Stinky library hours in NYC

Today I took the morning off to spend some time with my 3 1/2 year-old son. Thinking that a visit to our local branch of the New York Public Library would be an ideal way to entertain us both, I took my son at 9:30 over to the St. Agnes branch, a 5-minute walk. Thinking that maybe the library would open at 10, I was annoyed to find it would not open until 1 PM. My son, on the verge of tears upon hearing of the collapse of our plans, vaguely agreed to ride the subway with me up to the Morningside Heights branch, our other "local" branch up by Columbia University (there are a few other branches that would have involved a 15-20 minute bus ride that we could have considered, but I had never been to them and was a bit unsure of their exact locations).

On the ride up, my son turned to me and said, "So, what do you do at work?" Suddenly my son is a conversationlist. I'll have to bring the kid to work some day soon and show him the deep dent in my office chair (that would be the chair planted squarely and perpetually facing my computer screen).

Upon approaching the entrance of local library #2, what a surprise we had when we discover ed that this branch also didn't open until 1 PM. Reading the sign on the door posting the hours of other libraries in Manhattan, I realized that every single branch is either closed or doesn't open until 1 PM! I'll have to remember that bit of incovenience for the future.

As much as I love the NYPL (and the Brooklyn PL and the Queens Library), the hours leave a lot to be desired, a problem that Library Journal and the Daily News recently noted.

So plan C (the C is for "Crisis situation leading to a Cash transaction") was put into effect: a visit to an amazing children's bookstore a few blocks away from the Morningside Heights branch: Bank Street Books. So all's well (uhm, sort of not really) that ends well (the kid got a DVD version of a bunch of Leo Lionni books he loves, the very thing we went to our local branch to borrow in the first place).

Final score: Private Sector 1, Public Sector 0. Not what I would have wished for.

Web2.0 Logo Creatr

Just thinking of upgrading this blog from its 1.0 status; this would have to be my new 2.0 logo:




Or maybe it should go beta first:



Get one of your own at the Web2.0 Logo Creatr.

L2 script pretties up item records

Just stumbled upon the L2 script for Firefox. Once installed (note: Greasemonkey must first be installed), it opens a small box in the upper left corner of the item record display as long as there is an ISBN on the page. Clicking the plus sign in the box expands the window to reveal:

• jacket art (via Amazon.com)
• links to search LibraryThing and WorldCat for that item
• links (with prices) to buy the book at Amazon.com et al.
  
• editorial reviews from Amazon.com
• customer reviews from Amazon.com

You can slide the box around on the screen, too. What a neat little tool. Too bad our OPAC at CUNY (Ex Libris Aleph) requires you to go to the MARC view to see the ISBN. That adds a clunky additional step for me. Still, I'm excited that now I can use BookBurro (which also has a WorldCat lookup) when on Amazon.com and L2 when I'm in an OPAC; mmm...what a tasty combination!

UPDATE: An hour after I published this, I found this post by Casey Bisson on the Talis Shared Innovation blog indicating that the L2 toolbar is his entry in the Talis Mashing Up the Library competition. I should have mentioned that I found the L2 toolbar in a really roundabout way. While reading the comments on the Thing-ology blog posted in response to Tim Spalding's entry on subject headings, I noticed a comment by Casey that offered a link not to his blog but to his Lib 2.0 website. Anyway, thanks Casey for the great tool!