More reading & watching…

Actually, not more reading. The same reading as my post a few weeks back. Two of those books are very long!

Watching

• Rush Hour 3: B-  Nowhere near as good as the original. Love Jackie; getting tired of Chris Tucker and his never ending desire to get every woman in sight in his bed; some typical (great) Jackie chase sequences; always stay for the out-takes!
• StarDust: B+   A fun jaunt; loved DeNiro’s pirate character but not as much as Cap’n Jack Sparrow; and the dead princes are hilarious!
• Nanny Diaries: C   I just wasn’t impressed; I wanted to slap the trophy wives and their husbands
• Battlestar Galactica (season 1, disc 4 & season 2, disc 1):  A+ WHOA! great stuff!
• Stranger than Fiction: C-  Why do I even bother to rent Will Farrell movies? Dustin Hoffman was good.
• Just Like Heaven: B+   A chick flick; a “sweet” film. Very enjoyable.
• Bourne Supremacy: B   A good action flick; good sequel to Bourne Identity.

library expenditures

Mondays. Gotta love ‘em, eh? Actually, today wasn’t too bad. One meeting cancelled; another one scheduled in its place. Our financial services director is implementing a new accounting system so we can get better data. Woo-hoo! That’s always a good thing! Of course, that means I have to learn a lot of new fund numbers. (I think there’s still some space left in the brain for a little bit of new information.)

For years, we have been paying for a variety of things through our Voyager acquisitions client, things that are not collections: processing fees (like our OCLC cataloging service fees), supplies fees (e.g., tattletape), membership fees (consortial dues), to name a few. We won’t be doing that any more, which is a great time saver for me & my staff. We will continue to pay for print, non-print and e- stuff on Voyager, but the print invoices for these items and the non-collection stuff I mentioned will also have to be coded differently before they go to our financial services folks. We can do this. The new coding will allow us to break down more costs and easily retrieve monies spent on backfiles and other e- stuff that used to be tracked in a spreadsheet so they were easily accessible. I think the new system will make completing those collection surveys from ALS, ACRL, and others much easier!

Jello and e-resources

Oh the joy. Right. Surely that is how everyone describes working with electronic resources.

We’ve been in the process of migrating many of our print journals to e-only the last two years. Yesterday our serials librarian sent me a note from one of our subscription agents about a journal that is moving to a new publisher effective January 2008. In the print world this wouldn’t be an issue. In the e- world it could be a nightmare!

We cancelled print for Revue Romane (a Blackwell title) at the end of 2006. The notice yesterday indicated that the journal was moving to John Benjamins Publishing (JB) in January. There is no e- only option with the new publisher.

So… now what? I tracked down the license for JB, which took me a number of clicks. Wouldn’t you think that publishers could place that information with the subscription information? In this case, it wasn’t even linked from their “accessing the electronic version….” under subscription information. Terms and conditions – hmm… No governing clause. Hallelujah. What’s this “closed local network” thing mean? No ILL? What about perpetual access? No signed license required.

Decision time: do we go ahead and purchase the PRINT+ONLINE journal? Spend the money to bind it? Toss the print? Cancel the title all together: more steps: inform the subject specialist and collection managers, pull usage statistics. Does the new publisher allow us to locally archive e- issues or provide for some type of perpetual access? Our print holdings will now show a two year gap! What a mess! What happens if the title moves to another publisher in a couple of years? There’s a phrase in many licenses that disturbs me, i.e., along the lines of “… will provide access to the extent possible… if publisher maintains the right to…”.  I’m getting indigestion.

I emailed the publisher yesterday and expressed my concern about their subscription options. Our library cannot afford to maintain print + online. We don’t have the shelf space as we look to reduce our collection footprint. We have to pay $$ for offsite storage of bound volumes, which rises as we move more materials there! Our staff needs to be re-tooled away from traditional print processes to meet the needs of our users. C’mon publishers – jump into the 21^st century.

New image header

Since I started my little “memories” series I thought this old pic would be fun for a while!

There’s a new blog in town…

Okay, it’s been around for quite a while but I just discovered it thanks to an economist acquaintance:
Freakonomics. It’s contributors are author/journalist Stephen Dubner and economist Steven Levitt.  I vaguely remember hearing about their book that carries the same name as the blog.  Sounds like a fascinating read. Gotta see if the library has a copy. In the meantime, I’m going to follow their blog for a ride…

Do I look busy?

I hate to think that the summer is coming to an end and that committee work and deadlines will start to appear on my calendar. It really has been quiet on the work front. I’ve had a few informal meetings with staff related to our gift, binding and claiming policies, reviewed a quote and clarified contract information on a mini authority control project, and forwarded new pricing options to collection coordinators on some print+online titles since the serials librarian is on vacation and we are trying to wind up the renewal verification process. I also started reading the final version of our Emerald license and completed a memo regarding a cataloging project that has to be put on hold. (I need to remember to send that out tomorrow! I also need to back track in my inbox because I know I received correspondence on another license. I keep getting side-tracked!) I provided some feedback regarding another revision to our professional development funding guidelines. We had another supervisor training session this week and Jamene from our Digital Initiatives Department offered us round 3 of SFX training, this one on usage stats preformed queries.

A couple of us are talking about reducing email clutter by adding links to publisher/vendor RSS feeds on one of our blogs rather than forwarding messages that we receive to the various teams and committees that might be interested. It would be great if more publishers and vendors would provide feeds for their newsletters and other updates. (Anyone out there created a list of available feeds yet?) Often I get an email from them and just do not have time to look at it. I don’t want to leave it in my inbox because I usually have more critical email I need to read and respond to. If their headlines came through on my feedreader, I could easily scan them when I had time and read only those that I needed to accomplish my work! I know how Darren Lennard feels! (Ripped from Steven’s post over at Library Stuff.) I read, responded to, filed and/or deleted over 150 emails today. I have my email trash set to automatically delete every 10 days. I noticed there were approximately 2,100 items in my trash today. You do the math. And let me remind you, I opened this post saying how quiet it’s been!

I will mention — briefly — that I’m doing some NASIG-related work on work time, too. I won’t go into detail here because that update will be in the September Newsletter.

Is it really only Tuesday?????

Watching & reading update

Reading

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
The Fiery Cross  by Diana Gabaldon
still reading Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands: Europe

Watching

Battlestar Galactica, season 1, disc 3: A
Little Miss Sunshine:   A
The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines: C+
No Reservations: B
The Bourne Ultimatum : A (even with a few plot holes)

Teaching old dogs new tricks

I went to the Media Development Center (MDC) in the library this week. It was time to learn something new, and to complete a “project” I talked about for years but never got around to doing: how to digitize an old analog recording. The sound booth in the MDC has everything a student might need to create and edit music, create podcasts, score your movie, and more things than I could imagine with a program called GarageBand. While I’d love to have time to experiment with all the tools, all I wanted to learn how to do was to take an old record and digitize it to burn to CD. While this fits perfectly with the learning 2.0 objectives we’ve been talking about in our library 2.0/web 2.0 world, I had a more personal motive!

I was instructed to talk to Jahvalle, student assistant and sound booth expert. He knew what a record album was; he’d seen a few old vinyls. But he had never seen a 45rpm. When he learned that the 45 was a recording of my high school rock band “liberation” he was even more impressed. Jahvalle walked me through the process and within 30 minutes, we completed digitizing and burning both the A and B sides of the record my friends and I made back in 1973.

I hadn’t heard these recordings – “Let Me Touch You” and “Big Earl’s Girl” – in almost 30 years! The songs were written by Joe Bennett, formerly of Joe Bennett & the Sparkletones, a one-time front band for Elvis Presley. Joe was a music teacher in Spartanburg where I grew up. I met him & got involved with the rock band through best friend Shelley who was one of Joe’s guitar students.

I started taking piano lessons at age 8 and by 13 was teaching myself to play guitar on a very cheap instrument. Joe wanted to put a band together. Shelley didn’t have to twist my arm to join the band and fortunately my folks were willing to pay for the guitar/band lessons. Joe had 2 other students – another guitarist and a drummer – who he pulled together with Shelley & me. We had one other friend we invited to join, and “liberation”, an all-girl rock band, was born. Okay, we weren’t the Go-Go’s but we were there before them! As far as I know we were the first, and at that time, the only all-girl rock band in Spartanburg, including the first to compete in the local Battle of the Bands.

Back to my motives for digitizing: 1) just to hear the recordings again; 2) to leave this little legacy for my kids; and 3) to send to Shelley for her 50th birthday! So, happy birthday Shelley! The CD is in the mail!

More on liberation in another post…