In an e-mail from United Airlies this afternoon:
“Amount of Miles Required to Redeem for Certain Awards to Change
Effective Oct. 16, 2006, the number of miles required to redeem for many Standard and select Saver Awards will change. As an example, the domestic Economy Standard Award redemption amount will increase from 40,000 to 50,000 miles, matching most other U.S. carriers’ current standard award levels. Even with these changes, Mileage Plus award redemption levels remain among the lowest of international carriers with three classes of service.”
According to this Denver Post article there’s some interesting new library law being proposed for the state of Colorado.
“According to a draft of a concurrent resolution Schultheis is sponsoring, he also wants to bar public libraries from ‘purchasing any printed or electronic documents, publications or other materials in a language other than English.’”
One CO librarian has responded: “I think Herr Schultheis is denying his heritage.”
Dead Fish and Unnamed Substances is an anonymous blog from a public library LA2. The stories are always worth reading (especially for the descriptive names of this person’s coworkers) but yesterday’s post titled among_stacks: IM So Pissed really got my attention. It seems that the library is finally starting to use IM to communicate within the library. Trouble is, the Circulation department has been exclusively banned from participating. From the post:
“Cut an entire department off from communicating with the rest. Their argument is the same that was given to me by our stingy-ass Information Tech when I asked her to create logons for me on other computers so the Gorilla would quit eyeing me hungrily for monopolizing her Gmail computer with my pesky work-related IM. IT had refused, telling me Circulation was not meant to have individual logons to their computers because, as she put it, ‘Well, the idea was that you were supposed to be helping the public.’”
I agree with all of the author’s comments and add the following. Some people in some departments may joke about sticking the catalogers and processors in the basement without windows, and may look down on the paraprofessionals, but without them, the system fails. In some cases, those parapros may been considering getting MLS’ and becoming the future of librarianship. With attitudes like the one discussed in that post, it’s a wonder the building is still standing.
So there are these new CD-Rs that will hold your data for 300 years. Now, if someone will can find me a computer that will last 300 years so I can read that data in the future, you’ll have yourself an investor.
Here’s a cool mashup combining data and photos from Ghostbusters and putting it into Google Maps.
