It’s been a very busy past several months.

• Did two Facebook Privacy workshops….just in time for Facebook to change things all over again. Part of me feels the need to do a whole new workshop, yet I know my main reason for doing one in the first place was simply to make people aware that privacy settings exist in most social networks, that they don’t work the same for each one, and that each person must take responsibility for their own privacy online and not leave it up to social networks to do it for them. Here’s hoping that message got through, at least.
• Done a lot of campus committee work the past semester. Have learned a lot in the process.  Coming from a public library setting, I’ve been rather lost in the college campus world since I started here two years ago.  Committee work has been a primary source for learning how things actually work on a college campus, all the different official positions, the responsibilities of various departments, all the different limbs and levels required to make things work out the way they need to. It’s a very complex organism indeed.
• Found myself becoming much more active in SUNYLA. I’ve been a delegate for the past two years, but as elections approached, I decided to take a leap and try for the SUNYLA Council position of Secretary. Managed to land it and have been brushing up on my note taking skills ever since. Also, helped create a virtual meeting space for a SUNYLA Delegate Round Table using Google Wave.  I’ll write more on this in a different post, but to summarize here, I’ve discovered through this endeavor that Google Wave does not work well when attempting to use it like a wiki (I’m not sure why I used it this way…I think it was just a natural instinct after using wiki’s and forums for so long). It’s a conversational tool, and must be used so. Trying to have multiple conversations in one conversation just gets crazy confusing.

What’s to come:

• Weeding project – ongoing and pretty big.  Working on reference right now.
• Presentation on chat  reference for Annual SUNYLA conference in less then two weeks.
• Our library building is getting new windows this summer (yay!) but in order to make this happen safely, we all have to move out of our offices and into the basement for most of the duration of the summer (boo!). As such, we’re going to be pretty limited when it comes to library services we can offer and actual projects that we can work on. I’m planning to use this time to create a booty load of useful LibGuides and screencasts to help kick-start our own version of a Library Toolkit.
• I’m switching positions next fall.  Our Media Librarian retired last November.  Our Instruction Librarian took over the responsibilities of that position last January and starting this summer, I’ll be taking over his previous job overseeing library instruction.  It’s an exciting move for me, I’m deeply passionate about information literacy and I look forward to the challenge.

Formspring.me question:

What are your favorite library-related blogs to read??

Great question, thanks for asking!

I have several library related blogs in my RSS reader, but for the sake of space and time, I’ll only list my top five here. These are the five blogs that I always keep up with every week, regardless of busyness/laziness on my part.

1) Information Wants to Free – I feel privileged when I realize that I’ve been reading Meredith’s blog this 2005. She promoted important discussion back then and still does now. I think reading her blog regularly is what eventually inspired me to move from working in a public library to an academic library. http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/

2) Attempting Elegance – Jenica Rogers. She’s like…a librarian Xena. I just love this woman’s attitude. She’s got gumption and gut in just the right doses and makes you think differently, something I really crave as a professional. http://rogersurbanek.wordpress.com/

3) In the Library with the Lead Pipe – First of all, I just love the title of this blog. Second, they cite their sources at the end of each post, so librarianish of them, I just love it. Third, their posts are full of thought and great ideas.
http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/

4) Info-mational – Char Booth – I love this blog simply from a writers stand point. Char is a great writer and her posts are a joy to read and always full of relevant thought provoking material, especially on edtech, IL and library instruction issues. http://infomational.wordpress.com/about/

5) Librarian by Day – Bobbie L. Newman inspired the Library in the Day Of blogging project. She offers great tips and links, most focusing on transliteracy which is turning into a very important topic for me these days.
http://librarianbyday.net/

Ask me anything

This past week has been rather disorienting and disorganized. Monday morning I arrived at work surprised to find out that I had two English 101 classes to teach that I had obviously forgotten about and was slightly unprepared for. I had taught the same class on the same research topic last semester but still had to update and print out the handouts. The trend continued the next day when the same professor knocked on my office window asking for the keys to get into the instruction room. “Eh, sure, but why?”. Well, because her class was up there awaiting instruction from…me. I spent the next ten minutes doing an interesting panic dance, bouncing from computer, to printer to copier, then up to the classroom where I literally fumbled through most of my instruction. I felt compelled for the rest of the day to “explain myself” to anyone who would listen. “I just don’t understand it, I’m usually much more on top of things”. Really, I am.

The reason (or excuse) I “forgot” about my classes was really quite simple. My iPhone, you see, is lost. I lost it last week after having dinner at a local steakhouse. I have called them five times, left alternate numbers, searched the booth we sat in, the parking lot, the car, every pocket possible, but still nowhere is my iPhone. As I look out my window tonight where layers upon layers of snow are falling to the ground, I’ve lost all hope. It’s likely burried now, or in the hands of a less than honest restaurant employee.

Another downer for the week involved a couple of bad news meetings. Bad news meetings usually involve talks about the budget and how there isn’t much of one. We’re down a librarian since our media librarian retired and unfortunately we won’t be allocated money to hire another. So, between the three of us we’re trying to balance reference desk coverage, instruction, committee responsibilities, professional development and the rest of the daily activities required to keep this place running. This is no easy task. We’ll have to start making some hard choices soon. In the end it will be the students that suffer most and that breaks my heart.

So, on the upside of things I’ve put my name in for the position of Secretary for SUNYLA Executive Board. I’m not entirely sure how this election part works, or even whether I’m the only one going for the seat at this point. Truth is, I’ve been a little lost in SUNYLA world since becoming a delegate. I peruse the listserve and attend what meetings I can and in the process I’ve met some wonderful inspiring people. However, I’m endlessly confused by what seems like an ever-growing ocean of acronyms. Of OLIS and COCID and SCLD and SAC and so on. I guess, my hope was by obtaining a secretarial position, something that would require me to take notes and write minutes, I would become more familiar with all the essential limbs for the association, which would then help me to converse appropriately and provide input.
We shall see.

Oh, and I created a Flavors.me page, because you can never have enough life streaming profiles available to the world wide web.

Photo Credit: WPA Winter in New York State skiing. Vintage Printables. 15 June 2009. Web. 25 Feb. 2010.

Formspring.me question:

Did you always know you’d be a librarian? Of was it a surprise to find yourself behind a reference desk?

Well, yes and no. I had always expected to be a traveler and my ultimate goal really, was to be a traveling tour guide who would bounce from country to country guiding tourists through historic homes, villas and especially castles. I followed this dream all the way through undergraduate school, getting a bachelors in architectural history and even spending a summer taking a special architectural history course in Edinburgh which is where I had planned to get my future masters. I had it all figured out and it all sounds a little romantic now that I look back on it.

Although I had worked as a tour guide for a historic home through college, and loved it, I had also worked various part-time positions in libraries, one as a clerk in the children’s department of a public library, another as a student worker at my college slide library. So, I was always very partial to libraries and felt very comfortable in them.

But then I fell madly in love and got married, and the whole traveling tour guide thing just wasn’t going to quite fly with our pending financial needs. When I found myself working part-time at a public library again, this time in the reference department, I started getting a “hey wait, I think this is it, this is my calling” feeling. After that, enrolling in an MLIS program was just the next natural step.

Ask me anything

Formspring.me question:

The library is burning down. You can only save one section or set of bookshelves. What section would you save?

Great question! Not easy to answer but I’ll give it shot. My first instinct would be to run for the Reference area because we pay big bucks for that stuff. But if anyone knows anything about disaster preparedness in libraries, it’s that the most important material to save is the archives. However, if I were only thinking about myself and what I personally would save first it would probably be the literature section (PZ’s). I almost said the section with the art and architecture books (NA’s) but seriously, have you ever had to lift a copy of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages? If I tried saving that set of bookshelves I’d probably never make it out of the library alive.

Ask me anything