Making Maps

A friend of mine owns a water sports business in the Caribbean and I wanted to help her out with creating some maps to show the location of one of her excursions and to display the coral reefs surrounding the island. (Actually, now that I think about it, it would be great to create an interactive map where you can see corals, sea grass beds, limestone cliffs, mangrove ecosystems and so on and so forth with the various coastal and marine habitats of interest. A data manipulation skill to learn for the future.)

So in pursuit of creating the map, I looked up GIS software and of course the daddy of it all is the US Geological Survey's The National Map page for downloading pre-existing maps and The National Map Viewer for creating custom maps. I'll admit, after taking up 15 of the 30 minutes max I wanted to spend on this little project just exploring the features and lingo of these tools, I decided that the USGS NM and NMV were more high tech and less user friendly than I wanted. So I went looking for an easier user interface (note, I didn't say better)...

And I found the National Geographic MapMaker Interactive tool which allowed me to do everything I wanted, like draw on the map, zoom in, choose a satellite version (vs. topographic or street map) of the island, everything I was looking for initially... except download an image ( you could download a pdf, which I suppose could be converted to an image, etc, etc. but I wanted it now! Thank you, MS Windows, for the PrtSc function but then I needed to crop out the window, so my "workaround" still involved work.)

Here's the route my friends take for one of their snorkeling trips:

After I created that map, I then got all excited to see where all the coral reefs are located around Vieques Island and found the excellent tool ReefGIS by ReefBase, which is a database used by several international coral monitoring networks with funding by the United Nations Foundation. Below is a map displaying corals by their depth.

Light purple is shallow reefs, mid purple is mixed shallow/deep reefs, and dark purple is deep reef. Unfortunately, the actual depths were not included in the map, but from my snorkeling experience, I can say the mixed depth reef ranged from 8 - 20 feet deep. After checking the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Coral Reef Conservation Program page, I learned that corals may grow to depths of over 200 ft and that shallow reefs may be considered up to 90 feet in depth. Wow! But then that makes me want to question the map's data and what ranges were set. Oh, well, at least it identifies location of corals around Vieques. Enjoy.

Learning the RC: Public Information and Resources for Libraries

When I first started working for a public library in Sacramento, I had a supervisor who made it a hobby to do background checks on people. It might be about a person she read about in the new, or some gossip she was digging up on a disgraced staff member. But the stuff she found was always in the public record. I've always wondered how a person could perform a background check on someone else. The Sourcebook to Public Record Information (026.973 SOU 2008) is probably how. The first section basically tells you how "public" information is organized, such as how info gets into the public record in the first place, where it is held (government or business databases), and your rights to access it. The second section is the breakdown of the agencies that hold the information by state. A very handy book. I had a patron who was interested to learn which house his mother owned back in 1940s. It wasn't online and I wasn't sure where to point him. This book would be that resource to try to find those older records.

Now, I love libraries. And when I plan my trips, if there is a cool library where I'm going, then for sure I'm gonna check it out. But read a "guiness" record book on libraries? Pass. The Library World Records (027 OSW) book by Oswald is just that. It has lists on movies featuring libraries and the biggest and smallest books and the most "fascinating" libraries. (Seriously, can that really be a list?) But while it may tell me what the first book written in Dutch is, it doesn't tell me which library holds said book. Thanks Oswald, but no thanks.

Margaret A. Edwards's The Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts: The Library and the Young Adult (027.626 EDW) is a book of ideas on developing the "people in their teens who have outgrown the role of children and have become the eager, anxious understudies of adults" into readers. Edwards collected a selection of her articles, written through out her career in order to define her philosophy of why are how to serve this population, the most notable in the second article being, they are looking to define themselves and they will soon be the ones leading the nation. What better time to turn them into "thoughtful readers"? While this collection may not be modern, I recognize the title as canon within the YA field. Edwards's writing is clear and humorous and I think I will read this book.

I'm thinking of moving to Colorado. I'm a librarian. I want to get a job in libraries. Other than public libraries, what other library institutions might I work in? I open the American Library Directory 2012-2013 (027.073 AME 2012-2013 v. 1 & v.2) and turn to the Colorado section and I see in alphabetical order by name of city the libraries I may apply to for work, such as the USDA Agricultural Research Service (if I perhaps had a specialty in Agronomy). Should I wish to work for an Armed Forces Library, I can quickly turn through the pages and scan for the appropriate letter designation (A) to see that Fort Carson has one. Volume two also has information about networks and consortia, training courses, libraries in Canada and the US territories and military libraries overseas. A very handy directory.

The Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies (of the ALA) drew together a selection of documents related to the Americans with Disabilities Act to help libraries "implement the law." Titled The ADA Library Kit : sample ADA-related documents to help you implement the law (027.663 ADA ), it looks as though they surveyed their member libraries to see what they were doing to obey the law and how they were going about it and then asked, very nicely, if they could reproduce their documents in one book. The chapters tell you the titles of the documents, grouped according to subject. The index in the back lets you quickly see what topics are addressed (such as accessibility in the book stacks). I think I'd rather just call my lawyer, but for small libraries I could see how borrowing a ready made document could quickly speed the institution through the process and demonstrate intention to comply.