CHOICE TABLES MALAYSIA; Take Many Peoples and Ingredients, Mix, Enjoy - New York Times
By MATT GROSS
Published: November 5, 2006
How lovely! A major NYTimes article about Malaysia that has nothing to do with terrorism, which is not much to us in everyday life, but about what is undoubtedly Malaysian culture... food.

Selling Literature to Go With Your Lifestyle - New York Times

Placing books in different types of stores

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Dispatches from a Public Librarian

Link from Librarian.net (of course!). This guy is funny. Evidently a reference librarian; He calls Casanova the greatest librarian that ever lived, and this is why...

"In truth, Casanova didn't really like being a librarian and didn't contribute anything to the profession. Still, he is the only librarian to have Heath Ledger play him in a movie, which has to count for something."

ALA How to be a Successful Prison Librarian

Stories from 3 prison librarians... got the link from Librarian.net (who has more on this subject)


And from a different piece:

"... a Wisconsin inmate [] responded to a library survey with the following comment: "The librarian is a good and sincere person who makes me think of many new things -- although she won't let me chew gum!''"
http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla65/papers/046-132e.htm

Alfred Nobel and the Prize That Almost Didn’t Happen - New York Times
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D.
Published: September 26, 2006

History of the Nobel prize...

WSJ.com - Talking Tech: As Online Libraries are Formed, Issues of Control, Privacy Are PostedSeptember 12, 2006; Page B3

Brief interview with Internet Archive founder on reservations about Google's library project.

Who is Louis Bayard? Salon Books
By Louis Bayard
Entertaining review of new book by Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings, called "Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs", by a former Jeopardy contestant. Reveals that success is a lot to do with buzzer technique. The book is not just about Jeopardy but about trivia, quizzes, etc. A "validation of geekdom", as it were.

BBC NEWS Business Trivia hunters ask the texperts

A friend sent this to me the other day. Another commercial venture into what reference librarians do!
About a question-answering service in UK.

Relevant also to virtual reference efforts (where librarians answer reference enquiries via chat or IM etc.), since in this case they use SMS - which of course makes sense as the technology of choice to many people nowadays. Are some libraries using this yet? (In societies where SMS is prevalent). I bet Singapore, if any.

One difference between these answers and reference is the reference interview - in this case, they would just answer the question that is submitted without the benefit of the interview. Then again, this is how often email reference is done.

And of course, reference is FOC! (most of the time, anyway. Not necessarily in special libraries which charge-back). People are paying for a fast and convenient service, but you can also walk into/email/chat with a reference librarian at a public library and get it free of charge. (But probably not 24/7. There was a 24/7 virtual reference effort... wonder how that's doing).

Learning How to Read Slowly Again - New York Times
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: September 22, 2006
What to read? How to read? How much of the the original cultural context do we need to know to appreciate a novel? Review of 4 new books on reading. Makes them sound much more interesting than one would expect (somehow reading a book about reading doesn't seem to me to be as good as actually reading one of the books in question). Still, the Francine Prose one looks particularly promising.

HOW TO READ A NOVEL: A USER’S GUIDE, by John Sutherland; St. Martin’s Press; 260 pages. $21.95. Available in November.

READING LIKE A WRITER: A GUIDE FOR PEOPLE WHO LOVE BOOKS AND FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO WRITE THEM, by Francine Prose; HarperCollins, 273 pages. $23.95.

THE THINGS THAT MATTER: WHAT SEVEN CLASSIC NOVELS HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THE STAGES OF LIFE, by Edward Mendelson;

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In other news, all about Google's new philanthropic initiative. This interesting idea came up: providing same language subtitles to tv shows to promote literacy.
http://www.planetread.org/

More Quotes from Librarians
Infonation is a Canadian Library Association Web site promoting librarianship as a profession in Canada. Cool site, with lots of testimonials from librarians who love their jobs, and all kinds of librarians too... besides the quotes, you can "Take the Tour" and see what Pascal, Aurea, Erica, Todd, and others have to say....

A professor said to me today - the thing about our students is they are only interested in product, not process. If they see only the product as important and do not enjoy the process... are you going to have lifelong learners if they find learning a pain?

They have to learn the joy of discovery...

Jackson Pollock by Miltos Manetas, original design by Stamen

No other way to say it - this site is really cool!

Try it. http://www.jacksonpollock.org/
Click to change colours.

Can a publisher be a book club?

Hyperion Starts Imprint to Help Women Whittle the Book Choices - New York Times
By MOTOKO RICH
Published: August 29, 2006

I'm not sure if it's economically feasible or if demographics are such that "if you liked this, you will also like..." can be true of a single imprint.

In local news...

Saw Tony Fernandes (Dato') the other day. I was at a talk by him. The place was packed; standing room only. He said he spends about 50% of his time on internal branding - the AirAsia culture. Showed pictures of baggage handlers and the like who became first officers, their new flight simulators for their flying academy, and talked about their women pilots.

For a media darling and "the person you want at your table at a party", he isn't a very high energy guy. He has a more of deadpan sort of delivery, and a verbal tic which consists of long and loud "errrrrrrrrrr"s every so often. He worked with Richard Branson at Virgin earlier; the similarities (in AirAsia appearance) show. He gives all the press his cell phone number.

In answer to questions about MAS, he said all AirAsia wants is a "level playing field". As long as they are competing on the open market, he is fine.

Thanks to a friend, managed to catch Puteri Gunung Ledang: The Musical at Istana Budaya. Another friend was quite impressed with the place, making the visit more uplifting. The show itself was good. Overall, I guess you could say it was more than the sum of its parts (in contrast to M! The Opera, which was less).

Not that there weren't quibbles - I wasn't convinced the two leads were in love, for instance. No strong encounter before the two of them started soaring off in ballads. But the music was good - tuneful, catchy, cool drums, the set pieces were lively; the story was simple; all in all a worthwhile and well packaged endeavour.

My favourite character was the Sultan (of Melaka), who had a jazzy number which I thought was really funny somewhere in the middle. There was real royalty in the crowd that day; consequently the show started late. We were all wondering why, till 20 minutes after stated start time, the emcee began greeting the Sultan of Perak and his consort and some other VVIPs.

Anyway, I bought the children's book (they are really taking a leaf from Disney - the movie, the musical, the book, the revised legend!) and the original cast soundtrack (this is the 2nd run; it was highly popular). I wonder if the male lead, who is a foreigner, is pleased to have himself immortalized in a children's book. I would be. A most impressive perk to being a musical lead.

Why you can't trust news photography. By Jim Lewis

Follow-up to the story two entries ago. The fine line between doctoring and doctoring (of photos).

Ref: Don't Believe What You See in the Papers: The untrustworthiness of news photography.By Jim Lewis. Slate.com Posted Thursday, Aug. 10, 2006, at 5:48 PM ET

The seven ways that people search the Web. By Paul Boutin
Slate.com Posted Friday, Aug. 11, 2006, at 5:30 PM ET

"AOL researchers recently published the search logs of about 650,000 members—a total of 36,389,629 individual searches..." WOW!

Like Boutin, the first thing that came to my mind was - wow - what data! ("AOL's 36 million log entries might look like an Orwellian nightmare to you, but for us it's a user transaction case study to die for.")

Boutin writes an amusing article about what he found and how to search for it yourself (tip: see printer-friendly version).

Reuters withdraws all photos by freelancer - Yahoo! News
Reuters, Mon Aug 7, 12:20 PM ET

Mideast photographer doctors pic with Photoshop.

In India, a Maid Becomes an Unlikely Literary Star
By AMELIA GENTLEMAN
Published: August 2, 2006

"Written in Bengali and translated into several other Indian languages a
and English this year, Ms. Halder’s autobiography has become a best seller..."

Celebrating Puzzles, in 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 Moves (or So)
By Margaret Wertheim, 25 July 2006, New York Times

The Lilly Library at Indiana University acquires puzzles... lots and lots of them, including "Sunday boxes", which were used for entertainment on the Sabbath back in the day.

On being a scientist and a woman
Blog by a PhD candidate in the Northwest... haven't read it yet but should be interesting... was highlighted on Blogger.

BBC NEWS The Editors You Say Tomato

On the BBC's Pronunciation Research Unit, which tells newscasters how to pronounce names and such...

Have been busy with my conference paper (on information literacy for upcoming Teaching & Learning Conference) and new IL workshops that I'm planning in conjunction with teachers. All quite exciting, and good actually that both are around the same time - opportunity for research-based practice!

I was looking up exercises and examples on plagiarism for some of the sessions today, and by chance came across this NYTimes article about textbooks.

Schoolbooks Are Given F’s in Originality
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
Published: July 13, 2006

Tho' the focus of the article is not plagiarism but the dodgy world of multiple editions and virtual ghostwriting of textbooks--which is related to plagiarism, tho' they do not put it under the plagiarism issue. I suppose they consider it more related to ghostwriting rather than academic honesty.

However, there are assertions of why certain things are not plagiarism that don't hold water. By most university standards, if this was not the commercial publishing world (which is also bound by rules - see Harvard undergrad author scandal, and in fact, for the American history books here they pulled copies of offending title as well from the shelves), "unintentional" copying is NOT an excuse. It's still plagiarism whether you intended to copy or not.

World Cup!

Various articles flying around, but here's some funny... Slate has good blogging stuff/staff...

Dispatches from the World Cup
From: William Saletan
Includes observations from the Argentina-CIV game, Serbia-Holland, and USA-Czech... all of which I too watched, tho' from home or friend's home.

Others: AP had one about the dangers of World Cup viewing. Another wire about the Paraguayans speaking Guarani.

Have been working and not reading much online or having time to take notes when I do read...

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This is very interesting and pretty cool.
Blogging the Bible
What happens when an ignoramus reads the Good Book?
By David Plotz
There are 6 entries to date... from Genesis 1 up to the story of Joseph...

The Rise of Crowdsourcing
By Jeff Howe (Wired.com)

I haven't been posting much lately. This is because I've been quite busy. What have I been busy with? Here's edited excerpts from an email:

I am doing cataloguing (editing the catalogue records that others put together), which takes about 5-15 mins per title, depending whether it is difficult or not, and am supposed to do 10 titles per day.

I work at the counter (the Information Counter) of the library 3 hours a day (up from 1 hr, and may go to 4 hrs), which is where I help students with questions like computer/printing problems, looking for books and articles/doing research, etc.

I'm also developing and conducting workshops - currently I have a basic research skills workshop for pre-u students, how you go about looking for information for projects. This is 1 hour. These kids come during their class time. I'm also doing a new one, open registration, on finding information on the Internet. We are offering it to college staff first, and I am pleased to say that quite a number of people signed up! It's a 2 hour workshop.

I'm also in charge (more or less) of development of our Web site - currently we have a bare bones online catalogue, and we would like to make it a real library gateway, with information about the library, resource guides, more user help, etc.

There are meetings - library staff meetings, demos of new products and services. I had a training workshop for our own library staff once already, and probably have to do at least one more soon.

User issues - students - lost and found, circulation issues, other things that come up. College staff coming in to get textbooks, etc.

I also have to do the roster now, which is difficult, as it's quite a job to have all counters manned all the time, and rotate everyone satisfactorily. There are also rotations of other duties to be considered. Each time I do it for one month, but it takes basically 1-2 days to do it.Then there are other things like putting up stuff on the notice board, doing displays of library books to highlight items from the collection, and whatever else. Also reference enquiries from staff that come in via email - help with research.

Another new thing is to do presentations on EndNote and/or RefWorks, as we are considering these products... They are new to the college.

Pochahontas speaks again - reviving Native American languages NYTimes
Revising art history Janson - Whistler's mother is deleted from the textbook NYTimes
Wikipedia vs. Britannica - great article on Searcher

I seem to have trouble scribbling today's date onto invoices.

When acknowledging receipt of deliveries, where I have to stamp the Delivery Order or Invoice with the company stamp and sign and date, I seem to have a dysfunction as to what date it actually is. I usually get the day right, but the month and year are anyone's guess. It may turn out right, or not.

Looks like I'm not cut out for Acquisitions.

On another note, Time has yet another cover story on Google - how are they going to stay not evil? I'm reading the online version dated February 20, 2006, which I got to access for free after watching a brief ad (or more accurately, letting the ad run. Unlike Salon, which advertises cars, this one was something to do with CNN). Cover story: "In Search of the Real Google". Interview also.

A friend alerted me to LibraryThing some time ago, but I've only now gone to check it out. Very interesting. As one blogger put it, "like del.icio.us for books"

A good write-up about it in the CSMonitor:
Do your own LibraryThing
By Jim Regan csmonitor.com
posted November 09, 2005

Another museum vs. country of origin clash... good luck to them. Greece has not got back the Elgin marbles either.

Inca Show Pits Yale Against Peru
By HUGH EAKIN
Published: February 1, 2006 NY Times

Survey of UK students shows...

"Images of professors cut off from the real world prevail. Teenagers value the role of science in society but feel scientists are "brainy people not like them", research suggests."

Science 'not for normal people'
Last Updated: Friday, 20 January 2006, 13:30 GMT (BBC)

Here's an interesting one: "Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as "normal young and attractive men and women". "

On photo-manipulation in science journals

It May Look Authentic; Here's How to Tell It Isn't
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: January 24, 2006, NY Times

Journal of Cell Biology finds that authors Photoshop their data, e.g. removing gel bands, cleaning up images, patching together. 1% of these cases were judged to be "fraud" and the papers rejected. Journal proposes testing digital images to detect alteration, as peer-reviewers "defined role... is not to check for concocted data but to test whether a paper's conclusions follow from the data presented." Others disagree with checking.

In other news, library has ancient/traditional games day . "Games Around the World" at Rockford Public Library. Report from local paper, the Rockford Register Star, Ill.

Inundated with oranges. It's Chinese New Year, or nearly, and the library office is receiving almost hourly visits from the tea lady, who comes bringing gifts of oranges. Suppliers come with oranges. Everyone is giving oranges. Mandarin oranges, of course. Some are eaten on the spot - nice and juicy. Most will be taken home for later.

Fiction or nonfiction?

Oprah's book club latest pick - Elie Wiesel's "Night" is frequently classified as a novel. Is it actually a memoir? Amazon changes the classification on its site.

In our library, too, not all narratives are in Fiction. Unfortunately for those just looking for a good story, whether true or not, the non-fiction narratives are in Non-Fiction by subject. Biographies and autobiographies are not collated, unlike in some public libraries.

Oprah's Latest Book Pick Raises Issues
Tue Jan 17, 5:24 PM ET AP News