library+instruction+technology

Ok, that may be overkill. I’m posting from my Droid. I’ve had it for a week. I’m still getting use to it. This is my first smartphone. I know, I’m 2000 and late. Stay tuned…

Taking a year off from blogging has created an interesting situation. This post outlining my plans for Annual 2009 in Chicago is only one post away from the one I wrote last June listing what I intended to do at Annual 2008 in Anaheim. This should create a double take for future readers browsing my blog in chrono-order. No, I don’t think that many people browse my blog…but I can dream…

Here are my plans for Chicago. As always, there are multiple things I would love to do every spare minute of Annual. In reality, my brain gets fried and I tend to skip a session in the afternoon…so this is my optimistic schedule.

Let me know if you are going to be attending any of these events or feel free to say hello if you see me around.

Friday, July 10, 2009
3:30-4:30 PM – MARS Executive Committee I (New Chairs Orientation)

5:30-7:30 PM – MARS Happy Hour at Big Bar/Hyatt Regency

Saturday, July 11, 2009
8:00-10:30 AM – RSS Open House and Web Advisory Committee

10:30-Noon – FYE: Connecting First-Year College Students with the Library. Not holding my breath that I can make it to McCormick…so I may end up at Information Commons Discussion Group.

1:30-3:00 PM – Discussion Group: Open Source
I have no clue what this is going to be about, but it is being sponsored by RUSA Reference Services Section.

3:30-5:00 PM – Instruction Section Current Topics Discussion I: Teacher Proficiencies: Applying Proficiency Standards for Instruction Librarians in Your Library

Sunday, July 12, 2009
8:00-10:00 AM – MARS All Committee Meeting/Local Systems & Services Committee. I agreed to serve as chair for this year.

10:30-Noon – Instruction Section Current Topics Discussion II: Using Discovery-Based Learning to Engage Students with Information Literacy

Lunch with a friend

1:30-3:00 PM – College Library Directors Discussion Group

3:30-5:30 PM – You Got Me, Do You Like Me? Evaluating Next Generation Catalogs OR Illuminating New Instruction Research: Applying Research to Practice

4:00-5:30 PM 5th Annual Book cart Drill Team Championship

Monday, July 13, 2009
8:00-Noon – MARS Executive Committee II. Report out as Local Systems & Services Chair. I don’t think I’ll have to be there the entire time.

Lunch with a former OPAL colleague

1:30-3:00 PM – RUSA President’s Program: From the Book and Beyond: Interdisciplinary Readers’ Advisory

5:00-6:30 PM – PLA President’s Program and Awards Presentation featuring Cokie Roberts. I’m going for Cokie Roberts and not so much for the PLA Awards.

I’m not heading back to Ohio until Tuesday morning.

For the record, I am not dead. I have been on a blogcation…or maybe that is a blog-sabbatical…or maybe life just got busy and my use of alternate communication channels increased.

I’ve read a couple of posts over the last few days from other librarians feeling guilty about not tending to their blog as they would like. I didn’t intentionally plan on taking a year off. Like most of you, a lot of my communication has dispersed into various social media streams. You know the obvious culprits…Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, and del.icio.us. I did consider abandoning this blog, until I noticed that my site visit stats show that people are still tripping across content. The stats indicate that people are mostly “reading” the posts written about conference sessions. I guess I will keep the blog up for awhile and see if I can get into another posting groove (if only to buck the dead and dying blog trend that not many people are blogging about but lamenting on those other social channels).

In case you are curious, here is what I did during my year long blogcation…

• Interviewed for a job and was not the successful candidate in June 2008. Oh to have national exposure. Knowing what I know now…it worked out for the best that I didn’t get the position.
• Attended ALA Annual 2008 in Anaheim (pictures). My first trip to SoCal and also to Disneyland. I realize that Anaheim isn’t representative of all of southern California, but I think I still prefer San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area.
• Right-sized the reference collection at MFPOW in July and August (pictures).
• Received the Ohio Private Academic Library service award at the 10th OPAL Conference held at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus at the beginning of August.
• Interviewed for a library director position in mid-August (yeah about two weeks before classes started). Was offered and accepted an excellent opportunity at Defiance College in northwest Ohio (35 miles from where I grew up).
• Worked very hard to wrap-up projects and transition knowledge to colleagues and get the house sold in Zanesville during August and September.
• Left my former position as Head of User Services at Muskingum College on September 30 and started as Director of Library and Informational Resources on October 1. I don’t recommend the “no downtime” plan when switching jobs. My preference would have been not to do it that way, but that’s how it worked out. I think I was able to pull it off, because I had family in the area (no need to find an apartment for a few weeks) and because both libraries are members of OPAL (Ohio Private Academic Libraries…not the Online Programming yada yada group) and OhioLINK.
• Accepted into the CLS College Library Directors Mentor Program and assigned a terrific mentor.
• Wrote a successful application for a team from Defiance College to attend the CIC/NITLE/Project Kaleidoscope 2009 Learning Spaces and Technology Workshop for our learning commons renovation project.
• Closed on the sale of the Zanesville house on Halloween. We didn’t make as much off of the sale as we had hoped, but still not complaining because we actually walked away with a check when most houses were not selling.
• Looked at 12 houses in Defiance on November 1. Made an offer two days later on an empty 1960s two story that needed mostly cosmetic work and moved in on November 13. Moving company delivered our worldly possessions the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
• Reworked the entire Pilgrim Library web site over Christmas break.
• Attended the College Library Directors Mentor Program preceding Midwinter in Denver. Learned a lot about myself and what it takes to lead a smaller library. Perfected my elevator speech on how Defiance, Ohio was named.
• Had a successful RSS Web Advisory committee meeting at Midwinter. My other committee meeting was not that successful. I was the only one that showed up for the MARS Local Systems & Services meeting. No one else on the committee came to Midwinter. I ended up going over and hanging out at the Publications committee table. Overall, Midwinter went well. Had a great conversation with Chris C. about the direction of the RUSA web site and how to align RSS content with the big picture.
• February was cold and snowy and reminded me I had been gone from northwest Ohio winters for 20 years.
• Took a convoluted set of flights to get from Detroit to Richmond, VA (return flights were yet a different route) in order to save money to attend the Learning Spaces & Technology workshop the first week of March. Brought back a lot of good ideas and validation that our initial planning for a learning commons was on the right track. My takeaways: wheels give permission to move and developing successful collaborative learning spaces is an iterative process that builds on incremental change. (pictures)
• April was an intensive print reference rightsizing project to liberate floor space for a relocated computer lab and presenting on our learning commons sandbox project to faculty, staff, and new members of the board.
• May brought news of the exact dollar amount I had to work with for our learning commons sandbox area…not leaving a lot of time to source and procure furniture.
• Attend IUG 2009 back in sunny Anaheim in mid-May (felt like deja-vu since I had just been in Anaheim 11 months earlier). Conference and travel was paid for by OPAL since I had won the service award in 2008. It was my first IUG and probably my last IUG. I think it’s a good conference for systems librarians, catalogers, front-line circulation/access services folk, acquisitions folk, and public service librarians if you have your own III installation. I didn’t see a lot of value for reference librarians if you are on a shared catalog. (pictures…but none of the actual conference)
• June was jam-packed with book shifting, removal of shelving, and taking a chainsaw to the separate reference and circulation desks to come up with a new solution. Take a look at my learning commons set on Flickr to get a feel for the transformation to date.

That about wraps up the overview of this last year. I really do plan on getting back into writing mode. There is a lot more I would like to write about the Learning Spaces & Technology workshop and my experiences from our learning commons project.

I hope you stick around or at least stumble upon a future post via your favorite search engine.

I normally buy books from Amazon and usually buy enough to qualify for the SuperSaver shipping rate. I wanted to buy Chris Anderson's The Long Tail and thought I would give WalMart.com a whirl since they only charge $0.97 to ship one book.

I probably would not use WalMart again in the future. I placed the order on July 11. They collected my payment on July 12. The book arrived today…July 25. Looks like it came "Parcel Select" from Florida. The USPS web site defines parcel select as "the Postal Service's ground, package-delivery product designed for medium-to-large shippers that transport their packages to destinating Postal Service facilities." <sarcasm>I guess they had to pick the books up in a wharehouse in California and then drive them back to Florida to a "destinating Postal Service facility."</sarcasm>

Ironically in the 2 week time-frame of placing the order and receiving the book from WalMart.com, I ordered CDs (Alice DeeJay and QaF Season 4 and 5) from Amazon. The Amazon SuperSaver order came in 4 days.

I subscribe to my own blog using Bloglines. I noticed recently that new posts I had written were only displaying partially in Bloglines. I double checked my Bloglines settings to make sure I hadn't set the display preferences to summary. I double checked my Word Press settings and everything looked fine on that end too.

I did some more digging/Googling and discovered that the problem was in the syndication URL. I hadn't specified a version type and Word Press was defaulting to an older version. So, this afternoon I updated the two URLs linked under "subscribe".

If you use Bloglines and would like the full text of my posts…

1. Unsubscribe from my blog
2. Add my blog again using this URL http://www.whitis.us/blog/?feed=rss2

There is probably a more elegant and technically correct way to do the change…but this is the simplest.

I wasn't gone, but I have been neglecting this blog. I did find time to upgrade to WordPress 2.0.1 and then 2.0.2 in the past couple of months…

Work has been busy as usual. In addition to the normal instruction and reference tasks I have been spending a lot of time on collection management activities.  I represent the Library as a voting member on the Curriculum Committee. We've been discussing two new academic program proposals since September. Both programs received faculty support at last Friday's meeting.  So, we're on our way to add multimedia design and engineering to our slate of offerings. I've been spending a lot of time looking at potential resources that would support these two programs.

I've also been spending time on selecting books for our juvenile collection and our education collection.  We don't use an approval plan…so we have to select the old fashioned way. The other reference librarian has been busy weeding our reference collection.  I've been reviewing what she is deselecting and withdrawing the titles from our catalog.

I've also been busy at home. We finally finished the two guest bedrooms upstairs and have all the furniture back where it's suppose to be. That completes the entire renovation of the upstairs.  We're now working downstairs.  The room we were using as a family room is our current project. We're currently painting. It's going to become the dining room when we're done. We will hopefully be done renovating our 106 year old house this Fall. The kitchen is going to be the big projet on the first floor.

When we're done, we will have all new electric (replacing a lot of knob and tube), insulated external walls, new windows, new plumbing…basically a new house on the inside with Victorian stylings.

I forgot to mention that I migrated off of Blogger and into a WordPress blog on my web site. I should have done this a long time ago. I was a little hesitant, because I didn’t know how hard or easy it would be. I host my web site with Aplus.net. My plan includes 3 MySQL databases. It really wasn’t that hard. The most time consuming part was getting my posts out of Blogger and into WordPad.

I haven’t posted since last week. My schedule has been keeping me very busy.

I swapped shifts and worked the late Reference shift last Thursday. I was in Columbus last Friday for the OhioLINK Chemistry Subject Group meeting. I am the liaison between the group and OhioLINK’s CIRM (Cooperative Information Resource Management) Committee. Muskingum has an accredited chemistry program, so I have a stake in cooperative collection development too. It was a good meeting and always good to meet people you talk to via email face-to-face.

This Friday is ALAO’s annual conference in Columbus. ALAO is the Ohio chapter of ACRL. It’s always a great conference and I get to see my OPAL friends. All of the librarians from Muskingum and our circulation supervisor go to this conference. I’ll be attending the library instruction/information literacy sessions.

I’ll be back in Columbus the next two weeks after that too. CIRM’s November meeting is on November 11 and the OPAL web site redesign task force meets on November 17.

There was an interesting article in the Zanesville Times-Recorder this week about the number game sudoku. I think it was an AP article, so it was probably published all over the US. One of my coworkers read the article and found Web Sudoku. It’s pretty addictive.

It was a busy second week of the semester. I decided to make some changes tonight on my blog. I have chosen a different template and added a site counter. I am using the free counter available from StatCounter.