"an annual publication containing tabular information in a particular field or fields often arranged according to the calendar. Astronomical data and various statistics are also found in almanacs, such as the times of the rising and setting of the sun and moon, eclipses, hours of full tide, stated festivals of churches, terms of courts, lists of all types, timelines, and more."Modern almanacs, however, contain much more. They can list data from around the world, summarize recent events or popular phenomena, or describe developments in a given topic.
Day two of the Computers in Libraries 2010 and Internet@Schools conference was packed with information and ideas I’ll be bringing back to school to implement. Gary Price of The Reference Shelf showed us many new Internet resources. Cheryl Lederle-Ensign and Erika White of the Library of Congress introduced us to their newly updated website and the myriad new resources for teachers. Paul Barron, director of library and archives for the George C, Marshall Foundation, talked about Google’s ranking system and how important it is for students to understand why the top three results may not be the best results. He said “bad decision making is usually the result of an inability to locate information.” For this reason, it’s imperative that school libraries teach students to locate the best information available so that they will be able to make informed decisions now and throughout their lives.
Krista Godrey, liaison librarian at McMaster University demonstrated how open-source applications like Libx and Zotero can assist students in searching, collecting, citing, and sharing their research source materials. Rebecca Jones (Dysart and Jones) and Deb Wallace (Harvard Business School) were exceptionally persuasive when they discussed how we can use critical thinking skills to make the decisions that will help us to progress inside our organizations.
The evening program was a lighthearted look at “hot” and “not” technologies. Sorry, ipad users, but that one’s a “not.” Html5 and anything that helps people to work better collaboratively came out with high marks in the “hot” category. The highlight of my day, however, was hearing the archivist of the United States and "Collector-in-Chief" share that the book he's presently reading is Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
"The sun just touched the morning;
The morning, happy thing,
Supposed that he had come to dwell,
And life would be all spring."
Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia (shelved at JFic TAN) is a beautiful book full of astonishing, whimsical stories and illustrations. One of the stories, Distant Rain, talks about the fate of all the little poems people write but don't let others read."Reading the poems for Time You Let Me In reminded me of the sensation of vast horizontal breathing. The voices of these wonderful writers open up into whole worlds of roots and humor, and snazzy intelligence. No matter what age we are, we need those voices." (Introduction, p. xvi)
"The first rule, in some ways the only rule, is skim, skim,
skim. But skimming is not just reading in a hurry, or reading sloppily,
or reading the last line and the first line. It's actually a disciplined
activity in its own right."
"if a term recurs regularly in a text, or seems particularly central, you MUST
learn to pick up a dictionary and find out what the author means. Learn to keep
one by your side and don't try to bluff your way past such a term. An initial
mistake about the meaning of a term can rapidly multiply into a gigantic
misreading if you're not careful."
