nichole's auxiliary storage

What, you thought I was kidding about the easy listening?

Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 07:20:24
From: Nichole
To: Metro agent #1
Subject: Suggestion re: "Teens use bus shelter to meet, fight"

Hello,
I read with interest Lisa Schuetz's WiSJ story on the crowds of teens at the South transfer point. I've read that piping in adult contemporary or easy listening music has worked elsewhere to dramatically reduce the teen appeal of public places. Do you think that could work for Madison Metro?

Sincerely,
Nichole

Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 10:39:57
From: Metro agent #1
To: Nichole
Subject: Re: Suggestion re: "Teens use bus shelter to meet, fight"

Thank you for your good suggestion. I've heard that as well but must admit, I forgot it. I'll bring it to our Senior Management Team for discussion. It could be a deterrent.
Thanks again.

Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 13:20:56
From: Metro agent #2
To: Nichole
Subject: STP comments

Nichole: Thanks for the idea. Would you suggest Manilow, Yani [sic] or John Tesh music?  Have a great week end.

Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 13:29:02
To: Metro agent #2
From: Nichole
Subject: Re: STP comments

Some articles suggest "Mozart, Vivaldi, Handel and opera."

http://news.agendainc.com/mt-agenda/content/archives/2005/01/london_uses_unc.html http://www.freenewmexican.com/artsfeatures/10701.html

Yours,
Nichole

New libraries

Wednesday's WiSJ quotes the Mayor listing a new Central library within 10 years as part of his vision for Madison.

Ald. Brenda Konkel, 2nd District, applauded Cieslewicz for sparking the community's imagination and said a new Downtown library should be a top priority.

Other goals: new rain gardens, parks, parking grarges, and a South Side library; and improvements to the downtown area, Villager Mall on Park St., and Lisa Link Peace Park. Fingers crossed for all these worthy goals.

Big snake vs. big name

In an effort to emphasize the good in my life, I've been keeping a list of the one best thing to happen to me each day this year. Monday it was a toss up between Gorman's talk and what happened after. Namely, I was walking across Library Mall and saw a guy who was taking a walk with his pet boa constrictor.

In retrospect the boa constrictor wins, mostly because I can blog about petting a snake without feeling like I'm treading on eggshells. (It was kind of hard to find a tasteful alternative to "I met this strange guy who let me touch his snake," however.)

Michael Gorman's visit

Here are the points of yesterday's talk ("Is there a crisis in LIS education?") at SLIS which I thought were more than sound. In an effort to be a "librarian of goodwill," I won't cover the bits I didn't find as sound, or haven't the expertise to address completely (though "technology has gone feral" was a memorable phrase). Here are some other opinions.

(As a point of reference for those who draw a bright line a la "for us or against us," I'm a born cataloger, degreed for a year but still working in a patchwork of several paraprofessional jobs; I love teh tech but more importantly what it can do for the neediest users; I'm a blog person (obviously); and the Lipstick Librarian quiz question featuring Mr. Gorman still makes me giggle.)

I liked that he acknowledged that students and educators have limited time and money. While he didn't use the words "opportunity cost," that was his point when asserting that the core curriculum shouldn't be neglected in favor of tech-flavored electives. "Teach sword-swallowing if you want, as long as the basics are covered," was the gist.

(He listed a few techy elective course titles; I cringed when he said "Human-computer interaction," the name of a course I'd taken and found useful. Then again, SLIS might not have been the best department to teach said course, and meanwhile I had to fight tooth and nail to get more than a rudimentary cataloging education. Thank goodness for my undergrad LIS minor, which provided a cheaper opportunity to acquire core skills, and test my fit in the field before starting my MLS.)

He mentioned - sort of off the cuff - that a 5-year Bachelors/Masters program works for educators and might work for librarians. To this a school official responded that this would leave graduates without essential subject specialties.

Perhaps. But the unpopular truth is that very few grad students and still fewer undergrads choose their majors with an eye to what makes a good librarian. Maybe offering an alternative librarian path from the start is not so bad an idea, particularly for those who can't afford 8+ years of higher ed.

When it comes to what I need to know as a librarian, I'd believe Gorman as a library director responsible for hiring before I'd believe school administrators responsible for keeping enrollment up.

He recommended focusing, even constricting, the professional duties of librarians, to those tasks which clearly need the MLS. Who spends $15K+ on an MLS to do clerical work? No wonder we can't get respect. Though it would make librarians' work more rewarding, it may tighten the job market further, which is its own knotty topic.

"I'm no Cardinal Ratzinger," was his reply to a (strained) comment comparing his opinions on libraries' enduring values to Benedict XVI's "tyranny of relativism" blustering.

He acknowledged that teaching management skills is hard, and teaching cataloging is harder. It's not teaching students to be catalogers, nor teaching non-catalogers to understand catalogers (a formidable task indeed), but teaching librarians the framework of their profession.

He had strong words for those (politicians, esp. in California) who neglect the "golden thread" that runs through libraries, from school to public to the university level. He said that libraries at Fresno spend hundreds of thousands of dollars teaching incoming students the library skills they should have had since age 9. That's something I have to respect.

In a word, I'm glad I went, and thankful to the folks who invited Gorman to give the talk.

Jail Library Group annual report

The JLG 2004 Annual Report is now posted on SLISweb.

I wasn't surprised to learn that like libraries everywhere these days, JLG provided more services to more people while getting by with fewer resources. In this case, volunteers were down while visits held steady and requests increased dramatically. Kids' Connection participation was, sadly, down as well, though I'm not sure whether this reflects less demand or lower volunteer availability.

Hot spicy cheese bread

Courtesy my favorite (new-ish?) local blog, Dane101, a sweet slideshow of the first outdoor market on the square. It was freezing and windy on Saturday morning. As we passed Stella's Bakery and heard the usual call, "Hot spicy cheese bread, still warm from the oven!" I said a bit too loudly, "I'd stick it under my shirt." A couple necks craned, but I think everybody knew what I meant.

Worse than an OPAC

I took the new USDA "MyPyramid Tracker" for a spin. Registration is weird (no cookies? No logout button?) and I think it lets more than one user register under a given name, because I got booted out and when I logged back in, all kinds of whacked-out foods were on my "Frequent Foods List."

That, and the frames, and the incredibly kludgy searching (impossibly slow even on a T1 line), and my enthusiasm fizzled right quick. Oh well.

Not that bloggers' food habits are particularly interesting...

Starr Lackawanna, Pinkwater's Hoboken Librarian

...has her own Cafe Press store. *swoon*

Market back on the Square

While I'll miss the breakfasts and relatively stroller-free atmosphere at the indoor market, I'm looking forward to getting some fresh trout, greens, and maybe some plants come Saturday.

Plus Kayla pointed out the Mad City Chickens folk are doing a thing:

Saturday, April 23, 9-9:30 AM.....Pam and I will be doing a brief talk and slide show, at the State Historical Museum, on the Square....3rd Floor (I think)....There will be an entire morning of talks, involving Urban Agriculture, and the like....All are Free to the Public.....

This urban chicken idea has really caught my fancy.

First dispatch

My brother's been in Iraq for about a week. He emailed a few of us to say it was sunny and hot but that the officers are trying to make it more comfortable for the troops by rotating shifts in air conditioning and getting them lobster, prime rib, and crab for dinner. Weird.

He seems to be working at some sort of traffic checkpoint. I really need to stop following the news.

And then there’s the mercenary from Nepal that walks around freely with his AK-47.

Ah....These emails will probably do enough to my nerves, simultaneously soothing by their arrival and rattling with content like that. I can barely imagine how parents and spouses do this.

Do you never, ever shirk

The book Be happy at work: 100 women who love their jobs, and why features a school librarian:

This is not a boring bun-in-the-hair profession, and my colleagues are ... wild when we're outside the library. ... And library science is an especially great profession for younger people, because soon a slew of older librarians will be retiring.

At which point I stopped reading and started skimming. Other vignettes of interest (to me, anyway) feature a costume designer with an MFA who makes $25K/year in NYC working as a designer's assistant (hi, sis), and a software usability specialist. The book's nice in a chicken-soupy way.

Apparently Tennessee has no Bookmobiles

At least, Dooce thinks the idea of her future husband checking Robert Ludlum books out of the bookmobile is "the most adorable and sad thing" she's ever heard. Here is the most adorable and sad thing I've ever heard about my future husband.

Some of his stuffed animals were in a rock band, and he was their manager. One morning his dad came to wake him up and found him curled at the foot of the bed with the animals arranged on his pillow. His dad asked why he was sleeping that way and he said, "They're playing in a bar and I'm not twenty-one."

ALA voting

Karen's post urging ALA members to vote reminded me that before I got busy (yeah, that's the Ticket) I had some tiny little thoughts to share.

First off, the council candidate whose statement included the passage

We need to know how to reach this population [students] so that we create a generation of readers, not gamers.

did not get my vote.

Where the decision was not so easy, I had a rubric for doling out my council votes. Looking back, some of my preferences were sheer bias, and some I defend because they prefer underrepresented groups in ALA.

Fun facts, to the best of my knowledge and ability:

• Of the 91 candidates, almost half (43) had PhDs, second Masters degrees, or other certificates.
• The most commonly given undergrad major was English (15) and the next most common were flavors of education (9) and history (7).
• The most common second Masters were in education (5), English (4), history (3), the arts (3), and MBA/management (3).
• The average MLS was 24 years old. Median = 26; mode = 27.
• The average undergrad degree was 30 years old. Median = 32; mode = 35.

Interesting? Maybe. Surprising? No.

Coakley-Tech LLC

Via WisBlawg: The Milwaukee print-on-demand company has been named to Inc. Magazine's "Inner City 100" list of high-growth companies in "distressed urban centers." The rest of this Journal-Sentinel article is less uplifting.

Coakley-Tech did do a really nice job on my "Growing Raspberries in Wisconsin" booklet from UW-Extension.

Grat.uito.us

Aw, man, I was hoping it would be avar.icio.us...

New addiction

I've got it bad. Some mornings my brain won't let me get out of bed until I draw the right cards in a dream-game of Ticket to Ride. Whoo whoo...

To make matters worse, Ticket to Ride Europe is here.

JM and I did a preliminary route analysis to find the routes most crucial to the greatest number of tickets. In our picture, blue trains signify the most important routes; then green, yellow, red, black, and finally no trains at all.

So far, each game has been unique as we try out the stations and risk the tunnel routes. I'm already tired of going from Stockholm to Cadiz, though that's just the luck of the draw. Whoo whoo...

Texting at the Vatican

The CS Monitor reports (via) that the Vatican used text messaging to notify the cardinals of the Pope's death just 15 minutes after it happened.

This morning on NPR Renée Montagne reported (don't let the title discourage you) that texting was also used by Italian authorities to ask mourners to "steer pilgrims away from St. Peter's Square."

Someday this will be a trivia question on Car Talk.

Another reason for librarian non-shortage

Retirement savings not matching confidence.

NEW YORK - A majority of American workers continue to believe they'll have enough money for a comfortable retirement, but few have saved enough to ensure that will happen, a new study shows.

...

Although the overall confidence reading remains high, workers acknowledge that they haven't saved as much as they should.

In fact, most haven't saved much at all.

Scary. Of course, savings is just on paper. My pick for most stable retirement plan? Chickens. They're barterrific.

Madison buildings

The Cap Times wants to know, on behalf of Mayor Dave, what Madisonians think are the best and worst buildings in the city.

I'm bound by forces beyond my control to name my least favorite building, but you're smart. Take a guess!