Last night, I dreamt I caused people who wanted to interview me to change their minds and not interview me. Then, in the same dream, I proceeded to give the worst library instruction session of y enter career.
This is what I get for reviewing today’s instruction before bed.
Suddenly, it feels like 2008 was a long time ago.
We will not use this blog as a forum for Mac vs. PC mudslinging. At home, I am a Mac user, have been for years, and I have had really good experiences with all my Mac computers. When I had a PC, I several bad experiences involving hours spent on the phone with ill-tempered Windows support techs. There’s the beginning and the end of it.
Moving on to the purpose of this post:
I had a “I’ll do it!!!” moment the last day before spring break, which resulted in me bringing home a web analytics/data analysis project. I love web analytics, but I do not love working with Excel for Mac. Most of my number crunching happens at work, on work computers. As a result, I have gotten very accustomed to, dare I say spoiled by, the elegance of Excel for Windows. Especially because we have a recent version.
I am very happy mucking about in our analytics, but wrangling with Excel for Mac is like knitting Shetland lace with broomsticks. None of the keyboard shortcuts I want are there, all of the features that have floated to the ribbon in Excel 2007 are still buried in menus, and the formula bar *floats*. This is going to take a while…
This is pretty cool: a videogame that is actually scientific research:
http://blog.eyewire.org/play-eyewire-and-contribute-to-neuroscience-research-at-mit/.
If you’d like to read more, or you’re just an aural learner, check out what NPR has to say.
Sometimes I have terrific ideas. I see them unfold in technicolor in my mind. They are gorgeous, they are cutting-edge, and everyone loves them.
Sometimes, I implement these ideas. That’s where things get a little wonky.
My latest brilliant idea was to advertise this program I’m coordinating. I was going to combine low-tech (a poster) with high-tech (QR codes that link to resources from the library), and advertise the program, and the book that goes with it, and link patrons to really fantabulous resources…
*pauses to catch breath*
At first, the technicolor version was playing out. I had all my resources, I made QR codes using this QR code generator, and I tested the links. Granted, the websites I was linking to were not mobile optimized, but they were authoritative, darnit, and students are ingenuous creatures. If they want to look at that object on a desktop device, they’ll figure out a way to do it.
Then I attempted to create a permalink to an image we have access to through ARTstor. *insert whistling noise as technicolor version of project plumments towards the ground*
My first stumbling point was discovering that the mobile version of ARTstor does not offer the ability to grab permalinks. At best, I could add our proxy to the ARTstor mobile URL and use that to create a QR code that linked our students to the mobile ARTstor homepage. But there is a time and a place for teaching students how to start at a database homepage and arrive at the object they want, and a display is neither.
What about the full site? The full site has “image URLs.” If a student can get to the actual object, even if it’s not mobile optimized, that’s better than routing them to the homepage, right?
That would have been a decent Plan B, but ARTstor’s full site opens each item record in a new pop-up window. And iPhones (the phone I was testing all this on) have pop-ups blocked by default. The fact that one, or two, or maybe thousands of our students have iPhones is not lost on me.
But just because I like trying things, I disabled my phone’s pop-up blocker and tried an image URL with a proxy tacked onto the front. The link asked me to log in (huzzah!), loaded the pop-up window (huzzah!), and then presented me with a request to install Flash on my device so I could load the page.
Tomorrow’s work outfit: pencil skirt and a straitjacket.
The facades in downtown Seattle are absolutely wonderful
This time last week, I was coming home from the 2013 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting and thinking that goodness, it had been a busy week. One of the very last sessions I attended was the Midwinter End-of-Meeting Camp, and that session offered me the brain-unpacking I needed so very much. I was glad to find that I was not the only librarian attending an ALA conference for the first time, and that many of us were on the same page.
Ultimately, attending a conference is about learning. Learning about other libraries, and other flavors of librarianship, meeting other librarians and hearing what they do and why they came–and how it’s the same and different from why you came.
Just like becoming a college student for the first time (or all over again), there are things you can do to help you learn. For every suggestion I got before arriving, there were a few obvious things I was surprised to discover. I’m going to a few more conferences this year, and these are the things I’ll be keeping in mind:
1. Talk to everyone. Waiting in line, eating breakfast, before a session begins, after a session ends. This includes walking up to the presenters and chatting with them after sessions. It feels a little scary the first few times, but I found that everyone I talked to wanted to talk.
2. Don’t worry about what sessions you attend. Someone told me this before I left, and they were absolutely right. There will be one or two sessions that can’t be missed, but at a national-level conference, there will be at least two interesting, valuable, or fun sessions happening during any given time frame.
3. Do not eat in the convention center. Get out, breathe fresh air, take a little walk, and find someplace to eat that serves good food. Yes, that crepe stand on the corner counts.
4. Expect to gather tidbits of information, not glossy packages that can be unwrapped and plugged in to your particular job or projects. This is my takeaway from the whole makerspace craze: deconstruct everything, take out what you like, and use it to build what you need. Or want.
5. Do the exhibits, even if you have absolutely no purchasing power. I always thought exhibits were just for people who actually bought things, but shopping critically, comparing the various e-book services or types of library furniture, is a great way to see what the state of the art is.
6. Don’t paint your nails bright red. You will spend the entire conference touching them up in a desperate attempt to keep them from looking like a teenager’s nails.
Paint your nails. I have a weakness for nail polish. I think it adds a nice finishing touch. But in the course of travel, packing, unpacking, and conferencing, my nail polish has gotten chipped in a million places. Thank goodness I brought the color with me.
Get business cards.
The semester has just barely started, and already we are faced with a Copyright Conundrum.
That sounds rawther grand, but I have a sneaking suspicion that anything that involves copyright is a conundrum.
Here’s the issue: I work at a public college. The department that handles professional development would like to show a movie to faculty. Because of time considerations, they will not show the entire piece, just selected segments.
Public institution, educational purpose, check.
Fair use? Well, if they create a shortened version of the DVD to streamline the showing of selected segments, it could be considered a derivative work?
Darn. With a little help from a librarian that gets to play with copyright all the time, I found scads of information on copyright limitations on showing moving images at a public academic institution. Stanford has a lovely website on copyright and fair use, with a section for Academic and Educational uses of copyrighted material. Cornell has a book called Copyright and Cultural Institutions, and the University of Texas has put together fair use guidelines for educational multimedia.
All of these were excellent sources, easy to navigate and, considering the complexity of what they set out to describe, quite readable. Unfortunately, none of them offered suggestions on what to do when you have a movie you want to show to faculty, not students, in a modified form, but not store or distribute after the showing.
My next thought was to try original sources, like the mysteriously named Circular 21 (The full title kills the mystique–Circular 21: Reproduction of Copyrighted works by Educators and Librarians). I event found the link to U.S. Code Title 17: Copyrights on Cornell’s Legal Information Institute website.
But none of the original sources offered much in the way of concrete assistance either. The entire group of us looked at the resources, and what they had to say about where our project fell in the murk of fair use, and decided that it was all far too gray. And so, armed with many resources that outline just how we might (or might not) be covered by fair use guidelines, we are contacting the copyright holder.
First posts are invariably awkward. I have been a blogger for many years now–six? Seven? Writing the first post is always fraught with anxiety and indecision, and comes out sounding…just awkward.
It’s like going on a first date, or interviewing for a job. You want to put your best foot forward, but don’t know what to say. You don’t want to sound horribly boring, but not cringingly glib either. You haven’t built any history or common ground, so you don’t know what will come off well and what will go over like a lead balloon.
The one thing you do know is that you want it to go well. After the date, interview, or first post is over, you will lie awake in bed wondering if you said the right things, if you’ll get a second date/interview/comment, and second-guessing all the things you might have done wrong (which are everything).
So let’s get this over with quickly. I’m Allison. I’m an academic librarian, and in this blog, I’ll post about things I find worthy of comment. They might be library related, or information-related or culture-related. Libraries store information which stores culture, so in the end it’s all related.
Please take a gander, and chime in. The most awkward moments are the ones where you pause for breath and realize your date/interviewer has been waiting to get a word in edgewise.
Allison Ringness 