This a link to my google doc.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfr5xrvs_22cz3ht5db&hl=en

This is my lovely husband, almost unrecognisable after being warholized .

PODCASTS FOR 23 THINGS!!

It would be great if we could add podcast of Author talks ( particular segments that deal with a specific title) to the catalogue record of the said title. Care I guess has to be taken that we don't slow the functioning of the OPAC. Podcasts of stellar storytime sessions would encourage excellence if listened to by staff and encourage public interest in this activity, if linked to children's pages or whatson on the elibcat. Podcasts, providing they were accessible , would be great for vision impaired people and assist in English literacy studies , they could be descriptive of different resources available.

23 things: Video's

I particularly like Mosman's library's collection of author talks in Google video. This a great way to generate awareness that these events occur. It is a shame that links to a what's on page aren't possible there. Olive Riley was an interesting character, there are quite a few clips of her on youtube, and she exemplifies how ordinary people can be deeply significant for the recording of local history.

HEY They have stolen New Zealand, where's New Zealand! The phrase "the Lord of the rings film trilogy really put NZ on the map" obviously cuts no mustard with flickr

where Ive been

Make yours @ BigHugeLabs.com

Blogpost about wikis for twenty three things

BookLoversWiki Princeton Public Library is nice but seems a little limited when you consider that libraries have huge collections. I wonder how the reviews are accessed, tags or hypertext on the catalogue record would be a sensible way for patrons with specific intent I think, as book reviews are something you are interested in either because you want a book on a subject or by an author and would like it evaluated; or conversely because you might like to be able to access the whole wiki of reviews, to find reading suggestions. Such reviews should have a number of additions I think, i.e writes like and the reviewer could also name her favourite authors. I had a lady who came to check out three books by authors I read all the time. I asked her if she had read such and such and she immediately whipped out a pad and started jotting authors names down, confident I guess that we probably had similar taste.



mintwiki
Slightly bewildering in the way that the hypertext continuously opens popups and pages just by moving cursor over, IE without clicking even singly (let alone a double click). Very interesting information but it is difficult to detect any public contributions. Many links to blogs and wiki's that contain more commentary than the mint's; this also can get quite confusing as you need to be aware that you are now looking at a completely different museum /or website.


Montana history wiki does a strange thing, it disappears permanently, when I enlargen the page to full-screen.

Winsconsin Heritage wiki asked me to login and would not allow me guest access so we will wait till I'm granted access

SJCPL Subject Guides wiki
You have to email comments to be vetted by library staff here, which I guess reduces vandalism and inappropriate remarks. This does seem to impact however on the sense of a discussion board. It would be nice if the ask it services could be amalgamated somehow with the wiki and a greater sense of connexion and access to the collection fostered through being able to dip backwards and forwards between the wiki and the catalogue. They have a partially achieved this with their local authors page.

I can see that wiki's are good for allowing feedback and offering advice. Eg info regarding services can be provided at entry points like the hold tab in OPAC's: a good place for providing access to FAQ's in a wiki form. Example, can I move my holds to a different library after they arrive? Answer Yes but I really wish you had thought ahead. (KIDDING) More seriously what about a library service wiki that has a subject of the day.Eg How to donate items, IE criteria and the necessity of clearly labeling donations etc.

More about Fayoum portraits

Fayoum portraits were made roughly between 300 BC and 300 ad and have come out of a really fascinating blend of cultures , the earlier are greco-Egyptian, the later ones roman-Egyptian.You can see this in the costuming of the people and the very reason for the existence of the portraits. Basically the Ptolemaic(greco-Egyptian) people who lived in Egypt had many customs continuous from ancient Egyptian ones. One major one was mummification of the dead, and the portrait was intended to over the face held in place by the body wrapping. It must have been highly spooky to open up a tomb and find a realistic face staring back at you. There is some evidence that the portraits may have been kept (obviously without the body attached) in families living rooms until a certain period. There are some full length portraits which have individuals wearing togas meeting Anubis presenting laurel wreaths. But the real reason why I love them is this one of the few examples of ancient art showing real relatively ordinary individuals painted so that we feel we could know them or meet them in the street. It brings the past so close.The quality of art and the different styles used too, reveal that art development is not the linear progression we often imagine it as, IE stylised, then realism and later abstract, but much more fluid.

Where I am right now? Dear readers I am doing my professional work placement at the state library. This week in collection preservation, next week in heritage collection, then 1/2 a week in promotions and 1/2 in reference.
Yesterday I got to hold an eighteenth century folio of Cook's voyage to Tahiti, and contemporaneous botanicals, wow wee. I am hard at work today, rehousing hundreds of nineteenth and early twentieth century photo plates. More updates soon.

On sexing(up) the detective

I have been watching again, the spate of Agatha Christie film and TV adaptions filmed over the last few years A number of things really annoy me about them even though I do enjoy them, abet in a slightly irritated fashion. In a misguided sense that these stories will be more dynamic, they add a lot of extraneous plot elements and sexual subplots. It not the sexuality per se I object to, it is the dubious fit these sometimes have with the original storyline and even more outrageous, the hamfisted alterations of murderers, motives and denouements. Writers for film argue that the transference of a story to film necessitates changes to provide dramatic tension etc.
However, guys I have to say Agatha Christie was a far better writer than your scriptwriters and messing with her works is often not only arrogant, disrespectful but unjustifiable in  many cases.
1) "Sittaford mystery". Can you justify calling this an Agatha Christie story when you changed a) the motive b) the murderer C) added Miss Marple to the plot when she wasn't in the story? Can we consider this a, dare I say it, cynical desire to cash in Agatha's immense popularity while disregarding her plot.
2)"The body in the library".a) Changed murderer b) Introduced lesbian love affair motive. I happy to see depictions of non-hetero characters but the disturbing tendency of the scriptwriters to define them as murderers (see also "Cards on the table" where the murderer(s) have been altered to the gay doctor and Miss Dawes)suggests 50's pulp fiction exploitation rather than a sympathetic image
3)In "Murder in the vicarage". Miss Marple as played by Geraldine McEwan empathised with murderer whose motive has been a desire to marry her lover that she has been having an adulterous affair with, and we are shown through flashback Miss Marple's own adulterous relationship with a soldier in www1. Well, this of course did not occur in the book, which came out in 1930 (which would make Miss Marple an unlikely age for a youthful affair in 1918). Some might see this addition as grossly insensitive to Agatha Christie who suffered a breakdown from her own husbands affair. Sorry for the long post next time I rave on I will add a link with the arguments in.
4) "Nemesis" is the maddest of the lot. This was a quite sensitive story about thwarted would be maternal attachment and the evil of feeling that we can own a human and hence can destroy them (Think of real life parents who kill their children in murder/suicide events ). The writer/producers who thought up the dramatic treatment for the tele film should be forced to sit a class on ethical use of source material. Their nemesis is a mad gothic tale worthy of Radcliffe or Lewis, deranged nuns grapple with wounded enemy soldiers in a storyline so far removed from Christies' they share little more than a title.

Notes from the stacks

This is my first ever blog entry; plenty of emails, forum entries, blog responses but this is the inaugural personal blog. I'd like to keep the focus on library content because libraries are very broad places, and I can rave about books, films and other media under that umbrella.