September 9th, 2007 Brian Herzog
Here's something I never expected to hear as a librarian:
Patron: Can you show me where your microfilm reader is?
Me: Sure, follow me...
[show him where it is, and give him a quick overview of how to use it]
Me: Do you need help finding a microfilm reel?
Patron: No, thanks, I brought my own.
He brought his own?
But indeed he did. I never found out what it was he was looking at, but he had a bag full of reels, and spent a couple hours going over them. Huh.
libraries, library, microfiche, microfilm, public libraries, public library
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September 4th, 2007 Brian Herzog
The answer to Wikipedia's entry on Librarians is the Uncyclopedia's humorous Librarian entry.
Thanks, Karen.
More library-related humor websites:
humor, jokes, libraries, library, library humor, public libraries, public library
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September 1st, 2007 Brian Herzog
A patron comes in with "Titticutt Follies" written on a piece of paper. She hands it to me and asks if I can help her find it.
After a bit of questioning, I eventually find out that it is a film, about patients in a (now closed) Massachusetts mental hospital. I checked our local catalog and then the state-wide catalog, but found no matches.
Then I went online to see if I could find anything at all, and also to double-check the spelling. A search on IMDb for "Titticutt Follies" redirected me to a 1967 film called "Titicut Follies." After reading the description, it seemed like the right film.
However, the trivia section also provided this information:
The only American film banned from release for reasons other than obscenity or national security, Titicut Follies was filmed inside the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater, a prison hospital for the criminally insane. After the Commonwealth of Massachusetts sued the filmmakers, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the film constituted was an invasion of inmate privacy and ordered the withdrawal of the film from circulation.
Wow. I've helped people look for information on this hospital before, because of the bad conditions and treatment of the patients, but I'd never heard of this film.
A bit more from Wikipedia:
[Frederick] Wiseman, the film's director...believes that the Massachusetts Government, feeling concerned that it portrayed a state institution in a bad light, took the film out of circulation to protect their own reputation. In 1992, it was allowed to be shown on PBS. The film is now legally available through the distributor (Zipporah Films, Inc.), for purchase or rental on VHS or 16mm film for educational license only.
A few WorldCat libraries have this item, but after reading these descriptions, the patron decided not to request it after all.
bridgewater, libraries, library, public libraries, public library, reference question, titicut follies
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August 30th, 2007 Brian Herzog
Q: What's the most important job in the library?
A: The lowly Page.
Pages are important because how well they do their job dictates whether or not a book can be found on the shelf. A library is dependent on its organization system (whatever it might be), so the process for getting returned books back to the right place on the shelf needs to be pretty close to perfect.
Pages are the first step in that process.
The second step is shelf reading. Books get mis-shelved. Patrons pick up books and put them back in the wrong place. It happens. This is why it is necessary (however dreadful and tedious) to shelf read a library's collection from time to time.
Dodie Gaudet, on her blog Quick T.S., provides a nice Guide to Shelf Reading. It's kind of a recap of what is taught in library school, but distilled to the important parts, including suggestions and useful links.
Although I dread a massive shelf-reading project, we can always use one, and this might actually prompt me to begin.
libraries, library, page, pages, paging, public libraries, public library, shelf reading, shelf-reading, shelving
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August 25th, 2007 Brian Herzog
VS.
This question is more interesting to me for the resource it turned up than for the question itself...
A coworker and I were both at the reference desk when a patron walked up and asked,
Can you find a list of what all state employees are paid?
Since there were two of us there, we both started looking, each in our own way.
My Approach
I started with a Google search à la state employee payroll site:mass.gov (I've been getting a lot of mileage out of Google's "site:" search ever since I learned about it). However, even with trying different keywords, I wasn't getting anywhere.
My Coworker's Approach
My coworker just did an open Google search for Massachusetts State Employee Payroll, and found an amazing website with the first result. Apparently, the Boston Herald provides all of this information in a neat little searchable payroll database.
The patron was very pleased with that, and with the speedy turnaround. And we all had a good time looking up a few people.
However, feeling like this was the fast-food version of the answer, I still went back to Mass.gov to see if I could verify the information from an official source. I spent about twenty minutes over the course of the rest of the day looking, but never did find it.
I'm sure with a few phone calls or emails, I could have turned it up, but it's amazing how much better secondary sources are sometimes than the obvious primary resource.
boston herald, libraries, library, ma, mass.gov, massachusetts, payroll, public libraries, public library, reference question, state employees
Tags: boston herald, libraries, Library, ma, mass.gov, massachusetts, payroll, public libraries, public library, Reference Question, state employees
Posted under Uncategorized | Comments Off on Reference Question of the Week – 8/19/07
August 23rd, 2007 Brian Herzog
The Unshelved comic strip is generally pretty good, but this particular strip (and the next few days) really made me laugh.
As a librarian and a web designer, I can certainly relate. But increasingly, based on what I'm hearing at various meetings around the region, the budget itself isn't the real issue - it's staff and time. Either libraries have a staff member who knows how to maintain a website but doesn't have the time to do it, or they have someone willing and able time-wise, but who doesn't have the actual skills necessary to maintain a good website.
What librarians I know keep asking for (in desperation, in some cases), is an easy and quick way to update content on their website.
They don't necessarily want to outsource, don't want to heap all the responsibility onto one staff member, and also don't want to spread around responsibility (because that usually diminishes the quality and coherentness of the site).
CMS tools like Joomla and Drupal keep getting talked about, as do blog software like WordPress. There's a growing buzz about Scriblio too, but no one seems to know enough about it to view it as anything but a distant glimmer. Libraries in my consortium are considering moving from Frontpage to Dreamweaver, which seems to me to be more of a lateral move than an actual improvement.
All of these have a learning curve, plus time and effort to migrate/recreate the existing website. Which I think is acceptable, if the library knew that maintenance, once there, will not require a great deal of knowledge or time.
Library 2.0 tools are great, as they save the patron's time and let them get a better web experience without requiring a lot of web-savviness. But saving patrons effort usually means the library is doing more work, and a lot of us, again, don't have the time or skill to integrate these tools into our websites.
And this is just websites - online catalogs are a whole different story.
Errg. A solution? Anybody?
</frustration>
cms, libraries, library, overdue media, public libraries, public library, unshelved, web design, website, website design, websites
Tags: cms, libraries, Library, overdue media, public libraries, public library, Technology, unshelved, web design, website, website design, Websites
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