I hope you weren't planning on using Amicus this weekend

Today I saw a tweet from Library and Archives Canada that their catalogue, Amicus, will be down from this afternoon until Sunday evening.

For some reason Amicus seems to be unavailable one a somewhat regular basis.  What's up with that?

Anyway, if you were planning on doing any Amicusing you should either do it now or be prepared to wait until Sunday afternoon.

A Few Quick Notes 263

-For the past few days it has been on the cold side, some days going as low as -21 (maybe even colder). Today was a bit warmer, and it is forecast to be warmer still tomorrow. Unfortunately, with the rising temperatures we are supposed to get some snow, rain, and ice pellets, which seems like quite the combination.

-I managed to crank out another two loaves of bread this morning while preparing breakfast and working on school related things. It seems that Wednesday morning is a good day for me to do some bread baking.

-Today I had the opportunity to do some poking around in the Novanet catalogue (the union catalogue for Nova Scotia post-secondary institutions). The more I use this catalogue the more I think that it was designed to prevent access to materials. Not only are there all kinds of duplicate, and confusing, records, in many cases the records don't reflect what is actually available in the library (particularly when it comes to electronic journal access). I really don't understand how such a catalogue could have ever been deemed acceptable by any of the participating institutions.

-Recently I have been thinking that what we consider to be our tastes/preferences are really just functions of availability (mark another one up in the original thought tally).

-A few days ago I started using Google Reader. While I don't like everything about the service, I am generally pretty satisfied. I am somewhat amazed that it took me this long to start using a feed aggregator of some sort, particularly as there are a number of blogs that I check on a regular basis.

-I have to give my second round of lectures starting next week. Again I seem to have lucked out and picked a topic that I am familiar with and that relates to topics I have been reading about already this term. Hopefully they go a little more smoothly that some of my first lectures.

-We will be having a pot roast for dinner. Actually, I should consider taking things out of the oven in the very near future.

-A few days ago I came across the video for Colleen Power's new song New Townie Man. I was immediately taken with the piece, but that is likely only because I am townie male, and they tend to do pretty well in this piece.



Yesterday I was talking to a friend, who happens to be a 'bayman,' about this song and he expects that several responses to this song will be drafted and posted in the coming days and weeks. I really hope he is right, adding a Compton and Juice vs. Gazeebow Unit feel to this video and the resulting discourse would be great.

A Few Quick Notes 194

-Today has been another nice day. The skies are clear and the temperature is above 5.

-Something I didn't mention in the last post is that our team received our jerseys just before our ultimate game yesterday. While one might think that this should be good, I am not really so sure.

Unlike in past years when I had solid colour jerseys, this year my team has camouflage jerseys. Not only are our jerseys the only multi-colour jerseys, they are also the only ones that are tank-tops (which doesn't happen to my favourite shirt style). Even more frustrating is that the cut is a little strange, possibly just the regular t-shirt cut, but without the arms, instead of a specially designed tank-top design.

My impression of the jerseys so far is that they look and feel as though we are running around with garbage bags instead of shirts. Hopefully as I become more familiar with the item it will become more comfortable, and that I be so self-conscious about wearing a camouflage tank-top.

-A few years ago I started to use the comment function available in some OPACs whenever I see cataloging decisions I don't agree with. While I occasionally remember to go back and check and see that some of my suggestions are taken I always wonder who it is that gets the pleasure of going through these comments, and how many such comments come up in the run of a day.

-It looks as though I will be having steak and potatoes for dinner tonight. I am pretty sure that I could handle such a meal several times a week.

-Today I started working on some trivia questions. The plan is that I will try to host trivia at Bitters on a night I don't also have ultimate, which seem to be few and far between. Hopefully my rounds will come together in the next few days

A Few Quick Notes 193

-Aside from a few rain drops, today has been a rather nice day. Possibly even more important than the quality of the weather today is that fine weather has been predicted for the next few days (a prediction that I hope comes true).

-Today when searching by ISBN in Amicus I had 5 records returned for a single ISBN. While it is likely that this is not the record in this category, it is a much larger number than I would have expected. One would hope that only a single record would be returned for most ISBNs.

-It is possible that I have secured a house-sitting gig for the latter part of July. If this works out it would tie in nicely with my early August house-sitting obligation.

-I really dislike serials that under-go name changes. Not only have such changes caused me to have nightmares but they are also a bit of a pain to catalogue and I can't imagine that many people are able to follow the changes.

-We had a frisbee game. We all seemed to play much better this time around. In the end we managed to hang on to the lead long enough to secure the win.

-A few of us went to Bitters for trivia. Unfortunately, we didn't do all that well, but better than at least two teams. We were particularly hammered by a comic book category on which we scored zero.

-This year I have seen a number of very large ants. I don't recall seeing such creatures in past year. I wonder if Newfoundland has a new invasive species.

A Few Quick Notes 192

-Today has been another nice day. Amazingly, the higher temperatures did not make my walk to work particularly unpleasant.

-While yesterday was both Memorial Day (until noon, and in Newfoundland and Labrador only) and Canada Day I didn't participate in any of the available activities. Instead of an active member of the community I stayed at home and kept to myself, and eventually got around to chopping up several pounds worth of vegetables.

-The celery that I am eating right now is not particularly good. Neither the flavour or texture meet my exacting standards.

-Instead of book marking or remembering the URL for the Amicus, each day I go to Google and search for it.

When I first started doing this some number of years ago I learned that the first hit was actually for a union in the UK, rather than the Canadian union catalogue. Eventually I trained myself to go to the correct link (though it took a fair bit of time).

At some point in time, though I don't really know when, this union was dropped to a lower position by Google.

Just today I unfortunately found that the union has once again been returned to the prime position for the 'Amicus' search. Maybe I will have to try and post the link in a few places to get my preferred Amicus back in the prime spot.

-In the coming days Neil will be moving to a new apartment. This is particularly important to me because as of late August this will be my new apartment. Hopefully the move will go well and the transition to the new apartment will be smooth and painless.

As I was able to send many of my goods to Halifax when I left Montreal many of my belongings will be in the apartment when I arrive. Furthermore, the plan is to have Neil and Rebecca unpack all of the communal type objects and put them away, thus preventing a major re-arrangement of items once I arrive.

-Will I get my diploma? This is something that I have been wondering about since I missed my graduation ceremony about a month ago. I would have thought that McGill would have just mailed it to me, but I guess that hasn't happened yet. Maybe if I don't see any action on this front I will have to look into the matter.

Amicus, where did you go?

Soon after I arrived at work today I logged into Amicus, the Canadian National Catalogue, as is my practice. All seemed to be going as normal until about an hour or so into the day. All of a sudden I seemed not to be able to complete my searches, and then eventually I became unable to even access the splash page.

Assuming that this was a brief glitch I decided that I would leave it alone and come back in a few days. As I checked back during the problems were clearly still persisting.

Eventually I thought that maybe there would be an update or explanation somewhere online. Unfortunately, as the entire Library and Archives Canada site was inaccessible the most obvious location for such a notice was unavailable. In the end I tried to look in a few place, all of which turned up nothing. As I am pretty sure that there must be a message board with comments related to this occurrence I may have to continue my searching tomorrow (even though the problem has now been resolved).

Not surprisingly, with Amicus down, I decided to head over to the Library of Congress catalogue, assuming that their classifications of particular items would be pretty authoritative. Once in the catalog I learned that they too were having service problems. In this case the message I received indicated that they had reached their maximum user capacity.

While it is quite possible that this is what happened, I wonder if they were operating at diminished capacity as I have a very hard time believing that it is such a popular site that it would max out its capacity. Who knows, maybe I hit prime East coast cataloging time. As I don't use the service as much as I use Amicus I am not really in a position to say that this doesn't happen every day at that time.

Hopefully everything will be back on track tomorrow and their to serve my classification related needs.