Conference

Social Network Data: Making Sense of What's Online

/ dwakimoto

A bit of confusion about where we were in the program. But we’re all good now, so let’s getting into the session notes on social network data. Allons-y!

Open Standards for Social Data Exchange and Archiving
Evan Prodromou (StatusNet)

Talking about social network data and standards.

Classes of social data include: profile data (who user is, contact information, what user likes, etc.), social media (text, images, audio, video, polls, checkins, events, Q&A), social graph (record of relationships and connections), social curation (commenting, tagging, sharing).

Challenges to archiving social network data:
Most social networks have limits on what users can do to archive their own data. Have API access rules, winner-take-all business models, etc..

Motivations for preservation of digital social network data: digital civil liberties, open source implementers, enterprise social networks, and social network federation. More pressure to create open data formats in order to preserve social network data.

Standards used in Social Network Media
FOAF “Friend of a Friend”: RDF-based
RSS and/or Atom
SIOC: RDF-based (pronounced “shock”), works with RSS and FOAF
Portable Contacts aka PoCo, VCard-like, XML
Activity Streams social media linked, upward compatible with Atom and RSS, JSON version available, exciting and keep your eye on it, increasing use in libraries

Interesting to hear about standards being used, but presentation was too fast to get down all the important information. Check out the links above for more information.

Recommendations: Produce Activity Streams and consume ActivityStreams, RSS, and Atom.

Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Mapping and Measuring SOcial Media Networks to Find Key Positions and Structures
Marc Smith (Connected Action Consulting Group)

Talking about nodexl and that most people do not capture information about their networks. People are social and crowds are important. Crowds now gather online (interaction with physical crowds is very interesting too). Online social media for coming together online now serialize comments.

NodeXL builds a graph that looks like a graph based on social media data. Example, creating graphs from Tweets that mention a certain word. You can find some examples on Flickr of these graphs.

In social networks, the most important thing is “position, position, position.” Archiving connections is possible, but few of the resellers or archives of social media do so. Archiving connections is as important as archiving digital object (great for contextualization).

NodeXL makes really interesting, sometimes confusing, but cool looking graphics. My colleague who researches social networks is all over this type of data representations and analyses. Very interesting.

“We envision hundreds of NodeXL data collectors around the world collectively generating a free and open archive of social media network snapshots on a wide range of topics.”

The Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) Project
Ray Larson (UC Berkeley)

Dealing with metadata surrounding collections held in archives. Project funded by NEH.

Data from: EAD finding aids from LoC, OAC, Northwest DIgital Archive, and Virginia Heritage; Authority records from LoC, Getty Vocabulary Program, Virtual International Authority File; other biographical sources (eg DBPedia).

EAC is now complemented by EAC or Encoded Archival Context: XML-based standards for descriptions of record creators= authority control. Want to have controlled vocabularies because we have the problem of many different names for same person, same name for different person. (Are they also adding these authority files to LoC? We need standards, but we don’t need a ton of standards that overlap so we have issues about deciding which one to use.)

Very nice looking interface for the authority files. Nice touch: noting from which archives they are deriving the names for the authority file. And then using data to create pretty infographic of connections–still under development. SNAC website for latest version to download and try out.

Take away: Connections are super-important and we need sophisticated ways to capture this information. I’m definitely going to download NodeXL and play around with it. If you use it, let me know how you like it.

Reflections on the Gap Between Archivists and Librarians

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday, dear readers. I hope that you are all having a lovely day, whether it is in sunny SoCal or you are enjoying a snow day like my friends in Boston. I am very happy to be back home after a whirlwind tour of San Diego for both the ALISE and ALA Midwinter Conferences. Because I’m still processing everything I’ve learned or experienced at the conferences, I thought I’d talk about just one issue that was quite striking: the gap between archivists and librarians. This theme came up at both of the conferences and I think it deserves to be explored further.

I’ve written previously on the need for librarians to understand what archivists do, and vice versa, but today I want to discuss the communication, or the lack thereof, between the two fields. Communication is key on moving both professions forward and not duplicating each other’s work. This was driven home for me when I was sitting in a session on Top Tech Trends at Midwinter listening to librarians and library vendors discussing trends, a large part of which revolved around digital curation and preservation. I was excited to hear this in a talk about technology, but thought it was a shame that there were no archivists on the panel. Archivists have been wrestling with issues of digital preservation, curation, preservation, access, and authentication for years and it would have been a much more useful discussion if it was between librarians and archivists and not limited to the librarian world.

Now, I’m not saying that this lack of communication can be blamed wholly on the librarians, archivists are just as guilty of staying in their silos. There was actually a discussion about breaking down the silos among archivists, librarians, and museum curators at ALISE which had some defending, rather vigorously, the necessity of maintaining strict boundaries and not having any of this interdisciplinary stuff. On the whole, I find it rather sad and disappointing to see our wonderful professions worrying more about boundaries than figuring out how to work together on issues such as digital preservation.

The lack of communication seems to be leading to duplication of work by archivists and librarians. We don’t need dozens of metadata standards, some used by archivists and some used by librarians, none of which are completely agreed upon. We don’t need to duplicate projects (and we definitely don’t need to create any more crazy initialisms and acronyms). What we need is to first understand each other’s field, actually talk with one another, and then set out solving these digital preservation and curation issues together. Everyone seems to be chronically underfunded these days, so let’s make our limited funds and grants go further by working together instead of competing with each other. Who knows, we might make some progress. Wouldn’t that be great?

Okay, I’m stepping off my soapbox now. Kudos to those of you who are working to break down the barriers between archivists and librarians and working to build up our collaborations and communications. I have great hope for what the professions can do together in the realm of digital preservation and curation.

Today we will be ending with something fun from Doctor Who for three reasons:

  1. Because, as my awesome friend Hanna said, Who wouldn’t want to be at a wedding with the Doctor?
  2. Because another one of my friends has recently finished watching Series 5 and, like Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, believes that even if there are multiple universes, he will not be dancing in any of them. I’m hoping maybe the Doctor dancing will make him at least consider the possibility he is dancing in at least one of the universes.
  3. It’s Doctor Who, enough said:

Enjoy the rest of your day. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming in a few days. Allons-y!

Information Literacy Research Papers at ALISE 2011

/ dwakimoto

ALISE 2011 session of three juried papers on information literacy (IL). The session was titled, “Helping Students be Competitive,” but I didn’t find this to be the best title for the session. It’s a session about information literacy (and yes, being information literate makes one more competitive), so have information literacy in the title. Anyway, onward to the summary!

Evidence-Based Design of Information Literacy Instruction: Innovation in Pedagogy for the Library and for the MLIS
by Heidi Julien and Kathleen DeLong (University of Alberta)

This project looks at pedagogy in LIS education, which is influenced by many factors: ALA Committee on Accreditation, faculty experience, etc. Project wanted to develop empirical evidence for improving pedagogy. The project also looks at practice and instruction in University libraries which is influenced by similar factors: standards, experience, talking with colleagues, etc.

Study looks at experiences of undergraduates transition from high school to the post-secondary environment. Looking to improve design of IL pedagogy. Assesses skill development of selected secondary and post-secondary students, focusing on arts and social sciences students. Looking at the gap in the literature as research studies do not look at both secondary and post-secondary education together in IL research. Examines students’ experiences as they complete their last year of high school through the start of their undergraduate studies. The researchers are using the James Madison University’s “Information Literacy Test.” Recruitment of undergraduates for interviews proved difficult.

Findings and Implications: students recognized the importance of IL skills but were unaware of the resources available to support them. Librarian-taught courses are still rare. Students are not entering post-secondary education with well-developed IL skills.

Information Literacy and Its Discontents: Lessons from College Students with Below Proficient Skills
by Don Latham and Melissa Gross (Florida State University)

Talking about “Attaining Information Literacy Project” which is IMLS-funded project. Purpose: to identify students with below-proficient IL skills, gather data about their conceptions of and experiences with IL, and develop an IL intervention that will address their needs. Defining IL as: finding, evaluating, and using information.

Guiding principles: evidence-based approach (yay!), focus on issues of student perceptions, develop learner-centered instruction, and develop reality-based instruction. Used the Information Literacy Test from James Madison University. (Second yay! Latham and Gross used Bruce’s relational model of IL.)

Findings: students didn’t perceive IL as a discrete set of skills, below-proficient students in the study greatly over-estimated their performance on the IL test and described their IL skills as “good” or “above average.” Students wanted in-person instruction and interactive learning.

Conclusions: Used Bruce’s Informed Learning Approach (which emphasizes learner experiences and perceptions and the need for a personal relevance framework) to focus on self-generated rather than imposed information seeking, web searching rather than database searching and provide an incentive.

Goals of Instruction: change learners’ conception of skills required, change learners’ conception of their personal ability, and teach one skill that learners can readily use that will improve both self-generated and imposed information task outcomes.

Developed ASE (Analyse, Search, Evaluate) Model developed as an intervention and tested in an iterative process. Will deliver intervention in February and assess model.

Information Seeking Experiences of the Post-Secondary Distance/Online Student
by Nancy E. Black (University of British Columbia PhD candidate)

Questions: what does information seeking look like for the distance student? What are the lived experiences? What are the: barriers, strategies, themes and contexts?

Black used the theoretical frameworks of: hermeneutic phenomenology and communicative action. She used semi-structure interviews, verbal analysis protocol, and reflexive journals as her methodology.

Findings: majority thought of Google first for searching, not a surprising finding for Black (and not surprising for most), then used Wikipedia and Google Scholars, and interviewees also talked a lot about time (different conceptions of time and when searching ended) and motivation (different motivating factors and different degrees of motivation). Other patterns: appreciation of the option of distance learning, technological barriers to searching, and dislike of collaboration/group projects.

Final Thoughts
It was great to hear about evidence-based research on information literacy and researchers from North America using Bruce’s work and not exclusively relying on the ACRL definitions/standards of IL. It will be interesting to read more about the results of these multi-year projects when they are finished.

ALISE Keynote: LIS Education in the 21st Century

/ dwakimoto

Big, Complex, Demanding, and Competitive: The Road to Library and Information Science Education in the 21st Century
by Jorge Reina Schement (Dean of School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University)

First, yay for getting the code for the conference wifi (makes blogging so much easier)! And double yay to seeing some other people on iPads, laptops, and notebooks at the conference! On to the actual keynote–allons-y!

Converging Trends
1. The historic public commitment to higher education is at risk.
The percent support of state support is decreasing in some states, but others are increasing (but not by a lot given the low support). Many states are “stepping away” from their support of public higher education. Our challenge is to create a business model that “positions ourselves successfully.” We aren’t prepared for the period that is coming. The demand for higher education is continuing to increase, unlike the level of state support.

Schement posits that the state support level will not return to previous levels in our lifetimes.

2. Household income lags farther behind the growing cost of a university education.
Tuition continues to increase, but household income is not increasing. Undergraduates are engaging higher education as a “pay-as-you-go” proposition because of the realities of the economy. Also, we need to change how we “do business” at the university because of the increasing diversity of our country and our undergraduates.

LIS Education and Profession
Obviously, the above trends will affect LIS programs and the profession. We will have issues with attracting students if tuition continues to increase while the job market (and salaries) stagnate. Also, our faculties are not changing as rapidly as our student bodies to reflect the diversity of the students.

“Librarianship is an aging, largely white, profession that must plan for its future. Without aggressive recruitment among diverse student populations by librarians & library program faculty, the profession will incur the consequences of cultural isolation.” We need to figure out a way to get a more diverse profession to reflect the communities we serve. Schement suggests that, “LIS faculty should consider a joint campaign to recruit younger students to the profession” (and also to recruit minority students). (However, there is already a trend of younger students at LIS schools–at least at San Jose and Simmons.)

Four Modest Proposals for LIS Education

  1. In the midst of an economic transformation, we must recognize ourselves as an enterprise and minimize our dependence on subsidies from the university and the state.
  2. We must ride the demographic wave sweeping America and attract and recruit a diverse profile of students and faculty.
  3. To succeed nationally, we must succeed within our own institutions by showing our centrality to the mission of the university.
  4. Just as Americans are developing a national narrative to explain economic hardships and demographic change, we too must craft a national narrative of value, service, and leadership.

Questions
What about distance education?
Distance education is clearly something we have to do. We might think about offering distance education programs collaboratively with other programs. “Distance education is thinking outside the box.”

How do we succeed when there are no jobs for our students?
There are tension between profession and function of librarianship. (I don’t think that this question was answered well because we can’t deny that this is a tough economy for finding work, no matter what you call the degree or job. If organizations aren’t hiring, there isn’t much one can do.)

How do you change the face of LIS faculty when people want to hire people who “look like us”?
“Give people the benefit of the doubt.” People just need to find the most qualified person for the position, regardless of ethnicity, sexuality, gender, etc. We also need to cultivate people for these positions.

Conclusion
Interesting review of changing demographics of the United States and how LIS schools need to change to reflect the diversity. I agreed with much of the talk, but I’m not sure how I feel about even more aggressive recruitment of students to LIS programs. I am in favor with increasing diversity in both the LIS faculty and student bodies, but not by promising that there will be employment after graduation for our students. I did completely agree with the need to be aggressive about showing and telling the value of librarianship to the public in order to create a narrative of value for the library that reflects the needs of society. Nice start to the conference.

On being bold and making decisions

/ dwakimoto / 1 Comment

Happy Holidays! As we are nearing the end of another year, I think we need to discuss being bold, making decisions, and keeping resolutions.

So let’s talk about resolutions, since it is that time of year. Intellectually, I completely understand the appeal of making resolutions. To do lists are helpful for focusing on what you want to accomplish and for keeping you on task when there is so much other shiny stuff to look at on the Internet that can derail your best intentions of not procrastinating and really getting whatever it is done this year. Resolutions are also, to me at least, a symbol of optimism that you can actually make the world or yourself (or both) a little better through sheer will and determination. But on the flip side, broken resolutions can fill you with guilt and angst. So is it better to make resolutions and cut yourself slack when you inevitably fall short of perfection? Or is it better to not make resolutions? I don’t have the answer, although I find zen habits rather helpful for living life well and not full of too many lists of things to do.

As for me, I haven’t made any new year’s resolutions for quite a few years now. I might make some this year, who knows. Do you make new year’s resolutions?

But even if you are not into making resolutions for the new year, it is good to resolve to being a person who is bold and willing to make decisions. I was talking with a friend the other day about being the one to make decisions in a group and then read this post from Seth Godin, Just Looking. Sometimes real life and the blogosphere are just in sync; I don’t ask why. So go out there and be bold– actually make a decision. Sitting on the fence doesn’t do you any good and doesn’t move either you or your work or the library forward. Speaking of being bold, check out Engaged Learning’s post, Are You So Bold? Then, go and do whatever you know needs to be done or said that you’ve been putting off. You’ll feel better and it will be easier to be bold the next time you need to be.

So, if you feel like you now need to do something to be bolder in the new year, check out the call for bloggers at Midwinter. If you happen to be going to either ALISE or ALA Midwinter (or even both), do say hello. I’ll be in San Diego for both conferences (probably tweeting and blogging about some of the sessions too). Also, in conference traveling news, check out the TSA Status website to find out the status of the new body scanners at various airports’ checkpoints.

And, because it is that time of year, we must end with a list: check out Lifehacker’s Most Popular Explainers of 2010. We also need something fun, so enjoy a couple of photos of my family’s cats having fun with the wrapping paper…

Cheetah in Wrapping Paper

Cheetah in Wrapping Paper

Fey with Ribbon

Fey with Ribbon

…and an awesome video about the Tenth Doctor and Donna because it is so fun that it must be shared.

Happy New Year, dear readers! I hope it is a fantastic year for you. I’ll be back next week with posts from ALISE. Allons-y!

Conference Productivity

/ dwakimoto

Hi, all. Yes, once again we turn to talking about conferences and productivity. Why? Mainly because I am super-excited about Internet Librarian at the end of October, but also because work never stops–even when you are at a conference. So any help to make conferences productive, and keep us from wanting to gouge out our eyes from trying to keep up with what is happening back at the library, is probably a very good thing. Shall we dive into some conference goodies? Allons-y!

First, unless a conference happens to be in your backyard, or within reasonable driving distance, you probably are going to have to fly. And if you are going to fly, you better show up at the airport with a goodly amount of time to spare. So check out Lifehacker’s guide on how to always get to the airport on time. Lots of common sense tips, but it is always good to have a reminder. Also, you may be interested in when you can get the best price on airfare. Turns out that the cheapest time to book a flight is about eight weeks before your travel date. That’s definitely handy to know. (Also good information to share with your library patrons who may be traveling soon.)

Once you’re at the conference, you’ll want to implement some of the tips from WebWorkerDaily on how to stay productive at conferences. Lots of good tips and I really like the emphasis on not trying to do everything so you can actually enjoy and learn at the conference. I’ll try to take that advice to heart while at Internet Librarian.

Also, if you are ever like me and come home from conferences with a mess of notes that made sense of the time but now look like just scribbles, check out How to take effective conference notes. Then be nice and share your experience and tips on your blog. I really find it helpful to read about other people’s conference experiences, especially from conferences that I haven’t been able to attend.

And since you know you’ll be working on your laptop, computer, other digital device while you are away from the office at a conference, check out turning your flash drive into a portable privacy toolkit. Really, is there anything a flash drive can’t be reconfigured to do?

Do you have any conference productivity tips? If so, please share them in the comments. I’d love to hear about them and the Waki Librarian will be back on Friday with more library fun.

ALA 2010 Wrap-up

/ dwakimoto / 2 Comments

Hi, all. I know, once again I missed posting on Friday. I’m sorry, but with the flight to DC and the heat I really wasn’t in any shape to be blogging. So this post will serve as a wrap-up to my experience at ALA 2010. It was my first time going to ALA Annual and it was a very good conference experience.

After a rocky start of having my first flight delayed over an hour (and then miraculously landing only about 5-10 minutes late at the destination–don’t ask me, I don’t know–I think it involved use of a wormhole, a TARDIS or a time-turner), the rest of the trip was uneventful. I think about half of the flight from Detroit to DC consisted of librarians going to ALA! The rest of the day was spent being a tourist and having dinner with Nancy and Mary (Nerdfighter extrodinaires as well as librarian mother and future librarian daughter super duo).

Friday was the first day of conferencing (after a necessary trip to the National Archives, of course). I went to the PAIG (Preservation Administration Interest Group) meeting which was really informative. The talk on creating and maintaining sustainable preservation environments by James M. Reilley was fascinating and I look forward to reading the final reports on the results of turning off and on the climate control systems have on the environment and the collections. If the results are positive, it will be a boon for archives and libraries trying to preserve their collections while also being more environmentally friendly in terms of using energy. The presentation of some of the findings from the Ithaka Report was also interesting–although it was terrifying that some of the faculty agreed that it would be okay to discard primary source documents once they had been digitized. (yikes!)

Saturday was Library of Congress Day (a.k.a. let’s go and geek out over awesome digital forensic stuff). I listened in on the Library of Congress Twitter Archive talk in “The Stacks” (aka exhibit floor). Didn’t really hear anything new, but it was good to get confirmation on some information. Plus the two LoC speakers were engaging and drew a fairly large crowd for the tiny space they had set aside in their booth area for the talks.

In the afternoon, there was the amazing, awesome, fabulous (really I could go on and on geeking out over it, but I won’t) Digital Forensics talks and tour at LoC. Three research scientists in the preservation directorate (don’t you just love that name?) explained how they use non-invasive techniques to discover lost and obscured information in the documents in the LoC collection as well as creating baseline information and creating a research database of papers and pigment samples for conservation work. I’m so envious of the amazing tools they have at their disposal: electron scanning microscope, XRF (x-ray fluorescence), XRD (x-ray diffraction), and hyperspectral imaging, among others. While it was definitely cool to see all the amazing information they could uncover using these imaging techniques (like changes in speeches that can’t be seen with the naked eye and watermarks hidden by text), I think one of the best parts was the affirmation of the importance of the original document. As all the scientists said, the originals are so important because they can find out more information as the technology improves. So to them, like so many in the archives and preservation fields, digitization is an access tool, not a preservation tool.

photograph of librarians touring Library of Congress preservation lab

Librarians touring LoC Preservation lab

Another awesome part of their research is trying to create methods and techniques, not to mention tools, that librarians, conservators, and archivists at institutions with less resources than the LoC can afford. I am looking forward to their results because I can only imagine what great information there is to be found in the documents in other archives’ collections.

Sunday morning’s session on National Preservation Week was inspiring and it was great to hear about all the successful events held this year. I’m going to work with my library and some local community organizations to host at least one event for National Preservation Week 2011 (fingers crossed it all works out). And for those of you who like to plan ahead, National Preservation Week will be held April 24-30, 2011: “Pass it on”!

In the afternoon, Megan Oakleaf and I gave a presentation for the Instruction Section titled: “Question, Find, Evaluate, Apply: Translating Evidence Based Practice to Information Literacy Instruction” to an almost full room of around 450. (As an aside, I have to give props to The Litbrarian who was gracious enough to take me to brunch and put up with me stressing out before the talk–I get incredibly nervous before every talk I give, although I am fine once I start talking.) I think the talk went well; people participated, they laughed at our jokes, a lot of people knew about (and liked) xkcd and a good chunk of the audience watches Bones so they got my analogy using Dr. Brennan to explain evidence-based practice, and a number of people asked awesome questions during the Q & A. We even got tweeted about which I found pretty cool and a little strange as Clara Fowler, Chair of IS, told me that the tweets happening during the presentation were really positive. So yay! (Of course I had to go and look at the tweets and one of my favorites has to be from linkedlibrary: “Rules of EBL: Evidence=good; anecdote=bad; when in doubt, ask! Oakleaf and wakimoto are great.”) A huge thank you to the IS conference planning committee for inviting me to come speak–it was a blast and I’m so excited that so many librarians are interested in evidence-based practice! Our bibliography and links to the slides and resources can be found here: link to bibliography of suggested EBP resources. A review of our session was in Tuesday’s Cognotes (pdf) . How cool is that?

The final session I went to was “Emerging Research in Collection Management and Development.” Both Aline Soules, who is my colleague at Cal State East Bay, and Jeffrey Kushkowski, from Iowa State University, talked about their current research. Aline is comparing biographical databases to information found on the open web to determine which products, or combination of products, are best for use when researching authors. Kushkowski has, with the help of a team of graduate students, completed journal article citation analyses to determine journal rankings in the field of corporate governance. It was good to hear about research that is outside of my own research interests and specialties. But I can definitely say that the only way I would ever do a citation analysis study on the scale of Kushkowski’s study (analyses of over 15,000 citations) was if I had a team of graduate students too!

Overall, my first ALA Annual Conference experience was positive, although if the exhibits opened earlier on Friday I wouldn’t complain. It definitely helped to have a focus in order to sort out what tracks to attend (although there were about 3 other talks I really wanted to go to that were happening at the same time I was speaking). DC is an amazing city, but I’m with the other NorCal, Bay Area people who came to the conference: the heat and humidity were a little overwhelming. I do hope to come back to DC to see more of it because this was a bit of a whirlwind tour and hopefully I’ll also be able to attend more ALA Annual Conferences as well.

More technology and library fun to follow shortly, but in the meantime get back to your summer reading and relaxing.

More Travel Fun

/ dwakimoto / 2 Comments

So how’s everybody doing? Sorry for no post on Friday, but I was enjoying my vacation too much to plug into the computer to write. (Not that I don’t, of course, love you dear readers, but I promised myself no work during my one week of vacation and while I love blogging, it felt too much like work before today.) I mean, really, take a look at the photo below and tell me you wouldn’t be out enjoying the quiet of nature instead of staring at a laptop screen:

photograph of Deschutes River

Deschutes River

I thought, though, that I should share a few links that I read while waiting thunderstorms to pass that may be helpful for those of you going to ALA this week.

Don’t you just love Lifehacker? I sure do and this post on the top 10 strategies for surviving airports and airplanes couldn’t have come at a more opportune time than right before ALA. I’m so not looking forward to flying in from the West Coast–jet lag is not fun, but I’m sure the conference will be.

Lifehacker also has a post on 5 tactics for getting sleep on long distance flights. Definitely a fan of getting sleep on planes and these are a few excellent tips.

Finally the Lifehacker pack for Macs. I felt it only right that I include this link as I already linked to the Lifehacker pack for Windows and far be it from me not to alert Mac owners of a cool suite of software.

I hope everyone who is going to ALA has a very safe journey to DC and a fantastic conference experience. I’ll probably post about it as I’m excited for ALA (it’s my first time attending). Have a lovely week, read a lot, and I’ll be back with more library and tech fun soon.

More random stuff for ALA, etc.

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday! Oh, my goodness am I ever ready for the weekend. And yes, I know that ALA isn’t for another two weeks or so, but I thought for those of you who like to plan ahead might find some of this week’s random stuff helpful. Plus, I’m leaving on vacation prior to ALA fun and might not post anything next week except lovely photographs from my trip because I am looking forward to being mostly unplugged for a week. So, allons-y! (let’s go) as the good Doctor would say (sorry, had to include that again as I’ve finally managed to persuade one of the interns that his life truly wouldn’t be complete until he’s watched the new Doctor Who).

Before delving into some of the really interesting, and or fun, stuff that may (or may not) be useful for your ALA trip, I had to share this wonderful post Intimidation that Hanna [link is to her awesome blog] sent to me. This is a fantastic post that sums up how I feel when people say I’m “intimidating.” I especially like this bit, “as a shy woman who stands all of 5’3″, I can’t say that I see myself as especially terrifying.” But then again, apparently Hanna and I were considered intimidating once people had a history seminar with us. There is a definite power dynamic in the instructor/student relationship no matter how much we try to smooth out the hierarchy so that we are all learning and teaching together which, along with shyness (that can be perceived as aloofness or intimidation), probably leads to the “scary” instructor effect.

Just goes to show that instructors can be misperceived as often as their students and really, in the end, we are all just people. And this may help you at ALA in all those receptions and mixers–just remember shy doesn’t equal antisocial. So just come over and say hi. Though perhaps, just so people don’t have to guess where you stand on the whole “social interaction thing,” you might want to get this shirt from xkcd.

I love traveling (well, actually I don’t like flying very much but I like how traveling is the means to the end which is seeing new places and meeting people). But sometimes those transatlantic and flights from California to the East Coast get really long and boring. So to the rescue, why don’t you check out one of the Top 10 Difficult Literary Works from your local library to ponder on the flight? Found via ALA Direct, it is lovely for the sheer hilarity of the descriptions of some of works. As soon as I told my office mate about it, he immediately asked if Tolkien’s The Similarion was on the list–it’s not, but I bet some of the books you were required to read in your studies are on the list. So what do you think is the most difficult literary work to slog through?

Here’s another great post from Lifehacker that will help you make the photographs you take at ALA really shine: Top 10 photo fixing and image editing tricks. Come on, you know you’ll take photographs at ALA, so why not take the time to take/make great photographs?

Oh, and while your at ALA, if you need to hook into a meeting happening back at your workplace, check out the Lifehacker guide to the Five best web-based conferencing tools and find something that will work nicely. I’m hoping to try out a couple of the free ones at my library for our meetings because we always have at least one librarian at another physical location during meeting times. Still, I’m just waiting for the holographic projections, or really good virtual reality, to make meetings more fun (and productive, of course).

This is amazing: locals and tourists flickr set helps you avoid tourists on vacation, find local favorites. What a cool use creation and use of data pulled from flickr images. Alas, it appears that just about everywhere in DC where ALA events are happening is tourist-central. It would be nifty to create a similar type map using data from all the photos by librarians attending ALA. Just a thought.

Finally, something fun to end another Friday post, a clip explaining the Friendship Algorithm (thanks to Hanna from the great idea of having Friday posts include videos and to my sister for basically forcing me to watch this show). It’s fantastic, nerdy fun.

Have a lovely weekend, read a lot, and the Waki Librarian will be blogging about the actual ALA Conference very soon.

Some ALA Fun

/ dwakimoto / 2 Comments

Happy Friday! Is it just me, or has it seemed like a really long week? I’m so glad that it is Friday and that the weekend starts very, very soon. But before the day closes, I wanted to share a bit of library fun that really does relate to ALA Annual.

First, I want to share this wonderful post by Mary (who just happens to be a Nerdfighter, future librarian, and daughter of the rockin’ librarian Nancy): Why ALA is going to be awesome. I am super excited that people, like Mary, with this much enthusiasm want to join our profession. Our levels of awesome will only increase with the inclusion of more Nerdfighters in the librarian ranks. (And if that made no sense to you, well, you need to become a Nerdfighter and watch the Vlogbrothers and it will.)

Also, Mary did the “Hi, Hank” introduction at ALA 2008 in Anaheim (note the Nerdfighter t-shirt). So if you just can’t wait for ALA Annual at the end of the month, get your quick fix here:

While we are on the subject of conferences, we might as well talk about how much the excitement and all can wreck havoc with a person’s sleep schedule. In order to get back on track before (or after) the conference, check out the Lifehacker guide on how to reboot your sleep cycle. [Even if you have no issues with your sleep habits, check it out for the adorable photo of the cat.]

While on vacation or being a tourist at a conference this summer, you will probably want to talk photographs of your adventures. And, if you are like me, when you are photographing a monument, you like not having people messing up the shot. But we all know that is difficult to do in high tourist season. (I once spent 15 minutes waiting for people to move out of the way so I could photograph Leeds Castle.) But now with digital photograph and a little Photoshop magic you don’t have to wait for people to move. Check out how from Shutterstock.

Also, on the tech front, check out the Lifehacker Pack 2010 for a downloadable software bundle of the programs Lifehacker has found to be essential for Windows. Never hurts to just check out the article to see if there is some bit of software that you’ve not heard of yet.

And to end, this fun video by one of our local Bay Area bands, Train. What can I say? This Friday simply needed people dancing around in chicken suits to a happy tune.

Have a fantastic weekend! Enjoy the weather, read outside in the sunshine, and I’ll be back next week with more library and technology fun.