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Friday, August 29
Friday Fun Link - 29 Apps for Students and White Collar Workers (Aug 29, 2008)
by
Jason
on Fri 29 Aug 2008 10:52 PM CST
29 Web Apps For Students and White Collar Workers - lots of cool sites here, many of which I'd never seen before.In other news, I had a surreal moment today: I was at a branch near my house today and got talking to a clerk. When I mentioned my new position with RPL, she said she recognized my name when the announcement of my new position went out to all staff at RPL last week. Turns out she used to work at the branch on the other end of the city that I frequented during undergrad...over ten years ago. Apparently "frequented" doesn't begin to cover it! (My immediate thought was "oh no - I'm *that* guy." At Southeast, there were a few patrons who were such heavy users of the library system that everyone on staff knew them by name, professional staff would order books specifically for them, and we all speculated how these people could read the dozens of books they ordered each month. I don't think I was that prolific when I went to that branch a decade ago - perhaps she just remembered me because I was in the category of "regular" rather than "super mega-user"! At least I think that must be it!  )
Saturday, August 23
How I Found Out Who Obama's VP Pick Is
by
Jason
on Sat 23 Aug 2008 08:57 AM CST
Last night, various Reddit users posted links to stories from ABC and other news outlets reporting that the Secret Service had been dispatched to the home of Senator Joe Biden. That wasn't a 100% slam dunk but a pretty good indication of the pending announcement, which Obama's campaign had otherwise managed to keep in great secrecy up until that point. Still, there's a lesson in there about "Internet time" and the fact that nothing's a secret for very long anymore in this day and age.
Friday, August 22
Friday Fun Link - Spreeder - Online Speed Reading Application (Aug 22, 2008)
by
Jason
on Fri 22 Aug 2008 10:06 PM CST
In undergrad, I went to a speed reading seminar put on by the Psych Students Association. Basically, the instructor said that if you just kept training yourself to read more and more "parts" at a time - words then phrases then sentences then paragraphs then pages, you'd be able to speed read books and other materials in no time flat because you'd learn to grab keywords from each "part" and get just as much meaning as if you'd done a careful, thorough reading. The instructor did caution that it required ongoing practice and I think I lasted about a week before I was on to some other flight of fancy to distract myself. Still, that memory came back when I heard about Spreeder.com which bills itself as an online speed-reading application.
Saturday, August 9
What Proportion of Academic Library Books Never Get Read?
by
Jason
on Sat 09 Aug 2008 10:25 PM CST
AskMetaFilter recently featured an interesting question about how many books in a typical University library rarely or never get used.It was timely for me because, although I'm in a public library setting, I'm in the midst of a major weeding project so I've had occasion to look at the usage statistics for over a thousand books in the last couple weeks. I'm happy to report that it is extremely rare to find a book that has never been used. Slightly more common are books that haven't been checked out since the early 1990's (which is when our system automated) and unfortunately quite common to find books that haven't been checked out since the late 1990's to early 2000's (which corresponds to the emergence of the Internet in the consciousness of the general public which is my best guess for this decline/shift in reading habits.)
Make sure you read down to the comment marked as "Best Answer".
On a semi-related note, does anybody know of an organization or method to dispose of a large number of weeded books short of the perennial "LIBRARY BOOK SALE - ON NOW!!!" As always, AskMetafilter has a couple suggestions (I'm only linking to one thread because I can't find the other one that was on the same topic that I saw last week.)
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