I haven't checked oss4lib until today. I am glad that there are site updates already. It's been a while.
I have seen that PhpMyLibrary is already there^_^ I just heard about it from one of my batchmates. Polerio Babao III studied in UP but I never had the chance to meet him. I have to check out PhpMyLibrary and see how it goes.
I am happy that there are people who develop such software for libraries. Librarians here in the country usually have budgetary problems. Software vendors are around and offer packages such as Maelisa and Athena but they are expensive. The government has already cut down the budget for education again and so libraries (in general) suffer. In the private sector, it depends whether the institution is non-profit or not. Usually, non-profit organizations don't have much budget for libraries either. Money has been a problem and it continues to afflict librarians.
The site oss4lib is indeed helpful because of the options it offers. And now we even have a Filipino integrated library system. This might be a great opportunity for librarians to experiment with alternatives.
The Philippines has a lot of renewable energy resources. Why not utilize them instead of using coal? There are so many alternatives like bio-gas, wind energy, hydrothermal energy, etc. Anyhow, please check this out if you have time.
Yay! Figaro has been fixed already. It was basically a grounded reset button wire and nothing else^_^ At least there was nothing much to worry about. But I have no idea how in the world that happened. How could such wires get grounded?
Times like these you really feel the amount of money you have draining away. And these days, changing a defective computer part is something that would indeed drain the pocket.
That is why I am happy that the computer we assembled on November 29 last year conked out within the warranty period. Imagine having to pay for everything - check up and parts. Man, that is so expensive. If I had a lot of money that won't be a problem. The thing is, everyone at home seems to have allocated money to other things, thinking that we won't have to fix anything or change anything in the computer until next year.
The other night, the computer just suddenly died. No warning whatsoever. I was just typing and it died. Blackness filled the monitor. And I tried rebooting it. There wasn't any beeping sound. There was no listing of devices detected. There was silence and the red LED that indicated that the harddrive was ok.
Brymac even called me up last night, trying to troubleshoot it. He made me remove the memory and try it if it would make a noise. He also asked me to remove the CMOS battery and check what happens. Nothing. Nothing happened. After some other things, he told me it might be the motherboard.
Get Release 1.0 from the link above! But there are some extensions that are not compatible with it. Some of them are Slogger, Wikalong and del.icio.us. If you are not yet ready to part with those extensions, maybe you should stick with the release you have on your computer. But if you're excited to try release 1.0, do try it. It installs quickly and checks for updated versions of the extensions you have previously installed ^_^
Interesting stuff from the Librarians' Index to the Internet
I subscribe to it and I got some interesting links to a site on Food Psychology, the Turing Digital Archive, the Evolution of the Shopping Center, etc. Reference librarians got to check this out every once in a while because one never knows what library users would ask. The url is http://lii.org/
As someone who is hooked on to both del.icio.us and Firefox would love this article. There are also a bunch of cool links from here.
del.icio.us is one of the nicest things I have encountered on the net. It has solved my problem of remembering the urls of various sites that I go to. I have no internet access at home so I go to net cafes and other people's homes to surf. Indeed, this is a convenient way of keeping track of those cool urls.
And there so many things that one can do with del.icio.us too!
Adobe dipping toes into desktop Linux waters | CNET News.com
Adobe dipping toes into desktop Linux waters | CNET News.com: "And buying trends are changing. Previously, most desktop Linux interest was in Asia, but new growth is cropping up in the West. About 35 percent of HP's desktop Linux shipments go to Europe and 15 percent to North America, Wade said."
This article caught my eye as I was going through my feeds this afternoon.
Universal Serial Bus (USB): FAQ: "Questions and answers about the USB connection between personal computers and peripherals. Topics addressed include what the plugs and ports look like; what USB does; support and installation; cables, connectors, and networking; and USB On-The-Go (OTG), which has been developed for 'portable computing devices such as hand-helds, cell phones and digital cameras.' From 'a non-profit corporation founded by the group of companies that developed the Universal Serial Bus specification.'"
As my friend Trebs has just IMed me, I am hooked on to Firefox. I have installed Slogger and even posted about it. I was really happy about it ^__^ And here I am with another extension. I have installed it last week but I am just posting about it now.
It's the Just Blog It! extension. Perfect for bloggers. When you like something that you see on the net and want to blog about it, just like this one, you just have to right click on the page you're browsing and voila! You have access to the update your blog section. And the Just Blog It extension works for Blogger, Livejournal and several other blog hosts.
I just luuuuuuuurve Firefox! I want to hug everyone who's making the extensions and everyone working on Firefox and making it better for us.
I think that the person interviewed here, Mr. Joey Gurango, is very negative about open source.
I am reminded of one of my friends who is very cautious about open source software, to the point of almost kicking for watching the documentary about Linux and open source software (waaay back in college). Up to now, he is very uptight about the topic, telling me and my other friend that there's a lot of writings about the good things about open source software but people leave out the negatives.
Be it proprietary or open source, software and the development have pros and cons. Right now, I am seeing it as a matter of preference. I am using both proprietary and open source software as of the moment. I am in the office, with my computer running on WinXP and other Microsoft software, but at the same time, I am using Firefox, GAIM, GIMP, E-sword and KewlpAd. (I could install OpenOffice.org but everything here in the office is M$ so I didn't bother.) They are useful to me right now and I have yet to explore the pros and cons of open source software.
This is what I think about OSS:
It can stimulate developers to think more creatively.
It has a potential to generate income for the country since we have a lot of brilliant minds.
When something goes wrong with it, you could go to the users' maling list or forums when you need help.
It's free of charge. Well, most of the time.
A lot of them are still in the development stages but there are stable versions available for download.
It's a risk, true. But it's something worth trying out.
I don't consider myself as a techie but I admit that I am interested in developments with technology. I am a librarian by profession and I have very little training with computers and other related things. In the course of time, as I have studied and interacted with people, I have gotten more hooked on to knowing what's going on in the tech world.
Then again, I am not so sure whether "tech world" is indeed a separate realm because we use technology everyday. I mean, a lot of us have mobile phones, tv sets, computers, calculators, etc. Even if we don't have all these gadgets, we have encountered them in one way or another. That's what fascinates me. Everytime I encounter a gadget, I gingerly move close to it, touch it and see what it does. Sometimes, I feel some sort of hesitation because I am intimidated. Weird, you might think, but I am sometimes wary because I might ruin it or mishandle it while testing it and I have no money in my pocket that would cover the expenses in case that happens.
Using a computer at home
At home, I have been using a computer since 1994. I was fourteen at that time and I needed a computer to try out the programs that we have been taught in school. Aside from that, I needed the computer to make reports. It was a time when the typewriter was not suited for me because I was a crammer and typewritten reports were difficult to type when one crams. At that time, I had boot diskettes containing DOS 6. (But the first time I handled those diskettes were in first year because I had to bring them in the lab so I would be able to use the computers.) And I had WordStar 5, I think. I had to remember all sorts of shortcuts just to make my reports. But ChiWriter came along and made life simpler. It was such a big thing for me back then. It took me a while before I had Windows 3.11. I was already in my senior year in high school when we had it installed in the computer at home. We were using Windows 3.11 even when a lot of people have already been using Windows 95. And I always thought, "What's with those numbers anyway?" I didn't get it. I was utterly clueless. I just used the computer. All I noticed was just how easily I got things done using Windows 3.11 compared to DOS. And of course, the GUI was so pretty. The reports I made in high school were sometimes typed using PrintMaster, or something like it, so that I could use pretty fonts and stuff like that. I didn't want to keep on using the very "boring" fonts of WordStar anymore. But that all ended when I got acquainted with Windows 3.11 and Word.
Programming?
When I was in grade school, we had classes wherein we were taught Logo or something like that. There was a triangle on the screenand we called it a turtle. We were supposed to make it draw various shapes on the screen. I guess you could call it my introduction to programming or something like it. In first year high school we had computer classes and we were taught how use DOS, WordStar and Lotus123. It wasn't so easy for me because I didn't have a computer at home yet until much later. Mom used to bring me to a computer shop which was relatively far from home. It was there where I applied what I learned in the classroom and it was pretty confusing sometimes because my mind was filled with shortcuts, concepts and what-not. I think that my teacher tried teaching us BASIC in the fourth quarter of my freshman year but we didn't progress much. That was why I hard a tremendously terrible time in my sophomore year. That was when I transferred to Philippine Science High School. Everyone was so smart and they knew everything while I was striving so hard to get the concepts in my head. (I guess that I might be a bit smart but most of what I know I learned the hard way. That or I could guess pretty well ^_-) My classmates were using BASIC quite naturally while I was way behind. I even had tutor - the very cool and smart Jason Alcarez. I'm certain that he found it difficult to teach me sometimes because i easily confused with stuff. He started coaching me with C, just the basic stuff that we needed for school.
By my junior year, I was somehow ok with the thought of going into ComSci class. After all, I had no choice because it was all part of the curriculum. I wasn't so intimidated anymore. Just a bit. And that was the time that we were taught Clipper. My groupmates and I weren't very good at it but somehow I managed to survive in class. Now that I think about it, a lot of the times I was seriously figuring things out while they were having fun just typing anything. They'd put in more comments (most of them were even unrelated to the objective of the exercises) while I would figure things out or ask someone to help us out. That did me some good because it made me think creatively. To a certain degree at least. But my senior year in high school was the toughest because my groupmates decided to use Visual Basic for our project and I wasn't able to do much except the bitmaps and documentation of the game. Also, I had difficulty in programming in my elective. I have guessed by that time that programming wasn't for me even if I was interested to learn. And now that I think about it, I entered the College of Engineering in UP wanting to graduate BS Computer Engineering. Hehe. Wasn't that absurd? I was a student interested in computers but was intimidated by them. *laughs* Crazy, wasn't it? And guess what? I had 9 units of Computer Science classes on the curriculum... I took up CS11 and CS12 under Ma'am Aduana in my first two years in college. There were lectures and exercises. I think that I understood the concepts... It's just that I couldn't program. You may think to yourself that it's weird of me but it's true. I can understand how things are supposed to work and I do know what the commands that I can use. But I couldn't program. I must be totally weird. That's why I had help from a lot of my friends. I guess I exasperated them but they were so nice to me. And I passed both CS11 and CS12. However CS32 was the bane of my existence (aside from the EEE subjects). It made me more afraid to try things out. It was a class on data structures and I think most of the people in class didn't really enjoy it for one reason or another. (Maybe Prof. Pros Naval was more than one bit scary.) The trauma for me was bad. The algorithms taught in class were swimming in my head and I could follow the "Easy" program (it was a pseudo program of sorts) that was on the class manual. And I could identify the steps that I should do in order to use it. But it was all to no avail. I sigh thinking, "Has all been lost between programming and myself?" How come I wasn't able to really program at those opportunities? Is it really not for me?
Is there hope for me?
Then again I remember my struggle with Math. I was never a genius in Math... I remember being in Grade 1 and I had a low grade on my report card. The subject - Math. But I got beyond my Math anxiety. I had a tutor who encouraged me and helped me. By the time I was in fifth grade I was in the school Math Quiz Bee and I was usually in the top 3. I had similar problems with Math in college, especially Calculus. I had to take Math 53 and 54 twice. it was a joke that I took up Math 106 and Math 108 because I had to take each of them twice in a row because I flunked. And yet my second take of Math 54 was a different experience all together. Why? I had fun. I laugh about it because I swear that I did. Sure, it was tough. I had my index cards containing the formulae and concepts. They were even color coded. They were with me all the time. Schaum's was my constant friend. I passed! Not just a 3.0 on my card but it was a 2.75 and it was already a major feat because Math 54 is tough. The Math 55 came along. I was excelling in the exams. What on earth happened? I don't know. I just had fun. What was the difference? Nothing really except that I began to have fun. I was always studious. I always burned the midnight oil. But it was different because of the enjoyment. The pleasure of solving those equations was heaven for me at that time. And I had ES 21 as well and the differential equations were cute. I called them cute. Haha. I wish I still know how to do those things and find them cute. I haven't touched a single mathematical equation since I shifted to Library Science. But I digress. The point is, I later had fun with Math, no matter how long it took me. I was able to overcome the fear. And here I am, sitting in front of the computer thinking about my future, my career path. Yes, I have barely begun my career as a librarian but I am already thinking about what I want to do in the long run. Being a librarian has many aspects. I like being a librarian because of that. There are so many things that a librarian can do. But I don't want to be a jack of all trades and a master of none. I want to be a jack of all trades and a master of one. I may not be the best in the field right now, but I want to make a difference. I don't want to be just the stereotype of the librarian that just sits on the reference desk and tells people to be quiet. I want to make sure that people have the information that they need at the right time. I want to facilitate in the use of all the information resources. I want people to enjoy learning and researching the way I love reading books and learning from them. And I want to do all of those with the technology that is available not just today but also the kind of technology that is to come.
Librarians and technology
It is frustrating sometimes because librarians must be well rounded but people expect them to be something else because of the stereotype. Librarians seem to surprise people when they know other things aside from the books that they have in the library. I have always been fond of going to the library and accessing various information sources. And I have always admired how librarians are able to sort things out for me, a library user. Now that I am one, I am finding it difficult to deal with people who have never ever been to a library and they don't seem to respect the materials there or myself or the other library users. I find it daunting that people think that I don't have anything else to do but sit there and wait for them to borrow the information sources that they need. I happen to be my own cataloguer, reference librarian, the person on the circulation desk, I am also the one who shelfs the books, entertains phone calls from various people who want to make transactions with me, the one who troubleshoots the computers (just the minor stuff), the one who looks for books and does the paperwork. And I also have to deal with people on a daily basis. Anyway, that's for another day. What I am saying is that I want to make libraries work better. Technology is a tool that I can use for this to happen. That is why two librarians I admire a lot are the late Dr. Josephine Sison and Mrs. Lourdes David of the Ateneo De Manila University. They are librarians who have integrated information technology in the field of library science. I think that are others who have done so but these are two that I have heard and seen. I have seen their passion and I have heard of their ideas. That is why I want to have the same kind of passion. I want the same kind of wisdom that they have, the same kind of perseverance. That is why I am thinking of what to do. I want to plan things out. I don't want to just go with the flow. I want to make waves. Right now, I am encouraged that there are various open source software for libraries. We haven't used the same technologies in the library where I am working because I am focused on the collection development. But once I am done with cataloguing the books that we have, I will have the time to really maximize our information resources. People come and go in the libraries and you never know what they would ask for, what they need. Libraries have to be prepared for such things. That is why I am also thinking of linking up with other libraries once the collection we have has been accounted for and catalogued. Maybe post grad studies is something I am not yet ready for. After all, I am not yet sure what to take. I have been thinking about taking up IT in ADMU or TMC in UP. But those are two very different programs. I was thinking there is a school that has something in between. If I take up IT, I might be too intimidated because of the CS subjects. If I take TMC, I might havethe knowledge to manage technology for libraries but I might not have the know-how which is what I would also like to have.
This has already become a very long thought... But it just means that I am serious enough to consider a lot of things in my life.
