Repurposing

My latest toy: PULP-O-MIZER

 

Created with PULP-O-MIZER

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Elvis citing: or,the neo-Luddite's embarrassment

On multiple levels, this one's a dilly.

A recent customer at the "Ask Here" (aka reference) desk was seeking the original print version of an article about Elvis Presley, but with incomplete citation information.

"It was in the Time/Life magazine for 1956. Either in August or November," she said.

"In 1956," I answered politely, "those were two separate magazines. But let's see what we can find."

Suspecting that our access to InfoTrac OneFile might not help, since that database doesn't have Life Magazine in its collection, I tried a rather sloppy Google search, which led me to the Life covers archive. The search we did gave us covers of 1956 issues in which Elvis was mentioned, but not the articles themselves.

[Note: Naturally, having done a "sloppy search," I now cannot retrace the URL I got to before.]

Then, just as we were jotting down from that search the likely August and November issues, I thought,

"Oh, duh! Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature! There's a reliable print resource that I know will work better than this database and Google searching!"

We grabbed volume 20 of RGPL, covering Mar 1955-Feb 1957, I showed my customer how to search for citations, and this is what she came up with:

Elvis, a different kind of idol. ill pors Life
41:101-9 Ag 27 '56.                      

I found the bound volume 41 of Life, and my customer found her article and photocopied what she wanted.

I was so pleased with myself that I decided to write a post about the neo-Luddite delight of print trumping digital. Here's the photo which amused me the most:

PRESLEY'S MOTIONS are demonstrated by a 13-year-old, Steve Shad, in a Jacksonville record shop. High school boys in area have mastered Presley's gestures, but show little interest in his singing style.

Being an obsessive showoff, I decided to research the article a bit more for this blog post. I tried another Google search, now that I had a full citation of the Elvis article.

Oops!

This first thing I found this time was the GoogleBooks link to the digitized original Life article.

"Duh. Well now I know better how to find this stuff online."

Then I found the GoogleNews link for an August 11, 2002, article from the Charleston, SC, Post & Courier, in which Steve Shad is interviewed.

"Oh, well...."

So, now I'm caught between two options: either the neo-Luddite's embarrassment that he didn't think of print reference sources earlier, or the neo-Luddite's embarrassment that he could have found more online while his customer was still there, if he hadn't been so sloppy.

Or, maybe it's the case that this path of online source—to print source—to better online source is actually a happy balance of the riches of both modes of searching.

Whatcha think?

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Addendum: Refman just showed me this morning his post on Digitized Life Magazine, which I read when he published it back in November 2009 but had forgotten about. Thanks, Refman.

Multi-tasking overload?

If you need to do a self-check to find out if you've been doing too much computer multi-tasking, click here.

#5 Discover Flickr: or, More adventures in neo-Luddism

This has taken a lot of doing.

I decided to try the second version of the assignment:

...create a Free account in Flickr and use your digital camera.... Upload these to your Flickr account.... Then create a post in your blog about your photo and experience. Be sure to include the image in your post. Once you have a Flickr account, you have two options for doing this: through Flickr's blogging tool or using Blogger's photo upload feature.

I'm used to blogging with Blogger, though I usually just upload images from my harddrive or flashdrive.

I thought that all I needed to do was use the Blogger photo upload, with its "image from the web" option. Apparently Flickr doesn't like this. I put my photo URL http://www.flickr.com/photos/bright_crow/2632052926/ into the Blogger URL field and uploaded.

What I got was this:

You have to click on the empty box, and then Flickr asks you to log in.

I'm probably still missing something, but I next tried the other route, starting in Flickr and using the BLOG THIS feature.

The catch here was that I hadn't configured my "external blog" (that is, this one), so I had to do that first.

Hohum....

Then I found out that all my photos were still set for Private, even though I had changed the default privacy setting to Public.

It seems that changing your default only applies to future uploads. I haven't found a way to do bulk resetting of privacy codes (or copyright licensing).

Hohohum....

Now I have to create a blog entry using the BLOG THIS feature.

Bleegh! Flickr creates a new blog entry, so I have to open that one, copy the code for the image, and past it into this post.

Grrrrrrr....

Two Lilies
Originally uploaded by Mike Shell

And it forces a default format...which doesn't display quite the way it says it will...and which I can't change from post to post.

Aaaaaaargh!!!

[Can you tell I'm fussy? I like Flickr, but this process is waaay too cumbersome for a lazy...um...hyper-efficient librarian.]

Anyway, here's the photo.

At Mohonk Mountain House, where my spouse Jim and I went for vacation last July, one climbs a cliff (by stairs, of course) to find a watchtower and, behind it, a man-made lily pond.

This is one of my favorite shots from the pond. I usually have it as wallpaper on my PC.

Hope you like it.

Oh, well...okay: or,the neo-Luddite Web 2.0 librarian

Most of the folks I work with probably know that I only half jokingly call myself a neo-Luddite.

I think computers and the 'Net are marvelous tools. However, since they are used by human beings, most of what goes on is a combination of two things:

• our utter fascination with the newest, most improved whatever
• our utter hubris, which imagines that what we do with stuff is always actually a good idea.

At its worst, this means that e-technology can be abusive and even dangerous—especially if the people who implement new technologies or applications don't do genuine research at the ground level first, in order to make absolutely certain

• what the impact will be on the people whose lives and work are affected, and
• whether those people are able and willing to migrate into the new environment.

Even when the changes are essential to an organization, that research should still be done first.

At a more personal level, my neo-Luddism simply has to do with the fact that I don't need or use a lot of the new e-technology (MP3 players, games, laptops, iPods, downloadable media, etc.). I have nothing against these new toys. I just don't use them.

Unfortunately, I'm in a profession in which I have to be "professionally nice" to people who do want to have and use these things...whether or not they understand the first thing about computers and the 'Net.

Oy!

So, anyway.... I'm glad we're doing JPL Learning 2.0.

I'm also lazy and resistant. The most difficult bits will be the bits I'm not interested in knowing how to use (see above). The easiest bits will be those I've already been doing—like blogging—and those I want to teach others.

We shall see....