Slave to the creeping green bar

G'day from Cooma in the Snowy Mountains. I checked into an internet-ready motel fairly early today, solely in order to keep working on these Koha citations, and I've been at it ever since, because this connection is sooooo sssslllloooowwww. Every single new screen to come up forces me to wait through 30-45 seconds of glacially creeping green status-bar "progress" before displaying the coveted "Done" in the lower left corner -- and this assignment demands a lot of clicking. I've got Sky News on TV for background diversion, and they've cycled through the same headlines so often they'll surely enter my dreams tonight (fishermen rescued off Australia's east coast, human bones washed up on Phillips Island, gunman loose in Sydney, father-daughter pot bust, blizzards in New Zealand; repeat). But at least the Goddess of Koha has heeded my pleas and is no longer pretending not to recognize ISBN numbers; they're all going through now. I don't know what was up with the earlier impertinence!

I'm still a bit baffled by Koha, however. What's a "z39.50"? Why can't we see author and title info on some of the pages? Why must we enter random numbers before proceeding? Hrmph. The system doesn't always run smoothly, either, occasionally yielding little snafus that actually wouldn't bother me much at all if I weren't on a connection whose speed evokes 1993. I dream of a future in which bona fide high-speed internet cloaks the planet... until then, my apologies for this text-only post, but a picture or video would take all night to upload!

Aw, OK, as a pittance, here's a link to a library cartoon.

from The New Yorker, August 12, 1950

Marsupials and KohAAAAAHH!

What a wonderful vacation this is. I'm posting a photo from yesterday -- Paul and I did indeed see Pebbly Beach's "surfing roos"; the whole beach was full of them! We counted over 30 kangaroos, but we were practically the only people there. Australia seems to be full of such splendidly remote locales. Then today we got friendly with some wombats and koalas at a wildlife sanctuary, but it didn't quite compare to the thrill of seeing so many marsupials in the wild.

Tonight we chose our motel specifically for its WiFi, and I've been attempting to work on the Koha assignment. Auurrrgh. I could accept that the assignment involved a lot of clicking through random data screens, and I could handle having to work with ISBNs rather than authors and titles, but what's truly infuriating me now is how few ISBNs seem to link to Library of Congress records. What the...? I thought the LoC housed every book ever published! Is it just because the books aren't in Pitt's library system? There's no indication. It occurred to me that my ISBNs might refer to paperbacks rather than original hardcovers, but even when I located the hardback data, overwhelmingly many of the ISBNs simply resulted in a "file not found" screen. So I went to catalog.loc.gov, but even when I've pulled ISBNs from the LoC's own online catalog, this has been happening again and again. 10-digit, 13-digit, hyphens, no hyphens, no difference. What explains it? Did I choose too obscure a book topic? How come Koha gotta treat me so mean? What's the point of Koha, anyway? I'm losing sight of the big picture amidst all of this annoyance.

So my Koha virtual shelf still only contains, like, two items, but at least my virtual photo album is filling up with gorgeous shots of the land down under! I'll aim to find another WiFi-offering motel tomorrow night and continue this mad odyssey into Koha organization, hopefully with a bit more success.