BM Challenge #2: Laptop Presentation

Once a Children's Librarian, Always a Children's Librarian...when it came to selecting something to demonstrate I went with Tumblebooks. The only negative comment I must share is the difficulty in finding it on our website! No link is provided on the kids webpage itself! One must know to go to Find It! within our research page for access. I suppose the old kids page is kind of defunct, but if so, let's get rid of it altogether! Too many places to look, so little time....

Anyway, this wonderful new electronic resource can't get enough press! So I found a staff member who didn't even recognize its name, and went to work.

Aside from the fun of sharing all the great features, I will say that laptop presentations are a cinch, and a great tool to take on the road. Simple as pie even for the tech phobic population, it takes almost no time at all to plug in the projector, put power to the laptop, and connect the two with the blue, color-coded cable. Now if only I could get my hands on that awesome portable screen TRIS has! I'll be putting in a request for sure!

Anyway, Challenge 2 is being posted late, so please excuse the out of order sequence.....

Well, having the digitized reference titles is a great thing for sure! I don't think I would have any problem convincing customers that it is the 'real thing' and that is just as trustworthy as paging through the physical book, but....

As with any electronic resource there are things that just don't seem to work correctly and so can be frustrating at times. For instance, I searched for Sojourner Truth within one of the biographical titles. I selected the very first entry with a 100% relevancy rating. Just under a photo near the top of the page there was a "view PDF" hyperlink. When I clicked on this it only brought up one page. So it is clearly important to choose PDF from the "Tools" box on the right side of the screen. If someone had chosen to go with the first PDF displayed, they would have missed the large majority of the actual entry!

As for typos, when using VideoHound I selected The Last King of Scotland. The digitized version on GVRL had wordwrapped the title into The Last King ofScotland--I wonder just how many typos of this kind there might be? Many I would surmise....

All in all, it is a great resource, but once again, we can rest assured that our jobs are secure--people will always need our assistance!

P.S. Translation is a cool tool!

P.P.S. Since we have VideoHound here in full text, I would love to get my Halliwell's back as a standing order Reference work, and ditch the paper VideoHound!!! Ah, how will we ever keep up?...

Listen NJ--BM Web Challenge

Shannon Hale’s magical retelling of the Grimms's fairy tale of the princess who became a goose girl before she could become queen is a wonderfully rich one, full of eloquent description and lovely imagery, and with a complex plot, a large cast of characters, and a strong female protagonist. I enjoyed listening to Part 1 before deleting it from the MP3 player! Children's librarianship never fully dies...

As for the process of ListenNJ downloading and transferring to the player goes, I found it to be more time-consuming than hoped for. Having to download the overdrive software, update the windows media security certificate, and then do the actual steps required to get the book onto the Sansa player, I can only hope that this is far quicker from a home computer where the necessary software remains available for regular use. A great service, but can we make it easier to use within our branches?

Happy to have completed 'Thing One' of the BM Web Challenge! Onward ho! Thanks for getting me back on track with new 2.0 technology learning!

Flickr Fun

With the multitude of photos being shared 'round the world with Flickr, I am happy to pick one to share with all of you OCL Bloggers! Can you imagine this small glass structure is the entrance to my hands-down favorite museum in Copenhagen? Largely unknown even to Danes, I applaud my world-traveling daughter for turning my husband & I on to Cisternerne, where we spent our final afternoon in Denmark. Visit the link to read about this awesome Museum of Modern Glass Art, an underground historic water reservoir which also houses an exhibition of sandstone sculptures from ca. 1700! http://www.cisternerne.dk/index1.htm

23 Skiddoo --what's it to ya?

Aside from all this background as to the possible derivation of the term, 23 Skiddoo, I and my family DO SKI !!!

(: Junie B.

Why the name 23 Skiddoo? Credit: Wikipedia

23 skidoo (sometimes 23 skiddoo) is an American slang phrase popularized in the early twentieth century, first appearing before WWIand becoming popular in the Roaring Twenties. It generally refers to leaving quickly, being forced to leave quickly by someone else or taking advantage of a propitious opportunity to leave, that is, "getting [out] while the getting's good."
23 skidoo has been described as "perhaps the first truly national fad expression and one of the most popular fad expressions to appear in the U.S," to the extent that "Pennants and arm-bands at shore resorts, parks, and county fairs bore either [23] or the word 'Skiddoo.'" Although there are a number of stories suggesting the possible origin of the phrase, none has been universally accepted.
Flatiron Building
Perhaps the most widely known possible source of the expression derives from the area around the triangular-shaped Flatiron Building at Madison Square in New York City. The building is located on 23rd Street at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway, and due to the complex geography of the intersection winds swirl around the building. In the Roaring Twenties groups of men would gather to watch women walking by have their skirts blown up, revealing ankles which were seldom seen in public at that time. Local constables, breaking up these groups of men, were said to be "giving them the 23 Skidoo".

It is at a triangular site where Broadway and Fifth Avenue—the two most important streets of New York—meet at Madison Square, and because of the juxtaposition of the streets and the park across the street, there was a wind-tunnel effect here. In the early twentieth century, men would hang out on the corner here on Twenty-third Street and watch the wind blowing women's dresses up so that they could catch a little bit of ankle. This entered into popular culture and there are hundreds of postcards and illustrations of women with their dresses blowing up in front of the Flatiron Building. And it supposedly is where the slang expression "23 skidoo" comes from because the police would come and give the voyeurs the 23 skidoo to tell them to get out of the area.

The slang expression "23" was already in use at that time (see below), and Webster's New World Dictionary derives skiddoo (with two d's) as probably from skedaddle, meaning "to leave", with an imperative sense.
The Flatiron Building was completed in 1902, and three years earlier, in 1899, popular slang author George Ade explained the meaning of the new slang "twenty-three" in the WAshington Post dated October 22:
By the way, I have come upon a new piece of slang within the past two months and it has puzzled me. I just heard it from a big newsboy who had a ‘stand’ on a corner. A small boy with several papers under his arm had edged up until he was trespassing on the territory of the other. When the big boy saw the small one he went at him in a threatening manner and said: ‘Here! Here! Twenty-three! Twenty-three!’ The small boy scowled and talked under his breath, but he moved away. A few days after that I saw a street beggar approach a well-dressed man, who might have been a bookmaker or horseman, and try for the usual ‘touch’. The man looked at the beggar in cold disgust and said: ‘Aw, twenty-three!’ I could see that the beggar didn’t understand it any better than I did. I happened to meet a man who tries to ‘keep up’ on slang and I asked the meaning of ‘Twenty-three!’ He said it was a signal to clear out, run, get away. In his opinion it came from the English race tracks, twenty-three being the limit on the number of horses allowed to start in one race. I don’t know that twenty-three is the limit. But his theory was that ‘twenty-three’ means that there was no longer any reason for waiting at the post. It was a signal to run, a synonym for the Bowery boy’s ‘On your way!’. Another student of slang said the expression originated in New Orleans at the time an attempt was made to rescue a Mexican embezzler who had been arrested there and was to be taken back to his own country. Several of his friends planned to close in upon the police officer prisoner as they were passing in front of a business block which had a wide corridor running through to another block. They were to separate the officer from the prisoner and then, when one of them shouted ‘Twenty-three,’ the crowd was to scatter in all directions, and the prisoner was to run back through the corridor, on the chance that the officer would be too confused to follow the right man. The plan was tried and it failed, but ‘twenty-three’ came into local use as meaning ‘Get away, quick!’ and in time it spread to other cities. I don’t vouch for either of these explanations. But I do know that ‘twenty-three’ is now a part of the slangy boy’s vocabulary.
Or one of my favorite possible origins of the term!
****An early 1900s Death Valley town had 23 saloons (many basically tents). A visit to all, going 23 skidoo, meant having a really good time
Other possible roots:
Cartoonist "TAD" (Thomas A. Dorgan) was credited in his obituary in the New York Times in 1929, as being the "First to say 'Twenty-three, Skidoo.'"
An article in the June 26, 1906 New York American credits the phrase to one Patsey Marlson, then a former jockey hauled into court on a misdemeanor charge. At his hearing, Marlson is asked by the judge how the expression came about. He explains that when he was a jockey, he worked at a track which only had room for 22 horses to start in a line. If a 23rd horse was added, the long shot would be lined up behind the 22 horses on the front line. Apparently, "23 skidoo" implied that if the horse in the back was to have any chance of winning, it would really have to run very hard. Marlson also says in the article that the expression was originally "23, skidoo for you."
Death Valley National Park Service interpreters have sometimes given as an explanation that the early 1900s mining town of Skidoo required that a water line be dug from the source of water on Telescope Peak to the town - a distance of 23 miles. Most thought it would be easy, but the immensely hard rock along the course made it very difficult; it was eventually accomplished by a determined engineer. The term "23 Skidoo" was then used as a statement of irony, something like "duck soup": a reference to something 'apparently easy,' but actually very difficult.
It is said that 23 was an old Morse code signal used by telegraph operators to mean "away with you."

There was a town in California named Skidoo during the first decade of the 20th century. It was a number of short-lived "gold rush" towns that were abandoned after the local gold deposits were exhausted.

7 1/2 Lifelong Learning Habits Revisited

The easiest for me, Habit 4, is due to the fact that I DO have the confidence in myself as a competent and effective learner, BUT I often lack the patience to implement new technologies because of the time it takes, and my gut feeling that these things are fleeting...
That brings me around to the hardest for me, Habit 6, Using technology to my advantage....