Daily Thoughts 3/18/2009

Adelaide Hanscom and Blanche Cumming Earth Could Not Answer Omar Khayyam, tr. Edward Fitzgerald: “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” (1905, 1912)

Earth could not answer; nor the Seas that mourn
In flowing Purple, of their Lord forlorn;
Nor rolling Heaven, with all his Signs reveal’d
And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn

Daily Thoughts 3/18/2009

Today started out well, I have been transferred from reference to collection development. This is a nice first step towards my goals. This means, I will be doing more ordering and working more closely with the material in the collection. It also moves me closer to the publishing side of librarianship. This puts me in a really good mood.

I read some magazines this morning. I found a very nice title in Publishers Weekly, March 9, 2009 issue. Sometimes, you notice that people write titles that grab your attention immediately. There is a magic in having the right title to a book. In The Land of Invented Language: Esperanto Rockstars, Klingon Poets, Logian Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language by Arika Okrent. Notice how land and language match nicely. Also, the use of two word descriptors is evocative. We are ordering the book.

This afternoon I spent some time putting paper slips with descriptions for books for a cataloger who is supposed to visit on Friday. We have a decent amount of uncataloged books in our processing area. On Monday, a representative from Baker and Taylor is visiting with us to discuss our back orders.

I spent some time looking up pdfs of library surveys on google. I am looking at possibly creating a short, simple user survey of two to three pages for ourlibrary. Something with checkboxes that is easy to fill in. I used the search string: "public library" AND "user survey" OR "community survey "AND filetype:pdf in google to pull out examples of surveys. Then I eliminated a few of them. I am looking at five of them right now.

On the way home, I read some of Social Software in Libraries. I rather liked the site http://www.libworm.com which is a rss search engine for library blogs.