The Gryphon's Den

New blog with grant and workshop announcements

2009-08-16T21:38:00.001-04:00

We've started a new blog to list them in one handy place. Put us on your reader, and let us do the work!

http://masterplansinc.blogspot.com/

Susan Knoer
Master Plans Inc.
Library and archival consultants

New blog

2008-05-24T15:14:00.002-04:00

I'm carrying on the "tradition" with a new blog, The Flexible Librarian. That refers mostly to my mind - I teach, I'm an archivist and a librarian, I freelance. I try to think and write, and that's what my new blog is about. So come see what's new!

http://flexiblelibrarian.blogspot.com/

Humanities for Librarians

2007-12-09T15:58:00.000-05:00

If anyone's interested, I'm slowly moving the links that I use for my UKy reference class to a wiki at
http://humanitiesforlibrarians.pbwiki.com/

Feel free to add, annotate, copy, or otherwise use it!

Right now, Appalachian Studies is the only one completed, since I rushed that one for the Learning Community, but check out How-To for some neat photography videos.

Eventually, I'll get my primary sources links in other fields into another wiki, and my Preservation links into another.

Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis Dances

2007-10-14T02:09:00.000-04:00

Part of the Ohio University collections, here is streaming video of some of the dances by these pioneering dancers/choreographers.

http://www.library.ohiou.edu/archives/dance/movingimage/index.html

Sally Mann's wet collodion photographs

2007-10-14T01:57:00.000-04:00

Check out the PBS Art:21 videos of Sally Mann at work

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/mann/index.html

Antique Photographic Processes - how to videos

2007-10-14T01:13:00.000-04:00

Learn how to make a daguerreotype
http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/videoDetails?segid=378
Or just see what they look like new
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGpLju39fGY

Or a wet plate collodion negative?
http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/videoDetails?segid=1726
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNeHs5M974g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gyf8fQOdvDs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WcEu-L1Wls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JocSuLBSk0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-VWxomz8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6RMgTXcEK8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JocSuLBSk0

Or an albumen photo with Doug Munson at the Chicago Albumen Works, part of the wonderful Albumen site?
http://albumen.stanford.edu/video/munsonhome.html

Or maybe a photogravure?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNeHs5M974g

How about an ambrotype?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An0JJLVTVYk

Or a tintype?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K_xQ0MDzlU

The End...?

2007-08-23T11:42:00.000-04:00

Last things first - yea, I'm going to keep doing this, I'm thinking of setting up a wiki for my Blackboard class for online resources. I'd love to teach more 2.0 stuff. Let the fun begin!
Of course, it has already, cuz I've found online sources that will make my class much better.

I think the most exciting part that I've seen is Beinecke (Yale) using wordpress for promoting unprocessed collections. Not traditional, but traditional is going the way of Marc and Endevour and other broken programs and processes. It's scary to be a new grad and watch all you learned go away - but it's also very liberating. I thought Marc was broken (or at least the Opac was) years ago.

http://beineckejwj.wordpress.com/

Of course, I could go to SAA this week and hear it live but ......I can get all the sessions I want on cd without going, and tap into the blogs...so why go? Why not stick with MAC, where I can meet regional people? Cuz I'm not going to cross paths with Harvard people anywhere else - except online.

I need much more time - so many toys, so little time! Use Zotero, or CiteULike? delicious or Googlemarks? And more importantly, can I import them if I change my mind?

So we live in ineresting times, in the Chinese curse sense. Librarians may get totally repurposed in the next decade. I've been repurposed before. Not always fun, but challenges are growth things, not fun things. If I hadn't been who I was before, I wouldn't be where I am, and in the words of my father - no knowledge is lost, what you have in your head, no one can take away.

Facebook

2007-08-23T09:06:00.000-04:00

Yech. Boring. Selfindulgent. Juvenile.
Getalife.
Ok, it's as boring as Second Life, maybe getabrain.
Maybe it's a sign of my advanced age, but ego-driven social sites don't turn me on, and I can't see much use for them in any library. Add them to the whack-a-mole collection - amusing for 30 seconds or less, if it's a slow day.

Number 19

2007-08-22T16:23:00.000-04:00

I don't think we've looked at this one before. Eventful is an events bulletin board, with a fairly wide scope (Vienna, Belpre, etc). Events are listed in categories - books, pets, performing arts, etc. I can see this being a useful PR tool, if you get the word out about it. Unlike Yahoo's version, it doesn't have an RSS feed, or at least not an intuitive one.
Still, an RSS feed would do the same and keep the focus on YOUR event - though this one does link to some good stuff.

http://eventful.com/

MySpace, the penultimate thing

2007-08-20T15:28:00.001-04:00

I can see the possibilities - virtual study groups, virtual bookclubs, etc - but Facebook and MySpace are also overgrown with groups, so you can't see the forest for the trees, unless you're one of the In Crowd. If the In Crowd is incoming freshmen and you are emailed the link, it's useful. If you're just trying to find something useful, well, there's a lot of drek to go through.

Or am I just getting jaded? Thinking that something that's been around for 5 years is just so...yesterday?

New Technology

2007-08-09T11:48:00.000-04:00

There aren't many YouTube videos that I like, but I do like this one. There are so many psychological blocks to dealing with ONE MORE NEW THING!

And, of course, the SO MANY NEW THINGS to look at! I spent two hours looking for one good thing (well, my favorite was taken - The Machine is Us/ing Us - which will be in my next class..)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUczKPXWLAM

Google docs

2007-08-04T16:05:00.000-04:00

Love it! Love it!

I've been using it to summarize readings, make notes to myself for work, keep to-do lists, all the things I've emailed myself (okay, I'm an archivist, I email myself too. And copy to my thumb drive. Redundancy all over - the LOCKSS theory - Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe).

I'll be using it to collaborate on a session for MAC next year - we can work even though we're hundreds of miles away. How much fun is that! We've had a little experience at this - we were classmates, and did "group" presentations by emailing each other before class, and winging it from there. Or flinging it - previous presenters had flung candy at the class to keep their interest. We threw antique media - Duck! 8 track coming!

The one problem is it's all pc based, so I can't work while the spousal unit is playing games, so I hope I win the laptop!

Wiki wiki!

2007-07-31T11:38:00.000-04:00

I've always thought wikis would be great for intranets (procedures manuals, obscure stuff that comes up now-and-then, updates) and for classes. I'm a fan of Wikipedia (don't tell my students!) for quick background info, but I don't trust it too far - if I can find problems, there are surely more!

Wikis are really good for specialist geeks - I'd trust a wiki on nanobiology or ambrotypes more than one on the latest Harry Potter movie, just because who cares enough to spam ambrotypes?

A campus-wide theme

2007-07-25T16:35:00.000-04:00

Apropos of nothing, when I interviewed at Syracuse a while ago, they had a neat thing going. They had a campus-wide theme for the year! That year, it was Humor. Engineering students built Rube Goldberg machines, Museum Studies students curated an exhibit from the library's materials, soc students studied humor in communities, med students did humor in medical settings.

It gave everyone on campus, despite their majors, some one thing in common. A symposium kicked it off (with Gary Trudeau, no less!) and Michael Moore among the speakers.

A quote:

Syracuse Symposium is an intellectual festival celebrating
interdisciplinary thinking, imagining, and creating. Our theme this fall is “humor.” Humor is a crucial dimension of our lives, individual and social, but it is not often the subject of academic conversation. We seek to correct that for our campus. Throughout the semester, we will explore topics such as the role of humor in society; the craft of humor; what’s funny and what’s not and why; what are we allowed to poke fun at and what not and why; cross-cultural perspectives on humor; political cartoons; how humor allows us to express things we otherwise cannot; how humor provokes thinking; humor and diversity — the list of possible subjects to discuss is long, as you can imagine.

http://symposium.syr.edu/archives/humor_2004/keynote.html

Other themes included Borders and Imagination, other years. How cool is that! It has to be broad to cover all the fields, but some of the work that came out of it was fantastic!

Looking at other blogs

2007-07-25T16:11:00.000-04:00

I browsed a little, and went to the Dmoz site (poor abandoned baby!), and lo! the nemesis of the Archives listserve! Don Saklad!

Saklad has been the bane for years, just recently banned again. There has been speculation that Saklad is actually an anagram for some computer IA program, but that would requires intelligence. Maybe he's just a political writer - who could say this with a straight face?
"The hypocritical librarian censors while enunciating principles of intellectual freedom"
http://guidetoproblematicallibraryuse.blog-city.com/e/Weblogs/">http://guidetoproblematicallibraryuse.blog-city.com

Once again Sturgeon's Law is proven.

But elsewise, http://dmoz.org/Reference/Libraries/Library_and_Information_Science/Weblogs/
is a good guide to a lot of library blogs, though many are just diaries. The Shifted Librarian is a fave on my RSS, but like I said before, I go with reccomendations, rather than browsing. No Time! No Time!

2.0 and the new catalog

2007-07-17T14:11:00.000-04:00

Forget the expensive Endeca backend - the answer is here, I think. Literally, right down the street. LibLime caused a lot of excitement among my library school students last year - the concept of a usable and cheap and customizable catalog that doesn't require a scad of specially trained Voyager geeks!

There's more to come - I heard the praises of Rescarta as opposed to ContentDM. Rescarta has the great advantage of Free and Open Source. Zotero vs EndNote. 2. 0 may not be THE answer, but it's better than the $600,000 Answer.

So tagging isn't LCSH - LCSH isn't all that, anyway. At some point, we'll find a happy medium for precision and usability, but LCSH ain't it, and tagging ain't it, but they're both a good first step. We can't stop in the middle and say it's good enough - 2.0 is all about making it better, about new ideas, about collaboration.

2.0 is library science for science fiction fans - thinking outside the box.

Life in photography

2007-07-17T14:06:00.001-04:00

Louisville is in the midst of a photographic orgy this month (and I'm missing it!). But details are here.
http://leoweekly.com/?q=node/4917

Maybe an inspiration?

technorati

2007-07-17T13:37:00.000-04:00

When I get a public blog going - maybe for class this fall - this'll be helpful. Right now, I don't want everyone seeing my rambling, there's enough of that on the web!

I'm not fond of the "Everything in the known universe" blurb - it's just everything in the blogosphere - a definite difference in scale! Or maybe I'm just getting cranky in my elder years - but I KNOW not everything - or even a portion thereof - is online.

Though that may not matter to 99% of people. Sturgeon's Law once again.

Not so delicious

2007-07-17T13:31:00.000-04:00

I've been using delicious for a few months, but it's getting out of hand. Having my bookmarks available is great, but disambiguation is killing me. I have LOTs of bookmarks, and a tag cloud isn't helping. I need to have a lot more control of where things are to manage them.

Thus, I've gone to Foxmarks, thanks to Diana's recc, and I'm looking at Zotero to get my act together and on the road. Zotero is a bib manager and notes program that's portable.

Rollyo and Zotero

2007-07-10T12:09:00.000-04:00

I can see this being very useful. I can also see it taking a long time to set up, for me. I have a huge bookmark directory, and it'd be great - but only 25 sites? I have a hundred just for one topic! Not even thinking about "humanities" as a subject. Guess I'll do it in my spare time....

One exciting discovery today was Zotero. It's a Firefox extension that's a portable citation manager - and let's you annotate, and save full webpages to work offline. I can see this being very useful, not in the least for keeping my students from attacking with pitchforks when I tell them they'll have to do an annotated bib!

Being able to work offline is important for distance learners, who are often on dialup, and often disconnected - in many senses. I'm thinking of using it to organize my lessons better, or at least easier than switching between sites and cites!

http://www.zotero.org/

LIbrary thing

2007-07-10T09:51:00.000-04:00

Okay, I admit I wasn't too impressed by this, but then again, my hubby has been telling me for years YOU WORK IN A LIBRARY!!!!!!! WHY ARE YOU BUYING ALL THIS!!!!!

Now that I've actually taken it to heart, I don't have many books to catalog. And I do a lot of reading online now. I could have used this years ago, when I was a hoarder!

Now, if it was an ebay thing, that might be different......

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/gryphonsus

Motivational or ...whatever...

2007-07-09T16:03:00.001-04:00

http://www.churchsigngenerator.com/

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/

Librarians be so cool!

2007-07-08T23:22:00.000-04:00

From Sunday's NYTimes - how librarians are the new hipsters, in a retro kinda way. I'm so reminded of The Beav peeking into his teacher's window and finding out that - she EATS! Today, he could find out a lot more on YouTube or her blog. Maybe a LOT more :0
I'm so glad - a year or so ago a former student worker, now an archivist, felt daring about going to a work-related party in a sleeveless dress - she had worn long sleeves there for a year for fear of shocking her co-workers and boss with her very conservative tattoos!
So you too can be hip and Lib2.0 - in fact,I'm thinking of getting that tat, myself. Or is that a sign of middle age in itself?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/fashion/08librarian.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

RSS never feeds me chocolate.....

2007-07-02T14:48:00.000-04:00

I've had feeds set up for a while, and I admit that I've added and deleted a lot. Some sounded perfect from the description, but were zero content. What I have now is distilled, for the most part, from reccomendations and referals, and some I just glance at headlines and read rarely, and they may soon go. The search tools haven't been more useful than plain Googling for me - maybe because the terms I'm interested in have too many meanings, and I'm not really interested in software and code libraries.
I use Google Reader rather than Bloglines, simply because it's so easy from Gmail. Personal preference, but I like the way it lays out.
For me, that's what it's all about- making the mass of online reading I accumulate managable. Between teaching and work and personal interests, it can get overwhelming. This way I can scan the headlines and look at just what interests me, without the chance of missing something cool.

Sex in Special Collections!

2007-06-26T14:05:00.000-04:00

Did that get your attention? Have you ever seen a bra on a book? It's on exhibit in Special Collections - come and see more neat stuff!

Flickr

2007-06-25T15:38:00.000-04:00

The more I look at Flickr, the more it reminds me of Google Images - lots of stuff, but no context. So if you want a generic picture of a cat, you can get one. If you want a picture of something older, or specific, it gets harder - it all depends on the metadata (tags).
I admit with a background as a photo archivist, I'm pickier than most. And as a new grad/teacher, I'm even pickier. But I did run across Slideshare, which I like much more! You can share PPt presentations there , so there's content and context. Here's one on library 2.0
http://www.slideshare.net/chadmairn/libraries-do-matter-enhancing-traditional-services-with-library-20/

TechThots - at the moment my mind is filled with Archivist's Toolkit, which is an open source program. It's not immensely more sophisticated than relational Access, but it is pre-configured, and it does have a good fast-data-entry interface. What I really like is - it's OS. What I really don't like is - there's no Idiots Guide.
I'm also running around with my new digital camera - ooohh, 19.95 is an upgrade for me, notice I'm an archivist, not a photographer. Look for a slide show to come :)

Another reason to let YouTube live

2007-06-15T16:24:00.000-04:00

I hate tenors and I hate opera, but this guy is amazing! Of course, I can't carry a tune in the handbasket I'm taking to Hades, so I may be slightly prejudiced.

YouTube may take Sturgeon's Law to the extreme, but there are gems.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA

7 1/2 habits

2007-06-11T13:25:00.000-04:00

My hardest habit is always setting goals - my priorities shift often and I'm a strong believer in serendipity. Sometimes the chance encounter leads in the right direction. This is not what I started out to do - my BA is in El Ed, then I went off into a number of careers and jobs, all of which I learned from, then I did another BA, then I ended up in a library. If I had stuck to that early goal, I wouldn't be a librarian and wouldn't have brought the experiences I had along with me.

The easiest is being a life-long learner (see above). I had good examples - my mother and my little sister got their GEDs at the same time, my father earned licenses in different trades most of his life. I've been self-educated in several fields, and I figure I'll do several more before I push up the daisies - or push chickens out of mailboxes (you Ohio folks are a little strange.....)

I always want to be a newbie at something!

On the radar

2007-06-11T09:11:00.000-04:00

OCLC is playing with tag clouds. WorldCat Identities produces pages for personal and corporate names. The first 100 are pretty cool, but I can't imagine dealing with a tagcloud of the 18 million names in WorldCat!

http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/

This may be a perpetual Beta, too. I was amused to search for Cornelius Ryan and check the related names. Related by datamining, perhaps, but not by bibliography - John Wayne may have appeared in a movie based on a book by Ryan, but that's the closest they may have ever come. But maybe not, maybe there's something hidden there - but hidden is what we're trying to get away from, isn't it?

Not that it's all bad - the timeline is useful, having the "by" and "about" on the same site is great, and genres can be VERY useful (see Asimov). And finding fictional characters, well, that goes without saying.

This will be great for public and schools librarians, but I bet it gets used even more by undergrads. This was a frequent request for Eng102 when I worked in a community college, and at the U, undergrads usually tried to "find it themselves".

Disintermediation works, too.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

2007-06-10T23:40:00.000-04:00

If you haven't seen this one yet, it's definitely worth a look. This is why YouTube deserves to live, even if it proves Sturgeon's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law . I find it interesting that it's used as an example of Pareto, father of the Long Tail. But that's the subject for another post).

I had hoped to use this for the introduction to a class for the summer, but alas, the MLS program I teach for is struggling its way into the 19th century, after a brave start with streaming video in 2000. Entropy works!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&eurl

Flickr and the rest of the World

2007-06-08T13:28:00.000-04:00

Flickr as a social site doesn't excite me much, but there are some interesting possibilities. I admit John Collier's photos caught my eye because I had worked with his FSA and Standard Oil (NJ) images. What I don't like is the lack of captions and metadata with the thumbnail - it's just too easy for them to get separated. One of the joys of the Stryker collections is the info that was collected and recorded, that give context to the images.

http://www.flickr.com/people/johncollierjr/

Of course, the fame of Migrant Mother (by Lange) is independent of the caption, but the difference between OWI and FSA photos is all explained in the background materials and captions. If you don't have that info, you're working blind. If that info is garbled, you're not doing too much better - here it's attributed to the FDR Library and NARA, and FDR as creator. Not! Lange shot it for the FSA, and the neg lives at LC, even if prints are all over.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pingnews/455806594/

I can hope that, like Wikipedia, it's self-correcting, but how many people have how much time to monitor how many of these sites, before the incorrect info overtakes the correct?

But I digress. It's very cool to get the images out there, where they'll be seen and used more than at the LC site. I want a way to link them up to textual info, tho. That happens sometimes. http://www.flickr.com/photos/cobalt/352042952/

I must admit the rest of flickr strikes me as "just for my buds". I'd love to see separate tags for "taken with my cell" and "documentary". But I'm fussy about my babies.

Other mashups, like Bubbler, are cute, but bore me quickly. I'm looking forward to more "serious" uses than "this is my clean closet".

And so it begins....

2007-06-08T11:44:00.000-04:00

This is the beginning of my "23 Things" for the Ohio University Library's workshop. I hope that it will all be as fun and easy!

I discovered RSS feeds some time ago, so I'm going to share a few of my favorites:

Digitization 101 - Jill Hurst-Wahl always has something interesting to add on the topic.

EDUCAUSE RSS | Recent EDUCAUSE Quarterly List - This is a great one, if for nothing else than its "7 things you need to know" section, which is a quick rundown of new tech that teachers and students are using. If I only read one thing, this will be it.

SourceForge.net: SF.net Project News: ResCarta is a new one, for a new opensource software product for online collections. Not much going on yet, but it does have possibilities, and I'm an opensource fan.

LISNews.org keeps me in touch with the stuff my students are in touch with.