The Librarian's Lounge

Today's Update

I know, it's been a long time coming.

I just discovered a new artist whose music was featured in the film "Loving Annabelle" - Jake Newton. Wow. I went directly to CDBaby and bought his album online. I love his sound. I hope to hear much more from him.

While I was on CDBaby, I noticed they now have a Film Baby site where you can buy independently released movies. What a great idea! I'm always looking for new interesting documentaries and films, so I'm psyched to have learned about this today.

I've spent the last couple days beefing up my podcast subscriptions and have found some great ones. I usually do most of my podcast listening when I'm weeding books out of my collection and have managed to finally get through the This American Life archives after several years of listening. I really need to donate some money to them. One thing I've really taken notice of while browsing for interesting podcasts is how many of the ones that sound the most appealing have gone defunct for lack of money. Although most of their archives are still available online, it's disturbing to see how many radio shows have been abandoned because of funding issues. One really great site I just found that had led me to many great shows is Public Radio Fan. The coolest thing about that site is that the homepage shows you what's on the radio now around the world and provides links to those that are available online for instant listening, along with links to podcasts and homepages of the shows. I've done extensive searching on that site over the past couple days and have found it to be very up to date and useful. Among my discoveries this weekend are Joe Frank, Outfront, Third Coast Audio International Festival, All in the Mind, and Curious Orange. Suddenly I am struck with the same depressing dilemma I have with books - too many awesome podcasts, too little time before I die to hear it all.

Back in SL and What's on the Telly

So I broke down, after a month without Second Life, and bought myself a Dell laptop. I love it. It's got a 17 inch monitor, good sound, 3 gigs of RAM, and SL works like a charm on it. I'm getting back in the swing of things and hope to start volunteering for Info Island on a regular basis soon. Right now, I've got to figure out what my avatar will wear for Halloween - it's a toss-up between a cigarette girl and a zombie 1950's sock hop girl at the moment. I'm also looking forward to trying geocaching soon - both in real life and in second life! Yesterday, I even watched a ballet in SL - it was a very crowded event and certainly a unique one.

I was really hoping that Mojopac would be the answer to working around our current IT limits on our OPACs for Second Life. Alas, our security is set so high that it's still unworkable.

Check out this clip for the new Librarians TV show down under:

Checking out Vside

I spent the evening in vSide, a virtual world seemingly aimed at teen music lovers. It does seem a bit like a 3D Myspace, except more commercial. Basically, you can wander around these different small city-like places, each one consisting of different venues, shops, and residential spots that play different music channels. You have the ability to rate the music you hear, talk to other people, shop with "creds" you can buy via your credit card, "emote" with various available actions, and check out people's profiles.

The graphics in this virtual world are very cool-looking. The avatars have a cartoon-like quality to them. The landscapes and characters are fast-loading, unlike what you usually find to be the case in Second Life. This, in itself, makes it easier to navigate.

However, at this point, there's not much to see or do. The shops want you to spend real money on clothes, and clothes seems to be the only thing available to buy. Considering how little there seems to do there besides walk around and hear the different channels, I'm not sure why I'd care to spend money on clothes at the moment. I appear to have access to only 3 main city-places, and one of them won't load. The music that I've heard in the other two all sounds pretty much the same to me - a lot of it is current pop, rock, and hip hop. I heard all of 3 songs I like in the space of 2 hours in-world - 2 by Gwen Stefani and one by Coldplay. And there doesn't seem to be a way to find out where the music you're interested in might be playing.

The avatar customization seems very limited, as are the free clothing choices. I can't help but feel that  they're expecting to make a killing off selling in-world items like Second Life does, as if what they have at this point is anywhere near what you can find in SL in terms of creativeness and variety. The vSide vendors seem to be selling what you'd find at Old Navy, which isn't much of a fantasy - I'd rather pretend I'm buying clothes for a grand ball if I'm going to spend real money. I mean, I can see spending some Lindens on an ornate imaginative costume but not on simple jeans and t-shirts, particularly if I'm going to be branded by the shop in the process. In fact, one of the more disturbing parts of one's vSide profile is the brands section, where one can identify with as many brands as one's heart desires through the use of tags.

As far as events go, it seems like all the coming attractions are dj parties and a bunch of "talk shows."

vSide does not allow custom-made content, unlike Second Life. So much for the creative impulse.

vSide also depends a lot on web-browsing access. If you want to see someone's profile, you get sent to the web. If you want to make changes to your own, you get sent to the web. This definitely takes away from the seamlessness of the application at this stage.

After reading this article from Metaversed on vSide, I was expecting to be pretty wowed. Granted, the graphics are darn cool. But the world itself seems so limited at this point. I'm just wondering whether the music and graphics is enough to make teens want to use this space for socializing.   

Our Newest Patron

We had one of these gorgeous creatures hanging around outside the library today. As I was pondering whether I should call the fire department or not (not yet knowing this was a "good" snake), I was struck by three things. One, the number of readily-available cameras that my patrons as a community have. Two, the overall dominating sense of curiousity among these desert dwellers, instead of sheer terror. And three, what a novelty it is, even for us desert folk, to see wildlife up close and personal.

I've noticed a greater variety in the wildlife in this area lately. My theory is that the construction of our new library nearby has disturbed the local ecosystem.

Thankfully, our snake friend was quite startled by all the attention and soon slithered away back to the nearby wash. In the meantime, we went back inside with some of the human patrons to learn more about the king snake.

 

Newly Discovered

The Library of Congress has a cool website to go along with their exhibition, Cartoon America. You might also be interested in browsing through their webcasts on all sorts of topics and feature many well-known authors and other public figures.

A Ray Charles Library is in the works.

For more mashups of books and multimedia, check out VidLit and KidVidLit. I also happened upon Bookshorts today - so far, not a whole lot of content, but it'll be interesting to see where it goes.

Shhh...Found in a library book

Courtesy of this week's Postsecret roundup is this one (click image to make it larger):

This 'n That

For those of you who haven't heard, Worldcat is now open to the public at large, making it easy for anyone to see what libraries near their homes carry a particular title. In my system, this is soon going to become an added feature to our catalog, which will certainly help us info-folk save some time logging into FirstSearch to answer a fairly straight-forward question.

It was nice to find out that Movie Licensing USA has added New Line Cinema to its list of authorized movie studios. Now, libraries everywhere that subscribe to the service have an even wider selection of films to share with their patrons inside the building.

For those who like to think outside of the box in terms of library building design, check out this bookstore in Beijing known as Kids Republic. I couldn't find the actual site for the store itself - all links lead back to The Cool Hunter at this time.

The Burlington Free Press has run a story about Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. I picked this up recently and really enjoyed it. From the article:      

"As a result of her family's discomfort with the her candor and very public story-telling, Bechdel    said she hasn't been able to fully enjoy the success of the book. She's almost become ambivalent about the notoriety she's achieved because of the book, and it seems more baneful than anything. She acknowledged that while she had to get her story out, perhaps as a way to make peace with it all, the process wasn't easy and the aftermath of the book has completely disrupted her life."

Want to help a library or perhaps yourself get some new reading material? Check out Bookmooch, a new service run by people who believe that "the worst thing that can happen to a book is for no-one to be able to read it."  I'm thinking this service, if it becomes big, could be a great thing for people who are moving, don't want to lug their books with them, and are willing to potentially part with them forever. Just send out the books to the world and once re-situated, cash in your points for a whole new private collection!

And lastly, just for fun or mild perplexity, check out the Flickr set devoted to Engrish.

Dispatches from a Public Librarian

McSweeney's rocks in many ways. If you haven't been there, I suggest you go immediately and start reading some of the open letters to people or entities who are unlikely to respond. I just happened upon the latest entry by Scott Douglas - it's a FAQ for library-related questions you always wanted to ask but never had the nerve.

Coloring book pages online

You never know when you might appreciate a link to some coloring book pictures. This one has pages from Alice in Wonderland, Batman, Dexter's Laboratory, Rainbow Fish, and much more!

Graffiti Art

Want to brighten up a public space? Consider throwing a LED Throwies party. I'm all about Christmas Lights, so of course this looks way cool to me. It might make an interesting teen project, too, especially if your building is one they would stick to.