‘puters

be organized from the very beginning

A difficult part of technology instruction is not that things are unknowable, but that no one is ever starting at the beginning, not in 2024.

a woman in a fancy dress siting at a typewriter with a cigarette in her mouth. She is lookig over her shoulder ta the camera — How I work – image from State Library of New South Wales

I was reading this post by my colleague Alex talking about digital decluttering. Like Alex, I can get stuck into a hyperfocus jag where I am doing nothing but cleaning up data and I enjoy it a lot. My email archives go back to… 1996 which was actually further back than I was expecting. I periodically archive my websites. I’ve had the good fortune to have suffered no major data losses other than a few months of pictures between backups once, before I got good at doing those regularly. I like doing digital tidying tasks.

a man sititng in front of a desk which is piled high with neatly organized mail — Image from the Smithsonian Institution

Most people I see at the library for tech help are not like me. They don’t enjoy messing with tech just to mess with it. They’d like to spend less time fussing with technology and more time using it to do the things they want to do. But they feel stuck in a rut. They know they have “deferred maintenance” on their tech lives and are not sure how to start tackling the problem.

When I am helping someone with a computer issue, it often only takes me a few minutes of looking at their device to see if their problem is technological in nature or not. Sometimes people need help doing a thing, learning a task, or understanding a concept. I can help them with that and then they wander off and do okay on their own. Sometimes people have memory issues and we can talk about memory strategies: using password managers, making lists, setting reminders. Other times people are just disorganized, and this both is and is not a tech issue. Continue reading “be organized from the very beginning”

Ask A Librarian: Getting Live Transcription Working with Zoom

Posted on 28Jan2228Jan22 by jessamyn

From a local hearing impaired pal: Can you help the library to get captions on Zoom? They’ve been trying to figure it out for a couple of months now. I asked them to have you help them, but I don’t think they’ve tried that.

Live captions are now a service available to anyone with a Zoom account, paid or free, but its not always obvious how to get it working. I got it sorted for my local library so I figured I’d write down my steps in case it helps others. Turns out this is a thing you have to first turn on in the settings which is confusing. Continue reading “Ask A Librarian: Getting Live Transcription Working with Zoom”

Ask A Librarian: Sharing links behind a soft paywall?

Posted on 21Jan2221Jan22 by jessamyn

screenshot from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine indicating that the page is available live on the web.

From a friend in my trivia community: I’ll post a link to an article or something on FB and/or Twitter, and I hear from Euro folk about how they’re blocked from reading it. I’d like to have a go-to answer for them that would be broadly applicable. Can you give me a generalized technique for this problem when it arises?

Sure! This is also how I get around soft-paywalls like “You have read all your free articles this month” (won’t work with “You have to pay to see this at all”) for news sites like the New York Times and other places I may not have full access too. Here are steps. Continue reading “Ask A Librarian: Sharing links behind a soft paywall?”

what you learn in library school, what’s in a name

Posted on 24May2110Jul21 by jessamyn

library of congress advanced search boxes

I use my library school education in odd ways. I barely knew library school was a thing before I went to library school. So I’m not entirely surprised when other people don’t know that many, if not most, librarians have some sort of professional-level education. Library education is a curious mix of what I think of as trade-school work–learning to do repetitive tasks efficiently and within the scope of an existing protocol–and professional work–thinking about big picture ideas like intellectual freedom and how to determine what a book is really “about.” In the work I do nowadays, I am more likely to use my decades of experience than I am to use things I specifically learned in school, but there are a few exceptions. Doing research to write Wikipedia articles uses a lot of my library school learning.

Continue reading “what you learn in library school, what’s in a name”

Ask A Librarian: Senior-Friendly Devices?

Posted on 17Dec2017Dec20 by jessamyn

hands of two men using a tablet computer

I’m working with a Council on Aging and they are looking for “senior-friendly” devices to purchase for their participants, ideally tablets that are also budget friendly. Does anyone have any recommendations? Are there any resources that exist to help people compare devices?

My opinion, as someone who works with seniors all the time who struggle with various devices, is that any device can be set up to be “senior friendly” and a lot of this will depend what other technology, if any, exists in their world.

So for someone who had a Mac, even an old Mac, an iPad is the right answer (could be an old iPad, they are remarkably useful still). Someone with a Windows laptop wouldn’t get as many “it just works” effects from one. I feel like the important part is setting up tablets to work for people which involves… Continue reading “Ask A Librarian: Senior-Friendly Devices?”