Libraries

Personal Archiving Systems and Interfaces for Institutions: PDA 2011

/ dwakimoto

And, we’re back. This session is about personal archiving systems being used in institutions. Very interesting and relevant topic given how many institutions are using institutional repositories. So without further ado, on to the summaries!

Enriching the Digital Junk Drawer
Birkin James Diana

Talking about Brown Digital Repository (BDR): instituional repository, platform for digitized library collections, departmental projects, and personal digital archiving piece. Built the BDR uploader: upload, describe, and manage access to them. In a perfect world, students and faculty would use it to store class projects, class materials, etc. (university related stuff and not personal stuff).

Worried about the personal digital archiving space becoming a digital junk drawer. Working assumption: A good repository helps user to navigate to their items/easy to upload and then users’ will be more likely to upload good content (and actually use it). Need quality metadata for this to work. But if you require long forms to create metadata, people won’t upload their materials. (Make it simple and people will actually use it) BDR requires a title and a tag in order to upload materials.

How, then, do you get quality metadata?
The best way is via background processes that do not require user mediation. If you have ability for users to optionally edit metadata, you will get even better metadata. What BDR is interested in is an approach that has background processes but requires user interaction,.

Want to test hypothesis that users will be willing to spend nano-blocks of time organizing and describing their materials if it is easy and they see the benefit of it. Mechanism: occasionally shown a single question about: item, importance of item, and about relationships between items. Show real-time benefit display, better navigation, improved utility-assessment, and more relevant scholarly-resources based on their answers to the questions. Evaluation of experiment via a thumbs-up/thumbs-down toggle and a go away button. Result would be understanding the users’ experience and data to modify weighted randomization algorithms for question frequency/type.

Privileging easy deposit of digital objects over metadata, but want metadata because it is necessary. So using easy-to-use ways of getting that metadata without creating a barrier to use. (Very, very cool. I can’t wait to learn a little more when I have time to research it after the conference is over.)

Digital Collections at the NCAR Library and Archives: Archiving in 21st century
Kathleen Legg from National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

NCAR is “devoted to service, research, and education in the atmospheric and related sciences” and is funded by the government. Legg is focusing more on access. She is working on preserving institutional memory documenting the activities of NCAR.

Vision for archives: trusted resource used by a wide-ranging audience, documents the history of NCAR and development of the atmospheric sciences, and provide an optimal user experience. (Love the user-centric approach)

Flagship collection is the Dr. Warren Washington papers. Dr. Washington received National Medal of Science and is a NCAR scientist. His papers document his work as a scientist, mentor, and as an advocate for diversity issues. Many different formats of materials. Using Washington papers to create a digitization model for NCAR.

Need to move away from traditional ways of access in the archives because researchers expect more in the digital research world. Meet expectations by providing a variety of ways to access collections:

  • Archives website (online finding aid, keyword search capability)
    Have EAD finding aids in ARCHON with ability to keyword search the finding aids–great for experienced archival users
  • Warren Washington Digital Exhibit: a way to increase access to materials for those who are not familiar with archives. Targets students as one main user group. Also serves as a jumping off point for other scholars.
  • OpenSky: Institutional Repository. Launched in September 2010–holds all digital assets from the archives, published NCAR research, and grey literature. Great way to increase understanding of context in scientific research via seamless integration.

Nice work NCAR! Love the user-centric view and seamless access to the materials.

Constructing a Digital Identity Compatible with Institutional Archives
Jay Datema (Bookism)

Great article about personal digital archiving: Jeremy Leighton John, “The future of saving our past” in Nature 459 from 11 June 2009

Talking about technological tools for personal digital archiving:
XML, RSS, Atom
Personal Home Page: PHP, WordPress, Drupal

The Egosystem: photos, blog posts, email, publications, activity streams
The id: Does someone want to read what I did in the future? Family, Institutions, and history may be interested.

Datema’s thinking has been influenced by Jacques Derrida: The Post Card and Archive Fever. Also, loved Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone. Sees social network data as postcards: data moving around and connecting different people and things. See media commons: a digital scholarly network. Many ways to capture your data including his creation Bookism.

Take away: Archives are doing some amazing work in the realm of improving digital archiving and increasing the usefulness to users. I love the user-centric viewpoints of these talks.

Teaching Outside the Library

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! I can’t believe we are to the middle of another week already. For the last bit of this week, I’ll be at the Personal Digital Archiving Conference in San Francisco and will hopefully be blogging some of the sessions. However, first I want to talk about teaching outside of the library (aka one shots). Most academic librarians will, at one time or another, have to teach one shot classes, usually with too much information to cover in too short amount of time. But I don’t want to talk about the difficulties inherent in this type of format, I want to talk about how you can be effective in subtly nudging your way into being asked to come to classes, rather than feeling like you must claw your way to getting time to talk with students in class.

As many of you are aware, there is ample literature on teaching information literacy one-shot sessions. We won’t be going over that again here. I’m just going to share what has worked for me with the hopes that it may help those of you who also teach one shot sessions or are looking to increase the number of sessions you teach.

Before going further, I should give you fair warning that the majority of these techniques take months if not years to reap benefits, but I think that is okay. You can also make gains in the shorter term, as we’ll discuss, but because so much depends on personal relationships it takes time to really build up a sustainable and long lasting instructional program.

So first, the easy bits. You should, obviously, introduce yourself to your faculty members in your liaison areas. This should occur via email, at faculty gatherings, in the line at lunch, basically anytime you can get a minute of their time. Don’t go into stalker territory, but do be proactive about meeting people and sharing information about the libraries. It is always amazing how many faculty members don’t know about all the great databases my library has to offer for research. I don’t care what anyone says, connecting in person has been the most successful way for me to further the library’s instruction agenda and get into classrooms.

Now for some of the longer term and more involved ways of getting invited to come and speak with classes. I think these are the ways that create a truly sustainable basis for instructional programs and lead into becoming more embedded with classes. Again, I just have to stress that relationships take time to build, as most of us know, and that means that you may not see the rewards of these approaches for a couple of years. I have been at my current position for 2.5 years and am just now really reaping the benefits of taking time to cultivate relationships with many faculty members.

So what are my two pieces of advice?

  1. Get on university level committees or organizational boards if at all possible. Being on committees (even though I’m really not a huge fan of committees) does have the distinct advantage of forcing you to come into contact with faculty and staff members from many different departments. It’s a great way to show off your mad librarian organizational and research skills thus proving to others that librarians are very cool people with a lot to offer. This matters because, as trite as the saying is, actions really do speak louder than words. Prove your value on committees, sneak in some plugs for the library when appropriate, and you’ll be well on your way to being asked to come in and help with information literacy instruction in their classes. Really. It works. And this is one of the few reasons that I think committees are worthwhile, on the whole.
  2. Meet the people who run your faculty development office and offer to lead workshops on technology and library topics. This is one of the best ways I’ve found to help faculty with learning new technologies and meeting those who might want me to come into their classrooms at some later point. I, along with a few of my colleagues, teach many workshops for our faculty development office. It is a lot of fun and we almost always come away with new contacts and ideas for collaborative projects. For example, after a workshop on Google Sites, a professor had me come to work with his graduate students on creating e-portfolios using Google Sites. Students then contacted me for help with the technology and with research questions. And the professor and I are thinking about working on other projects and research studies together. Another faculty member came to one of our talks about online library resources and then had us come and work with her students on their research projects. Does it take work to prepare and teach these workshops? Of course, but it is definitely worth it if you are serious about making connections and getting out there to help in ways that are meaningful to the faculty and students.

I hope sharing my experiences help those of you who are instructional librarians. I’d love to hear about the best methods you’ve found to become more ingrained and essential in the teaching of information literacy, etc. in classes outside of those that may be run through the library department. Remember, connections take time to build, but they’re really the only way to accomplish great work and, you know, keep society going and all.

I hope you have a fabulous rest of your day, dear readers. I should be back tomorrow with some thoughts from the Personal Digital Archiving Conference. Fingers crossed for good wifi and not getting lost on the way to the conference. Take care and thanks, as always, for reading. Allons-y!

Online Security and Travel

/ dwakimoto / 2 Comments

Happy Friday! I’m so ready for the weekend, dear readers. But first, a very short post on some of the great articles about online security and travel. Yes, today’s post was inspired by my desire to take a vacation soon and no, the conferences I’m going to this month and next month don’t count as vacations. But that is neither here nor there, so let’s get to the helpful bits of the post.

Lifehacker has been on an online privacy and security kick over the last few weeks and I think it behooves you to take a quick look over a few of their articles. They are, of course, great to share with your library patrons and colleagues. First, how to secure and encrypt your web browsing on public networks. It’s has easy-to-follow instructions and would be a good thing to do before going on your next trip, even to the local coffee house.

You should also check out the collection of tips on how to secure your online life the easy way. Just to point out one tip, if you haven’t enabled two-step verification for your Google Account you really should. Here’s the article on how to do it. I was happy that you can enable two-step verification for multiple accounts using the same smartphone which is very handy.

Now on to some helpful travel tools. Check out wanderfly. It’s still in beta, but is fun to play with while you’re still trying to figure out what you want to do for your vacation. Another plus, it is very easy to use. Also, check out the best travel apps for Android and the best travel apps for iPhone while you are trying to plan a trip.

Also, go check out John’s latest post over on Ink and Vellum on designing an information literacy course and leave a comment if you teach a term-long information literacy course. I have to go do that as we teach a required information literacy course at my university.

Finally, for your Friday viewing enjoyment, take a very quick break and watch Simon’s Cat in ‘Lunch Break.’

Have a fantastic rest of your day and a fabulous weekend. I’ll be back next week with more library and technology news.

Sandy Hirsh: Stepping into the Future

/ dwakimoto

Happy Thursday! I hope you are all doing well. You may be wondering what happened to my normal Wednesday post. Well, I was planning on writing up Dr. Sandy Hirsh’s talk last night, but my new cat decided that it was definitely time to play instead of letting me get some work done. So, dear readers, you get an unexpected Thursday post this week about the talk Sandy gave last night at the joint SLA San Francisco Bay Region Chapter and BayNet meeting. It was an interesting look at the changes happening in the library and information professions and how we can cope with the changes.

For those of you who do not know Dr. Sandy Hirsh, she is the current Director of the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at San Jose State University. You can check out her curriculum vitae here. She’s a really awesome person and a wonderful representative for the program. Plus, she is a good speaker as evidenced by last night’s talk, “Stepping into the Future:Perspectives on a Changing Profession.”

The two main points I took away from Sandy’s talk were that change is inevitable and we need to figure out how to leverage our skills and knowledge to take advantage of this change. I really appreciated her positive view on change, instead of the unfortunately all too common “doom and gloom” perspective that change is happening too quickly that includes reminisces about the “good old days.”

As Sandy noted, we need to be flexible, adaptable, and creative in order to remain relevant and help the next generation of librarians and information professionals remain relevant. She quoted Stephen Abrams who wrote, “LIS skills are good currency in this world–but only for those with the flexibility and insight to exploit the opportunities.” I think we all have the responsibility to continue evolving and figuring out better ways of marketing the valuable services and knowledge we have as a profession. As Sandy noted in her discussion of her journey to becoming a librarian, teaching in academia, transitioning to the high tech industry, and then moving back into academia, the skills and knowledge that librarians possess can be transfered to many other “non-traditional” jobs outside of the “traditional” library. But, as she also noted, we need to be able to better market ourselves and be able to translate what we can offer into the language of industry and professions outside of the library.

Sandy finished her talk with a discussion of how the curriculum and support services at the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose have evolved to better support and prepare students for the technological changes in our fields. San Jose has recently revamped its career development resources available online. Also, SLIS has receptions at many of the major library conferences and in-person programs for students. [Speaking of which, if you are a SLIS student and live in the Bay Area, there will be a Resume and Interviewing workshop on March 12th. If you go, say hi if you see me. I’ll be there talking with people about job hunting, interviewing, resumes, etc.]

SLIS has also developed new courses, such as Web 3.0: emerging technology trends and information entrepreneurship, and revised other courses, to better reflect changing technologies and skills needed in the workplace. And, as we all know, it’s not just the students who need to keep up with technology. We all have the responsibility to keep up with the changes in our field and related fields.

The one new technology Sandy mentioned that I hadn’t heard of before was Diff-IE which “highlights the changes to a webpage since the last time you visited it” which seems pretty useful. Too bad it’s currently just an add-on for Internet Explorer.

Overall, it was a great program and the Q&A was interesting as there were quite a number of San Jose students in the audience. For those who live in the Bay Area, I highly suggest coming to the SLA SF-Bay Area Chapter events and BayNet events. The next BayNet event is a talk by the Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

That’s it for today, dear readers. I will hopefully be back tomorrow with a library and technology related post. Allons-y!

Presentations, etc.

/ dwakimoto / 1 Comment

Happy Wednesday! It’s a good Wednesday here because my afternoon meeting was canceled, it’s beautifully sunny outside, and we get to talk a little bit about presentations and exciting news. So let’s get to it.

First, if you haven’t read through the presentation on Presentation Tips from The King’s Speech, you really should. Go ahead, click the link. I’ll wait here.

Now, wasn’t that worth reading? And it’s totally true, prepare, practice, get feedback, and find your own voice and you will be fine (although having a built in cheering section at your presentations is also helpful). I think it is incredibly important to keep your own voice when presenting. For example, even though I basically live in academia, I can’t get into the “super-serious professor” mode when presenting. It’s just not who I am and that’s okay. So to me, all presentations are just conversations, more or less, and that helps me with presenting. That and lots and lots of practice. So what helps you prepare for presentations? Any tips are always appreciated as I’m always trying to improve.

And you know the great thing about becoming an awesome presenter? There are so few of them, even though everyone can improve by taking the time to practice and prepare. So if you become a good presenter, people will not only appreciate it, but tell their colleagues and you will get more people coming to your talks. Really. At the last couple of conferences I attended I went to a few sessions not because I was super-interested in the topics, but because I knew the speakers were great. Content matters, but you are only effective at delivering content if you can connect with your audience and that’s where being a good speaker comes in.

Speaking of presentations (and exciting news), for any of you, dear readers, who are coming to the Society of California Archivist’s Annual General Meeting/Conference in San Jose in April, you should leave room in your schedule for a panel presentation that I’ll be chairing. It should be lots of fun (and hopefully useful) and also feature Collin Thorman, probably better known as The Litbrarian, Sherri Berger of the California Digital Library, and Jesse Nachem from the University of California’s Office of the President. We’ll be discussing graduate school, internships, breaking into the profession, among other stuff. At the very least, do stop by and say hello.

Now on to the public service announcement, you’ve probably heard of the horrible flooding affecting Queensland, but you may not have read this great article about Brisbane librarians and how their disaster planning allowed them to save a lot of materials and restore services quickly. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done, but it is good to see a report on how awesome librarians are, especially in times of crisis. Also, if you want to donate to help the flood victims, the government has a donation form for flood relief. And if you are wondering, the library school at Queensland University of Technology was affected as there was flooding on the QUT campus, but everyone (so far as I’ve heard) is okay.

Now, to finish up the day, let’s all take a break and watch “So You Want to be an Academic Librarian” (thanks to @johnxlibris for posting the link!):

Have a great rest of your day and I’ll be back on Friday with some tech and library fun. Allons-y!

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!

Teaching LIS Students to Teach

/ dwakimoto

“Unconference” style session (all materials will be available online–I’ll post link when we get it)
by Melissa Wong, Mega Oakleaf, and Jim Elmborg

“To Textbook or Not, That is the Question: Selecting Course Materials”
Jim Elmborg

Elmborg hasn’t seen a textbook that is great for his course–likes flexibility of using articles and book chapters. Librarians need to be teachers. The topic of instruction is very large and hard to wrap one’s head around. Trying to establish a mindset, ways of thinking about self and what the library is: a literacy activity, learning organizations. All library users are learners. Need to think about where course fits in the curriculum. Tries to sequence an extended argument in his course. Need to think about learning as a contextual activity.

“They Told Me I Should Learn to Teach: Addressing Student Anxiety”
Melissa Wong

Looking at student anxiety around learning to teach. Students know they should take the course, but are anxious about it. Reasons: students don’t see themselves as teachers, afraid of being bad teachers, students afraid that they don’t have “teacher traits,” but the main idea is that they don’t identify with being a teacher. So, how do we help students see themselves as teachers? Develop a personal style of teaching? Have confidence in their own efficacy?

“I Don’t Know if They Got It: Teaching Assessment and Evaluation”
Megan Oakleaf

Using questions by Understanding by Design: what do you want students to learn? What does learning look like? What activities will show learning? (make the assessment as part of your teaching activities= merge teaching activities with assessment) Satisfaction does not equal learning. Other facts can impact satisfaction: instruction enthusiasm, student expectations, and tendency to over-report satisfaction. Look at reflective learning/teaching (ILIAC, EBLIP, etc.). Talk about tools for assessing learning: teaching strategies that engage students, rubrics, classroom assessment techniques, tests, and self-report. Talk about problem of product versus process assessment. Look at good artifacts of student learning assessment. Then look at assessing teaching (CAT, videotape, and peer feedback). Uses for assessment data: improve instruction, improve the assessment, and/or throw a party.

Discussion
The lightening talks followed by group discussion. Looking at tensions between theory and practice in library school classes. Talking about how to operationalize everything that we are talking about–different in every context. Need to work to have relevance in each context. Internships for students in teaching are very important. Lots of different ways to inspire and teach instruction.

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.

Thankfulness in 2010

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! I know it is a day early for a Thanksgiving Day post, but it is never too early to list the things one is thankful for in life. And also, because in the United States tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I fully intend to stay away from all things online in order to engage with my family and friends in real life, I needed to send out this post today. (And yes, I know, I know I can schedule the post to publish on Thanksgiving Day but I’m hoping that other people too will unplug for the day and so the post is being published today.)

I think having a day with family and friends when you remember what you are thankful for in life is a fantastic basis for a holiday. And, to my dear long-time readers, the fact that I feel this way should not come as a surprise given my love of lists which have produced the last two year’s posts on things and people in libraries (and archives) which I am thankful for: Thanksgiving Day post for 2008: librarians and optimism and Thanksgiving Day post for 2009: Giving Thanks for Libraries and Librarians.

So this year, I just want to name five of library/archives-related things I’m thankful for and then let you go and celebrate Thanksgiving. (I’m still thankful for everything I named in previous years too, but didn’t want to include all of that here…again.)

1. San Jose State Library School Interns
I always have to include our interns in any list about library wonderfulness. I don’t know how we get so lucky, but we get fantastic interns. It is a blast to work with engaged library school students and I always learn something new. Plus they are just awesome people and it is nice to have an excuse to reflect on teaching philosophies and teaching methods with interested people. Plus, one of the interns could identify my limited edition John Green bobblehead in my office which was just awesome. And did I mention one of our interns was part of the winning Book Cart Drill Team at the CLA Conference this year? I didn’t? Well, take a look at the winning performance in the following video. Interns=awesomeness.

2. Amazing friends who also just happen to be fabulous archivists
Friends are just one of life’s wonders that make life worth living. I always feel very thankful and very lucky that a couple of my closest friends also happen to be archivists. It is so nice to be able to talk about work and research with people who get what I’m saying. These are the friends who I can count on to respond within minutes to a panicked message about confusing metadata standards and who will make sure I don’t lose myself in the Hollinger boxes down in the archives too long. They are the people I can geek out over archives and library stuff and then turn to talking about other important issues such as the best way to make English muffins or debating whether Eccleston or Tennant was a better Doctor. Bonding over paper cuts, freezing cold archives, and late nights talking about anything and everything make these people the ones I turn to for support (and support them) because they are always there. That’s what friends are for and having some that actually understand respect de fonds and OAIS are just (amazing) bonuses. (And I have amazing friends who are librarians too, but wanted to give a special shout out to my archivist friends because, really, archivists need to get some of love too.)

3. Amazing friends who aren’t in the field, but believe librarians are pretty cool
Obviously I don’t spend all my time in the archives or library (really it’s true) and not all my friends are in the field, but they still think librarians are pretty nifty people. And it is awesome to hear about their research and work in aviculture and veterinary practice, among other things. What can I say? I am blessed to have people who want to talk about books, can have fun being fangirls at author book signings, and understand the awesome appeal of Nerdfighteria.

4. Librarians and archivists who are actually proud of their work and their profession
Okay, so we all know that the economy pretty much is pathetic right now and it is seriously difficult to get a job. I will totally not deny those facts. I won’t argue either with the point that some universities are accepting way too many students for the number of jobs in our fields. (I will however take issue with the people who say that a specialization in archives will be a “hot” job segment. First archives are related to libraries, not a specialization in libraries, and second archivists have just as difficult time finding work as librarians, if not more.) But none of these points are what I really want to talk about in this list about things I’m thankful for.

I am so eternally grateful to those librarians and archivists who are proud of their work and their profession. Really, thank you. I’m always thrilled when I talk with people who are confident enough in their work and selves that they don’t feel the need to apologize for it. I love people who won’t make excuses for what they do or put down the profession. We do important work and should act like it. So thank you to those of you who are positive, realistic and true professionals. It makes me smile and glad to be a part of the profession.

5. You, dear reader
I am so thankful for you, dear reader, for continuing to read what I write and to converse with me about topics in the library-archives-tech field. It is fantastic. I adore that I’m not just throwing my writing into a black hole of nothingness. You make the time and energy it takes to write this blog worthwhile. So give yourself a pat on the back and know that you are appreciated.

And to end, enjoy this lovely, beautiful, and wonderful Doctor Who video, His Name is “The Doctor,” made by one of the best video creators I’ve seen on YouTube (and no, it has nothing to do with Thanksgiving, other than the fact that I’m thankful that both Eccleston and Tennant were the Doctor):

I hope you have a fantastic, restful, wonderful Thanksgiving. I’ll be back next week with more library and tech fun. Thank you, as always, for reading and conversing with me.

Web Typography and Other Geeky Fun

/ dwakimoto

Hello, dear readers. I know I’m a bit late in publishing this post. I’m sorry, but I plead illness as my excuse and hopefully you’ll find something in today’s bag of geeky fun useful and that will absolve me from the horror of not posting on a Friday. Anyway, as the good doctor would say, Allons-y!

It’s probably fairly obvious by now, but I have a weakness for good design and lovely typography. I’m, not surprisingly, very happy with Smashing Magazine lately for all their wonderful resources on typography, especially this round-up of 100 educational resources, tools and techniques for web typography. Get ready to drool if you have an appreciation for well-designed fonts and layouts.

Speaking of fonts, something else that is fun to play with is WhatFontis.com. Upload an image of a font you can’t identify and (with any luck) WhatFontis will be able to identify it for you. Yes, I know, this could be very, very bad because you might spend hours playing with this site. Don’t say I haven’t warned you.

In other useful, geeky news, check out this article from The Atlantic on taking care of your personal archives. What can I say? I get excited whenever an interview with an archivist gets published in something other than Archival Outlook. Read it and then get cracking on backing-up, remounting, and otherwise taking care of your personal archives.

In other super-important news, today is the 12th Annual International Transgender Day of Remembrance. Please go over to the Future Feminist Librarian-Activist’s site and read Anna’s thoughtful post for today.

In other, not nearly as important, but good for some weekend relaxation and enjoyment news, I have to share with you Joy the Baker’s vegan pumpkin walnut bread recipe. It is superb and makes two giant loaves of bread–perfect for when you find out your new intern is vegan and none of your standard baking recipes are anywhere close to being vegan (just saying). Also, just on the off chance you missed it last week, here’s a link to Stephen Abram’s Geek cred post.

And if you missed part 1 of John Green’s explanation of the French Revolution, or want to see parts 2 & 3, head over to Hanna’s blog where she has posted all of them.

As for me, my pick for a video this week is John Green’s video about his latest trip to Amsterdam because I know a lot of people will be traveling soon for Thanksgiving and will probably be able to empathize with John’s experiences with airports and flights. Enjoy.

Have a lovely weekend, rest, relax, and read (and don’t catch a cold; it’s no fun). See you next week for more tech, library, and archival fun!