The Terra-Cotta Dog by Camilleri; Poison Study by Snyder

Still no tape, still a wonky printer situation. The students only seem to be able to print from one computer so I'm reserving it for that purpose.I checked out four books yesterday; two to a faculty member and two to a student. Now to see if I eventually get them back. I could've printed them out a receipt if I had a frickin' printer.

Still doing catalog entry. I want to put the journal and magazine collection on it but the Populi catalog isn't very good for that. It insists on having a bar code for every item and I'm not putting bar codes on the journals. They're not available for check out. Same with some of the other media. Partially I just don't want to hear my boss complain about how long they take to get here when I need to order more bar codes. Brodart orders take forever. They don't make it clear that when you order something that they give the jobs to outside vendors who then take months to get things done. And I can't even call to complain because I don't know who they are. I've been waiting for my outside book return for a month and a half.

CamStudio was a bust. It wouldn't start on my machine and I didn't feel like babying it. So I downloaded Microsoft Expressions 4 which, so far, is working fine. I'm not quite ready to record as I don't have a place to do audio yet. I have a headset here at home I could use but I'd have to record the video there, watch it here and do voice over, and then put the both together there due to where the software is and the fact that I can't be assured quiet there. I'll figure it out. In the meantime I've started a school library blog to give tutorials on research and such using images from the problem step recorder. www.ghntslibrary.blogspot.com.

Also, I am the person in the building to go to with tech problems now that admin is across the street.

I'm reading The Terra-Cotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri. I enjoyed the last book of his and this one is just as interesting, maybe even more. Inspector Montalbano is intelligent and something of a ass at times but he's an interesting ass with redeeming qualities. In this book he has to contend with a fishy grocery store robbery and the secret imparted to him by a dying big crime figure. It's an easy read and again there are cultural notes at the back.

I'm reading Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder. This is a fantasy book about a young woman who gets a stay of execution if she'll agree to be the Commander's food taster. The writing is pretty decent and it reads easily even if the author has the annoying habit of ending chapters when something dramatic has happened or been said and then just picks up in the exact same place in the next chapter, often with the next line of dialogue in the conversation. This book might turn out to be a romance disguised as a fantasy but well-enough done to hold. The world she's created of a kingdom taken over by what's basically a military dictatorship is interestingly different from over books with the same feel. The Commander isn't arbitrarily tyrannical, he's a ruler. It's not a place I'd want to live but it's not stupidly harsh. You can understand his reasoning behind his laws even if you think they're too much. It's easy to imagine resistance naturally coming about as people grow tired of the strict laws rather than like other conquered fantasy worlds where an underground resistance movement headed by one savior defies cackling despots who kick puppies and molest children. Anyway, it has been a good read so far.

I haven't given up on First Drop though I sincerely want to drop kick it into the river.

I think the Title is the hardest part really

Me and my Grandpa.

I can now close the stacks part of the library while keeping the computer lab open so I can more easily go to lunch when I want. It's wonderful to have more control over my schedule again.

I've been doing catalog entry. I've done about 100+ books at his point and there are at least 300 to go. And then, once I get tape I can label them all! Yippee! I've been using the Populi library system that's connected to their college management software program since that's what the school already uses. Adding resources to the catalog is pretty simple. It lets you enter something by ISBN number and it pulls information from Amazon. This gives you a more or less full description of the contents for your resource page along with the authors and publisher. You have to enter all other data by hand. The resource page when created is not particularly streamlined but there are a lot of different field options. Except a series field for some reason. And you can't delete a resource or change it's status between available and unavailable. Apparently they're working on changing that. Sometimes it just refuses to enter things correctly at all and you just have to work around it.

You can, of course, assign multiple subjects of your own wording to each item and to be honest I only sometimes use LCSH or MeSH. I don't have thousands of books and I don't want there to be fifty different subject headings with only one item linked to them. These things are to help users find similar items or to let them browse for a useful topic. The wording needs to be something they'll think to look up. There's no way I'm putting the APA manual under the heading "Psychological Literature". Who's going to look for help with citations under that? Also, there's no reason to limit myself to three subjects when four will be better. I want things to be interconnected in such a way that when students browse the catalog they find things they hadn't thought to look at but find useful. I'll have to conduct a survey after they've been using it for awhile to make sure it works.

Yesterday I created an APA citation help sheet for the students and I've helped a couple that were sent by their teacher for instruction. I'm looking into how to make video tutorials for using online databases and to help teach reading comprehension and evaluative skills. I have no budget so I downloaded Windows Live Movie Maker and I'm thinking about getting CamStudio. I've also come to the realization that since the library is one of the only open doors on the hall I'm going to have to be ready to help not just students but anyone else who wanders in looking for information of whatever nature.

I'm almost done with Red Lights. It's just one long night for Steve the protagonist. He gets progressively drunker as he and his wife make the trip up to Maine to pick up the kids until eventually he decides his wife needs a lesson in understanding him when she objects to his stopping at bars along the way. He takes the keys with him into the bar to prevent her from driving off without him, which she threatened to do, and comes back out to find her gone. More drinking, one escaped convict, and lots of embarrassing drunken rambling about being men later and Steve wakes up in the car with a flat tire, missing luggage and wallet, a bad hangover, and no idea where his wife is. When he reaches a phone it turns out she never made it to where she was going. So he has to find her.

The narrative kind of feels like the passing of the highway under tires and also, unsurprisingly, like a drunken night out. It's a monotonous, nighttime journey, where roadside places are indistinct and very human emotions of hurt, annoyance, and confrontation come to the surface as the road wears on with nothing to do but watch traffic. Things start out very clear and get more and more blurry and less cohesive as Steve loses it, until he wakes up painfully alert with a squirrel watching him through the windshield. And then comes the shame, because he made a fool of himself, and the anxiety at being far from home with his wallet gone, and then the panic because he can't find his wife.

It's Friday!

The picture is my grandma and my mother.

I have the bar codes I need to put on the books so now I can enter them all into the catalog with the number of copies along with all their information. What I still can't do is put call numbers on them because 1) I can't print (although I may have fixed that, we'll see) and 2) I have no tape, still. I have put in a purchase request for Scotch book repair tape again and now hopefully I'll have it by next week. Oh please, oh please, oh please. Then everything will be ready for checking out. You know, once the students have ID cards. But that's not my problem!

Also, I'm coming to the conclusion (actually, I came to it weeks ago) that we may be able to afford only one online journal with full onsite access. AJN seems like a good bet but it's $500+ just for one user. Having an EBSCO product would have been great but all of their databases are over $8000. However, the nurse reference center they have is very similar in content on a number of points to Medscape's free content. Obviously the EBSCO version is much better but for a small institution Medscape seems like a pretty good alternative. Geez, education really is for the well-off. It's too bad there are no alternative pricing arrangements for small places.

I've also put in my first book request to the Director and the Director of General Education. The books I chose were mainly on subjects that faculty members told me students had trouble grasping. I included a few books to help with faculty development as well. The faculty I've talked to really like the idea of having professional development resources so I can use that if questions are raised about why we should buy them.

A student opened up to the copy/printer yesterday, grabbed a sheaf of paper, stuffed it into her bag and walked out. I didn't see it happen but a student who had been in the study room where the machine is told me. She and another student were just as flabbergasted and angry as myself. Paper isn't exactly expensive and there's a Staples right across the street. I'm going to have to keep a very small amount of paper in the machine and let people come to me if they need more. For every ten good students you get one bad one, you know? They're just stealing from their classmates.

I have finished Treasure Island. Pirates, treasure, mutiny, fights, ships; they all make for a great adventure. It's an action-driven story, not much for dialogue or character development. The atmosphere often takes center-stage.

I am now reading First Drop by Zoe Sharp. This is the first book in a British series to be printed in the U.S. about a new bodyguard named Charlie Fox (a woman) who comes to America to take her first job protecting the son of a computer programmer in, apparently, Florida. I'm only in about 60 pages and I already hate Ms. Fox to bits. She is massively unprepared for both her new job and a new country, she is incredibly unprofessional, and she is very petty and self-centered. I may abandon it, I may just save it to read by the computer.

I've also started Red Lights by Georges Simenon which will, of course, be better. His stories have not failed me yet. This one is not a Maigret mystery though. It takes place in '50s New England. A couple is driving up to Maine to retrieve their children from summer camp. So far they've fallen into their usual summer routine which has been marred only by the husband sneaking a double rye when he pulled over to use the restroom. Now there's a bit of tension between them and we'll see where that goes.

Yay, weekend! The drive to and from Cleveland (or the environs around Cleveland anyway) and everything in between was exhausting. I hate open casket funerals. I think they're demeaning. The makeup is never right, the flesh sags, the hands are stiff. I can understand people wanting to say goodbye but it just seems so degrading. Well. It was wonderful to see my family and next year one of my cousins is getting married so that will be a happy reason to have to go to Cleveland.

Edit: I can't print from my computer, but I can print from the student computers on my log-in. The tech guy said something about 32 and 64 bit and how something has to be changed which just sounds far too complicated. Oh, and Charlie Fox is one of the most uncompassionate, unsympathetic, self-centered, unprofessional little half-wits to masquerade as a bodyguard ever. The only time I've felt such annoyance and disgust for a character was when I was reading the first two Dexter books. (The show, however, is awesome.) Henry Miller doesn't count because he's amusing and the writing's much better.

I have to go to Cleveland again

My grandmother just died.

I hate having to ask for time off from my new job after only being there a month but this is important. I'll just have to see how things go.

A few preliminary pictures

Most everything's dried out now. I'm going to try and record what's there maybe over the weekend but I took a few pictures now just for the heck of it.

The girl with the bob is probably my grandmother and the teenager with the curls is most likely my great-grandmother.

Apparently the autism awareness symbol is a puzzle piece. Consider me informed.

Here's my great-grandmother.

I have a new computer at work; I am thrilled. I spent most of today (re)familiarizing myself with various databases and search engines and writing tutorials about how to use them. I need to write search strategies and reading comprehension sheets as well. I was glad of the air-conditioning today. The other building is having problems with the A/C and the heat outside was like a second skin. I got in my car at lunch time and the dashboard thermometer read 107. I need to remember to put my driving gloves back in the car so I can steer better and more easily handle the car key now that it's summer.

My parents drove to our poor flooded and stripped house over the weekend to save as many wet things as possible. My grandmother's year books and fairy tale books are gone but I was expecting that. So they brought me back a plastic bin of soaked things. While you don't want to store old paper in plastic (the fumes given off by old paper products would hasten their deterioration), it kept the moisture in long enough to allow me to separate a lot of pages. It's much harder if not impossible to peel apart dry paper. A number of photos are gone, stuck together with their own chemicals, but other photos remain along with a number of newspapers and correspondence.

There are a few papers dealing with the Hindenburg disaster. My grandparents were just parking the car to go watch it land when they saw it explode. One paper deals with conspiracy plots about sabotage. I think Bolsheviks were involved, I haven't gotten a chance to look closely.

There are a couple announcing the death of President McKinley. I'm drying one of those out now.

There are a lot of invitations to my great-grandfather to go to various events. He was chief clerk to the secretary of state of New Jersey during the 20's, 30's and 40's. Now the title is assistant secretary. There are a number of photographs of him working in his office. They must have had an official photographer. He always looks like he's been surprised at work but they had to have set those shots up.

There must be an entire ream of paper dedicated to my great-grandmother's high school graduation, including her last report card (she was an excellent speller and did quite well in rhetoric) and a poem she composed on a typewriter to commemorate the event.

There are several booklets on weird subjects. "The Germany of Asia" written around 1917 about Japan. "The Hole in the Hauptmann Case" about the man convicted in the Lindbergh baby case. I'm still drying that out but I think Bolsheviks are involved in that also. There's one on the German-Bolshevik connection written around WWI as well. There's Masonic Temple stuff but that's not surprising as my great-grandfather was a Mason.

Once everything is dried out I'll start taking photos.

I'm reading Treasure Island because I wanted an adventure book and I remember enjoying it as a kid.