2008 Olympics

Has anyone been watching the Olympics?  Which sports do you like best?  I’ve been enjoying watching these Olympic games.  I really liked the opening ceremonies, but I’ve always been an easy mark for big pageantry and production numbers.  I like watching basketball, swimming and gymnastics, and I’m looking forward to seeing more tennis and soccer.  I also hope to get a chance to see some of the less-broadcast sports like equestrian events, badminton, archery and the pentathlon.  On the IOC’s website I also learned about Olympic sports of the past, including polo, rugby and tug-of-war, which I would have liked to watch!  As any broadcast is also jam-packed with advertising, my favorite Olympic commercial so far, has been this one.  And I’d say my favorite Olympic film is the classic Chariots of Fire, which is available at Snell.

Learning to love the tag cloud?

I was searching the Old Colony Library Network catalog today and for the first time I kind of “got” the cloud display.  It’s not actually supposed to work like facets, it’s sort of the opposite of facets.  Facets help you narrow your search, and the tag cloud expands it. Then I experimented with other libraries that use tag clouds.  The same searches bring up different word clouds in each library.  Sometimes the associations seem weird but hey, if those words are linked in your catalog, why not suggest them to the user? I also see where tag clouds can compensate for the shortcomings of topic facets (“Refine”), which seem to be based on LC subjects.    The tag clouds allow you to bust out of the LC subject framework.  It’s like if someone comes to the library reference desk and asks for something using an incorrect or unfamiliar term–the tag cloud tries to imagine what possible relationship that term might have to something that’s actually in the library. Remember the mean librarian in Sophie’s Choice who humiliates Sophie and sends her away for asking for poetry books by “Emil Dickens”?  Well, with a tag cloud, Sophie might have been able to find it. (Of course then she never would have met Nathan… or Stingo…but on the other hand, that might have worked out better for her in the long run…) Maybe that explains why so many public libraries are choosing to display tag clouds? And maybe when people are researching interdisciplinary topics, the tag cloud might help expand their vocabulary into unfamiliar areas? I know it is popular to make fun of tag clouds, and I have been guilty of that myself.  But they are fun, once you let go of the notion that they are supposed to help you find a particular item, and instead allow yourself to be inspired to use the web catalog as a way of wandering through the collections. That’s what happened to me with the Old Colony Library.  Try it! (navigator.ocln.org) Karen Merguerian

Pillow Talk

One of my childhood friends really loved the movie Pillow Talk, but I’d never actually seen it until I checked it out from the Library last week.  I found it to be a lot of fun and I really enjoyed it.  It’s about a young career woman, Jan, (played by Doris Day) who shares a ‘party line’ (basically a phone line) with lothario composer Brad (played by Rock Hudson).   Phone lines are so scarce that Jan can’t get her own, and Brad continues to hog the line, singing “original” tribute songs to different women.  Eventually the two meet, and Brad adopts the persona of Texan Rex Stetson in order to woo Jan.  The movie seemed to be a little risqué for the 1950s, and I think it’s still a pretty clever romantic comedy. 

Homework Assignment

I have an assignment for the next two weeks: listen to some rock music and identify the accents in the guitar riffs. I’m sure it’s okay if I listen to blues, too, so I went on over to iTunes and found a few songs in various genres that I thought would be great. Thankfully, I remembered that we probably have some good stuff in our collection before I went hogwild with Leadbelly purchases. And there’s lots of other recordings of American roots music. Now to remember all this when I’m actually at the library. I’ve got lots of listening to do!