Evolution of English

British Library Maps Evolution of English,

Contribute Your Accent by Reading Mr. Tickle Aloud

From ReadWriteWeb
By Audrey Watters / December 19, 2010 1:45 PM

For those that have been busily searching Google's new Ngram Viewer to assess how language has changed over time, here's another project that might pique your interest, one that involves another great literary work, Roger Hargreaves's children's book Mr. Tickle.

The British Library wants to map different words and accents and chart the changing pronunciation of the English language. As part of its exhibit Evolving English, the British Library is adding to its already sizable collection of 20th century recordings of the English voice, and it's asking any English speaker worldwide to record their voice reading Mr. Tickle aloud.

Comparing Accents

In order to compare accents, the British Library is examining words in lexical sets, those that share certain pronunciation patterns. According to phoneticians, reading long lists of words aloud is not ideal as it tends not to be "authentic" or conversational, so reading prose aloud is preferable. And since you're likely to read it casually and with confidence, no matter your age or native language, a children's book is apparently even better.

The British Library says it chose one of the beloved Mr. Men series as the book contained all the lexical sets. (Personally, I preferred Mr. Chatterbox and always found the ending of Mr. Tickle to be quite annoying.) For its part, Mr. Tickle contains words like "mischievous," "postman," and "extraordinary." Do you say "miss-cheevy-us" or "miss-chiv-us"?

To add your voice, you can either use the British Library website or an Audioboo mobile app. Copies of Mr. Tickle are available on the library website, as well instructions on how to tag your upload so it appears as part of the collection.

Oh, The Places You'll Go

The rage is eBooks and everyone loves free titles. This year's best Free Reference Websites (Twelfth Annual List) compiled by RUSA (MARS Section) included a free eBooks site.


from Reference and User Services Quarterly, Fall 2010
ebooks @ Adelaide, http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au
The University of Adelaide provides full-text ebooks of classic works of literature, philosophy, and history from a variety of countries, most available free online to anyone because the copyright has expired. Users can browse by subject, title, author or search by keywords. The formatting is attractive and very readable, with fonts and page layout that approximate to what the eye is used to seeing in a print book. Titles can be downloaded to eReader devices supporting the ePub standard (such as Sony, BeBook, Bookeen, B&N nook, or the iPhone). Brief author biographies and links to other resources are provided for each work, as are MARC records. Ebooks @ Adelaide is useful for any library seeking an additional source of electronic books.
Author/Publisher: University of Adelaide
Free/Fee-based: Free
Date Reviewed: 2/11/10

Web Site Design

From David Lee King's Blog

Answer these Questions for your Website
by David Lee King

posted on November 2, 2010

We’re in the midst of a website redesign for our library. As we start looking at content, links, buttons, headings, etc – stuff like that – you know what we’re thinking?
We’re thinking this: does this link/content/heading/etc answer these questions for our customers?

• What can I do here?
• What can I do next?
• Why should I care?

Answering these are really hard! Think about it for a sec – take a pretty normal link, like the library web designer’s favorite – “Library Databases.” Answering that “what can I do here” question certainly gets into how you label that section of your website (’cause we all know that “Library Databases” means nothing). Perhaps something like “Find articles” or “do some research” might work better?

Or think about a blog post – answering the “what can I do next” question can be as easy as linking to a set of related articles, topics, or even related books at the end of the post. I do this on my blog – when you’re reading it on the actual website, when you finish reading the article, you’ll see a list of related blog posts I wrote. What’s this get you? Website visitors staying on your site for longer amounts of time. More clicks. Hopefully, more conversions – more people clicking “attend this event” or checking out a book, etc.

“Why should I care” is a favorite one of our library director, and it’s probably the hardest of the three questions to answer. One way to do this is in the content itself. So your first couple of questions get the customer to your content … and then your content itself will need to answer that “why should I care” thing.

The answer could be any number of things, ranging from “because you can borrow it for free” to “because you’re a small business owner, and these resources will help you be profitable.” See where I’m going with this? Another way to say “why should I care” is to ask “what’s in it for me” or “why is this interesting?” Give them that reason.

Give your customers a reason to stay on your site by having great content AND by actually telling them why they might want to stay. Do that, and my guess is that … they actually WILL stay on your site – your digital branch – longer, doing more things.

Could be a good thing!

Old Friends

The flipping of the calendar to December signals a very important thing to me, the availability of the new World Almanac and Book of Facts. I have received this book every year for Christmas since I was little and it continues to be my favorite source for many things at work and home. With sections for history, geography, politics, entertainment, and sports, this book can answer most ready reference questions in an instant. The tables for perpetual calendar, wedding anniversary gifts, and weights and measures are particularly useful. I am always amazed by the wealth of information included in each year's edition. If I were stuck on an island and could could only bring 5 reference sources (isn't that always the case?), this is my #1 choice.

Deck the Halls...

From mlive.com

Delta College Librarian Constructs Christmas Tree Out of Books
Published: Friday, December 03, 2010, 1:20 PM Updated: Saturday, December 04, 2010, 8:21 AM
Brandon Howell The Bay City Times

FRANKENLUST TWP. — From a distance, it looks like a Christmas tree is adorning the main window inside the entrance to the Delta College Library.
Upon further inspection, though, one will find that it's not a blue spruce or a Douglas fir, but rather a meticulous amalgam of books.

Librarian Jennean Kabat spent six hours with a couple of coworkers carefully assembling the decoration the day before Thanksgiving. It was an idea she gleaned from the Internet.

"I was looking for inspiration — because I do all the displays — and came across this library in Connecticut who had done something similar," Kabat said. "So I said to my coworkers, 'Let's try building one of those!'"

The literary structure — which is buttressed from within by a wastebasket — is comprised of over 100 books. At the bottom, red books were used to simulate a tree skirt. Green books fill out the body of the tree while gold ones round out the top, mimicking a star.
The tree is constituted predominantly by copies of publications such as Congressional Quarterly Almanac and The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature.
Those books were chosen for a reason.

"We went into the collection and took a few of the books that aren't used quite as often as others," Kabat said. That hasn't stopped some students from giving the library staff a little good-natured grief.

"We've had some people come by and ask, 'What if I need to use that book in the middle there?' and we've said, 'Too bad, you'll have to wait until January,'" Kabat said, adding that her project reminds her of the nerve-racking game Jenga.

Aside from her ambition to continually impress library-goers with her displays, Kabat said the Christmas tree represents a broader approach by the library this holiday season.
"We always have a concern because we have a diverse population here at Delta and everybody isn't all about Christmas," she said. "We wanted to get away a little bit from the traditional Christmas tree, but yet still celebrate the holidays."

Students and faculty have both made time to stop and appreciate the Christmas tree, Kabat said. "Students have been stopping by just taking shots with their phone," she said. "We've heard things like, 'That's so awesome! I love it! How appropriate for a library to do something like that.'"

Delta College Library Director Jack Wood also approves of the decoration — although Kabat surreptitiously constructed it during one of his vacation days.
"I love it. It looks pretty cool," Wood said. "We've been getting nothing but compliments."
For Kabat, the decoration presents a problem in the future.
"I'm constantly trying to outdo myself," she said. "I'll have to come up with something really great next year."


© 2010 MLive.com. All rights reserved.

It's Great to be Needed

From the University of Texas Libraries comes this report...

"Surviving the Crunch"

"The days get shorter in more ways than you can imagine this time of the year, especially around the university campus as the final push of the semester evinces itself in the form of projects, papers and tests.

The Libraries does its part to help minimize the stress with a program meant to promote those resources and services that make the tasks at hand a tad less imposing.

This year’s Crunch Time outreach initiative highlighted library services and resources for students at The University of Texas at Austin between the hours of 11am-3pm on November 9, 10 &11. The program purpose is to promote the availability of in-person, drop-by assistance, subject librarian consultations, and the UT Libraries Ask a Librarian IM and email services.

During Crunch Time students are provided with Ask a Librarian contact cards attached to mini-Nestle Crunch bars, a series of time saving handouts and increased staffing at service points. A brief survey to determine awareness of service options is made available from UT Libraries computer workstations across the campus, and students who participate are entered in a prize drawing.

First introduced by the Reference and Information Services department at UT’s Perry-Castaneda Library in 2008, Crunch Time has become an annual event and three additional UT Libraries locations participated this year, increasing its reach.

Statistics indicate that students took advantage of the program and more of them were connected with the information they wanted, at point of need, as a result. Of the three locations reporting, there were 536 queries, with a large number of those (199) occurring on Wednesday, November 10, at the Perry-Castañeda (105) and Fine Arts (94) Libraries. There were also 193 participants in the services web survey. "

Jenifer Flaxbart is Head of Reference & Information Services for the University of Texas Libraries.

See more images from Crunch Time programs here.

Choosing the 100 Notable Books of 2010

From Paper Cuts
A Blog about Books
(a blog by The New York Times)

By THE EDITORS
Illustration by Joe Ciardiello

November 24, 2010, 3:49 pm

"Today, we published our 100 Notable Books of the Year online (they will appear in print on Dec. 5). The task of choosing them ­— or rather of excluding other superb books — grows harder each time. Consider it in terms of arithmetic: If we limited ourselves to a single work of fiction and nonfiction chosen from each of the issues published since Dec. 6, 2009, when the previous Notables list appeared, we would exceed our self-imposed limit.

Not that our decisions are determined arithmetically. On the contrary, we are guided by judgment, instinct and feel. The final result, for all its variety, implies a kind of logic, if not in our method, then in “the culture.” Not long ago the short story was presumed to be in extremis; our list includes nine short-story collections. When the Vietnam debacle ended 35 years ago, America entered a period of willed amnesia. But three novels on the list reimagine that war.

Patterns emerge from our nonfiction list too. It includes three biographies of baseball gods, contemporaries and rivals who together reinvented the game in the 1950s and ’60s. And we chose summings-up by songwriting prodigies who each redefined the term “popular music,” though in utterly dissimilar ways.

Readers will detect other patterns — and also errors of omission. We apologize for them, and stand ready to be scolded and corrected in the comments..."

Fun Factoid

This is the kind of trivia that crowds your head, keeping out valuable information like anniversaries or appointments, but it's so interesting (in a librarianish way).

...from the Librarian History Buff Blog

Friday, December 3, 2010

Otis Hall Robinson (1835-1912), Rochester University Librarian

Happy birthday to the man who put the hole in library catalog cards. Today marks the 175th anniversary of the birth of Otis Hall Robinson who served as Librarian of the University of Rochester Library from 1868 to 1889. Robinson is noted more for his advocacy for library instruction than for his idea for dealing with the annoying tendency of library users to remove catalog cards and put them back in the wrong order (or to keep them for later reference).

But lets not underestimate the importance of that idea. How often has a single idea or practice been adopted by every library in America. Robinson's plan called for punching a hole in the lower left corner of each catalog card and running a rod through all the holes to prevent the removal of the cards. Later with the development of standard catalog cabinet drawers the hole was moved to the center of the catalog card. Although French librarian M. Pincon had similar thoughts, Robinson's holes (which were larger than the rod) were more effective. The catalog card above (a Harvard sized catalog card) started out with the hole to the left but was moved to the center later.

Robinson is listed in the Dictionary of American Library Biography Libraries Unlimited, 1978) where there is an excellent article about him by Edward G. Holley. There is also actually some information on the University of Rochester Library website about Robinson (although it is easier to find through Google than their website). Both sources provide a good picture of the challenges and limitations of academic librarianship in the 19th century. Robinson was exceptional in his views on serving the library and information needs of students. Even so, the library was only open a few hours each day.

Posted by Larry T. Nix at 8:44 AM