Tools for library fools

ARTS X 2008 High Scorers on the “Are you High or Low (Art)” quiz — a high score means you have mastered knowledge relating to both high art culture and low art culture. Quiz is here.

We repurposed ReAssess, the tutorial software we built for the GSW library tutorial, for the 2008 Arts Extravaganza. Here are the answers to the quiz:

1) Who took the photograph for this Rolling Stones “Sticky Fingers” LP?

Answer: Andy Warhol

2) The image and musical example are two illustrations of a stylistic period that flourished between c. 1905 and c. 1920, especially in Germany. This style displays intense emotion in any medium.

Answer: Expressionism

3) The peasants in this video clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail are of what political persuasion?

Dennis the  Peasant on YouTube

Answer: Anarcho-Syndicalists

4) Name the artist of these two works:

Answer: Damien Hirst

5) What gender is Krazy Kat?

Answer: Indeterminate. Krazy Kat’s gender changes according to the situation. See “‘To He, I am for Evva True’”: Krazy Kat’s Indeterminate Gender” Postmodern Culture - Volume 4, Number 2, January 1994, available through OhioLINK’s EJC (Authentication required from off-campus).

6) Which of these composers wrote a Piano Quintet about a fish?

Answer: Franz Schubert (Piano Quintet in A)

7) Name this 1922 classic:

Answer: Nosferatu on YouTube

8 ) Who’s the artist of this self-portrait?

Answer: Rembrandt van Rijn

9) Name the artist who painted this seascape entitled “La Jolla Cove”:

Answer: Thomas Kinkade

10) What famous opera composer is immortalized in this “What’s Opera Doc” video?

What’s Opera, Doc? on YouTube

Answer: Richard Wagner

11) What 20th century musician performed a tribute to the creator of The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh?

Answer: Don McLean; the song is titled “Vincent”, aka “Starry, Starry Night”

12) What reclusive artist living in New York state made frequent trips to Manhattan to collect the materials for his assemblages?

Answer: Joseph Cornell

13) Who is this famous comic detective?

Answer: Dick Tracy

14) Name the opera based on two plays by Shakespeare.

Answer: Falstaff, by Verdi

15) What TV show takes place in Bikini Bottom?

Answer: Spongebob Squarepants

16) Who wrote the play Oedipus Rex, or Oedipus the King?

Answer: Sophocles

17) The four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were named after:

Answer: Renaissance Artists: Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello

18) Both Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger played versions of the same character in the 2007 film “I’m Not There.” Who was the character?

Answer: Bob Dylan

19) Name the prolific artist represented by these two vintage paperback covers (from the Popular Culture Library Vintage Paperback database):

Answer: Frank Frazetta

20) The Wiesbaden manifesto was:

Answer: The Monuments Men’s 1945 protest to their Army superiors over the plan to ship looted Nazi art to the National Gallery in Washington for “safekeeping.”

Answer to other manifestos, in order:

Andre Breton’s first Surrealist manifesto issued in 1924: The Surrealist Manifesto

Claes Oldenburg’s manifesto, along with other artists, reacting against Abstract Expressionism in 1961: I Am For An Art….Manifesto

Donna Haraway’s manifesto about Cyborgs and Socialist Feminism in the late 20th century: The Cyborg Manifesto: A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century

Valerie Solanas’ anti-men manifesto, published the same year she shot Andy Warhol: The S.C.U.M. Manifesto

21) Sally Rand, Immodesty Blaise, and Gypsy Rose Lee are famous for what type of theatrical performance?

Answer: Burlesque

On the menu in the Pallister Conference Room, Thursday November 20th, 2008 at 11:30 to 12:30:

LibraryThing for Libraries: Tim Spaulding’s keynote presentation at LITA made a compelling case for looking at LibraryThing for Libraries more closely — usually thought of as an enhancement for public libraries, there might be very interesting and useful applications for the Popular Culture Library and the Curriculum Resource Library in particular. Here’ the list of libraries using LibraryThing; some sample records of items include: Neuromancer by William Gibson at San Francisco State U; Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson at SFSU; 1984 by George Orwell at Cleveland State; Wicked Loving Lies by Rosemary Rogers at King County Library System; A Wizard Abroad by Diane Duane at King County Library System. Sample reading lists out of Librarything: Vampire Romances, Young Adult Leukemia, Unread, Featuring Kate Najacht, our very own LibraryThing user.

Demo of Centennial Memories: BGSU’s Digital Scrapbook. Centennial Memories will be a collection of past and present stories, images, and other digital artifacts donated by students, faculty, and staff of Bowling Green State University. See the demo — we’ll be asking for your contributions of stories, photos, video, audio, images and scans — as well as eventually hosting a metadata party to help us identify the images that were scanned from the 40th anniversary celebration — for example, does anyone know who these two women are, and why they are dressed as bunnies?

What is Twitter good for anyway, and why should we care? The Los Angeles Fire Department’s use of Web 2.0 technologies.

From the article: “Humphrey advises other government agencies testing the waters of Web 2.0 not to fall into a common misconception about the technology: That it will allow an organization’s voice to be heard louder, more clearly and over a greater distance.

Instead, “having this Web 2.0 presence … allows us to listen more clearly and more accurately over a greater area,” he said. “It is all about getting much more feedback [from the public].”"

Update: More Twitter stuff: TechCrunch on Twitter and Mumbai; CNN on Mumbai, Twitter, and Flickr.

Everything useful I learned at LITA National in 5 minute summaries and salient points, including:

Don’t Make Me Choose! (or, Just Get What I Need!): Making It Simple to Borrow by Jean Rainwater, Brown University Library & Bonnie Buzzell, Brown University Library. They’ve written a program that allows patrons to request any book from worldcat.org, and the program successively checks their local Millennium catalog, their Inn-Reach consortium, their two other consortiums —places a request if the item is available, and if the system is not able to place a request, the program automatically logs in to ILLiad and fills out the monograph request form. Circulation has jumped 15% in one year and patrons love it. Detailed Technical Info here, with stats, user assessment, etc.

A Faceted Browsing Approach to Duke’s Digital Collections: Using Open-Source Platforms to Enhance the User Experience by Will Sexton, Duke University Libraries and Sean Aery, Duke University Libraries. “In our approach, we treated our system not merely as an asset repository, but an easy-to-use, information-rich, enjoyable discovery system to be appreciated by casual users, serious researchers, and librarians alike.” Update: Slide Presentation and a blog post on Grand Metadata Tool Ideas by Will Sexton, one of the developers.

Crowdsourcing Digitization: Harnessing Workflows to Increase Output by Gretchen Gueguen, University of Maryland and Ann Hanlon, University of Maryland. Since November 2005, the University of Maryland libraries has engaged in another model for digitization: a workflow model that harnesses the digitization already being done by archivists and other staff for requests by patrons. By “crowdsourcing” selection decisions in this way the libraries have built a collection of over 5,000 objects from the holdings of the University Archives and Historical Manuscripts. (PDF)10_crowdsourcing

Other related news: WorldCat Local Implementation at Illinois Libraries (all types); Andrew Pace from OCLC saying that they will roll out a simple circulation system for libraries within 18 months.

If anyone has any technology related demonstrations or projects they would like to present, please let me know and I will add you to the menu.

This is free ebbedded quiz offered by mystudio. Might be handy for fun for spreading info.

ITS has loaded our Omeka install (heretofore referred to as memories) — on campus access only at the moment, with the very BGSU-like “Autumn” theme. Buggy still, little things to work out. Contribute something (anything but wav files) and let me know what happens.

The new server hosted by ITS is live at http://journals.bgsu.edu. We’ll be working on it over the fall semester, testing it with faculty and others with some editorial experience.

The new OPAC design is live. Thanks to the Public Interfaces Committee (Kate Najacht, Jennifer Nyiri, Ryan Mays, Mark Strang, Gwen Evans, and for a while, Cathi Cardwell) for all their hard work. Special thanks to Mark Strang, Eric Topp the LITS labs student, and graphic designer Lee Floro-Thompson.

We were talking in the Scholarly Communications seminar about alternative ways to the impact of scholarly publications, and I asked if anyone ever used worldcat that way, especially now that WorldCat Identities is out in beta; it gives a nice summary of scholarly publication for those whose main work is in monographs.

Carol Singer

Elizabeth Wood

Identities goes pretty “deep” — my father-in-law is in there because of his MFA thesis at the U of Colorado Boulder.

Our OJS installation is temporarily housed at http://ernie.bgsu.edu/ojs (on campus access only).

Our Omeka installation is temporarily housed at http://omeka1/omeka (on campus access only)

Contribute something — anything but audio, as we are having problems with some size and file type settings somewhere.

Screenshots of Musicovery

1. Positive/Energetic Axis

3. Dark/Energetic Axis

4. Positive/Calm Axis

5. Red Portishead

6. Green Donna Summer