Nora Burmeister

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. - Jorge Luis Borges

[xokrista]

[aotus]

Cabin Fever Remedies

Much of the Eastern Seaboard is bracing for a major snow/ice event this weekend. Are you prepared? Looking for indoor activities?

Even if you can’t make it out to the research rooms, you can still do something fun and good for the country from the comfort of your own home as you tag and transcribe records from the National Archives. Your tags and transcriptions will help make our catalog easier to search.

With snow on our minds, we’ve created a few winter-themed tagging missions on our Citizen Archivist Dashboard.

Find something interesting? Share your contributions with us on Twitter @USNatArchives #ITaggedIt

Read the full post on the AOTUS blog.

Image: Agent’s House. Department of Commerce. Bureau of Fisheries. Division of Alaska Fisheries. 1913-7/1/1939. Series: Pribilof Islands Glass Plate Negatives, 1913 - 1921. National Archives Identifier: 23853701 

[todaysdocument]

Don’t let that #snowzilla cabin fever get to you – check out some #CitizenArchivist Transcription and Tagging missions!

And don’t miss our recent transcription missions for #NationalHandwritingDay and #NationalPieDay!

[wordsnquotes]

And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn’t really change the fact that you have what you have. Good and bad.

Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (via wordsnquotes)

[wickedclothes]

This digitally sculpted Cerberus skeleton is extremely versatile – it contains 25 points of articulation, for a wide variety of poses. As you can imagine, they can be rather expensive – but we’re giving one away for free! It only takes a few seconds of your time. Enter to win here!

[nkburm]

Soooooo cool!

[thetinhouse-deactivated20180604]

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator — a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

Mary Ruefle (via thetinhouse)

[explore-blog]

Neil Gaiman on what stories do for the human spirit and how they last for generations. 

[nkburm]

ER&L 2015 - Day 1

Wow. That's all I can say. ER&L 2015 thus far has been an incredible whirlwind of learning, networking, and enjoying the company of some really fantastic library folks. Check out my Twitter, @norakb for more detailed information about the sessions I'm attending and the amazing amount of knowledge I'm gleaning from the insightful and inventive presentations. I'm bedding down for the night in Austin right now, but I wanted to make sure I took a moment to appreciate the wonderful opportunity winning this travel grant has afforded me. Wow wow wow times a thousand to the power of infinity. Can't wait to wake up and do it all again tomorrow!

[nkburm]

Hooray! Another conference! In case the picture is obscured, this reads "Our next ONW15 scholarship winner is Nora Burmeister. Nora is interested in digital facets of public and academic librarianship, particularly virtual reference, virtual information literacy instruction, and patron driven acquisition. She currently works at the Clark College and will complete her MLS in May 2015. You can find her at @norakb on twitter,www.nkburm.tumblr.com on tumblr, and www.linkedin.com/in/noraburmeister on LinkedIn." Thanks to Online Northwest for selecting me to attend your conference! I'm really looking forward to it. 

[liberatingreality]

Honor your ability to think critically.

[vintageanchorbooks]

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And auld lang syne! For auld lang syne, my jo, For auld lang syne, We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet, For auld lang syne. And surely ye’ll be your pint stowp! And surely I’ll be mine! And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet, For auld lang syne. We twa hae run about the braes, And pou’d the gowan fine; But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fitt, Sin’ auld lang syne. We twa hae paidl’d in the burn, Frae morning sun till dine; But seas between us braid hae roar’d Sin’ auld lang syne. And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere! And gie’s a hand o’ thine! And we’ll tak a right gude-willie-waught, For auld lang syne. For auld lang syne, my jo, For auld lang syne, We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet, For auld lang syne.

"Auld Lang Syne" by Robert Burns (via vintageanchorbooks)

[franny-squalor-glass]

Literature Prints

[infoneer-pulse]

A battle is brewing between research libraries and an association of academic publishers over the right to engage in international interlibrary loans and document delivery, both well-established library practices that are increasingly important to scholarship as the amount of discoverable information expands.

The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), representing some of the major STM publishers like Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, among others, released a statement on June 8, which says that library exceptions for document delivery in the digital environment, particularly of individual journal articles, are justified only in very limited circumstances and with the permission of the publisher.

[infoneer-pulse]

» via Library Journal

[bookpatrol]

Mining newspapers for poetry 

What to do you get when you partner up a digital humanities projects librarian with an associate professor of computer science and engineering?

Answer: Something good.

At the University of Nebraska Elizabeth Lorang, research assistant professor and digital humanities projects librarian in the University Libraries has teamed with Leen-Kiat Soh, associate professor of the computer science and engineering, and a couple of students students to develop software to recognize poetry from digitized newspapers.

“Millions of poems were published in newspapers. Looking at them will shift the way we understand poetry in the United States.” says Lorang.

Similar to text-mining applications, where specific words and phrases are mined from digital sources, the goal of the image processing computer program is to locate specific images or outlines of images. The idea traces back to Lorang’s doctoral dissertation project, when she spent 18 months scouring old newspapers for poems. She was only able to catalog 3,000 poems in that time, but she noticed that the poems were often easily recognizable when looking at the whole page at once.

In steps Leen-Kiat Soh who views this as” a big data problem” and off they go.

Says Lorang:

If we think about the massive digital libraries that we’re creating, the tradition has been to use the text that’s created in those processes to enable us to discover content, but at the same time we’re creating digital images. If we don’t do anything with those digital images, we’re missing a lot of the potential of the digital libraries

On the other side of the pond, Andrew Hobbs and Claire Januszewski from the University of Central Lancashire have been keeping a blog focusing on poetry found in nineteenth -century newspapers. The blog, the local press as poetry publisher, 1800-1900, is centered around the hypothesis that “the national network of local newspapers was the largest publisher of nineteenth-century poetry, and the medium through which most encounters with poetry occurred.”

Great stuff.

More on the project:

Project mines 8 million news pages for poetry | University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

[dr-archeville]

When people think of libraries they normally envision old ladies with cats eye glasses shushing everyone. The only sounds that are audible is the rhythmic clanking of ink based book stamps. Times have certainly changed with many libraries forgoing books altogether and focusing on digital. The vast majority though, have embraced digital to a substantial degree.

A recent report by the Library Journal has stated that 95% of all US libraries have an e-book collection. That’s up from 89% in both 2013 and 2012, when researchers thought that adoption had plateaued for good.

The average number of e-books carried was 20,244 by each library, but that of course was skewed toward large libraries. Medium sized libraries statistically had around 10,434 titles.

The American Library Association every year holds an annual event that brings thousands of librarians and companies marketing services towards them. One of the biggest trends in 2014 was audiobooks, which have quickly become a billion dollar industry. The 3M Cloud Library disclosed that 50% of all the libraries they serve are very interested in an audiobook solution, while Baker & Taylor is seeing unparalleled demand.

"All… will benefit from increased access to all the good things technology can provide — the opportunity to learn, to explore and to create. This space will welcome everyone from our children learning to read and our grandparents applying for Social Security, to the emerging creative class who will develop the tools and products of the future, to our next generation of entrepreneurs."

[nkburm]

Nora Burmeister, ER&L + Taylor & Francis Student Travel Winner

Electronic Resources and Libraries is pleased to congratulate Nora Burmeister, one of two student travel awards to attend ER&L in Austin, Feb 22-25. Read excerpts from Nora's winning essay and ...

It’s officially official! I’ll be heading to ER&L in February to marinate in digital knowledge provided by the best in the library business.

[dailydoseofbookssauce]

When trouble strikes, head to the library. You will either be able to solve the problem, or simply have something to read as the world crashes down around you.

Lemony Snicket (via dailydoseofbookssauce)

[nkburm]

Ah! I am so so so so so (ad infinitum) excited right now! I just got word I've been selected to receive a travel grant from Taylor and Francis to attend the Electronic Resources and Libraries conference in Austin, TX! I'm beyond thrilled. Libraries and technology are my two loves (aside from Sherlock and Eleven, of course) and I cannot wait to hob nob and match wits with brilliant librarians from around the country/world. 

Now the challenge is holding my breath till February 22nd!