putting the rarin back in librarian since 1999
My drop-in time work used to be a lot of teaching basic skills. “Here’s how to click. Now here’s how to right-click.” Then for a time it was teaching people about software. “Here’s how a menu works in Microsoft Word.” Then it was more about social media, then mobile phones. Lately it’s still a bit of all of those things, but the major thing I do is something I call “How do I connect this to that?” Continue reading “Connecting this to that”
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.
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.
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”
“Public.work is a search engine for public domain content.” The site claims to have over 100,000 public domain images. This in and of itself is not that special, but the interface is. It’s gorgeous, a fun and engaging discovery layer where every search becomes a URL that can be shared [example] and the page of images endlessly scrolls up, down, and even sideways. Of course, the endless scroll is a bit of a fiction because many niche searches have few results and thus you see images repeating almost immediately. As someone who has seen a lot of repositories of public domain images come and go, I realized I’ve become something of an expert in them. Here are some of my thoughts. Continue reading “The mining of the public domain”
This started out as a cranky email and then I decided to write this up instead and be (somewhat) constructive.
I was listening to a local history podcast which I love called Before Your Time. It’s a joint project of the Vermont Historical Society and Vermont Humanities (where I used to be a board member). They look at one item from the VHS collection and talk about what it tells us about the history of Vermont. It’s a well-produced podcast which is full of facts and yet also brief. I liked this one in particular because it’s about forests and one of the people they interview is my county forester and I like listening to him. The other two people they interview are a librarian at VHS and a man who was a past director of VHS and wrote a book about Vermont maps. One of the things they both mention is how much they both wish that their collections were used more. In fact the former director says towards the end of the podcast
I hope people who listen to the podcast take the initiative to go to some of the great collections. You can’t be more than about 25 to 50 miles away from excellent Vermont history collections if you’re living in the state, whether it’s Bennington Museum in the southwest, Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, the VHS here in Barre, UVM Special Collections in, in Burlington, extraordinary resources that are open to anyone who wants to come in and use them
As I was listening to this I thought to myself “Yeah why don’t I go to the Vermont Historical Society collection more often? I like that place.” and then I remembered: it costs $9 a day if you’re not a VHS member or a student. Continue reading “Who has access to collections?”
This is a message I sent out to a mailing list I’m on, responding to the Scholastic Reading Report about kids and family reading.
“Most alarmingly, kids in third and fourth grade are beginning to stop reading for fun. It’s called the ‘Decline by 9.'” A few people on the list discussed their own children who didn’t like the books they were given to read in school.
I’ve thought about this a lot as someone in the library world where YA books that cover “issues” (for lack of a better word, but basically struggle and conflict and/or difficult topics) are often the ones winning book awards or getting selected for the statewide “$STATE_NAME Reads” programs. Our local Humanities Council, which I love and which I used to be on the board of, has consistently picked books in this loose topic area for the past half-decade. They’re good books, but they’re also fraught during a time when the world around us has also been a bit fraught. Continue reading “Every person their book”