shinylib

Asleep in my shoes (again)

Well, I made it home from Midwinter in one piece. The same really can’t be said for my luggage. I think Delta has some kind of beef with me… that’s another story for a different blog.

There have been many occasions in my life where I have blamed a general lack of alertness (alertitude?) on jetlag; this time it’s frealz. Ha. I might be the only liblogger to say ‘frealz’ . Love it. Hopefully this will remind me to, later, share some thoughts on diction, nomenclature, and librarians.

If I can say one thing about my first year as a faculty librarian it’s that my assumptions and perceptions are constantly changing. I wrote recently about my instruction load for fall term and how pleased I was about the stats. Then I went away to a conference, and came back to find I have more classes scheduled in the next few months weeks than I did all of last term… how’s that for a little perspective?

To be sure, I’m feeling less freaked about classes now than I was in the first quarter. I also have the advantage of a partial instruction portfolio to work from. It was nice to realize I had to throw together a class right before I left for Midwinter and not stress the issue because I already spent ages prepping that course last quarter. Lather, rinse, repeat…

A real update on Midwinter and Emerging Leaders will follow at some point when I’m not at work. Also, my boss wants to meet with me today…eep!

Also, I miss working with Kevin. It’s weird not to see him every week. That’s neither here nor there, just puttin the word out.

Instruction Load

I was talking with a colleague (an on-call librarian) last night about the reality of being a librarian here in Portlandia. Usually you have to cobble together umpteen part-time and on-call jobs in hopes of coming away with a semi-decent resume. {Before I was offered my current temporary FT position I was looking at three jobs which would total about 35 hours a week–with wildly varying salaries and commutes.} An unfortunate downside to this cobbling tends to be a marked lack of teaching experience.

I just took a look at last quarter’s instruction stats and realized that over the course of about 10 weeks I taught 15 courses in 7 distinct program areas. That’s 300 students, 995 minutes of teaching, 465 minutes of prep work,  and about 100 cough drops. Srsly, I always sound like a 14-year old boy about ten minutes into my teaching. I have no idea why.

The reason I am taking note of these stats is that I get the idea they are fairly abnormal. I just read a blog entry at ACRLog in which a first-year faculty librarian relays that he taught 8 courses over a semester. I am certainly not dissing his 8 courses…that’s awesome.  We have a lot more students than his institution does, certainly an important factor.  Nevertheless, I’m realizing that I am really blessed with my work scenario.

Sure I wake up every night drenched in sweat, doing the late-night freakout over my total lack of job security, but at least I can eventually go back to sleep certain that I am at least getting really killer experience.

Falling asleep in my shoes…

I am exhausted today. Staying up until 1am packing was neither good nor smart. Bleh…and I’m not at all sure I managed to pack anything logical.

Today’s Bio class went fine although there were some frustrations with the timing. If I see I am scheduled to teach a class from 11-12, I don’t expect that the instructor will tell me at 11:50 that I’m out of time… it makes me look ill-prepared and you, dear readers, must know that the shiny adores preparation and planning!

On the upside, I have never had a class find me as entertaining as these guys did. It was awesome. Usually I make jokes knowing that they groan at me and think I am a total n3rd. These guys just kept laughing, one cat in the front row was actually havin’ a belly-buster laugh. This is kind of funny…because I’m really not, at least not intentionally.

Well, lunch is over and I’m out of caffeine. I better go walk around before I slump over at my desk…

I am definitely human.

• My freakin’ wrists are killing me. No combination of anti-inflammatory, brace, and stretching has come close to fixing it. A smart person might take this as a sign to type less. Me? I have two handouts to create by Wednesday.
• I totally did not apply for ACRL Emersion 08. I really wanted to, and I sat down a few different times to write the application mini-essays. It just never happened. You know how it is. Really, I am going to give myself a break on this one. I am doing quite enough stuff as it is. There’s always next year or, praise jebus, the year aftah.
• I am really looking forward to winter break. This is one major plus for working in academic libraries. Or minus if you’re hoping to escape some visiting in-laws. Fortunately, I am not. I need some time off to not think about work. I love my job, but as I have mentioned before–I work a lot.
• Did I mention I have two handouts to create by Wednesday? This might seem like a minor thing, but I have to create them for CINAHL with Ebsco interface and for some heinous Sage publication (a database that looks like a website), both of which are extremely buggy right now. No one seems to know why. Ah the vagaries of databases. And I am actually creating these handouts for the 8am class the first Monday of winter term. It’s just weird.

Catching Up

Phew. The impending arrival of finals week gives me a minute to breathe and compose a post. Of course the knocking on my office door from frantic students looking to find me does hamper the writing somewhat.

I can’t believe that my first quarter as an academic librarian is coming to a close. I have been following the First Year Librarian posts over at ACRLog and am relieved to see that many of my experiences are very normal.

First, there is the ever-present inability to go the heck home at the end of my shift. It’s not as though I mean to stick around the library for umpteen extra hours–it’s just a really long walk from my office to the door and any number of things are likely to occur on the way. Some examples include printer jams, discussions of cafeteria-induced food poisoning, who threw away whose perfectly good milk, and the occasional friendly chat with that one lunatic faculty member who does that thing with the thing. Imagine that I am, right now, making shifty eyes at you.

This relates to item the second, gossip. Gossip exists in various forms in all libraries, in all departments. I am learning to try to steer clear of this as much as possible. It doesn’t help that everyone knows I am funny and I like to talk– I suppose I seem like the natural choice for sharing gossip. I’m not, it pretty much goes in one ear and clatters around in there until I stuff enough other crap in after to consume the space.

I am horrified and amused to realize that my research skills are totally rusty. I have gotten so good at dumbing down my inner research geek to help students (sure, that’s the internet button, just click on it and away we go!) that I actually stared at Library Lit & Inf Science in consternation a few minutes ago, trying to sort out how to begin finding articles that speak to any sort of research interest whatsoever.

I vaguely remember going through a similar phase after the completion of my BA. I just forgot how to develop my own research topics and go after them. I recall soliciting essay topics on LJ just to have something to write.

Needless to say I don’t have anything resembling the time to write let alone to do research most of the time so this is an exercise in futility… or at least in collecting PDF versions of articles that I will likely never find a chance to read.

Absent in this list, quite notably from my perspective, is any discussion of the future job scenario. Like I have said before, I just don’t have the time to worry about a future job–I have too much to do with the job I have right now. That said, I still worry, a lot…

Updates on the shiny librarian and thoughts on the state of the world…

Less a real entry than a list of updates…

• I finally got around to putting content on shinylib.com. As ever there’s “more to come”. We’ll see.
• I am not sure where I was for the past several months, but I have only just become aware of the Jena Six controversy, in which several escalating racially-focused incidents at a high school lead to six black students beating a white student (who apparently was feeling well enough to attend a party later that evening).I don’t understand what I heard reported on NPR, which amounted to the FBI stating that hanging nooses from the “white tree” is not a hate crime and therefore there are no laws under which to charge the white perpetrators. I don’t advocate the beating of a white student by six black students, or really the beating of anyone except parents of small children left unattended at libraries. If you are not already following this case I would suggest you do so, the fallout is sure to be immense.
• Shiny! The college library I work for has just doubled my contract, meaning that I will be temporary full time faculty through the end of winter term, at least. I also am eligible for benefits now, and really–who doesn’t need health care?

Long time no blog

Hi. Long time no blog. I have been riding the post-graduation roller coaster: recover from visiting friends and family, have panic attacks induced by the unfamiliar feeling of doing nothing, realize that I have a “real” job that begins in a few weeks, freak out over the former realization, etc… All of this has resulted in what fellow yarn-addict and blogger MK refers to as “hibernate-and-twitch”. Glad to know I’m not alone in the need for solitude.

I feel particularly pleased with myself for coming up with a workaround to Six Apart’s stubborn refusal to allow me to embed my Vox blog in my website. [Ok, if I am being honest there is no website currently, but there could be...] Create a full post atom feed of my own posts, subscribe to it through Google Reader, share each individual entry (ugh, but currently I can’t figure out how to share an entire feed), and then use the GReader generated URL for my shared entries. It sounds excessively complicated but since I have my web life compartmentalized to the nth degree there’s nothing in the Reader account associated with The Shiny Librarian except that feed. You get the idea… at least it works. I am sure there are many other feed readers that could perform the same task as well or better, but I am loyal to Google (more on that in future posts… Helio anyone?) to a fault, most likely.

Speaking of Google, how much would I love to have the teahouse theme as my Vox theme? Quite a lot…

In terms of real news I can share that I have accepted a shot at a full time job. I know, what does that mean exactly? Basically it means that I am taking a full time interim position, knowing that it’s the only way I might prove myself as a teaching librarian in a short period of time–all in hopes of laying claim to the full time permanent position. If it doesn’t pan out I will keep the 10 hours a week already assigned me by this college. It’s an amazing opportunity, but I did have to leave my former position with a different college to accept it. Everyone there has been amazing, wishing me well in my new job. I do hope they know how conflicted I was– I’d hate for anyone to think I’d actually made a decision without agonizing over it. For instance I’ve been deliberating on eating some ice cream since I began writing this post. Signs are positive that ice cream is in my immediate future.

Of course as soon as I post this I go to check on my Google Reader workaround and find that this post, inexplicably, refuses to show up in my reader. I am sure that if I were not stubbornly attached to Google Reader (I don’t even like RSS feeds, if I am honest. I’m not a twopointopian, what can I say?) this would probably not be an issue–why else is that handy ‘share’ drop-down up there? More on this later…