shinylib

Finally, a use for Twitter

I had forgotten to mention this, but I was really impressed by something that happened the other day. elliehearts sent out a tweet looking for screencap software recommendations. I recommended Snagit, in part because Techsmith had been giving out free licenses for an outdated version.

Of course as soon as I tweet my recommendation I realize that Techsmith isn’t actually doing that free license offer anymore. (It was a pretty old deal, who can blame them?) So I retweet elliehearts to tell her that it is no mo. She sends me back an @msg explaining why she’s hunting for screencap software anyway. We agree it’s a bummer on the Snagit issue.

About 2 hours later we both get an @msg from betsyweber at Techsmith, making sure we know there’s a free 30 day trial at Snagit.com and and that they have educational pricing packages.

That’s just good Twittering. I realize some people might feel invaded, but that’s what happens when you allow your tweets to go public, which is an opt-in function. I for one think Techsmith just got a big gold star.

Webvisions podcasts

Webvisions podcasts are now up at http://www.webvisionsevent.com/wp/?p=65. And on that note, I’m too lazy to finish those session reviews. Email me if you want my notes. (:

Webvisions: Design is in the details

These guys win my award for best presentation slides of the entire conference, no contest. Sadly I can’t give them the same award for polished verbal presentation, but you can’t winnem all, eh? I wasn’t really sure whether the schtick about forgetting who was presenting which slides was authentic disorganization or a poorly executed attempt at humor. In any case…

Design is in the Details, presented by Bryan Veloso and Dan Rubin focused on how the tiny details are what distinguish a good design from a great design. You can check out the entire presentation at their site, Design is in the Details.The presentation focused on the essentials of good design feel: layout, type, and pixels.
Continue reading…

Webvisions: Hacking the enterprise with social media

DL Byron is nothing if not a nut. He’s the geek behindTextura Design,and the co-author of Publish & Prosper: Blogging for Your Business. He runs the srs bike culture blog, Bike Hugger and does cool stuff like host Twitter giveaways at conferences. To be clear, I like any dude who starts a presentation by encouraging the audience to do epic shit. Although I didn’t really get all of the aspects related to hacking the enterprise, DL did give a decent seat-of-his-pants overview of 2.0 social stuff, peppered with such phrases as “Yeah, you gotta pursue your vision — stuff you love, and rock it hard.”
Continue reading…

Webvisions: Blogging for a living

Blogging for a living: Taking your skills to the next level

Jim Turner, founder of Bloggers for Hire and creator of the Genuine Blog (a “Daddy blog”) spoke about the challenges and triumphs of blogging professionally. He suggests that there are significant differences between those seeking to blog part-time and those looking for full-time professional blog-writing gigs.
Continue reading…

Webvisions 08

Webvisions is officially done and over with. It was an awesome time. I think I will have quite a lot to say, but I’m going to attempt to break things up into smaller, segmented posts. We’ll see how that goes—my conference writeups are always sorely lacking and out-of-date.

From my standpoint as a librarian, Webvisions was everything I wanted Online Northwest to be…but without all the pink sweaters and discussion of cats. Also missing is a critical discussion of aboutness, classification, and human language. That is, Webvisions is an awesome place to geek out about design, but as a practicing librarian I have to take all of that design and interface geekery and apply it to the library context.

In general it was a supremely refreshing experience to immerse myself into design, interface, and interaction but I did find myself wishing for less theory and more practical application. I know, those of you who know me are finding it difficult to reconcile that statement with the theory monkey you’ve come to love and tolerate. I think my friends would tell you that I am pretty intolerable after several days of immersive geekery—I become hypercritical of the discrete elements in the world and how they fail to seamlessly flow together.

Rather than attempt to apply a structure to the posts, I’ll just do them chronologically. I’ll leave it to you to decide how the session information interrelates.

Day 1 at Webvisions

• Blogging for a living: Taking your skills to the next level (Jim Turner)
• Hacking the enterprise with social media (DL Byron)
• Design is in the details (Dan Rubin & Bryan Veloso)
• Total recall: Complementing information architecture (Sean Cowne & James Keller)

Day 2 at Webvisions

• Data portability, privacy and identity: Welcome to the Open Web (Scott Kveton)
• The language of interaction (Bill Rouchey)
• The Web is dead (Roger Black)
• Website optimization in seven easy steps (Kim Blessing)

2.0 titles

It’s interesting that recently I was reading some David Lee King archives about 2.0 sounding job titles. Although my job title hasn’t really changed (I still don’t know what it officially is, I just go with Faculty Librarian) it has opened to incorporate some other ideas. I am now some kind of Web Reference Librarian, or sometimes Web Resources Librarian, we can’t quite decide.

Basically this is a more official sounding way to keep doing what I already do: bombard my colleagues with “helpful” emails about tech things happening in the library world. I’m the one you can count on to say, “Hi. Can we have LibraryThing tags in the catalog?” and other such insanity. It’s something of a liaison role to the web and Millennium teams, which is fine because I spent quite a bit of time communing with those folks anyway.

My hope is that being in this intermediary role will allow the reference team to think really big about what they want out of our web presence. I hope for the various tech teams to be able to do really well what they already do really well: design, implement, deal with our inane nagging, and other such things. The bonus here is that each department should be able to go on speaking in nuanced and jargony language without having to translate for the benefit of the other. I already speak geek and librarian (well, on good days anyway, on less shiny days I just mumble incoherently).

Mostly, as I told my colleagues, I’m just making it up as I go along.

Meme: Passion Quilt

I had been ignoring the passion quilt meme for the most part, but Ellie <3 libraries prompted me to think about how to use this meme to sum up some of my thoughts on my IL instruction process. Maybe this will get me off my rump and moving forward on that article I should be writing…

When I taught my first “library instruction” (BI, IL, whatever you want to call them) classes I really struggled with how to connect with the students. They arrive in the classroom certain that they’re going to hear what they’ve already heard, which they didn’t find especially useful the first time. Many of them are pretty sure they rank amongst the best Googlin’ experts and, while they may not know what one is, many are certain they don’t need an article database. Some students groan, “Dude! I’ve had this EBSCO class 4 times this year,” and I don’t doubt it. I don’t blame them and I’m not offended—after all, Google and the like haven’t let them down when it comes to finding playoff scores, movie times, and sometimes their next date.

Despite all of that, community college students coming to a 50 minute one-shot in the library are surrounded by things they don’t know—unfortunately many haven’t been exposed to that concept in a way that doesn’t insult, bore, or intimidate. Even more baffling is the idea that there are things they don’t know about Google!

In library school we learn about sensemaking and “the gap”. The principle issues here are that there are things we don’t know, gaps in our knowledge. In order to acquire the knowledge we need we have to somehow figure out what it is that we don’t know, acquire the language to search for information on what we don’t know, and then absorb and interpret information to help us fill in those gaps in our knowledge. Like a great many theoretical pieces of library school, I don’t always think about these ideas while I am teaching.

With that and an assignment brought to me by a writing instructor I started developing a research exercise I think of as Mind the Gap (although the handout just says Research Exercise, heh), where I shove the students into various resources and then discuss the tips n’ tricks after. It seems to work fairly well, the students are more interested in my schpiel about Google advanced search, page rank, or other facets of the popular search engine once they realize they can’t readily identify three scholarly sources from the first page of a Google results list.

Interested in seeing what the other two people who read this have to share.

The rules are simple:

1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

You know, my blonde friend…

I am feeling peevish today, sorry shiny readers. One of my biggest pet peeves with students is that they don’t bother to learn the names of things. Who is your instructor? I dunno, she’s got brown hair and works on Mondays. What book are you looking for? That business one with the spiral edge. WHICH class that I taught last week that you missed because you went to the beach with your baby daddy?

I teach students that this is akin to calling information and asking for the digits of your friend, you know, she has blonde hair and she lives on the Eastside. Do they really expect that the operator would think that was enough information to locate their friend and connect them to her?

I’m not so concerned about the students I teach, I think they get it, at least judging by the laughs. It’s the students who just breeze by for 30 seconds, deal with a student worker who is happy to oblige their incomplete request, and waltz out again. There’s no room in that interaction for the pushy librarian to start insisting they learn what a call number is. Or a course number. Something specific.

Although I sometimes felt like it was a real barrier to access, I do understand why other libraries I have worked for have flat out refused to aid any student who couldn’t be bothered to learn a call number. “No, we don’t have a course reserve called ‘that one math book’. Please see the reference librarian to learn how to request materials.” Of course that’s fairly pedantic, I think anyone would be right in pointing out the flaws in that method.

But some days, some days you really just want to do it anyway…

Invite Share

I have beta sickness, always have. I just feel this irritating compulsion to get involved in the ground floor of everything. Consequently I usually end up bored and leaving by the time other folks are showing up. Ah well, that’s a different issue altogether.

Anyway, if you also suffer from beta sickness you might want to check out Invite Share. Invite Share is a free website where people share the invites they have to give. You don’t have to barter or beg, you just click the button (the email address you use to register will be displayed to other users) and someone will come along and click a button on their end that delivers you an invite. Very simple. Within 15 minutes someone responded to my request for an invite to Yahoo! Mash. I’m not sure I’m going to do anything with the account, which seems to be some kind of blog/profile service. MySpace for Yahoo. Anyone want an invite? It seems I’ve got plenty.