random musings from a serialist
Yay!: Coming up with a great idea for a research article. Boo!: Doing a literature search and discovering that someone else recently published an article on the same topic. Oh, well. Back to slogging through email and end/beginning of fiscal year paperwork.
Yay!: Coming up with a great idea for a research article.
Boo!: Doing a literature search and discovering that someone else recently published an article on the same topic.
Oh, well. Back to slogging through email and end/beginning of fiscal year paperwork.
I’ve got invites for anyone interested in joining la la. Send me an email or leave a comment. So far, I’ve sent out three CDs and received four, and all it cost me was $3, since the first one was free. la la provides all of the mailing stuff, so no trips to the post … Continue reading “you can hear ’em singing la la la”
I’ve got invites for anyone interested in joining la la. Send me an email or leave a comment. So far, I’ve sent out three CDs and received four, and all it cost me was $3, since the first one was free. la la provides all of the mailing stuff, so no trips to the post office or packaging supply store required.
It’s been a quiet month here at eclectic librarian dot net…. Actually, my non-digital life has been eventful and not at all quiet or boring. However, very little of it has been relevant to the focus of this blog, so I haven’t written much about it. Also, I’ve been saving my creative literary juices for … Continue reading “writing”
It’s been a quiet month here at eclectic librarian dot net…. Actually, my non-digital life has been eventful and not at all quiet or boring. However, very little of it has been relevant to the focus of this blog, so I haven’t written much about it. Also, I’ve been saving my creative literary juices for an essay I am contributing to a book about electronic resource librarians. I will need every drop of those creative literary juices if I’m going to get anything decent cranked out. I’ll be happy when it’s done. Formal writing is unpleasant and bothersome.
One thing that I have learned about myself in writing this essay is that my perception of the digital revolution is skewed in a way I had never fully realized before. My family first purchased a PC in the late 1980s. It had two 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drives and no hard drive to speak of. The monitor was green monochrome, and although we had a mouse, we rarely needed to use it. In grade school through high school, I used various Apple computers and the occasional PC, but none of them were networked. I began college in 1994 and discovered the networked computer labs. My concept of the whole thing was still very hazy, but I understood that the computers were all connected to each other somehow, and more importantly, to the printer. In the spring of 1995, I received my first email account. I didn’t know anyone to email besides my friends at the university. I still remember a painful telephone conversation with the father of my high school best friend, trying to transcribe the @ symbol so I could email my friend. However, by the fall of 1996, my university connected with the World Wide Web, and a whole new world was opened up to me. I discovered Yahoo! and listservs and guitar tablature and and…
To me, the Internet began in 1995/1996. Over time, that has evolved to include integrated library systems, online public access catalogs, and just about anything electronic in libraries, even though I know better. In high school I used an OPAC terminal to look up books at my local public library, and I have vague recollections of using a telnet session to search ArticleFirst and WorldCat for research in the first few years of college. These things existed long before my experiences with the Internet, but over the years I have forgotten or ignored that fact, and it is coming back to haunt me now.
My essay is about the evolution of serials librarians to electronic resource librarians, where applicable. Once again, my own perspective has come in to trip me up. Before I started my research, I placed the beginning of the electronic revolution somewhere around 1999/2000. Probably because that is when I became more aware of electronic resources and ceased using print indexes for research. In reality, it was a decade or two earlier. My fear is that my skewed perceptions of the history of technology will taint the essay and make me look like a complete fool to my colleagues. Then again, if they have been reading this blog, they already know me for the fool I am.
I have recently switched my personal emailing entirely over to my Gmail account. In the past year, I’ve been using it for Where’s George hit notifications, Geocaching.com messages, and new BookCrossing messages and journal entry notifications. I continued to use my SpamCop webmail account for other personal emailing. However, when it came time to renew … Continue reading “gmail coolness”
I have recently switched my personal emailing entirely over to my Gmail account. In the past year, I’ve been using it for Where’s George hit notifications, Geocaching.com messages, and new BookCrossing messages and journal entry notifications. I continued to use my SpamCop webmail account for other personal emailing. However, when it came time to renew my account ($30/yr), I decided that it was time to move on. I’ve found that changing my email address every few years keeps the spam down. Even with the excellent spam filters, I was getting 10-15 spam messages a day sent to my SpamCop account, some of which were not filtered to the Held Mail folder. In the past 15 days that I’ve been using Gmail exclusively for all of my non-work emailing, I’ve been very happy with it. It’s managing threads of conversations much better than any email system I’ve used in the past. And, since it’s a relatively new account, I have gotten maybe fifteen spam messages in the past year. Not bad.
This past year, I received permission to set up a book exchange bookshelf in the group study area in the library. It’s not exactly an OBCZ, but it functions as such. I set up a separate account on BookCrossing and started registering books left there using that account rather than my regular one. I had been using my work email for that account, but I felt a bit uncomfortable about it. Also, I suspected that sometimes private messages and journal entry notifications were not getting through the campus email filters. I thought about setting up a Gmail account for that, but the idea of having to check yet another email account did not appeal to me. Then I realized I could just have everything forwarded from the library BookCrossing email account to my regular Gmail account. Brilliant! In no time I had the second account set up and forwarding messages. Thank you, Google!
Long-time readers and friends probably know my thoughts on the Librarian Action Figure. I’ve mellowed a bit over time, and have even had a little fun with it. Now Archie McPhee has a deluxe edition that comes with a “library diorama” that includes a computer with what looks like an email message and an IM … Continue reading “okay, okay, i want one”
Long-time readers and friends probably know my thoughts on the Librarian Action Figure. I’ve mellowed a bit over time, and have even had a little fun with it. Now Archie McPhee has a deluxe edition that comes with a “library diorama” that includes a computer with what looks like an email message and an IM chat window open on the screen. I think this is a Librarian Action Figure that I wouldn’t mind finding in my Christmas stocking (or as a birthday gift – you’ve got exactly one month to get it to me).
I’ve reinstated the option to subscribe to updates via email. It wasn’t used much in the past, so I quit bothering with it and took it off of menu. Now I’m making use of a service called RMail that takes the automatically generated RSS feed and turns it into an email message sent to subscribers. … Continue reading “subscribe via email”
I’ve reinstated the option to subscribe to updates via email. It wasn’t used much in the past, so I quit bothering with it and took it off of menu. Now I’m making use of a service called RMail that takes the automatically generated RSS feed and turns it into an email message sent to subscribers. You can sign up using the text box in the left column on the main page of this blog (scroll down a bit). It doesn’t like FeedBurner, so I had to create a new feed just for this.
update:
Well, that was odd. Yesterday I got a weird database error when I tried the form using my FeedBurner feed, but today after reading the comment below, I tried it again and it worked fine. Just so you know, you won’t get a confirmation page from RMail, it just sends you back to the page you signed up on. However, you will need to confirm the subscription via email.
New email users and those overwhelmed by the size of their inboxes will find this book useful.
Degunking Your Email, Spam, and Viruses by Jeff Duntemann
Duntemann is a co-founder of Paraglyph Press, the publisher of this how-to computer book. His previous publications include Degunking Windows (Paraglyph) and Assembly Language Step-by-Step (Wiley), and he has been writing technical books for the geeks and the plebes for many years. I was immediately drawn to the accessible, common language used in the book. Although, I did find it difficult that he tends to use some non-standard terms several times before actually defining them (ie mailbase).
You’d think that a feed agregator would have a feed for its own newsletter.
Bloglines has announced that they have a new newsletter to “help inform you and provide a glimpse into the different ways people are using the service.” I found great irony in the following paragraph from the announcement:
You can choose to receive the newsletter via email or simply stay subscribed to Bloglines News, and we’ll let you know when each issue is posted.
I guess having an RSS feed for the newsletter and its contents would make too much sense.
If it takes me three weeks or more to reply to your email, it’s because I love you.
If it takes me three weeks or more to reply to your email, it’s because I love you.
The Gay Librarian writes:
The Gay Librarian has a very bad habit of, call it procrastination if you will, putting important personal things on the back burner until he has more time to give them the attention they deserve. An email from a friend he hasn
Am I the only person who gets irritated by the flood of out of office auto reply messages after posting to a discussion list?
Am I the only person who gets irritated by the flood of out of office auto reply messages after posting to a discussion list? I think these people do it out of ignorance. They don’t know that by setting their auto reply and remaining subscribed to the discussion list, they will be sending an auto reply to every single person who posts a message to that list. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t use the auto reply.
I’ve gone through the hassle of changing my discussion list settings to “no mail” or the equivalent before leaving for a trip, and then re-setting them upon my return. Well, I did it once and then decided it wasn’t worth it. Besides, I usually find a way to check my email while I’m gone, just in case something important comes through. In any case, it’s just common courtesy to change your discussion list settings before using the auto reply option, because otherwise you’re going to be another drop in the flood that will hit an unsuspecting user after they post to one of your discussion lists.
Am I asking for too much?
