Thing 5

Take the weekend off?  Nope, I drew the Easter slot in the reference librarian rotation this year.  We were surprisingly busy, with actual research-related questions and not just, "Do you have a pen I can borrow?"

Feedback first so it's easy to find:

1. The "in plain English" videos are great!
2. It feels like there should be a more cohesive place for discussion for a program like this than in comments on blogs, but then I wonder if that wouldn't just end up being another "Thing" for people to learn.  (A forum, or a chat room, or some other group communication tool.)  Blogs can work for group communication, but it can be more cumbersome than some other media if not everyone is posting on the same one's comments.

And a summary of what I've learned (and/or observations) thus far:

Barcode scanner!

I now own my very own barcode scanner! It's an Opticon my husband found for me on eBay; it looks similar to the white one here. (That's the same model; this one is refurbished though, so it's not as pretty.) I'd take a picture and post it, but I'm at work (on Easter, alas). It is basically the model we use at our Circ desk here.

I discovered when I went to start scanning books to test it that some paperbacks have a generic paperback UPC on the back cover, and an ISBN barcode on the inside front cover. For most of the books with barcodes that I tested, however, the barcode is the ISBN. I can scan straight into Excel.

Soon, goodreads, soon...

Goodreads, day 2

Hm, I deviated from my 3-5 page average yesterday and rambled on quite a bit.

I poked around goodreads a bit more since Polly friended me (thanks, Polly!), and I looked through all the friend suggestions it gave me (since now we had a friend in common). There were a lot of names I've seen from both this project and various mailing lists, which was a nice reminder that the library world has a 6-degrees-of-separation thing going on.

Thing 4: Online Communities

Given which of the online communities (goodreads) I'm looking at for this week's Thing, a couple of confessions are in order:

Firstly, I don't read for pleasure nearly as much as I used to. There are a lot of reasons for that, but what disrupted my habit the most was eight years of college. When I do stumble upon a series I like, I tend to inhale it. (By inhale, I mean multiple books in a day/nothing else gets done/oh, did you want supper? kind of reading.)

Secondly, I didn't actually join goodreads for this Thing.

No, I signed up Friday because Felicia Day linked hers on Twitter in response to a review, published on the New York Times' website, of the new "A Game of Thrones" series on t.v. (If you don't know who Felicia Day is, this is one place to start.) If you don't have a digital subscription to the Times and don't want to use one of your 15 free articles for this month, basically, there's a point where the reviewer suggests that all the sexual content in the HBO series is to attract female viewers, since the reviewer doesn't know of any woman who prefers fantasy over romance as a genre.