Her life's work: conversations with five New Zealand women

“Pragmatism, humour, stubborn bloody-mindedness – what else does a woman need to carry her through the ups and downs of her life's work?"

This book describes and analyses the lives of five significant New Zealand women, through in depth interviews with historian and biographer Deborah Shepard. Although there are separate biographies and memoirs of these women, the interviewer is concerned here with the influences that have affected their careers; their education, their families, their self-image; their creativity; their aspirations and major events like the Land March of 1975, the rise of feminism and the Springbok tour. All have answered honestly about these influences and also about motherhood and domesticity and all make insightful comments on how they achieved the life balance needed to become such leaders in their own fields. The editor’s introduction and conclusion are also enlightening.

Shepard is a narrator rather than an interrogator and provides interesting details about the women's homes and surroundings. This book deserves a long slow read for its assessment of the way life unfolds for different people and the commitment of individuals to their own goals.

Did I get with it?

I think so. I set up alerts and RSS feeds and got some interesting results. I did the extra reading and learnt about more exciting technologies.

Take, for example, the longpen devised by Margaret Atwood for interacting remotely with her readers:

People stood before a TV screen showing Atwood sitting in Toronto. Up in a corner of the screen was a live feed of the person in Halifax. Atwood talked to the person a couple of minutes, got the name (and perhaps any dedication desired). In Halifax, someone put a copy of the book in a machine on the top of a filing cabinet-sized unit. The book was put in clamps (reminded me some of the wringer rollers used in old washing machines). Once clamped, a pen(?) attached to a moving arm, something like the arms which hold drills on a dentist's chair, moved across the paper as Atwood moved her hand on the screen (I could not clearly see the implement she used). Then the book was unclamped and handed to the patron.

 
What's next? We must be open minded about innovations and willing to learn - an online program like this one is a great help. Thank you team! :)
 

Evaluating websites

This is a very helpful topic and the information and readings offered are very useful for us in the Libraries. I thought the article: Web 2.0 Meets Information Fluency: Evaluating Blogs by Joyce Valenza was really enlightening and I lifted this whole quote from it:

"Blogs are essentially primary sources and can provide lively insights and perspectives not documented by traditional sources. They compare in some ways to a traditional interview, with the speaker controlling the questions. Ripe for essays and debate, blogs present not only the traditional two sides of an issue, but the potentially thousands of takes. And those takes take less time to appear than documents forced through the traditional publishing or peer review process. Blogs allow scholars and experts written opportunities to loosen their ties and engage in lively conversation."

As librarians we are detectives when searching for information, we do follow clues but the analogy of the fingerprint that the resource gives us is of real help when we need to verify what we find.

The helpsheets provided on Wikipedia would be useful for parents and students as we often hear that teachers do not want their students to use Wikipedia. Pretty useful for teachers too of course!


Putting the theory into practice
I looked critically at Library Thing using the given criteria and I found; about info, other links, help and FAQs. However it is still up to us as users to exercise our own judgement and discretion, remembering that the site is composed of input from all sorts of people. For example tags are created by each user without necessarily looking at previous tags; I noticed gentle fiction was not used as a tag for Remarkable creatures although the word and a rationale occured in more than one of the reviews. I know I'm a librarian but I do think that moderation or a controlled vocabulary would make Library Thing even more useful for people looking for their next best read.

Next I evaluated Beattie's Blog using the given criteria and it passed with flying colours (well yes it is a favourite of mine!). It has a full about me section, is very well organised and easy to read, has a search facility, a list of followers, lots of links and references to other writers, commentators, publications and websites. I got a link to a live screening of a talk by Tracey Chevalier. Just brilliant!


And it's available from The Reading Experience section of the North Shore Libraries website.

File converters

That was a fun exercise! Gmail offers to open an attachment as a Google document but I thought I should follow instructions and download to my computer and then upload into Google docs. Was still waiting an houir later! However when I automatically opened the file as a Google doc it had certainly changed some elements, bullets, spacing etc.

Using gmail and google docs together is a good way of sharing files and cutting some corners and may prove useful if people are having difficulties with attachments but it is not for everyone. Our half an hour time limit on the public internet stations affords us little opportunity to help with tough file conversion problems e.g. documents created in older programmes, and wps and png files. Knowing about Zamzar and Convert.files means at least we can explain these facilities to our customers.
Open Office is a good suite of open source programmes that can be saved as word, excel, ppt docs. I think it is important that we remember the formats we want when saving our docs to avoid having to convert later but sometimes you just want to push the button when you've finshed composing!