Next week I’ll be heading out to Crystal City, VA to attend CiL 2007. It’s the first conference in many moons that I don’t have a presentation or other formal commitment to attend. This means, of course, that I have completely overbooked my time in sessions, because there is so damn much good stuff. Plus, I’ll get to catch up with lots of good friends.
But, if you are attending, and you want to catch up with me, take your pick as to calendar format:
Forgive the metablog post, but I was looking at some trackbacks and such, which led me down the road of Technorati, and then back to the mothership: Google.
I’m not sure how, but I made the first page of results for “Pattern Recognition” on Google, at least for now. Given that it’s a phrase that is not only the title of a bestselling book by one of my favorite authors, but is an entire academic field of study, I didn’t expect to be there.
But there I am.
I’ve just returned after a complete whirlwind of a week. I spent 5 days in New Orleans at ALA, then drove to Columbus, OH for the Origins game fair, the second largest gaming convention in the country. So much stuff to talk about, but I’m completely exhausted. So instead of writing, you all get: My Week In Pictures!
I recieved my first Valleyschwag package yesterday…I must say, I’m impressed. From the detail put into the packaging to the schwag itself, a cool once a month surprise. It’s like having a birthday every month!
It was, as you can see, wrapped in painted burlap. After you peeled away the burlap, the goodies inside were:
All in all, not bad for $14.95. The Rubyred T-shirt and the Goatse stickers will be worth that much in conversation at least, and the PerplexCity cards are just cool.
Today I’m off to Dale Hollow Lake with the family for a little vacation. We were there in 2003, and it was a ton of fun and very relaxing. I’m hoping for more of the same! More on the website redesign, templating, and such to come.
While I hesitated to talk about this before it became official and was announced, but I’m going to take over as webmaster for the UTC Library. I won’t be leaving my position in Reference/Instruction, and will still be teaching and being a reference librarian. This is just an additional duty that I’ll balance by doing less desk time overall. My skillset is probably atypical for a reference/instruction librarian overall, so this is an opportunity to leverage my technology skills to the benefit of the library.
This is an interesting thing for me to move into, since I effectively left a webmaster position to move into what I really wanted, Reference and Instruction. But this is a direction that I find interesting in librarianship, the taking of something that has for years been considered the domain of systems, and moving it to reference/instruction. A month or so ago there was a Blended Librarian webcast about these sorts of new positions in libraries…a sort of Instructional Technology librarian, who bridges the ability to do web design, instructional design, and other issues relating technology and the patron.
So my summer project: to redesign the library website, with usability in mind. We’ll almost certainly be moving to a CMS as well, and are evaluating those now. If anybody out there has tips/thoughts about open source CMS’s as far as pros/cons, let me know. As well, if you’ve got favorite library sites/must haves/other tips, I’m open as well. I know what I want, but it’s always good to hear what others find valuable.
As a cow-orker pointed out, I missed celebrating my blogiversary! On Feb 10, this thing has been around for 3 years. Over the course of those years, this is the third software system I’ve used (started in Blogger, moved to Radio Userland, then to WordPress). Since Feb 10, 2003:
Seems really odd to have that many years behind me since I started this. Even more odd? It looks like people actually read it. 🙂 This year, I’ve averaged 161 people per day hitting my RSS feed, and 1100 or so Sessions per day. Raw hits are over 6000 a day, which blows my mind, and has to be hugely because of spambots and such. The rest of the stats are equally interesting, though:
So thanks to everyone who reads, subscribes or just wanders by occasionally. I do this mostly for me, but I certainly appreciate the fact that others think it’s worth their time.
Inspired by Walt’s recent ego surfing, I decided to see what a few search engines thought of me. In doing so, I came across a really odd result….Yahoo has, as the 20th hit for the search “Jason Griffey“, a Yahoo Local page on Science and Technology.
Except that I’m not actually on the page. That is, there’s no mention of me anywhere.
Now, it’s true that Cowan is local…I’m just a few miles from the town. But why link me to science and technology in the area when there’s no direct textual referent?
Thoughts?
I was just notified that I’ve been accepted in the 2006 HigherEd BlogCon!
I’ll be doing a presentation on how we’ve leveraged/are leveraging blogs here at UTC to fulfill some not-so-straightforward information needs. My proposal says:
This presentation will walk through the installation, configuration, and customization of WordPress 2.0, with a discussion of the benefits of the Structured Blogging plugin, an RSS aggregation plugin, how to use PHP inside of WordPress Pages to create dynamic content. All of this will be framed in the context of outreach to patrons and interaction with academic departments, with discussion of what we’ve found useful, potential for integration with the larger University IT system, and a look at future uses of the technology.
Between this, an invitation from LITA to speak on a blog panel at ALA Annual, a presentation at the TLA/SELA Conference in April, and acceptance at the ACRL Immersion program…damn I’m going to have a busy year. But I’m thrilled!