Hilary Booth... of course!

Hm, so reports have the "Read or Die" OVA popping up on Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim", along with the first InuYasha movie. My only worry is I've heard they've stuffed into an hour timeslot. RoD is 90 minutes. Even editing the credits down, some bits will have to go. *sighs* I wonder if the TV show is far behind...

In semi-related news, article on The Librarian tv movie from TNT with Noah Wyle.

I don't like rain. I like freezing rain even less. The fed was on delayed arrival, which only meant fewer people on my morning commute. We won't even discuss the huge areas of puddling in our corner of DC. Dodging snow drifts is easier than large areas of water.

Our local NBC station has an article about parents dropping their kids at libraries because of snow days. I am so glad I don't work in public libraries.

One of my parents' favorite restaurants in Arlington, Mediterranee, appears to have burned down over the Thanksgiving weekend. Fortunately no one was hurt. My parents liked the place but I never did, mainly because I'm too picky an eater for that type of cuisine. Too many sauces and etceteras.

researchbuzz had a fascinating link today with Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts, including a seperate page on Germanic folklore.

Work is progressing fairly smoothly. I've gone from being the sole person responsible for checking in materials to one of three. The fourth one handles some of the shelving and runs around to local libraries with requests. But the extra people is a Good Thing, imho, since the firm receives a massive amount of mail on a regular basis. They do have a regular looseleaf filer, so I don't have those duties anymore. As much as I enjoyed the break from staring at the computer, the sheer volume would have overwhelmed me in this setting.

However I do get to know the joys of the pocket parts. For the uninitiated, those are the small little supplements tucked in the back of books, mostly legal treatises and codes. When the new set comes in, I have to go the shelf, take out the old pps and stuff in the new ones. Hopefully all of the set will be intact and not scattered into so many attorney's offices. We have an equally large Twilight Zone of pps waiting to be matched with their volumes once they are returned to the shelf.

Writing has slowed to standstill other than finishing off a fanfic piece that had been plaguing me since before Nano. I'm trying to do a novel concept for the CVS meeting by actually reading the monthly writing book, Fiction First Aid.

You're probably tired of hearing me complain about the weather. But darnit, I was hoping to feel like "doing stuff" as in outside in the sunshine, but no, another torrential downpour appeared where there had been beautiful sun for the last day or two. I was humming the line from Guys and Dolls "Likes mud, likes mud, this guy says the horse likes mud," until I watched another horse race on by. And that folks is why I can't get too excited about a possible Triple Crown. Although I was vastly amused to discover Roger Clemens could not even beat the Cubs for his 300th victory. After listening to Kathy Agel expound on the virtues of the Yankees for an hour and how Roger would win it against the Red Sox at Media West, I feel strangely vindicated.

I have posted the first set of icons over at remember_wenn. Bless gpsysngbrd for the nice screen captures. The blank ones are free to be used and adapted and captioned.

Girls only RPG started on Friday with the character generation session, along with discussions about the "game contract", as in what we want and don't want in the campaign. I had never experienced that sort of input before, so I wasn't sure what I could offer in the way of ideas. We're using the new Marvel game system, set in the fictional San Angelo. Which prompted a crash course in "gaming math". I was again reminded of Helene Hanff who wrote "I don't add too well in plain American. I haven't a prayer of ever mastering bilingual arithmetic." After being amused to read a comparison between character generation and Dewey cataloguing, I mentioned this at the game wherein one of my gaming friends retorted "Does this make Gurps the Library of Congress?"

Finally caved in and bought a subscription to Chronicle of Higher Education on a month to month basis. I've found too many interesting articles through that magazine, like the essay contest by Fairleigh Dickinson University on "Academic Libraries in 2012", archived on Dr. James Marcum's website. I love playing "What if?" and "Why not?" It's part of the reason I love science fiction so much. I willingly admit that some of the ideas seem a bit far-fetched, but the writer in me wants to take a spin through that hypothetical world. If the librarians or Cybrarians as one group called them now use VR technology to work with customers, do they work remotely? With wireless connections these days, it almost doesn't even make sense for users to come to the reference desk. I was able to get help from Library of Congress' microfilm connection by a simple email form. Extend that "Ask a Librarian" even further to see what you might get.

A post on libraries caught my eye, confirming the bad news I'd been hearing rumored both online and at the office. Divine/Faxon is in serious trouble to the point of sending the classic Romans to Britain "Fend for yourselves" missive to their users. Faxon is the major vendor which provides all of our journal subscriptions. My mail check-in relies quite heavily on those subscriptions. Hopefully our acquisitions expert has already started exploring alternatives, but I'm not sure who else handles the sheer breadth of journals as Faxon did. Unless we start splitting them up into smaller groups all over the place.

http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb021220-1.htm

I was working on a foreign law title today and discovered an interesting linguistic shift. The title was Turkish, so I found our foreign language guide that listed the various basic stuff for most languages, like months, days of the week, seasons, etc. Those are very useful for setting up patterns for checking in journals. The guide listed the months, no problem, except that they didn't match for October through January. According to our one contractor, whose wife speaks the language, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk spearheaded the language shift in the 1920s, completely overhauling Turkish so it was more Turkish than Arabic, eliminating language borrowings. The guide was published in the 1930s so I'm guessing the changes came during that period. (It reminds me of the movement in French to purify it of the "le hot dog" type words.)