jessamyn

hawai’i’s libraries

The Moon Book Club gets foreign language books to Hawai’i’s libraries. Meanwhile, the Hawai’ian library system has 108 staff vacancies.

The library, beset by a critical staffing shortage and other needs, has an annual budget of only $35,000 for buying books in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, Filipino and Vietnamese…. the principal difficulty in expanding the collection is cataloging, especially the Asian titles written in characters that must be romanized for the database. They also must be categorized correctly, and it’s sometimes hard to find resources to help librarians do that. [thanks brandon]

battle of the bands @ your library?

Posted on 04Jun04 by jessamyn

Whiel I am sad that Bloodhag lives too far away to come to my library, I am happy that other libraries are jumping on the loud music band bandwagon. [thanks mac]

Roofie McSleepytime (clown hypnotist) @ your library

Posted on 04Jun04 by jessamyn

Five controversial performers coming to your local library. [thanks lisa]

deaf peopel can make phone calls @ your library

Posted on 04Jun04 by jessamyn

As you’ve seen me write a zillion times, I pretty much don’t review web sites or web apps that aren’t library specific, but I helped a patron use this one in my library yesterday and it’s worth people knowing about. IP-relay.com is a web site put out by MCI that allows deaf and hearing impaired people a web interface to gain access to a relay operator. They type into a chat-like java applet and a specially trained operator then speaks what they type over the phone to whomever they call. There is an extra cool feature where using a video phone people can converse using sign language. A patron can sign to a video phone [for many deaf people this is their first language and English is second] and a relay operator will translate their signs into spoken English. For more information on deaf telecommunication hurdles in the US, I recommend reading A Phone of Our Own: The Deaf Insurrection Against Ma Bell by Harry Lang.

hi – 31may

Posted on 31May04 by jessamyn

Hi. It’s taken me a while to get back on track after travelling. I got some good feedback on my talk from various ALA members and others and am hoping to use it even more in the future. I have also been invited to give a talk on “Emerging Technologies” for a group called Librarians of the Upper Valley [aka LUV] which is the area I live in. I am planning to talk about “technologies” such as voice mail, email, and good signage in addition to more nouvelle tech such as IM, blogs and “ask a librarian” web site features.