Favorite Podcasts

Podcasts are one of my favorite ways to get news or be entertained. I thought I'd share some of my favorites.

Welcome to Night Vale
This is the only fiction podcast I subscribe to. The story is told in the form of broadcasts of a radio show from Night Vale, an odd little town where conspiracy theories are real. Updated twice a month, on the 1st and the 15th. Each episode is around half an hour. If you decide to check this one out, go back to beginning and start with the first episodes.

CBC: World Report 
10-minute daily report of world news. Great for catching up on what's going on in the big picture during your morning commute/walk to work.

CBC: Quirks & Quarks (Segmented Show)
Bob McDonald's fabulous weekly science podcast, segmented into individual stories. Often features interviews with Canadian scientists. Updates Fridays. Segments are ~5-15 minutes.

60-Second Science
Got a minute to keep up-to-date on science news? Scientific American publishes these very short audio articles on new science items. Normally 1-2 minutes long. There are additional 60-second podcasts for health, space, psychology, and environmentalism:

This Week in Science
The first podcast I got addicted to.

A weekly summary of science news from Dr. Kiki, Justin, and Blair. Each episode more than an hour.



BBC's The Infinite Monkey Cage
Physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince are joined by a variety of experts and comedians to discuss a science-related topic. I find them both hilarious and informative. During the season, episodes are released weekly, but there are long breaks between seasons.

I started listening to this podcast after seeing/hearing Brian Cox in Symphony of Science's early music videos/tracks.


Other Favorites

• CBC: Information Morning Fredericton
• Dan Carlin's Hardcore History
• Freakonomics Radio (I loved the books and love the podcast)
• The Memory Palace (Try Episode 41: Mary, Mary, and Mercy first)
• NPR: Pop Culture Happy Hour
• The Reality Check
• The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe
• Skeptoid
• Star Talk Radio
• Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project
• Stuff to Blow Your Mind
• Stuff You Missed in History Class
• Stuff You Should Know
• Writing Excuses (I don't write; I just think that Mary Robinette Kowal is fabulous.)

A Reader's Advisory Challenge

Can I challenge any of you with a bit of a reader's advisory?

I read Riel Nason's The Town That Drowned earlier this month. It spoke to me in a way I don't really understand and broke my heart a little.

I know that it's a fictional account of a fictional town: I'd like to learn a little more about the real communities that were affected by the construction of the Mactaquac Dam.

I just finished The Vanished Village: Jewett's Mills, N.B., 1804-1967 ... But it was a little insubstantial and really more focused on the earlier days of the community.

Does anyone know of any more in-depth local histories, personal narratives, people stories, about that event? (I'm not wedded to the idea of a book: I'll take a meaty website or recorded oral history.)

If ever you wake one day and the people who run your little province tell you they're going to drown the valley you lived in your whole life in, the valley your parents were born in, the valley your ancestors thought was as good as a gift from God when they sailed to this New World and were given a piece of it to start their lives over again (and that's why it's called God's country), if men who live in a city of planted elms on squares as big as half your front lawn, and work in buildings from which they should be able to see the same river as you (but somehow you just know they don't see it the same way), if those men decide for you that a tidal wave is coming to wash your whole life away-- well then know that there will be at least one, maybe some, who will love that beautiful land so much they won't ever want to see it different, won't ever have it turned into only a memory, and would rather become one with it than let it go.

The Town That Drowned, Riel Nason, p. 197

(Note: Just found Disregarded Sentiments: Discovering the Voices of Opposition to the Mactaquac Dam by Samatha Bourgoin. Loading to my eReader now.)

Do Reference Librarians Dream About Complicated Reference Questions?

I woke up dreaming that one of my colleagues in Edmundston was requesting a shelflist report to assist in building a regular rotating 'Library Bestseller' display in his library. (Which would probably make a lot more sense if he were the Adult/Young Adult Services Librarian, but that's dream-logic for you, isn't it?)

My brain being the rogue tool that it is, it has of course been pondering over how to build such a report (even though no one really asked for it, outside of a dream) instead of grabbing another hour's sleep.

So what parameters would you want to automagically identify library bestsellers suitable for a display? (Given sufficient ops-time, I suspect it's probably possible for a sufficiently experienced human to build such a display by grazing the shelves and pulling books based on their cover recognition. But sometimes it's fun to see if you can figure out criteria that the computer can apply to hack the same problem.)

The obvious criteria would, I suppose, include:

• Available on the shelf at 'my' library (Library to be definable at the point of scheduling the report)
• Total checkouts (at the title-level, not the copy-level) more than X (X to be definable at the point of scheduling the report)
• Optional criterion to limit the report to books published since year Y (Y to be definable at the point of scheduling the report)
• Optional criteria to limit the report to particular item types (fiction, non-fiction, etc.), item category 1s (large print, CD audiobooks, etc.), item category 2s (adult, young adult, etc.), and/or statistics category (donations, Aboriginal collection, etc.)

Would one want the ability to limit the report to a particular genre? It'd probably be possible to hack on a seltext query to search the 099 field in the bibliographic record (similar to Gaby's Book Club Report*) and pipe it through to the item-level filters.

And then there would be the necessity/desire to limit the report to titles that are still somewhat fresh, even if they are no longer hot enough to have holds to fill. After building the list of candidate titles based on the other criteria, we could calculate the last date on which any of the copies were checked out, sort the list by that date, and head the first 25 (40? 50? How many books do you need to build a display?) to get the most recently checked out (and presumably still interesting) titles.

On the output side, if you are going to use this to pull a display from the shelves, you'd want it sorted by home location, then call number, right? And then the usual suspects for the other data? Author, title, publication year, item barcode. This would probably be a report that one would want scheduled and the output emailed, so a columnar display rather than tab-delimited (for dumping into Excel, etc.)

So, that's mapped out, so my brain can stop chewing on the problem! Fortunately, my rogue brain does not require me to actually write the Perl scripts to get these things out of the back of my head, but it'll sometimes keep poking me with an interesting question until I at least map out how I could tackle the challenge :-)

(* Yes, I have a bad habit of naming custom reports in Symphony after the people who first asked for them. Most of the present and past TSLs, ARDs, and Circulation Supervisors have their names stored in source code on the server for posterity, as do a smattering of library managers and other staff. We send her mental well-wishes every time we schedule irene to suspend holds newly placed for pickup at a library that is closed for renovations.)

Week 2: Twitter

On Twitter, my handle is Infomancer ... I mostly use Twitter as a news source. I follow several accounts from CBC, arts organizations in my city, and the like.

When I post myself, it is generally about what I'm reading, what my cat is up to, or about what I've been making.

The first account I followed on Twitter was a cat named Charlene Butterbean (you know, from the Itty Bitty Kitty Committee?). The most recent account I followed was the European Space Agency's Rosetta Mission. That says everything about the Internet, doesn't it?

For library-related Twitter use, I find it useful to follow BiblioCommons and OverDrive Libraries.

Content Producers: Derivative Works Are Your Friends

Thing #2 on the NB 23 Things to-do list was to add a post to our blogs. Sorry: I just don't stop talking :-)

One of the widgets I added to bling up my blog is a list of the top 10 tracks that I have listened to the most since starting to use Last.fm around seven years ago (it's over there --> on the right).

It struck me as I looked over the list that two of the ten songs are ones that I first became aware of through derivative works.

A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted.

Track 4 on my list, Coldplay's Viva la Vida, is one that I was introduced to via Norwegian Recycling's mashup Viva La Viral (available as a free download on Last.fm). (Yes, I know that Viva la Vida was played all over music radio ... I'm one of those hard-to-reach consumers who, on getting a new radio alarm clock, tune their radios to the local public radio news station and then never mess with it again.) I enjoyed the mashup enough seek out the source material, enjoyed that as well, and ended up purchasing the album.

Norwegian Recycling's Soul of Fireflies is similarly how I became familiar with Train's Hey, Soul Sister and Owl City's Fireflies and went on to give both those artists my money.

Track 9 on my list, Kate Rusby & Kathryn Roberts's Exile, is one that I became of aware through a fanvid. Specifically, a Doctor Who (9th Doctor) fanvid of the same name by Wolfling:



Having completely fallen for Kate Rusby's voice, I thereafter sought out multiple albums by her. I'm fairly certain that I would never have encountered her work otherwise. (Unlike Viva la Vida, her work has never been featured as a question at Tuesday Night Trivia.)

A close friend is quite fond of vidding, including making her own videos, so there are quite a number of tracks in my music library that I only ever encountered because they served as the background music for fan videos. (Slightly odder, there are also television shows and movies that I have only watched because I enjoyed the music videos that their fans made about the shows. Equilibrium, I'm talking about you.)

So, content producers and artists, don't freak out about derivative works: sometimes, they will drive consumers back to the original source material and bring you more fans.

But Seriously, Let's Talk About Cats

I like to geek out as much as the next person, but let's get real and talk about cats!

My furry companion is His Imperially Fuzzy Highness Jaguar I of Anything He Claims, known casually as Jaguar.

He is fond of sleeping on my iPod:

Other electronic devices:

Any craft projects in progress or finished:

Or just sleeping in general:

The other furry person in my life is Callie, known on Twitter as waterkitty. She likes to play in sinks:

I catsit her (inadequately, she claims) when her person is wandering to various corners of the world. Have any of you read Toot and Puddle? Callie's person is Toot and I'm Puddle.

Tempted to Embed a BiblioCommons Carousel on Your Blog?

Would anyone else be interested in learning how to embed a BiblioCommons carousel on your blog? I thought I would amuse myself by writing up a tiny tutorial (while listening to Owl City or Garou and playing Neopets on my other screen) ... Forgive my style throughout: most of the people I write tutorials for are cataloguers or technical services staff!

Step 1. Pick a user list on the library catalogue that you want to use. I'm using my Borrowed in 2014 list through this tutorial.

Step 2. Notice the URL for the list. In the URL, the number that appears before the words in the title of your list is the List ID for the list. Like the ISBN for a book, it uniquely represents this list. In this case, the List ID is 226006717
http://vision.bibliocommons.com/list/show/75445213_rainey/226006717_borrowed_in_2014

Step 3. Next, go to the widgets page for the library catalogue. This page is accessible to anyone, whether they are library staff or patrons, and whether they have a library account or not. (It's a useful resource if you are developing-- or having someone develop-- a web presence for your local library.) You will find this page at: http://vision.bibliocommons.com/info/integration/ 

(There is a similar page on any BiblioCommons catalogue, but by using the vision subdomain, you'll get code customized for our library catalogue. If you go to http://ottawa.bibliocommons.com/info/integration/  you will find similar snippets of code, but they'll work for Ottawa Public Library's catalogue.)

If you scroll down to the section labeled User List Carousel, you'll find this snippet of code:
<iframe src="//vision.bibliocommons.com/list/list_browse/user/LIST_ID" height="315" width="550" frameBorder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Following the instructions there, replace the test LIST_ID with the List ID you found in Step 2.

That gives me the snippet:
<iframe src="//vision.bibliocommons.com/list/list_browse/user/226006717" height="315" width="550" frameBorder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Step 4. To add the carousel to one of your posts, write the introductory text of your post normally with the Compose option selected in Blogger. But when you are ready to add your carousel, switch to the HTML option.

Paste your snippet of HTML at the bottom of your post:

Then, switch back to Compose mode and continue writing up your post with any closing remarks you feel like adding.

If you try this and it works, I'd be interested in knowing. If you try it and it DOESN'T work, I'd be REALLY interested in figuring out why!