Potential, Interrupted

While with my family for Thanksgiving, my nephew Jake showed me his latest toy car - Lightning McQueen, with a boot.

He loved it, because it was something new from his favorite movie. But the more I thought about this particular toy, the more I wondered about life in general.

Whose idea was it to sell kids a toy car that is designed not to roll? Where's the fun in that? Lots of kids' toys don't do anything, I know, and rely heavily on imagination to make them fun - but this defies even that. It seems like the gratification comes not from playing with the car, but just from owning it. Personally, I think this is a Very Wrong Message to send to kids, but that's not why I'm bringing this up.

It also occurred to me was that this booted toy car is very similar to downloadable media with DRM (because I have a tendency to relate every single aspect of my life back to libraries).

Patrons can get some limited joy out of them, but the built-in handicap of DRM is contrary to how (I think) downloadable media is supposed to work. DRM doesn't render downloadable audiobooks completely useless, but it does derail their potential and makes enjoying them unnecessarily difficult.

I asked Jake why he liked this car, since it didn't roll, but being three years old, he just said he wanted it because it was Lightning McQueen. I tried to get him to play with his brother and me as we zoomed cars that did roll back and forth to each other across the floor, but he just sat on a chair holding his new car and looking at it.

As an uncle, I felt bad that the limitations of Jake's new toy kept him from playing with us. But he didn't seem upset, and I figured he'd eventually realize that looking at a car that doesn't work isn't as much fun as playing with one that does.

As a librarian, I feel like every downloadable media option available to us has a boot on it, and people are afraid to get down on the floor and start rolling cars around. We're timidly exploring "free-wheeling" options, and I am hoping libraries and Jake quickly come to the same realization.

And I know I might talk about the wrongs of DRM too much, but it just bugs me.

Posted under Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

List of 25 Banned Books

iLibrarian is one of my favorite blogs - they always have interesting or useful posts.

Last week they posted about a story from DegreeDirectory that lists the top 25 banned books people should read.

I've never really gotten in to banned books week, or read books just because someone else was trying to outlaw them. It seems so fundamentally un-American and undemocratic to me to feel you have the right to repress or discriminate against something just because you don't like it. So usually, book banning news just slides right by me, but since it's making national news, I gave it more attention.

In looking at this list, I noticed that the books that I've read I'd really enjoyed. Since I liked some banned books, it stands to reason I might enjoy others, so I am going to make a point of reading the rest of this list.

The full list (in alphabeticalish order) is below - check out the original post for descriptions and links to excerpts or full-text online.

1. A Day No Pigs Would Die, Robert Newton Peck
2. American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
3. And Tango Makes Three, Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
4. Annie on My Mind, Nancy Garden
5. Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Patterson
6. Candide, Voltaire
7. Fallen Angels, Walter Dean Myers
8. Fanny Hill, John Cleland
9. Forever, Judy Blume
10. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
11. Harry Potter (The Entire Series), J. K. Rowling
12. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
13. Lady Chatterley's Lover, D. H. Lawrence
14. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
15. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
16. Silas Marner, George Eliot
17. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
18. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
19. The Arabian Nights
20. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
21. The Chocolate War, Robert Cormier
22. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
23. The Giver, Lois Lowry
24. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
25. Ulysses, James Joyce

And of course, there's lots of other banned books resources online.

Posted under Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Phone Book Follies

So apparently, in 34 years, I've never looked up in the phone book a business name starting with the word "The."

While looking up a phone number of someone whose name started with "Terr," I happened to glance at the rest of the page. I was surprised to notice that there were business listings filed under "the" - The Pizza Place, The Family Eye Care Center, etc.

Since listings like this in a library catalog would be an error, it caught my eye. It seems like it should be wrong for a phone book, too, but I could understand there are business where "The" is an official part of their name.

But I was amazed I'd never noticed this before. Just to make sure I wasn't crazy, I looked up some of these businesses where I would have thought they'd be - under "P" for Pizza, "F" for Family, etc. Some were listed, and some weren't. How strange.

So I checked the other phone books we have, to see if all the publishers did it that way. I found that some businesses are listed under "The," some aren't, and some are under both. And then I found something even stranger.

On the "T" page of one of the books, there were listings for "Test Test." This is something I commonly do when entering junk information to test a new system, and I was thoroughly entertained to see it published in a phone book.

All of the various "Test" entries were listed at the same address, but with different phone numbers. Curiosity got the better of me, and I tried a few of the numbers - but they all just went right to a generic voicemail. These "Test" entries were listed in the other phone books, too, so I'm guessing it tracks back to whoever complied the data originally and sold their database to the publishers. Ha.

But again, this underscores the important of knowing the appropriateness and limitations of your resources.

And so, now the world knows that I can entertain myself for a good twenty minutes reading the telephone book.

Posted under Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Book Binding Tutorial Videos

Not that anyone looking couldn't find these on their own, but I read about these book binding videos on the studiotwentysix2 blog and like them.

As Tom says, they're not edge-of-your-seat exciting, but they are very useful and instructional. Actually, they're very reminiscent of a book binding and repair workshop I took in library school, except in nice, short chunks instead of a five hour workshop.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

The sewing template is available on the paperdesign.de website.

Posted under Uncategorized | Comments Off on Book Binding Tutorial Videos

Reference Question of the Week – 8/3/08

[Note: I'm starting to feel bad that most of the "reference question of the week" questions lately have just been humorous or interesting, but not challenging or requiring strategy or unique reference resources. I'll try to do better in the future.]

A patron walks up to the desk with "Memories coming from a Tennis Star by Alfred A. Knopf" written on a piece of paper. She hands it to me and says, "I read about this book in the paper, about Andre Agassi - can you request if for me?"

That's pretty straightforward, but it didn't show up in our consortium catalog. It didn't show up in the state-wide catalog. And I couldn't find it in either WorldCat or Amazon. Hmm.

Each time I didn't find the title, the patron insisted she read about it in the paper. Patrons are notorious for being simultaneously confident and inaccurate, so I asked her which paper she reads, in the hopes of tracking down the article and learning more about the book.

She couldn't remember where she read it, so I just searched the internet for "memories coming from tennis star agassi." The first result linked to a new story entitled Memoirs coming from tennis star Agassi, from USA Today, and the patron said "yes, that's what I read."

When we clicked into read the story, though, we found that she had slightly misread the article. It said that publisher Alfred A. Knopf had acquired the rights to publish Agassi's memoirs (not memories), and that "his book is not yet titled and no release date has been set."

The patron was a little embarrassed, but recovered by asking:

Well, can request it for me anyway?

When I said that no, I couldn't request it until it's been published and we have a record in our system, she got upset and left.

Which made me feel bad, because there are other books about Andre Agassi out there. But hopefully she'll read again in the paper when the book is published, and come back to request it then. I'm definitely buying this whenever it comes out.

Posted under Uncategorized | Comments Off on Reference Question of the Week – 8/3/08

Found Bookmarks

This is worth repeating: Kate over on Adventures in Library Land highlighted an AbeBooks article that listed a few examples of things that were found in used books:

• Forty $1,000 bills
• Piece of bacon
• Credit cards
• Valuable baseball cards
• A diamond ring

I'm sure most libraries have a collection of odd things, too - just this week I found a Pokémon card (in a book about dealing with bullying). I tend to use receipts myself, or whatever random scrap of paper is handy at the time. Perhaps there should be a Where's George?-like program for bookmarks, too.

Posted under Uncategorized | 5 Comments »