Hmmm...

So, I was about to click on a link to a journal article on intrinsic motivation and retention when I couldn't help but feel a bit suspicious.

The title of the article was "Teaching you to Suck Eggs", and it was written by A Trapp.

Turns out it's actually a chapter in a book called "Teaching Psychology in Higher Education" and not a trap at all.

We don't have the book, by the way, but it sounds like something we should have...

Devanny Project Diary, Entry 9

Yep, definitely leaning towards focusing on Sugar Heaven. This is at least partly because I haven't managed to progress beyond the first half of The Butcher Shop and can't see myself reading any of her other novels before I have to start writing something for this project, and also partly because circling this one novel gives a nice scope.

The real question is moving away from 'what' and towards 'if'...

Oh, that's right, I have superpowers.

Every now and then, I forget I'm a librarian and I don't actually have to know what I'm looking for in order to find it.

Just as I finish writing a post on how I can't find the kind of music I'm after in German, I hit on a few new approaches and track down a possible lead. Not sure if I've found what I'm looking for, yet, as I'm sans sound at present. Will find out soon enough.

Once I've workout out whether my super librarian powers have actually helped me solve the German half of this problem, I can try for the Estonian side of things.

I wonder what it must be like to be normal, and actually be able to say "Oh, well - can't find it" and give up...

Listeners' Advisory

Readers' Advisory has been on my mind a lot lately. I took a short course on the subject last year, and learnt all sorts of interesting things. I haven't yet managed to convince anyone else to let me put that knowledge to good use, but I'm hoping to wear them down eventually.

The trouble with academic libraries is that we often forget we hold books that are interesting and entertaining, and that some people just want to read for the fun of it. We make it easy to find books with a purpose, but constantly neglect the users who want to discover books for the heck of it.

A Readers' Advisory service is like a travel agent for books. You go into a travel agent and say "I want to visit Europe", the travel agent should spend some time finding what elements of Europe you are most interested in (snow-capped mountains, beaches, vibrant cities, sleepy hamlets...) and make sure your itinerary doesn't have you spending most of your time in the north of Denmark when you'd much prefer to be in the south of Spain.

If you go to a Reader's Advisory service and say "I've just finished the Bourne books by Ludlum and would like to read something like that", then they should spend a few minutes finding out what it was you found particularly appealing about the books you have liked. It may be that what you loved about the Bourne books is not the specific spy/espionage genre, but rather the lone-man-against-an-unknown-foe side of things. In which case, you may enjoy many other books that are not spy thrillers.

I need a Listener's Advisory service. The online stores from which I tend to purchase music (such as Amazon.de and CDBaby.com) keep sending me recommendations based on genres. In the case of CDBaby.com, this isn't too bad as they have a slightly askew take on musical genres, so I am discovering new things through them. Amazon just keeps sending me recommendations that tick exactly the same boxes as the music I have bought in the past.

My real problem is that neither of them will give me recommendations based on what I want, and I don't know how to describe what I want in terms that will create a suitable result using their computer systems. At the moment, what I want is something like Ranarim, only not in Swedish. I want that kind of modernised-traditional-instrument-alt-folk-music thing that Ranarim does, but I want to find bands that do this sort of thing in German or Estonian.

It's a strange request, I'll grant you. I love listening to Ranarim for the sound of the music, but if I can get recordings in one of the two languages I'm currently learning, then my 'casual music listening' doubles up as my 'autonomous language learning', and I get to kill two birds with one stone.

CDBaby has never heard of Ranarim, so the system cannot offer me a "sounds like" option for the band. Even if I could, I would not be able to narrow that to the languages I'm after. You can search for country of origin, but not language, which means the odds of finding a German or Estonian language CD are really slim-to-none, let alone looking for one in a very specific sub-genre (for which I do not know the name).

Amazon.de is where I bought my current Ranarim CDs from, and is happy to recommend other folk groups from Sweden and Norway with a similar feel. Unfortunately, I want something in German, and when you go looking for German folk music you get something completely different. Wading through the popular stuff to see if what I'm after is lurking down the bottom is a challenge I haven't accepted as yet.

The sound I want is pretty easy to find in Celtic-themed groups (Ranarim actually performed at a couple of Celtic music gigs in Britain a few years back), but trying to feed the word "Celtic" into the machine just moves me further away from German language results.

Surely there's some service somewhere where I can say "I want something alt-folky and kind of Celtic, only in German or Estonian" and someone can make appropriate recommendations?

Just felt like a change

Yep, changed the blog theme again. Don't think it's been that long since the last time, but the background of the previous version was making me sleepy. This one makes me smile.

This, by the way, is the reason why I don't have any tattoos. Within three months I'll be bored and wanting to get it changed...

Scabies, Scurvy and other Piratical Ailments.

Did I say scabies? I meant scurvy. That whole thing about Krauts and Limeys was a piece of pointless trivia about scurvy. The only piece of pointless trivia I know about scabies is that it was common amongst pirates in the 18 Century (as were a variety of other mites, lice and similar communicable critters). But that's not really that special - they were common amongst a lot of sailors of the period, pirate or otherwise.

So, yeah, my apologies to the class of Pharmacy students to whom I told a piece of trivial information that was not only useless, but also incorrect.