or, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fear and Loathing at a Public Library Reference Desk


Upcoming Events of Note

   February 3rd, 2011 Brian Herzog

Save the DateJust a few quick blurbs on some upcoming events that caught my eye - the first two for Boston-area people, and the third for all of New England:

MobileCampBoston
I seem to be all about mobile technology lately - and MobileCampBoston is a day-long event devoted to it. The day looks organized into three tracks - Programming, Design, and Business/Marketing, so attendees can focus on their area of interest. Should be a great day of learning, and best of all, it's free.

Boston Radical Reference: Volunteer at the Community Change Library
Members of Boston Radical Reference will be volunteering at the Community Change library, which houses some of the best sources of information on racism in the United States. The plan is to conduct a comprehensive inventory of the collection, going book by book, to catch errors in the catalog, determine subject areas in which to expand, and identify books that need repair.

NELA-ITS Spring Workshop
I'm part of the IT Section of the New England Library Association, and we're designing this year's Spring Workshop to address the intersection of mobile technology and libraries. We're still working out the details, but the overall plan is to devote the morning to a sort of "state of things/orientation" as far as libraries and mobile tech goes, then lunch, and then an afternoon panel of librarians demo'ing ways they're using mobile tech in their own libraries. If you've never been to an NELA-ITS workshop before, they're a good time, and very focused on practical information.

I'll be at all three of these events - if you see me, please say hi.



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Reference Question of the Week – 10/17/10

   October 23rd, 2010 Brian Herzog

Volunteer facts bookmarkThis week's question is actually one I needed to answer myself - it's a little bit random, so bear with me.

My library just held our annual thank-you dinner for all of our adult volunteers. To illustrate "the value of volunteers" (in other words, how much money volunteers save us) my director and I came up with a "volunteer stats" bookmark* [ppt, 1.2MB] to hand out.

We had 241 volunteers last year, with a total of 5804 volunteer hours. We figured if we paid them each $15/hour, their labor would have cost the library $87,060. Just to add another little fact to the bookmark, I wanted to figure out just how tall $87,060 was in $100 bills.

So of course, I turned to the internet. I did a search for something like how tall is a stack of money, and after clicking on a few results, I found a forum posting that provided the Excel formulas needed to calculate not just the height of a stack of bills, but also the cubic volume and value of different denominations. Neat.

I copy/pasted the formulas into an Excel spreadsheet* [xls], and after a little tweaking, had my answer. And just to double-check it, I went back to the internet to find a "known value" (in this case, the height of $1 million in $100's). It checked out, so I had my fact for the bookmark, and a job well done, right?

Well, not so fast: being me, I thought, "hey, wouldn't it be awesome to turn this Excel spreadsheet into a web form that other people could play with? After all, that was so popular the last time."

Volunteer bookmark front

But this was all happening late in the day on Thursday, and I didn't have time to figure out how to convert the Excel formulas into javascript. So once again, I turn to the internet, thinking, "I just bet there's some easy spreadsheet-to-javascript converter out there."

And it turns out, there is: I found SpreadsheetConverter.com, which does exactly that. After you download the software, it converts spreadsheets to a web-ready format with just a click of a button - pretty neat.

But even better was their free demo offer, where you email them your spreadsheet and they convert it for you. Within 24 hours they sent back the converted webpage, and it works great - just enter the height** of your money stack below, and the spreadsheet tells you the value of various denominations, for both a single stack and a cubic block of bills.

One condition of the free demo is that it is for evaluation purposes only, so evaluate away and keep this tool in mind if you ever need to throw a spreadsheet up on your website - it can save you a lot of time. Too bad I didn't know about it when I was coding the Library Use Value Calculator.

The thank-you dinner went well, and the bookmarks were a big hit. Yay for volunteers.

 


*Feel free to download, edit and reuse our volunteer bookmark* [ppt, 1.2MB] or the Excel spreadsheet* [xls] if you like.

**This was designed to figure out height in inches - to use different measurements, the form below will convert those values into inches:





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Building a Bridge

   April 29th, 2007 Brian Herzog

Chelmsford Conservation Commission trail markerWhen I'm not at the library, I volunteer as a land steward with the Chelmsford Open Spaces Stewardship program. We build and maintain trails on the public lands managed by the Chelmsford Conservation Commission.

Mostly the work is small clean-up projects and just keeping the trails clear of debris. But this morning, we actually built a bridge (see photos).

Over the winter, a new green trail (indicated by the color of the letters on the trail marker signs like the one in the photo) was built at the Lime Quarry. The last step was to build a bridge to span a small stream, so a bunch of us met at 9am on a Sunday morning.

After all the materials were carried the half-mile from the parking area to the stream, it only took us about an hour to actually build the bridge. There ended up being 12 volunteers for maybe a four-person job, but between the extra help and having all the wood pre-cut, the job was a breeze.

If anyone is in Chelmsford and would like to walk these trails, let me know. Or, look around in your own communities for trails and parks, either maintained by the town or city department or by private or volunteer groups. Help maintain and preserve these public lands if you can, but by all means, go out and enjoy them.

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