Ashes and Snow

I know that I dropped a TedTalk on you a while ago, but that site never ceases to amaze. Cate dug this one up, and I should have posted it a while ago.

Note that if you have trouble watching the video here, or want to surf the TedTalk site (recomended) and still haven't figured out that most of the titles in my blog are links, click through... HERE!

TEDTalks : Gregory Colbert

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Gregory Colbert's video, as well as an exhibit of his photography, is permanently housed in an impermanent place: The Nomadic Museum. No worries, though, it will probably never come anywhere near where you live. Since 2002 it has visited Venice, New York, Santa Monica (i.e. suburban L.A.) and now Tokyo. I'm thinking that Canada is pretty far down the list.

Cheers

Printers are liars

A new study commissioned by Epson has found that even the best ink jet printers (not surprisingly, Epson) announce that ink cartridges are empty when they are still 20% full. The study tags Kodak's EasyShare 5300 as the worst. It helpfully tells you that your cartidge is empty when it drops below 64% capacity.

So it's probably best to take that "Cartridge Empty" notice as sort of a heads up that you should get a new one whenever it is convenient. Then don't switch it up until you actually see unacceptably pale prints spitting out of your machine.

Cheers

Hamilton Who?

Okay, so if Balsille does manage to move the Nashville Predators to Hamilton, I hope that he has the good sense to change their nickname. It's obvious what they were trying to communicate, but really is just sounds like 20 guys on the Sex Offender Registry. I can just see the headlines:

"Hamilton Predator Chris Mason Visits Boy's School"

I don't think that would be very good brand management.

For music lovers...

I hear through the grapevine that some people want more updates to the blog (Hi Wayne!). I wish I could. I suppose that I could take 5 minutes every day and just say nothing, or do a link dump more often. I sort of feel like I have too many posts already that are just Youtube clips or links without much comment or insight.

That being said... Oh my freaking God!!

Legendary concert promoter Bill Graham has put a gazillion concert recordings up on his website. You have to pay to download them, but if you just want to stream them they're free.

http://concerts.wolfgangsvault.com/

It is unreal the concerts that are on here. I'm listening to a 1983 Bowie concert from Montreal right now. There are about 450 concerts altogether. There's Springsteen ('73, '88), Stevie Ray Vaughn ('84), Hendrix ('68), Pretenders ('80), U2 ('81, '83), The Cure ('84), Blondie ('78), and a crapload more.

He got out of the business in the early '90s, so there's not much from that era and beyond. But there's a bit of every musical style and taste in there.

Cheers

Bush Fleeced

You know the fact that Bush had his pocket picked in Albania doesn't really bother me. Nope. It's the lingering suspicion that this happens to him all the time that makes me feel uneasy.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but he's incredibly wealthy, moves in the highest circles of power, is not up for re-election, and wears a $50 watch. He just gave up after he lost the first dozen Rolexes to the Joint Cheifs of Staff ("Hey guys, give it back! I know one of you has it.") and started buying cheap Timex.

Cheers

Beginning of the end for Dewey?

I know that I don't often get into the minutiae of librarianship on this blog, but this is a development that I will be following with interest.

Prelinger Library has done away with the Dewey Decimal Classifaction system (DDC) in favour of broader (and quirkier) subject groupings. The Gilbert Public Library in Arizona has followed suit -- albiet with more traditional subject groupings. It is an interesting concept although not terribly revolutionary, in my opinion, given that DDC already maps to subjects anyway. DDC has a finer granulation, though, so when you find one book on a topic, the books around it will be on the same sub-topic and sub-sub-topic.

DDC's performance varies, depending on how well it has been developed for a certain subject (and there are a few factors that determine which subjects work better than others), but the approach could generally be characterized as: leading the browsing patron from the inside-out of a subject. You start with a relatively specific topic, then browse outwards to very closely related topics, and up to more general subjects.

Organizing the same collection by very broad topics would lead the browser from a specfic book to more by the same author (assuming it is a bookstore-like system) then to other authors who write in the same broad category. By increasing the granularity of the subject-groupings, there are more opportunities for connections between works that would take longer to browse to in a more granular system and new-authors on a favorite topic might be found more easily through browsing.

Ironically, I think that this change would tend to increase reliance on the catalogue. In my experience, users aren't very good at finding everything they want in library catalogues (or on Google, for the matter) and usually end up selecting something that is "good enough". When a library patron finds good enough, she or he is going to then browse the stacks for related works that might also be useful.

If the granularity is too big, then finding a "good enough" book in the catalogue will not create any better browsing opportunities than just going to the broad subject area. If you have a fairly focused information need, "good enough" will no longer cut it. Each of the books on a more specific topic will be scattered throughout the stacks. If you do not have a relatively focused information need, then well, isn't one arbitrary system as good as another when you are browsing?

The Prelinger intrigues me because the unique arrangement has a point and a politics. The system is designed to lead the browser through a subject area in such a way as to teach something of the historical and intellectual ebb and flow of the topic. That's cool. I'm not sure it would work with a more general collection, though. Then again, with a broad and general collection, the staff could take turns re-arranging the collection based on their own biases, interests, expertise, sense-of-humour, or whatever.

But for Prelinger's scope and purpose, it is worth tracking, I think.

The Gilbert system just seems like lazyiness. Less effort by cataloguers. No value added for browsers or devoted searchers. Most public libraries that I've been to have compromised the granularity of DDC with signage. I'm not actually a big fan of DDC specifically, and would love to see an alternative make a run at DDC's ubiquity. But I also think that any system is better than no system when you are trying to accomodate a broad variety of information needs and practices.

(via Metafilter)

Cheers

Last word on the tire swing

Apparently, a few days after the tire swing disappeared it was replaced with a new one. Sometime on Thursday or Friday night, the entire tree was cut down.

That is all.

Elimination Dance

1. Anyone who has touched a library book.




(credit: Ruben Bolling's Tom the Dancing Bug.)