Thursday, April 25, 2013

A few new books

A number of weird software issues have held my most recent vlog back from completion, which is a shame, because it's a review of one of my sleeper favorites: Childhood's End.

Instead, I've placed it on the back-burner until those issues resolve themselves -- how 'bout an update, Apple? -- and decided to do a bunch of quickie reviews of new books. Here goes ...

Afrika Reich by Guy Saville
An alternate-universe novel in which the Second World War ended in truce rather than victory, this book explores Africa in the 1950s. Divided between British and German colonies, the continent harbors a new German threat that promises to end British supremacy. Our intrepid British hero participates in an assassination with disastrous consequences that strand him in the middle of enemy territory. It's a fairly high-concept work that delivers on tension and excitement!

Aya: Love in Yop City by Marguerite Abouet & Clement Oubrerie
Aya returns in the third and final installment of a graphic-novel series about her life. This series is pretty popular, probably because it's light-hearted and is an interesting look at life in 1970s Ivory Coast. Aya's grown up and is working on becoming a doctor, until a scorned professor ruins her plans. She gets to take her revenge, though, with the help of her hometown!

Bomb: The race to build and steal the world's most dangerous weapon by Steve Sheinkin
The development of nuclear weapons at Los Alamos is one of the most fascinating stories of military technological advancement -- even more than the history of the Internet -- largely because the stakes -- and risks -- were so high and the people involved were ... well, it's tough to describe them. Put it this way: my favorite scientist of all, Richard Feynman, had an exceptionally puckish sense of humor. For example, his favorite hobby was safecracking ... in the middle of the most top-secret government facility in the world.

Extra virginity: The sublime and scandalous world of olive oil by Tom Mueller
Like dog shows and kiddie entertainers, the most innocent-seeming parts of life often conceal a seething cauldron of corruption, fraud, and deceit. This is true even of olive oil, everyone's favorite addition to toasted bread, mozzarella, tomato, and basil. It's not just knowing the difference between virgin and extra-virgin -- what about the difference between olives and canola? These are the things that matter, people!

House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
One of my personal favorite recent reads, House of the Scorpion is a young-adult science-fiction novel, which is increasingly becoming a genre not to be reckoned with. Our main character lives in Opium, a new country that exists between Mexico and the United States, ruled and fueled by drug lords' agricultural pursuits. Weird enough, except he's an illegal -- and widely-hated -- clone of the richest lord of them all. That's weird enough, except his original dies, and ... well, read it. Tense, suspenseful, and jam-packed wall-to-wall with issues in bioethics, House of the Scorpion is fantastic all around.

Subliminal: How your unconscious mind rules your behavior by Leonard Mlodinow
Full disclosure: This book is on my kitchen table right now. Sorry. But I highlight it for two reasons: It's from the author of The drunkard's walk, which I briefly review here, and it's just interesting in general to see how your brain seems to have a mind of its own. Mlodinow focuses on how people make decisions, and the factors that affect those decisions without their knowledge. Drunkard's walk was about probability and how some things are considerably less -- and more -- likely than you usually think they are, and Subliminal is about all the tiny little signals that go into shaping your view of the world and how those signals can be manipulated. He's a fun guy!

That about covers it this time. Have fun browsing the stacks!

Friday, April 5, 2013

Update ... for real.

I hope everyone enjoyed that April Fool’s post, because now it’s time to bring the pain.

Just kidding! Actually, we’re long overdue for new stuff on this thing, which I admit is my fault.

First and most immediate, we’d like to announce a trial subscription to EasyBib; it’s an online citation tool similar to RefWorks.

And by “citation tool,” we really mean, “thing that does all the work for you when you have a bunch of references to cope with for your paper, project, or other academic product.” This trial expires April 25, so if you’re curious, you’ll need to hop to the following:
  • Go to http://www.easybib.com while on campus.
  • Register for a free personal account. You can tell you’ve done it right if you see the Gallaudet logo.
  • Once that’s done, you can get in from off-campus with your login information.
  • Play around a little bit. Maybe take a stab at it with an actual assignment.
  • Let us know what you think. We’ve got a survey up and running.
A lot of other things that we’ve been working on are taking place behind the scenes. For instance, we’re in the process of getting some new inter-library loan software on its feet.

That doesn’t sound terribly interesting, but the immediate advantage for students, staff, and faculty is that the turnaround time required to get your requests out and the loaned items in should go down somewhat. Ideally, you wouldn’t notice much of a change from the way we already do it, but the truth is, a lot of work had to happen in order to get your requests out there and taken care of as quickly as possible. It saves you time and us a lot of work!

Speaking of lengthy implementations, you can expect to see one version of our catalog, ALADIN Discovery (the search box on our web site), change considerably at some point in the near future, mostly in terms of what it looks like and the results that will show up when you search. I’m careful to say “at some point,” because I’ve been teasing this announcement for the past year. But the light at the end of the tunnel is finally visible.

Basically, we’re replacing Discovery with a newer product from the same company, one that will -- wait for it -- also search quite a few of our databases in addition to our print and electronic books. It’ll be more of a one-stop shop than ever!

It’s taken so long because, as it turns out, figuring out how several universities and their library collections, database subscriptions, and generally-weird resources, some of which are publicly-available and some of which aren’t, all slot together so that the right people take the right pathways to the right resources ... is a bit of a challenge.

Each university library also has its own individual preferences for how to present things -- do we want to make sure Gallaudet items are at the top of the list (well ... yes)? Do we display books only first, or let the articles come through full blast, or tweak the relevancy algorithm, or set up a tabbed search box for each type of resource? That kind of thing -- so that’s also taken some time.

I’m sure that the folks directly involved with this process would roll their eyes and say “a bit of a challenge” is a bit of an understatement, and they’re right about that.

Either way, we’re looking forward to the final implementation at some point before the next Fall semester, and getting prepared for the inevitable flood of confused and delighted e-mails from the campus community.

And our old-school users don’t need to worry: the Classic Catalog isn’t going anywhere. Truth is, it’ll be years before that one goes away; it actually grows directly from the backbone system that most of WRLC uses to handle, well, everything. That backbone has to be replaced before Classic goes anywhere. We’ve begun the process of figuring out what we want from the new system, but are looking at, possibly, several years before a final decision is reached.

What can I say? We’re picky.

Anyway, those are the big things, as well as all the smaller things we all do every day, that keep the Library moving along.

Next week, you can anticipate a vlog of some kind. Stay tuned ...

Monday, April 1, 2013

New announcements

We’re a month or so away from the end of the Spring semester, but we have some big news, and I just had to share.

First, we’ve decided to transition away from the Dewey Decimal System. Most other universities are using the Library of Congress (LOC) classification system, which uses an alphanumeric code that offers more fine-grained categorization. It’s pretty neat.

However, we’re not going to do anything silly like that. Instead, in order to better aid students, we’ll start shelving according to when each item was published, then organizing by color. We plan to use the classical ROY G. BIV spectrum, bookended by black and white covers. Gray-colored books are a little difficult to place, so we’re discarding those.

The result will be so much simpler than Dewey or LOC that we’re getting rid of all numbers altogether. Instead, when searching in the catalog, you’ll find information like “Recently published in gamboge.” Then all you have to do is go to the last half of the shelves, then move to where red transitions to orange, zero in on the gamboge-colored books, then find the individual title you want!

We think it’ll be a lot easier on the eyes, too. As an added benefit to our students, it’ll also provide an interesting visual representation of publishing trends through the choice of color in book covers, which we’re sure will be extremely useful to our students.

Additionally, we’ve noticed that demand for our public computers is very high, resulting in frustrated students either waiting in line or seeking an open computer elsewhere. We want our students to be happy, so we’ve removed the computers altogether!

Printing costs have skyrocketed -- paper is very expensive -- so we’ve also removed the printers and are offering scrolls made from vellum for student use. Super environmentally-friendly; all you have to do to reuse your scroll is take some sand from our public litter box, scrape the surface of the scroll with it until all the ink is gone, then check out one of our quills and inkpots and start filling the scroll up again!

In order to trim costs, we’ve also started raising calves that will eventually be converted into the vellum we need for our scrolls; this is a huge win for the Library, as the leftover veal will be cooked and sold to our students for further funds! We’ve begun to consult with a local restaurant group on tips for making great burgers, and will be collaborating with campus fraternities to staff the griddles.

Now, because we’ve decided to diversify into livestock, we also foresee the need for pastureland, so have begun consultations with another group for ways we can knock down the Library and replace it with some lovely grass! It’s already paying off, as they’ve suggested that over the summer, we take the remaining books, compost them, and use them to fertilize the new pasture. Because the books will be organized by color, the pasture will be a lovely rainbow of hues. Now that’s aesthetic sustainability!

Unfortunately, since librarians do not very often make good cowboys, all Library staff has been scheduled for retraining over the summer. We’ll be spending two months at a ranch in Colorado learning how to rope steers. Additionally, in order to beef up our leadership in this new era of librarianship, we’ll be getting a new administrator to oversee the Library. Over Labor Day weekend, you can expect a blog post from Chet “Desperado” Carney, Gallaudet University’s newest Chief Cattle-Herdin’ Officer, on further exciting new developments!

Since we have removed all computers and the electricity will be shut off, Dr. Carney will be painting his news on a large piece of cardboard; he, and the board, will be found in his new office on the Green. Just keep an eye out for the lawn chair and fella in the cowboy hat!

An actual update will be forthcoming later this week.