Daily Thoughts 9/9/2011

Still-life with Rarities, Jan Van der Heyden, 1712


Daily Thoughts 9/9/2011

I finished reading A Dance With Dragons on the train to work today.  It was quite enjoyable.  There is a huge cast of characters.


This morning, I spent some time checking the Facebook and Twitter account.  I also checked the displays.

I joined the ALCTS (Association of Library Collections and Technical Services) Eforum this morning to discuss gift policies.  We have been getting a lot more gifts lately.  We got a large donation of African American titles with authors like T.D. Jakes, E. Lynn Harris, Michael Baisden, Iyanla Vanzant and others.

I also made a set of phone calls to people who were at the previous Writers Networking Event.  We have one coming up on September 15, 2011 from 6:00-8:00 p.m. in the Rotunda Art Gallery.  I also printed up some more fliers for the event.

On the way home, I read some of Blur How To Know What's True In The Age Of Information Overload by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel.  The authors are journalists so we are dealing with journalistic truth which is an interesting concept.  Journalistic truth comes across as a bit flexible to me.

I did half an hour more on Lynda.com for training and finished the first hour of a 10 hour course on Indesign CS5.  It will be a slow steady process.

Web Bits

A Set of Library Posters on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/philbradley/sets/72157625923493122/

Daily Thoughts 9/8/2011

Man Sitting on a Log, 1895, Karoly Ferenczy
Daily Thoughts 9/8/2011

I read some more of A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin.  I especially like the character of Tyrione Lannister.  He is wonderfully wicked.

I checked the displays and printed some more flyers for events.  I put in a display for computer books and put some fliers for our different computer activities in the display including fliers about our E-readers and social media presence on Twitter and Facebook.

I put the book Willpower Rediscovering The Greatest Human Strength by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney on hold.  A book that caught my attention is A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss which is a scientific argument for the reason why the universe exists.  It is coming out in January of 2012.

I also put the graphic novel The influencing machine : Brooke Gladstone on the media / illustrated by Josh Neufeld ; with additional penciling by Randy Jones and Susann Ferris-Jones.  I like reading nonfiction graphic novels.

The book Blur How To Know What's True In The Age of Information Overload by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenthal came in for me to read.

I read a bit more of A Dance With Dragons on the train home.

I noticed while looking through the Sony Reader store that both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times were 99 cents for single issues. This is half of the $2.00 price on the newsstands.  It also appears to be true of magazines as well.  PC Magazine was listed at $1.49 per issue for each monthly issue.  It is something to consider trying out.

Web Bits

Permanence Matters-- a campaign for quality paper in printed books.
http://www.permanencematters.com/

Daily Thoughts 9/7/2011

The Novel Reading I, oil on wood painting by Josef Danhauser, 1841, 63 x 78,8 cm. Belvedere, Vienna

Daily Thoughts 9/7/2011

I read some more of A Dance With Dragons this morning.  I am enjoying the fantasy novel.

This afternoon, we had our E-reader presentation.  It ran a half hour past the allotted time of 2:00-3:30 p.m. Most of the program came from this presentation http://www.westchesterlibraries.org/eReaderProgram
The presenter reminded us that things changed day to day with E-readers.  He also reminded us that tablets would be a separate program.  Tablets are something which are quite intriguing.

There were a few interesting ideas that came from the presentation.  The first was that there were a lot of different options available for getting ebooks.  We could purchase them from both storefronts and vendors. 

The second idea was that you could easily get the school assignment for the high schools and get many of the classic books that are assigned as ebooks for free and purchase the other titles to create a complete assignment E-reader.

After the E-reader presentation, I wrote the bi-monthly report for the collection development department.  A lot of my time during the last two months has been focused on improving our website.

Daily Thoughts 9/5/2011

Paul Fisher, A Good Book, 1905

Daily Thoughts 9/5/2011

I spent some time updating Twitter and Facebook.  I also finished reading No Shelf Required.  It was interesting reading the different options for delivering and purchasing ebooks.  There are subscriptions, pay per view, automatically buy an ebook after a certain number of views, buy a set of ebooks as a package, subscribe to a series of ebooks as they are released, and many other options.

This morning, I finished taking the Youtube Essentials course on Lynda.com which giave me a better idea how the service works.  I plan on learning a number of different programs while I still have the option to use Lynda.com, InDesign, Photoshop, and Flash.

I started reading A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin this morning. I rather like the story because the author does not stint on villainy.  He makes his treacherous characters truly nasty.  It adds to the story quite nicely.

I took some time to look at the 2011 Washington Irving Book Awards which are presented by the Westchester Library Association.  They are all for Westchester authors.  http://www.westchesterlibraryassociation.org/bookmark.pdf