(The Customer Is) Not Always Right blog has a delightful (and frightful!) exchange from a library circ desk: Books On Surveillance Tape.

The Perdita Project is an online collection of Early Modern (1500s to 1820s) period manuscripts by women. It is a collaborative project funded until 2002 by the AHRB, Nottingham Trent University, and Warwick University. So far it links to over 400 manuscripts around the world.

The catalog is viewable either as frames-based or frameless. The frame view allows the user to see the text plus information on a manuscript or a biography of its author concurrently. The material can be searched by writer’s name, genre, first line of text, repository name, geographical repository index, names of people, placenames, composition date, main languages, and bibliographic sources (although in the frames-based version only).

The background information about the project is sparse, and the site hasn’t been updated since 2007. Nevertheless, it offers valuable material not easily available elsewhere. The resource would benefit from an update to both content and look, though.

ACRL’s toolkit for scholarly communication is updated! They want to

• provide an educational resource
• offer tools and practical resources, and
• construct a repository which encourages sharing and reusing content.

Check out especially the links on the Websites page: author’s rights, open access, general sites about scholarly communication, selected reseach libraries, and organizations.

A delightful new blog acquaintance for me is In the Library with the Lead Pipe. It’s co-written by six librarians with wonderfully varying backgrounds. It is also

“intended to help improve our communities, our libraries, and our professional organizations. Our goal is to explore new ideas and start conversations; to document our concerns and argue for solutions. Each article is peer-reviewed by at least one external and one internal reviewer.”

My favorite post has to be Google, stupidity, and libraries by Kim Leeder.

Via librarian.net.

Just a few inspiring visual tours of what the technical services staff do – and why.

Arlington Heights Memorial Library, Arlington Heights, IL [video ca. 6 min]

Newton Free Library, Newton, MA

Michelle Mach has compiled a list of Real Job Titles for Library & Information Science Professionals. It’s fascinating what a variety of job titles currently exists.

Happy New Year!

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but it’s a good time to tidy up for the year ahead. Continuing my clean-up project, I came across another old kept-mailbox find: the Visual Thesaurus. This is certainly a less annoying search tool than Ms. Dewey. It displays results as a web of related terms.

You can search for words in English, German, Dutch, Italian, French, and Spanish. The explanations seem to default to English, however. You can control which parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs) your results cover from the panel on the right-hand side. A small speaker icon next to the word allows users to hear the pronunciation (American English default). You can edit some of the search and display settings, and share or print results.

Trial searches are free, but the number of attempts is (frustratingly) limited. It looks like a good resource for K-12 students as well as learners of English.

While cleaning my kept-mailbox, I found a link to a new search engine (well, new in 2006) called Ms. Dewey powered by LiveSearch (i.e., by Microsoft). It features an actress doing cutesy little things while waiting for the user to type in their search.

The animation plus the background take up most of the screen, while the search results are displayed in a corner of the screen.

The graphics are nice, but they’re like those pesky DVD menu screens. Both look cool for the first five seconds, but then they’ll just get in the way. Unfortunately the lines that Ms. Dewey repeats also go old really fast. This search engine will not get me back any time soon.

I’ve found it both pragmatic and helpful to write my blog entries in a word-processing program prior to posting, and it’s worked fine until now. Some recent WordPress update or feature has started to interfere with text formatting after cutting and pasting. Please bear with me as I work out the kinks.

I have a few friends and relatives who are color blind. I recently stumbled onto the Colorblind Web Page Filter and wanted a test run. Here’s what the Level1librarian rainbow book shelf looks like through the red-green filter:

Quite a difference! Reminds me that it’s better never to rely on color difference alone on your signage or web site buttons – or anywhere there’s a selection to be made.