How to spend a foggy, freezing Sunday morning.

Don’t get out of bed until the house is warm. The cat will let me know when it's warm enough (and she's hungry enough) to uncurl herself from the end of the bed. Hang out a load of washing and hope the fog clears so it will dry.

Read some chapters of Lethal Legacy by Linda Fairstein. It’s centred around murder and mystery at the New York Public Library. I seem to be finding library connections everywhere this year. It’s the 10th book in the Alex Cooper series I’ve read. All have settings in and about significant New York landmarks so I’ve learnt a fair bit about New York history.

Write an article for the new blog I set up on WordPress yesterday. See libstech.wordpress.com. It’s a blog for and about my university studies. More of a professional blog than this one and will include some posts that are required for my digital technologies paper. I decided to use WordPress because I wanted to try a different blogging platform and see how it compares to Blogger.

Start roaming around the WordPress blogs to see what other people are doing and how they've set their blogs up. I spent ages looking through a blog by Bridget Schaumann, who has a really good school library blog as well as an interesting personal blog. Get distracted by some entertaining YouTube videos – there goes half an hour. Check my e-mail. There's already a comment to approve on my first WordPress article!

The sun is coming out. Time to go outside and soak up a few rays.

Here is one of the entertaining YouTube videos I watched - the best of Funny Talking Animals by the BBC.

Trimester Two Starts

My second trimester as a full-time distance student at Victoria University of Wellington started this week. I'm taking three information studies papers:
Info521 Management in Information Services
Info525 Digital Technologies for Information Professionals
Info528 Research Methods

Each paper has a weekly online class. It's good to be able to hear and speak to the course coordinators and other students although it is a little odd to be in a class full of people you can't see. One advantage is that I don't have to worry if I'm having a bad hair day and no one would know if I attended class in my pyjamas! As these will be my 5th, 6th and 7th papers I'm used to the system now. I feel more comfortable about speaking using the microphone and can focus on getting the most out of the sessions. I'm looking forward to learning more about the subjects of management, digital technologies and research, and I hope the assignments will be as interesting as they were last semester.

The photo is of Rutherford House in Wellington. That's where the School of Information Management is situated apparently. I must visit my university one day!

Photo by TreMichLan

Learning about Censorship

This week I've been reading about censorship for my Information in Society paper. A lot of the week's reading has been about legislation and how censorship applies to libraries. However I sometimes get a bit sidetracked and follow links to interesting but not quite relevant topics. For example, today I found a timeline on the history of censorship for use by school students (in the Office of Film & Literature Classification website).

The fascinating fact (i.e. piece of trivia) I learned was this. When the film Ulysses was released in 1967 it was controversial, partly because of its sexual references but mostly because it contained one use of the word 'f**k'. So according to the website this is what happened when it reached New Zealand.

"The Chief Film Censor, screened it to two test audiences, one made up of church representatives (all men) and the other made up of married couples. While the first group recommended an R18 or Restricted to Film Societies classification, the second felt it could only be shown to segregated (split) audiences aged 18 years and over.
The Film Censor followed the second group's recommendation and men and women were separated during screenings. He stated that some of the dialogue in the film would cause embarrassment in 'mixed company'. In smaller theatres this meant a rope was put down the middle of the cinema. In larger theatres the aisle separated men and women, or one group sat upstairs and the other downstairs.
In 1972 the classification was changed to R18. Today the DVD of Ulysses is rated 'M: contains sex scenes'."

Attitudes have certainly changed since then. I wonder what affect this sort of publicity had on box office takings at the time.

Learning about Legislation

The Official Information Act, The Privacy Act and Intellectual Property Rights are not topics that I have thought about much in the past. But we've had some interesting readings and discussions in my university class. Apparently last week was Privacy Awareness Week (it's hard to keep up, there seems to be This Week and That Day for everything now). One of our tasks was to take a 'test', that's available to anyone online, to determine how aware of the risks of identity theft we are. If you're interested the link is below - it certainly raised some points for me to consider.
http://www.privacyawarenessweek.org/id_theft_tool/index.html