Downs
Calvin woke up again at 4:30am. However, instead of immediately bringing him into our bed, like I have been doing the past week or so, I decided to see if he’d go back to sleep if I just left him alone. He spent the next half hour crying intermittently. Eventually, I gave up because I wanted to go back to sleep. However, by the time I went to get him, I guess he was completely awake and wanted to play. I spent the next hour trying to convince him to go back to sleep. Finally, at 6:00am I gave up and put him on my shoulder in order to go downstairs and start our day. Almost the moment I put him on my shoulder he was asleep. I gingerly laid him back down on the bed and he slept until I woke him up at 7:30. I’m really not sure what my best course of action is at this point. For the most part, I don’t mind him sleeping in our bed, at least in the morning. However, it absolutely kills my morning routine as I can’t leave him sleeping by himself. I haven’t exercised in more than a week

Ups
Because of the morning excitement with Calvin, I debated calling in sick and sleeping. However, I decided I wasn’t really that tired and so just started work a little later than usual. To my surprise, I still managed to get all the “must do” things crossed off my mental list. (Though this is so unprecedented for my past few weeks that I’m sure I have forgotten something major.) One of the things I’m especially excited about is that we are working to implement a “spell checker” in our patron catalog.

Our vendor hasn’t felt the need to add spell-checking to our catalog which I think is ridiculous. A while back I collected about 800 real-life patron searches and was amazed to see that over 10% of the searches returned no results because of misspellings. It boggles my mind how our vendor couldn’t see this as being a problem. Our library doesn’t have the budget for a programmer and I have neither the time nor my managers blessing to do any coding myself. There are “discovery layers” that one can install on top of most patron catalogs. However, these are very spendy and, personally, I haven’t been very impressed with the spelling corrections.

A couple of months ago, it occurred to me that what I really wanted was Google’s “did you mean” suggestions instead of a real spell-checker. Regular spelling dictionaries often don’t contain proper names which would be included in a reasonable number of catalog searches, either for information on famous people or searching for specific authors. However, since Google’s “did you mean” is more flexible, it seemed like a better fit. I did some digging to see if an API existed for Google’s “did you mean” and stumbled across this entry which discussed a site called Jaunter offering a “did you mean” service to libraries.

I contacted a representative from Jaunter but they had never worked with a HIP catalog before. Since we were going to be upgrading to a new version of our catalog soon, I decided it would be better to wait to try to implement it in case there were any major stylesheet changes. A couple of months ago we got our new server and in the process, installed the newest version of our catalog software so we could test it out before upgrading in the fall. This gave Jaunter an excellent opportunity to see if we could get their script working on our test system.

We still have several bugs that need to be dealt with. However, it’s looking very promising. Today I started testing out the suggestions with the real-life misspellings I had collected previously. I’m not finished yet so I haven’t started analyzing my results but I can say that it usually comes up with good suggestions.

While testing the “did you mean” suggestions, I was amused to come up with a real-life example of Google’s “did you mean” failing. As you probably know, “did you mean” is based on the most common spellings people use, not necessarily the right one. Several years ago someone searched our catalog for “orgasum.” When you type this word into Google, it doesn’t suggest any alternatives but instead provides thousands of results with the word spelled this way. My conclusion is that enough people must consistently spell the word this way that Google doesn’t realize it’s incorrect. Sadly, this probably isn’t an appropriate example for my search class at the library

Calvin Moment
Calvin is starting to interact when I read him books! This afternoon he requested I read him Moo, Baa, La La La! several times in a row. The second time I started, I decided too see if he could make any of the sounds. I said, “the cow says . . . ” and Calvin supplied something that sounded similar to “moo.” He repeated this several times so I don’t think it was a fluke.

Simplification
I’m still working on our financial docs. I let them get into an appalling state during Calvin’s first year.

Food Diary

• Breakfast – 2 pieces of Peanut Butter Applesauce Cherry Toast
• Lunch – Triscuits and cheese, cherries, and 2 chocolate piece
• Dinner – Garbanzo Pot Pie, Glazed Carrots, and Bread
• Evening Treat – 3 chocolate pieces