We deal in slides: Speaking next week at WNYLRC

As God as my witness, I thought weeks had more days in them.

The presentation as UNYSLA went really well, I think, and was bracketed by other excellent talks. I’m glad I got to see the whole thing, and would love to coalesce my thoughts about the event into words here. But I’m already prepping for my next presentation/workshop, so check out my fellow presenter Jill Hurst-Wahl’s take on things.

My next gig is on Monday, outside of Buffalo at the Western New York Library Resources Council:

Building Digital Communities With Digital Collections

Librarians can build online communities around their digital collections in the same way they build physical communities around their physical collections: by providing resources that interest their patrons, by making their patrons feel comfortable using those resources, and by providing their patrons with a sense of ownership of those resources. Hear how one library used the tools provided by new technologies to build a community of users around DigitalCommons@ILR, a premier institutional and disciplinary repository. Jim will discuss Catherwood’s strategies, practices, experiences and lessons learned, and illustrate how their success keeps patrons coming back.

There will be ample time for discussion. Please consider sharing information about your own library’s digital collections, or even doing a short demonstration.

I confess I’m not thrilled with the description, and that my dissatisfaction is entirely my fault. As described, it’s basically my talk from CiL2010, plus workshop elements. While that’s somewhat understandable — this event was originally scheduled for last November, and was prompted by good feedback the CiL presentation had received — the description itself feels somewhat obsolete to me. I wrote it nearly eighteen months ago, and those months have been full of work and thinking and assessment and discussion.

But, all is far from lost. It was good to revisit that presentation, see what still resonated and what needed to be removed. My plan now is to use a revised version of that preso’s thesis as a skeleton for the first part of the day, bring in some interactive bits rooted in the workshop Amy Buckland and I ran at CiL11 to get people talking and involved, and on the whole offer something that reflects my current thinking on these issues, allows attendees the opportunity to explore this stuff on their own terms, but doesn’t let me fall into the trap of simply rehashing an old presentation.

If you’re in the area and this sounds interesting to you, I hope to see you there! I’m thinking it’ll be a good one.

Library Day in the Life, Day 5

I am deeply glad I took part in this round of Library Day in the Life: it was great to reconnect with folks and make new connections, plus nothing gets you focused on your work quite like writing about it.

Today I knocked out a few more deep cuts from my inbox, which is now contains an absolutely absurd eight messages. A couple are personal stuff (“Medicate the dog!”), but about a half-dozen have to do with the work, mainly dealing with upcoming travel. I also waiting for a phone call to discussing such matters; seems like dealing with travel schedules will be my first priority next week, since I doubt I’ll get a complete handle on it before the end of today.

There’s also an email exchange I had with Erin Dorney about masculinity, male privilege, and librarianship that I’ve been meaning to turn into a blog post for about eight months. I should actually do that one of these days. On that topic…

This week has made me realize that I’m getting a better handle on things like committees and projects and presentations, but not at all on writing; specifically, writing for publication. (Not that I don’t love you, little blog.) I’ve gotten a few things published, but none of my current writing projects are going anywhere.

On one level, I know that the smart thing to do is just pick one and do it. (I seem to recall a great admonishment making the rounds recently that if you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities; sums up my writing efforts lately, that does.) On the other, I’m wondering if some kind of mentoring, either at CUL or through an organization like SLA, might not be something worth pursuing.

In any case, I had a great time this week capturing my work here, and on Twitter, and even on Flickr. I also really enjoyed following the #libday tag on Twitter and reading other folks’ blog posts about what they’ve been working on. I love this work, and I love this profession. Rawk on, people.

Library Day in the Life

Waking up to discover it’s -15° F is not a good start to a week. It didn’t impact my morning routine overmuch, though: coffee still got brewed, eggs scrambled, webcomics read. Taking the dog out was less fun for both of us, though, since it hurt me to breathe and him to walk. But we got by, and Nina and I both seemed able to stumble off to work in a reasonably effective manner. The bus was packed, which reminded me that classes started today; the lost-looking students confirmed it. I hope none of them freeze to death.

Got in, opened my calendar, and got my four to-do reminders for today:

• Write for 15 minutes. The post you’re reading will cover that.
• Post to SLA blog. Snooze for four hours. This is a weekly thing for me, and between what I’m writing now and other stuff I need to do today, I’ll probably wait until later in the week. Besides, I just posted there on Friday.
• RefBlog editor. I get this duty about twice a semester, and when it comes up I’m responsible for 2-3 posts over the course of the week. I’ll try to get them all written up this morning, and schedule them to go live automatically today, Wednesday, and Friday.
• Clean out inbox. I do this three times a week. It never stays done. But it’s the first thing I’ll do today, since I’ve got 141 messages in there, 121 unread. Typical weekend, really.

Today’s meeting-free, which is a rarity. There will be a few later in the week — presentations from the first applicant for the library director gig, the first get-together of the Cornell University Library Archival Repository Policy committee on Thursday, etc. — but it’s damned light compared to the last two weeks and next week. Which means I actually need to use that time to do stuff.

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So, I managed to get my inbox down to something manageable (fewer than 20!), and did some email support for a few folks who manage their own series in DigitalCommons@ILR; also followed up on a reference question for a former student. Wrote up two of three questions for the RefBlog, then realized that if I wanted to get to the gym before lunch, I needed to get going. (Those efforts are chronicled elsewhere.) I also managed to answer some questions for the Web & Digital Projects Group’s two student employees, who are awesome.

After lunch, I found myself briefly distracted by the glorious and profane comic alchemy that was the @MayorEmanuel Twitter feed in the aftermath of an appeals court decision that Rahm Emanuel was not actually eligible to run for mayor in Chicago. But I got myself back on track and wrote up that final RefBlog post.

We got new phones today, which is cool; unfortunately, they’re not working yet, and I need to return a call to California.

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Phones working, so now I’m waiting for a return call. (Cross-country phone tag is the best kind.)  I’m very much looking forward to said call, though: it could mean a couple more opportunities to go somewhere and tell folks about what we’re doing here at Catherwood, and I love that stuff. Of course, it’s starting to look like I might be taking something like half a dozen library-related trips between now and the end of June, which could get kind of crazy. Luckily, most of them seem like they’ll be reasonably short, and only a couple of them are definite.

——-

Coming in on the end of the day. It’s been much more about writing than about meetings, which was a nice change of pace. Plus, most of the writing I’ve been doing the past few weeks has been for the Digital Projects Assessment of our three soon-to-be-consolidated libraries, but I got what could be the final draft of that out to my fellow Collection Management Team members on Friday. I suppose that’s one more reply I’m waiting to harvest, but for now it’s freed me up to do other things.

Of course, I could argue that today was just a day in which I answered questions and had discussions via email and blogs rather than in person, and thus not really much of a change. Truth be told, you could distill a decent number of my days down to, “Answering questions and talking about digital library projects, with an interlude of lifting heavy objects.”

You know what? I am totally fine with that.

Transforming Spaces

I’d thought about posting about this article here, but I decided it fit to damned nicely over at the SLA Academic Division blog. So check it out there, and maybe I’ll throw together a political rant here to keep y’all entertained.

Delicious shall live on in our hearts…

…and also, apparently, at delicious.com.

Contrary to the soul-shaking news going around the web yesterday, it seems that Yahoo! plans to sell, rather than end, social bookmarking service Delicious. While this is good news, it’s still something of a cautionary tale for those of us who use such services either personally or professionally: build it like it’ll last forever, but always know where the export option lives.

I wrote a bit more on this over at the SLA Academic Division blog.

A follow-up to my follow-up

Columbia reverses their position on Wikileaks.

Stay tuned! I may need to follow-up on the follow-up to my follow-up, and if you missed it you’d be really confused when I followed up on it.

A bit of Wikileaks follow-up

Here’s some more information on the Wikileaks cables issue I ranted about on Friday. I posted it over at SLA Academic because, seriously, if you’re an academic librarian working with a program that trains up future diplomats or analysts, this is something you need to know.

Can I just say how thrilled I am that our government is so dedicated the locking the doors of empty barns that it’s willing to limit itself to hiring only those applicants who’ve proven willing to remain ignorant of material available to analysts in Russia, Iran, and the rest of the world? Or maybe just to those who are willing to pretend that said material is still secret in some way that actually means something.

In which I touch on matters vaguely political

I generally don’t get into my politics here, but that’s something that may change. Lately it’s become increasingly obvious to me that any attempt to separate one’s politics from the rest of one’s life is completely artificial. I try to maintain that artificiality here for a number of reasons, but recently three issues have hit a bit close to home, or at least to this blog’s purview.

First off, this story from the Huffington Post about the FCC Chair’s pathetic and transparent acquiescence to corporate interests on net neutrality. I confess to knowing little about the issues surrounding net neutrality prior to writing an issue brief on the topic for library school, but suffice it to say that the profound effect that net neutrality policies will have on the future of information access and dissemination cannot be overestimated. The fact that promises to set policies that would preserve net neutrality are being disregarded in favor of providing corporations with exactly what they want is reprehensible.

Second, as more and more libraries face budget and staffing cuts, and as more and more people find themselves without work, everyone in America should be calling their representatives in Congress and demanding the extension of unemployment benefits. Seriously, whether it’s out of empathy for your fellow citizens, concern for yourself, or just wanting to see the economy improve, this one is a no-brainer.

Finally, there have been reports that the Library of Congress has cut off access to Wikileaks for its staff and for the wireless network available to its patrons. I’m hoping this is an error, but betting it’s not. My take on Wikileaks’ actions is that they are neither treasonous attacks on the lives of our troops and public servants, nor a lethal blow against American imperial hegemony. Rather, I think they strike at two elements of American political culture desperately in need of change: the pernicious culture of secrecy that pervades far too many government offices and agencies, and the reprehensible culture of servility that saturates our media where the government is concerned. We shouldn’t be shocked that Wikileaks has revealed these things: we should be stunned that our government spends so much effort keeping such things secret, and horrified that our media isn’t trying to reveal them.

As someone who wrote his entrance essay for library school on the dangers of asymmetric information, and who believes strongly that libraries — and governments — need to be investing more in people, these stories just pissed me off. And I decided to share.

Another post to the SLA Academic blog

This one’s about colleges using aggregators to track social-media involvement. Once again, I owe the link to Ellyssa Kroski, whose blog you should totally be subscribing to. I’m sharing it here to re-post some questions I asked at the end:

It’s an interesting piece, especially as academic librarians debate the merits of their libraries getting more involved in social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Could these sorts of aggregators increase the viability of that kind of involvement, by linking it to increasingly common library blogs and other library resources? If colleges and universities find value in this sort of technology, how can librarians leverage their tech and information savvy to help make those projects better?

What do y’all think about it?

Usability.gov

So, Ellyssa Kroski and Michael Porter posted about the very cool Usability.gov. It’s something so cool that I had to chat it up at the SLA Academic Division blog:

While aimed at helping the designers of U.S. government web designers “learn how to make websites more usable, useful, and accessible,” [Usability.gov's] contents are freely available on the web. Those contents include a guide to usability basics, descriptions of methodologies, discussion of best practices and guidelines, a collection of articles about usability issues, and [this] nifty step-by-step usability flowchart.

Check it out, and have a very good weekend!