Google's Star Trek

One of my wife's colleagues told her that people who use the iGoogle and have chosen a background theme get a special surprise in the middle of the night. At 3:14 a.m., the stars in the page start moving around. There have been a few nights where I had insomnia and checked it out. I was beginning to think that this was an urban myth until one night at 4:14 I saw it. The stars were not scattered around the page as usual but lined up to form the Greek letter Pi.

I've been an amateur astronomer since the age of 13, which dates back before the Age of Aquarius. I've looked at a few star guide programs for the computer, and most of them were okay, but nothing got the juices flowing. Until last week, when I heard that Google had turned its Earth program inside out and let you have a look at the full skies. Like in the regular Earth program, you can search for a particular celestial object or constellation and it will zoom in to that. I headed immediately to the Southern constellations that are denied us New Yorkers and got an eyeful of the Southern Cross. If you haven't uploaded to the new release 4.2 of Google Earth you need to do it. Once it's loaded, you just click on View and Switch to Sky.

The number 4.2 brings to mind the number 42, well known as magic to baseball fans and readers of Douglas Adams. That is the number for this blog in a page that published the top 25 library blogs, so I'm off the main list for now but right up there in honorable mentions, so I feel pretty good. You can see the whole thing at: http://oedb.org/library/features/top-25-librarian-bloggers-by-the-numbers . Pretty good company.

My son Bob got his library degree this summer, and was just hired by the Queensborough Public Library system. He is an only child and since both of his parents are librarians, he completes the trifecta. We spent the morning following his route to the neighborhood where he will be working - Flushing. There is a large ethnic Chinese and Korean community here, so his obsession with all things Japanese will serve him well. Lately I spent some time on the library's web site and found myself entraced with their online catalog. It has AquaBrowser, a feature developed by TLC that displays some of the features that we're anticipating in Innovative's Encore - Tag Clouds, and the ability to drill down by format or subject for greater precision. Bob found that using the tag cloud in a search of musicians helped him to find what he wanted in the face of variant spellings. Try it out at http://www.queenslibrary.org/index.aspx?section_id=14&page_id=138 . This is the future of OPACs.