Thing #22 -- Welcome to the World of eBooks!

This month at the College of San Mateo Library, we are promoting the college's eBook collection, which seems to be a little known and little utilized resource. The college's eBook collection can be accessed remotely 24/7 IF members of the campus community set up an account from a computer on campus. Peninsula Library System cardholders can access the eBook collection for PLS, which is substantial but does not include some of the academic materials associated with a community college library.

Yesterday I conducted an informational/marketing survey at the CSM Library, using the incoming patrons as my sample pool to select from. Patrons self-selected by indicating if they were willing or not to participate. There were five questions on the survey regarding eBooks in general and the eBook collection at CSM more specifically. The participants who have access to the Internet at home or somewhere off campus could see the convenience of accessing eBooks from home and when the library is closed. A few of the participants indicated that they did not have access to a computer and/or the Internet at home, so for them, accessing eBooks at the library itself would be their best option.

A good place to start looking for eBooks is the World eBook Fair, which serves as a portal to numerous collections of approximately one million eBooks.

There are sidebar ads showing links to more free eBooks as a marketing tool to get Internet users to visit the websites to look at not only the freebies but also the eBooks for sale. Fictionwise.com is one such site.

Project Gutenberg offers 25,000+ free eBooks and even more books through their affiliates. Volunteer opportunities abound.

Project Gutenberg keeps lists of the top 100 eBooks downloaded:

The categories are Top 100 EBooks yesterday — Top 100 Authors yesterday — Top 100 EBooks last 7 days — Top 100 Authors last 7 days — Top 100 EBooks last 30 days — Top 100 Authors last 30 days

And how about gaining access to 500,000+ PDF eBooks and eDocuments for $8.95? Stop by World Public Library to find out more.

Going back to the eBook collection available through the College of San Mateo, here are some of the enticing titles that we have on our display of mock eBooks:

How to Survive and Maybe Even Love Your Life As a Nurse

by Dunham, Kelli S.; Smith, Staci J.
Publication: Philadelphia, PA F.A. Davis Company, 2005.

Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads

by Best, Joel.
Publication: Berkeley University of California Press, 2006.

Surviving: Coping With a Life Crisis
North American Ed.

by Montgomery, Bob.; Morris, Laurel.
Publication: Tucson, Ariz Perseus Books Group, 2000.

Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America
Organisms and Environments ; 8

by Martin, Paul S.
Publication: Berkeley University of California Press, 2005.

America's 101 Fastest Growing Jobs: Detailed Information On Major Jobs With the Most Openings and Growth
America's Top Jobs Series

by Farr, J. Michael.
Publication: Indianapolis, IN Jist Publishing, 2005.

Desktop Audio Technology: Digital Audio and MIDI Principles
Music Technology Series

by Rumsey, Francis.
Publication: Amsterdam, Boston Elsevier, 2004.

War & Peace in the Balkans: The Diplomacy of Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia

by Oliver, Ian.
Publication: London, New York I.B. Tauris, 2005.

Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity: The Uncanniness of Late Modernity
SUNY Series in National Identities

by Arnold, Kathleen R.
Publication: Albany State University of New York Press, 2004.

~ Ms. Mundy ~

Still Leaping Around -- this time to Thing #18

Last Friday, October 17th, the College of San Mateo Library hosted its first Learning 2.0 interactive educational experience for staff and faculty. For a Friday afternoon, when folks are already transitioning to Weekend Mode, it was well attended. It was fun to watch (and help) people sign up for Google accounts and create their own blogs -- a first online publishing experience for them. In the meantime, school assignments have kept me busy and off the streets and away from blogging. Last week's Learning 2.0 experience reminded me of the usefulness of such web-based applications like Google Docs, which I hadn't used for a couple of semesters. It's been helpful to set up some Word documents in Google Docs for easy access when I'm away from my laptop. To access Google Docs, you can go to Google's home page and click on the hyperlinked "More" to access the dropdown menu where "Documents" is listed. I created a number of documents related to school projects as well as a things to do list by category that I can update from any computer. One of the assignments for Thing #18 is to make a web page out of one of the documents created, so let me try that and report back with a link to add to this blog entry.

It's pretty easy to do. After creating your Google document, you are given a number of choices as far as "sharing" your document, and one of the options is to publish your document as a Web page. So here is mine about flu vaccinations with a couple of references. Initially I wasn't planning on getting a flu shot; however, after doing some reading about flu vaccinations and how you may be protecting more than just yourself, it might be worthwhile after all.

~ Ms. Mundy ~

Why I am fascinated by lemurs

Just take a look at that face!! And check out the incredible acrobatic agility. Amazing!

http://lemur.duke.edu/animals/slowloris/feeding.jpg

The caption under the photo reads:
A slow loris munches on a banana while suspended upside down.

P.S. About Thing #13

The linkroll feature from Delicious to this blog worked fine -- well, sort of -- but for some reason, even though the HTML code showed that the bookmarks should be showing up in alphabetical order, and everything looked good in the preview on the Delicious site, the bookmarks didn't appear that way in this blog. I saw the changes to the HTML code with my very own eyes, but nothing happened to change the outward appearance of the order of the bookmarks. Harrumph. So, when the recommended method fails to yield the results one is looking for and when one is absolutely illiterate in reading and writing HTML code, then one is left with no other recourse than to switch to the tried and true "copy and paste" tactic, which seemed to work just fine. Go figure.

~ Ms. Mundy the Mildly Miffed ~

P.S. I promise to go back to the order of The 23 Things and get busy with Thing #6, "Flickr Fun and Mashups"...someday soon... Speaking of "mashups," here is a blurb from The Circulator Archives about how the word itself has evolved from musical applications to meaning a Web application hybrid.

Lemur Lover Leaps to Thing #13

So much for following instructions and approaching The 23 Things in an orderly fashion! Lemurs leap from one branch to another -- with no apparent method to their madness -- and hence this lemur loving librarian 2B has decided to follow suit. I was at the Planetree Library last week, where I volunteer, working on a school assignment. I wanted to access one of the information literacy blogs that I remembered coming across last semester BUT it was bookmarked on my laptop at home and quick searches from my memory did not yield the longed for result. Gr-r-r. Time to call on another Web 2.0 tool by setting up an account on Delicious.com (formerly del.icio.us), a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing and discovering bookmarked websites of interest to the other 5 million users on Delicious. Now the trick will be to see if I can incorporate a linkroll from Delicious into this blog. BTW, I finally watched Foul Play with Goldie Hawn, Chevy Chase, and Dudley Moore and got to see Ms. Gloria Mundy in action.

Some of My Delicious Bookmarks

• Best Friends Animal Society / animals pets rescue charity dogs cats rabbits animal_sanctuaries Utah Kanab national_parks parrots pigs horses

  Best Friends Animal Sanctuary located 5 miles outside Kanab, Utah. Kanab is a terrific little town (pop. 5,400), a few miles north of the Arizona border, from where a visitor can travel to the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, and Lake Powell.

• Bikram Yoga / Bikram_Yoga Hatha_Yoga

  This website is a great introduction to Bikram Yoga, a series of 26 postures done in a hot room with fellow practitioners -- students who have been doing Bikram Yoga for years and students who are just starting. It's an amazing Hatha Yoga practice! The testimonials page is fascinating though if I had a lot of pain from injuries and/or chronic conditions, I probably wouldn't have the incredible fortitude and perseverance to work through it like some of these folks who know that this yoga practice will help relieve their discomfort over time.

• Duke Lemur Center -- Mission Statement / lemurs Duke_Lemur_Center

  If you can't travel all the way to Madagascar to see lemurs in their natural habitat, you could go to the Duke Lemur Center instead, which is located in North Carolina. I'm looking forward to going there someday.

• IAVA - Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America - An Introduction to IAVA / IAVA Iraq_Veterans Afghanistan_Veterans Iraq_War

  The title of this bookmark speaks for itself. The video clip is well worth watching.

• If I Ran the Universe... / librarian_blog twisted_humor opossums

  If you're a LIS student, a librarian, a library paraprofessional, or someone who knows and loves librarians, you may get a kick out of this librarian's outlook on life inside and outside the library.

I am LemurLover on Delicious

Thing #5 - Exploring Flickr

It's been over 2 weeks since I have added anything to the Lemur Lover's Library Log. Every Friday when I see Jackie at the Reference Desk at the College of San Mateo Library, it's a good reminder to get back to the 23 Things. I volunteer at a Planetree Library in Mountain View, and there I remember viewing one of the medical librarian's photos on a Flickr site. I have also seen some library students' photos on their Flickr pages and that has been the extent of my involvement with Flickr thus far. Do I dare admit that from time to time, I still take photos with a camera that uses 35mm film?? That particular camera is very special because of the memories associated with it. The camera I had brought with me died on a mother-daughter trip to Ireland two years ago. With ten minutes left before the shops closed in downtown Killarney, my mother and I set out rapidly to find a camera shop that still had "old fashioned" 35mm cameras in stock. We found a small shop in a back alley with a lovely and patient owner. He had ONE Pentax Espio 115V camera in stock (38mm - 115mm zoom lens), which we bought. Of course, it doesn't compare to the ease and versatility of using a digital camera, but it's fun to have all the same.

Speaking of Killarney, here's a photo of Ross Castle from Flickr:

















www.flickr.com/photos/95135184@N00/199777661/

And now for two photos from one of our home activities:




















This is from when I worked at a large animal shelter, giving my husband and me a golden opportunity to foster kittens and raise the occasional "bottle babies." At the time this little character and his sibling came into the shelter, the policy was that the kittens had to be eating on their own before they could go into foster care. These two put on a good show, but after I brought them home, they both said, "We were fakin' it; give us a bottle please!" They weighed about 8-10 ounces each and were probably about three weeks old.




















At the time, because of their size, we thought the black and white kitten was a male and that the brown tabby was a female. Turned out to be the other way around though the B&W girl was pretty hefty at 2 months of age while her brother was more on the petite side. Even at two months of age, when they were able to eat dry food with no problem, they still enjoyed a comfort bottle from time to time. When she was two months old, the B&W kitten was able to hold her own bottle.

I found it easier to upload photos from my computer than from a website like Flickr. For some reason, even though Blogger went through the motions and said that the photo I was uploading from a particular URL on Flickr had uploaded successfully, nothing showed up. Frustrating! Instead I saved the photo to my desktop and then added it to Blogger through the "Add Image" function, which worked great. Well, it worked great until I tried to publish this post. I received several error messages indicating that some of the Html tags were not OK. Fortunately, one by one, each Html tag that Blogger didn't like was highlighted, so I removed each offensive one as it was identified by the system and wondered what the removal of these tags would do to the overall appearance of the blog post. Finally, it must have run out of inappropriate Html tags because it showed up as being published. I have no answer for why certain Html formatting showed up as inappropriate unless it had to do with the first photo from Flickr that I tried to upload a few times. Otherwise, I'm stumped. Enough blogging and Flickr exploration for today.

The movie, Foul Play, from which I derived my blogger identity, arrived recently from Netflix. I haven't seen this movie yet but look forward to watching it. It's a 30-year old comedy-thriller involving a shy San Francisco librarian (Goldie Hawn) and the detective assigned to protect her (Chevy Chase). It is supposed to be a spoof of Hitchcock suspense thrillers.

~ Ms. Mundy ~

Weeks 1 & 2 -- Life at the CSM Library

This is the start of my 23 Things blog to get the College of San Mateo faculty, staff and students off to a rolling start. I am working on my master's degree at San Jose State University and was accepted as an intern at the CSM Library where I will be learning and practicing skills to help me a more effective librarian out there somewhere in Library Land.

This is a wonderful community college library with very pleasant, knowledgeable professional and paraprofessional staff. I hope that all the students who attend classes on campus will swing by the library and take a look at all the resources available to them. Ditto for the remote users.

Currently at the CSM Library, there are two displays of books and other print materials. The downstairs display showcases books and journals on global warming. The title on the display case is "GREEN" ISSUES. Upstairs is a display of books on "Women of Achievement."

~ Gloria Mundy ~