Streaming Screaming

During a slow hour off the desk, I finally turned on some streaming audio from Naxos Library. The featured music all seemed to be classical except for Snack Time by Barenaked Ladies. I do enjoy classical music, but somehow the day seemed to call out for Barenaked Ladies. I enjoyed listening for a while, despite occasional static and some abrupt stops when mouse-clicking in other applications. If you are not a music purist, you can probably live with the glitches for a time, but eventually you may reach your tolerance limit. I am going to try this at home and compare the sound quality.

I did wonder how much bandwidth I was claiming. (While I was streaming, were patrons screaming?) A colleague here was watching a Skillsoft video online this fall and later found out that her web activity had slowed the patrons' computers to a crawl.

Spreek je Dutch?

AquaBrowser's HQ is in Amsterdam. Who knew? I am ruminating about this morning's session with an AquaBrowser trainer via the bat phone. Lots of useful features, although the vocab was not as user friendly as I'd been led to suppose. Syndetic, for instance, and that acronym with four letters, three of which are frb. Supposedly anyone who can use Amazon can use this. I can use Amazon. Sort of... I do like being able to see the refine options on the results page.

Then there's the word cloud. When I put in barbara rosenblatt, did I get the correct spelling, which is rosenblat? No. I got Greenblatt, barbra, barbera, havers, lynley. Stop trying so hard, AquaBrowser! I then clicked on author and retrieved a list of Rosenblatts. Including Rosenblatt, Barbara, which was the first listing. So, AquaBrowser was smart enough to put the last name first, but it still didn't show me what I wanted. Maybe there is a way to scroll through the list that I missed.

One interesting feature is the ability to add an RSS feed of a search to your own reader, blog, etc. I occasionally do a PowerSearch in iBistro to look for new DVDs. AquaBrowser would feed me titles right to my reader. You can even select to be fed every new title added to our entire catalog. Yikes. I am tempted...

A wonderful feature--AquaBrowser will remember your username and PIN after you've typed them in once when placing a hold. No punishing you for not remembering to login first.

Ok. Here is my greatest apprehension. I was practicing back at the branch. I brought up one detailed record, because that is the only way you can see what's in and what's out. And the little circle flower thingy went around and around for a lot longer than I'd like. Will bandwidth issues slow down our catalog?