newsminer.com

Sometimes I feel absolutely lethean, which is sort of like saying I feel like hell.

Start with mythological Hades, which has five major rivers. There’s the most famous one, the Styx, the river of hate; Acheron, the river of sorrow; Cocytus (lamentation); Phlegethon (fire) and the one that slips everyone’s mind, Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, where I often hang out, especially after encountering a list of useful or intriguing facts. I might recall one of them later, but mostly, I’m like Shakespeare’s “fat weed that roots itself on Lethe wharf.”

Take for example “101 New Uses for Everyday Things” from RealSimple.com. This interesting and helpful compilation includes unusual applications for common household items. Use lemon halves to remove soft cheese from graters, and crumpled newspaper to deodorize refrigerator veggie bins.

Coffee filters can diffuse photograph flashes or strain wine from bottles with shredded corks. You can shave with olive oil or slip it into your kitty’s food to prevent hairballs. Putting dryer sheets in old books will remove musty smells.

When all’s said and done, chances are I’ll try olive oil to diffuse the lighting in a future camera session, but I might remember the dryer sheet in the musty book trick, since librarians frequently encounter those.

My library background also focused my attention on several items listed in an article from American Libraries magazine titled “MIT’s Technology Review Spotlights Top 10 Emerging Technologies.” The descriptions of graphene, “a newly discovered form of carbon found in ordinary pencil lead” that might “pave the way for speedier compact computer processors,” and atomic magnetometers that are “about the size of a fat grain of rice” yet as powerful as full-sized MRI machines, were both remarkable.

However, it was “wireless power sources” and “reality mining” that snagged my professional attention. Wireless power remotely recharges batteries in cell phones, laptops and other portable devices. Reality mining uses breadcrumbs to track where cell phone users are physically, who they talked to and the sort of relationships they have with the people they call.

According to the technical dictionary at searchsoa.techtarget.com, “a breadcrumb trail is a navigation tool that allows a user to see where the current page is in relation to the Web site’s hierarchy. The term breadcrumb trail comes from the story of Hansel and Gretel, who left a trail of breadcrumbs as they walked through the forest so they could trace their way back home.” In other words, computer breadcrumbs help people track where they are within websites.

Another assault on the old ways is the new, longer ISBN. Ten-digit International Standard Book Numbers have been ubiquitous to book lovers since 1970 when they were created by the International Organization for Standardization. Books are being published at such a phenomenal rate that 10 digits have become insufficient, so in 2007 the 13-digit ISBN was introduced. Separate ISBNs are assigned to every edition of a book, so it gets different ISBNs for hardback, paperback, large print and CD versions. That’s why knowing the specific ISBN will insure you’ll receive the version you want when ordering a book.

I mostly agree with stodgy John Ruskin who said, “They are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men, that most love variety and change,” yet I work in a library, an institution where change is abundantly rife although it’s provided the same fundamental services for the last 5,000 years.

Libraries have always collected, organized and disseminated information, but the forms that information comes in, and the way it’s stored, have changed enormously during the past 20 years.

Perhaps that’s why the Americans who most frequently use their public libraries are the Generation Y age group. A recent Pew Internet and American Life study found that 53 percent of Americans visited a public library last year, but those using it the most were in the 18-30 year-old category. Apparently, those Americans are more aware of what modern libraries offer since they came of age as libraries underwent their latest computer-age transformations.

That means old codger librarians have to keep up, too. Like Ogden Nash said, “I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance,/ Were it not for making a living which is rather a nouciance.”