so i’m at work today, because, well, I wasn’t doing anything else, and hey, $50 to sit on my ass all day. sure, whatthefuck, why not?

i’ll tell you why not: mutherfucking library is boring during interim. aside from a few people returning books, i’ve seen two patrons today, professors looking for a journal and a book, respectively, that both turned out to be at storage (edit: and some crazy russian lady who couldn’t believe she’d have to go to the medschool library to find a physics article—that was published in a general science (not physics) journal that we don’t carry.). my supervisor is out taking care of a window that got broken out of her car, so i’m here all alone listening to the air conditioning (apparently all the labs are on vacation, too, so i don’t even get to listen to the freaky noises some of the equipment makes. . .). i don’t even hardly feel like doing stuff online right now, or even reading. . . i just want to sleep.

And I’m not even that tired.

Yesterday was truly adventurous, and we had some adventures. I got a haircut, at a real salon, and then we went to an apparently-inauthentic, though not-all-that-bad, Thai restaurant in Craig Street (see Kat’s review here). Then we went home briefly, and then we went down to the Greyhound station. We went down on the 67H, a strange little route that, if you look at the map, bears a strong resemblance to a deformed ballpeen hammer. . . .

Apparently Greyhound counterfolken aren’t well trained in end-of-shift and start-of-shift procedures—one guy who was finishing his shift must have gone between the counter and the office between it five times between taking his drawer out and the time we left—each time moving about as quickly as a tweaker snail. When we got there at first, there were two men working the counter, while two women stood behind them talking and doing not much else. then the two women disappeared. . . then the two men reached the end of their shift, and left. . . . then one of the men came out, did something at the counter, and returned to the office. . . . then the other guy (in a wheelchair) came out to the station he’d left. . . and immediately returned to the office, followed a moment later by a limping maintenance man (which nineteenfishes said looked like something out of a David Lynch movie). . . . this went on for a while. then one of the women came out. . . without a drawer, so she couldn’t do anything involving cash. fortunately, i’d already paid for my ticket online, so at this point—45 minutes or so after we’d gotten there—i was finally able to pick up my ticket back to ann arbor the night of the 27th. then i had to wait another 15 or 25 minutes for someone who wasn’t a trainee to (a) emerge from the office and (b) stop doing other things long enough to answer my question about my ticket back to pgh on the 31st. (I had a ticket from August that was AA->DET->PGH; I wanted to switch to one that was Toledo->PGH. Turns out I can still use a DET->PGH ticket but just get on in Toledo. . . . . For this (and a newly printed ticket) I stood in line for an extra 20 minutes. . . .

after that, we went to target (where we also spent what seemed like a somewhat absurd amount of time), then to PetCo to look at kitties and buy food for the Beasts; then we met jillontherocks and went *back* to Target (to get Jill a broom), then to Giant Eagle, and then we went home. And then we picked up lillyv, and went to help jillontherocks clean up her apartment, and then we went to the Goat, and then we went home. Again.

The end.

In other news. . . .

• In England, someone has invented a way to get small amounts (for traffic lights, say) of power from passing cars themselves.
• More importantly, however, producers of the new Superman movie have apparently not been too happy with the actor playing him: his package is too big.
• “I have found my soul and it is deep fried pork.â€?
• The Governor’s Transportation Funding and Reform Commission will meet in Pittsburgh on Jan 26 to examine “options to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of public transit, highways and bridges, and their underlying funding.” You can go! (Though if you want to talk, sign up in advance by writing tfrc@state.pa.us or the street address in the article.)
• And, finally, with a little ($48M) help from their friends and yours, PNC Bank will plant another ass-ugly building on their property downtown, on Fifth Ave near Wood St. It’ll be 25–30 stories high and feature massive amounts of office space as well as a 150-room “luxury hotel” and 30 top-floor condos. Another project, announced last week, will go up across the street with 28 condos and 19 “rooftop townhouses”. All the poor people, of course, can just stay down on ground level, where they belong. . . . .

Some cheesy photos from an Internet Librarians convo. . . .

If television’s a babysitter, the internet’s a drunk librarian who won’t shut up.

I did, in fact, make it home yesterday. Now I’m at work, and something’s making the machines cranky—everything is slow as hell. Maybe it has to do with the system update they’re doing this weekend—the staff servers are all offline this weekend, and we’re doing all the circulation off line, storing it in files on the machines till the servers come back up on Monday. . . .

Thank god I (probably) won’t be here if they ever decide to do this again. . . .

For just $1,025, you can own the pierogi with Jesus’ face fried into the side. (via apostropher)

I meer for beer!

Proposed by Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the Librarian Education Development Act would provide up to $5,000 in loan forgiveness to qualified librarians, teachers, and child-welfare workers in low-income communities.

—American Libraries, “House Bill Would Forgive Student Loans for Librarians”

nineteenfishes: only 5k? seems a little bit lame
DangerCat20: yeah, well.
DangerCat20: i don’t think the teachers get any better a deal.

UPDATE: Jessamyn at librarian.net mentions the story (linking to ALA’s press release instead of the news story linked above), and wonders at the ALA’s motives. Mark at …the thoughts are broken… also comments, pointing out that by the time you’ve worked long enough to get the deferment, you’ll have paid off that much already. . .

No, it does not matter how far out of town or the country you’ve been, the book’s still late, and you will still be charged for it. If you knew you were going out of the country, you should’ve returned the book(s) before you left.

(And yes, you can mail them back if you realise you’ve still got them after you’ve left already.)

Most of these come from LISNews:

• CAIR: Explore the Quran:
  

  In today’s climate of heightened religious sensitivities and apparent cultural clashes, now is the time for people of all faiths to better acquaint themselves with Islam’s sacred text, the Holy Quran.

  The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is proud to announce a new campaign intended to promote understanding of the Quran by distributing complimentary copies to any interested member of the American public. This campaign, titled Explore the Qur’an, serves as a response to those who would defame and desecrate the holy book of Muslims without full knowledge of its teachings.

  The mission of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.

• Religion News Service is a secular news and photo service devoted to unbiased coverage of religion and ethics. They appear to be primarily a e-mail and wire based service, as they’ve only got a sentence with each headline on the main page, and none of them are linked. But there are links to “Search RNS Now!“

  But if you’re using Opera, you get the page mirrored here: Your Browser is Not Allowed at this site, in very large type. Period.

  Well, fuck you, too.

  The “Browser Wars” were over nearly 7 years ago. We were supposed to be done with that “best viewed in [Browser X]” crap years ago (Well, except for trying to convince people to drop Netscape 4, the 8-year-old dinosaur so far decayed it’s starting to turn to petroleum….). As World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wrote 9 years ago,

  Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network. (Technology Review, July 1996)

  Besides all which… that’s just rude. “Your Browser is Not Allowed”. You Have Not Said the Magic Word. You Have Been Denied.

  

   

  Anyway, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, more library stories:

• According to the International Herald-Tribune, a group of German publishers, especially smaller- and medium-sized houses, are considering creating a Google Print-like project for a digital index of their books.
  

  We have to decide whether distribution is in the hands of a few global distributors and global publishing houses, said [Matthias] Ulmer, who heads Eugen Ulmer Verlag, a medium-size publishing house in Stuttgart. Publishers and booksellers that are involved, he said, feel that if they don’t do this today, they may no longer exist in some years.

• Shortly before Memorial Day, the California Assembly passed a bill that would ban public school districts from purchasing textbooks longer than 200 pages. The bill was sponsored by an Assemblywoman from Los Angeles, the Democratic chair of the Education Committee in the house, who claims that rather than reading specified pages from a manual, the work world students will be graduating to now requires more that personnel be able to find information online, on their own. The bill requires key points and basic ideas to be condensed into the 200 pages, with appendexes listing website addresses suggested as starting points for further research. (AB 756) says don’t give students a predigested version of what U.S. history is, let them explore the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, its sponsor said.

  The executive director of the California School Library Association responded, What we’re finding more and more is that people are saying, ‘Who needs an encyclopedia? Who needs an almanac? Just go to the Internet, it’s all there.’ Well, it’s not all there. Neither the state public schools Superintendent nor the Governor, nor various education groups, have taken positions on the bill, which now goes to the State Senate.

  (Sacramento Bee, via Scripps-McClatchy Western Service, via LISNews.com)

  Although I feel less opposed than when I first read it, there are definitely a number of problems with this idea:

  • First and foremost, access to computers and the internet. There’s still a substantial number of families that don’t have a computer, let alone internet access, in their home, and school and public libraries don’t have the facilities, staff (California’s public schools have the lowest ratio of professional school librarians to students in the country), or open hours to take all those kids. And of course, the areas with the largest numbers of kids who don’t have access to the internet at home will also be the ones where the school libraries are understaffed and underresourced (did i just invent that word?) and the public libraries have short hours and few facilities—if there are any at all.
  • Secondly, math and sciences.

    It’s still very difficult to work with math and sciences, especially post-algebraic math, in HTML. To represent mathematical texts requires one of a number of differently distateful solutions; the most popular are to create images of the equations (lots of files to download, poor quality) and to create PDF or similar files of the text. . . . which not only requires massive downloads (and massive plugins), but pretty much puts us back where we started.

  • Third: standards, community, educational, and political.
    

    [Y]ou’d have to know how aligned the materials are on the Internet with our education standards, said Michael Kirst, a Stanford education professor and co-director of Policy Analysis for Education.

    If we’re giving students a list of sites to visit in the back of the book—according to the bill, books would have to provide a rich appendix with Web sites where students can go for more information—how is that better than just putting the information in the book? Ok, we teach them how to enter an address in an address bar. That should be part of a keyboarding or basic computer skills course.

    On the other hand, they could give kids sites as ’starters’, take-off points, for further research. But then you have to teach kids to recognise what’s real on the web and what’s not. And given the number of people who fall for bank scams, viruses, and worms, are any of us ones to talk? Keeping kids from falling prey to malware and bad information seems like something that will take a hell of a lot more time and energy than it seems like anyone’s got to give in California these days.

The Cornell University Faculty Senate has endorsed a resolution, proposed by the faculty’s Library Board, which

urges tenured faculty to cease supporting publishers who engage in exorbitant pricing, by not submitting papers to, or refereeing for, the journals sold by those publishers, and by resigning from their editorial boards if more reasonable pricing policies are not forthcoming.

Due to sharply increasing prices Cornell’s libraries cancelled dozens of subscriptions to Elsevier journals in 2004; one would have been as low as $221 for the year, but dozens were over $1,000/yr; the European journal of pharmacology would have cost nearly $10,000 for a single year! One of Cornell’s Technical Services librarians recently resigned as an assistant editor for an Elsevier journal because of the pricing policies.

Ohio U’s independent student paper opines on the proposed—and nearly assured—5% across-the-board cut in funding for public libraries in Ohio:

With Gov. Taft continually promoting the need for Ohio to compete in high-tech industries, the decision to cut library funding seems not only to contradict these economic goals, but also make them nearly impossible.

via LISnews.