Literacy · is · the · Path · to · Communism!

(But only if you read and agree with Communist ideals)

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09:40 am 7/25/27 Leave a comment	amandareads a reply This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.


09:38 am 2/27/08 1 comment Leave a comment	amandareads a reply I've been neglecting this but I've read something recently that I think needs recording. Candyfloss by Jacqueline Wilson ( This got long ) That was super long-winded but the book bothered me and I had to get it all out.


08:11 am 8/1/07 Leave a comment	amandareads a reply Also, this is only tangentally related, but some friends of mine are running NaNoReaMo (totally unaffiliated with NaNoWriMo), a read-as-much-as-you-can-in-a-month project/community. Books should be over 150 pages but can otherwise be of any type on any topic in any format. Reading starts today. I've got my first book picked out and ready.

07:53 am
8/1/07

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This week's topic in 460 is virtual worlds and while there is a discussion page in the class wiki I desiced that some of what's in my head really doesn't belong there. So it'll go here.

1. I freely admit that outside of work probably 90% of my social interacting is done online. As my husband says, my friends live in my computer. This is largely because I am, by nature, an introvert. I love my rl friends and I love seeing them and getting together with them (I spent this past weekend in CT with one and I'll probably write about that later) but it takes massive amounts of energy. There are days when I come home from work and the idea of talking out loud is simply exhausting.

2. I know I'm not the only person in the world who feels like this. Many of my friends online have mentioned similar reactions to rl social situations. It's not hard or unpleasant, just exhausting.

3. If I were a library patron I'd be one of the ones who comes in, gets my books without saying a word, checks them out without saying a word, leaves without any real interaction. I was painfully shy as a child and terrified of any and all authority figures, including a woman who was probably the nicest school librarian ever in the history of school librarians. From what I've seen at work there are plenty of kids like I was.

Bearing all this in mind, I can see no end of uses for virtual worlds and online communication between patrons/students and librarians. Would I have asked more questions if I could have done it without stammering out of sheer nerves? Definitely. Some of the most eloquent book reviews we get at work are written by a boy who has never said more to me than "Can I check these out?" If I encountered him online how much would he have to say?

And then there's the case of patrons/students who are hearing impaired. A few months back in a community I read here on LiveJournal I read a complaint from one poster about how poorly written a character with a hearing impairment was. She had a number of points on how unrealistic the portrayal of being deaf was and backed it up with her own experiences and those of friends. The post was then flooded by comments from other hearing-impaired posters. I have one patron, an adult, who is mostly deaf and always comes to me when she needs help because few others will take the time to hold a conversation with her by writing out what needs to be said. How much faster and easier would it be online?

To me the whole idea of being able to talk to people in a virtual environment is an alternative for those who are more comfortable this way. It makes it possible to serve a portion of the population who might otherwise go underserved.

09:44 am
7/25/07

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amandareads

One last entry

Since I've been hurrying to get all of my stuff done by tomorrow (gah, graduating!) I admit I skimped a bit on this week's readings. But then, I spent a full semester talking about copyright and censorship last fall and I remember well the heated discussions that class produced.

I think what shocked me most when I took that class was how little we're taught about the subject in other classes (this one being the exception). Even if we don't agree with the current laws in place we still need to know what they are. Ignorance doesn't excuse breaking the law and if you're going to try and get things changed in order to fit the current state of things then you need to know what you're changing and how. If you go in well informed then you're starting strong.

I'm posting from work (I know, naughty of me) so I'll keep this short but I wanted to relate a little story from yesterday:
A patron came in and handed my coworker a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on CD.

"Is something wrong with this?" My coworker asked, knowing that the patron had only checked it out earlier in the morning and did not have time to listen to all 17 hours.

"Oh, no," the patron replied. "I just put it on my computer. I'll stick it on my iPod later and listen to it."

"Don't tell me that!" my coworker cried. "Technically that's illegal and I do not want to know."

"No it's not! I mean, so long as I'm not making a copy..."

"You already did."

"But I'm not selling copies..."

"It's still illegal. Just don't tell us you did it so we don't have to tell you not to."

"Oh! Okay, I said nothing!"

It seems perfectly reasonable for a patron to make a copy for personal use in order to get the item back so someone else can have it but according to current law it is indeed illegal. The thing is? We'd rather have the item back. It'll make someone else happy faster and the first patron still gets to hear the book. We turn a blind eye to this sort of infringement and I really can't bring myself to feel bad about that.


09:22 pm 7/22/07 2 comments Leave a comment	amandareads Text messaging and rules I really did mean to post an entry about texting last week but what with preparations for the Harry Potter event at work I lost track of things. At least it's over now (with a good turnout too! 50 kids helped to de-gnome our event room then stayed on to do crafts). On to text messaging. ( Texting )

07:48 am
7/20/07

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Harry Potter and book piracy

This isn't really related to class but I'm insanely awake and felt like writing.

When I was taking History of the Book (oh so many weeks ago) Prof. Berger stated on the first day and the last that he felt that people's claims that books were becoming obsolete were ridiculous. I'm inclined to agree.

Supposedly the last Harry Potter book has been pirated. Twice. It's been photographed and made into a gigantic 500-odd page PDF file and shared all over the place. Now, granted, the image quality is pretty damn poor. I saw the title page and from the reports I've read it doesn't sound like the rest of the pages are any better. One LJer posted a suggestion that if you want to read it you should turn down the brightness on your monitor then turn up the contrast and then you should be able to read it passably well.

Me, I'm assuming that it's a fake. Largely because I've seen the agreements my boss had to sign in quadruplicate in order to get the books into the building for cataloging before tomorrow. They are currently locked in her office in a re-sealed box now that we've made sure that the catalog record has the right barcodes and the stickers are affixed in the right places. Under no circumstances are we to open the book beyond its endpapers! My point is that getting the actual book in hand is difficult to do. And the pagecounts are off by about 20.

Anyhow, Scholastic has already stated that they don't believe that the scans will affect sales. Of course they won't. People still want the actual book in hand. And that was Prof. Berger's point. A book online is not the same as a book in hand. The act of reading it isn't the same. And it will never be truly obsolete in the sense that it is unreadable technology. But what of PDF files? Will they be readable 10 years in the future? How many people still have 5 1/2 inch floppy disks or a drive to read them in?

As we push for further tech we need to be mindful of not leaving ourselves behind.

09:49 pm
7/12/07

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amandareads

Hipsters and Google

I've got two things to muse on - The "Hipster Librarians" article and Google Docs.

First, the article.

It made me sigh. Mostly because there was this air of elitism in it that sets me on edge. I have no problem with being seen as cool, though it makes me laugh since I have always had no trouble finding people who will tell me I'm not, but I don't want to be seen as unapproachable. The whole point of my job is to be approachable and friendly and unthreatening. I want kids to know that I won't tolerate blatant rule-breaking or trouble-making (such as climbing the bookcases or stomping on books, both of which I had to speak to someone about today) but I also want them to know that no matter what I have to speak to them about or chastise them for, if they have a question about finding information I will still be happy to help them. Why else do I have a job if not to help people out?

Maybe it was the article and not the people but it made this little cadre of hipster librarians look like a clique. And cliques are, by definition, not approachable or accessible. And then too, am I not a modern librarian? I don't have brightly colored hair (these days). I only have a couple of boring earrings. My clothing is boring, to say the least. My music taste, while eclectic, is not particularly modern. But I can use the newest technology. I can find a variety of media types in a variety of places. I can multitask. I'm not bemoaning the lack of a physical card catalog (and yes, I have coworkers who do that daily). But I'm not hip, apparently. I guess I don't need to be.

As for GoogleDocs, I love it so much it's almost embarrassing. I've been using it since it was Writely, before Google came in and bought it out, and for one, it's always been a great thing. For another, the change over from Writely to GoogleDocs was fairly smooth, which made me very happy. I've been using it for collaborative writing projects for a while now and it's great.

I'd love to run an online creative writing workshop through GoogleDocs. It makes for easy collaboration as well as reviewing, workshopping, editing, etc. You can look at your revisions, look at who's reading, who's editing. I really really love it a lot. It almost makes me wish I was more in a teaching position than I am. The most I can do now is introduce kids to it and hope they use it once I've walked away. One of the troubles I've come across at work is that the computers in the children's room are filtered with the same filters as the public school computers. And those filters block "personal storage sites" such as GoogleDocs, Flickr, Photobucket, etc. So it's useless to them IN school. But that's a rant for another time.

10:18 pm
7/6/07

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amandareads

Podcast Ghost

This isn't quite what I intended this journal for but this freaked me out so much I need to vent about it somewhere.

We've been doing podcasts in class and I was so proud of getting mine done and converted to mp3 (from Apple's proprietary file type, which took more time to figure out that I think it should have) and uploaded and everything. Then I clicked on "play" and about 30 seconds in was this burst of radio static. It's clearly radio, like a poorly tuned police scanner or something. It lasted less than a second and was gone but was MUCH louder than anything in my podcast had been. The thing is? I demanded complete silence while I recorded. I even kicked the cat out of the room lest he purr too loudly near the mic. So I checked the .mp3 on my desktop. Yep. It was there. I checked the .m4a I'd converted from. Still there! I opened up the original GarageBand file and went to the right place and YES! It's in the original recording!

Only not. After playing it and hearing it once (and not seeing any sign of it in the visual of the recording) it was gone. I played it four times and it was gone. Then I saved everything over again, new file names and all. Played the new files and it's still there. Now it's gone again. It's driving me nuts.

We used to pick up the same sort of sound on our stereo in the other room every so often. Sometimes when the system was turned off.

Apparently my podcast has a ghost.

01:37 pm
7/3/07

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amandareads

Podcast Problems

I've been poking through podcasts for the podcast assignment and I have to say I think most of them are wasted on me. I don't like talk radio for the most part. I don't like self-important DJs who think they're the funniest thing since a pie in the face. I don't like ads. I need engaging voices to keep from being put to sleep. I found the finding podcast music podcast to be helpful in terms of the info contained in it but getting to that info was just plain torture for me. The musical interludes just did nothing for me and made the whole thing feel disjointed and frustrating.

A friend of mine gave me a whole list of humor podcasts to listen to and I know she and I share the same sense of humor and I just couldn't get into most of what she had listed. I tried using iTunes to find some interesting ones but everything I tried just left me feeling blah. The content of the two Yellowstone podcasts was interesting but the format made me yawn. It was a struggle to find the ones I found and get through more than one on each. I honestly don't know if I'll keep up with them. It just isn't how I function aurally.

On the other hand, I find Linda's class podcasts to be easy to listen to because I'm listening for a very specific reason and making use of all of the content. I mentioned on Twitter that I talked to my boss about podcasts/audio files as intructional tools on our website and she was all for it. Maybe we could make the database instructions fixed and then add short ones every month or so to highlight new books and events. We already do it with text but we're a children's room that serves pre-literate kids right alongside the literate ones. And what about a busy parent chasing a toddler around? Putting a sound file on to listen to while doing something else might be really useful even to readers.

I guess my point is that I can see the use of podcasts but they're not really my sort of thing to use personally.

Literacy · is · the · Path · to · Communism!

(But only if you read and agree with Communist ideals)

Recent Entries · Archive · Friends · User Info

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