The virtues of re-purposing

An anecdote:

Recently, a colleague stopped by my office to pick my brain on a matter technological. She’s an expert in photo digitization and photo archiving, and is working with someone in NYC on a project involving such images. But the geographical distance between the collaborators was proving problematic, and she wondered if I knew of any applications that might help address the issue.

Initially, I drew a blank; or rather, nothing that sprung immediately to my mind seemed to fit her situation. In my experience, Google Docs doesn’t handle images well enough to make the sort of communication she described efficient or elegant. She’d used the Cornell dropbox to transfer images, but the project she was working on required images and their associated captions to be re-organized, edited, and collated in a way that Dropbox was too ponderous to address. Google Wave was a possibility — if nothing else, it handles images better than Docs — but again, the back-and-forth flow of information she was describing seemed too multi-dimensional for Wave to facilitate.

“What I’d want,” she said, gesturing at the table in my office, “would be something like this. Someplace we could lay pictures out with their captions, and re-arrange them as needed. An online worktable.”

Unfortunately, I didn’t know of such a program, though I was sure they were out there. Until, suddenly, I did.

“Have you seen Prezi?”

She hadn’t, so I showed it to her. I explained that it was an application designed for making interesting presentations, but that the workspace you use to create that presentation seemed to provide the features she was looking for: images could be uploaded, text could be uploaded, the two could be associated (a new feature since I last used the application!) and then moved and re-configured as needed. The “virtual worktable” was theoretically infinite, and as long as multiple people had access to the account it could easily be used for collaboration. She said she’d give it a try, and from what she’s told me since it seems to be working very well.

Lest this post be seen as nothing but self-aggrandizement — though, honestly, I felt damnably good after I came up with that — the experience got me thinking on technological re-purposing. It’s something that I think tends to happen without a great deal of attention or discussion. As librarians, we see needs, find something that works, and then move on.

So, a question:

What experiences have you had with re-purposing an application or program in your library, and how well did it work out?

Some gallows humor for your Thursday

Chances are you’ve seen this image before, but I thought it was worth re-posting. In November, BusinessWeek laid off its library staff as part of its general downsizing. BW employees visiting the former library now see the following (click image for source):

CiL2010, here I come

Computers in Libraries 2008 was the first professional library conference that I went to. I was unambitious: it was enough for me to attend, avoid humiliation, and not get captured. (It also marked the start of this blog. Historians, take note.) My return trip was marked by a desire to get more involved in next year’s conference, and a commitment to not getting trapped at the Syracuse Airport overnight.

I decided that for CiL2009, more involvement meant getting to know more people. So I went out to the discussion dinners, talked to presenters and fellow conference goers between sessions (and friended them on Facebook and Twitter), and sung more songs during Sunday’s RockBand session. I left the conference with plans to expedite my graduation from library school, hopes of not getting trapped in Newark overnight, and confidence that next year I could present at this shindig.

Well as a wise man once said, two outta three ain’t bad.*

It looks like I will be presenting at CiL2010. I’ll provide more details as things get set in stone, but suffice it to say that I am thrilled to get this opportunity. I’m looking forward to attending the conference again, and I’ll do my best to bring something interesting to the table during my presentation. Right now I can’t even get my mind around content: I’m just excited that this is coming together.

* God, how I hate Newark.

Things I’ve learned this week

I don’t use twitter enough to merit the use of LoudTwitter for this blog.

When you use your Gmail Inbox as your to-do list, having it be empty engenders great joy.

Checking your online calendar after you get out of the shower is a really great way to make sure that you don’t show up to teach an introduction to research seminar in jeans.

Today’s tweets

• 15:33 DigitalCommons@ILR about to hit 10,000 uploaded documents: bit.ly/XeGu #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

10,000 is a nice round number

So one of the things that I’ve been working on for the last few weeks is how to best draw attention to the fact that DigitalCommons@ILR is about to exceed 10,000 uploaded documents. The repository’s been around since the end of 2004, and my involvement began in early 2006, with me officially taking over management this past January.

As I said in the title, 10,000 is a nice round number, and we’re bringing attention to it in no small part because we want to get the word out about the resource that we’ve been putting together here at Catherwood, and making available to the world. But I also consider that number important because of the level of oversight each item in the repository receives during the upload process. Almost nothing is automated, and each item is processed by multiple staff members and frequently at least one or two student employees. We try to make sure each document is as useful as possible to anyone who downloads it, and that means there’s a lot of hard work on display in that repository.

Thanks go out to Steve, Fran, Angie, Julia, Clement, Lynette, Corinne, Katherine, Kayla, Susanne, John, and especially Mary Newhart and Suzanne Cohen (who were the driving force behind this thing when I came on board). I’m just glad to have gotten the opportunity to join up.

Today’s tweets

• 10:15 Just put up a new post at The Nascent Librarian: bit.ly/Oyya8 #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

What a fortnight…

It started with a presentation Chris Miller and I made at the Upstate New York Science Librarians Meeting on cloud computing, which ended up going rather well; you can check out the LibGuide Chris threw together as supporting materials here, if you’d like. (And my sardonic commentary on it here.) What’s really telling is that when I started writing this post I initially thought it had just been this past Monday, as opposed to two Mondays back. It’s really been that kind of Autumn, flying by like a reckless teenage driver and often feeling as dangerous. Or at least as heedless to its surroundings.

Seems like every day these last couple weeks has left my brain fried, unable to accept further input or produce further results; staggering home to dinner and maybe a touch of WoW seemed within my capabilities, but only barely. That being said, there’ll be something besides a level 76 rogue to show for my efforts before too long, some of which I’ll even be able to post about shortly. I’m shallow enough that the possibility of displaying the fruits of my labor makes the labor easier to endure.

And of course, this fortnight included Halloween, for which I finally provided some context to an oft-used icon by dressing up as Doc Gnosis: hero, pulp adventurer, and man of science.

This made me happy in a way which only confirms my earlier statement about shallowness. Sadly, my idea of using NaNoWriMo to write a longer tale involving the Good Doctor and the Raptormen of Venus has not materialized in any way. We’ll see if that changes, but considering how this week, fortnight, month, and season have been going, it does seem unlikely.

In which the principle of right action trumps adherance to habit

For a brief period of time, while I was working in Baltimore, I was a weekly purchaser of single-issue comic books. I enjoyed it, but after we moved back to Ithaca I gave up the practice (much to the betterment of my wallet). However, there are times when one must make exceptions to even the best of habits.

This is one of those times.

All I can say is: finally.

It’s about time this happened to someone other than librarians

Thanks to the imagination of David Malki ! and the diligent effort of one Liam Cooke, the internet has now obviated the genre author.