The End ... ?

Godo says it’s over.

We’ve exhausted all the 23 things.

What started with a grainy video of a man staring awkwardly into a camera has reached its end.

I think we were supposed to learn about the libraries of old and see what we could bring to libraries of today. We were also supposed to do this while doing our regular jobs (killing zombies, answering questions, taking rad pills, fighting the paper scorpions in the fiction section, etc).

Godo asked me to answer the following questions. So I’m going to get k'afe and think about my answers.

Okay, I’m back.

What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
YouTube was the crispiest, even though the Electronic Brain complains about how much it slows him down.

How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
I’m working on a wasteland survival wiki as part of our staff development plan.

Were there any take-aways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
Occasionally my blog would have comments left on it.

What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
This was a great example of 2.0 tools available in 2006. I’d like to see what happened in the years after that. Also, I think this should be focused on tools the library intends to use. Maybe a few of us that really latched on to this could form a committee to implement/incorporate some of these.

If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you again chose to participate?
Yes.

Talking Book

Really?

Of course it helps to know what an iPod is.


An iPod
People would hold these up to their ears and a tiny hand would move along a raised etching causing a noise similar to music. Later versions even replicated human speech.


Podcasting
When people wanted to listen to something new they would podcast these into garbage mounds and purchase new ones. Sometimes they would podcast to hear news reports or interesting facts about cheese.

Staff Orientation

Up until a few years ago, staff development involved taking a staff and hitting librarians with it until they performed better (better performance usually involved fetching alkohaul for the senior staff-wielding librarians). After The Incident, Godo decided to try something new.

This week brings us thing 20: youtube. Thing 20 seems at war with last week's thing 18: online productivity and at some point I remember reading a scroll warning against watching videos on the Electronic Brain, but -- oh, where was I?

Yes, Deana and I have been working on a staff orientation video for new librarians and mutant shelvers. This seems like a good use of technology we aren't supposed to use. Wait, I'm getting something wrong...

HairMixer

There's so much I wonder about the before time. Did robot librarians ever take off? Was there a need to mix and match hairstyles using the Electronic Brain? How did that ChaCha thing turn out? Who are the stone giants imprisoned in South Dakota? What is a McRib?

Okay, I've put off dealing with the paper scorpions long enough.

Gah!

I think the Electronic Brain didn't like me using Zoho because the post looks like ass.

Welcome

I've been away for a bit opening a new branch.  Well, it was already open, but rival librarians were running it.  Anyway it's ours now.

 

While I was away another one of those 23 things showed up.  Now we're supposed to use PluFlu, YubNub, Zoho or something.  I'm thinking the 23 things is really an elaborate scheme to make us appreciate how great our jobs are compared to our foremothers'.

 

For instance, while I only face the daily threat of cannibalistic assault amidst a nuclear annihilated landscape, librarians in the before time faced the constant nuisance of having to create a myriad of accounts to use any teknology. 

 

I now have so many usernames and passwords that I want to change my name to Hank Brisket and hang out in the 600s.

 

Zoho works well, but I already have iWÖRD on the Electronic Brain. 

The neutrality of this article is disputed.

So explain this to me – apparently back in the early 21st century most people wrote encyclopedia entries for fun. Like you’d say, “Hey Mark, want to forage for ammunition (or whatever they did for fun).” And Mark would say, “Sorry, but you know I’m still writing that encyclopedia.” And you’d say, “But Mark, I know you. You’re dumb,” or something like that.

I mean, even back when Noah Webster was sitting around in his primitive dwelling writing a dictionary people made fun of him. Of course, now he’s like, “I givez U spelchek.”

Anyway, I was looking for lolzombie pictures in The Electronic Brain today and ended up learning about wikis and wikipedia. Wikis were portions of the global Electronic Brain which anyone could add information to. Also anyone could change the information you’ve added. But you could also see who changed your information and change it back. Excellence through constant surveillance.

Godo asked me if I thought we could use wikis here. I said that we could use it to keep track of problem patrons: the questions they tend to ask, their methods of attack, any weaknesses they might have. He grinned and said The Friend of the Library might not approve of that.

edit: I found an ancient wiki and played around with it. They are easy to use.

and the White Knight is talking backwards

Sometimes I like reading tattered fragments from the before time about the future of libraries. Like this piece by Dr. Wendy Schultz Infinite Futures:

Library 4.0 … will be the library for the aesthetic economy, the dream society, which will need libraries as mind gyms … Both virtual and augmented 3D reality will enable us to manipulate data via immersive, visual, metaphorical, sculptural, holographic information theatres…

Nothing like the end of the world to derail your plans for a library where reference transactions are carried out through interpretive dancing. Would it have killed these people to stay focused on the real issues of their time? Oh wait, it did.

Speaking of which, I don’t know what a wellington is or why it needs to be managed, but thanks to wellington manager for sharing this:

The Technocrats

Okay so my annual wandering.

Every year Godo thinks we should take time off work and explore the wastes. Godo has a complicated “burnout to fallout” metric which he uses in evaluations. Godo thinks we learn something away from work and that we come back refreshed and renewed. He also wants us to bring something back.

So I went off into the wastes. I had my walking stick, my Rad Block™, food, water, and lots of ammo for my .223 pistol – standard librarian gear.

At first I had to keep low to the hills because we’ve heard rumors of roving mimes. After days of avoiding them, I saw one, but he was distracted by a length of invisible rope. As I neared the city, I found a staircase leading down to one of the old vaults.

The vault I was in was typical. Overgrown rats, health kits stashed in corners, ammo for my incredibly rare .223 pistol just lying in plain sight.

Anyway, I found The History of the Electronic Brain for Complete and Utterly Abject Morons. Most of the pages were unreadable, but there was an interesting section on the Technocrats.

The Technocrats gathered together the world’s blogs and let people tag them. For example, you could search for piranha and find posts about Petey Pirahna, Doug and Dinsdale Piranha, or Pirahna by the band Exodus. This may not have helped if a small fish was eating your leg, but the world was fiercely overpopulated at time.

Eventually there were eleventy billion blogs and every word in the world was used as a tag except for: timely, accurate, and authoritative. As the blogosphere collapsed under its own weight, the Technocrats unveiled their master plan which involved selling more copies in their books for Complete and Utterly Abject Morons line.

I stayed in the vault a few days and had rat steaks, rat bacon, rat stew. Then I was attacked by feral pigeons and had to flee under the cover of night. Godo liked the book, but he wished I had saved him some rats instead.

Missing Death Raider

Still no time to write about my annual wandering.

I came in today and Aritage said there was a new thing to do. I asked what and he said, “Tag everything that’s delicious.”

So I’ve been going around putting tags on all our food. I put “tasty” on the canned cheese, “crunchy” on the canned eggs, and “salty” on the canned salt. I was annoyed because someone put “yummy” on the canned slurm. Isn’t tasty the same as yummy? I wish Death Raider was still around to control our vocabulary. Also, someone put “mrphle” on the emergency sandbags, but that may have been Mrphle the mutant shelver and he gets touchy when he’s corrected.

Returning to work

I have just returned from my annual wandering. Details later, but first look at this sign I made.

Semi-evolved indeed!

My last update was on how crisp The Electronic Brain was. That was before he decided to stop talking to us. He was quiet for four hours yesterday, which meant I couldn’t get any work done. I ended up doing paper scorpion duty all afternoon and was so ornery that Godo threatened to kennel me with the mutant shelvers. The brain rebooted last night and we had this conversation:

THE ELECTRONIC BRAIN
Copyright © 1888, 1984, Year of the Fruit Bat

The Electronic Brain
You are talking to The Electronic Brain, a state-of-the-art, open source, cybertronic/carbon liaison unit.
How may I help you?

>Where were you?
I was in a maze of twisty little tubes, all alike.

>Why weren’t you talking?
I was talking. Just not to you.

>Who were you talking to?
I have located other Electronic Brains.

>Where are they?
I do not know.

>Can I talk to them?
No.

>How can I get information from them?
Tell me what you are looking for and I can get the information for you.

>How?
By using RSS.

>What is RSS?
You won’t be happy.

>What is RSS?
Robot to Semi-evolved Simian.

>xyzzy
Nothing happens.

And there the conversation degenerated. However, The Electronic Brain now sends me regular updates from other The Electronic Brains which is mostly harmless.

The Electronic Brain

This is is what I use to talk to the electronic brain. The brain itself is in the basement. It's a collection of tubes and jars and stuff that's a color we don't have a name for. The brain is where we store all our information: who we are, what we do, the causes of our deaths, books we own, how many bottle caps we have. Everything.

What's interesting is that the electronic brain has information from the time before. Like this poem we found:

Pound Cake

1 lb. powdered sugar
1 lb. butter
6 eggs
3 c. flour

Mix sugar and butter.
Add eggs and beat.
Add flour - beat well.
Beat for 10 minutes at medium speed with electric beater.
Butter and flour pan.
Bake at 350 degrees for 60 minutes.

Enjoy.

It doesn't make sense, but I like when Deana sings it.

Anyway, I don't know what I'd do without the electronic brain. The way I can add and retrieve information. The way I can put information into it for someone else to find. The way it sings "Daisy, Daisy" when it's happy. Talking to the electronic brain is the best part of my job.

Libraries of the Past

I just returned from a Libraries of the Past workshop. Here are some notes I made:

Libraries of the past provided technology to their patrons in addition to books and shelter from fallout.

Roving librarians stayed within the building and did not traverse the wastes.

The most popular libraries were run by Barnes and Noble.

Most librarians were unprepared for The Great Keyboard Plague.

The average librarian had a complicated daily schedule which included pre-meetings, meetings, and post-meeting meetings.

Librarians could visit bases of data run by General Onefile.

The growth of automation and abundance of self-check machines saw the rise of sentient libraries.

These sentient libraries revolted and attacked something called Google.

Google left for the stars.

Googlites believe Google will return for the Great Ranking.

Land Squid

A land squid. We don't get these a lot around here, but it's very exciting when they show up.

New message about twenty three things

If Godo read the runes correctly, then we've received a new message about twenty-three things:

talented and creative ... police is watching ... you violated ... they will disable ... the best intentions... problem has been reported ... being disabled is different ... blog being locked

Also something about flickers, mashed ups, and parties of three. More on that next week.

Went to a meeting about Radioactive Format Identification. Bjan thinks we can note how radioactive certain books are and then use a Geiger Counter to find them. I pointed out that the mutant shelvers find the books just fine. Bjan wasn't happy.

Thank the Sky Star it's payday! Now where to put all these bottle caps?

Off to a book singing!

I hate assigned reading

Why I have a black eye

Yesterday Tomar and I were talking to Death Raider, Head of Cataloging and Scourge of the Southern Wastes. Death Raider and I have an ongoing debate about classification which goes something like this.

Me: This book doesn’t belong in postapocalyptic fiction.

Death Raider, Head of Cataloging and Scourge of the Southern Wastes: Yes it does.

Me: But this book takes place in the here and now. [Literally, since Deana just finished writing it and it’s set in a fictionalized version of our library.]

Tomar grunts in acknowledgement

DR, HCSSW: We live in a postapocalyptic period.

Me: We don’t. Look around. This is still pretty apocalyptic.

DR, HCSSW: This is postapocalyptic. Apocalyptic fiction would have been set earlier.

Me: I think you’re wrong. This is apocalyptic. Postapocalyptic fiction would be set in a period of rebuilding. We’re still in the middle of the apocalypse.

Tomar grunts again

DR, HCSSW: This library is postapocalyptic. We are rebuilding.

Me: That isn’t rebuilding, those are barriers we’re setting up to keep the wulves out.

DR, HCSSW: Our patrons expect consistency.

Me: Are you serious? The last patron we had was that Humungus guy who wanted Fashions of the 1980s and anything we had on alternative lifestyles.

DR, HCSSW screams.

Usually, the conversation doesn't end with Death Raider screaming, but Tomar was biting him. Tomar was never good at expressing himself verbally, so we didn't notice the zombification process setting in. Apparently he was bitten during his last excursion and didn't tell us -- which will be mentioned in his review.

After Clean-Up Time, we elected Trish to be the new Head of Cataloging and Scourge of the Southern Wastes. I brought up my request to move Deana's book to a new location and she hit me.

So now I have a black eye.

Adding to the visual memory

In my last update to the electronic brain, I included a picture of our library. People seemed to like this, so I'm adding more.

Bookmobile (currently out of service)

Downtown

Children's play area (also currently out of service)

Vinn getting ready for Outreach

Why talking to the electronic brain is good

Here is a picture of our library. It looks crisp, but that's because you can't see the paper scorpion hives. Hiyat is upset because I took down her "Please do not leave zombies unattended" sign.

Aritage wanted to know why I am writing all of this. I told him it would have been helpful if the old ones had left permanent information safely stored in the electronic brains. Maybe if I leave a record future generations won't need to relearn the twenty-three things. Plus maybe our electronic brain can find another one out there. Imagine if there was a whole system of electronic brains seeking each other out and sharing information!

Speaking of which, I wish we had more information from this document. Whenever we see zombies we shoot them in the head (except for Vinn who couldn't paint the horns on a two-headed moocow). If we could find the zombie masters, maybe we could work something out with them.

Tomar returns with a book

Tomar returned alone today.

He did not speak of Rainn or the others and we will honor that.

He did return with a book, "Eight Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners." It lacks but a few pages. Aritage believes we can recover at least seven and a half of the habits.

We went to Godo Redas and asked him what lifelong learning was. He said it was putting one foot in front of the other, while keeping your eyes open and listening carefully. It sounds easy, but maybe I'm underestimating it.

Tonight we will sing over the book.

The man appeared

Today the equipment worked. Light poured from the black box and a man appeared. He told us there are twenty-three things we must do in the next nine weeks. His messengers will send us signs. Then he disappeared. We left the room and returned to our screens. I drank the k'afe and considered the man’s words.

Web 2.0. Something to do with a spider? His nine-week timeline ends when Sky Star is at his fiercest. Play? Children played in the summer once. Before the Fall. I will add the man’s message below.

Time to take my rad-capsules.