Tag: me!

hi – 27nov07

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi. I used to start quite a large number of these posts this way, but I haven’t lately. This is just a little heads up about a few things that you might be interested in.

  • I’m adding a little holiday sidebar with a few links to things you can get your favorite librarian. I’ve seen a few things where I’ve been like “Oh, isn’t that clever/appropriate?” so I figured I’d add them. The woodblock link is to a MetaFilter buddy who makes and sells amazingly lovely woodblock prints and has a little “help me advertise” program that I figured I’d help with. If you have other links, to your own stuff or great stuff from others, add it to the comments and I’ll put it up. I’ll take the sidebar down after the holidays. Please don’t get me anything, I have all that I need.
  • I may not have mentioned it here, but I took the Vermont Library Association website and ported it over to a bloggish format using WordPress and a few choice plugins that do things like put the jobs on their own page withough putting them on the front page, and allow people to add posts that are also events on the sidebar. I’d love to say that it went off without a hitch but the process was a little bumpy, mostly because of difficulty figuring out who had passwords to which pieces of the site. Folks, make sure you get this stuff in your binders! The switch from having one webmaster to making groups more responsible for their own content is a challenge as well. I’m lucky to be supported strongly by the VLA president as well as Judah Hamer from my former library who does the diplomacy stuff while I do the coding stuff.
  • I’ll be speaking at a conference in Dubai at the end of next week which I am very excited about. My friend Step who you may know from her various blogs is working at Zayed University and I am speaking at their conference and then Step and I are leading a blogging/wiki workshop. It will be the first time I’ve been out of the country to a non-English speaking locale (I know many people speak English, but not compared to Australia or Canada) in years. I am making an assumption that there are not many librarian.net readers in Dubai, but if anyone is, please look me up.

talk: what do do when your change agent is broken

Posted on by jessamyn

I gave a talk yesterday at the NEASIS&T event in Providence Rhode Island. I was psyched to present with John Blyberg and Jill Stover (also at Designing Better Libraries) who have very different backgrounds but both gave great talks. I pulled the “after lunch” slot which is sort of what happens when I ask to not speak before 11 am but I thought it went really well. ASIS&T get togethers are generally a really good time because they are often filled with accomplished and interesting people. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s definitely something I’ve noticed. The topic for the day was From Guerilla Innovation to Institutional Transformation: Information Professionals as Change Agents which to me sounded a little silly, — I have change agent reflux disease — but everyone made really nifty stuff out of it and we had a good time despite being in a really weird room with iffy wireless.

Buoyed my my recent presentation in Michigan, I decided to write the talk I really wanted to give and talk a bit about how my activist background has informed my current work. Sometimes you have to say that something sucks [my suggestion is to go for “suboptimal”] and write a manifesto to get noticed, but that these are okay tacks to take if you’re really solving the problems and can do it without being a jerk yourself.

Anyhow, I did another Keynote presentation — I’m still in favor of a no-PowerPoint approach generally but I’m learning other methods for other occasions — and you can see my slides and links online here: Sleeper 2.0 – Agitprop problem solving. Thanks to Jill and John for giving such excellent talks and thanks also to ASIST&T for inviting me.

Michigan Library Association – talks and notes

Posted on by jessamyn

I gave a talk today at the Michigan Library Association: What Works: More My Library Less MySpace.

It was an all new from-the-ground-up talk about appropriate social technologies with some decent (and local!) examples of libraries that are doing Library 2.0 stuff, especially Twitter. I almost always rewrite my talks somewhat, but using the excuse that I wanted to learn to use Keynote, this time I started from scratch. Unfortunately I don’t have a sleek 150K html page to share with you, but I do have the slides in PDF or flash format. The librarians in Michigan are always excellent to talk to and with, and have a great sense of humor about forever being compared to Ann Arbor District Library in things technological. They liked my John Blyberg joke. I heard that Kevin Yezbick was supposed to be live Twittering my talk but blogocoverage seems to be thin. I have gotten a few Facebook friend requests, Twitter adds, and one really nice MeFiMail (MetaFilter’s in-house mail system) from a member who came to my talk and enjoyed it.

This morning I wandered around downtown Lansing and marvelled at some of the lovely buldings including the downtown library. I’d show you some photos but despite all my blabbing about 2.0 Tech, I left my USB cable at home. I get back to New England tomorrow and will be chatting Scriblio with Casey before heading home to a snowy Vermont and a sock sale. Thanks very much to everyone in Michigan for making me feel so welcome.

Hello Chronicle of Higher Ed readers/listeners

Posted on by jessamyn

I knew something was up when I got an email from the President of the Vermont Library Association this morning saying “Wow nice podcast!”

I was pretty sure she wasn’t referring to the MetaFilter Podcast — though those are quite nice — so I emailed her back asking wtf as politely as I could. That’s how I learned that the interview I did with the Chronicle of Higher Education from a hotel room in Halifax (setting the alarm so I could be alert at 9:30, do I sound like I just woke up?) was part of the CHE podcast and was excerpted, along with the succinct commentary from many other “young librarians” (oh gosh, I laugh and laugh) including my pal Casey and other names you’ll recognize. I’m not entirely sure how to link to CHE articles for non-subscribers, but you can maybe see the article and the amusing iphone photo here. Apologies, as always, for swearing.

four talks in six days in two countries

Posted on by jessamyn

If the title sounds familiar, it’s because it is. I’ve been trying to combine more of my public speaking trips which means more weird weeks like this one and that one, but it works out a lot better on my end. After I got back to Massachusetts from Access, I drove over to NELA and gave three talks there. I really enjoy NELA but there were some complications this time around mostly involving iffy wireless (and hotel staff who were just repeating what their outsourced IT told them which the IT-librarians knew was a little fishy-sounding, but I digress) which means I wasn’t doing much blogging and had a period of radio silence here and on Flickr and on Scrabulous, etc.

I got home today and I’ve uploaded the latest talks. One was all new, one was a modified version of an earlier talk and one was a talk I gave earlier, but with twice as much time. All of them went really well but I have a sore throat and will be heading to bed as soon as they’re linked here so that I can be bright and bushytailed for work which starts tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who made my trip easier, more pleasant, and fun.