LibraryThing blog post for details.]

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The Difference Between Librarians and Web Programmers

Published by Iris on Wednesday, December 13th, 2006

I’ve figured it out, and it’s not as spectacular as you might think…. The difference between librarians and web programmers is that librarians keep their office lights on while web programmers prefer to type away in comparative darkness.

This insight struck me as I was doing some hunting in the stacks today and spent a few minutes in the ML section, which happens to be right next to the offices of the college’s web services group (who are either privileged or cursed to be the only non-library-related people to have offices in the library). There they sat, bathed in the luminescence of their computer monitors, working busily away.

Emerging from my stack hunting into the brightness of the reference area, I walked past the offices of my fellow reference librarians, each of whom worked under overhead florescent lights that keep at bay all those mysterious shadows in corners.

I haven’t yet worked out what this all means, but I wonder… If I turn out my lights, will I get the urge to build wonderful web applications? If I sneak down and turn on the overhead lights in the web team’s offices, would they suddenly ask me if I needed help finding something?

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