Afternoon Thoughts, Be Thankful

An Image of A Black Hole. We Could Have Been There Today.

Afternoon Thoughts

I spent some more time looking at Zoomii, I tried the different categories for social science books. I found that an awful lot of the books were textbooks which is not good for a public library. There of course was a mix of classic titles and new titles. I think that I found a few more books to order after looking through the storefront.

Our collection development meeting was cancelled this morning. It was kind of frustrating.

I also did some more weeding this afternoon. I constantly do weeding. I know it sounds tedious and it is, but it is something that I will be doing every single day for a long time. De-accessioning items is quite frankly a bit boring.

There was absolutely nothing interesting in the bestseller lists which I wanted to read from Publishers Weekly, or the New York Times Bestseller List. Sometimes these things bore me. I occassionally get that contrarian feeling where what is popular is not necessarily good. There is an awful lot of popular trash in the world.

How do you like the new font and font size? I am not going to center the header, I am going to resize the width so it fits better on the screen. It might take a bit for me to do it right.

Be thankful today that the day did not end in doom. We could have been swallowed by a giant black hole. But we weren't so breath a sigh of relief. :)

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-fermilab-explainer_bd07sep07,0,1577860.story

Changing The Fonts and Background, Ordering Computer Books

Changing Fonts And Background

I changed the fonts and background color to make my sidebar more visible. Someone recently complained about the way my blog looked. It was not readable enough. I hope this looks much better. The links were hard to see.

Ordering Computer Books

I spent more time ordering computer books today. I spoke with the person in charge of the Cybercorner where people can sign up to use the computers for free. She told me that she thought that the Complete Idiots Guides and The For Dummies series of books were about the right speed for our library. She also mentioned that we needed a lot of very basic books on computers: email, PCs, internet, computer repair, routers, ebay, windows vista, and digital photography. There were not a whole lot of books on routers. I always try and get input from other staff members when I am doing ordering lists.

I also spent a bit of time going through the current computer books to see if there were any publishers imprints I had missed. There was a series called The Absolute Beginners Guides which covered basic issues with computing. As part of looking, I discarded a few of the computer guides.

We cannot discard a lot of the older books because of the problem of legacy computing. What happens is that some businesses keep their old software for many years and do not upgrade it. The stores stop selling the older books about computers, but the businesses still maintain the older systems. We get questions about Windows 95, SAP, Wordstar, DBase IV, and similar systems which can no longer be purchased in the bookstores. The library becomes the de facto repository for books on legacy programs.

I took a few minutes to look at PC Magazine and Computers In Libraries. Computers In libraries had two interesting books listed, The Accidental Webmaster by Julie Stills, and Social Software In Libraries by Meredith Farkas. There were a few gadgets that I had forgotten to consider in PC Magazine, the Smart Phone, Blackberry, and Palm devices.

While I was looking at Amazon and plugging in various categories, I also came across another interesting book, The Future of the Internet And How To Stop It by Jonathan Ziffrain. It is a fascinating title, but I don't think we are going to stop the internet any time soon.