Courage

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! I hope your day is going well, dear readers. It finally feels like summer here in the Bay Area, which is actually a nice change from the cold (at least in my opinion). Today I just want to write a little bit about courage as I’ve been thinking about it a lot and want to hear your thoughts on courage and your work. Let me explain.

Most people would probably agree that courage is a positive attribute or characteristic to possess. Two of my favorite quotes about courage are from Ernest Hemingway and Ruth Fishel, respectively. Hemingway wrote that “courage is grace under pressure” and Fishel wrote that “courage is fear that has said its prayers.” What I like about these quotes is that they remind us that it’s not an all or nothing proposition when it comes to courage. We can still be scared and worried when we are courageous. Courage is not, then, some super-human feat of perfection. It completely works in with my “fake it ’til you make it” approach to a lot of things in life.

So why am I thinking so much about courage lately?

Three reasons:

  1. It is summer quarter which means I have time to breathe and actually reflect instead of simply running around trying to keep up with day-to-day stresses of the regular academic year.
  2. This reflection has led me to ponder how I can foster more courage in my students to stand by their own goals in their education and life. How can we foster courage?
  3. I also wonder how I can have more courage to boldly challenge, share, and implement ideas, research, and projects that may be challenging to my current work and colleagues.

It can be difficult to be courageous and also difficult for some to separate being courageous from being pushy or foolhardy. Perhaps, it comes down to creating an environment that is supportive and encourages people to speak up and share what could be unpopular ideas. Maybe that’s the classroom–it’s a training ground for being both respectful and courageous and through these experiences we (both teachers and students) can be courageous in our work, in our sharing, and in our lives.

Or maybe I’m just over-thinking things and others feel that they are courageous enough in their work and are, for lack of a better term, “change agents” who actually get things accomplished in ways that bring people, ideas, and projects together.

Let me know what you think in comments.

That’s all I really have to share today. Let’s end with today’s great comic strip by xkcd. It *so* reminds me of the craziness with metadata standards.

standards by xkcd

standards by xkcd

Have a wonderful day and I’ll be back on Friday with the usual round up of tech news and notes to share with your family, friends, and archives/library patrons. Allons-y!

Laptop and Life Tips

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday! I hope you are having a lovely Friday, dear readers. Today I want to share a roundup of some tips on laptops and some hacks for life. Then I want to get you on your way to enjoying your weekend.

Does Lifehacker ever fail to bring us great tips to share? I think not. First, check out Lifehacker’s article on what to do if your laptop battery is not lasting as long as it used to. Then refer people over to Gizmodo’s article on the best back to school laptops if they are in the market for buying a laptop for school or for their kids or just want some information on laptop choices in general.

After you are done with the tips on laptops, take a read through Lifehacker’s Top 10 real world Easter Eggs and cheat codes. You’ll probably find at least one cheat code you can use to improve your efficiency in getting things done and decrease your annoyance with certain life tasks.

Now let’s turn to some fun stuff. Hopefully the weather has been nice where you live and you feel like having people over for dinner parties. If you are like me, sometimes you forget the ins-and-outs of correctly setting a table. Again, Lifehacker comes to the rescue with how to set the table properly.

If you need help on figuring out what to make for dinner (or lunch or tea time), you could always check out the lovely recipes on Joy the Baker or Gojee, which has some of the most gorgeous food photography I’ve seen. Both sites will make you hungry. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Finally, let’s get nostalgic for a moment, take a work break and watch this lovely video about the Tenth Doctor (credit to Seduff for the amazing video):

Have a fantastic weekend filled with good fun, wonderful friends, and yummy food (plus a good book and maybe a cup of tea, too). I’ll be back next week with more tips, tricks, and news. Allons-y!

Letterpress Fun!

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! I hope you are having a lovely day, dear readers. Someone has confused the weather here in the Bay Area and it is raining today. I feel like sleeping rather than working, but alas, that is not to be. Instead, I’m going to talk just briefly about some fun I had over the weekend and then let you get back to your day.

On Saturday I went to San Francisco Center for the Book in order to see Moveable Type, which I’ve already talked about on this blog. It’s pretty awesome to see a converted van that’s set up for demonstrating the art of using letterpresses. It was awesome to hear Kyle Durrie (who also owns and runs Power and Light Press in Portland, Oregon) talk about her craft and demonstrate the usage of two of her presses.

My favorite of the two presses was definitely the one in the photo below, which used to be used a lot by businesses to create inexpensive posters and ads.

Letterpress

Letterpress

We even got to try our hand at using the letterpresses. This is the result of what I made using the above letterpress. I think it came out rather well.

Example from the Letterpress

Example from the Letterpress

Finally, Kyle Durrie was selling some of her letterpress cards and posters, all of which were awesome. I couldn’t help but buy a couple of the design featured below. (I told her I was a librarian and she thought it was rather appropriate that I bought the cards.)

Checkout Slip Card

Checkout Slip Card

You should check out Moveable Type’s blog to see if the Type Truck is coming to your neck of the woods and you can always request a visit if there isn’t a stop near you. And, if it works out in her schedule, maybe Kyle will do a demo in your hometown.

I thought it was a great way to spend a day in the city and a great juxtaposition to all the technology stuff so many of us are working with and on during the workweek. Now I just have to figure out how to make one of those poster presses…

I hope the rest of your day is wonderful (and rain-free). I’ll be back on Friday with some archives, library, and tech news. Allons-y!

Relaxing and Planning

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope your day is going splendidly and you have a wonderful weekend planned. Today I have a few tools and articles to share with you on relaxing and planning. So let’s just get into the tips so you can get on with planning your weekend.

Yes, I want to share some Lifehacker links on planning, just in case you missed them. I find thinking about planning things anxiety-producing, but actually making and executing a plan very relaxing. Yeah, I’m that kind of person. Anyway, if you haven’t thought about retirement planning, you should, and Lifehacker has a great guide to retirement planning. Sometimes, the Internet is wonderful and the online tools in the article are super-helpful. If you have any other tools you recommend, please share them in the comments.

Also good for planning is Lifehacker’s article on creating a master information kit. I’m totally finishing this kit this weekend and making sure the important people in my life know where to find it and how to access it. Being prepared is good. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Another cool tip is this one from Gizmodo on how to get rid of Google’s black bar. Share it with your friends, family members, and patrons who don’t like the new look of Google. They’ll think you are awesome, really. When I told some of my colleagues how to turn off threading in Gmail conversations, they thought it was wonderful. (I happen to love threading, but you know, different strokes for different folks.) Customization of your online experience= brilliant.

I hope you have the time to take a true vacation this summer. As you get ready for vacation, consider implementing danah boyd’s email sabbatical. This is truly a great idea to avoid having to check email while on vacation and also avoid the dreaded email avalanche when you get back to the office. I find breaks away from work email truly wonderful and plan on implementing an email sabbatical when I go on my next trip, which hopefully will be in the not too distant future (*fingers crossed*).

Finally, I want to leave you with another wonderful photograph from beautiful portals. I hope you have some place similar to curl up with a good book this weekend.

Stairs and Doorway

Stairs and Doorway

Have a lovely weekend, full of relaxation, good food and good company (also, a good book and a cup of tea are always nice, too). I’ll be back next week with more tech, archives, and library notes and news. Allons-y!

Portals and Teaching

/ dwakimoto / 1 Comment

Happy Wednesday! I hope you are having a lovely day. Today I just want to talk briefly about portals and teaching. (And apologies to those who immediately thought of Portal 2, I’m not talking about video game.) Plus share some pretty photographs from one of my favorite Tumblr feeds.

I teach information literacy along with my fellow librarian colleagues at my university. I love teaching, but I also love summer when the library is quiet and I get a break from teaching. In addition to catching up on a lot of my own learning, research, and work, I use the summer to revise my information literacy course. I tear apart the class every summer in order to improve it based on student comments and my own observations in order to make it more useful and relevant to my students. So that gets me to the topic of portals.

Some of you may have heard of The Threshold Concept and how it relates to learning. Basically you have to go through a threshold, or portal, in order to learn a new concept. It is a tricky, sometimes annoying and difficult process, but once you cross a threshold your thinking and perception will have been “transformed.” Obviously this got me to thinking about portals and photography (I’ll explain in a minute) and how I could use images of portals to spur discussion in my classes.

So now to one of my favorite Tumblr feeds, Beautiful Portals. There are amazing photographs of portals on this Tumblr, many of which involving staircases and/or books. I’m hopefully that I can use some of the images to get my students discussing learning as a process and the various thresholds/portals we go through as we learn and grow. But I’m not exactly sure what I’ll be doing yet. Luckily I have two more months to figure it out.

For now, enjoy a couple of the wonderful images from Beautiful Portals:

From Beautiful Portals

And this lovely photography, reblogged from craigfinlay

The Abbey Bookshop, Paris, France

The Abbey Bookshop, Paris, France by craigfinlay

Do you use threshold concepts when teaching? How do you integrate images into your teaching? How do you conceptualize learning and teaching? I’d love to hear about it in comments.

Have a fantastic rest of your day and I’ll be back on Friday with some tech news and tools to share with your patrons. Allons-y!

Dropbox and the Cloud

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday! I hope you are having a lovely day, dear readers. Today I’m going to share some great links to secure your Dropbox account. These would be great to share with your patrons as more and more people are going to cloud storage. Dropbox is great. Being able to use Dropbox and still have your files secure is better.

We’ve all heard about Dropbox accounts being unlocked for 4 hours, right? And if that isn’t enough to make you want to use encrypted zip file to secure files in Dropbox, I don’t know what will. I love cloud storage and being able to collaborate via the cloud, but I don’t like the thought of my data being unsecured. So take a break from the backyard barbecue this weekend and secure your data.

Lifehacker has had a ton of good articles about security and Dropbox including how to add a second layer of encryption. (Have you sensed an encryption theme in today’s post?) Once you’ve secured your data, you might want to also check out the article on how to free up disk space by deleting files in the hidden Dropbox cache folder. More disk space is handy.

Also, as we go forth into the cloud, you should check out Gizmodo’s article on bandwidth caps around the world. This may become an even bigger issue as more and more people start uploading their data to the cloud and streaming media from the cloud. If nothing else, it will give you something to talk about during your barbecue this weekend.

And while not technically about the cloud and Dropbox, AccountKiller is something you may want to check out if you need help deleting some of your unused accounts online.

Now for the Friday fun bits. If you are in the United States, today marks the start of the long 4th of July weekend. For those hosting/going to a barbecue, you may want to check out Joy the Baker’s bourbon orange coriander barbecue sauce. Also, you should really try strawberry balsamic flatbread. It’s delicious.

Finally, for a work break to make you smile. Check out this lovely Tangled video by Seduff. I just finally saw this movie on my birthday and loved it. Now I feel like I need a coloring changing chameleon from ThinkGeek.

Have a lovely rest of your day, a fabulous (relaxing) weekend, and I’ll be back next week with more tech, library, and archives tips and news. Allons-y!

Privacy and Security Checks

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! I hope you are having a lovely day. For today’s post, I want to share a few links that should be useful for checking on the security of your passwords, searching, and data. Then let’s finish up with some helpful tips for summer cooking.

Lifehacker, Gizmodo, and other techie websites have shared a bunch of great resources for increasing the security of your browsing, passwords, and checking for security compromises to your various online accounts in the past week or so. A few that you might want to share with your patrons are: Should I Change My Password? (super-easy to use, just type in your email account to see if it may have been hacked); Panopticlick (checks how “unique and trackable your browser is,” plus EFF provides information on how to make your browser less trackable); and web worker security: how to keep your data safe at a distance (great for anyone who travels a lot and/or telecommutes). Hopefully these tools will help you and your patrons, plus they are a great way to start raising awareness about privacy and security issues online. (Then you can go into the wonders of Google 2-step authentication and maybe even file encryption.)

After you’ve helped secure your patrons online accounts, find some great books, articles, and/or movies, they might also be thinking about lunch/snack/dinner. Luckily, we’ve got you covered for that stuff, too. Point them to Lifehacker’s guide on how to select fresh ripe produce so they are armed with knowledge the next time they go to the grocery store or farmer’s market. You might also want to suggest this delicious sounding recipe for grilled corn salad. Enjoy.

That’s it for today. I’m off now to the reference desk. Have a wonderful rest of your day. I’ll be back on Friday with some more news and tech tips to share. Allons-y!

You Don't (Always) Have to Listen to the Complainers

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday! Isn’t fantastic to make it to the end of another week and have it be Friday? I quite like Fridays. To celebrate today, I thought we’d talk about ignoring complainers and end with something fun. How does that sound? Good? Let’s get into it then.

Again today I’m taking inspiration from Seth Godin, specifically his post on giving umbrage. I enjoy most of Godin’s posts, but I loved this post. The issue of what to do about vocal complainers, especially now that it is so easy to air every little perceived wrong online, and the weight that these complaints should have is one of the constant issues I think about in life and in my work as an instructor.

One place that this conflict of how much power and time to give to complainers is on evaluation forms filled out by students at the end of a course. Many institutions, including mine, place a good deal of emphasis on getting good student evaluations. But, as many of us know from firsthand experience (and also evidence-based studies), the evaluations reflect whether or not the students liked you, not whether the course was useful or your teaching style was effective.

Now I’m completely for listening to student feedback and thoughtful reflection. I encourage feedback from my students and incorporate a lot of their suggestions into my subsequent classes. And, for the most part, I receive mature, considered evaluations from my students. However, I’ve also been on the end of receiving immature, uncalled for expletives because I’ve refused to pass failing students or reported instances of academic dishonesty. These have been incredibly vocal students, but should these complainers be taken seriously?

I don’t think so. It’s like letting one canister of film with vinegar syndrome destroying the rest of the film in an archives. You don’t let that happen, just like you throw out outliers when doing statistical analyses. Especially as an instructor, if you try anything out of the ordinary and/or have high expectations, most of your students will react positively and do swimmingly. But you also have to be ready for the complainers, therefore you need to develop a thick skin and the ability to let your department chair or supervisor know why you are getting a few complaints amidst the heaps of praise (or at least neutral comments) from the rest of your students.

In life too, it seems like we spend a lot of time catering to those who are belligerent complainers. We see this in libraries, archives, and really all service professions. But we’ll never please everyone, so we should focus on being receptive and reflective, but not bending every (single) time someone complains. If we do, we’ll never get anything done and be constantly on defense, which isn’t fun. Be receptive to constructive criticism, not groundless whining and complaining.

Anyway, that’s my (more than) two cents on the matter.

Now on to some fun stuff for your weekend. It’s finally summer and it’s just turned quite warm in the Bay Area. I think it’s then the perfect time to try out Joy the Baker’s strawberry balsamic flatbread. It looks delicious and perfect with a salad.

And to end, one of my favorite Doctor Who videos (because yes, the 11th Doctor is fabulous, but I adore the 10th Doctor). So enjoy Seduff’s “Lonely Angel.”

Have a fantastic rest of your day and a glorious weekend. I’ll be back next week with more thoughts on archives, libraries, and tech. Allons-y!

Content Programming

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday, dear readers! I hope that your day is going well. I hope that this post goes up and is publicized via Twitter as scheduled considering I’ll be on a plane going to a friend’s wedding when this is supposed to be posted and who knows when I’ll be back online. Anyway, today I just want to riff on one of Seth Godin’s latest posts and what I think it has to do with archivists and librarians. So let’s get into the fun of content programming.

Seth Godin recently wrote this post, In Praise of Programming. It’s a nice, short, interesting read. I’ll wait here while you read it. See? Quite interesting, right? It reminded me immediately of the work that archivists and librarians do everyday. We constantly do programming, whether we are in a public library setting, academic setting, or community archives.

I think it’s important to remember that we are about programming and that programming is a social activity. It’s not that we are just data curators or content distributors, we are also about value-added programming. This may be in the form of recommending what to read next, explaining how to actually use that shiny new tech tool in a meaningful way in the classroom, or directing the researcher to that newly processed collection that hasn’t made it into the online database just yet. We create meaning and connections through programming. I think this is one of the most important things that we do each day.

It is also a reminder that we need to remember our audience in all that we do. We need to involve the users/patrons/researchers in our programming. This is a great time to flex your evidence-based practice muscles and gather some data from your users to improve programming at your archives and library.

It’s such an exciting time we live in, with tons of change and new opportunities. But instead of running around like kittens, cashing every new shiny thing in our path, we can thoughtful collect, curate, and program our services and resources to have maximum impact in our communities. It is an art and I think we are more than up to the task.

So that’s what I have to say about programming. Now let’s move on to something else that is super-interesting: Moveable Type! I’m excited about the Type Truck coming to my neck of the woods. A letterpress in a truck! How amazingly awesome is that? I’m very much looking forward to the demonstrations. So check out if the Type Truck is coming to your area and let me know what you think.

That’s all from me today, dear readers. I hope the rest of your day goes swimmingly and you have a relaxing evening. I’ll be back on Friday with more. Allons-y!

An Apology and An Introduction

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you are having a lovely day and have a relaxing weekend planned. Today’s post will be very short. I have two things to share and a cute video to leave you with today. Regularly scheduled blogging will resume shortly.

First, an apology for lack of posts the last few weeks. I’ve been ill and not up to doing much of anything other than sleeping. Luckily, I’m on the mend so there will be more regular posts on The Waki Librarian going forward, as per usual. But I just wanted to let you know the reason behind my silence on my blog and Twitter. Illness: so inconvenient for getting anything done.

Anyway, now on to the fun announcement/introduction. My friend, Jesse, has started blogging! You should check out her blog over at Low Tech Librarian. It’s also a great blog to share with those you know who might be a little more reticent to dive into the wild world of digital, online, crazy tech tools, programming, coding, etc.. And, although, I’m probably more than a little biased, I think it’s a lovely blog. Jesse updates it once a week. So go on over and give a new blogger a welcome the the librarian/archivist blogosphere.

Finally, to end, enjoy a study/work break with Simon’s Cat:

Have a wonderful rest of your day and a glorious weekend. I’ll be back next week with more archives, libraries, and tech news. Allons-y!