Recent travels

A favourite seasonal poem!!

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Spring and Fall
to a young child
1Margaret, are you grieving
2Over Goldengrove unleaving?
3Leaves, like the things of man, you
4With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
5Ah! as the heart grows older
6It will come to such sights colder
7By & by, nor spare a sigh
8Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
9And yet you wíll weep & know why.
10Now no matter, child, the name:
11Sorrow's springs are the same.
12Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
13What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
14It is the blight man was born for,
15It is Margaret you mourn for.
Notes
1] Hopkins wrote this poem as he walked from Lydiate to the train for Liverpool (White). He wrote Robert Bridges that it was "a little piece composed since I began this letter [Sept. 5], not founded on any real incident. I am not well satisfied with it" (Letters, I, 109).
2] Goldengrove: capitalized, as a place name. Golden Grove, Carmarthenshire (Wales), is about three hours south of Liverpool, and was the estate of Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), an Anglican bishop who wrote a manual of daily prayers, The Golden Grove (1655). Closer to Hopkins' regular home in Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, and more appropriate to the theme in Hopkins' poem, is the Golden Grove at Llanasa, Flintshire, a great house from the Elizabethan period that rests in a thousand acres of great trees and pastures.

Social networking etc.

Unfortunately at the time when I had to do this final part of the course the only site I could get to open ( not yet full moon?, something to do with our IT?, sunspots? passing aliens?) of the social networking variety was the Roturua site, and this definitely evoked "We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto" feelings. I also remember a comment made by one of the presenters at the Library Web 2.0 colloquium in Brisbane earlier this year that in regard to the students of the uni. where she worked "they don't want us in their space",and the mere suggestion had invoked the response "creepy". It was noticeable that she herself was definitely of the 2.0 generation.
However, I'll leave it as a generational thing and in pusuit of that thought close with a quote from that delightful book I wrote about on my Google.doc, Scott Douglas's Quiet Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian, Philadelphia , De Capo/Perseus, 2008. Even though Douglas graduated in 2001 he does say"MySpace is a great tool. Just not in the library" but he does go on to say "What I learned from it was there was an entire world of librarians my age and even younger...We talked about random things, from best film to feature a librarian to should food be allowed in the library? We encouraged each other becuse we knew we were the future. We were the ones who had to come up with the ideas to take the library to the next level."p.209.

Online applications and tools

I guess the internal office applications of something like Google.docs is fairly apparent, and would ease the production of library documents that need the collaboration of several staff, like newsletters etc. I imagine you might also be able to use Google.docs to do collaborative work with special interest groups such as local history societies, with members able to contribute to a common document which could then be put on the library's website. At one of our branches we have a collection of manuscripts and typescripts produced by a local heritage group on the history of the area which are invaluable ( I used one for a university assignment on war memorials to good effect) and it is conceivable that some sort of online collaborative document detailing the group's historic memories could be created using Google.docs.

Mashups

This is a mashup which is a quite extensive reference library of online resources , and with
an obvious library application.

www.librarianchick.com/

I have myself been trying to download a soundbite to a Google image, but have decided life is too short after many attempts. However, for the technically proficient, mashups would be a marvellous resources for adding commentary to local history photographs online, for one example, or to produce promotional audio visuals which would have considerable impact online or screened in the library during , say, Library Week. As librarychick shows, time permitting, a library could create customised reference tools for its individual community.

Podcasts

Poor Evelyn Waugh seems to be under pursuit throughout this particular 2.0 training program! I couldn't resist listening to his 1947 broadcast per the BBC podcast , as it is always interesting to hear someone's voice or see them, and see or hear if they match your image of them. Interesting that his voice was somewhat different to what I expected (less fruity, less orotund and dogmatic) and that he was discussing Forest Lawn, I place I have also visited and enjoyed as I enjoyed The Loved One , was an added bonus. I guess the uses of podcasting in a library could be manifold, as they are on the Library Success wiki, and the library websites, book talks, visiting authors and artists, instructional material on how to use the library's services and facilities, library news etc, etc. You would always have to have the agreement of members of staff and the public attending events to be able to podcast as a matter of privacy and ettiquette.
Perhaps at the moment this application might have the greatest appeal to the youth segment?

Answer Boards and Social Searching

So appalling is the quality of some of the answers to the Australian History questions on Yahoo! Seven Answers that perhaps we have a duty to participate and bring our expertise to bear on the answers boards, something I have to confess I haven't had much to do with despite the RISG initiative. As they stand, you could use those answers on Yahoo in support of the the the thesis in Andrew Keen's book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and
Assaulting Our Economy, London/Boston,Nicholas Brealey,2007. One thing, the answer boards idea of enabling rating of the quality of the answers, if used by libraries, would be a way of getting immediate feedback on the quality of online reference service, at least, rather than having to rely on occassional user surveys.

Folk taxsonomies, Library Thing, Technorati etc, etc

del.icio.us / isloggett /

I have put just a few items initially to my new del.cio.us account, including a witty article on a author I love to hate, Evelyn Waugh (such a snob, such a boor, then, suddenly, such spiritual insight, Lord Marchmain's deathbed in Brideshead etc etc) a couple of favourite architectural specimens in LA and that strange little Grande Guignol horror story by Lovecraft. I guess the big advantage of del.icio.us is that you can have flexible , easily done, in house "catalogueing" (or certainly retrieval) that is available to staff and public and can suit particular needs your library service might have. I did recently retrieve that Lovecraft story for an HSC student who was needing extra text on the "Outsider" theme and they decided to use it, I believe. You could, for example, put the story into de.icio.us as an extra HSC resource, or tag the Capitol Records building as an example of fantasy architecture or 1950's style.

I showed Library Thing to our Bookchat group today, it being one of my days to chair, and they were quite impressed. The entries in my catalogue are all books I bought over the last couple of months for myself, except the Slessor, which was an example that came from one of our Bookchat members, although I do own copies of his poetry, and as a poet I sincerely think he deserves a 5 rating!

www.librarything.com/catalog/ISloggett