Google Answers, We Hardly Knew Ye...

Google Answers (a pay for information service) has closed its doors. Read more here from Resource Shelf and librarian.net points the way to an interesting discussion on Metafilter that compares the pay for play answer biz to free online library assistance.

Reading with Charlotte...

From Librarian Del Hamilton:

Join schools, libraries and other organizations across the nation to help break the World Record for the most people reading the same passage simultaneously in multiple locations. On Wednesday, December 13, 2006, at 12 noon (EST), you are invited to join students, educators, librarians and fans of Charlotte's Web to gather in schools, hospitals, libraries and community centers to read a passage from E.B. White's classic tale of friendship, kindness, selfless giving and miracles. It is our hope that "Break a World Reading Record with Charlotte's Web" will introduce this wonderful story to a new generation and reintroduce the story to fans who haven't read it since childhood. Go to http://www.walden.com to find out how to participate today!

Also available online are detailed instructions, a Charlotte's Web reading record event guide, reproducible activity sheets, registration forms, an Educator Guide, coloring sheets, fun activities and an online database with comprehensive information and tips to join this national attempt! Charlotte's Web, the movie, opens nationwide on December 20, 2006.

A Bounty of Thanksgiving Information...

Virginia claims first Thanksgiving...

The History of Thanksgiving in North America...

How to Deep Fry a Turkey...

Eat, Drink, and Be Thankful....

A Vegan Friendly Thanksgiving...

The library will close at 11:00 pm on Tuesday evening and will be open from 8:00-4:30 pm on Wednesday, closed on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, open again on Sunday, 3:00 pm-2:00 am. Enjoy a safe and happy holiday!

Everybody's Workin' for the Weekend....

• A St. Louis area library collects 5,471 cans of food in lieu of overdue book fines...
• Here's a peer-reviewed wikipedia... Scholarpedia....
• LitSum, online literature summaries for those too lazy or too busy to read real books...
• Ancestry.com is currently making Passenger and Immigration Lists available for free... Search a huge database of immigration records from 1820 to 1960 freely until November 30. (Nice interface and web design also.)
• Find the nearest mailbox...
• A guide to Public Opinion polling sites....
• The National Book Awards have announced the 2006 winners. Constant Reader may recognize M. T. Anderson, the winner of the Young People's Literature prize, as an author I dissed a couple of posts ago. Coming soon... I pick the winners for the Kentucky Derby, March Madness, Super Bowl, and Academy Awards.
• Play an Information Literacy game from the University of North Carolina Greensboro. (and unrelated to anything but fun, a really enjoyable typing game called Word Shoot from Cognitive Labs.)

and finally, from the Defacing Old Books to Make Crappy Craft Projects department: Build a Book Picture Frame!

Thanks to RSS feeds from ResearchBuzz, Lifehacker, About.com, the Shifted Librarian, and Resource Shelf.

New Trial Database...

Education Research Complete is a new database within the EBSCO family and is currently available on a trial basis, the last database listed in the EBSCO directory. Here's the company description:

Education Research Complete is the definitive online resource for education research. This massive file offers the world's largest and most complete collection of full text education journals. It is a bibliographic and full text database covering scholarly research and information relating to all areas of education. Topics covered include all levels of education from early childhood to higher education, and all educational specialties, such as multilingual education, health education, and testing. Education Research Complete also covers areas of curriculum instruction as well as administration, policy, funding, and related social issues. The database provides indexing and abstracts for more than 1,500 journals, as well as full text for more than 750 journals. This database also includes full text for more than 100 books and monographs, and full text for numerous education-related conference papers.

Take it for a test drive! Please send your comments and feedback to Lynn Hoffmann, Electronic Resources Librarian.

Let's Get Physical...

Enough of the serious chatter, check out the Library Workout Tape on You Tube.

Customers Who Hated This Book....

One of the library 2.0 type features that might be incorporated into online catalogs in the future is the ability to allow patrons to "recommend." You have probably seen this feature on Amazon and it is really quite useful. "Customers who bought this item also bought".... so in the case of an academic library, you might be doing research on women's suffrage and benefit from the recommendations and experiences of other students and/or faculty, who would be suggesting that Book A and Book B are good resources for this topic. Faculty might create a scholarly "Listmania List" or tag a reading list on their particular specialty.

Which brings me to LibraryThing, a very popular web site/application for cataloging and tagging your books and forming communities of similar interest, among other things. They have launched Book Suggester, which allows you to enter a title and quickly returns a list of titles based on "People Who Have This Book Also Have," the Amazon recommendations mentioned above, and "Books with Similar Tags." Now this is great fun and no doubt a benefit to readers everywhere, but the part that is fast becoming a parlor game is the UnSuggester. UnSuggester compares the title you enter with the 7 million books collected by LibraryThing members and returns the titles of those books least likely to share a shelf. For instance, The Nanny Diaries is least likely to share a shelf with A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. Only one person owned both. So, I guess the current thinking is that a book that is really repulsive to you, like The Bridges of Madison County or How to Talk to a Liberal, would generate a list of opposites that would comprise your ideal library. It's fun and creates some strange pairings, but I must say it seems heavy with science fiction titles... no, but wait, that's right! That would be the opposite of what I like. Read more about it here...

UPDATE: I was just browsing a Library Journal article on Reading Maps. A new technique for reader's advisory, reading maps are thematic blueprints for exploring different aspects of a subject. Here's an example for the novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I would consider this a type of pathfinder and I recently pulled together something similar (although much less elaborate) on arranged marriage for a reading group. Language arts teachers use similar concept mapping tecnhniques to explore themes in literature. Whatever you want to call it, this is one of my favorite reading pursuits... letting curiosity be your guide.

Recently Read and Heard...

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. In my never ending quest to be up on the latest bestsellers two to three years later or more, I borrowed Freakonomics on CD from the Reading Room recently. Extremely entertaining and thought provoking... I was particularly interested in how they determined teachers were cheating for their students on standardized tests in their desperation to Leave No Child Behind and the explanation of the economics of crack dealing. Did you know that only pays about $3.00 an hour for the dealer on the street? The analysis of baby naming patterns goes on for quite a bit but is fascinating stuff. If you haven't read or heard this yet, it is definitely worth a listen.

Lost in the Forest by Sue Miller. This book on CD made me uncomfortable, primarily because the central plot point was the seduction of a 15-year old girl by a 50-year old man. It was very graphic. I was Lost in the Points of View several times also, wondering whose story this was as the focus shifts from Eva, the widowed mother, to Mark, her ex-husband, to Daisy, the grief stricken 15-year old, all lost in one way or another. The Red Riding Hood theme is a little too simplistic to describe the complexities and layers here and some things, like the responsibility of the older man, seem oddly unaddressed.

Whales on Stilts by M. T. Anderson. This book for children is getting a lot of publicity lately and buzz among the book bloggers, but I personally did not care for it. It reminded me very much of the Lemony Snicket books, which I also dislike. I also hate puppets. Please don't turn me in to the children's library police. I guess the point of the forced hilarity in this book is to satirize other children's series (I'm looking at you, Lemony!) but I think it falls flat. I am not, however, twelve.

The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff. This was September's selection for the Women's Studies Reading Group. I wandered away from the group a couple of years ago because it seemed we were reading a lot of transgendered biography but I recently returned to the fold... only to discover that the next selection was the biography of transgendered artist Einar Wegener. I'm beginning to suspect someone in that group has a secret agenda. However, this was a fascinating story about a man who made a choice to live as a woman, back in the 1930's, and actually had sex reassignment surgery, a rarity at the time. What interested me the most, however, was the flipping of gender roles with his artist wife who remained loyal to him/her throughout the experience. I have always found artistic marriages or partnerships kind of interesting and it often seems that the woman's career becomes secondary (ex. Picasso, Rodin, Pollock) ...perhaps from an inferior talent, perhaps from the subjugation of the relationship, perhaps from the suffocation of living with genius. In this story, the woman artist/wife is a secondary talent and Wegener is more successful. This changes when he becomes a woman. She requests that he dress as a woman to be her temporary model and help her complete a portrait, which launches the whole chain of events wherein he eventually completely transforms into "Lily." Her artwork becomes most sought after, as long as she is painting the beautiful Lily, and Lily/Einar no longer has any interest in painting at all. I think Alanis Morissette would call that ironic.

My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student by Rebekah Nathan. This book was October's selection for the Women's Studies Reading Group and provided some interesting insight into student world. Like Margaret Mead among the Samoans, Nathan lived in the dormitory to observe student life first hand, actually posing as a non-traditional. In my opinion, this made her the "other" despite her good intentions. I found most fascinating the subversion of all of our efforts. For example, within several feet an observer might see the official dormitory bulletin board with advice about responsible alcohol use and personal door decorations depicting students over-indulging. All of the community building exercises seemed rather futile, as students established their own bonds based on high school friendships and majors. Nathan was motivated by her students' perceived lack of motivation and engagement, although I think any education major could have told her that motivation and engagement are directly correlated to perceived utility.

For the Kiddies...

This charming quilt depicts a scene from The Root Children, a 1908 German children's book, and took Best in Show at the International Quilt Festival.

Here's a site for free printable book plates for kids.

It's not too soon to be thinking of books to buy as holiday gifts. Check out the New York Times Children's Book Review section... The American Library Association lists books recommended by children's librarians... and Horn Book offers some Holiday High Notes...

Trading the Usual Snark for a Salute...

The History of Veteran's Day

American Indian Heritage Month salutes Native American veterans

Library of Congress Veterans History Project

Facts for Features: Veterans Day 2006

New Trial Database: Newsbank...

A trial of Access World News from NewsBank is now available through the Bailey Library web site. This database consists of the full text of newspapers. The following newspapers are offered in the trial:
The New York Times (2000 - present)
The New York Times Book Review (2000 - present)
The New York Times Magazine (2000 - present)
The Washington Post (1977 - present)
Pennsylvania Newspapers, over 20 titles including:
Butler Eagle (2005 - present)
Philadelphia Inquirer ((1981 - present)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1990 - present)
Other National Newspapers
International Newspapers

A collection of Special Reports is also available. Special Reports are collections of newspaper and magazine articles on various world topics such as indigenous cultures, world economy, environment, and geography. To use Access World News go to the Library's trial databases page. The trial ends December 8, 2006 and is available only on campus.

Do You Speak Library?

Library Director Phil Tramdack forwards a Boise State site from a student: Library Jargon Defined or What Does That Mean??? Another site, the Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science, will also help you crack our secret code...

Desiderata, Microfiche, Monograph, Offprint, Abecedary, Aberrant Copies, Autograph Scores, Incunabula, Quadrennial, Quatern, Vade Mecum, Versal, Metadata... talk library to me!

Go Vote!

Ask.com has a collection of voting resources....

Other resources from Resource Shelf:

• Campaign Network from C-Span...
• CQ Election Forecast Map....
• CQ Politics.com....

Infoplosion....

The iread wiki seems to be just getting off the ground... the idea being to bring the concepts of Library 2.0 to readers' advisory.

It's NaNoWriMo time again... National Novel Writing Month. Sign up and get it done in the next 30 days.... you are only 1000 words behind.

Search the Currier & Ives database from the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts...
The top 100 free e-books from Project Gutenberg...
Google Earth adds an election feature that identifies your representatives...

170 librarians blog about the "typo of the day"... wow... hard... to... stay... awake... eyelids getting heavy....

The World's Fastest Librarian? Bring it on....