library+instruction+technology

Should unused vacation be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should unused vacation be forgot,
and money on the bottom line?

For unencumbered funds, my dear,
for unencumbered funds,
we'll take our full four weeks next year,
and spend every last dime.

I've been having "fun" creating a schedule for Annual. I'm trending towards RUSA activities, since I was just at the ACRL Conference in March. Saturday is a bit heavy. So, we'll see what really happens. I'm hoping to fit in some sightseeing as time allows.

Friday

• 5:30 or 6 p.m. MARS or STARS Happy Hour
• 8 p.m. World Premiere of the The Hollywood Librarian

Saturday

• 8 a.m. RSS Social Hour
• 10:30 a.m. CODES Dual Assignments Discussion Group
• Poster Session 1: The Collectors (if I can get there)
• 1:30 p.m. CODES Cooperative Monographic Collection Development – Recent Trends
• 3:30 p.m. Exhibits
• 6 p.m. Dinner with DC friends

Sunday

• 10:30 a.m. CODES/STARS Cooperative Collection Development Committee Meeting
• 1 p.m. Poster Session IV: Outreach
• 2:30 Exhibits
• 5:45 Blog Salon 

Monday

• 8 a.m RSS Catalog Use Meeting
• 10:30 ALA Publishing: Reference Books Bulletin: Is Print Reference Dead?
• 1:30 RUSA President's Program: Time Odyssey: Visions of Reference and User Services

and so is this post. I have had a copy of David Weinberger's new book, Everything is miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder, checked out from my local public library for six weeks. I finally made myself finish it this week. I know that David has something important to say. However, I could hardly get past the use of the card catalog and Dewey as examples of the second order of order that we must overcome in the age of the third order of order to get through the book.

Yeah, I know his point is that our old school ways of applying control over the ones and zeros zipping around on the series of tubes is in the best interest of no one. I agree that users should be able to tag their content and share their knowledge online. I am a user of Flickr, del.icio.us, Wikipedia, and many other digital disorder tools. I do my best to educate our students and faculty about these tools. However, I wish David would have thrown us a bone and commented somewhere in the book that librarians are finally getting on board. Most librarians will agree that our roles have evolved tremendously over the past few years. I know many are still focused on metadata, but that is a necessary evil when you are standing with one foot in the digital world and one foot in the print world. I would hazard to say that a fair number of academic librarians have embraced the new third order of order, okay maybe not everyone . 

David writes, "There's something comforting about the sight of cards spooning in a library card catalog. A world of ideas and knowledge, more than we could ever absorb, is waiting for us, carefully indexed in those neat rows of drawers. And yet the second order masks a complexity that the third order confronts head-on: We don't really know what a book is." (118-119) He continues, "card catalogs have value because of what they leave out. Melvil Dewey himself designed the current standard card in 1877…Because it's not very large, catalogers have to make tough decisions about what information to include." (119) David includes yet another reference to the card catalog used by Brown and Duguid in the Social Life of Information, "you can sometimes tell if a card has been heavily consulted by how dog-eared it is." (119)

Seriously, when was the last time you used a card catalog?  For me it was 1988 and it was my local public library in BFE northwest Ohio.  I would have been much happier to see David pick on the card catalog's progeny, the OPAC. Unfortunately, the OPAC is missing and the closest mention is a comment about the "OCLC database of books" (122) being much like a card catalog. I am at a loss as to why he didn't use the name WorldCat or even do some research to figure out the name and that a free version of it is on the web where users can be kind of social and share reviews of books. 

I know, I know…I need to move past the whole card catalog issue. I am sure that Michael Gorman had a hard time reading this book too, but it may not have passed the "scholarly enough" test to land on his desk. David has an entire chapter titled Social Knowing, where he argues that Wikipedia is better than Britannica and provides many reasons why he has taken this position. I can not say that I agree with him totally on this point either, but anything that ticks off the media identified library standard-bearer can't be too wrong.

Karen Schneider's excellent review is on the TechSource blog and additional reactions are available on the book's companion web site appropriately titled, Everything is Miscellaneous.

Our monograph acquisitions work flow is out of wack. I didn't count how many boxes of books came in this week, but I know we're nearing 100 for the past couple of weeks.

There are multiple issues by having the majority of our books arrive in June and July (besides overloading acquisitions and cataloging). The biggest challenge I see is one of perception. Our students and faculty are on campus September to May. They only see a small number of new books coming in during those months. I'm sure that our students never realize how many tangible books come in over the summer, because they are already processed and shelved by the time they are back on campus in the August.

I have some ideas on how to even out our work flow, but I'm always looking for good ideas that work. Feel free to share what works on your campus by writing a comment (it won't show until I approve it).

• Web-based IM – More than just Meebo
  Paul Pival’s post pointing to Robin Good’s comparison of of web based instant messengers.
  (tags: instant_messaging guide chart tools)

Sounds like Maxis is not going to be the developer for SimCity Societies and the new game is not going to be "a realistic urban simulation". Bummer. CVG has the details. Found via Zonk's post on Slashdot.

• Systemic change: CIC and Google
  Lorcan Dempsey’s thoughts on the CIC’s (Big 10 + U Chicago) announced digitization project with Google Book Search.
  (tags: google digitization academic_library books)

Joystiq has the scoop. EA has confirmed that a new SimCity (working title SimCity Societies) is coming later this year.

I worked with a world mythology class back in April. I didn't run this group through the normal modified PBL activity. The class was in a tech enhanced classroom, so we did live searching using topics that the students were planning on researching. One student was interested in researching different versions of the great flood story. We found articles, but I think I would have had an easier time with the topic if I had already read The buried book : the loss and rediscovery of the great Epic of Gilgamesh by David Damrosch.

I finished The buried book during my first week of vacation. I highly recommend it if you are interested in the story of Gilgamesh, the history of Mesopotamia, or Victorian era archeology. Damrosch recommended the books below for further study.

Books about Gilgamesh

• The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation by Andrew George ("best and most complete translation")
• The Babylonian Gilgamesh epic : introduction, critical edition, and cuneiform texts  by Andrew George (scholarly)

Akkadian literature

• Myths from Mesopotamia : creation, the flood, Gilgamesh, and others by Stephanie Dalley 
• Before the muses : an anthology of Akkadian literature by Benjamin R Foster 
• Ancient Near Eastern texts : relating to the Old Testament by James Bennett Pritchard 
• Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature

Mesopotamian history

• A history of the ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 B.C. by Marc Van de Mieroop 
• The ancient Near East : a history by William W Hallo;  William Kelly Simpson 
• Ancient Iraq by Georges Roux 
• Mesopotamia : the invention of the city by Gwendolyn Leick 

Victorian Era Archaeologist Writings

• Nineveh and its remains by Sir Austen Henry Layard 
• Early adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia, including a residence among the Bakhtiyari and other wild tribes before the discovery of Nineveh by Austen Henry Layard, Sir 
• The Chaldean account of Genesis, containing the description of the creation, the fall of man, the deluge, the tower of Babel, the times of the patriarchs, and Nimrod: Babylonian fables, and legends of the gods; from the cuneiform inscriptions by George Smith 
• Asshur and the land of Nimrod: being an account of the discoveries made in the ancient ruins of Nineveh, Asshur, Sepharvaim, Calah, Babylon, Borsippa, Cuthah, and Van. Incl. a narrative of different journeys in Mesopotamia, Assyria, Asia Minor, and Koordistan. by Hormuzd Rassam
• Narrative of the British mission to Theodore, king of Abyssinia ; with notices of the countries traversed from Massowah, through the SoodaÌ‚n, the AmhaÌ‚ra, and back to Annesley Bay, from Mágdala. by Hormuzd Rassam 

Victorian views on the Middle East

• Orientalism by Edward W. Said 
• The conquest of Assyria : excavations in an antique land, 1840-1860 by Mogens Trolle Larsen 
• Empires of the sand : the struggle for mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923 by Efraim Karsh;  Inari Karsh

Oh how times have changed. When I was a growing up, network programming sucked in the summer. This is not the case with cable in 2007.

I was already anticipating the new season of The 4400 . I can now get ready to set the DVR for new (to the US) seasons of Footballers Wive$ (with Joan Collins), MI-5, and Hex.  Now, if we could just convince the BBC to show Torchwood on this side of the Atlantic.