Talking in the Library

Audiobook recommendations?

I'm a huge audiobook fan. I tried books on tape years ago and wasn't impressed. The narration was so so and it seemed like so many of the books were abridged. That's not the case anymore, so if you weren't impressed in the past, I would recommend trying them again. 

This may seem weird, but I pick all my audiobooks by narraror instead of author. A good narrarotor is like a good storyteller. Most of what I listen to are books I've read before. Hearing them read by someone makes the story new again. 

I get 90% of my audiobooks from the State Library of Kansas' "Audiobooks, Music, and More!" website. I don't know if that is the official name, but I like to call it that. All you need is a Kansas Library Card. You can get that at your local library or online. While they don't have everything, I think the selection is great. You can download stuff to iPods or other such devices. And the best part is that everything is free. FREE! Yay!

Here are some of my favorites:

Susan Ericksen-In Death series by J.D. Robb

Stephen Colbert-I Am America And So Can You by Stephen Colbert

Stephen J. Dubner-Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt

Michael F. Roizen & Mehmet Oz-You: The Owner's Manual by Michael F. Roizen & Mehmet Oz

Johanna Parker-Sookie Stackhouse by Charlaine Harris 

I'm always on the lookout for a new audiobooks. If you have any recommendations, please share!

Yo grammer is wack

I got called out today for using incorrect grammar. I also got called out for abusing the office plants. Then threatened with the punishment of having to diagram a sentence until I learn to treat the plants better. Why am I sharing this story with you? A) in my head it is a funny story. B) it gives me a reason to share this YouTube video I recently discovered.

So what did I learn? Dumping too much tea into the plants makes the soil very acidic, which is apparently bad. If you are going to do it, don't leave the tea bag in the pot as evidence. And what's most importantly (yeah I wrote that on purpose), check your grammar. Or at least learn to spell.

Vintage

I love looking at old pictures and posters. I was at a conference a while back and discovered that the History of Medicine Division (HMD) of the U.S National Library of Medicine (NLM) has tons of digitized pictures and posters available for viewing.

Here are a few of my favorites. Some of these images are copyrighted, so please be aware of that before you do anything crazy like put them on a t-shirt or print off wallpaper for your bathroom.

Students reveal why and how they use Wikipedia

And they're using it almost exactly the same way I do.

Check out this video from Project Information Literacy, based on interviews conducted with undergraduate students at seven universities in the U.S.

When I work with students beginning, or stuck in the middle of, the research process, I may begin at Wikipedia, too.  Especially if it's a topic I know little to nothing about, like Lewis structures.  This way I can locate other search terms, related concepts, and journal articles, books, conference proceedings, and other sources of information. 

Some students already know my standard caveat speech, but I give it anyway.  "Start with Wikipedia, don't end with Wikipedia.  Any information you find in Wikipedia that you use in your paper/project/speech, you had better be able to confirm (or disprove) with another source, such as a journal article or book."  Another part of the speech, "If you use something in your paper/project/speech that you only found on Wikipedia, you have to cite that Wikipedia article."  As part of the scholarly process, your audience must be able to locate and read/hear/watch your source of information.

By the way, if you download the LibX toolbar, and the references in the Wikipedia article are correct, you may be only a few clicks away from reading or requesting those legit sources.

I'm graduating ... and I'm leery of the interwebs, can I take the Libraries with me?

We're librarians, do we strike you as being the cold-hearted, throw-you-out-into-the-information-wilderness-without-even-a- Swiss-Army-knife types? Of course we're not. 

Graduates retain their online access and checkout privileges until the beginning of the next semester. If you are one of the lucky ones graduating this Friday or Saturday, you'll still be able to search and whatnot until the fall semester begins. If you are graduating in December, the timing isn't as fantabulous. You'll still retain your searching and checkout privileges until the next semester starts, unfortunately the next semester starts just a few weeks later in January.

So then do we chuck you, alone and defenseless, into the series of tubes?  Of course not. We've pulled together the resources that you can use post-graduation on our Alumni Services and Real World Research pages. If you stretch the analogy, these pages are your information Swiss Army knife because they are chock full of useful research tools.

We offer:

• free and open access journals
• databases from the State Library of Kansas (including some old favorites like Expanded Academic and Business & Company Resource Center)
• alumni or non-university user library cards (so you can still check us out)
• links to free research tools (Yahoo! Finance and Internet Archive are just two)

As we continue to discover free and/or open access resources, we'll add them to these pages. Why?  Because we like you.

Image credit: My old Swiss Army knife #01 by Luca Passoni on Flickr.

Fact checking your zombies

After my Pride and Prejudice and Zombies post, a friend told me I had to read a BBC report about swine flu zombies.  The article explained that the hearts of some swine flu victims victims restarted up to two hours after death and the victims then exhibited violent behavior, essentially making them zombies. I didn't want to believe it.  Mostly because of the "that is so wrong and it freaks me out" factor.  I asked a friend who likes medical news stories, the gorier and freakier the better, to look at it first to see if I could handle it. (That's what friends are for: the good times, the bad times, the gory medical news.)  I was assured that I could handle the report and followed this link: http://bouncewith.me.uk/europe/8027043.htm .... and yes, I thought, "That's an odd URL for a BBC report."

As you can see, it looks an awful lot like the BBC website. Apart from the paragraphs reporting "zombism" (is that a word?) it reads like a BBC news article. But the URL still bugged me.  And honestly, zombies?  So I decided to see if I could back up and locate the article from the BBC site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ .  Hey. look at that, the BBC URL actually has the letters "bbc" in it, none of that "bouncewith.me" stuff.  Scanning the news pages unearthed no articles about swine flu zombies.  A search for "zombism" also drew a blank.  "Zombies" revealed articles about hacked computers, music, and movies.  Still no luck with the living dead.

Meanwhile, the friend who sent me the link was also snooping around.  She went to Snopes.com.  Snopes is all about busting (or confirming) the urban and suburban myths.  They declared the swine flu zombie report is....false.

All of this searching and fact checking took about three minutes.  Which is only a drop in the bucket of time when you consider the hours of mockery that will be directed at the person who first sent us this report.  Moral of the story: if it sounds too good, too bizarre, too whatever to be true ... check it out.

We want to know what makes you click

I have a new True Love Forever (sorry, NPR, but we can still be BFF's). Rather than build the suspense, I'm just going to blurt out the identity of my TLF: usability testing.  It is intoxicating and I cannot think of how I went through life without it.  I mean, I've heard others talk about how informative it is.  How useful.  How utterly revealing.  So I've been wanting to try it for years.  But it wasn't until I sat down knee to knee with usability testing that I . . .  well, I swooned.

Let me pause my gushing for a moment and tell you why I am in love with usability testing.  Basically, we can learn if you use things the way we think you use them: things like our website or our catalog.  If you do, awesome, life is good.  If you don't, however, we now have information about how to modify our website so that it does work the way you expect it to.  The obvious outcome being that, if it works the way you expect it to, you will find the information you need.

How do we figure out how you use things like our website?  There are a variety of ways to conduct usability tests.  For this round, we developed some tasks for volunteers to complete using our website.  We have a computer with software loaded on it that will record how the volunteer moves through the website and we have a microphone that will record the volunteer explaining why she (or he) clicked where she did. Plus, a couple of us librarians observe and jot down notes, in case the software goes on strike.  The process for the volunteers takes between 10 and 20 minutes. 

It honestly takes only a few people before we start to see trends, and a few more before we've reached saturation.  (That's a research methods term that I learned this semester--it means that you've hit the point when you've interviewed enough people that you are getting the same information over and over and learning little that's new.)

If usability testing is so out of this world awesome, why weren't we already aboard the usability train?  Mostly, it was because we didn't have the right mix of time, resources, and interest.  But, this fall, we hit that sweet spot of synergy.  A small group of us in the Libraries (Dale Askey, Thomas Bell, Jennny Dale, Donna Ekart, Steven Shelton, and myself, with support from our building services, finance, and tech people) came together and began planning.  That planning flowered last week with our first usability testing.  Right now, we're looking at how well people can find information on our website.  

Once we've gathered and reviewed the results, we'll submit our findings to our library interfaces team.

Usability testing is an ongoing, iterative process, and you can trust that this is just the first of many usability studies we conduct.  Because, we all need to remember, "If the user can't find it, the function's not there."

Image credit: Usability Testing in Progress by Roebot on Flickr.com

Podiobooks and Free Music Archive

At last, free audio books and music, with the added bonus of being guilt-free.

I'm always on the lookout for podcasts and audiobooks that I can listen to while I'm weeding or mowing or otherwise trying to keep my yard from looking like an abandoned lot.  So, I was excited (maybe even jumped up and down) when I stumbled across Podiobooks.  Podiobooks are free(!) serialized books that are released as podcasts.  My first listen has been The Secret World Chronicles by Mercedes Lackey and Steve Libby, read by Veronica Giguere.  Love it.  For you authors out there, Podiobooks welcomes you work.

The next find wasn't mine, it was Tara Coleman's.  But she apparently doesn't love you all enough to  share it.  I do, however.  If you're on the lookout for free music, try the Free Music Archive--especially if you want to move away from the overplayed on the radio variety of music.  While I'm tempted to linger on "Everyone in Town Wants you Dead" in the Old Time/Historic genre, there's plenty to hear under rock, international, country, R&B, and other genres.

The best bit is that both Podiobooks and the Free Music Archive operate under Creative Commons licenses, which means that the authors and artists, rather than publishers or producers, get to decide whether works can be downloaded for free (and here, they can) and to what extent you, the listener, can remix or modify their work.  Each song or podcast will list the license.  So, if I'm intrigued by Glass Candy's Iko! Iko! (vocal/conga mix), I learn that the license for this song is a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. And clicking on that license will explain exactly what Glass Candy is agreeing to let me do with the song.

Compose a poem with virtual magnetic poetry

In observation of National Poetry Month, day 2, I give you Magnetic Poetry--and you don't even need a refrigerator to use it. Simply choose a poet or style and follow the directions on the page to move the words, edit existing words, or add your own.  (By the way, I did encounter an obnoxious ad before being allowed to play.)

OK, here's my poem.  I worked very hard on it, so please feel free to mock.  I chose Angela Carter, by the way.

Labyrinth
hothouse phosphorescence
soaked dandelion tufts
wildflowers glitter through satin thickets
prisms sprouting mossy rain

Got the poetry bug?  Post your own poem in the comments.

From Sebelius to Parkinson

The big news in Kansas is that President Obama nominated Governor Kathleen Sebelius for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services.  If she is confirmed by the Senate, that means we're down a governor.  Well, not really.  What it really means is that our Lieutenant Governor, Mark Parkinson, will drop the Lieutenant from his job title and become Kansas Governor.  And then we're down a lieutenant governor until a new one is named. Now, I could pretend I knew before this week that a) we had a Lieutenant Governor* and b) that his name is Mark Parkinson, but I'm trying to be more truthful, so I won't.

In addition to my true love forever, NPR, I learn more about our government from Kansas Government Information, a cool blog from the State Library of Kansas.  And, since I'm a librarian and congenitally incapable of keeping any cool information to myself, I share this information with you. The latest post from Kansas Government Information is all about Sebelius's nomination, who Parkinson is, and what the Department of Health and Human Services does.

*Although, thanks to Benson, I did know that such a position as Lieutenant Governor existed, so I wasn't completely uninformed.