shinylib

Wrapping up

It’s always a bit sad to leave conference. You make new friends, see old friends, and generally have a sleepaway camp feel about the whole event. At least that’s how I feel about the time spent.

Yesterday I went to the ACRL Science and Technology section (STS) program on innovation in science learning and the ACRL President’s Program. The President’s program speaker, Dan Ariely, was really interesting. So much so, in fact, that I was motivated to buy his new book. I’ve never really done much thinking from the behavioral economist perspective and his talk was quite fascinating. For me, the biggest Ah Ha! was related to the idea of free and what that means to people. Dan suggested that if a person buy’s a gym membership, but fails to use it, you motivate them to come back by reminding them that they are ripping themselves off each month for $__. In the library environment we tend to remind people ad nauseum that what we are providing is free. So, rather than emphasizing that the students have access to x number of databases for free, we need to emphasize that x  percentage of their tuition is spent on databases and they are in fact wasting $__ by not using them. Or something that that effect, he does a much better job with it.

Ironically, this is similar to something I do in the classroom all the time—and I was worried I was doing it wrong. I tell students all the time that our resources are incredibly expensive, certainly not free, and mostly paid for by them. I just don’t emphasize that they are losing out in a financial sense if they don’t use them.

The STS program was interesting although I felt that Felice Frankel, the first presenter, did not have anything for me that I could apply in the library or classroom. She’s the author of several books and is a well-known scientific image creator/photographer. It seemed the session was largely intended to promote her new book of scientific images. The imagery is stunning, don’t get me wrong, and even the concepts around science instruction. I guess I was just missing the bits on science and IL instruction—on a community college library budget. Here’s what there is from my sparse notes… Continue reading…

notes from Anaheim

Just a quick note from Anaheim to say that our ACRL 101 program went off without a hitch. I am so pleased and proud of the work of all of the Emerging Leaders in my group. Planning a national conference program was a totally new thing to me but I think it’s a skill set that I can really get a lot of mileage from.

Had dinner with Kevin and Sara Ryan last night. That was a blast. I was feeling a bit sorry for myself and my lack of dinner company when Kevmo came through with the plan to meet at the Hilton. Sara and I have crossed paths a few times at conferences but never actually hung out. Holy mess, I hope to put in more face time with this powerhouse sometime. Our blends of ridiculous hilarity mesh very well…and there were $9 potato chips!

After dinner and assorted hijinks we parted ways about 10:30 last night…and I promptly got really lost and end up walking all over hell and gone. After uttering the words, “I don’t get lost at conferences too often,” I suppose it’s what I get. In either case I have some gnarly blisters to show for it.

There really haven’t been any groundshaking (for me) sessions just yet. Today I’m off to check out a program on the future of face to face reference and then some research into reference services. After that, it’s an ACRL membership advisory committee meeting and presentation (by me, eek).

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)

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.

Issues with time and maybe a little freaking out.

Argh!

Sometimes you just need to begin a post with ‘argh’. It’s true. Why am I so bad at leaving work on time? I swear I had a better reason than I usually do–I was helping a student this time, but still. I am terrible at leaving work on time.

At my previous campus it was not such a big deal because we were a micro-sized staff and we spent a lot of time flexing around our individual inabilities to go the freak home. {A total aside, but can someone tell me what it’s called when you take a profane word and turn it into a wimpy word? I know there’s a specific term for it, forgotten many years ago. } Anyway, yes, it actually doesn’t matter what campus I am at and what flexing is possible. The point is that I need to have more distinct boxes around my time. End of story.

Speaking of time, I am having other issues as well. It’s just about 10pm and I haven’t packed for Philly yet. This is something of a problem since we leave after work tomorrow. You might be wondering why I’m leaving so early when this thing doesn’t get off the ground till Friday. Let’s just say Delta is extremely in the ? zone. That’s right, NO LOVE, Delta! So yes, we’ll be flying overnight and stopping at too many airports along the way. We don’t even get to Philly until Thursday sometime.

Friday I have an all day leadership thingy. {Thingy is a technical term, at least that’s what I keep trying to convince my students. Is it working? I dunno, I haven’t done any assessment. Heh.} Then my Midwinter calendar starts to look wicked scary; why do people insist on scheduling important meetings at the same time? I have to see umpteen committee members and attend many, many meetings–but the sick thing about me is that sometimes I really enjoy those activities. I don’t enjoy running or scrambling from one place to the next. Srsly.

I suppose I can’t procrastinate any longer or I won’t have clothes to wear in Philly. Not exactly the kind of impression I want to make as a so-called Emerging Leader, eh? This time I resolve to bring home less free crap. I sent 17 pounds of free books home from Annual last year. Have I read any of them? Pfft…

Stop the insanity!

Oh jeez. It’s ok if you laugh at me for this, I promise.

I just found another something for which I just have to apply. It’s nothing as huge as EL 08, but is really cool and important to me. So yeah, I will once again be frantically cranking out letters and applications. This is for the ACRL-sponsored Immersion 08 teaching institute. Also, it’s in San Diego at the end of July. I know, what? Damn those people sure know how to book a good location.

So once again I will begin the process of hunting for letters of reference, etc. because I really need a scholarship. There’s not a chance in hell I could afford to attend this thing on my own. Even with a scholarship I would still be on the hunt for $1000 that I know my employers sure don’t have.

If you ever wanted to know what it’s like to be shiny… it’s all about applications and cover letters.