Daily Thoughts 4/4/2009

Children's library promotion poster. "Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town / Upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown / Rapping at the windows, searching all nooks / To count the many children / Reading library books."

Daily Thoughts 4/4/2009

I finished reading The Human Side of Enterprise by Douglas McGregor. It is the basis for "Theory Y" style management bringing into vogue things like management by objective, training, group cooperation, ambition, self- motivation, and self control. One of the ideas in this book was the Scanlon plan a form of bonus program. The funny thing about this is that there are no bonuses or performance incentives for public servants. Public librarians are public servants. I will be writing a review of the book shortly.

I walked up to my local library and got a new library card. It was cold, but pleasant outside. I tried the card but it didn't work on the public computers initially. I did take a look at the new books. I picked up a copy of What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. It is a book about Google's management strategy. I think it should be interesting. The book opens by mentioning Ten Things Google Has Found To Be True. http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html

The book mentions a lot of articles in its content. Another article is "What We're Doing When We Blog," by Meg Houlihan. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/06/13/megnut.html

Another Way To Look at a URL (Search Tip):



This is a url from wikimedia.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Reading_in_art



It can be broken into three pieces:



http://commons.wikimedia.org/ -- The site for the Wikimedia

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ -- The homepage for Wikimedia

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Reading_In_Art A specific category in Wikimedia.

In online recruiting the breaking apart of url's into separate pieces is called stripping. It is a way to look at a website that does not require a search engine.

Recognizing how to break urls into different pieces is a way of searching websites. Often pieces of a url also are usable as a search type. In many search engines, the url: commaand allows you to search a specific site for content. You can add search terms to the url command to allow you to dig deep into a specific website. There is also the link: command which allows you to search for which sites are linked to a website. This allows you to search a webiste inside a search engine instead of looking at a website directly. It is often a quicker way to find specific information inside a site.

You can combine url commands with the filetype: commands like .doc (word document), .ppt (powerpoint),.xls (excel spreadsheet), or .pdf to find documents inside a website.

Web Bits

The Library of Congress will be on youtube. http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2009/09-055.html