Freedom to Savor the Salacious and Sample the Staid

I went to see my cousin's CofC class production of the play, Quills.  The play is about the Marquis de Sade and is quite provocative.  It was made into a movie starring Geoffrey Rush.  It brought to mind discussions I had in library school with fellow students about censorship and "thought crimes".  Banned Books Week starts tomorrow, too, so the subject of intellectual freedom is at the forefront of my mind.

Personally, I don't think that knowing and thinking about things is the same as doing them.  Thought crimes don't exist in my world.  Even thoughts/concepts that may be unpleasant to me are fodder for books, articles, and discussion.  I believe people should be free to think and write about anything they like as long as they are not planning or inciting crimes.  Not everyone agrees with this and I do find hateful pundits to be extremely unpleasant but I think that holding the ideal of intellectual freedom above all my personal inhibitions and preferences is essential for my practice as a public librarian. 

To paraphrase Ranganathan, "Every book its reader and every reader its book."  Yes, indeed!

Picture from http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/23/115523-004-FA619CA3.jpg .  Accessed 12/8/08.

My Life Post-Harry: What I Am Waiting For

I am not exactly "waiting" for The Tales of Beedle the Bard in the way I waited for Deathly Hallows, but I will buy it and I will read it, mostly for background info.  My capability for anticipatory zeal is not piqued in the slightest by any of the HP movies.  They have not been all that great with the exception of the Cuaron effort.

Here's what I am waiting for.

*David Mitchell's new book about Dutch traders in Japan in the 18th or 19th century on the island of Dejima (or Deshima).

*A new book in Holly Black's Modern Tales of Faerie series or any YA book or any book by Holly Black.

*Wendy McClure's promised tome about disturbing children's books.

*The movie version of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

*Another season of Flight of the Conchords.

*Finding a copy of Sarah Kider's Mermaid Song to purchase on CD or by audio download.

The waiting is not the hardest part.  The real problem is that a good "wait" is hard to find.

Random Reading: Bookmarks and Books

While reading a great article in the Charleston City Paper (I really have to give props to their Web 2.0 skillz) I found a new bookmarking site, Mister Wong.  It appears to be a multi lingual version of Del.icio.us, which I find really interesting.  I like messing around with languages, words, idioms, etc, and I don't mind subtitles.

During the process of importing some Del.icio.us bookmarks into Mr. Wong, I found a new Library 2.0 site, Open Library, which wants to create a web page for every book, according to their site info.  Looks like an interesting site to keep an eye on and play around with.

I must say that Del.icio.us' new look is much more graphically appealing.  The import/export process was also really easy.  This was the first time, I tried that, too.   I went ahead and imported all my random Del.icio.us bookmarks into one account, as well.  Now to trim the tags.

Meme Streak: The Day After Caturday

I have memes on the brain. 

While reading a William Gibson novel, Pattern Recognition, a virtual, semiotic funfest, I wanted to refresh my understanding of the word "meme".   Discovering that my bed-worthy Webster's Collegiate, circa 1977, was too outdated to help and my newish Websters 3rd too heavy for horizontal use, I decided take the contextually-appropriate Google/Wikipedia route.  This led to more info grazing and I found this online Time article about 4chan, an "off the chain" website, where users share assorted visual tidbits and other stuff. 

According to Time, 4chan is a meme hothouse which started out as an anime/manga fan site modeled after a Japanese site called 2chan.  At some point, 4chan had a Saturday thing called "Caturday", where users posted funny pictures of cats.   This in turn spawned the LOLcat phenom.  Interesting stuff.

Lately I have been really interested in the whole viral info transmission concept.  It figures in several good nonfiction books I have been reading; The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  The internet is a great place to see it in action because it happens so quickly and so visibly. 

It is also interesting to me that 4chan is a mostly unrestricted website that allows for a high degree of anonymity.  I think that theoretically, at least, information evolution/transmission probably occurs more rapidly in this kind of open environment (the watched pot and all that).  I found the anime/manga connection interesting too.  Otaku figure heavily in Pattern Recognition as well.  Just another drop in the meme pool.


Internet People by Dan Meth




Weezer's Take

A Little Tab'll Do Ya!

I am really lovin' the tabs so now I am converting the library blogs that I work on to tabbed versions using the CSS stylesheets from http://www.btemplates.com/ . I can see possiblities for major improvements in navigation and access to info using these templates. Click the links below to see what tabs can do. Please note that these are still under construction.

http://standrewslibrary.blogspot.com/

http://standrewslibrarychildren.blogspot.com/

Picture from T.J. Wagner's Tab Gallery. Available at http://home.epix.net/~tjwagner/myfulltabbottle.jpg. Accessed 7/14/08.

Clonification and My Year of Blogging Dangerously: Faux Wordpress Templates

Exploring the options of Wordpress has pushed me to expand my knowledge of Blogger. I have decided to stick with Blogger as my primary blogging platform for this blog. My horizon has definitely been expanded by interacting with Wordpress. I really liked using Chris Pearson's Cutline Template (Wordpress.org) on my own site but find the Wordpress.com version too constraining to use as my only blogging option primarily, as I mentioned before, because of the banning of Javascript.
I googled to see what other people were saying about the topic of Wordpress versus Blogger and found a great blog, Smithereens, with a pretty clear discussion of the limitations of Wordpress.com. I also found out that just like MySpace, Blogger has inspired folks to create CSS layouts/templates so that users can customize their blogs.
I have always used the templates that come with Blogger and have never tried actually loading my own. Apparently interest in Wordpress clone templates for Blogger is a hot and happening thing. I have tried three templates so far and I found....tah dah!!... a Cutline clone template. The tabs are web addresses not pages like the Wordpress versions and the instructions in the code are written in Spanish, but that is okay. I am plowing ahead.
I paid for a year of web hosting for my birthday last year and created a blog using Wordpress (the dot org CMS - content management system - just learned that term yesterday ; ) ) This really pushed me to learn more about the mechanics of independant blogging, which was a good thing, I think. It was very technical; not infrequently over my head. Everytime I see "MySQL", I think "my squall" and "perfect storm".
In the end, I have learned that the biggest thing about using a free blog host versus DIY blogging is that free hosting saves a lot of time and brain power. Like Lyle Lovett said in the song, "one wrong move will turn your world upside down" when you are hosting your own blog. Fixing mess-ups was frustrating and took time away from the actual process of writing something. Using these custom Blogger templates is allowing me to get under the hood and tinker around without having to do too much. It is kind of like putting on some rims versus rebuilding the engine.

Samurai Night Fever: Two Guys and a Girl

I have totally gotten into the Samurai Champloo anime series. I am now on Disc 5. Two guys, Jin, a ronin, and Mugen, a thief, are traveling with a fifteen year old girl, Fuu, who is searching for the "samurai who smells of sunflowers".   This is a great anime series for adults.  Highly recommended!!