Rollyo Search

The Lumber Room Rollyo Search function is now in the menu. Some of the best Jewish jokes on the web. Enlightenment for all at Rollyo.com.

Membership in Library Thing

Lumber Room has enrolled as a member of Library Thing. Some modern titles from the bookshelves have been included on the website.

"The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing."

Benjamin Disraeli

Image Generators!

With a bit of ingenuity and cunning circumvention the Lumber Room was able to post this Computer Use Warning for viewing. I used Personal Threat Level to create it. Although the site provided instructions for saving the image the authors did not account for the use of an iMac or the Camino browser. Camino, by the way, is a product of Mozilla -- the equivalent of Firefox for Macs. Initially, I tried to click/save the image from the web page & also the URL of the image (the same way one would right click using a PC). Secondly, after finding out that the images would not open properly on the iMac after downloading them. The resulting files showed either a white background with the words "No Hotlinks Please" in the Preview image viewer or in Photoshop Elements. When the file was pasted into a PowerPoint slide the URL appeared but as a dead link. I resorted to the iMac Grab application and took a screen capture from the image URL & saved it to the desktop. The default saved it as a tiff file. Unfortunately, Blogspot would not upload it. I copied it & saved it as a jpeg; it would not upload. I copied it & saved it as a gif; it would not upload. Finally, I copied it & saved it as a bitmap bmp & it uploaded as it is now displayed.

I was finally able to successfully upload the images created with the Custom Neon Sign Creator. The files originally downloaded to my iMac desktop opened as simple text files. When I uploaded them as jpegs on my office PC -- running Windows XP with Internet Explorer -- it was a piece of cake.

"Emergency! Emergency! Everybody to get from street!"

N. Benchley

Thinking About 2.0

The Lumber Room has rarely visited the OCLC website or read their NextSpace newsletter. We, however, have read and more often than not agreed with Walt Crawford, the library advocate/pundit (admittedly without MLS) who formerly published in the Library Journal.

Mr. Crawford -- the voice of the radical middle -- is a long standing ALA member & is currently writing an online journal Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large that is sponsored by Baker & Taylor. His work has been unfortunately omitted in the Wikipedia bibliographies for the articles listed on our own TLC 2.0 website.

This is not to say that librarians who provide technology services should have no knowledge of how these various online instruments work and how they can be beneficial or dynamic. But, do librarians need to be able to organize the personal scrapbooks of the public?

Here is some interesting reading from Mr. Crawford in the current (December 2007) issue of Cites & Insights.

This article from the Cites & Insights 2006 Midwinter issue is his early evaluation of Library 2.0.

Making one's private life public is requisite for our declining culture. Why should not public libraries become enablers to this end?

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy."

Ayn Rand

Tag List

In the menu to the you will find subject tags to my posts in alphabetical order. No doubt you will discover the wide variety of ephemera stored in the Library Lumber Room.

“The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of 'Ten Best'.”

H. Allen Smith

Del.icio.us

Here is a link to my new Del.icio.us page.
I have listed some of my favorite Yiddish related websites.

"He who dares not offend cannot be honest."

Thomas Paine

Personal Radio Tuner

If you like to stream radio as much as I do check out the Personal Radio Tuner from Yahoo!.

As an old shortwave radio buff it is now easier to hear "broadcasts" of many worldwide stations streamed on the internet without interference, fading, or regard for atmospheric conditions (anyone remember jamming?) than to set up a radio with an antenna that is more receptive than the common whip antenna that is standard with modern shortwave receivers.

The widget allows you to set up 32 radio stations. This is much easier than creating bookmarks in your browser.

"The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books."

Stéphane Mallarmé