Apparently, I oughta be in pictures

Several weeks back, I mentioned that I’d made a presentation to the ILR Extension Leadership Team, but noted that the story portion wouldn’t work as well without the verbal component. Well, thanks to the fine work of Don Bazley, ILR’s Multimedia Producer, you can now enjoy the full experience.

I think it came off pretty well, considering that it was done with no notes beyond my slides (which is why I keep glancing back at the laptop). It’s much less fun without a room full of people to play off of, though. That being said, I think Don did a great job on the videos, and I hope we get to do more of this.

IRs@Cornell

On Monday I made a presentation for CUL’s Professional Development Week titled, “IRs@Cornell: The Expanding Role of Institutional Repositories“. I used Prezi.com to make it, so it’s viewable online.

Like many of my presentations, it loses something without my “voiceover,” therefore I will provide an excerpt from said that may clarify one portion of the presentation:

The purpose of institutions and measures like the Federal Depository Library Program was to preserve government documentation in case of fire, flood, technological mishap, or other natural disasters.

(beat)

Too soon?

See if you can guess where it goes!

Semester’s end

My final papers are handed in for the semester, and my brain is mush. Thus, I fall back on the joy that is Wordle, and present this blog and my workout blog as interpreted by its most virtuous algorithms!

The Nascent Librarian, as of today:

Jim vs., as of today:

Have a great and restful weekend, all!

Apologies to Robert E. Howard

This illustrates why I probably shouldn’t keep writing at night after I start to get punchy:

“Know, O prince, that between the years when the undergrads drank Zima and nasty box-wine, and in the years of the rise of the collars on fratboys’ pastel polo shirts, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining graduate programs lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars — Ithaca College, Cortland, Cornell with her gold-tongued lies of instruction in any study, Binghamton with her WalMart-haunted depths. But the proudest graduate program was Syracuse, reigning supreme in the dreaming fields of information science. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, laptop in hand, a thief, a slayer, a library paraprofessional, with gigantic melancholies, gigantic mirth, and ever-more-gigantic student loan balances, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.”

It’s a good thing my semester’s almost over. And thanks, Judd, for getting me riffing on Conan. :)

Three links for a busy weekend

Working on my final assignments for the semester: a pair of issue briefs documenting net neutrality and internet filtering, respectively. With that in mind, here are three fun links that are worth a gander:

The Secret Of Google’s Book Scanning Machine Revealed

Using Dropbox for library document delivery

My presentation from Wednesday’s meeting of the ILR Extension Leadership Team, from prezi.com. Be warned: the “story” portion doesn’t make a lick of sense without me talking, but the software’s just plain keen.

Back to the grind.

EDIT: I have not forgotten about my promise of book reviews. They will come after I wrap my classes, possibly accompanied by one of When Gravity Fails, which has gotten off to an amazing start.

A doubly-interesting day

…at least, for those of us who deal with the world of work. 

Today is both Workers Memorial Day, which honors those who have been injured or killed due to their jobs, and Equal Pay Day, which marks the symbolic date on which the average woman’s earnings catch up to the amount a man earned in the previous year.

 

The links above will take you to posts I made on the subjects over at the Catherwood blog. For more info on Workers Memorial Day, visit the AFL-CIO site; to learn more about Equal Pay Day, visit the site from the National Committee on Pay Equity.

News analysis

News: Thanks to my internship having a significant component applicable to the field of digital libraries, it looks like I’ll be graduating this August, rather than December.
What this means: I’m gonna have to start rationalizing not changing the name of this blog about four months early.

News: The ILR Student Government Association decided to take our library as the inspiration for their t-shirt this year. The front of the shirt reads “CLUB CATHERWOOD”, while the back says, “WHAT HAPPENS IN CATHERWOOD, STAYS IN CATHERWOOD”. 
What this means: While it may indicate that the student body doesn’t fully appreciate Catherwood’s commitment to outreach, the main lesson to be learned is that other libraries should be totally jealous that their patrons don’t compare them to freakin’ Vegas.

Jim vs. recursive blog linking

So, because I’ve got so much time on my hands, I started another blog. This one’s dedicated to personal fitness, and it’s called “Jim vs.” Why am I posting about it here?

1. Because I’m doing my part to keep blogs alive, baby.
2. Potentially, some of you might be interested. Anything is possible.
3. Because the name came to me at CiL2009, when I realized that I was giving all my workout report emails to buddies back in Ithaca subject headers like “Jim vs. Pull-ups” and “Jim vs. 400m Runs”.

See? It all hangs together.

I’ll be back later this week to review Scott Westerfeld’s The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds.

The trendy and the dead

Another CiL has come and gone, leaving in its wake longer Facebook friends lists, crowded Twitter feeds, numerous travel horror stories, and several gaggles of library folk who’re more informed and engaged than they were a week ago.* My Day 3 began with Michael Edson’s excellent keynote address detailing the insights he’s gained as the Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian, and ended in a Holiday Inn in Edison, NJ, quite further from home than I’d hoped to be. (But then, getting back to Ithaca can be difficult.)

Since the conference, I’ve found myself considering and reconsidering Amanda Etches-Johnson’s presentation during Tuesday evening’s Dead and Innovative Technologies session.  In a display of audience participation which warmed the cockles of this former teacher’s heart, she’d put the name of a technology up on the big screen and ask the audience if it was alive or dead. Unsurprisingly, “blogs”, “Twitter”, “Second Life”, and “information architecture” went up on the screen to be soundly and joyously declared deceased by the crowd, and Amanda concurred with their assessment.

But then, with the first two examples, she did something I found very interesting. She showed how the purposes of blogs and Twitter had become diluted in content and infested with corporate advertising, and noted that this proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that such things were no longer trendy.  And the part of me that used to teach LSAT prep perked up and said, “That’s a scope shift. Just because something’s not trendy doesn’t mean it’s dead.” And sure enough, then she showed a blog that was honest and interesting, and a helfpul Twitter conversation between a library and a patron. In cases like these, such tech doesn’t seem nearly so dead.

It’s easy, I think, when we play around with so much new tech, to mistake trendiness for viability.** It’s easy for library folk to forget that, by and large, we are not our target audience. Neglecting technology that our patrons might still be using because it’s not trendy is just another iteration of the mindset that gives us user-unfriendly OPACs that librarians think are awesome.  And considering that most studies of library presence in Facebook indicate that the kids don’t really want us there right now, maybe communication and networking technologies like these only become viable for libraries when they’re not trendy anymore.  

Finding the viability window for communication technology strikes me as one of the major issues that librarians need to grapple with in coming years, and Amanda and the other presenters did a great job of kicking folks’ brains into gear on the subject. And, it was fun to play RockBand with her.

* Based on extrapolation from a representative gaggle who’s posted to this effect on their various blogs.
** Of course, the fact that I’m still blogging and Twittering indicates that I’m clearly immune to this. Or slow. One of those.

Wow on multiple counts

So, my Day 3 retrospective on CiL was driven from my head by my absolutely awful trip home. Rather than dwell on that, I’ll put together my thoughts on the whole shebang this weekend, perhaps with a discussion of trendy vs. viable.

Until then, check out something glorious (that some of you have probably seen already, but hey).