Daily Thoughts 4/8/2009

Portrait of Cornelis Claesz Anslo, etching by Rembrandt

Daily Thoughts 4/8/2009

I have decided to read Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick W. Taylor. It is the first text on ideas about modern efficiency. I have heard quite a few horror stories about this work and what it means to laborers and unions. I would like to see what it says. I am going to read this book online as an etext because there is only one copy of this book in our library system and it is currently checked out. This is one of the reasons places like Project Gutenberg and other sites for free online books are so useful. The book is on longer under copyright. http://www.eldritchpress.org/fwt/taylor.html

This morning, I was reading some more of On The Road, The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac on the subway and came across one of those sentences that comes out as a strong theme in this novel, " At the end of the American road is a man and a woman making love in a hotel room." I also learned that Potchky a dog owned by Lucien Carr chewed up the last few pages of the ending. They present a possible ending, but it not quite the same as the rest of the book. This is one of the deep ironies of this book.

We had a reference meeting today where we discussed different books. One of my colleagues discussed Benet's Readers Encyclopedia which is excellent and well written. I talked about Wikimedia Commons which is Wikipedia's media collection. The Deutsche Fothothek uploaded 250,000 images under creative commons to Wikimedia on March 31, 2009. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deutsche_Fotothek I find Wikimedia Commons to be a tremendous resource for images.

We hung up a huge marigold colored poster for Earth Celebration Week in the lobby of the library. It is four feet by eight feet and really stands out. I also put out a bunch of flyers near the circulation desk for the city on Earth Celebration Week. We will a place for neighborhood groups to sign up. The committee meeting was today as well.

They finished processing We The Media Grassroots Journalism By The People For The People by Dan Gilmor and Step by Step Microsoft Office Publisher 2007 by Joyce Cox and Joan Preppernau. I am going to have a long weekend starting tomorrow. I will have a few things to read.