Sarah the Librarian

I chose to attend a half-day postconference on using and understanding COUNTER 4 reports, which, if you know anything about stats collection for online resources, you know sounds like a potential torture session. Luckily Jennifer Leffler made it relatively painless. I think one of the most useful things about this session was the chance to slow down and just focus on the methods of stats collection. So often I'm trying to grab stats quick to answer a question or make a point and I'm focusing more on the end result instead of the process going into it. This helped me realize that it's important not to skip the process, that it's just that - a process - so it will take time to get it right. But, at the same time, if I take some time to set up the process correctly, then going forward it should be faster and easier and not require all that time for set up. I have done some of this with stats collection, but hearing someone else's process and a more in depth overview ...

The conference overload was starting to happen on Friday, but I soldiered on. At breakfast I talked to someone from a regional library council. Her background is in special libraries, but in her current position she works with a ton of teeny tiny public libraries, so I was excited to find someone with some common ground. As for the opening speaker, I was pleasantly surprised. The head honcho at Alexander Street Press talked about the future of open access publishing and the reception was mixed. First, he was surprised that librarians didn't think all scholarly publishing was going to be open access in the next decade. Then when he described how publishers were going to stay in business, basically by providing services that either make it easier for researchers to publish or to find what they're looking for in bare bones open access text, the crowd seemed ready to revolt and scream that that wasn't really open access. Maybe because I'm not in academia I'm not so up...

The first full day of NASIG was a busy one for me. It started with breakfast with my NASIG mentor, Jeanie Castro from the University of Houston. As a veteran member of NASIG and electronic resources librarianship, Jeanie was really able to get to the heart of want I wanted to get out of this conference and how to do that quickly. She also confirmed my suspicion that ER&L is really the conference for me and I explained why I couldn't go this year, but hoped in the future that I would be able to go. She also made her pitch for joining a NASIG committee and of course sold the committee she's an ardent member of - continuing education. I got really excited about a project she wants to work on down the road sharing case studies of electronic resources librarianship in all sizes and types of libraries. And I have to admit, as a public librarian focusing on electronic resource management I'm interested in any project that wants to add more voices to a field dominated by acad...

Today was primarily a travel day. Since my flight was late arriving, I missed the First Timers Reception and a chance to meet my mentor, so I sat through the opening session in the back with some other late comers feeling completely out of place because it's not only my first time here and I'm the only one from my library, but I'm also one of the few people from a public library here. The opening speaker works at an architecture museum here in DC and gave a lecture on the history of the city's architecture. It was pretty interesting, but also highlighted just how different a type of library conference I'm at. PLA has fun popular presenters. ALA makes bold political choices. NASIG goes for academic detail. During the meal I got to know my tablemates, two of whom bonded over ASL. Since my boss has been taking a library ASL class, I sort of wish she'd been there to contribute to the conversation. The other two at our table were a married couple from Pennsylvania....

Last week Jacob Berg wrote a very candid post about the hiring process and it dovetails nicely with something I had wanted to write about. After 2 1/2 years of searching, I finally landed a full-time job. Because of the length of the process and the number of jobs I thought I was getting, but then didn't, I still don't completely comprehend why this is the one that worked out, so I don't have much to say about that, but I do have some thoughts on how to not go crazy during the job search process. It essentially boils down to: Don't take rejection personally.   The nature of the job market in this field means that there are often many more librarians looking for jobs than there are openings, so employers get the luxury of being a little picky. There were multiple positions where I was told very sincerely, "You were great, but so was everyone else, and we had to pick someone, which, unfortunately wasn't you." This is often followed by a well-meani...

After my last post loosely based on my reading of Meg Jay's The Defining Decade , I realized what's really bothering me about that book and a lot of the writing about what's wrong with twentysomethings is this idea that we're not doing enough important things. I think one of the things our generation is struggling with more than previous generations is the idea of how to make your dreams come true as an adult. It's true that we are a generation that was raised to believe that we're special and we can do whatever we want, but sometimes what that feels like is pressure to do something amazing because no one's going to tell you you can't try reaching for the stars. The thing is, we need people doing the mundane everyday work too, and if you're doing something you love, then boring work doesn't feel boring to you. It's all about perspective and realizing that doing something that excites you, or at least fills you with satisfaction is infinite...

I turned thirty this month and, not surprisingly, it's given me pause. Last month I picked up a book on the importance of your twenties , and for the most part it was reassuring because I never approached my twenties with the mindset that they weren't important. In fact, I spent most of my twenties worrying that I had taken them too seriously. I married my college sweetheart and went straight to library school and found jobs in libraries or related fields to pay the bills until I landed my first professional librarian gig. I was conventional, responsible, and hard-working. But then what started as a few bumps in the road quickly became something much more serious. My husband started having health problems, which we finally realized were due to a toxic work environment. We decided not only on a job change, but a move to the city we'd been visiting nearly every month anyway. In the process of moving he managed to injure himself so badly that he was unable to work for mont...

Elearning and Digital Cultures finished up about a month ago. However, before life got in the way of me finishing this class on time to get a completion certificate, I had most of my ideas in place for my final project, so I'm presenting it now, mostly for myself, to prove that I got something out of this new mode of learning. This MOOC has been quite the journey for me. I've been very hesitant of the whole MOOC phenomenon because of my own history with online education. About a decade ago, when I was an undergrad, I took a blended online and in person course on Medieval Latin. I was going to a small liberal arts and with it's block scheduling, our academic calendar didn't match up with the other schools in the course, so I had to rearrange my schedule to fit in the class. Our weekly lectures were streamed online with chat function embedded, but there was only one lab on campus where the computers had the software and headphones available to access these lectures wi...

I realize that #edcmooc finished up several weeks ago, but the last weekend of the course when I planned to finish up all my projects happened to be a perfect storm of excuses not to work on this class, which might be a great start to a conversation on completion rates for MOOCs and what that means in terms of how successful they are, but that's for another time. Before life got in the way, I had this blog post on Week 4's readings nearly ready to go, so I'll present it to you now. This week we talked about posthumanism, what happens when technology has enhanced the human form so much that we are no longer human, but something else. It seems like the central concern here is if at some point adding technological enhancements to the human form will become advanced to the point that accepting such enhancements will forfeit something essential to the human experience. Transhumanists argue that this is not the case, at least not right now. They argue that humanity has such...

While initially it was hard for me this week to transition from the class's first theme of "Dystopia/Utopia" to the second of "Being Human", now I have so many thoughts on the topic, I don't know where to start. I find the movie Wall-E coming to mind again, maybe because I haven't read Brave New World , which has been talked about a lot. I guess Wall-E  is my example of a world where technology has taken over subtly, lulling us into complacency by giving us everything we could ever want - except for the things that arguably make us human. Sometimes this is the way I feel about TV, especially Netflix. In theory this sounds like a great service. You can stream TV shows and movies you're interested in whenever you feel like it, so the convenience aspect is wonderful. But somehow it all gets flipped on it's head, and instead it becomes so important to not only watch what I want, but the idea of a queue makes watching feel like another thin...

This week we stuck with the thoughts of utopias/dystopias, but turned our focus toward the future. One of the articles we read this week discussed the metaphors used to describe the internet in the media. I knew we used metaphors to describe the internet, but I was surprised at how prevalent this practice was once I saw a sampling of them all laid out. Not surprisingly, many metaphors focused around the internet either as creator or destructor. I was a little surprised, though, to see how prevalent the "internet as physical place" metaphor still is. I know social networks and "meeting" with people online is all the rage now (I am taking a class that meets solely online), but I didn't think about how that's tied back to the earlier days of the internet when people really struggled to understand what the world wide web was and there were tons of representations of it as a physical space, even a Saturday morning cartoon  based on the premise that the web was...

This winter I decided to try out a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) to see what all the fuss was about and to get a better handle on what's going on with online educational in general. I'm taking E-learning and Digital Cultures offered by the University of Edinburgh through the Coursera platform. The class started last week, but I'm just getting around to blogging about week one now. For the first week we watched several videos focusing on dystopias/utopias as a way of looking at technology and we read some things from the recent history of technology and e-learning. We were asked to blog about any examples of technological dystopias/utopias we could think of. For me the movie Wall-E  sprung to mind pretty quickly. Here we have a society living in blissful listless ignorance thanks to the wonders of technology. They think this is as good as it gets, until the natural non-technological world comes crashing in and they realize just how much of life was blocked out by ...

A little while ago I put up a few links about issues of gender in the workplace but didn't really have time to elaborate, so I've come back to the topic with some thoughts. Of the posts I linked a while ago, the one that's really stuck with is the way women limit themselves by  being nice . Trying to be anything besides accommodating has always been a challenge for me, especially professionally. I'm a small town Midwestern girl who was raised to, above all other things, "be nice", so in situations where there's any question about how I should act, I take the nice route. But I've seen how this has limited me over the years by not standing up for projects I believe in or pointing out issues I think are being ignored. Lately it's really been sticking with me because I've been job hunting. While the details will stay private, the fact that I'm job searching is no big secret. I love what I do in my current position, but it's only part-ti...

I originally planned to post this on Friday as an extended #FridayReads, but I got too into what I had to say and was interrupted before I could finish it. I still think it was a worthwhile train of thought, though, so I took the time to finish up recording my thoughts and polishing the whole thing up a little. A lot of the non-fiction I've been reading lately has been parenting related, but currently I'm finally finishing an LIS career book I bought a couple years ago when I was going through a difficult time career-wise.  Rethinking Information Work  by G. Kim Dority is more aimed at LIS students and would make a good textbook for an intro class focused on planning your career (which, I think, is really under-emphasized in library school). Some of the suggested resources listed at the end of each chapter have me rolling my eyes, but if I were new to Libraryland, I would need to have them pointed out to me and would probably learn a lot from them. Published in 2006, ma...

Sorry it took so long to get the shortest day of the conference for me up here. Because of when my flight left, I only had time to go to the first session of the conference's last day, which was really worth it. The packed program was all about serving patrons in their 20s and 30s. Essentially the advice broke down in two ways: 1) make sure you're marketing your current adult programs in ways that don't scare off younger adults 2) find out what younger adults in your community are interested in and develop appropriate programming, even if that means hosting after hours events where alcohol is served. You may have to think outside the box a little bit in order to create events and that will attract patrons you aren't used to seeing in the library. This presentation reinforced a feeling I'd been having even before PLA. I thought it was unique to our community, but apparently not. Libraries are generally great at serving their youngest and oldest patrons, but teens a...

Day Three at PLA started with "Oh, I Should Have Said ... : aka Dealing With Difficult People" which was a really great program that used humor to deal with various "problem patron" situations, including when the "problem patron" is actually the library staff member. The presentation was scattered with skits demonstrating situations familiar to all of us who work public service desks. I think one key which they addressed is not taking the actions of angry people personally, and I think that's key for any customer service oriented job. People can be grumpy, and it's generally not your fault, so stop getting defensive and instead try to defuse the situation by really listening to what they have to say and finding an acceptable solution for both parties. Next up was "Top Five of the Top Five" which was blitz of genre fiction recommendations. The five genres represented were horror, fantasy, women's fiction, crime, and humor and, just to...

Day Two at PLA brought the beginning of regular sessions and my massive day of teen services. I started the day with "Reinventing Your Teen Department" which was a library that brought teens into their library by creating appropriate teen spaces in the library and focusing on gaming. While the general aim of their gaming program was similar to what we talked about in my preconference the day before, the way they went about achieving it was completely different. Instead of starting with the crowd pleasing Wii and branching out to other gaming systems as interest grew, they went straight for the teenage boys and set them loose on an Xbox. It was interesting, but a lot of the ideas they implemented aren't very applicable to my current situation. I got a few new ideas for resources, though. The second morning session was "Top Trends in Teen Services" which was one of those great potpourri sessions where they threw out tons of great ideas for all aspects of teen ...

Today was my first day at the Public Library Association conference, and I'm not sure how I'm going to do 2.5 more days and keep my head from exploding. There's just so much that's so relevant to my job, I can find something interesting everywhere I look. This morning I went to the Get Your Game On: Gaming in Libraries Preconference, and it was wonderful. I realized that I need to stop playing the role of wife of a gamer and own that I know a thing or two about video games, too, and what I don't know I can learn. Eli and Aaron spent the first half of the program talking about the benefits of gaming and why libraries should be doing gaming, which is something I'd always bought, but never been very good at articulating. Essentially it boils down to all the different types of literacies learned through video games and what are libraries for if not promoting literacy. It was also interesting they argued that the way libraries get the most value out of gaming is by...

Star Wars at ALA Originally uploaded by dumbsarah At the last minute I decided to visit this year's American Library Association conference. It just so happens that my college roommate lives less than 10 blocks from McCormick Place, where the conference was held. Add in the fact that it was my first full weekend off since sometime in May, so of course I wanted to spend my time off with other librarians. Since I was only in town for the day on Saturday, I just stuck to the exhibits, but that was enough for me. Luckily, I've been to similar types of conferences before so it wasn't too surprising, but it was still a little surreal to see so many librarians in one place at the same time. The part that was overwhelming to me is that I've now been a librarian long enough that I actually found most of the exhibitors relevant to my work life, but I haven't been a librarian long enough to know how to make the most of that relevance. There were giveaways and prize drawings...