Rogue Librarian

Originally posted Monday October 20, 2003.

Enjoy the recently updated Web Design on a Shoestring web site where you will find a place to report bugs, links to book excerpts, banners and reviews.

The latest volume of Digital Documents Quarterly contains a critique of The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, The NDIIPP Plan: What’s Missing?

As I reported earlier LC is now accepting applications from institutions interested in becoming NDIIPP project partners. The applications deadline is just around the corner: November 12.

Andy King has posted a section of Chapter 2, “The Pound Wise Project Plan,” at Web Reference.

The promise of this book is to show you how to build a wonderful site on a shoestring budget. Although these pages share important techniques for working through each phase and aspect of a shoestring site, the overall success of your project depends on the planning work that you do at the outset. After all, the success of any project is the result of good organization and a straightforward concept. This is especially true for shoestring sites. When you have little money, you can’t afford to take on the bloat that accompanies ill-defined goals and poorly organized work plans.

More excerpts are waiting for you on the Shoestring site.

Web Design on a Shoestring has hit the stores! Accordingly, the Shoestring book site is up, and will be growing over the next few weeks.

Today on the Virtual Book Tour:

Jaws was the first PG-rated film that I ever saw. In retrospect, I can see that at age five I was not ready for it.

My mom kept a series of shark attack drawings that I produced over the months following the viewing. Endless crayon renditions of the single fin floating on the water, the remains of mauled swimmers piled up on the beach, and boats splintering apart in the teeth of great whites all read like I was trying to process a horror that could never be integrated by my little second-grade mind.

So, because Dennis Hensley’s Screening Party opens with a screening of this man-verses-nature flick, I am a tad predisposed to connect with the book.

The Screening Party is a sort of diary that Hensley keeps over the course of a year of hosting film-viewing parties with his friends. The book is pleasantly chatty, surprisingly character-driven, and very LA; a perfect light read for people who love movies.

Earlier this week, the VBT’s Dave interviewed Hensley and his friends.

With my own book just days from hitting the shelf, my peeps at the Virtual Book Tour and I are kicking off a week of Dennis Hensley’s Screening Party. Today’s stop is Inkblots Magazine.

OCLC is disappointed that legal action had to be taken against The Library Hotel. This is an unusual event for OCLC. However, trademark law imposes affirmative obligations on trademark owners to protect their trademarks, or risk losing all rights in those marks through legal abandonment.

See the recent OCLC press release .

Things for boys and girls to do in the big city this weekend:

• Visit Dawn of Photography at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• See Carmen at New York City Opera
• (Window) Shop for shoes
  

Jeffrey and I were married at the Library Hotel, one of the many small boutique hotels that have popped up all over Manhattan in the last few years. Each floor of the hotel is named for one of the ten main headings in the Dewey Decimal System: general knowledge, math and science, philosophy and psychology, medicine and technology, religion and mythology, arts and entertainment, social science and folklore, literature, language, and geography & history.

Rooms are named for subdivisions of their floor’s main category. On the Math and Science floor, for example rooms are named for mathematics, geology, zoology, botany, dinosaurs, and astronomy.

Now the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) is suing the Library Hotel for its unlicensed use of Dewey. OCLC, a non-profit organization, has owned the Dewey system since 1988.

How a stylish Manhattan hotel’s light-hearted use of Dewey might harm the trademark is lost on me at the moment. One has only to look at the unfortunate Librarian Action Figure, whose weapon of choice is the Dewey Decimal System, to see how Dewey and the profession would benefit from more products like the Library Hotel.

Jeffrey and I reviewed the galleys of my book this weekend. Receiving them was a bit like meeting an old friend; it was nice to catch up and see her doing well, but I was just as happy to return to my post-manuscript life when the visit was over. Strange emotions are connected to book writing.

Two Futures

I tend not to duplicate news that my hubby covers (everyone in the web or library biz should be reading him anyway), but I must echo the importance of the news that Microsoft may have to nix plug-in technology in its browser.

The news raises disturbing questions. Will other browsers have to kill plug-in technology? What could happen to sites that use plug-ins? Could Flash go the way of the Black Mamo?

Miracle Product

I’ve written about them before. Tweezerman tweezers. No glamour girl (or boy — I know more than a few who would benefit from a good brow, nose or ear pluck!) should have to live without them. Here’s the thing: the company sharpens the little gems for free.

A few weeks ago, I sent my favorite pair for sharpening, hastily shoving five bucks in the envelope to cover return postage. On Thursday, they came back to me as sharp as they had been when I first picked them up, and with my crumpled five dollar bill still in the box.

Yesterday I wrote about the part that the individual collector may have to play in preserving our digital legacy. Libraries and museums are approaching the problem from the institutional side, and one of the most ambitious solutions is a mammoth project at The Library of Congress. The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) is a federally funded project to preserve digital media on a super large scale. LC is now accepting applications from institutions interested in becoming NDIIPP project partners. Grants will range from $500,000 to $3,000,000. Institutions interested in preserving materials like web sites, electronic books and moving images have until November 12 to apply. Thanks AK.

My little redesign has had a glitch or two. The right navigation seems to sink to the bottom of the page on some browsers. I hope that efforts this morning fixed the problem. Thanks to the eagle eyes who pointed it out.

A cigarette card inspired the redesign of this site. The smoking girl above is printed on one of thousands of such cards from The George Arents Collection on Tobacco held by The New York Public Library. Parts of the Arents collection will be published in the NYPL Digital Gallery, a database of hundreds of thousands of visual materials from the NYPL. The Gallery is one of the major projects I have been working on this year. Keep your eyes peeled for more news on the launch.

George Arents collected materials relating to the history, literature, and lore of tobacco over a sixty-year period before the collection was brought to the NYPL. Many of the important collections in research libraries like New York Public were started by individuals and then turned over to trusted repositories. The work of individuals like Arents is one of the things that preserves our historical record.

Some librarians and archivists wonder if the same mechanism might preserve our digital legacy. It may be some time before libraries and museums can collect and preserve digital material on a scale that mirrors print collections. In the interim, it may be the digital pack rat who save the good stuff for us.