I’m in the pacific Northwest, at the ALA Midwinter meeting! Had a good conference so far, but yesterday the jet lag got to me. It’s only two hours, but it’s the two hours that made me wake up at 5am, and wouldn’t let me go back to sleep.
Took some great shots of the city yesterday, and of Pike St. Market (you know, the famous one where they throw the fish around). Here’s a few of my favorites:
Well, now that both contracts are signed, I can talk a bit about my next two writing projects.
First up, I’ve agreed to write an article for Library Journal. The topic? A new reference/instruction project here at UTC involving podcasts and iPod rentals. We’ve got grand plans that we hope to put into practice over the course of 2007 that involve video and audio production and leverage our new website (just launched today!). We’re looking for integration and experimentation from our reference/instruction team, and I have faith they’ll come up with uses that I can’t now imagine. But for LJ, I’m going to write up the entire planning process, from grant writing to how we’ll handle the various challenges involved in a project of this scope.
Second…I’m currently under contract to write a book for Linworth Publishing, tentatively titled Biblioblogging (almost certainly that will change), along with my partner in crime Karen Coombs. I plan on blogging portions of the work, research, and process involved in this writing as well.
These two things, along with the new job…well, let’s just say that 2007 is promising to be interesting if nothing else.
I call upon the wisdom of crowds: I will be moving into my new Head of Library Information Technology position in the new year. What information sources must I now attach myself to in order to fully embrace and excel at this job? I’m thinking:
Lay the world of Info Tech management on me, and tell me where I should be participating and consuming!
After a lot (and I mean a LOT…probably far too much) soul searching, I’ve decided to try out a different position here at UTC Lupton Library. I was offered and I have accepted the position of Head of Library Information Technology.
This means a transition out of doing tons of reference and instruction work…but I’m planning on keeping my nose in that realm as much as possible. It’s just too good for tracking what the patrons are actually concerned with to not stay involved. At the same time, I’ll be taking on the huge burden of all tech in the library…all wires, systems, applications, and boxen are to be my purview. I’d be lying if I wasn’t a bit nervous about the whole thing.
The big concern? We use the VTLS library system…and byzantine wouldn’t begin to describe my feelings about ILS’s. Add in that we’re one of less than a dozen academic libraries that use it, and my circle of assistance is pretty low.
The big opportunity? Pretty much everything. Digital repository, ticketing system for patron issues, getting our archives online…tons to keep me busy. I’m really excited about the opportunity.
And there’s a bevy of stuff happening at MPOW. We’ve launched the official beta of our new website, and I’ve signed to write an article for Library Journal.
Yeah, yeah…let the stoning commence!
To be fair, I did request and get the “better” publication agreement from Reed, as well as request and receive permission for a clarifying line of text to be added to the agreement (the clarification was in the realm of the term of the contract, and what rights reverted to me after 6 months). I will be able to self-archive the work, which was a big deal. I feel like I was treated fairly in the negotiations, now I just have to write.
So what am I writing about? There’s a great opportunity at MPOW revolving around our instruction section and podcasts/vidcasts/netcasts/whatever the cool kids are calling it these days. I wrote a grant proposal for 30 ipods and supporting equipment (including everything we need to produce nearly professional level videos), and we’ll be moving forward with integrating podcasts into our new instruction/outreach efforts. So my work for LJ will be chronicling that process, as well as looking at ways that libraries can leverage this technology to greatly enhance their efforts towards patron education.
I’ll be blogging some of the process…it’s exciting, because it’s a completely new feature for MPOW, plus it will involve a lot of integration with the new website and the instructional team.
So who here is surprised that the officer from the UCLA student tasering has been in trouble for excessive force before?
Duren said Monday that he joined the UCLA police force after being fired from the Long Beach Police Department in the late 1980s. He said he was a probationary officer at the time and was let go because of poor report-writing skills and geographical knowledge.
In May 1990, he was accused of using his nightstick to choke someone who was hanging out on a Saturday in front of a UCLA fraternity. Kente S. Scott alleged that Duren confronted him while he was walking on the street outside the Theta Xi fraternity house.
…
In October 2003, Duren shot and wounded a homeless man he encountered in Kerckhoff Hall. Duren chased the man into a bathroom, where they struggled and he fired two shots.
The homeless man, Willie Davis Frazier, was later convicted of assaulting an officer. Duren said Frasier had tried to grab his gun during the struggle. But Frazier’s attorney, John Raphling, said his client was mentally ill and didn’t do anything to provoke the shooting.
I just helped a student at the desk with a problem that is, after analysis, laughable. But the student was frustrated beyond words at it…here’s the situation.
The student bought a Lexar Secure Jumpdrive (not this specific model, but a similar one), and used it to save a bunch of papers off of their desktop to bring in to the library and print. Except that the software that the Secure Jumpdrive uses requires Administrative rights on the computer system to run…which means that none of the computers on campus could read her files.
I walked her through how to save the files to her desktop, put them on her university webspace, and then format the drive to get rid off the offending software. I get the thought behind the security on a thumbdrive…but trying to explain that to a student who only sees that she can’t use the tool she bought is like explaining DRM to someone for the first time. Yes, you bought it. Yes, you should be able to do that. No, you can’t actually do that. Such fun!
I’m falling so behind on blogging! Right now, I feel guilty writing here, knowing that it’s Nanowrimo and I’m not working on the novel. Add to that I now have 2, count’em, TWO possible publication opportunities that hit me this week. One involves blogs and blogging, and the other is a write-up of some podcasting work that I’m in the preliminary stages in setting up. More on that later as well…I don’t want to talk too much about any of this stuff before contracts are signed and such, but it wouldn’t be far off to say I’ve got many irons in the fire.
So right now, in order to not be terribly overwhelmed, I’m concentrating on nanowrimo. Once there’s a bit more clarity on the other issues, I’ll share as I can. Especially about the podcasting…an exciting opportunity might be around the bend on that front.
On my campus, as well as others, there has of late been a terrific focus placed upon student plagiarism. I’ve been asked to teach a handful of plagiarism workshops (4 down, 1 to go…this Thursday, if anyone’s in town) and I was recently asked to produce a “statement” of a sort to be used in advertising a conference on Academic Integrity that is being held here at UTC. So I said:
There is a lot of confusion among students as to citation in academic writing, including what needs a citation and who should be cited in specific circumstances. My feeling is that if we continue teaching the specifics of what, who, and how, we’re missing the real issue. Students need to understand why we insist on citation, and the purpose and goals of this very specific sort of writing. We as educators need to encourage students to be willing to see themselves as part of the academic dialogue, as a piece of the ongoing attempt at the creation of knowledge. Students need to see academic writing as a conversation between themselves, the professor, and the rest of the Academy, and not as a hoop to jump through or a check-mark on their transcript. A large part of their vision of academic writing is formed by the way educators present assignments, and I think that we can better serve the student by re-imagining the way this is done.
Plagiarism is something that strikes me as old news…always been here, always will, and until we can convince professors that traditional “write a paper on X” assignments aren’t the best sorts, we’ll always have to deal with it. I need to find a way to get my workshop online…it uses music as a metaphor for academic writing, and shows how something can move from “bad” reuse to “ok” reuse, and how to think about academic writing in a different way. I believe that the current “millenial” student really has a difficult time understanding plagiarism, and the workshop is designed to get them thinking in a new way. I’ll put that on the pile of things to do in the next year or so…
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few months as I worked through the website redesign at MPOW is how reference departments interact with patrons in the virtual world. In conjunction with the re-launch, we’re going live with our IM reference service, and re-visiting how we take virtual reference questions. As I think about how we do things, I realize I’m not happy with the overall way we’re dealing with email reference…it’s distributed, so there’s no single record that can be browsed for common questions. It’s not archived in a meaningfully searchable way. It’s not flexible. It requires us to manually forward emails and potentially miss a followup.
So in re-envisioning email reference in a new way, I realized that what I really wanted was a Help Desk/Trouble Ticket system. Is anyone out there using a formal Trouble Ticket system as a reference tool? Or, is anyone using one at all, in any capacity, and could recommend a good Open Source php/MySQL system?
I’m looking for something that presents a browser-based form for collection of issues, with a big plus if it also allows email reception into the system. Anyone got a favorite?