Actual Thursday and Ideal Thursday stayed in lockstep, and ended with a busy reference shift with several sharp/long/interesting interactions (anthropological readings of food and folklore, gendered social conditions under different dictatorships, etc.). Ideal Friday is looking much less relentless: - Backup scheduling duties for web-requested instruction sessions while a colleague is out of town -... Continue Reading →
library (thurs)day in the life.
Actual Wednesday was another resounding success - made good headway on my updating and communication housecleaning, and was satisfied with my progress on the tutorial. The editing, however, left me a little cold. Still stalling on the chapter submission front - beating the dead horse otherwise known as revision has never been my strongest suit.... Continue Reading →
library (wednes)day in the life.
Actual Tuesday was right on, especially in terms of the Anthro instruction session I led, which was indeed earth-shattering. In the summer my teaching/training load goes way down, so it's not unusual for me to feel a bit out of my element. This class, however, had a very engaged grad instructor and unusually bright/attentive students,... Continue Reading →
library (tues)day in the life.
Actual Monday ended up resembling Ideal Monday, although I completely scrapped the Drupal chapter (no surprise there, really) and half of the FAQ work in order to make better headway on the syllabi. Ideal Tuesday -finish preparing for instruction. - lead an earth-shattering session for the 6 students in Anth R5b: Politics of Ordinary Life.... Continue Reading →
library (mon)day in the life.
After reading Meridith Farkas' excellent post on the the blogging/tweeting thoughtfulness v. frequency relationship, I was motivated to reflect for a bit on my own recent blog/microblog habits. I have begun to engage more regularly with Twitter (@charbooth) and find that it leads people to my blog posts via alternate routes, and I definitely ascribe... Continue Reading →
on collaboration.
Despite an extremely truncated Annual (I needed to leave early to help an injured friend), my preconference presentation went well. The preconference itself was an all-day RUSA affair on the subject of Reinvented Reference, or new approaches to the challenge of structuring library public and information services in light of shrinking budgets and changing staffing... Continue Reading →
chicago.
As the relentless leaflets and committee-spam filling my work inboxes keep reminding me, ALA Annual is most definitely "upon us." After a much-needed Texas vacation next week, I'll be speaking/facilitating at the RUSA Reinvented Reference Preconference: Reinvented Reference V: Using Our Collective Wisdom Friday, July 10, 8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sponsored by RUSA Reference... Continue Reading →
mobilization.
Last week I attended an excellent in-house staff training at UCB led by Fleur Helsingor of the Kresge Engineering Library on what it takes to make an existing website mobile-friendly using HTML, XHTML, and CSS. This is a topic on the minds of many, and Fleur deftly covers the range of issues involved in this... Continue Reading →
interview x2.
Now that it's summer and academic librarians have a bit of breathing/reading room, I've been getting more and more inquiries about the research report I published via ACRL in late April (and keep them coming, by all means). By way of further explanation, this week I talked with my longtime friend Ellie Collier at In... Continue Reading →
font sleuthing.
I'm more than a little preoccupied with fonts and typefaces, and am constantly vexed by unidentifiable ones on signs, etc. that I can't place or recall. A while back Lia sent me a link to an iPhone application that actually works pretty well in this situation - WhatTheFont. It uses the same image recognition technology... Continue Reading →
info-mational 