I am ready to index

Finally! After completing the indexing course through University of Berkeley Extension and setting up my website at Maha's Indexing, I am ready to index and proof-read.

I just need to find some writers and publishing houses to send me their books to index. I have already done a couple - take a look at my samples on the website. If you are reading this and if you have written a book talk to me. I offer great deals for first timers.

http://www.mahasindexing.synthasite.com/

Again, please post your comments. I enjoy them.

Library of Congress and Folger Shakespeare Library in DC

My son and I had a chance to visit LOC in August. Enjoy the show.

My latest publication

Check out my latest publication under publications called Decoarting Cents or click on this icon.

Library of Congress

I was on a holiday on the Eastern part of US and had the opportunity to go to Washington D.C. My 8 year old and I visited the Library of Congress and were given a tour of the building. We were both overwhelmed by the sights - how beautiful the building was, the history of it, the history in it. Due to time constraints I couldn't use their reading rooms but managed to get a card to use later - hopefully on my next trip.... I will post some pictures soon.

Divi-ing Them Up

Public Library patrons, just like any other patrons, come in all attitudes and moods. I thought I should divide them up. Here are some.

Cyclists: You never know what mood they are in today. They are usually non-expressive, but today they are upset. It could be they had a bad day elsewhere with something else but somehow a library seems like a good place to shake it all away. Have to be very wary of them.

Acrimonious: These patrons are always annoyed. Regardless of how cheerful everything around them is, they tend to show dissatisfaction about everything/everyone. It doesn’t matter how much time you spend with them to find what they need, they are still upset about something: you took too long, your damn computers weren’t fast enough for their research, you don’t have the updated version (which is still not published), the library is closing in 2 minutes and it is so inconvenient (doesn’t matter you have worked the last 7 hours on a Saturday), they don’t want to use databases they just want everything in print, oh! this list can be long.

Cheery: Contrary to the above, there are those who are always cheerful. It doesn’t matter you can’t find anything for them, they are so grateful you just tried. They thank you so profusely and leave.

Naggers: There are those who come in everyday (or call) with a question. One day it is an address, then it is about a product, then it is something else insignificant. Usually they are not looking for an answer. They are evasive about every question they ask and probably just come in to feel important and maybe have some company.

Know-it-alls: Oh these patrons know everything. But they check to see if you do. I added this out of personal experience from my library. They read about something then call the library and check to see if we give them the right answer. God forbid if you give them more than one likely possible answer. They will read the text (proof of their answer) over the phone to you.

Browsers: Then there are browsers – come only to browse the net: Kijiji, Bebo, Wiki – nothing research oriented. They want nothing off you. You might as well be running an Internet café.

Porn-ers: Should I mention the porn viewers here…..We usually give them the pink slip and ask them to leave. Many don’t even flinch while receiving the pink slip.

Demanders: These are patrons who never request. There is an “I pay the taxes and You Owe Me” attitude.

I’ll add more as I meet them.

MySpace and Facebook - Illegal?

ABC has Aftab talking about keepings kids safe online. I am a mother and I am all for keeping mine safe. I am also all for snooping into my kids life. Hey! my mom did so and I turned out fine. I was mad at the time but now I am thankful she was watching me.

It is only harder for parents these days as there are too many social sites. Finding which one your kid is on is your first challenge, then getting into that site and tracing your child and his/her activities is just too much work for any parent today. In some cases, parents themselves are busy socializing on sites and they themselves don't know any better.

But what got me in this article was the reference to MySpace and Facebook being illegal for kids? Is that advertised somewhere or is the author just guessing this? If it is illegal, public libraries are in trouble. To throw in my 2 cents worth social sites should not be illegal to anyone. Humans should only be taught online socializing skills just as we were taught critical thinking and literacy skills and many others I can't bother to remember now.

Regulars and Irregulars at the Library

When we open the doors at 10 a.m. they rsuh in to get to the computers. Some yell and fight to get THE computer they want. Once settled they play online games, browse some crappy sites which occasionally includes porn, check their emails, blog, bebo, orkut, chat and after booking a computer for the next day or two, leave. This is the morning routine at our branch. It is the same faces, same issues, and same questions. These are our regulars.

There are other regulars who drop in or call just to chat. They’ll start with a serious question of course – on politics, criminal codes, or any current event that is happening. Then they tell you what they think about those issues, ask you for an opinion. In my case I might have an accent and of course look different so the conversation expands to where I might be from, how long I’ve been here and anything else you can ask an immigrant.

Then there are some who come to flirt with staff. One of our staff members was asked out for coffee by a middle-aged bald guy with an accent. She is a happily married wife and mother of three teenagers and whatever made him think she would be interested in him we would never know. After many appeals to her for a coffee date he suggested that she watch Bridges of Madison County. I guess he doesn’t know that it is also a book. Isn’t there a free club in town where guys like him can hang out?

What about your library? I'm sure you get these fun types visiting you too?

Amazon and Salwar Kameez

This cloud computing service that Amazon is doing is mostly amazing but…. I have seen some clothes being sold on Amazon but was really surprised to see ethnic clothes being sold too. I found Salwar Kameez. They also have African ruppa, kaftan, Dashiki, among other things. I didn’t’ even consider looking for this on Amazon. Actually I was Googling for Salwar Kameez patterns and Amazon showed up.

To me Amazon used to mean the online book store. Not any more. Actually not for a long time. But why? Why does everyone want to be everything? Why is there no focus? Is it really helping the customer or is it just about marketing and profiting. I am slightly put off by this and don’t know why. I have to think harder. Maybe it is because these major cloud services put small businesses out of business, maybe it is the monopolization, maybe it is because I am mentally prepared only to buy books from this store like I am mentally unable to buy bread from Walmart or just maybe I have had bad patrons today.

Libraries are following this same pattern. We want to be Starbucks, information kiosk, computer café, and whatever else is out there. I guess we are keeping ourselves in business too. We have been asked why we don’t have fax services, postal services, coffee vending machines, diapers for kids, offer free printing services, and a few other things that I can’t think of now. At least no one has suggested we sell clothes or may be they did and I just don’t know it yet.

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for going with the flow and doing whatever a library should do to keep up with our patrons’ needs. I am a virtual reference librarian and am happy to be one. But I really hope we don’t go tooooooo retail oriented – even in appearance.

By the way Amazon, I buy books from you. I will not buy a cotton salwar kameez for $80 from you.

Google Docs

I know! I know! Some of you librarians do not like Google. I disagree. Unlike our patrons, I use it as one of the sources not as my only source.

I started playing with Google Docs – another of Google’s collaboration tools. I hadn’t seriously used it yet when one of my colleagues also brought it to my attention. That made me think about it seriously and wonder if I should design a class to teach our patrons. Think about it! You don’t need to buy Microsoft Office, can access it from anywhere on a computer and share your documents to be seen, worked on and edited at the same time from anywhere in the world. I recently published a paper on Google Co-op with a friend who lives in a different province. Check under My Publications. If you are co-writing a paper with a friend or colleague like I did, and you and your friend happen to live in two different parts of the world this would be a great way to collaborate. You could work on the same paper at the same time.

Panorama Software has partnered with Google to offer new capabilities to Google docs in terms of analytics, reporting and visualization process. You can analyze your data on spreadsheets using panorama’s pivot table. Click here for more on how to use Panorama Pivot Tables for Google Docs.

The three applications currently available on Google Docs are Documents (similar to Word), Presentations (similar to Powerpoint) and Spreadsheet (similar to Excel). You can share any of these withothers (or not) by inviting them as collaborators or just viewers. One important requirement is that you and your collaborator have a gmail id. Talk about marketing!

Your work can be saved and exported in any of these formats: DOC, XLS, CSV, ODS, ODF, PDF, RTF and HTML. From my previous posts you know I am also an indexer. Indexers are quite often asked to export their material in RTF format. If your old MS Office doesn’t have RTF, Google Docs does.

With my little exposure to this I have found that Documents lacks some of the features that MS Word has such as: a smaller tool bar, fewer font options, grammar check (Not that I use it much). I still haven't figured out how to present parts of the slide in a certain order with thier Presentation. The whole slide shows up at once. I want each sentence to appear one at a time as it can with powerpoint. I'll keep working.

Alright, I am beginning to sound like a free advertisement for Google Docs. So I’ll stop now and let you take a look.

Pearl Growing

• This is another technique that many searchers use sometimes unconsciously.


• Start with the original idea and go from there.


• Pearl growing involves false drops and precision.


• When you send your query to a database you get hundreds and sometimes thousands of results. Not all of them are relevant. The non- relevant ones are called false drops. The relevant ones are precision.


• You use the relevant articles (your precision results) to find more articles. This could mean you are using citations from the relevant articles (Citation pearl growing) or you are using more words and concepts, subject headings, descriptors from the relevant articles to grow your search further. Either way your pearl is growing.

“Site-ation pearl growing: methods and librarianship history and theory” by Sheryl L. Ramer is an interesting article on pearl growing search for medical information http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1175807

Truncation, Wildcards, Limits and Stop Words

TRUNCATION
This is a way to extend your search for a word. For example: eat* will search for eating, eatery, eater, eats, etc. Not all databases use truncated searches. Some may not accept a truncated search. In most cases a * is used for truncation. Occasionally you might come across a database that uses some other symbol (such as ?) for truncation.

Ex: Using Ind* in Google searches for Indianapolis, International, Industries, India, etc. Of course in Google you have about 103,000,000 for Ind*in 0.22 seconds.

WILDCARDS
Wildcard search is used to find words with various spellings: colo?r will search color and colour, wom?n will search for woman and women. This is very helpful when you are not sure if the article was written in British English or American English.

Note: Wildcard and Truncation symbols may be interchanged by some databases. Find out what symbols are used for what under Help.

LIMITS
Users can also limit their searches by date, language, format, full-text or just abstract, etc. Most databases have a drop down menu of Limit options available.

STOP WORDS
This varies from database to database. Most common stop words are a, an, and, by, for, from, of, to, the, with, etc. Check their Help section to find out which are stop words for the given database.

Ph.D in Library Science

For anyone interested in doing their Ph.D in Library Science off-campus, San Jose State University is offereing a Gateway Ph.D Program in partnership with Queen's Univeristy of Technology. It looks like there are some on-site components to this program but most of it can be done as distance education. If you are ready to commit to six years, this is a program for you.

Proximity Searching

Some databases allow proximity searching. For example: you can search for the word religion (N) Civil War (N) United States: Here you are looking for all three words to appear NEAR each other in any order.

The user can indicate 5N to indicate that the two words being searched should be within five words of each other in any order.

Another proximity search commonly available is W – for WITHIN. You can search for Library W school.

Proximity searching increases accuracy in searching.

Databases such as Dialog have such refined search functions. When a database consists of millions of entries, this is a better option to search. Databases that have this service will have help information on what proximities searches to use and how.

Field Searching

• This is the ability to limit a search by fields: keyword, author, title, date, subject, etc. This again narrows down results
• In most databases, field searching is available as a drop-down menu
• If you do not restrict to field searching, the database searches all fields for the word(s) you put in the search box. This would be keyword search.
• Other fields that a database may or may not have are (depending on the subject is deals with) : ISBN, ISSN, Journal title, Accession number, Geographic terms or locations, company name, NAICS code, product name, document title, document number, brand name, book review, etc.
• Some databases have their own subject terms and you will have no option but to choose only from them. One example that comes to mind is the Greenwood Daily Life Online. You can also do a keyword search here but it is more effective to search using their subjects, timelines and geographic locations. Example from Greenwood:

· SUBJECT (view all)
o Holidays and Festivals
§ Carnival
§ Christmas
§ Easter
§ Festivals
§ Holidays
§ New Year's Celebrations
§ Ramadan
§ Spectacles
· TIME
o Ancient (beginning of time to 4th century CE)
o Medieval (5th century - 14th century)
o Modern (15th century - 19th century)
o Present (20th century -21st century)
· REGION
o Africa
o Asia
o Caribbean
o Europe
o Latin America
o Middle East
o North America
o Oceania

If you are not sure where to start, keyword is a good place. But if you know the title, author or the dates between which the item was published you can narrow your search using one or many different fields.

A title search can also be done using websites. For example in Google, to search for a book with a title Gregg Reference Manual, type intitle:Gregg Reference Manual. Searching this way will reduce the number of hits from 173,000 to about 7000. This is a more effective search if you know what you are looking for. It brings up information on the book titled "Gregg Reference Manual", instead of looking for three different words, Gregg, Reference and Manual.

Controlled Vocabulary

LC Subject headings, Sears list of subject headings, Canadian Subject Headings, MeSH (Medical subject headings) thesaurus, descriptors, authority control could all be labeled as controlled vocabulary. This eliminates the need for the user to come up with synonyms for search terms

It helps refine ones’ search

Your database may or may not have a controlled vocabulary. But many offer some kind of subject lists to browse or narrow searches. If not, think of other terms you may want to use for an item you are searching: Use 'investment' instead of 'finance', or 'recipe' instead of 'cooking'

It is the lack of controlled vocabulary (selected list of words to search) that casues so much confusion on the web. What you find one day is lost the next.

Stay tuned for more search tools.....

Boolean logic

• Remember your venn diagrams from yesteryears! That is the basis of Boolean logic.


• Uses And (+), OR and AND NOT (-)


• They are spelled in capitals or symbols are used. OR is spelled out


• AND represents intersection of two sets and will produce smaller results (Note that this AND is not additive. It limits the search)


• OR represents a combination of two sets and will produce larger results (expands the search)


• NOT, as the word means, excludes a term you do not want to see in the search. This also produces smaller results


• What Boolean logic one uses depends on the database and what one is searching for. AND could produce too many results and you might have to use a NOT. Or, NOT might produce too few results and you may have to use AND and OR

Example: Typically, Mandoline NOT Slicer should search for items that are catagorized as Mandolin or Mandoline and omit slicer as a search word. Hence there will be fewer results. (143,000 hits in Google not all of them relevant)
Example: Mandolin OR Slicer will evidently have more results than the previous search. (366,000 hits in Google)
How exactly the results are displayed and what information is retrieved for the user will all depend on the level of sophistication of your database.

(BTW: My new love is for Mandolins that chop or grate your vegetables just perfectly)

More search tools to come.....

Know Thy Database

When I started library school it was all a bit confusing: What is a database, who puts them together, what’s in them, why are there so many different ones, which is the best one, etc. I was so naïve and didn’t think of the money involved in such things.

I like to think of an aggregated database as a big box. It is a place for storing information. Or you can imagine it as a filing cabinet. This cabinet could be Ebsco, Infotrac or Thomson Gale, ProQuest or any of the aggregators available out there.

Inside filing cabinet are folders. Imagine folders as individual databases bought by the aggregators. They could be a database of magazines, academic journals, newspaper articles, collection of online books, etc. These folders contain papers in them. These papers contain the information within the databases - the actual article. Does that make sense?

As a librarian, your job is to know what your filing cabinet contains so you can serve your patrons better. Every drawer in the filing cabinet could be a different aggregator. To makes things more interesting your organization might have various ways in which you can access these cabinets. Choose the best one for the question thrown at you and you will have a good day!

Gum Chewers at the Frontline

I am not a gum chewer. Even as a teen I don’t remember chewing gum under peer pressure – mostly because it caused me headaches. All that chewing!

I look around me and see that many here like to chew gum, including adults. I am not against that. Who am I tell you not to chew gum? But I do not like it when I have to deal with someone who is talking to me while chewing gum. Should people at the front line be chewing gum? Chew it during your break, lunch time, on your way home, at home….anywhere you like but at work – especially when you are dealing with customers.

I was so intrigued by people chewing gum non-stop that I decided to look for information about it. Just Googling found me a few results.

Here is one that claims gum chewing increases memory. Hmmm…!! Had I known I would have chewed some gum before every exam!

Here is another one: this is my favourite. This is a gum that enhances breasts! Vow ladies! Forget surgery! Just buy some gum!

It is funny, but this is a big industry. Companies are not only coming up with different kinds and flavors of gum, but are also working on gum cleaners – products that use enzymes to break down the chemical structure of chewing gum so they can be removed easily from hair, clothes or anywhere you stick them. Environmental Health Perspectives (Oct 2005): p.A663(1)

There was another article (I forget where), that talked about new moms chewing gums for the first couple of years, so they don’t pass on dental caries to their newborns.

With all this encouraging news (!) and more to come (from the gum industry) I guess no one will stop chewing gum for a while!

Five Reasons Why I Went to Library School

1. I have had many other jobs. One of them was at a bank. Believe me, people and money simply don’t go together. It is as if a monster gets a hold of them when they come into the bank. Why? They have been charged a fee. They lost a draft and the bank tells them to try and find it. The bank tells them to use online services if they want free transactions. The list goes on and on.
2. I was also teaching at a college. I had 120 students in each of my classes. My voice doesn’t carry well in a large room with that many students and there was no microphone. And can you imagine the paper corrections!
3. I accidentally found a paging position and happened to like not only being in a library but also my co-workers. They were so polite and seemed to know, understand and be curious about people from other cultures, unlike my bank co-workers who thought I was from another planet and had to be dealt with very sensitively or not.
4. The above accidental job, lead me to other jobs, also in libraries. I realized I liked all the libraries I worked at: public, college and University. This is where I belong.
5. By now I have had 7-8 years experience of working at libraries. I had been trying to go to library school but we seemed to always move to a state or city that didn’t have library school. Finally it happened. I got into a well-known university after a bit of a fight with them. And here I am - a virtual reference librarian. And to think this happened within two years of my graduation! I will call it luck!

Indexing

I have joined Sylvia Coates's indexing course. I have wanted to do this for the last 3 years -since I took an indexing class at library school in 2005. I felt that I was a natural at this (not that anyone has confirmed it) and decided then that I should pursue it further. Since our Canadian rates are now higher than U.S. rates I took this opportunity.

I am about halfway through the course and maybe it is too early to say I am doing alright. I am learning along with my other virtual classmates that there is much to it than just being a natural. The business side of it is a bit apprehensive, but hey! everything comes with practice. I just need to remember that when it is business, there are legal issues involved and follow instructions carefully with publishers. If I get stuck there is always the listeserves to go to and find an answer. Let me tell you, indexers are pretty good at helping each other. They help you with software issues, finding proper wording, and finding some work. Hmmmm! I guess I should make some indexing friends.

I think librarians will find it interesting to index a book. We read many books anyway why not make some money out of it. I think I will give it a try!