What Happens at the Reference Desk When no Patrons are in Sight

Laughter. Yep. We reference librarians often end up laughing. Here's how tonight's laughter started.

• reviews on Will Smith's new movie
• excitment about the Underworld movie
• why werewolves and vampires can't ever get along
• reading Anita Blake
• reading the passage in Sunshine about wereskunks and werechickens
• McDonald's commerical about a man turning into a chicken (if you can find this, please send me a link. )
• more about werechickens
• zombie chickens
• Poultrygeist

Nasa Photos

Nasa just released some new photos of the earth. I just had to share my favorites.

The sunlight off the Amazon River in Brazil.

And polar mesopheric clouds over Central Asia.

You can find more photos of earth from space at Nasa's Earth Observatory.

Things, Things, and more Things

So the reason I haven't posted in a while is because I have been on vacation. I took a week long cruise to Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. And then I spent another couple of days in New Orleans. When your cruise ship goes in and out of New Orleans, you can't not stay there for a day or two. I will post more about the Great Cruise of 2008 later. When I get all my pictures back. Yes, I took a lot with my new digital camera, but I also finished up a roll and half of regular film too.



So on the the Things.



Del.icio.us Thing

I suppose you could call del.icio.us a tag organizer as well as a really fancy bookmarker. It lets you label websites with whatever type of tag you want. You can search and create tags. You can even add a del.icio.us button to your web browser tool bar so can tag sites as you surf. Tagging websites it like adding subject headings to them, but we're not limited to technical language like we are with Library of Congress Subject Headings. We can use real language and not technical jargon.



For a little extra fun with del.icio.us, I found a site call Wordle that will turn your tags into artwork like this:

Technorati Thing

Technorati is a site you can use to find out what's hot in blogs and news. What's gaining the most attention; who's looking at what and how often. I think you can use this site to find out how often your own blog is being looked at. I haven't checked on this yet, but I have claimed my blog. Someone remind me to look at this again, after the holidays, when I have more time. Hopefully.

Wiki Thing

The last thing for today is the Wiki. Ah yes, the wiki. A little piece of technology that lets anyone and everyone pool their knowledge together in one place. This can sometimes get people in trouble. Especially those whose intentions are not pure. You know the ones I'm talking about. The ones that deliberately put wrong information out there in order to deceive their fellow men. But we don't know anyone like that, do we?

I haven't set up any of my own wiki's. I don't think I'm ready for that. But I am part of a wiki for work. We have a wiki where we post and create documents to help us with Reader's Advisory Training. We don't have much up there yet, but there's lots of potential. It should get more use after we start teaching the RA classes.

More Reasons to Love GoodReads

If you haven't heard about GoodReads yet, then you really need to go there right now and explore.

I just got signed off after adding new books to my "read" list, which is quite an accomplishment for me. Usually I add books to my "to-read" list. I think for every book gets read, I add at least two more to the "to-read" pile.

They've added something new. Book giveaways. They're about 20 books that are in the giveaway list right now. To find the list, you have to click on "explore", then "books". So what are you waiting for? Don't you like free books? Okay, so its a random drawing with only so many copies available, but they show you how many people want the books and how many copies they're giving away, so you can calculate your chances. If you're that type of smart, that is. Me, I just enter and cross and my fingers.