emily's posterous

Blogging my way to a master's degree in library and information science

Evolution of Dictionary Definitions and the e-Reader novelty

At the bottom is a link to an interesting article about evolution of dictionary
definitions (from Visual Thesaurus magazine).

Digital versions of dictionaries NOT written by professional lexicographers tend to run on and not have concise numbered definitions.  On the other hand, they contain lots of contextual examples which are always helpful.

I finally got myself an iRiver Story HD reader....engendering the possibility (with
purchase of a 32 gb SD card) of fitting all the reference books you'd
want onto this slim piece of plastic, including dictionaries. I think of how the ready reference section in libraries has shrunk to almost nothing, due to space constraints and use of the Internet because of its convenience--but how you could replace that collection with a digital version of all those rich reference works that the librarian could carry around....

What I like about the new e-reader:

  • clarity of print
  • simplicity of use
  • smallness
  • ability to get library ebooks on it
  • ability to read first sections of books I’m interested in for free while lying in bed
  • ability to mirror my ebook collection in Google eBooks online....
  • ability to purchase eBooks through my favorite local bookstore--most of which now have links to Google eBooks (and support them versus Amazon, if I were to buy a Kindle)
  • easy on the eyes, easy to read in good light, fine detail in the grayscale illustrations, font can be enlarged (in fact, the reflection on the screen is so minimal, that a dim reading light isn't quite good enough, whereas with a book, the whiteness of the page increases the contrast)
  • carry it around in my purse constantly and never lack for reading materials; my physical books won't get dog-eared from carrying them around all the time!
  • offers me a choice of reading materials at all times


What I don't like:

  • the actual reference books I'd like to own are still pretty expensive!
  • Also not good for impulse purchasers (but then again neither are bookstores).
  • Can’t see the context of the page I’m reading that easily — the name of the chapter I’m on, the author of the book, and how many more pages are left before I get to the end. (Note: when I press the next page button, a page marker briefly appears -- the page I'm on and the total number of pages in the book.)
  • Not possible at this time to read subscriptions to newspapers and magazines (I still have to buy a tablet!!!?)


Before I bought the eReader, I wistfully thought -- wouldn't it be nice to keep all my future reading on it -- all the unread books in my house! 

My wish: turn all those dusty books in my house into digital versions
without having to pay for them again!!!

This could call for some cataloging in my house of what I would wish to keep. Sell or give away the unread books — then, on an as-needed basis, I could consult my Google Books list or personal Google catalog, and get them when I’m finally ready to read them.

Reference to Visual Thesaurus magazine:

Brief is Beautiful

December 1, 2011

By Orin Hargraves


The  Internet makes it possible to publish dictionaries containing entries
of any length, in any format, that are not necessarily subject to
traditional rules or conventions. So it's fair to ask: is abandoning the
traditional short-form definition, along with the paper it was once printed
on, a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater? Or is it a good
opportunity to reinvent lexicography? To read the whole article, visit the
following URL:
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/article/fM._bVJTXj4pcwYP8p_3KBUqsEvOBXytO8EBg
Cr u3Nw-A

Significance of a Nakashima table

Nakashima_table_-_marthas
 When I was young, my parents decided to get a house designed to their specfiications. My mother needed a dance studio (she always had made a place to work out and choreograph in a living room emptied of all extraneous stuff or pushed aside a rug); and my stepfather needed a quiet study for composing music. We were renting a converted carriage house from a dairy farmer in rural New Jersey, not too far from the Delaware River and Bucks County, PA, which lay beyond. In New Hope, PA, was George Nakashima's furniture building workshop and show room. My parents somehow convinced him that he could help them design their dream house. Princeton University was donating the land but they put plenty of stumbling blocks in front of that dream house being realized. Nevertheless, we did end up with a Nakashima-designed house. Along the way, there were countless napkins with kitchens and other spaces drawn out with a pen by my mother -- endless endless doodling (a habit which I adopted as a child). We only lived in that rather beautiful and modern house for four years before we moved away to Cambridge. We took with us a single Mira chair that I still have to this day. My mother and stepfather divorced later on and he married Martha,a violinist, now widowed. Sometime during their marriage they ordered this beautiful dining room table (with chairs)  which I had never seen until recently. Interesting that the relationship with Nakashima was kept alive all those years.

A research project on Trademarks


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Documenting the labelling phase

 One shot shows Readerware open on my computer as I make edits to the catalog while labelling another shelf-ful. The second picture shows how we are labelling a collection of rarer books with archival ID slips instead of spine labels.  Steve is taking the opportunity to familiarize himself with some of his books that he hasn't read yet.

(download)

Cataloging project - the labeling phase - with music

Working together, my client and I have labeled about 15 shelves out of 55, in about 10 or 11 hours. The routine works very well, especially to rock and roll, jazz, or classical music  accompaniment! We retrieve all the books from each shelf and set them out in order in front of us on the work surface.  We each have a heavy duty tape dispenser and roll of library tape. The labels have been printed out in the same order in which I catalogued the shelves, and each label sheet is labeled with the shelf number that I had assigned. I had pre-printed out a “shelf list” listing all the books in the correct LOC order to consult as we are labeling, one page per shelf.  We make sure the books in front of us are in the same order as the shelf list, and check the list as we are applying labels.  The list is an excel spreadsheet with abbreviated title, author, LOC number and shelf number.  Note that the books on each shelf had been arranged in LOC order, but the library as a whole is not. I estimate about 10-20 hours just getting the labels and shelf lists ready, because I do not have the automated software that a real library would have. Readerware does print labels and catalog cards under the report function, but I couldn’t figure out how to customize it for the 2” x .75” labels that I have, so I used Excel and Word merge.

We apply clear archival library tape to the spine to protect it (and make labels easier to remove if that is ever needed), then apply the label, then cover over with another piece of tape.  Because of this double taping and my underestimation of how much tape we needed, we plowed through two expensive tape rolls already (they run almost $20 each) and I ordered 5 more rolls (hoping that a total of 8 2” rolls @36 yards each will do it).

The books now resemble freshly labeled library books. The only problem is, how to distinguish the numerous “real” library books the professor already has on his shelves! He decided to segregate those to their specially designated shelves, and we may tag all of our beautiful new labels with a yellow permanent highlighter marker (from Staedtler – Lumocolor).

For pamphlets, the best would be to have some archival envelopes, but we can label the lower front, or use the archival ID strips.

Next phase will be reorganizing 1700 books in LOC order, leaving “slack and gap” as Zack put it. I also have to make sure my client has Readerware properly installed with the customization that is needed to glean LOC call number and subject headings from the LOC website  (when new books are added) and that my corrected records are exported to his database.
--

More on cataloging challenges

   Just to add to my comment/description above, the rate of books catalogued per hour was also slowed down by the fact that Library of Congress often did not have the items (pamphlets, self-published books, etc.) in this very special library, at least not by the title of the edition that I had in front of me. Many of them however could be found in libraries that specialized in or were local to the issues being written about. WorldCat was one way of quickly locating the item in a library. Then I “copy catalogued” what call number that librarian had assigned to the item. Often times, two libraries (for instances, both in the UC System but at different universities) would catalog the item differently. Here it wasn’t too useful to split hairs, as the main purpose of the catalog was to group like items with like items, and to be able to find the damn book!

    Another interesting fact is that often times the professor I was working for would have gathered some interesting fiction that related to or illustrated a particular subject or era in history and shelved it (in his informal system) with the nonfiction (perhaps for use with a special class that he had taught). But in our new system, the fiction will be shelved far from its nonfiction cousins. However, Readerware stores keywords and subject headings, so I hope that the works of fiction can eventually be found again by consulting the catalog.

Cataloging a Home Library by Library of Congress

This is a response I made to a very thorough report of a cataloging project similar to one I embarked on last month:
http://www.zackgrossbart.com/hackito/the-library-problem/#comment-2629

I concur with Zack that Readerware was the best choice I found for my recent project cataloging a 1700-book personal library of a U.S. history professor. I have a mac laptop and he has a PC, so it had to be cross-platform.

I cataloged all the books shelf by shelf, labelling each item in the database with its shelf number (arbitrarily/temporarily assigned, 1-53). Because I am slightly a perfectionist, I averaged 20 books an hour because so many ISBN's (paperbacks mostly) were incorrect and many books did not have barcodes (I did purchase a high quality barcode scanner by SerialIO - the LaserChamp).  

In addition, he wanted labels. I ordered my labels from Brodart as they also supplied very detailed templates so I could create a custom label in MS Word (Avery doesn't have any appropriate labels).  I planned to use the merge feature with Word, using Excel or Word as the datasource.

Exporting from Readerware to Excel is a breeze. In Excel I cleaned up the Library of Congress call numbers but found that it did not alphabetize totally correctly (how do you tell Excel that HD 51 is a whole number and not a decimal so that it will place HD 51 before HD 4000? Excel experts out there - please help!). I did a bit of tweaking and further imported the data into a Word table in order to insert paragraph spaces so the labels would wrap correctly. (Used a combination of search and replace and manual techniques.)  I used the Word tables imported from Excel as datasources for my merge because of the better editing tools and better merge results.  The result of the merge are beautiful labels but a lot of hand correcting is needed. After they were perfect, I printed out all the labels and they are ready to apply shelf by shelf. The labels are in same order as each shelf of books, very nearly.  

Only then will we attempt to organize alphabetically by LOC number. Any suggestions? Each shelf is in LOC order but the whole library now has to be reshelved in the proper order.  We are also deliberating on whether to protect the books with clear tape first, and whether to apply the tape over the label as well. Some of the books are splendid volumes from the 20s, 30s, and 40s, and I purchased archival book ID strips, and will apply labels to those (they stick out the top). Wish us luck in the next phase!  

I will try to convince the professor that importing his books into Google Books or LibraryThing will be rewarding. In Google Books "My Library" you will have cover images (you can have them in Readerware as well if you auto-update using Amazon), and be able to search instantly by keyword and even for text snippets if the book has been digitized! However, the books will appear in no particular order that would be useful to you, though they are instantly findable.  You can carry your Readerware database around in a Palm-based system or on your netbook, or you can consult your "Google" or LibraryThing library to avoid buying duplicates.  

I imagine that in order to maintain this book catalog, newly obtained books will need to reside on the "new shelf" and when enough are accumulated, they will need to be scanned in to the catalog, and labels created, and then added. Leaving space in the most popular subject categories sounds like a good idea.

I live in Oakland, CA and I'm looking for my next project!!
-Emily