[2005-04-19]
Carnegie Report article: Do Libraries Still Matter?. "The answer seems to be a resounding yes," he writes in the lead sentence, "because libraries are more than just a place to keep volumes on dusty shelves."
[2005-02-11]
Johns Hopkins University president William R. Brody has pro-librarian piece in Dec. 6, 2004 issue of Johns Hopkins Gazette
"Librarians under threat" article by Tony Tysome p. 8 of Times Higher Education Supplement, Feb. 11, 2005, on plan at University of Wales, Bangor, to eliminate 8 out of 12 librarians
And here's the story from the Library Journal Academic Newswire Publishing Report, February 17, 2005:
SUBSTANTIALLY DESKILLED? IN WALES, A UNIVERSITY MAY CUT MOST OF ITS
LIBRARIANS In a move that has rankled librarians and teachers throughout the
United Kingdom, the University of Wales, Bangor, is proposing to eliminate
eight of its 12 librarians, on the premise that students can find most
information they need online. According to the GUARDIAN, a "consultation
document" issued by the university last month said that a £300,000 (about
$566,000 USD) savings could be realized by reducing the library staff to one
cataloguer, an acquisitions expert, a chief librarian, and a law librarian.
"The support to the academic and student communities from the qualified
subject librarians, whatever its contribution to the teaching and research
roles of the institution," reads the document, "is hard to justify in
value-for-money terms at a time when the process of literature searches is
substantially deskilled by online bibliographical resources."
Librarian Eileen Tilley told the newspaper, "The university thinks that
because we have the Internet it no longer needs skills teaching. I would say
[the Internet] has, in fact, complicated the resources...users are confused
and need guiding through this." Meanwhile, the university's registrar said
the document was to stimulate discussion and that no decisions have been
made.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Librarians under siege?
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Costume Bazaar
Largest selection of costumes in New Haven area may be Costume Bazaar on 1593 State Street (New Haven). Unfortunately, they're still on summer hours, which are M-F, 9:30-4:30; and closed Sa-Su. Phone: 787-3600.
Monday, July 25, 2005
Cascading Style Sheets (New Horizons)
"Cascading Style Sheets", New Horizons' Taurus Wright, July 25-26, 2005.
Style sheet is "any rule or sequence of rules that affect appearance of a document". Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is "core technology of HTML".
Types: inline rarely used, applied to specific elements, appropriate for overriding linked CSS when necessary. More common are embedded (controlling a single page) and linked (controlling several pages). Imported CSS only recently supported in Firefox and Netscape, creates secondary link to another external stylesheet.
Syntax:
Each statement is a "rule", which includes a "selector" and a "declaration"
For the rule "P {font-size: 10pt; color: blue}", 'p' is the Selector; 'font-size' and 'color' are properties; '10pt' and 'blue' are values.
In Dreamweaver, F12 to preview.
Manual p. 5: group elements together using comma. Spaces within css rule syntax don't matter. Semicolons only matter when separating values (but OK to leave in).
Consult w3schools.com for css elements and tutorials.
Separate style sheet contains only rules, no "style" tag. HTML document points to it like this:
Font shorthand, p. 54;
Lesson 2: Designing with the Cascade
To solve conflicts between styles:
Elements: 1 point
Classes: 10 points
IDs: 100 points
Class Selectors: 2 types ...
Class Selectors (cont.)
Why use ID Selectors? functions more as an anchor (for hyperlinks, etc.) than classes. Oftentimes, an ID will already be in document functioning as bookmark (formerly handled by 'a', now 'id'), and this same tag can also carry formatting information through the ID selector (=#). Also: IDs are unique per page, while classes are repeatable.
e.g., at footer, [div id="footer"] (with angle brackets though) toward bottom of HTML body.
In new rule on style sheet: #footer {color: white; letter-spacing: 2px; font-size: 10px; font-weight: bold; }
Contextual & Attribute Selectors
Contextual selector: p b {color: red} means find bold text within any p tag, and make it red. (just p space b)
Attribute selector: e.g., identifying table by its width, to be formatted differently. Not supported by IE.
table [align] {font-family: Georgia, serif; } = "find the table that has the align attribute in it, and change font to Georgia"
The Cascade II
Imported Styel Sheets
Designing with the Cascade
Designing Content Sections
Formatting with the Box Model
Margins and Padding
Borders
To create beveled-look (3D): "border: white outset 2px;"
To create horizontal dashes (and other heading attributes):
h1, h2 { color: #366;
background-color: #cff;
text-transform: capitalize;
letter-spacing: 4px;
font-size: 18px;
font-weight: 900;
font-variant: small-caps;
border-top: 1px dashed #699;
border-bottom: 1px dashed #699;
width: 300px; }
Floating
Float property: to wrap text around picture or other object
Floating allows elements to arrange on page by defining
Clear prevents wrapping around an element (can only be used on floated elements)
Overflow
Day 2
Content Overview
Lesson 4: Positioning
Enhancing Design
Background Images
...
Generated content
Enhancing Elements
Print Styles
Integrated Learning Manager:
my.newhorizons.com
TW99-BXEW3-3JGC
Saturday, July 23, 2005
House of Flying Daggers (2004)
Or Shi mian mai fu, I guess in Chinese. Unrealistic swordplay doesn't stop the love story from being believable. Ziyi Zhang is the ravishing rebel "Mei"; Takeshi Kaneshiro is the playboy soldier Jin who suffers from divided loyalties. Directed by Yimou Zhang, who also directed Hero.
Friday, July 22, 2005
NELINET Course Calendar
A lot of great courses offered through NELINET and the Connecticut Library Association can be found on this Annual Course Calendar
Ethnologue piece in New York Times
Article in July 19, 2005 New York Times on Ethnologue, entitled " How Linguists and Missionaries Share a Bible of 6,912 Languages." Begun in 1951 to help missionaries identify languages into which the Bible had not yet been translated, it is now a huge database (and 1,200-page book) consulted 'religiously' by linguists, librarians, software developers, the federal government, and others needing a panoramic view of the world's languages. Ethnologue estimates number of the world's extant spoken languages to be about 7,000. There's a nice map showing language diversity by country. North Korea has the least with 1 spoken languages; Papua New Guinea the most with 820.
Ethnologue has assigned a three-letter code for all 7,000 languages. 400 of these have been mapped to their (similarly 3-letter) equivalents in MARC. It wouldn't be hard, then, for libraries to convert to this more robust set of codes some day).
Monday, July 18, 2005
Yale Library iconography
Yale Digital Library no. 8098 "Savage, the Leffingwell Professor of Painting, Yale School of the Fine Arts, described his retable [REE-tay-bul] as follows: 'Under the spreading branches of the tree of knowledge is a golden portal within which stands Alma Mater, laurel crowned, clothed in white, and wearing a blue mantle. She holds in one hand the sphere of learning and in the other an open book illuminated with the ancient characters which 'Lux et Veritas' translate in the seal of the University. On the left of the composition, Light bearing a torch, and Truth holding a mirror have led their followers to make grateful acknowledgment to Alma Mater. Science and Labor present to her the fruits of the earth; Music, Divinity and Literature attend on the right, while the Fine Arts places a figure of Winged Victory at her feet.' See Yale University Library Gazette, v.VII:no.3 (1933:Jan), pages 75-76."
When one enters Sterling Memorial Library through its main portal, the most striking feature are the inscriptions carved above its doors: literary passages from Assyrian cuneiform, Hebrew, Arabic, Mayan, Egyptian hieroglyphic, Greek, and Chinese scripts can be found there. There are even engravings reproduced from Cro-Magnon caves dwellings.
Another great resource is Nota Bene, many issues of which (perhaps all?) are available online.
Categories: SML, Tours, Iconography
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Johnson's Dictionary
Rutgers English professor Jack Lynch has 7/2/05 op-ed piece in the New York Times on occasion of 250th anniversary of Samuel Johnson's dictionary. Compares Johnson's achievement favorably with that of Noah Webster, whose celebrated 1828 dictionary turns out to be little more than "a terse utilitarian spelling guide." Despite Webster's patriotic credentials, it is still Johnson to whom constitutional lawyers and supreme court justices turn when they want to know the original meaning of 18th century words. Ironically, Johnson had little affection for the American adventure, especially as it pertained to slavery and money-grubbing. "I am willing to love all mankind, except an American," he wrote. "They are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging." Webster, for his part (according to David Littlejohn, 1971) was disgusted by Johnson for using the profane Shakespeare has one of his principle authorities.
Friday, July 15, 2005
Pseudoephedrine
According to the DEA, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine "are highly coveted by drug traffickers who use them to manufacture methamphetamine, a Schedule II controlled substance". Shop owners can be found criminally negligent, it seems, if they do not take measures to prevent shelf-clearing, shoplifting, and "smurfing". The meth empidemic has brought dentists untold cases of "meth mouth", where teeth assume the "consistency of ripe fruit" In the mean time, Pfizer and its Sudafed clones are using phenylephrine as alternative decongestant.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Access 2005
Speakers at Access 2005 (October 17-19 at University of Alberta) include Clifford Lynch keynote, Art Rhyno/Peter Binkley session on Vannevar Bush, Lorcan Dempsey on "The library and the network," Dan Chudnov on "Digital Library Dialtone: Bootstrapping with Service Registries and Autodiscovery", William Moen on "A Radioactive Metadata Record Approach for Interoperability Testing Based on Analysis of Metadata Utilization", Roy Tennant on "Creating Customized Metasearch using an XML API".
"Developing Digital Libraries"
Britta refers me to Connecticut Webjunction course list, including online tutorial "Developing Dgital Projects" (and another on XML), developed together with OCLC.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Jessica Williams at Yoshi's
Extraordinary performance by Jessica Williams at Yoshi's 6/22/05 at Jack London Square, Oakland. Surpised I hadn't heard of her before. Picked up one her CDs ("Live at Yoshi's vol. 1"), and it's just as brilliant.
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Frank Rich: Iraq machinations worse than Watergate
[added 7/10/05:] Frank Rich's scathing Op-Ed column in today's Times, We're Not in Watergate Anymore, maintaining that John Dean was right, the illegitimate war in Iraq is "Worse than Watergate," and unpacking the strange story of how fellow Times reporter Judith Miller wound up in prison. In order to understand what happened, one needs to remember Joseph Wilson's July 6, 2003 Op-Ed piece in the Times, where he recounted his 2002 CIA-sponsored mission to Niger that convinced him reports of yellow cake uranium purchases by Iraq were bogus. "[S]ome of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program," Wilson wrote, "was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." This threw the spotlight on Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address, in which he claimed: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," since the Administration had mendaciously ignored Wilson's findings. It took five weeks for the administration to issue a retraction, but then the invasion of Iraq would begin just a few days later. Five months later, and the week after Wilson's Op-Ed piece was published, George Tennet wanly conceded that "these 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president." According to Rich, Wilson's public assertions provoked the Administration's to take revenge by divulging the covert CIA operations of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, and insinuating that his Niger mission was done on partisan and nepotistic grounds. The betrayal of Plame's covert identity reminds rich of what Nixon hacks tried to do when they broke into the office of Daniel Ellgerg's psychiatrist, hoping to find something with which to smear the man who had revealed the Pentagon Papers (and therefore the true facts about the Vietnam War) to the public. Rich cites the Washington Post story, that "two otop White House officials" contacted 6 or more reporters, not just Robert Novak, in order to "destroy" Wilson and his wife. I'm a bit confused on this point, but it seems the connection here with Judith Miller's imprisonment is that she was working on the same story, and was protecting sources that specialy prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerals was demanding that she reveal.
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Paul Bass and Douglas Rae: "Eminent Disdain"
Op-Ed contribution from Paul Bass and Douglas Rae on last month's ill-conceived recent Supreme Court decision. The City of New London is being allowed to re-develop a 90-acre neighborhood, removing current residents and shopkeepers to make room for office space, hotel, and conference center. This brings back bad memories for those who lived through New Haven's "urban renewal"in the 1950s. Meant to improve the city's quality of life, the long-term consequences were catastrophic. According to the authors, "In 1970, as urban renewal ended, the census ranked New Haven the 38th-poorest city in America. Ten years later, it was ranked seventh, with 23.2 percent of its population living below the poverty line. Today, more than a quarter of the city's families live in subsidized housing. So much for combating poverty."
Friday, July 01, 2005
Documenting Invasion of Iraq
Truth out has archived video footage documenting the U.S. decision to invade Iraq.
Google Maps API Key
Google Maps API Key. View API documentation. Roy Tennant mentioned that the City of Chicago has mapped crime statistics along with other layers of data onto the now-freely-available Google API.
Categories: Google_Maps, APIs
PHP + MySQL in slashdot
Michael J. Ross June 30, 2005 Slashdot book review of Vikram Vaswani's How to Do Everything with PHP and MySQL. Doesn't assume prior knowledge of database programming, but does presuppose familiarity with HTML. Chapter one is freely available on publisher's Web site.
Categories: PHP, MySQL, Databases, Vikram_Vaswani, Michael_Ross
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