Head Tale - Yet Another Librarian's Blog

Hmmm...it doesn't seem to require that you be a librarian, only that you are willing to join CLA for the duration of the term on the jury (which is a 5 year commitment with a requirement that you read ~100 books per year. I've done nearly that for a book awards jury once but doing it for five years straight?

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Call for Volunteers, CLA Young Adult Book Award Committee

The committee is seeking someone who is:

widely read in young adult literature
passionate about connecting teens with books
a member of the Canadian Library Association, or willing to join for the duration of their term on the Committee

Each member of the committee represents a region of Canada, and this year’s applicant must be a resident of Saskatchewan.

We hope to create a Committee that best embodies our national identity. If you are male, a member of the First Nations or a member of a visible minority, you are especially encouraged to apply.

To apply, please submit the following:

· a cover letter

· your resume

· two reviews of recent young adult literature. Reviews may be of novels, collections of short stories or graphic novels.

Please read the complete requirements on the CLA Web site, http://www.cla.ca/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Young_Adult_Canadian_Book_Award

Submissions should be sent by Monday, February 25, 2008 to the Canadian Library Association’s Participation Committee c/o Brenda Shields, bshields@cla.ca; or Don Butcher, Executive Director, dbutcher@cla.ca. Fax to 613-563-9895; mail to 328 Frank St., Ottawa, ON K2P 0X8.

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Silent Banker Trojan?!?

by Jason on Sat 02 Feb 2008 12:00 AM CST

So I was giving my standard "these days, buying online or doing your online banking is as safe, if not safer, than doing it via a real world transaction" line during a public Internet session the other day when some old guy puts up his hand and goes "What about that Silent Banker virus they were talking about on the news the other night?"

I've been on the road for most evenings lately and hadn't seen that particular report so I admited I hadn't heard about it, bluffed some answer about making sure you have your anti-virus program up-to-date and quickly changed the subject.

But after doing some research with the librarian's best friend it sounds like this is a very nasty little program.

Anybody have any more details? How does it get on your computer? Are most anti-virus programs able to catch it with their latest updates? Is there a program out there yet to specifically check for it? The people of rural Saskatchewan (including me!) need answers!

Oh, and speaking of the librarian's best friend, in my training sessions, I always point out that Google isn't the be-all-and-end-all and that there are other search engines that often have vastly different results - Ask.com, MSN Live and Yahoo! being the other main ones right now.

I also get my branch librarians to do a "vanity search" for their own name, first without quotes then within quotes then with a relevant keyword related to themselves ("Saskatchewan" or their community name or "librarian") to illustrate how to use different techniques to improve and refine a Google search.

Even though this is part of the training, I hadn't done a vanity search on my own name for a long time and guess what I realised when I did - "Jason Hammond", even without quotes, brings up my blog as the first result in all of the search engines I listed above EXCEPT Google.

I can't figure it out - before starting my blog, my regular web page used to be the first result for Jason Hamond as well. Now, even though I've submitted my new site to Google via their own URL submitter, it's just not showing up at all - even in the first few pages of results. Using quotes doesn't help and even a search for "head tale" only brings up my site via a third-party listing service called MyBlogLog.com. Very weird.

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