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.
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.
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.
I am always amazed by how much worse traffic in this town gets once the Cornell students return. Since they rarely drive to class and only slightly less rarely leave East Hill — mainly to go to Wegmans — I tend to assume that there is some indirect mechanism by which they cause this effect. Of course, correlation and causation and all that, so I shouldn’t rule out the possibility that there is some Z factor snarling late August traffic every year.
The scholastic influx’s effect on the library is much less obscure. This week saw me giving tours, fixing links on the library’s web page, and selecting my slots on the semester’s reference desk schedule. It’s a hectic time, especially after summer’s languorous pace, but it’s also an irrefutable reminder of why we’re here in the first place.
It’s also cool to realize that in amongst the several thousand incoming freshmen there are a few people who are going to fall in love with this town and end up staying here long after they’ve graduated. They likely have no idea that this is the case; I certainly didn’t.
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.
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!
…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: 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.
No, not that kind.
So, here in the Web & Digital Projects group, we’re looking to snag a new scanner. It will mainly be used to digitize hardcopy articles for upload into our digital repository, so both the quality of the scans and the ability to scan many pages quickly and accurately are priorities.
I’m taking a look at options now, but I was wondering if anyone out there in blogland had some experinece or suggestions about models i should take a closer look at or avoid entirely?
Thanks!
I spent a huge chunk of today working on my internship, with results that I’m pleased with and wish I could share. But, while the research guide I’m working on likely won’t go live until the Spring, it’s really starting to look like a guide. Lots of resources (including embedded video and RSS feeds to show off how cool LibGuides is), and even some images to pretty it up. I need to get some print resources worked in, though: I tend towards a kind of electronic chauvanism when I create these sorts of things, and that’s a habit I badly need to break.
I’ll be dipping back into book reviews sooner than I’d anticipated, to tackle Richard K. Morgan’s staggeringly awesome The Steel Remains.
