shinylib

the twice annual ALA is blah post

So, like every other librarian blogger out there who actually attends ALA Midwinter Meeting, I have to write my conference recap.

This year I’m not going to tell you about the fancypants programs I attended and the fabulously organized content I sucked up. Why? Because I didn’t and there wasn’t. [a quick shout out to the Set Sail for Fail folks from NJ for throwing down an unsession during Midwinter, that part was fabulous]

My big realization about ALA this year was that I’ve graduated. I was a fledgling ALA member and I did fabulous things like Student to Staff, during which I interned for RUSA; I was an Emerging Leader and worked on a project for ACRL; I showed up to a lot of discussion groups and asked a lot of vague and half-assed questions.

I became more established while serving as an ACRL MAC committee member; I started speaking for ACRL at events like ACRL 101 and took over as convener of the ACRL New Members Discussion Group, where we have launched a new discussion group presentation style (No-Tech Talks, CV opportunities for all).

After these experiences I’ve become a semi-veteran ALA member and conference attendee and spent much time wreaking general havoc and running amok, amongst many other activities. This is where I’m at now and I realize I have two primary options.

1. Shrug. I got what I was gonna get, time to stop paying in to the machine. I mean, the machine has run out of things to give me, right? I’ve been semi-elevated, some folks took note, I got a tenure-track job. Woot. I even gave a little back, so I won’t feel too guilty. End transmission…
2. Contribute more. Bring my own content and share it, formally and informally. Continue to work on making ACRL relevant and useful for members. Help ACRL board to no longer need a bellybutton window. Start showing up at Council. Make more noise.

Although it really, oh man I mean really pains me to do it, I’m going to strive for option 2. I’ve joined the task force of many names (young turks, young librarians, young professionals…yadda yadda) and am going to try to help ALA figure out what the eff we want from them. If I just bail out now, I’m only doing what countless librarians and ALA members before me have done (and I don’t blame them at all) — ”…drunk all, and left no friendly drop to help me after?” Yes, I know that’s about poison and death. Right now, if I am honest, that’s what being an ALA member feels like… like these a-holes who came before could have at least left me a memo telling me to find my own damn poison.

So although I probably sound a little bitter, and am in fact a little bitter about all the money I have to come up with to help ALA not brontosaurus their way through the future, I’m a little posicore as well.

p.s. I like this tweet:
@pbromberg @kimll #youngturks think beyond What Can ALA Do For YOUYOUYOU. I just gave $ 2 RedCross. What do they do 4 MEMEME? Yet I support them.

post-ALA reflections

OK, I have to force myself to sit down and write a conference wrap-up now or it will never get done. Much of my thinking about this conference has to do with socializing, cliques, and professional development. Hit me up in the socialsphere if you just want to know what I thought was a great program. Or better yet, go read #ala2009 or Library Journal.

This conference was epic for me on a lot of levels. I was directly involved in two programs: ACRL 101 (my first speaking gig at ALA Annual) and ACRL New Members Discussion Group (of which I am now the convener). 101 was awesome and I had a lot of fun, more fun than I expected to. Preparing my remarks on how to get the most out of conference really caused me to do some reflecting about my first Annual (2007) and what that experience was like for me.

My first Annual was different because I was a student-to-staff participant, interning to RUSA. So when I got really overwhelmed (frequently) I had someplace to go—the staff office. Anyway, thinking about that had an impact on my conference this year, I think. I always feel hyper aware of the social dynamics of conference, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how those cool kids came to be those cool kids (not a specific set of people, I think your cool kids may be different than mine, but whoever they are, you know them when you see them). How did they break in to their clique? How did the clique become a clique? Do those people even know that we see them that way? Continue reading…

Chat reference: live and pornographic

Wow. I am beyond excited. I just logged in to the admin account and reviewed our first day of chat transcripts.

We had 5 interactions, of which 3 were actual attempts to chat with us. One was someone testing and the last was a porn spam. Given that it’s the first day of summer term I am actually surprised there were 3 actual attempts to chat with us. We weren’t able to connect with everyone and that’s fine—sometimes yer gonna miss us. I’m just so excited that we’re actually doing this, pushing forward.

I am sorry for one of my librarians, who reported following the link and inadvertently viewing a few pics. I guess we’ll have to do some work on suggested practices with regard to receiving links via chat. I was highly amused at her response to the offending robot: “That’s not an appropriate question for our chat service.” She is made of win, that one!

It’s a pretty awesome feeling to log in to admin and see records that aren’t just you chatting with yourself in 3 different browsers.

Brainfire

I love the way I feel after a conference, like I have all of this brainfire motivating me and synapses pinging all over the place. This is a sharp contrast to how I feel at the end of the quarter, which is a lot more accurately described as brainfried. The challenge is to keep all of this fire going through the summer and into fall quarter. Hopefully having another conference in August will keep things rolling along.

I think it’s amazing that just a few weeks ago I was as skeptical of Twitter as many folks out there and now I think I’m a solid convert. Without Twitter I’d have spent much of ALA alone and hungry. I know there has to be some application for community college libraries– I just haven’t figured out what it is yet. I’ve heard my boss might have caught some serious brainfire at ALA as well, so I am looking forward to connecting with her and seeing what our collective imaginations can come up with.

As with every national conference I attend I am always struck by the numbers of librarians out there stagnating away in libraries with administrators who are afraid to do something different than they’ve always done. I feel like I need to keep pinching myself because I certainly don’t suffer under any stale conditions. How awesome to have a boss who wants you to dream big and figure out ways to apply those dreams in practical, user-centered ways. I swear I’m not sucking up, just reflecting.

If, like me, you are blessed with an environment in which you can dream big, I recommend a column in the current RUSQ, written by Michale Stephens. Taming technolust: Ten steps for planning in a 2.0 world offers concrete steps to take on your way to embracing the twopointopian mishegas while ensuring that you don’t go overboard with “flashy, sexy technology” that does nothing to further your end goals.

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: 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.