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5 things you didn’t know about Kathryn Greenhill

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I’ve been sitting out here on the “C” list in Australia, waiting to be tagged with this meme. I’ve just had three “driveby” taggings – of the “if you’re reading this, you’re tagged” kind – so off I go…

  1. Neither my husband nor I were born Greenhill. It’s the family name we chose when our first child was born. We changed our names by deed, then registered the birth.
  2. I’ve just come out of 9 years of looking after small children and dying parents, so the opportunity to choose what I do with some hours of my day is novel and exciting. I’m like a kid in a lolly shop.
  3. In 1991, I was removed by police from a public bar in Swansea, Tasmania, making the front page of the Mercury. I was having a quiet drink with some other women the night after the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission had ruled that the RSL could not legally continue to exclude women from the bar. The RSL President was drunk and belligerent and removing us was how the police kept the peace.
  4. I have a morbid fear of beetroot. The smell, the stains, the texture, the taste, the look…all spine-chilling.
  5. I am very good at yoyo tricks. I had pneumonia when I was 11, during a yoyo craze. While I was off school recovering, I put the time to good use.

Consider yourself driveby tagged if you’re reading this, but particularly if you are:

  1. CW
  2. Dave Pattern
  3. Feral TB
  4. Rochelle Hartman
  5. Judy O’Connell


TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Strength

YouTube and I say “Happy holidays”.

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Here’s one I made earlier today at the windy beach.

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/S48nqIH6PvQ” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /]

If the YouTube viewer doesn’t appear in your aggregator, try going here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S48nqIH6PvQ

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Only 9 more days to help Peter pick his glasses…..

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I’m always fascinated by people using blogs creatively.

One of the students at my uni needs help picking his new glasses frames. The terms of his health insurance means he has to do it by 31 December. On his blog, he’s posted pictures of himself wearing different frames and would like people to use comments to vote on the best.

He’s shortsighted, so can’t see what he looks like in the mirror..without his glasses.

Give him your opinion as a Christmas present……

Pick my glasses.

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Oh you cain’t getta man with a booooook!

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Oh yes you can..if you live in Victoria.

The State Library of Victoria is running “Text appeal” bring-a-book speed dating sessions. I can’t explain it any better than the library itself:

Love is in the air at the State Library of Victoria this summer.

Text Appeal is a new take on the traditional dating formula. Each person brings a book they love, loathe or have recently read to act as a conversation starter. Jane Austen may find Patrick O’Brien, Salman Rushdie could be captivated by Zadie Smith, and JK Rowling – can take her pick. The books people bring may reveal who they are, who they aren’t and perhaps who they are looking for, all in a three-minute conversation.

Text Appeal will run once a month from December 2006 to February 2007, with the final event being held on Valentine’s Day. 6 Dec 2006, 17 Jan & 14 Feb 2007; 7-9.30pm
Venue Experimedia
Bookings Registration is essential. Fill in the form below, tel +61386647555 or email learning@slv.vic.gov.au
Cost $20 per session – drinks, entertainment and the promise of a bookish romance included (a three-for-the-price-of-two discount applies to group bookings

Now, I’m not looking for love..but I am really nosy about other people’s reactions to their reading. I’d love to take part in something like that, particlularly listening to those who just hate my favourites.

My Co-Pilot has pointed out that if I did go along, I’d probably end up with my nose in the book and ignoring the person on the other side of the table. Hmmmm…after that comment, maybe I am in the market for lurve!

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Skype and google..they’re talking!!!

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Now that I’ve installed skype, my google search results display clickable links to some telephone numbers so I can start a VOIP call with just one click. That’s them below with the Australian flag next to them.


My vague and not-so-tech-savvy-this-morning-brain thinks…..”is this something to do with microformats, and should I find out more about them…they look fun”.

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Hey Jude! Congratulations

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Congratulations to all winners in the 2006 Edublog awards, but particularly my fellow Australian and fellow librarian, Judy O’Connell.

Hey Jude! won in the “Best Library/Best Librarian Blog” category. I’m hoping she’ll answer a few questions I emailed her so that we can publish them on LINT tomorrow.

For a heartwarming …aaaahhhhh… kind of moment, check out Duck Diaries. This won the convenor’s prize, awarded by Josie Fraser who tabulated the scores. It’s the story of a duck which built a nest in the playground of a school..told by the kids in pictures and words.

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Skype high and Edublog awards night

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My telephony is being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. I’m about the only person I know who isn’t a dab hand at texting. In the language of my son’s school report, this skill is still “emerging” for me. It’s my last bastion of ludditism..because tonight, I finally succumbed to:


Why? A nifty llittle email arrived in my gmail box this morning reminding me that the 2006 Edublogger awards are being announced tonight at 11pm Western Australian time.

LINT (librariesinteract.info) has been nominated in the “Best Library/Librarian blog 2006” category. There are 5 entrants in all, three from Australia.

The awards are being transmitted directly from the chat room and Skypecast. It is also streamed live into the Worldbridges building on Info Island in Second Life. A text chat room ran at the same time so people could paste in links and accept awards via text if their microphones didn’t work.

Here’s how it looks live with a skype window open and the chat window open:


Results were updated live on the blog as announced.

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If you love something, set it free…

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Here’s some radical ideas…

  • What if users don’t care where their library material comes from?
  • What if users don’t care where our catalogue records come from?
  • What if instead of a “no holdings” screen, we told users if an item existed in another library and gave them a “yes/no” option to start an interlibrary loan?
  • How many people work at Amazon keeping their bib data accurate? Could we harness the hours and hours of people power, chewed up in library cataloguing departments, to keep centralised records accurate?

These are some of my thoughts after listening to the latest Library2.0 Gang podcast from Talis called The Mellon rewards WPOpac…and opens an Open Data door? It discusses Casey Bisson’s Mellon Award for his work with WPOpac…and his library’s decision to use the USD50 000 award to buy Library of Congress Records and redistribute them under Creative Commons liscence. It then ranged further to discuss what would happen if we all pooled our records.

I’ve already admitted to not fully understanding the implications of this. Although the podcast made a few things clearer, I think that I need to see more from Casey about what his plans are, and whether he plans to value add, before I really “get” it.

Some of the points I noted were:

  • The barrier MARC poses to sharing our records with “non library” people. Converting the records to XML would be make them much more accessible.
  • Libraries could probably have shared records in this way before, but just haven’t.
  • What would be the motivation for an agency with lots of data to share it? …there was a long silence and then someone tentatively suggested…”Hugs??”
  • Often in-house standards or the ILS used determines which fields of a MARC record are loaded on a library’s system. Often data that cannot be immediately used is not uploaded, so restrospective use is impossible.
  • What if libraries just went ahead and pooled our records, and then coped with legal ramifications later?
  • Why do bloggers link book references to Amazon and not a library?
  • The United States does not have a National Library like we have in Australia. The Library of Congress is there foremost to serve the elected members.
  • What we could do with pooled records remains to be discovered.

Amy Ostrom’s laundry list of features she’d like to see on OAPCs (from the NGC list) dovetails nicely in to this…and no doubt also influenced my thoughts.

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: OK as is
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Pimp my PC

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Over at Tech Explorer, Corey asks “what does your computer say about you?” He had the thankless task of visiting a large number of staff computers in his library.

I was interested that many people had loaded in a favourite background image. Our electronic services librarian says this reminds her …and others…that she has a life outside work.


10 years ago, I customised my first work laptop with the album cover for Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Instead of the Windows close down noise, I had Bollywood. I sampled in Sri Devi singing the “awi wiwi wiwi wiwi wiwiw wi” bit of Hawa Hawaii from Mr India.

I think I must have got it out of my system, because after that I haven’t really fiddled with my PC settings too much… I just make everything a subltle shade of lilac, nowadays. And set the default browser to Firefox.

But.. I think I might be expressing myself outside my PC, at least at home….

Analyse This !!

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Growth
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Caught out at the library….

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Last time our house was broken into, we were at home and the perps. broke a window with a big crash. Why they didn’t use the unlocked door next to it, we don’t know. Our neighbour remarked:

“If they had more brains, they’d probably be in a different business”.


Here’s further proof… Prison Escapee cought after checking MySpace.

Darren Bates had escaped from a Georgia county jail and was arrested in Philadelphia after checking his Myspace account. Bates accessed the page from a public computer at the main branch of the Philadelphia Free Library.

Authorities say Bates regularly checked into his account from the library and used his real name. Police aren’t saying exactly how Bates was caught, but most websites regularly track visitors by the IP address and those addresses can be traced back to a physical location.

Yep..just what every crim. who’s been deprived of the joys of society does…visits his public library.

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