Colloquium Fun!

Here I am in Orlando . . . working the long hours and eating hotel food. I'm almost halfway through, and the suite is nice. But I'm here so little, it's almost not worth it. Tonight I'm sitting in the living area, watching tv #2, just so I can feel like I'm getting the full use of the room!
I've been swimming in the pool two nights so far. I think it's a colloquium record for the librarians!
And now for a funny picture from icanhascheezburger.

Boy, talk about being a Librarian!

Today I finally posted my weird database search experience on one of the listservs I'm on. One day I was searching for information about SWOT analyses and I went into ProQuest's ABI/INFORM. Since I didn't want to see any actual company SWOT analyses--I was interested in finding articles that explain the process--I did a very basic search so that I could identify the marker of a company SWOT and figure out how to remove them from a second search. To do that I searched just SWOT. I thought that would be simple, and then I got my results back.

Sure, there were some articles out of the 3000 that used the word SWOT. But the vast majority were highlighting a few different, and very unusual, words instead: wonk, nerd, and grind. What the heck was going on? At first I thought that the database just didn't like my acronym, but a search for TQM was spot on. Then I became more puzzled.

The other librarians couldn't give me an answer (okay, they laughed at me). So I brought it to the listserv, and then suddenly it all started to make sense. One of the librarians mentioned that Swot is British slange for a nerdy person. Now I had a link between swot and nerd. Well, it stands to reason that wonk can be viewed in the same light. We use wonk almost exclusively in it's policy wonk form, but it may actually be a broader term.

But GRIND? That required an internet search, and lo and behold, after all the dirty slang usages is a much tamer one: someone who is mocked for being too studious. So, there you go. ABI/INFORM, which is set at our library to search related terms, has gone a little overboard. It's now adding british slang to BUSINESS SEARCHES! Someone there has got to have a weird sense of humor (humour).

Speaking of odd humor from across the pond: Tristram Shandy rocks so far!

Back in the Groove

Since my last post was all about keeping my energy consumption low, I think it's appropriate to start up my posting again with a bit of an energy complaint. There is some numbnut at Walgreens who goes out every morning at 7 a.m. (I know because I'm standing at the bus stop at that hour) and starts up his obnoxious leaf blower. Now, it's not just annoying because of the hour, and because it's a mostly pointless endeavor, but these days he's out there making a ruckus when it's RAINING! He can't possibly be accomplishing anything - everything is plastered to the ground! It's just noise for noise's sake.
At least I'm back to reading with some sort of regularity. For so long I was reading almost nothing but newspapers and the economist. I ended up with $11.50 in fines at the library (largely for books I didn't read), and my list was looking really pathetic. Almost no books read all summer!
Part of the problem was what I was reading. It just hasn't been a good summer for books for me. Not since Cat's Cradle in the spring, really. So I just got a Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart (not his best, I have to admit), but it was just good enough to get me back to normal. That's especially good since my last novel for fun was The Countess of Dellwyn by Henry Fielding's not-so-talented sister Sarah. The first chapter was fantastic. And then it sucked. For ... four ... whole ... books. At least it was only two hundred pages of yuck, and I plowed through to make way for Murakami.
Now I can start Tristram Shandy, which was available from the library in a very handy purse-sized edition from the '50s. It's 600 pages, but they should be fun pages, and the tissue-like pages are light enough to make it on the bus every day. If only I could bring myself to hack War and Peace into little pieces - I love what I've read so far, but I just can't stand carrying it around. The first 100 pages nearly threw my back out! What I wouldn't give for an original serialized version in a magazine . . . maybe the Economist. And then all would be perfect!