Month: April 2006

carnival and other readings

Carnival of the Infosciences #34 is up at Library Stuff with the usual goodies. Next week it moves north to Blog Without a Library.

Looking for more to read? Here’s a wonderful and inspiring story from the Guardian about a library in the UK that decided to work with teens rather than against them.

And finally, back in the US, the latest recommended reading list is out from the Dominican University Rosary College of Arts and Sciences faculty. They’ve been putting these together for the past few years; sometimes the recommendations come from faculty, sometimes from graduating seniors. You can see all the lists on the library home page.

presentation

As promised, here’s a link to the presentation I’m giving tomorrow on blogs, rss, wikis, and IM.  A good deal of it will look very familiar if you’ve spent time poking around in other people’s presentations (many thanks to Aaron, Meredith, and Jessamyn, and to Michael Stephens for the OPAL talk that led to this shindig).  Minor poets imitate; major poets steal, and the rest of us are just thankful that we have such smart and generous colleagues.

I’m still fiddling with it a bit, so if you see any egregious errors, do let me know. 

impersonation

Update: the link for the Bloglines account should work now–thanks to Mom for the tipoff.

Have I mentioned lately that my job rocks? And that librarians rock?

A few weeks ago, several of my colleagues attended Michael Stephen’s OPAL talk Ten Top Technologies for Libraries in 2006. They came away intrigued but slightly overwhelmed, and so my director has asked me to do a little talk about new technologies for libraries at the all-county staff meeting this Wednesday. I’m going to be talking about blogs and RSS, wikis, and IM. Actually, I’m thinking of subtitling my talk “How to Steal Stuff from Your Librarian Friends,” since I’ve pretty much been swiping (with Creative Commons or other permission) slides from other people’s talks right and left. Or, as I wrote to Michael Stephens shortly after I was asked to do the talk, “I get to be you!”

I’ll post a link to the talk when I get it up, probably later tonight. In the meantime, though, you might like to check out the little Bloglines account (with some Wyoming specific blogs, some general ones, and some fun stuff, but not too much of anything) that I put together to demonstrate the power of RSS. And, if I should happen to IM you on Wednesday, I’m probably doing so in front of a live audience. Consider yourselves warned.

carnival treats

I am consistently amazed by the wisdom to be found in the biblioblogosphere.  Oh sure, we have our quarrels, our infighting, our what list am I on anyway? moments, but then we get back to the good stuff, like this week’s Carnival of the Infosciences (#33) at ReferenceWORK. 

The Krafty Librarian blogs about what to do when you are successful; T. Scott blogs about learning from past success and failure.  And if all of that is too ethereal for you, there are a couple of links to instructions on how to build library Firefox search plugins.

Next week the Carnival makes a return visit to Library Stuff.  Here are the submission guidelines.  Now go forth and blog!

tornado was here


IAKS120.jpgOriginally uploaded by kevinsanders.

In 1998, I lived in the basement pink house that now has a tarp for a roof and no front porch, and from 2001-2003, I lived in another house a couple blocks away. My friends now live–or did until the storm hit–on the top floor of the pink house. They were crouched right inside the door, next to the porch that is no longer there, when the tornado hit. I am happy to say that they are okay. Many of the houses around them were pretty well destroyed.

update, 17 April

I promise to leave the land of small-time natural disasters and return to librarianship in the near future, but in the meantime, you can see another view of the house and street, this time from the New York Times. The pink house on the far left is the one where I lived in 1998 and my friends live now; the house next door to it is where my oldest friend lived for several years when she was a little girl. Here’s an account from my friends the current residents, with links to more photos.

tornado

My hometown, Iowa City, was hit by a tornado last night.  I have heard from my mother and many friends, and so far all are okay, cats included, although everyone knows someone whose house was damaged or car destroyed.

The governor has declared a state of emergency in several counties; the University of Iowa has cancelled classes (the first time in my memory that has ever happened), and the Iowa City Public Library is closed today.  There are photos of the storm and the damage here and here and here, and Flickr has a growing collection of photos under the tag iowacity. 

It’s very weird to be 1200 miles away right now, and to have heard Dean Borg of WSUI on the national NPR newscast this morning.  For the moment I’m just  glad that so far my friends and family are safe.

palindrome carnival

Carnival of the Infosciences #32 is up and running at Tangognat, with verbal tidbits from all around the biblioblogosphere, including a crossword puzzle [pdf] from my fellow Wyoming librarians at the Wyoming Law Library Letter.  (And while you’re there, check out the post on word processing confidentiality, with tips on how to get rid of that metadata that Microsoft automatically adds to all your documents.  Apparently the tools for erasing the metadata also come from Microsoft, so I guess the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house, at least sometimes. . . .)

local news

People often think that since I moved to a town of 351 people, I’ve kind of dropped out of modern civilization. I’m writing this post from my home, where I have DSL, courtesy of our excellent local phone company, TCT West, and the library has a T1 line and four public access computers, so that’s not quite true. In some ways, actually, I feel like the opposite is true.

Take local news, for example. When I lived in suburban Chicago, there was one twice weekly newspaper that covered sixteen suburbs with a total population of over 126,000 people and was part of a chain that provided similar newspapers for about sixty of Chicago’s suburbs. Good luck getting any news about your library’s summer reading program reported.

Here in Meeteetse, we get five newspapers at the library. We have the Billings Gazette and the Casper Star-Tribune for regional and state news. But we also get local newspapers from around our region. Cody, population 8835, has a twice weekly paper, the Cody Enterprise. Powell, population 5373, has the twice weekly Powell Tribune. And Worland, population 5250, puts out the Northern Wyoming Daily News five days a week (it is too bad they no longer call it the Worland Grit, but you can’t have everything). All these papers rely to some extent on wire stories, but they all also have local staff who attend city council meetings and county commissioners’ meetings, who take pictures at high school ball games, and who write impassioned editorials about the delisting of wolves and grizzlies from the Endangered Species list; the Cap Tax II initiative that, if passed, will fund a new library in Cody, a new pool in Powell, and a refurbished pool here in Meeteetse; and the state legislature’s recent failure to pass a bill banning open containers in cars (currently you can drink all you want in a vehicle as long as you’re not the driver). And just this past week, the Cody Enterprise reported that the state of Wyoming will soon have its first tourism podcast, developed and produced right here in Park County.

When I hear people say that newspapers are dead, I always wonder where they live. It’s true that the media conglomeration that has bled the fm dial of local djs and diverse music has also gobbled up local newspapers, so that in many parts of the country, your “local news” is a canned Gannett product with about as much news value as the back of a cereal box. That’s been true of most of the places I lived (with the exception of Indianapolis, where the newspapers were locally owned, but owned by Dan Quayle’s family, which sometimes made them of dubious news value when we lived there, from 1988-1990).

Does your library have microfilm of old newspapers? If so, dip into it sometime. You might be surprised at what you find. Earlier this week I took several boxes of microfilm of the Cody Enterprise down to our local museum, since sadly, we don’t have a microfilm reader at the library. Even more sadly, the museum doesn’t have one either, so now we’re both trying to track one down. In the meantime, though, I’ll relish all the current local news that we’re lucky enough to have here on the edge of the wilderness.

how i got my job

The short story: I got lucky.

A year ago at this time I was a semester and a half into library school, and I’d been reading library blogs for several months. I went to library school because I already had two useless degrees (they call the MFA a terminal degree, as I like to say, because it leads nowhere), and librarianship seemed like a far better option than, say, law school. (I have great respect for the many good lawyers of the world, but after a friend told me that in law school they had lockers and bells, “just like high school!”, I knew it wasn’t for me.)
I had a terrible time finding a part-time library support staff job, both before I started library school and after. I got one letter that said, essentially, “Sorry, we were looking for someone with an education background and customer service experience.” (“Oh,” said a friend of mine, “they wanted an education major who worked at Wal-Mart.”) Apparently my three years of college teaching and four years of teaching at a whacky alternative elementary school didn’t count for anything.

Blog reading led me to follow the struggles that people like Dorothea and Meredith, people with educations and skills equal to and in most cases surpassing my own, were having finding jobs. I began to get worried. So I began to do the kinds of things that people suggested

  • I eventually got a job as a youth services assistant at a library in the western suburbs (and had the pleasure of being a co-worker of Rachel Gordon Singer for a few months)
  • In my archives class, we could either write a research paper or do an internship–I chose the internship even though it meant a 13-hour day and eating dinner in my car
  • I subscribed to the RSS feed for LISjobs.com/Library Job Postings on the Internet so I could get an idea of what was out there
  • I read articles at LISCareer.com and Info Career Trends
  • I joined ALA and got involved by helping plan the Free Speech Buffet for the ALA conference in Chicago (had I wanted to stay in Illinois, I think joining the Illinois Library Association would have been equally if not more beneficial)
  • I started asking my savvy friends for advice on how to arrange my resume so it looked less like I’d spent the past five years or so meandering through graduate programs. (You can see the result; sorry it’s a PDF).
  • I started lis.dom and got to know, virtually and sometimes personally, a bunch of enthusiastic, energetic, and extremely talented library people

Last August, I ran across an ad for a job in Meeteetse, Wyoming. Since Wyoming was high on my list of states I wanted to live in, I whipped out my road atlas and looked it up. It looked pretty good. So even though I had a full year of school left, I sent off a letter and my resume, just in case.

In the next few months, I sent out a couple of other letters, both also for branch manager or director positions in small rural libraries. I was asked to interview at two of the three places I applied; the third called to say that they’d love to interview me, but needed to hire someone ASAP.

I had a telephone interview for the Wyoming job in November and flew out for an interview in January, so it was a long process. But, as it turned out, well worth it.

I don’t know why I got lucky in the job market when so many other talented people have struggled. It may have helped that I was applying almost exclusively to places with populations under 10,000. It probably helped that I found ways to emphasize how my other work experience–writing and teaching–was applicable to librarianship. But ultimately, I don’t know; I’m just grateful.

So what about my blog? I put the url of my website on my resume, chiefly as a way saying “look, I can make a website!” but also because even without the website and the blog, I had a fairly sizeable web presence, and I preferred to have some control over its presentation. (Having just Googled myself, I’ve found that the results have been pretty much overtaken by biblioblogosphere comments, but it used to be a much odder assortment of links).

I know that a few people on a couple of the search committees looked at lis.dom. It didn’t come up in any interviews, and I don’t think anyone decided to hire me or not hire me based on the blog or anything in it. I do think, however, that blogging gave me stake in librarianship that nothing else did. It let me get my feet wet, and it let me join in a conversation about the profession with many of its best and brightest.

I enjoyed first listening to that conversation and then joining in, and I’m deeply grateful to all the people whom I’ve exchanged comments and e-mails and IMs with over the past months, and to those whose writings I’ve just read. You all rock.