Mom has been using this homemade laundry detergent all year and giving bottles of it to my sister and I (and anyone else who asks). It cost her around $12 for a year’s worth of laundry (or so I remember), even with giving stuff away, and she has leftover ingredients to cut the cost for this year. I’m gonna make a batch for myself after I move into my new digs.
Month: January 2010
Ithaka’s What to Withdraw tool
Have you seen the tool that Ithaka developed to determine what print scholarly journals you could withdraw (discard/store) that are already in your digital collections? It’s pretty nifty for a spreadsheet. About 10-15 minutes of playing with it and a list of our print holdings resulted in giving me a list of around 200 or so actionable titles in our collection, which I passed on to our subject liaison librarians.
The guys who designed it are giving some webinar sessions, and I just attended one. Here are my notes, for what it’s worth. I suggest you participate in a webinar if you’re interested in it. The next one is tomorrow and there’s one on February 10th as well.
Background
- They have an organizational commitment to preservation: JSTOR, Portico, and Ithaka S+R
- Libraries are under pressure to both decrease their print collections and to maintain some print copies for the library community as a whole
- Individual libraries are often unable to identify materials that are sufficiently well-preserved elsewhere
- The What to Withdraw framework is for general collections of scholarly journals, not monographs, rare books, newspapers, etc.
- The report/framework is not meant to replace the local decision-making process
What to Withdraw Framework
- Why do we need to preserve the print materials once we have a digital version?
- Fix errors in the digital versions
- Replace poor quality scans or formats
- Inadequate preservation of the digital content
- Unreliable access to the digital content
- Also, local politics or research needs might require access to or preservation of the print
- Once they developed the rationales, they created specific preservation goals for each category of preservation and then determined the level of preservation needed for each goal.
- Importance of images in journals (the digitization standards for text is not the same as for images, particularly color images)
- Quality of the digitization process
- Ongoing quality assurance processes to fix errors
- Reliability of digital access (business model, terms & conditions)
- Digital preservation
- Commissioned Candace Yano (operations researcher at UC Berkeley) to develop a model for copies needed to meet preservation goals, with the annual loss rate of 0.1% for a dark archive.
- As a result, they found they needed only two copies to have a >99% confidence than they will still have remaining copies left in twenty years.
- As a community, this means we need to be retaining at least two copies, if not more.
Decision-Support Tool (proof of concept)
- JSTOR is an easy first step because many libraries have this resource and many own print copies of the titles in the collections and Harvard & UC already have dim/dark archives of JSTOR titles
- The tool provides libraries information to identify titles held by Harvard & UC libraries which also have relatively few images
Future Plans
- Would like to apply the tool to other digital collections and dark/dim archives, and they are looking for partners in this
- Would also like to incorporate information from other JSTOR repositories (such as Orbis-Cascade)
book swap/sale
I’ve been complaining for years about how many books I have piled up in my house that I haven’t read yet. Well, in preparation for moving across town to a new apartment, I’ve pulled out a bunch of them that I’ve decided I can re-acquire or borrow if/when I get around to reading them. Please do me a favor and take some off of my hands!
The books I have for trade are listed on PaperBackSwap, so they’re only available in the US. I thought about listing them on BookMooch, which is international, but I have a pile of credits over there and almost never get a book coming to me, whereas with PBS, I seem to have more luck.
The books I have for sale are listed on Half and Amazon, but you’ll get a better deal by purchasing them through Half. Two reasons: I priced them lower there because I get about $0.50 more per book due to different fee structures, and you save on shipping if you buy more than one, which Amazon does not do.
Finally, I have some BookCrossing books that I need to, um, bookcross. If you’d like any of them, please let me know and maybe we can work something out.
library day in the life – round 4
Hello. I’m the electronic resources librarian at the University of Richmond, a small private liberal arts university nestled on the edge of suburbia in a medium-sized mid-Atlantic city. Today I am participating in the Library Day in the Life Project for its fourth round. Enjoy!
8:30am Arrive, turn on computer, and go get a cup of coffee from the coffee shop attached to the library. By the time I return, the login screen is displayed, and thus begins the 5 minute long process of logging in and then opening Outlook, Firefox, and TweetDeck. Pidgin starts on its own, thankfully. Update location on FourSquare. (Gotta keep my mayorship!)
8:40am Check schedule on Outlook, note the day’s meeting times, and then check the tasks for the day. At this point, I see that it’s time for a DILO, so I start this entry.
8:50am Weed through the new emails that arrived over the weekend. Note that there is more spam than normal. In the middle of this, my boss cancels one of two meetings today. (w00t!)
9:15am Email processed and sorted into folders and labels. Time to dig into the day’s tasks and action items. Chatty coworkers in the cube farm prompt me to load Songbird and don headphones.
9:25am Send a reminder to the LIB 101 students registered for my seminar on Friday. Work out switching reference desk shifts because my Wednesday LIB 101 seminar conflicts with my regular Wednesday shift. Also send out a note requesting trades for next week’s shifts, since I’ll be away at ER&L.
9:40am Cleared all action items and to-do items, so now it’s time to dig into my current project — gathering 2009 use statistics.
10:30am Electronic resources workflow planning meeting for the next year with an eye towards the next five years.
11:00am Back to gathering use stats. I’ve been working on this for over two weeks, and I’m a little over half-way through. I’d be further along if I could dedicate all my time to it, but unfortunately, meetings, desk schedules, and other action items get in the way.
12:15pm Hunger overrides my obsessive hunt for stats. I brought my lunch with me today, but often I end up grabbing something on the go while I run errands.
1:10pm Process the email that has come in over the past two hours. Only two action items added (yay!) and both are responses to request for information from this morning (yay!), so I’m happy to see them.
1:15pm Back to the side-yet-related project that I started on shortly before lunch. We have a bunch of journals in the “Multiple Vendors :: Single Journals” category in our ERMS, and I’m moving them over to their specific publisher listings if I can, checking to see if we have use stats for them, and requesting admin info when we don’t. There are only about 55 titles, so I’m hoping to get most of this done before my reference desk shift at 3.
3:00pm I’m only half-way through the side-yet-related project, but I have to set it down and go to my reference desk shift now. Answering many technology questions from a retired woman who is attempting to take a class that requires her to use Blackboard and view PowerPoints and things that are highly confusing to her. Checking out netbooks to students and showing them how to scan documents to PDF using the copiers rather than making a bunch of copies. Also, catching up on RSS feeds between the questions.
5:00pm Desk shift over. I have just enough time to wrap up my projects for the day and prep for tomorrow, grab a quick bite to eat, and then I’m off to the other side of campus where I have choir rehearsal until 7pm.
Thank you for reading!
2009 reckoning
Once again I attempted to read 50 books in a year, and once again I failed. Well, actually, I pretty much gave up on it early on, so it’s no surprise to me that I didn’t get there. Anyway, here are the books I read last year (I read a lot more than just books, but these are all that I’m counting):
- Don’t Stop Believin’: How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life by Brian Raftery
- Vulcan’s Forge by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz
- Vulcan’s Heart by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz
- Vulcan’s Soul Trilogy Book One: Exodus by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz
- Vulcan’s Soul Trilogy Book Two: Exiles by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz
- Vulcan’s Soul Trilogy Book Three: Epiphany by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz
- Slurp: Drinks and Light Fare, All Day, All Night by Jim Hensley, Nina Dreyer Hensley, and Paul Lowe
- Of Mule and Man by Mike Farrell
- The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition, and Get a Truly International Education by Maya Frost
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
- I’m Off Then: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santiago by Hape Kerkeling
- Libyrinth by Pearl North
- Kilimanjaro: A Photographic Journey to the Roof of Africa by Michel Moushabeck & Hiltrud Schulz
- Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino
- Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi
- Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
My pleasure reading was mostly Spock, and all of the non-fiction was either for review or for a book group discussion. This weekend I went through my bookshelves and pulled about 80 books that I’m either selling or trading away because I haven’t read them yet and will probably get them from the library if/when I ever get around to reading them. The nice thing is that in the process of doing this, I was reminded of books I’ve wanted to read for a long time but have forgotten I have them sitting on my shelves already.
One book down already for 2010, and hopefully more to follow it. In fact, I think I’ll go start on The Ghost Brigade right now.
