It’s been a long time since the last time I posted anything. As with blogs, when you don’t post, the blog doesn’t exists. I’ve been thinking about posting regular entries for quite sometime. As always, something else comes up that stops me from posting. I was thinking that with the dependence on technology, my son will not have a legacy to look back upon. We don’t keep up photo albums like our parents used to so what so we do? Mayby posting here will someday be looked back upon.
We are in the middle of the Cornavirus, COVID-19 emergency. Since about March 2020, the progress of the virus really started hitting American news. Now we are being asked by the Governor to stay-at-home and self-isolate. I’m forced to take two weeks mandatory vacation time from Loma Linda University to help flatten-the-curve of the virus and help financially for the University. I hope to go back to work on April 6th. It is a stressful time. My sister Cindy came down with pneumonia maybe as a result of a serious flu but we’ll see if it isn’t COVID-19, she was tested. My mom has respiratory issues so getting COVID would be deadly. Just going out to the grocery store is starting to get scary because these stores seem to have the least social-distancing and the shelves have been laid bare due to the panic buying of necessities by others. It’s depressing to see the empty shelves. Taking a toll on my mental well-being.
During this self-isolation, I plan to take care of things around the house that I have put off. But the first thing I am working on is to catalog the California Turtle and Tortoise Club, Inland Empire’s library collection. I took over as the club’s librarian in January, picked up the books around then, but hadn’t inventoried them. I wanted to make the library available online so that members can see that is available. I tossed around two online service that I found. Librarika (https://librarika.com/) and TinyCat (https://www.librarycat.org/). Librarika is completely free (up until 2000 items) and offers a really good ILS. The problem is that it isn’t very customizable, so I cannot change the browse display to show a book’s status. It’s not well known and looking on the GitHub page, some comments for features dating back to 2015 have not been implemented. Then there’s TinyCat which is a catalog from LibraryThink and well-known librarian site for personal collections and therefore, has an established community of support. The catalog is customizable and the browse display is laid out nicely. Unfortunately, the TinyCat should be licensed for a small library at $3 / month. But having given it a lot of thought, I think the TinyCat version is the right choice. CTTCIE Library: https://www.librarycat.org/lib/cttcie
Starnight 71 