Insomniac Librarians Why sleep when there's field literature?

"I've had all I can stand. I can't stands no more!"

I feel the need to dissect the 2009 LITA National Forum in gory, gory, blow by blow detail.

I must confess I meant to write this a bit earlier during the perfect storm of Budget Season. I couldn't work up the stomach to do so until

I Saw It Again

*sigh*

As someone that was awarded an A in killing people, as well as someone that knows a whole heck of a lot of brave firefighters, I feel as though I can unequivocally say that, yes, we are in the same company as the Army and the Fire Department when it comes down to budget time.

"Why?" you ask. Perhaps "That's absurd!" you posit.

How many times have users posted to the listserv that they'd like to learn all about cataloguing, but they only really have time or the desire to input the Author, Title, and Publication Date? (Or subject, or what have you...) There's a wide array of special Librarians that have to deal with publications that are unique to their organisations. By having the fields tied to the icons and text boxes, but hidden from the user, there should be a lot less fear in this approach.

This part of cataloguing will present the greatest challenge to describe and to implement. I've wrestled for many years in trying to teach volunteers and others how to catalogue. I'm still not secure that I've any authority to do such a thing, but the books must be found.

I'm convinced that what we're doing is more or less a repetitious dance, sort of like a line dance. Ginger Rogers would most certainly make things look better than I, and so it is with Sandy Berman, but we all must do it, and we all _can_ once we learn the process. But what to do before that?

I've a navigation bar on me Mac. I've a navigation bar in World of Warcraft. I don't recall ever seeing a decent, graphical, interactive navigation bar in Library Software. Sure, it's a hassle to programme, but once it's done, we'd be the cool kids on the block again.

Having a step between the general intranet screen and the types of cataloguing available might serve to alleviate some of the user's text information overload.

From time to time, I get emails from various listservs that I'm a part of. This time, my mailbox had a letter from Simmons GSLIS.

The Open Movement and Libraries
Online -- February 1 - 28, 2009
$250 ($200 for Simmons GSLIS alums)

Am I the only one that sees something wrong with this picture? If we're talking about Open Source and Open Access, why are we insisting on closing doors by charging several hundred dollars during a Depression? (Sure, folks are calling this a Recession right now, but that's another story.) The very nature of this screams professional hypocrisy to me.

It's just too busy and too text intensive. I get lost right away. I do like the news box, but maybe that could be smaller on the lower left of my ideal one.

I don't like the text boxes about me text, but it's the best I could manage with what I've got. Ideally, there'd be a text box under circulation that would allow a barcode from either a patron or a book for issues. I'd love to have it so that the middle part of the flow let you flip over to transfers and holds since there's motion in the triskelion graphic. From this screen, or maybe even the log in box, you could have little flags at the bottom for language selection.

BWS Johnson
mhelmanATillinoisalumni.org