Using only the power of our brains!
Binders of field notes sit in the common area of the Macaulay library, the audio/video library where I spent three years working as a software interface designer.
These are all digitized now, but the collection goes back to the 1950’s so these books are the last line of defense in case of a digital preservation catastrophe.
NYC game developers Large Animal Games have created a downloadable PC video game based on bird sounds and expertise provided by the Macaulay Library at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology.
Which is where I work.
The game is called Snapshot Adventures. It was recently was acquired by Yahoo! games, which is a great for both the Lab and for environmental education, since part of the money it earns will directly fund our ecology work.
You can play it for free here.
I tried out Cornell Library’s book-delivery service this week. A nice stack of David Foster Wallace books quickly appeared at my workplace yesterday afternoon, and I got a friendly call when they arrived.
If you are a Cornell student or staff, you can have library books delivered to any library-location of your choice for free. For me, this means walking upstairs to our sunny little ornithology library overlooking the pond, and sitting by the fireplace for a bit.
I’m an irredeemable Amazon.com addict, so I view as a right the ability to learn about a book, click a few links, and have said book delivered to me. Imagine my pleasure at being able to do this without paying for it.
Unfortunately, you pretty much have to be told about the service to find out about it, unless you are the type of user who clicks links labeled “requests” on library websites and enjoy library jargon. Like many public services in the country, the crucial step of communicating to humans was overlooked.*
*Many nonprofits seem to say to their clients: “Look, we provide a valuable and benevolent service. You could at least be arsed enough to jump through a few design hurdles in order to discover our valuable service that you don’t know exists because of our design hurdles.”
I’m not sure, but I think the Cornell Library Patron narrative is supposed to go like this:
A MIRACLE OCCURS HERE
The patron chooses “Book Delivery Services (9996 available)” from a dropdown list conveniently located below the fold.
The patron knows that, unlike use of the weight rooms, climbing wall, or campus cinema, the library book delivery service is free.Still, mad useful if you know about it.
The financial advice site Get Rich Slowly suggests using the library as a frugal way to save money on books. I agree, and am going to endure more bad OPAC design in the interest of financial progress. Stay tuned.
Cornell librarians: Please do not kill me. I’m glad to have your services. Bad online user experiences are common in the library world. I’m sure you are busy right now improving the OPAC and writing clear non-jargon filled text describing your services. Go Big Red!
Liz Henry from BlogHer describes how to hide content on the Internet:
“Obscurity through verbosity”
I think this also explains the reason why many academic websites have trouble finding readers. Digital Librarians take heed! Avoid unnecessary words.
I’m liveblogging from the WDIL web conference, conveniently held where I work. I got shanghaied into this. I just wanted to meet the Wikipedia guy, but somehow I ended up going to the entire thing.
I’m no huge fan of conferences, as a rule. Usually the signal-to-noise ratio is insanely low, and I’ve got the attention span of a gnat when it comes to listening to ill-prepared speakers. Mercifully, coworker Rafe loaned me the office laptop, which is running Ubuntu, a very cool flavor of Linux, so I’ll be talking to you guys all day.
There’s big excitement here at the Lab of Ornithology this morning since we announced the rediscovery of a once-extinct bird. You can read all about the Ivory-billed woodpecker hoo-ha at ivorybill.org. It’s been fun to watch all of this from the inside. The Lab kept it quiet for a long time, rapidly trying to raise funds for land conservation efforts before the news leaked and the entire state of Arkansas becomes birder-Disneyworld and someone starts selling Ivory Burgers.
Two baby librarians were born to my wonderful friends from the Cornell library. Laih and Anika are both nine and a half pounds, super-smart, and will be entering the University of Michigan’s Information program in 2028. Congratulations Kim and Brian, and Clay and Mike!
I attended a seminar on the Million Book Project last night. There were a buncha computer science folks there, and the usual gang of library folks. I was horrified by the scale of the project, which involves sending hundreds of shipping crates of books to India and China for scanning, and wrangling terabytes of information that takes a week to even copy. Yow. One thing I found curious was their decision to do bitonal scanning instead of grayscale. I’m told that this results in “no real information loss” but many of their pages are really hard to read because of the lost grayscale info. In many cases the entire nature of the page is lost, and the resulting image looks like a rubber stamp of the Mona Lisa. Does anyone with more experience in these matters have thoughts on the subject? They scan at 600 DPI, so it can’t just be a matter of storage space.
In other news, there was a duck in one of our trees this morning, female mallard who was driven to extremes by an ardent male duck. She was up there for about five minutes, wobbling around until she finally fell into the pond.
Did you know that there is an American Society of Indexers? How meta is that?
In a similar vein, our fearless leaders here at the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds recently spearheaded the creation of an animal behavior ontology. I was browsing through the list of behaviors and have concluded that librarians are predisposed to aid-giving behavior, and perhaps homeostatic postures.
