etc.

Way. To. GO!

• I would like another cat (a third!), a brand new, squeaky kitten, but the mister is quite firm on this point. So are the existing cats, they won’t have any part of it. Damn them.
• I am knitting the exitsing cats a blanket, one they will have to share because, while I have good intentions and plan on knitting two, I know that I will make it to the end of the first and say to them, “there isn’t a chance I’m making another one of these, my dears; you will have to share.” I’m using Lion Suede (in ecru), which is a heavy, soft, chenille-like yarn, which isn’t tons of fun on the needles, but oh! the feeling of the knit fabric between my fingers, it’s delightful. I think the cats will enjoy it, even if they have to wrestle for it.
• I’m weary to-day. I’ve been weary for a few days. I am ready for Spring.
• At the moment, my teevee roster includes Lost, Veronica Mars, Project Runway, The Sheild, Battlestar Galactica, and 24. As you can see, it’s a pretty substantial roster, but I hardly ever talk about these shows at all here. I’m not sure why that is, exactly, except that I watch most of this teevee peripherally, with my laptop on my lap, while I do interwebby things. Like right now, for example, I am blogging while Jack pulls out an arrow from the shoulder of an “other”. If you know what I’m talking about, you know what I’m talking about; it’s not quite worth explaining, so my apologies to non-teevee-viewers.
• Last week, I bought an issue of The New Yorker. I haven’t bought The New Yorker in ages, months, maybe years, and all of a sudden I feel like I need to incorporate some decent vocabulary into my regular communications. Words like vernal and behest. Anyway, decent vocabulary aside, there is a very good article by Malcolm Gladwell that deals with how to solve the problem of homelessness rather than manage it (which is what most cities do) using power-law theory. As Gladwell says, the theory is economically sound (it costs less to rent homes for the homeless than it does to run shelters and provide other such services, including health care) but morally problematic (giving a free apartment to a homeless person is not “fair” when there are plenty of people who are not homeless but living below the poverty line & struggling to make ends meet). We have a dire homeless situation in this here city, and I have no good ideas on how to solve it, so I’m always keen to read what others have to say on the subject, even if I have slight philosophical reservations with their solutions.

Inauguration day to-day. Noted without comment.

Sneaky, that whole hyperlinking thing.

I’ve been in all day, seaming a sweater and cleaning house for the mister’s return to-morrow (he’s been in L.A./Korea/Hong Kong for the past three weeks, did I forget to mention?), so it’s been pretty easy to buy nothing to-day. I’ve been acutely aware of this anti-consumerism movement for years, and try to participate when I can, and as much as I think that everyone not shopping for one day is a little like trying to bail the Titanic with a bucket, it’s still one of those things I think people need to be made aware of, if they aren’t already. So, do try and buy nothing to-day. But please also try & consume more responsibly everyday. OK?

OK. </pontification>

Lately, I came upon another knitting librarian blogger (via LIS Blogsource) and got to thinking about how many of us there are. This thinking led to some searching, which in turn led to this list, which is not at all exhaustive, and which I encourage you to append to in the comments:

• Black Sheep
• Cavalier Stitches
• Crafty Librarian
• Detroit Diva
• Hairball
• Knit with Me
• Knitnick’s Studio
• Knitting from Outer Space
• KnittinK
• Librarian Knits
• Step into My Thimble
• The Knitting Revolutionary
• when usually it’s nothing
• Yarn Lust (who has a lovely guide to knitting Web rings on her site)

My hope is that these brilliant and arresting links will distract you from that other thing, of which I cannot speak, for I am heartsick.

This day, being election day, I bid you go over to the CBC Radio Web site and listen to Naomi Klein deliver a lecture called “War and Fleece: How Economic ‘Shock Therapy’ Backfired in Iraq.” I listened to it broadcast on Ideas last night as I drove home from work, and it is, indeed, a fine piece of journalistic exposition.

If you can’t get the file to work (as I could not), perhaps you should read the Harper’s article Klein wrote in September 2004, called “Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neo-con utopia”, which touches on much of the same?

And, is it just me, or is this CNN pulse-of-the-blogosphere entirely vacuous?

50 ways to love your country from the good folks at MoveOn, the online activist [via newpages].

I can’t be the only geek who anticipates the first of every month for the latest offerings from Infotoday. My library gets most of Infotoday’s electronic content through ProQuest, which means a month embargo at least, so I really appreciate the selective full-text content at the publisher’s site.

Turns out that that wasn’t the last time I saw the chapter before publication and officaldom after all. My editors & I have been going back and forth over style details for the past week and I’ve enjoyed the process a whole lot, niggling details have the potential to annoy a lot of people, but I like monkeying with them. It’s what made me think I might make a good bibliographer, but that’s for another day. In the last round of revisions, completed a few hours ago, I was checking endnotes, filling in missing URLs and retrieval times, verifying the completeness of citations, dates and page numbers. Good work is what it is, I’m just not sure I feel that way because it’s my work.

So, in one particular endnote I had left out a page number, and it happened to be for a citation in a book, instead of one of the many online journal articles I’d used, so no way to verify it until I got home to my copy of the book. Being on a roll, I tried to think of ways to get the details without losing time and I just about stopped short of e-mailing the author since no one likes to feel like they’re doing someone else’s homework, even if it means finding out about all the curious and interesting ways people are citing one’s work (my citation was neither curious nor interesting, just plain factual).

Then I remembered amazon.com. There are many reasons why I don’t like and refuse to shop at amazon, not the least of which is that, despite their innovative business model, their success is completely predicated on pill-popping consumerism (i.e.: don’t feel well? take a pill; need something? buy & receive it almost instantly from amazon) which is antithetical to everything I believe in as a librarian (the consumerism part, not the fast part; I think libraries have a distance to go to catch up with the fast and format-efficient information delivery that patrons are demanding).

Still, credit where it’s due & all that, you have to admire anyone (person, company) who is not content to rest on their laurels, and there certainly is no laurel-resting going on at amazon. As you may or may not know, they introduced a full-text search capability last Fall to some initial resistance (publishing industry) and mild controversy (libraries). I personally thought it was brilliant and I’ve even used it at the reference desk to assist patrons in full-text searching edited volumes for their research topics (that’s right, amazon at the reference desk. This is fodder for a whole other post, surely).

Before today, the “Search Inside” feature hadn’t made any significant impact on my own research habits, I had merely played with it to quality-test for words I knew were in certain books (it faired well). Today I got a first-hand look at what a powerful research tool it can be when I called up the book for which I had an incomplete citation, performed a full-text search for the phrase I quoted and insufficiently cited, got the page number complete with search results in-context, and viewed the page to verify it. I can’t imagine that there is a single undergrad, grad student, or faculty member who wouldn’t be delighted to find out about this invaluable resource.

Personally, it saved me a bunch of time — maybe 24 hours (turnaround time). But am I, as a library user, put out that my library does not offer this sort of thing in the catalogue? Not really, especially if I know where else I can get it (besides, librarians are probably bad people to ask because we don’t have the same one-stop-shopping/single-click-info-retrieval impulse that a lot of library patrons/consumers do). As a librarian, I’m happy that you’re hard-pressed to find another librarian complaining about the feature anymore because full-text searching of scanned books is a resource that I’m glad I have access to, and I’m happy to teach students how to exploit it at the reference desk or in the classroom. I say let the rich corporations spend the money to do this, especially if the rest of us can keep taking advantage of it.

Project Censored sheds light on stories that are kept out of mainstream media.

what questions do YOU want the media to answer/ askquestions.org is raising media awareness for urgent issues [via abada].