Daily Thoughts 5/12/2009

Promotional poster for Baum's "Popular Books For Children", 1901

Daily Thoughts 5/12/2009

I tried to start reading two different novels on the train. The first was an advanced reading copy of How To Rob An Armored Car by iain Levinson. It bored me. The premise was a group of potheads in dead end jobs turn to crime. I could not find much sympathy with the characters. The second book I tried to read was Daemon by Daniel Suarez. This is a near future thriller. I got through the first chapter then I got distracted by the characters. There were too many plot threads to make the writing very coherent and they did not mesh very well, so I put it down. I was hoping I would have something to read on the train in the morning but, I guess, I will have to pick up the New York Times instead and read it on the way to work tomorrow.

I had a typical day today. I spent some time in the morning weeding the 700s. I also plan to shift the books in the 700s around to create some space tomorrow. We put in a whole new set of baskets for the new book display area. We are waiting for two more slat wall panels. Then we will be finished redoing the new books display area. It looks a lot nicer than before.

We had Westlaw come over to do some training on the new interface for Westlaw Patron Access. The training was kind of interesting. Westlaw has designed a new set of drop down menus and directories that is more user friendly for the public to find law material. The search engine reminds me of Google now. The training took about an hour and a half.

I also spent time this morning going over the Purchase Alerts from the central system. Most of the holds are for dvds and music cds with a few bestselling titles. There were a few social science titles mixed in along with a few self help titles. What surprised me is that a lot of the dvds were for nonfiction subjects like the great depression and exercise. Sometimes when you look at holds reports they can be a little bit counterintuitive.