...I thought I'd write a quick post about the book I'm currently reading, seeing as it was written by a woman, 'n' all.
Janet Flanner was a New York journalist, acquainted with such luminaries as Dorothy Parker. In the early 1920s she settled in Paris with New York Tribune drama writer Solita Solano on, as the American National Biography Online puts it, 'the Left Bank of Paris near other American expatriates and lesbians'. From 1925 until 1975 she wrote a bi-weekly 'Letter from Paris' column above the pseudonym 'Genêt' in the New Yorker magazine.
I hadn't heard of Flanner until late last year, when I was browsing through the Smithsonian National PortraitGallery's exhibition 'Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture' (Flanner appears in the section on modernism).
I ordered up the book from the local library, and have been not getting round to reading it for a couple of months now. That's rather a shame - the writing is *wonderful*, and I know very little about the history of post-war France (its recovery from occupation and collaboration) so it's a good education, too. Sadly it's due back at the Library on Friday, and I still have 400+ pages to go.
With a Radio 4 habit like mine, and even without an mp3 player, you bet that I can do podcasts! Life would be unthinkable without being able to listen (again) to The Now Show, Test Match Special summaries (not to be missed just for Aggers and Boycott laying into each other), or last year's superlative Life Stories by David Attenborough (podcasts sadly no longer available, though you can buy the CD or book).
Venturing outside the Radio 4 enclave, I recently discovered the University's Streaming Media Service, after a College Fellow mentioned to the Librarian that Prof. Schaffer had mentioned our Library (favorably) in this year's Tarner Lectures, and I was tasked with checking this out. The SMS hosts audio and video from Departments and Colleges, and you can register for an account online if you think you'll want to upload some content of your own. I have plans to use this service to make publicly available talks given in the future as part of outreach events here at St John's, subject to the agreement of the speakers and to obtaining decent recordings.
Coming to YouTube, I'm sure that we've all searched it for TV programmes we half-remember from our childhoods, haven't we? Today's miscellany of disturbing mid-80s cartoon and live-action is brought to you by Jimbo, King Rollo, Fingermouse and Pob.
But none of this yet directly impinges on libraries. Never fear, there's a viral video for every occasion, and today's occasion is Masters of Library Science Croquet (via almost everyone on Twitter).
Still not what I'm supposed to be doing? OK. *stomps off to find headphones and time*
I've now had a listen to a few of the Cam23 suggested podcasts. I started at the British Library, first browsing by type and finding a public lecture about the future of taxonomy and then browsing by exhibition, and finding a short information piece by curator Vrej Nersessian on the Awag Vank' Gospels and the history of Christianity in Armenia.When I took off snuffling round the BL website to find the online version of the Sacred exhibition in order to see a picture of these gospels (BL Or. MS 13654), I was very pleased to find that the podcast in available there too, and with a transcription, to boot. This level of integration is what really makes for a good website visit. The taxonomy lecture was also interesting (in a Radio 4 sort of way), and although it did lack something for not having the presenter's slides visible, I think it was still worthwhile for the BL to have made it available. I have plans to upload a podcast of a forthcoming library event, hopefully with accompanying gallery of pictures, and these two examples have been useful in directing my thinking about that.
Next up I had a look at the CILIP and JISC podcast pages. I must confess to not having listened to anything from either of them, and I'm blaming that on them. With the CILIP page I'm just not sure what I'm getting - it looks disordered, and there's also not much to choose from. JISC has much more choice, but no summaries. The topics aren't really my favourites, and with no extra information (date, length, or content) on the main page, I don't feel tempted to click through.
User-education wise I looked at the Goldsmiths Library tour podcasts. I kinda like the idea of a tour round the library, though I'm not sure how many people would actually use the audio tour in situ. But I could imagine myself printing off the scripts as a guide to the building, so there's definitely some merit there.
Overall I'm ambivalent about library podcasts. The thing is that I like listening to things for pleasure, but for work I'd rather read. If I had a commute to work (and an ipod) maybe it would be different then I'd probably would listen to JISC-style professional interest podcasts as well as the best of Radio 4. And if there's a video of how to do something, then I will watch that if I can't find written instructions, although I'll almost always watch with the sound off, so it had better have on-screen text! But otherwise, I'm likely only to watch or listen for fun.
But because I'm me, I leave you with this little link to the BBC Archive. It's a series of six ten-minute programmes in which genius of twentieth-century physics Richard Feynman sits in a old blue armchair and talks to camera about science. If you know nothing about atoms or quantum mechanics you'll love it. If you have a PhD in physics and now work at CERN you'll probably love it.
-------- *No nudity actually involved.
**Conflict of interest disclaimer: one of my housemates is a Naked Scientist, and pretty much all of the house, its contents, and inhabitants have featured in Naked Scientist content one way or another. Yes, that is my cello, our tea set, our garden and our very own gherkinator. If we ever invite you to a party do come, because thereislikelytobefire.
I might not like LibraryThing for a range of what I consider to be good, librarianly, search-and-organisation based reasons, but it isn't 'alf addictive. And useful - the different default collections, including 'wishlist' and 'read but unowned' neatly solve two problems: I don't really like keeping a wishlist on Amazon (I have pinko-liberal lentil-knitting views about what Amazon has done to local bookshops) and I like to keep a record of what I've read in libraries but am bad at doing so on paper (the notebook is never nearby when I want it). This new-found addiction is also driven in no small part by seeing what recommendations will appear when the collection is broader - at the moment a lot of suggested works are just further books in series that I already part own.
So without really meaning too, I'm up to 70-ish books now, and just by thinking about what I've got lying around at home. A methodical assault on the shelves might lead to the purchase of a life account. Not a lot to do with work in libraries, and a big ol' drain on my time. Oops.
Edited to add: I've just found the 'Local' tab, and it turns out that there's already an entry for the library in which I work. We've got some events coming up (as part of Open Cambridge), so I've added those. Every little publicity helps.
So, the end of my last post saw me confused and infuriated by a LibraryThing that didn't really live up to my expectations. But whispersinthewilderness has reassured me that I can get full book information when I have an account, and in compliance with the 23 Things instructions I've signed myself up.
Adding books (even after photographing my most difficult bookshelf and cataloguing it remotely without dates or ISBNs) is easy enough, although I'd still like to be able to limit searches and filter results by date. Some of the more obscure things I own were found successfully, even my most favourite book ever, a German translation of a Mexican novel that I bought for a few Marks from a stand outside a corner bookshop in a suburb of Bonn one rainy November lunchtime in 2001 (oh, happy days!). I did have to search a number of German library catalogues to find it, and it turns out that I'm the only LibraryThinger to have it, so I hope everyone's impressed with my recheché tastes!
Weirdly, it's not possible to add a book to your own library from its page in LibraryThing - when you click on the 'add to my library' link you have to choose a databse to search for it. But for obscure things, it's hard to know which database to choose, and for ephemera it can be necessary to add the details from scratch. So adding it can take ages, even when other people have already clearly got it. I don't really understand why a new entry can't just be linked to what's already there. So some of my collection of comic strip pamphlets haven't made it on because I'm too lazy. This is a shame - it's for the really obscure things that I think it would be most fun to connect with other readers.
I've added an arbitrary selection of 36 books from my shelves, including my small collection of Little Princes, but I'm not sure I'll ever keep this up, either for new acquisitons or retrospectively. For the nosey, here's a widget of my shelves:
Overall, I can see that there's a lot of good in LibraryThing, for libraries and librarians, library users and book lovers. But I'm not sure that it and I can overcome our rocky start together.
