The Netflix Suggestion Engine gave me some funny recommendations today.  Why did it think I liked Beyonce and Cher, I wondered.  Oh, because of stereotypes.

 The Beyonce Experience: Live
Because you enjoyed:

When the Levees Broke

Clearly these two films are very similar.  Anyone who cares about the most racist miscarriage of justice in contemporary America must also love Bootylicious.

Cher: The Farewell Tour

Because you enjoyed:Showgirls

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas

Oh, the shame.  I like trashy films and Dolly Parton.  Damn you, Netflix, I do not like Cher.

There are not many thesaurus themed t-shirts, but this one is great!

Today I unfortunately found really, really horrible pornography on flickr.   In a way, I am shocked I have used Flickr for this long without finding very unattractive people having sex.  Bikers can be very unattractive people, and biker women really don’t like wearing a bra.  If there’s anything I have learned today it is to wear a bra and sunscreen all the time.  Yet all of these very (to my mind) horrifically unattractive people had lots and lots of fans even even though I would say the majority of their boobs fell into the generally accepted as unattractive “pancake” or “stretch mark” varieties.

Of course, I could not keep these horrifying photos to myself.  I shared.  And my friend, over IM, replied:

2:14
you are a classificationist
2:14
you’ve classified tits

And there you go.  They call it a discipline because it puts rules around the way you think.  Even about boobs, apparently.

Hi! I have several times tried to use your services–maybe a book or internet access. But all of your books are from 1973 and your storefront library leaves little to be desired. But you are close to my dad’s house and I need the internet. I call to ask you if you have “wi-fi.” You say, “what?” After a while I clarify I would like wireless internet, and you say you have it but I need a library card. Really? Okay, I have the ID and 2 pieces of mail you require to get one. When I come in to do so, you say my Netflix envelopes are “junk mail” and do not count. When I explain I bank and bill online you make fun of me.

So no internet will be given to me today by you. I wonder why I am the only patron in your library. Oh wait, I don’t, customer serviceless library. I don’t at all. I will go to the library .5 miles away that also has the free wifi for everyone.

If you happen to be in Austin and of the library/info science/museum persuasion, please come to the hoedown:

Saturday, March 8, 2008
12:30 PM
Las Manitas
211 Congress Ave Austin, Texas 78701

Eat/drink with your fellow information professionals. Use the words gatekeepers and cherrypicking. Snicker about your out of touch colleagues. Ask for advice/help from others who’ve been there. Bitch about Michael Gorman. Mention how Otlet could have schooled all of
these SxSWers decades ago. Reminisce about the days of authority control as king. All with tasty food and drink.

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An office where you can shout, “All the orphans are dead!  I killed them!  I am so excited!  Look!  Ten thousand, all gone!” and the response is merriment.

So I will be heading to Austin for South by Southwest Interactive 2008.  I am doing a Librarian meetup again, so message me/comment if you’ll be there and want to meetup!  Or if you just live in Austin and want to hang out.

While I am sure I am a pickier library customer than most, since I have worked in libraries, it saddens me that I have had a supremely horrible customer service experience at almost every library I have patronized. Today’s included a circulation desk worker lying about the ability to make a claims return on a book (you’re using Horizon, so I know how it works, circ meanie), and telling me I had to find the book on one of several library branches’ shelves or pay for the book. No option for if a library actually loses the item. When I asked for the number of the other library to get them to do a shelf check, she said she didn’t have it.

She didn’t have the phone number of a branch library in her system? No. No offers to find it, or directions to ask a reference librarian. When I did get the number (from a reference librarian who avoided looking at me to pretend I wasn’t there until I interrupted her) and called the other library I was transferred FOUR times, each time having to retell my story. The reference librarian I finally got shunted to (for a circulation problem) was extremely awesome. The silver lining.

All of the reference help I have had at this library has been extremely awesome (except the first woman today), actually, and weirdly, the majority of their reference librarians seem to be young men. Those are not related, but both can be statistical oddities in the public library!

Ironically, I was there to pick up Free For All.

It occurs to me that I discuss Ol’ Dirty Bastard for work purposes a lot more than most people.

I am loving the color and subject of this library art. I think the first is my favorite.

by David Weinberger

This book, for me, must be what it’s like for Brad Pitt to read Star Magazine. “Why do these people care about my job? Who would read this?” I mean I like my job, but who picks up a popular non-fiction book on metadata? I have no idea. Which is sort of the problem with librarians reviewing it, I guess, is because of course it’s simplified, it’s not FOR US. It’s for other people to understand what we do. I have no idea why they would want to, but it would be cool if one day I could explain my job to people in other fields.

That said, while this book is (literally) dedicated to librarians and generally very pro-librarians, I think the author has a prejudicially anti-traditional cataloging stance. I understand why, since Dewey is crazy. But still, just because we need to PHYSICALLY colocate things in the real world doesn’t mean we can’t also do a lot of awesome digital stuff away from traditional book cataloging FOR BOOKS. He seems to think it is one or the other–either you catalog physical stuff and are chained to something like DDC, or you are open to a wonderful world of user tagging. Why can there be no compromise?

This is generally how I feel at all discussions of this subject.

Also he seems to really dislike Melvil Dui. Okay, I get it he was racist and sexist, and kind of a crank, but he also did some awesome stuff. Not everything is bad just because you don’t personally like him.

Given that I have a personal stake in keeping some traditional cataloging perhaps I am biased. But honestly it makes me angry when people think we should just let everyone tag everything all the time. That works with many things. MANY THINGS. But it doesn’t with others. And why can’t there be both to allow for maximum access? Do we have to have a rap battle? Can’t we all just get along? Because of this I think all works that don’t move toward a combo of both are basically moot.

Also, he specifically mentions what he thinks the people doing what I do at the place I work should do. Which we are not doing. Which made me snicker. A book hasn’t really ever pointed its finger at me like that. In fact he referred to me and my coworkers as, “men in a well-lit room.” I think this is a funny characterization of my job as the vast majority of librarians are women and work in really dark confines.

My favorite part of the book is this quotation from Dewey:

“My heart is open to anything that’s either decimal or about libraries.” Way to use the Boolean, Melvil. Okay I am stopping before this all gets too biblioblogosphere and I have to argue about piddly things ALA does.

I think matryoshkas are the new “pirates.” They are everywhere. This is exciting to me because I love them. I have wanted some Yakov Smirnov ones for quite some time. These computer storage size ones though are my new favorites. Urban Outfitters is all over matryoshkas. They had some wall decals and this pillow. They also have a set of blank wood ones:

I have some of these someone was freecycling. I am completely excited about them, but what to do? I have 4 different styles of them, so I have a lot of choices.

I really like the plain wood look. But then I thought I could stain them in different wood colors. My original idea when I got them was to paint them with some of the vocabulary hierarchies from work. So like, Food and Drink>Beverages>Beer>Craft Beer.

The unification of crafting, taxonomies, and booze would be a beautiful thing indeed.

But I like these more modern matryoshkas, so any new ideas are appreciated.

I do not use captchas on this site.  I think the burden of work for you reading what I have to say should be on me, not you.  Me having to delete a few comments a week is more reasonable than you having to enter text on every comment.  This is partially because I personally HATE entering captchas.  But my mind was almost changed by a captcha that helps Internet Archive digitize books!  Thanks to Heidi for the tip!  ReCaptcha uses OCR text as its words!  I think part of the reason I hate captchas is that they seem like such a waste of time, and I frequently get them wrong, but at least in this case they DO something!  If you go the captcha route you should totally get these.

by Christopher Buckley

Silly, political, addictive, funny, biting satire.  I feel like at this point Christopher Buckley is super consistent–all of his books bring the same amount of cutting amusement.  The only difference on this one is that it’s about blogging, so it was a little more interesting to me.  But who knew there could be so much humor in a book about social security reform?  Although I often get bored at the DC-centric nature of Buckley’s books, this book made me realize I really wish he would run for office because I’d love to see his actual political beliefs.

A lot of these audiobooks I have been reading have been from Overdrive at the NYPL.  Of course I can’t listen to them on my ipod, or on my home computer.  I can listen at work though, which is nice.  The major bummer of the system though is that you can only check out a certain number of books, and you cannot return books you have checked out.  So digital books I checked out and finished two weeks ago are still in my queue and I cannot get them out!  It’s really annoying.  I can understand most other aspects of the library digital books copyright issues, but not why they force me to keep the book!

Hey! I just found out that Boyd’s Otlet video is online here which I found out through this review which has some great stills!

I received the best question at my recent presentation.

Aaron: “Is that a Glock sticker on your laptop?”

Me: “Yes”

A: “Cool, Do you own a Glock?”

Me: “No, I live in NYC where it is impossible to own guns, and I prefer HKs.”

This Aaron fellow mysteriously disappeared, but it got me thinking we should institute Librarians with Guns at ALA a la Geeks with Guns at SXSWi.

Anyone going to Midwinter and interested?

I try to put as few words in my slides as possible, but my job IS words, so I am not amazing at it.  However, my slides from my presentation today may not make sense without the audio, which should be available later.  Here they are in pdf.  The wireless here is AWFUL so this may be a touchy link.  I will try to get something more stable ASAP.

How do you organize yours? Ideally they would all be digital and I could put them in a database and search for any ingredient, but making all of them digital would be a HUGE pain in the ass. I could organize them in files by main ingredient, but that’s sort of not how I cook–I could put meat in a non-meat disk or pork in a chicken. By ethnicity seems good, except a lot would be “American.” So if anyone has any schemes I’d love to know about them!

Edited to add….If I had a scanner, the ideal would be scanning them and putting them on flickr with my tags….

Well almost. All library related conferences for the next few years here. I am glad someone was OCD enough to do it.

Sometimes I wish people would think more like computers.  I don’t understand when people fault the computers for not thinking like them.  That’s not their job pesky human!  This is why little kids should learn command line.

Okay, I love wikipedia, and for most personal things I use it for, it’s right on target. However, as a librarian I have been predjudiced against using it for hard and fast facts, especially at work. So today, when researching international heads of state, I was using the CIA World Factbook. This is deemed librarian credible, and has been the go to in most libraries I have worked at for factual country information.

Except it’s wrong.

And Wikipedia is right.

The Factbook thinks Chirac is the President of France. Wikipedia gave me the right info–it’s Sarkozy. The Factbook last updated the France listing on the 15th, and Sarkozy was inaugurated on the 16th. So perhaps, with current events, Wikipedia is a bit more reliable.

Yes, this is my rationalization for why I use wikipedia so much.

or, What Has Google Books Done For Me Lately?

Not much. As much as I love Google Patents, not much has sparked my interest on Google Books. Which is saying something. But this is pretty special.

Will any of you be at BookExpo, and/or have you been before?  I am considering going, and would love to know if you think it’s worth it, or if you’ll be around!

I was looking on Meetup.com regarding a meetup in my hood.  While surfing around the site, I found a section for asexual meetups.  I will clarify here that while I have nothing against asexuals, I completely cannot fathom this lifestyle and, admittedly, am probably somewhat derisive about it (I fear what I cannot understand!).  The case of asexuals was not helped by this statistical cluster on their page:

Popular Meetups with Asexuals

• Voluntary Human Extinction
• SA Support
• Shyness & Social Anxiety
• Sexual Assault Support
• Fat Pride
• Big Beautiful Women
• Bad Girl
• Adult Entertainment
• Indigo Girls
• Procrastinators

Okay so there’s some social anxiety and body issues there, which maybe are causing people to avoid sexual interactions but not necessarily showing a lack of interest in sex itself.  But what’s up with bad girl and adult entertainment?  I feel like, if you are calling yourself a bad girl or watching a lot of porn you are probably, BY DEFINITION not asexual.  Porn seems like a pretty good litmus test there.  And if you are so into the indigo girls you are going to a meetup, well that joke is too easy, but also points distinctly at sexuality.

I always have ideas for library science related bands and hip hop acts.  There’s my metal band DELIMITER!  And MARCy MARC is too funny.  And DJ AACR2 sounds real.  But today I thought of the optimus prime of LIS MC names.

MC P-MEST

This is a joke most librarians wouldn’t even get, but PMEST is  Ranganathan’s classification criteria which stand for Personality, Matter, Energy, Space, and Time.  And that is a very Sun Ra/P-Funk explanation–I mean let’s go to the mothership P-MEST!  I can imagine MC PMEST talking about vaguely spiritual space/time things and shilling Hypnotiq.

Word(z).

Folksonomy: A definition system by which the language’s most important word becomes “porn.”

The SxSW Library Type (and museum type) Meetup is officially here and here.  RSVP and we’ll be bestest friends.

This year, sadly, I will not be at Info Architecture Summit, as awesome as it will be in Las Vegas.  I will be at SxSWi (March 8-14) in Austin, TX (my kingdom for edible Mexican food!) and most likely the new North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization (June 13~17) in Toronto, Ontario.  If you, silent reader, live in one of these places or will be at one of these events, let’s hang out.

Also, I am hunting for new and exciting professional orgs since all of my previous ones have mainly been either useless or irrelevant to my line of work.  These include ALA, SLA, ASIST, etc.  I am a member of the Information Architecture Institute, which I like, but they aren’t EXACTLY what I do (which is the nature of IA), and I was a member of the North American Serials Interest Group, which I loved, but is completely not what I do.

Today, at a meeting, my boss said about me:
“She totally had authorization to look at those porn sites [at work]”

It’s really hard to convince coworkers you are working hard when you read Star Magazine and surf porn sites at work.  The whined “But it’s my jooooob.” does nothing to ease this situation.