nichole's auxiliary storage

David Byrne segues from Google Book Search

to bigger things in his Nov. 20, 2005 (un-permalinked) post:

Our universe became what we could catalogue.

A lot got left out.

Pomegranates

Rochelle tells a story about patience and pomegranates.

Every fall, my mom would also buy us pomegranates, and I'd eat them a seed at a  time, just like Juniorina. I came to associate the fruit with the excitement of my autumn birthday and - more nerdily - the hopefulness of a new school year.  I loved the Persephone myth, too, and remember making a hideout for myself on the closet floor with a flashlight and Edith Hamilton's Mythology for company.

Getting a post on Overheard in the Office

is more than a sidebar thing, I've been told by my best reader. :) Enjoy!

Wal-Mart movie screening

JM pointed out that the specific Madison showing of "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" to which Dane101 has linked is, in fact, the one at our church. Which would explain the huge crowd the film's organizer, our education director, is anticipating. Free pizza = magic.

I'm pretty excited - mostly to see the movie, but also by the sheer amount of interest in it. I'm proud of the church, too. We think about this stuff (by which I mean peace, justice, care for the environment) all the time, and I've never seen a more thoughtful and dedicated bunch of individuals working towards these goals. Yet we're not much for getting that word out beyond the choir, so to speak. This is a great step in the right direction.

Wiki-style authority control comes to LibraryThing

From the LibraryThing blog: Author pages—you control 'em.

In fact, the computer guesses pretty well, presenting a list of likely aliases for in the "Also known as…" section. You can check these authors out by clicking on their names. If they're really the same, and you're feeling generous, go ahead and click "combine." The authors will be smoothed together, with the more common name winning. I've gone through some of the better-known authors—the rest are up to you.

Be bold! The system is self-correcting. If you screw up and combine two authors who aren't really the same—eg., Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe—someone will notice. Clicking "separate" will break them apart again.

Not only does this show that authority control (under "smoothing together," "disambiguation" or any other name) does matter to users, and is easy to understand, but more importantly, that they are willing and able to contribute the work. At least in this little sample. And Wikipedia, like it or not. And IMDB.

What other "exclusively" librarian-like pursuits will emerge next?

The reins, they are slipping, and I for one welcome our new ...well, you get the picture.

ReStore conference

This week I did a show-and-tell about the little Access database some SLISters, JM and I made for the Habitat ReStore, which hosted a national ReStore conference that was over capacity and a great success.

Another ReStore's web-based volunteer management tool inspired me to put learning php on my professional development list. It was awesome: volunteers could sign up for a shift from anywhere, view a pictorial directory and calendar, clock in and out, all that good stuff. Managers could gather stats on hours worked and send messages as well. The only trouble they mentioned is that now that their volunteer developer has a "real" job it's hard to find someone to tweak the system.

Not to put too fine a point on it

This office plant came with me to my new job. It was bequeathed to me by a mentor at the last job who said it hadn't grown a new leaf in years.

Jail Library Group slideshow posted

The slides (based on Jessamyn West's ppt-free talk template) from Jail Library Group's panel at the WLA conference are up.

Supreme Court Denies Defendant Access to Prison Library

From ALA, via the Jail Library Group list:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled October 31 that having pretrial access to a law library is not intrinsic to defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to represent themselves.

And in the last para:

[A] 2–1 ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ... stated that inmates in a Pittsburgh maximum-security prison should not be denied reading materials as a disciplinary tool.

The dissenting vote was cast by Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Renovated Capitol Theater

Thanks to Kayla, I attended the preview of the new Capitol Theater in the Overture Center. It's amazingly opulent inside. The Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra gave a great performance. And the free nosh was mostly meat-based and very, very rich.

All that made for a more intense, vaguely guilt-flavored experience than I bargained for. As I listened, I remembered the faces, if not all the names, of my childhood violin teachers, and thought of my sad little instrument, shivering in the back of the closet in the empty room we closed up to save energy this winter. Not that I was ever very good.

I saw a thing I'd like to try, though: the dodecahedron they used to test the acoustics. Bwoot!

WiSJ: Jail phone contract revenue short $500,000

Not surprising.

The discrepancy in predicted and actual revenue occurred because SBC provided misleading data to contract bidders, Hicklin said.

Caveat Lector on the book brand

Dorothea cuts to the chase:

If books are important, and the library is where the books are, then libraries are indeed golden. If books aren’t so much these days, and libraries are just where the books are… we’re waving buggy whips around and we’d better stop it.

Healing Voices from the Inside Out event at South Madison Branch library

From the JLG list:

The South Madison Branch Library and Voices Beyond Bars will host "Healing Voices from the Inside Out: a panel presentation by formerly incarcerated persons and their families" on Wednesday, November 9 from 7-8:30 p.m. at the UW Community Partnership Office, 2234 A South Park Street (four doors down from the South Madison Branch Library).

   Parents, spouses, children and their formerly incarcerated family members will share their experience of loss and love when a family member is incarcerated.  What is it like when the family member returns home? What does it take for a formerly incarcerated individual to successfully reintegrate into the community?  Included in the panel will be a presentation by the chaplain of Fox Lake Correctional Institution, who was formerly icnarcerated in the same system in which she now serves.

   Voices Beyond Bars is a group of formerly incarcerated individuals who are working to restore justice, to advocate for change for those who are still within the system, and to give back to the community they were once a strain on.  Their mission statement is "to engage in dialogue; to share our truth; in hope of healing self, family and community."

  This presentation is a part of a series of programs on issues in the criminal justice system funded by a grant from the Friends of Madison Public Library.

  Please join us in exploring how we as a caring community can respond to these issues.