Tag Archives: toys

Keeping track of contacts

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Last week I put an Access database template up on my website and thought I’d better get around to actually mentioning it. What it does is keep brief notes of all my interactions (face-to-face, phone, email) with the academics, research students, and undergraduates I liaise with. (The templates actually on the website of course only have dummy data.)

My old system was handwritten notes on a copy of the welcome letter each grad student received on enrolling. This was Suboptimal for many reasons that only began with the fact that I could never decide whether to sort by first name, surname, or department… The database lets me:

  • sort by anything I like;
  • see together everything I’ve talked about with any given person, or everything I’ve talked about regarding any given course;
  • or my favourite (which I got the fantastic help of @dakvid for coding the SQL; also more generally I want to acknowledge my colleague Margaret Paterson for her inspiring beta-testing) – sorting all my contacts to show at the top the people I talked with the longest ago so I can be reminded to catch up with them.

As I said, I’m currently using it for liaison work but I suspect it could be used for other uses too, so if anyone wants to nab a copy, there it is.

Non-English blog roundup #4 (Dutch)

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I’ve been saving up a whole pile of stuff and then more came in when I was down with a cold, and then I just got behind. So I’ll start off with a bunch of old content from Dutch blogs — fair warning, it turns out that my Dutch is even worse than I thought it was. Hopefully it’ll improve, and in the meantime, machine translation is improving all the time…

On ZB Digitaal:

  • comments discuss the reliability of IP address tracing to find the location of visitors — the problem being that it depends on the address provided to the registry by the server. [In New Zealand this means that no matter where you are in the country, if you use ISP X you’ll show up in server logs as being in City Y.]
  • the 7 Vs of young adult librarianship: freedom, trust, responsibility, imagination, narrative, enrichment, cheerfulness. [Alliteration loses something in translation.]

On Wowter over het Web:

  • Wouter introduces a wiki for Dutch biblioblogs, nlbiblioblogs
  • a great post discussing at what point libraries should adopt new technologies. Wouter leans towards the experimentation side of the spectrum, rather than waiting for everything to be perfect, and gives an example of the unintended benefits of a comments feature in a catalogue. “When the library as an organisation is not exploring and playing with the possibilities than the organization is not teaching learning (thanks, wow!ter, for the correction -DF 30/6) anything.” [I ended up reading this through Google Translation which is startlingly readable though it doesn’t deal so well with compound words. Where you see “commentaarmogelijkheid”, read “the ability to comment”.]

And on the Bibliotheek 2.0 Ning group, Jeroen van Beijnen writes about one solution to writing in the margin of library books: transparent post-it notes. [I personally as a reader don’t mind if someone had pencilled in one or two notes. In pencil. And not many of them. OTOH, I do think that (following links all English) readers should be careful, when correcting a book’s historical details, to ensure first that it’s not an alternate history book. The author of the book in question maintains that “we should hold off on the brain-wipe until the second offence“; a comment on her post leads to a LiveJournal community for found marginalia.]