Elizabeth B. Thomsen

C-Span Video Archives

Posted on March 21, 2010 by Elizabeth Thomsen

The C-SPAN Video Library launched last week, opening up access to an amazing reference resource for students, journalists and anyone interested in history and government. This includes over 160,000 hours of political and public affairs events covered by the C‑SPAN Networks since 1987, free, well-organized, searchable, and easy to share. For example, embedded below is the first day of the Scalia Confirmation Hearing, in which Justice Scalia responded to questions about his views on federal-state relationships, the Constitution, death penalty, abortion, national security versus individual rights and more.

Continue reading →

Posted in History, Reference, Video | Leave a comment

Anita Silvey at Gordon College on April 8

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Elizabeth Thomsen

Anita Silvey, author of Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book, will be speaking at Gordon College on April 8.

This book is the community-wide reading title for Hamilton-Wenham. I live in Hamilton, and when they announced this selection I was a little surprised and wondered how it would work out. But as a former Children’s Librarian and lifelong lover of children’s literature, I should have known that nearly everyone has a favorite children’s book and that people would love to talk about them!

What We Learned From Children’s Books — The library has been posting short essays by members of the library staff and the community on their favorite children’s books and what they learned from them on their website, and some have also been featured in the Hamilton-Wenham Chronicle and their website.

I think this has been very effective. Library Director Jan Dempsey wrote about her favorite, Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, also a favorite of mine. I saw Jan in the library a few days after I had read this online, and rushed over to tell her how much I also liked this book. A woman who was checking out books looked over and said, “Oh, me, too!” and the three of us just stood their smiling in the warmth of shared memory. (That was when I decided, “This is a really great community read idea!”)

Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book” by Anita Silvey — Event listing with ticket information for this Hamilton-Wenham Public Library community read partnership event

Anita Silvey Event Poster [PDF]

Posted in Children's Literature | Leave a comment

CoverGuess from LibraryThing

Posted on March 15, 2010 by Elizabeth Thomsen

Earlier this month, Tim Spalding introduced a new group-tagging game called CoverGuess on LibraryThing. I would have blogged about it earlier, but I have been too busy spending all my spare time playing.

It’s pretty simple: “CoverGuess is a sort of game. We give you covers, and you describe them in words. If you guess the same things as other players, you get points.”

You see a cover image and enter a bunch of tags — it’s hard to explain why that’s fun. Maybe it’s the immediate feedback. For the cover of the book above, I entered: church, doors, wreath, snow. I got points for those, but when I saw what other people entered, I realized that I missed a lot. I didn’t notice those stained glass windows, and didn’t think to add the obvious Christmas. The more you play, the more details you notice, and the more points you get.

And although the points don’t actually mean anything, it’s fun to watch your name climb up the scoreboard. Not that I am the sort of person who cares about that sort of thing. But just for the record, right this minute I am number one for the hour, but not even in the top 200 for the day, and I rank number 1018 overall. This should give you some idea of how many people are actually playing around with this!

But it’s not just a game — it’s a fun way of using crowdsourcing to build a database of tagged cover images. Imagine how helpful this will be when someone can’t remember a title but knows there was a picture of a little girl or a Dalmatian wearing a top hat on the cover! LibraryThing is releasing the data under a Creative-Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and any non-profit entity, like a library, can use it without charge. We’re starting work on our new library catalog, and now I am really hopeful we’ll be able to add cover image searching!

Missing Messages

Posted on January 21, 2010 by Elizabeth Thomsen

You send a message to someone and never get a reply and later they tell you they never saw it. Someone claims to have sent you a message, but you never received it. A library user signs up for the library newsletter, but they never get it. Missing messages are like lost socks — they get into the system and then simply disappear. Where do they all go?

Some may genuinely get lost out in the Internet somewhere, and some get trapped in overzealous spam filters. But I think a lot of messages are sent and delivered to e-mail accounts that were never closed but are no longer active. If the accounts were closed, you’d get a bounce message and know there was a problem, but many people these days have several semi-abandoned e-mail accounts that they seldom check anymore and may have forgotten. Systems like Gmail provide so much storage that accounts rarely reach the limit and start bouncing mail, so you can be sending mail to someone for years without realizing that they’re not receiving it.

When colleagues, friends, patrons, anyone seems not to be getting mail from you or your library (including notices from the Millennium, NextReads and other e-mail newsletters, hold notices from OverDrive, etc.) here are the first two things I would do:

1. Ask them for their current e-mail address, and see if it’s the one we’re using.

2. Ask them to check to see if the message is being trapped in their spam filter. They may or may not be able to do this, depending on their e-mail provider, options, etc., and they may need to contact their system administrator for a business or school account or the help system for an account on a site like Gmail or YahooMail.

You can also send a test message to confirm that the address itself is working and that they can receive messages you send individually. The problem is that newsletters, overdue notices and other messages from the library may look like bulk mail to the spam filters and get sent straight to a spam folder or even just deleted.

Most systems will allow users to whitelist the e-mail address of the sender so these messages will be delivered, but you’ll need to provide people with that address. For example, in NOBLE our NextReads newsletters are sent by this address: noble-nextreads@noblenet.org. it’s a good idea to keep a list of all the e-mail addresses that get used by library services so you can help users troubleshoot spam problems.

As for the lost sock problem, sorry, you’re on your own!

Posted in E-Mail | Leave a comment

Oral Histories from the Stoneham Theatre

Posted on November 22, 2009 by Elizabeth Thomsen

The Stoneham Theatre opened its tenth season in September with Studs Terkel’s The Good War : A Musical Collage of World War II. Journalist Studs Terkel was known for his oral histories that reflected the American experience in all of its variety. As they prepared for their production of The Good War, the Stoneham Theatre reached out to local veterans and recorded some of their memories. These short films are on the Stoneham Theatre’s YouTube Channel, and are a lasting record of a few members of the Greatest Generation telling their own stories.

Here’s 1941 Stoneham High School graduate Ethel LaSalle, who served in the Women’s Army Corps:

Posted in Local History, YouTube | Leave a comment

Add Flickr Pictures to Your Site Using ImageCodr

Posted on November 4, 2009 by Elizabeth Thomsen

Many libraries use Flickr to find photographs to add color and visual interest to their blogs and websites. It’s an incredible resource, but one that you have to use with care. You need to check images to make sure any image you want to use has a Creative Commons license, figure out the correct code to link to the photograph on Flickr, and provide credit to the photographer.

ImageCodr is a tool that makes it easy to check the license and get the correct code to link to any size of an image on Flickr, complete with a Creative Commons license and credit link. You just paste in the URL for any Flickr photopage, and get the license information, and an option to preview any available size and generate the code you need for your page. Here’s a sample of what that page looks like:
ImageCodr Sample.

The image below was added to this blog post using ImageCodr. The image will inherit borders, fonts, etc., from your site’s stylesheet, and will probably look just fine as-is. However, if there’s something you don’t like, you can adjust the stylesheet and add a class to the div that encloses the code.

The site does add a link to the ImageCodr site, at the end of the photographer’s credit line. You can find it in the example below by hovering over the the space at the end of my name. This is either a subtle or awkward way to provide a linkback to the ImageCodr site.

ImageCodr — This is the main page
ImageCodr: Get Code Page — This link goes directly to the page where you can paste in a Flickr photopage URL
ImageCodr: Search — The search page makes it easy to search Flickr for images with a Creative Commons license