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March 29th, 2008 Brian Herzog
Working with the public has good and bad aspects. Some of the best times I’ve had with patrons is when they take time out of their information seeking to just be a normal person. This is one of those times.
An obviously distressed woman approaches me at the desk. She says her son is a special-needs student at a school in a nearby community (she didn’t feel comfortable going to her hometown library with this), but she doesn’t feel like he’s getting the attention he requires. She has been going around and around with various school administrators, but they haven’t been cooperating with her efforts to find out just what is being provided for her son on a daily basis.
Someone told her that Chapter 766 of the State Laws addressed the public school system paying to send a special-needs kid to a private school, and she wanted me to help her find the actual text of this law.
Alright, that’s pretty straight-forward.
The General Laws of Massachusetts are online, so I went to this on the desk computer. We tried searching for “chapter 766,” but nothing came up. Then we tried a keyword search for “special education,” and that lead us to Chapter 71b - Children with Special Needs.
After a quick skim of the table of contents, the patron felt that what she needed must be here. She jotted down the URL and went to one of the public computers to continue her search for the chapter section that addresses private special education.
About a half an hour later, I stopped by her computer to see how she was doing. She was smiling as she read, but when I asked her if she was finding what she needed, she looked at me as if I had just caught her with her hand in the cookie jar.
Apparently, she sat down at the computer and typed in the address for the laws search, but instead of searching for “special education,” started searching for other things - like “blasphemy,” “exhibition” and others - just to see what funny laws Massachusetts had on the books.
And it has many. She and I clicked through and read quite a few, and a had a good time speculating what the origins of the laws were, the seemingly arbitrary penalties, and what kind of news it would make if they were enforced today. Our favorites were all under Chapter 272 - Crimes against Chastity, Morality, Decency and Good Order, and here are some highlights:
It was fun to just spontaneously enjoy something with a patron, rather than seeing her as someone to help and move on. And she seemed to really enjoy the diversion, too, as what she came in to research was fairly serious. So, yay for a good library experience.
Tags: commonwealth, fun, funny, general laws, law, laws, legal, libraries, Library, ma, mass, massachusetts, public See Also
Posted under Library, Reference Question, Resources | 3 Comments »
March 27th, 2008 Brian Herzog
Something I’ve been seeing a lot of lately are websites with free television shows and movies. I mentioned hulu.com on a previous post, and it’s also been talked about elsewhere.
(I tried it out this weekend, and watched quite a few shows and a couple feature movies - all for free, with no problems, and very minimal commercial interruptions. This is the first time I’ve watched television or movies online, so I guess this is something for my Tech-YES list. But it did occur to me that, come Feb 17th, 2009, instead of buying a new set or digital cable box, I might just get rid of my television entirely and rely on the internet for shows and movies [then I could add "no television set" to my Tech-NO list])
Another free source, reported on Boing Boing, is the South Park Studios website. They just announced they are making all South Park episodes available free (but I noticed a few are not, due to contractual issues). According to creator Matt Stone, they’re doing this because “we just got really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. So we gave ourselves a legal alternative.”
A slightly different approach is AnyTV, discussed by LibrarianInBlack. I haven’t tried this, but it looks like you download and install their AnyTVplayer on your computer, and then can stream a large number television channels, radio stations and video clips - free. Sarah also bring up the idea of installing this software on public library computers, to allow people to use their internet time to watch television. Hmm.
Finally, LifeHacker offers a long list of free online resources for online videos. I checked out a couple, but none seemed as easy to use as Hulu.com. http://tv-video.net did seem to have more episodes of certain shows, but that might just be because Hulu.com is still new.
Of course, this is all in addition to what the networks themselves off on their websites: ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, PBS. These, like the South Park guys, have the edge because they are the source. If all information is free and legal, the only reason to go to the middlemen aggregators (like Hulu.com, et. al.) is ease of use of the interface.
Tags: free, libraries, Library, movie, movies, online, public, television, tv, video, videos, watch See Also
Posted under Library, Resources, Technology | No Comments »
March 18th, 2008 Brian Herzog
In the wake of the recent announcements of companies ditching DRM* as a mechanism to control access to audio files, the New York Times is reporting that Sports Illustrated is opening up access to its entire archive.
The Times did this itself not too long ago, as did Atlantic Monthly, but SI’s project is supposed to go a step further - not just text, but they’re making available their photographs and video and everything. They’re also including a handy search interface that lets people search by athlete, team, coach, year, etc.
Hopefully, more and more periodicals will start making their archives available, too (after all, Information Wants To Be Free). This of course would dramatically change the relationships libraries have with long-time vendors like EBSCO, NewsBank and Proquest, but information is information. If all the information is free, then the real value-added piece becomes the interface.
By the way, I found about this through The Huffington Post. I’ve also read recently about a few more free online resources:
*update: OverDrive just announced (at PLA, anyway) that they, too, are finally moving in the right direction. In June they’ll start offering mp3 files - which, best of all, will be iPod-compatible. And they’ll finally come out with a Mac interface, too. Read the entire announcement [pdf, 70kb].
Tags: archive, archives, free, ipod, libraries, Library, mp3, overdrive, pluc, research, resource, Resources See Also
Posted under Library, Resources | No Comments »
March 15th, 2008 Brian Herzog
A patron walked up to the desk and asks for a resource that tells him how the world financial markets are doing.
At first, this seemed like an easy question. But after I thought about it a minute, I realized we don’t have any print resources in the library devoted to world financial markets - just the domestic markets.
So, we tried a few different internet searches, and “global market index” seemed to yield the greatest number of reputable websites, such as:
Plenty of other websites referenced international indices, but I couldn’t tell how reliable they were. Also, some only did currency exchange, but that wasn’t what the patron was after.
The patron was happy with this list of urls, so he jotted them down to bookmark when he got home.
The financial world is still mostly a foggy mystery to me, so every time I do get a question about it, I try to poke around and keep looking until I learn something.
In this case, I soon found myself at the About.com page for Foreign Stock Exchange Quotes. Listed as one of the links on this page was Google Finance, and since I use Yahoo Finance for various things, I thought I’d check out how Google compared.
While searching here, I think it was me using the term “world” that led me to the World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.’s financial statements. Of course I was curious, so I took a look, and here are some interesting facts from their 2007 annual data:
- revenues: $485.65 million
- expenses: $417.22 million
- net income: $52.14 million
- they paid $24.33 million in taxes
- they also had a line item for “Research & Development” but no monies charged to it
Sadly, the reports weren’t very detailed, so I couldn’t tell how that $417.22 million was spent. Also sadly was their lack of research and development - but at least they had a line item for it. Now this was worth learning, wasn’t it?
Tags: financial, global, index, indexes, indicies, international, libraries, Library, market, markets, money, public, Reference Question, world, wwe See Also
Posted under Library, Reference Question, Resources | 1 Comment »
March 6th, 2008 Brian Herzog
When I use Google to find information, I often use the “site” limiter to improve the returns.
For instance, when looking for information on the new economic stimulus tax rebate thing, a search for “tax rebate site:irs.gov” gives much more direct information than does just searching for “tax rebate.” Which is great if you know the domain to which you’d like to limit your search, but yesterday, I didn’t.
Someone was looking for information on the James Madison dollar coin, and the U.S. Mint website seemed the most logical place to look for it. However, I didn’t know the Mint’s domain name. So before my usual site-specific search, I first searched for “us mint” to get the domain, and then I was going to run a second search limited to that domain.
But Google is one step ahead of me (I don’t know if this is a new feature or if I just never noticed it before): my search for U.S. Mint returned the Mint’s website as the first result, and the listing included a site search built right in to the search result (see picture).
Neat. And it saves me a step. Searching there for “james madison dollar” gave exactly what the patron was looking for as the first result.
I’m generally skeptical of Google as a company for hording private data, but they do have smart people working there.
See Also
Posted under Library, Resources, Technology | 2 Comments »
