Simon Tofield, the artist, has posted a half dozen or so animated vignettes featuring his kitty. He so obviously is a cat owner! His cat always seems to want to eat, and tries every sneaky catlike way he can think of to get the message across--FEED ME! If you own a cat, you'll recognize yourself and your feline(s)in every episode.
And if you enjoy these films, you'll purr at the collection of cartoons in the recently published, one and only book of Simon's Cat. Check it out at The Urbana Free Library and giggle along with fans the world over.
I couldn't say why, but it seems like we get more requests this time of year for lists of books people had checked out. The library doesn't keep such account histories, but if you're really interested in keeping track, there are some useful tools online that can help you do so.
Paper and pen works fine, of course, but sites like LibraryThing, Shelfari, and goodreads can allow you to share what you've read with others, write reviews of titles, and search through and sort the titles. Of these sites and others like them, I prefer and personally use Goodreads.
I find goodreads to be a bit less klunky than the other options. You can simply rate a book by clicking on the relevant star, change a title's status to "read" from "to read" or "currently reading," and add the book to other "shelves" you've previously created. It's versatile, allowing you to simply search titles and click "read" to track everything you've read, or to be more involved in writing reviews of everything you read and becoming involved in book discussions.
While there are plenty more options on Goodreads, from genre-specific book clubs to groups of fans of particular authors, I'll let you explore it for yourself. It can be a fun resource not only for tracking your reading, but finding new authors and titles, too.
Edit: I'd love to include some images of Goodreads, but I cannot get a screen capture large enough to be readable. :(
If you've got broadband access, you've perhaps watched some video online. This internet thing sure is getting fancy! From the anybody-can-create-(or pirate)-and-upload YouTube to the networks-will-create,-upload,-and-have-to-pay-their-writers-some-web-revenue Hulu, you certainly have your options.
Not so long ago, IMDB and Hulu announced that they would have full movies available for viewing online. I was excited, thinking that now I could have a back up plan for when the DVD I wanted from the library was checked out (yes, this happens to librarians, too). In browsing through the list again, there certainly are some things worth being excited about (welcome to my back up plan list, Broken Flowers, Hoop Dreams, and Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project), as well as some confusion-inducing titles (The Nude Bomb? Gamebox 1.0? To the Hills 2?). It can take some digging through the list to find something worth watching, and if I'm feeling to lazy to grab something at work, I'm definitely too lazy to browse through unknown and unwanted titles for the gems of the bunch.
Now a new free to watch online movie program has me excited again. You may have seen Criterion Collection DVDs in the library or elsewhere--they like to provide the best sound and video quality possible on the DVDs they produce, to the point of finding the best copy of the original films to work from. They also tend to provide a lot of interviews and info from creators as well as input from experts.
The Criterion Collection, in partnership with The Auteurs, is offering a handful of films to watch online for free every month. They're calling them festivals, and they tend to group titles around a theme. For example, the January 2009 festival Killer Movies featured Branded to Kill, The Honeymoon Killers, and Divorce Italian Style. April's almost over, so if you want to see any of the Great Documentaries currently available, you'd better glue yourself to your computer screen. I can't wait to see what titles May brings.
I'm finding that an increasing number of technology questions are from patrons facing problems with second-hand PCs, particularly laptops. The owners seem genuinely happy to have them, but often lack the experience or funds to make them work optimally.
As any nonprofit organization will likely attest, accepting used computer donations is not without risks.
Rarely is the gear ready for immediate use by its intended recipients; documentation and supporting software may be missing; the previous owners may leave sensitive information behind or, worse, malware and viruses; and the equipment may be damaged or in bad physical shape.
Administrative privileges and their corresponding passwords, which control who can make changes and updates on a given machine, also present problems.
Recently, a teen patron needed Microsoft PowerPoint to complete a class presentation on her home computer. Unfortunately, only PowerPoint Viewer is free.
I recommended she try Impress, which is part of the free OpenOffice suite. Impress files are compatible with PowerPoint.
We downloaded a copy of OpenOffice, burned it to a disc, and home she went.
The next day she called to say she'd encountered problems installing the software due to a lack of administrative privileges on her hand-me-down. She could access only the "Guest" account when she used the PC.
We tried a workaround over the phone, which went well until the very last step: no go.
I encouraged her to use PowerPoint on the library's PCs until we can find the right answer. (Leo Notenboom offers one interesting strategy ... and in the process reveals how easy it can be to crack security.)
But pass this tip around:
Volunteer Technology Assistants are currently available at our library every Thursday from 4 to 6 pm and every Saturday from 1 to 3 pm.
Bring your questions (and your laptops) if you're stuck. We'll do our best to help!
Though some critics simply view Keen as a crank, The NYT's Michiko Kakutani offered a favorable review:
This book, which grew out of a controversial essay published ... by The Weekly Standard, is a shrewdly argued jeremiad against the digerati effort to dethrone cultural and political gatekeepers and replace experts with the "wisdom of the crowd." Although Mr. Keen wanders off his subject in the later chapters of the book--to deliver some generic, moralistic rants against Internet evils like online gambling and online pornography--he writes with acuity and passion about the consequences of a world in which the lines between fact and opinion, informed expertise and amateurish speculation are willfully blurred.
President-elect Obama intends to provide every U.S. citizen with broadband Internet access. In response, Keen argues that bad economic times, combined with a "radically unregulated Internet" available to millions of potentially unemployed (and disgruntled) Americans, will ultimately lead to "digital fascism."
Silicon Valley utopians argue that blaming the Internet for online hatred is like blaming Johannes Gutenberg, the 15th century inventor of the moveable type printing press, for Mein Kampf. And that’s true, of course. Yet given the way in which we know that the unfiltered Internet spreads corrosive lies and inflames prejudice, why would we want to give all Americans universal broadband access at the very moment when millions of them will be unemployed, disorientated and angry? Rather than spending billions of dollars in telecom technology, wouldn’t it be better to invest that money in local libraries and librarians, where their education could be supervised by accountable human beings.
Both documents perhaps challenge his idea that librarians should provide "supervision"--which sounds a lot like "gatekeeping" in Keen's description--for which they are accountable (but to whom exactly?).
What Is Intellectual Freedom?
Intellectual freedom is the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access to all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause or movement may be explored.
Why Is Intellectual Freedom Important?
Intellectual freedom is the basis for our democratic system. We expect our people to be self-governors. But to do so responsibly, our citizenry must be well-informed. Libraries provide the ideas and information, in a variety of formats, to allow people to inform themselves.
Intellectual freedom encompasses the freedom to hold, receive and disseminate ideas.
I’m sorry that this is not a recommendation for any of the amazing items we have at the Urbana Free Library, but hopefully this will help you discover something new and exciting.It doesn’t require any extra effort on your part if you already search our catalog from home/work/wherever.You do use our catalog, right?
Even if you are a regular search-aholic, you may or may not have noticed LibraryThing sneakily infiltrate the catalog.Quick--open up a new window/tab and search for a book.Once you’ve got the book's listing up in front of you, take a look at the lower-left side of the webpage. For example, you'll see the image below on the lower left of the record for David Sedaris's latest, When You Are Engulfed in Flames.
That nifty little block of info is provided by LibraryThing. We’ll go into LibraryThing in more detail some other time—for now, you should know that LibraryThing adds several things to our catalog records:
Alternate formats/editions of the book.For example, it may list an audiobook on CD or large print or paperback edition. In our Sedaris example, you can see a link to the audio version of the book.
Similar books.What makes them similar? Based on LibraryThing's secret data, I suspect some combination of reader preferences and tags are used to determine similarity.Let's look at our example again. Sedaris's book is a collection of humorous biographical essays. Scott McClellan’s book is a memoir, Dear American Airlines is a humorous novel, and I Was Told There'd Be Cake is a humorous essay collection. Some things are more similar than others, but the point is to offer other titles of potential interest to you.
Tags.What’s a tag?In our catalog, librarians list specialized, defined subject headings on item records.Tags, on the other hand, are the people’s subjects. LibraryThing users have come up with single word/phrase descriptors of books in their collections, and they can use whatever word(s) they think are appropriate.This means that you’ve got a pool of everyday-Joe subjects that, when combined, can give you an even more detailed idea of the book.
If that’s not enough, you can click on these tags to discover additional titles so tagged by other readers.Again, let’s look at our example image.Clicking on “Humor” brings up a nice list of books—some I’ve read, some are new.Clicking on “Smoking” brings up an odd variety of titles, but hey, there’s Thank You for Smoking. I’ve been meaning to read that—the movie was excellent. For more info, check out LibraryThing's blog. I hope you play around with some of these cool little tools next time you’re browsing our catalog. With any luck, you’ll see a title that sounds compelling enough to make you scoot away from the computer, change out of your pajamas, and swing by the library to pick it up. Call ahead and we’ll hold it for you.
Okay, that was quick ... PCMag's current list of under-the-radar sites is already here, including a "favorites installer" that allows you to download all the site links.
The "Apps and Services" section is especially cool, featuring tools to "simplify your life and workflow." I'm intrigued by Jooce and PageOnce.
The sites range from the practical, like Zoho.com (which we librarians use on occasion), to geek-cult favorites, like xkcd.
Until PCMag releases a new list, check out the recently arrived Do-It-Yourself title Web Sites for Dummies:
The illustrated step-by-step instructions in this book--as well as the templates you can download from the companion Web site--will help you create an effective Web presence fast, whether you're creating a site for the first time or redesigning an old one. All you need are the most basic computer skills and a few easy-to-find software programs, and you'll be up and running in no time.
