Carole Leita's blog

Although it was written last November, I just ran across this interesting San Jose Mercury News story -- Selective enforcement of poker rules hurts library.

Say you've got a good cause, like the children's story-telling section at the Almaden library. Say you've got a supporter, like the Almaden Business Association. And say you have a good way to make $8,000 or $10,000, playing on a national craze by holding a Texas hold 'em tournament. . . .

I wrote about Los Angeles PL's California Fiction Index for lii.org a few years ago. Today I ran across another great index they've got going -- the Serials and Sequels Index.

"A listing of fiction books for adults which are part of a series, or are sequels to earlier novels. Can be searched by author, title and series name or characters."

Excel 101 is a very useful tutorial if you use, or plan to use, Excel. Find out what a spreadsheet is, what formulas are and how to do them, and how to format - text, numbers, and column width. You finish by learning how to insert a column or row and make charts and graphs. And, since this tutorial was done by a teacher, there's a quiz at the end.

The second issue of the Google Librarian Newsletter has a great article by Karen Schneider (of lii.org) on the steps for reviewing websites -- Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian's Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust. Read it, print it, hand it out.

SBC Yellow Pages is now a database with data from 12 states. Not a big deal as it's still in development -- but a big deal for Californians who want easy lookup for Bakersfield, Fresno-Clovis, Los Angeles, Oakland, Orange County, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose. A good ready reference bookmark.

Drugs have been in the news a lot lately because of the Medicare drug sign-up. And, the drug ads are increasing on TV (a possible connection?). The MERD | Panexa website has taken all the promises of the various drug ads and agglomerated them into their slickly designed site. One of the better parodies.

Mary Minow over at LibraryLaw brought this podcast to our attention. Download it to your computer or your Mp3 player to catch up on the good and the bad of RFID.

Among the course webcast series being offered this term from UC Berkeley to all viewers/listeners is this jewel for librarians: Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business. Professor Marti Hearst of SIMS has managed to make such search luminaries as Sergey Brin, Hal Varian, Peter Norvig, and Mary Hodder available to her class and gotten their permission to video and record it for a future life as video- and pod-casts.

The Government Domain column in LLRX.com "The Cream of the Federal Web Site Crop" by Peggy Garvin discusses the best of them and why usability is so important to having a good website. She ends the column with a site recommendation "that may restore your faith in government websites."