by Wish I had a bus like this one! Moncton is offering wireless on their buses! While the bus may be one of the few places where you can escape work, there are advantages to having wireless on a long ride. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before others follow suit.
odd stuff
Wishful Thinking
Radiohead decided to release their album online – without a price. They gave fans the option to pay what they wanted! My guess is that many will still give something to have the album. Wouldn’t it be nice if database providers would do the same? Again, I’d be willing to pay something, just not the crazy prices many are asking for.
Phone-in Story Time
Here’s a neat story. Libraries in Nova Scotia have teamed up with phone companies to provide children’s stories. I think this is a great idea, especially since many children don’t live close to a public library. Children call a toll-free number to hear pre-recorded stories. The project’s aim is to help install a love of literacy, and I think story telling, to children.
Interesting News
Apparently Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty is going to provide millions in funding to school libraries, allowing them to purchase more books and hire more librarians. It wold be great if it’s true. Read more here. Did I mention that we’re about to have an election?
Gaming in Libraries
I recently saw a playstation commercial that had gaming in a library. It’s quite funny and I’ll post a link as soon as I find it on youtube. They may be joking about a gaming room in a library but this may well be what we see frequently in libraries in the near future.
Where did summer go?
Well, the campus is thriving again, the student centre is chaos, and there is noise again in the library. Yes, it is the first day of classes. Yesterday was our annual Clubsfest and we handed out 1125 waterbottles (pic to come) in an hour and a half! The bottles promoted both our campus libraries and the local public library. Students were asking for them all day! Guess we’ll have to order more next year, although I hope to do more with our welcome week, something more akin to the Ubiquitous Librarians‘ events.
It’s a busy fall ahead, with my distance course to teach, instruction to do, new responsibilities as a liaison and presentations to prepare for.
We’ve been busy at the library. We’ve relaxed our food policy, started an online group study room booking system, are constantly updating our website to function better and are working have a new popular fiction collection. And, I’m going to buy I bought a Second Life Island today! We have 5 new librarians with 2 more on the way and 4 interns to help shake things up too. It’s going to be a busy and interesting fall!
update: I forgot to mention that we added Amazon links to our catalogue and have gotten our first self-check-out machine! – there’s just so much happening!
Just another reason…
It’s not like I needed another reason to want an iPhone, but I’ve recently come across a news piece that states HarperCollins will be providing new book excerpts on iPhone. I wonder what else will be showing up on iPhones.
Odds and Sods
Well, I’ve found a bunch of interesting tidbits. So here they are:
- There was a tremor near-ish my hometown in Nova Scotia. I have relatives in the area of the tremor too. Most unusual for this area. Not big but strange to hear about!
- They’ve found a golden mask for a Thracian king! Most exciting – they’re quite a rare find.
- Work is being done on Open Library. Here’s the site description: “Imagine a library that collected all the world’s information about all the world’s books and made it available for everyone to view and update. We’re building that library.” Kudos! Something we should have been working on for some time now. This is a site to watch!
- Meredith Farkas has a great post on risk-taking. It’s something I think I need to try to do a little more. I’ve done more than I thought I might have but there’s still room for improvement. It’s good to get out of our comfort zone and grow as individuals.
Falling Prices
Finally! For far too long Canadians have been paying for books at a high price. The strength of the loonie is finally going to change that and we can expect to see book prices lower. I’m not sure if CLA has been advocating for this change but it seems the Canadian Booksellers Association has been pushing to reduce book prices. More can be found in this news piece.
New Words
Merriam-Webster is adding new words to their dictionary, including ginormous, sudoku and speed dating. It always amazes me what gets added to a dictionary and sometimes feel that many should be in a slang dictionary instead. That aside, I was pleased to find “gray literature” – defined, at least by the news article, as hard-to-get written material was being added in. Perhaps we’ll be able to help students find it now that it’s officially recognized. The only thing I might change is that gray literature should also include online material as well. Here’s an article on the topic.