jessamyn

My Values Workshop for LLAMA’s Career Institute at ALA in Boston

I went to ALA for the first time in several years last week. I don’t think I’ve been to ALA since the Think Tank has been in existence. It was a great setup. Conference was in Boston. I was giving a pre-conference. Part of my deal was that I’d get registration for the conference, and one night in a fancy hotel (and some $). It worked out great. Usually, I admit, I dislike workshops. I don’t like to be in them and I barely know how to give them. However, my feelings on this are not normative, so I tried to bring my education and my experience to an afternoon workshop for about twenty people and have some useful exercises and activities as well as some good discussion. I think it went well. My main self-critique was that I had made sure I had three hours of “stuff” for a three hour workshop and maybe didn’t leave enough time for people to just talk to each other. More blank spaces next time. You can read through my slides as well as see the handouts and exercises (and the image credits) at this URL: https://www.librarian.net/talks/llama16/.

ALA had a conference app that encouraged you to upload your slides to the application so people could have them. Great idea in theory, but in reality I didn’t see any privacy policy and was a little leery of giving up my content so I uploaded a single slide with the URL to my actual slides. Hope people didn’t feel that it was too cheeky. A few other photos of my ALA trip are here. Thanks so much to everyone who came to the pre-conference and especially to LLAMA who invited me and took very good care of me. They were a joy to work with.

Todo: promote #1lib1ref project on Wikipedia

Posted on 14Jan16 by jessamyn

I am excited about the #1lib1ref project on Wikipedia. The goal is to get every librarian in the world (or a reasonable subsection) to add a citation to a Wikipedia article, just one. This helps make Wikipedia better in the process. I added my cite today to the Free Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow article. I’m not even trying to be sassy, that is just the page that was handed to me by this great tool that lets you know which articles need citations. I did some Googling, found a Google Book that had some supporting detail for the fact in question, used a book citation tool to turn it into Wikistyle and there you go. I might do two, just in case someone doesn’t have time to add a citation to Wikipedia this week. We have a facebook page and a lot of people using the #1lib1ref hashtag on Twitter. Join us!

2015 reading list and commentary

Posted on 01Jan16 by jessamyn

I started 91 books this year and finished 89. I’m now fully in the swing of reading at least 30 minutes before bed which has been great. Last year I had a lot of random low-level health issues which complicated matters a bit but I’m still pretty happy with how the Year in Reading turned out.

average read per month: 7.47
average read per week: 1.7
number read in worst month: 5 (Apr)
number read in best month: 11 (Aug)
number unfinished: 2
percentage by male authors: 59
percentage by female authors: 41
percentage of authors of color: 3
fiction as percentage of total: 73
non-fiction as percentage of total: 27
percentage of total liked: 90
percentage of total ambivalent: 7
percentage of total disliked: 3

The biggest issue this year was that I didn’t actively prioritize reading authors of color and so I just didn’t. No good. Must do better. Did okay with non-US authors but that’s not the same. I did a lot of social justice online reading and kept a bookshelf of worthwhile articles over at This.cm but I needed to translate more of this into book length reading and I did not. Digging into the Louise Penny series upped my percentage of female authors but I still need to work on that. I read a lot of books that I really enjoyed this past year including a history of spam and a photography book about large trees. I got a lot more suggestions from reading Library Journal than usual which was good and bad. I added a few books to my Best in Show shortlist. If you’ve made a reading list for last year, I’d love to read it. Happy New Year.

Previous librarian.net summaries: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. My always-updated booklist lives at jessamyn.info/booklist and it has its own RSS feed which is mostly not broken.

2015 in libraries

Posted on 31Dec1531Dec15 by jessamyn

Again with the library tracking! This is now six years in a row. Previous years: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and some reviews from 2003

I went to twenty-two different libraries in seven states and one non-US country for eighty-two visits total. Did not intend this but it’s the same number of visits (though many fewer individual libraries) as last year. A few things influenced this: I did a lot less distance traveling this year but did a lot of work in local libraries, I also taught at a college where the library was a major hangout for me (thanks VTC Librarians, you are the best) and I worked a lot at my local public library. Hereâ€™s the short annotated list of what I was doing in libraries last year.

Kimball Library – my local public library, I work here and I am a patron here
Hartness at VTC – the best academic library anywhere near here and I worked at VTC this year
Carney Library UMass Dartmouth – probably my favorite library building of all time (still!)
Chelsea VT – helping with tech planning and visiting my friend Virgil
Westport MA – the library where I summer, trying to warm up to this library
Fletcher/Burlington VT – did consulting here this year and spent more time here
Canada Water UK – the closest public library to where my sister and I stayed in the UK, nice busy library
Cranston RI – visiting my friend ed, great renovations!
Springfield MA – did some work on the way to CT, neat building with a weird vibe
Cary Library, Lexington MA – did a talk earlier in the year, really nice place and great people
Tiverton RI Main Branch – lovely new building across from the Sip n Dip, great to see it!
RUHS Library – high school library in my town
Bangor ME – a neat classic library which is getting renovated
Greensboro VT – the quintessential Vermont library
Roxbury VT – taught an ipad class and saw how it’s been growing and changing
East Granby CT – killing time bfore a CT talk, this was a great place to get some R&R
Pasadena CA – there was a fancy event here for CLA and we had a nice time hanging out and talking to people in the theater.
Bethel VT – another place I taught an iPad class
Springfield NH – did some consulting for a library having growing pain challenges as they make decisions on whether to automate or not
Kellogg-Hubbard VT – went to a slide show given by a friend of mine, great to be here again.
Norwich University, Northfield VT – sropped by and saw their renovations and excellent art exhibits.
Orono ME – a pretty and small library

The bigger deal was really the Passport to Vermont Libraries project, a summer program put on by VLA which got hundreds of Vermonters visiting their local libraries and getting passport stamps and other fun adventures. I worked on this with a team of a few other people and it was a very successful program and I think a chunk of that was all of our enthusiasm for our library visits. So I didn’t get my further in my personal project, but professionally I helped get this idea to take off. If you just like library photos, I have more on Flickr.

Talks and talking in 2015 to date

Posted on 11Nov1503Dec15 by jessamyn

This has been an odd year. Not only am I teaching college as my major job now (HTML and CSS, but I’m an adjunct so I swear I won’t be making a thing about it) but I’ve been doing a lot less of the usual talk circuit talk stuff. I just got back from CLA (California Library Association) which was a totally great time. I gave two talks (a major talk and an Ignite session which is pictured here) and won at Battledecks which was a dream come true. I enjoy the Ignite format and I’ve give three Ignite or Pecha Kucha Style talks this year.

– One about Open Library that I gave at VLA
– One at NELA about the Vermont Passport Program (and I swear I will write an article about it real soon now)
– The last one about porn driving technology adoption which is not only true it’s an amusing talk topic. That was for the CLA After Dark part of the program at a specific Ignite session called the Haters Ball including suck topics as I Hate Library Tours And You Should Too.extremal-board

I also spoke to my local Rotary club about the Digital Divide and got a good conversation started in my community about what we can be doing to help the people who need help. This is all coming on the tail of some aggravated shoulder stuff that’s been keeping me away from the keyboard for the past few months except when necessary (read: for work) which is finally getting resolved. So hey how are things?