This week I had the opportunity to travel to beautiful Waco, TX (ha) for training from the Texas Digital Library. The topic? D-Space.
We have access to a D-Space repository through our TDL membership, but it has gone largely unused. We have a number of projects in the pipeline that we may want to do with Dspace, so it was exciting to learn the ins and outs and ponder different ways that we can do things. I can’t wait to play around with it a bit more.
What can I say? Starting a new job and moving to a new city hasn’t left much time for blogging. Things have settled a bit at this point, so hopefully I’ll be back here more regularly from this point forward.
Houston, as a city, has been good to us so far. Our apartment complex is very social, and we’ve gotten to know our neighbors as well as reconnecting with some friends from Atlanta that live here now. It’s HOT, no denying that, but we have a pool in our complex and we’re pretty much enjoying the heat.
I’m loving the job. Not too surprising, it’s the job I was looking for all along, but I’m pleased to report that it doesn’t disappoint. I’ve spent most of my time this summer working on our website redesign, and now that that’s wrapping up I’ve got a few exciting projects in the pipeline for the fall.
I’ve also got a lot of travel coming up in the next few months – to Waco this week for training from the Texas Digital Library, to Colorado to visit friends, LITA in Atlanta at the end of September, and (hopefully) Internet Librarian in Monterey in October.
What I’m really excited (and slightly terrified) about is tomorrow – first day of classes. 37,787 students. I’m not sure I can even imagine how things will be with that many more people on campus. But I’m looking forward to it!
I’ve been reading a series of articles by Latoya Peterson at Racialicious, discussing the implications of a recent study about women of color and wealth. In her third installment, she covers the importance of networks to establishing wealth and advancing your career. While I’m not a woman of color, I did just spend 6+ months unemployed while trying to break into a career, and her closing question really stuck with me:
Thinking through your own network connections (parents, parent’s friends, schoolmates, peers), how easy it it to find someone who:
Since Fridays are for reflection, let’s ponder the following:
How does who you are connected to impact how far you can go professionally? How much information can you find out from your networks?
I was lucky in that my family could extend me a small, short-term loan if necessary (and did once or twice). I know a lot of other people who did not have the same luxury and have had a much harder time of things – both MLIS grads and just other acquaintances.
If I must once again apologize for lagging between posts, at least this time my excuse istems from something positive – I’ve been offered and accepted the position of Digital and Web Projects Fellow at the University of Houston Libraries. The past couple of weeks have flown by with working out logistics for leaving my current position, preparing for a move, and getting ready to start at UH. I’m not actually set to start there until the beginning of May, but time really does creep up on you and I’m already feeling a bit overwhelmed with everything that needs to be done in the next six weeks or so. Not to mention all the things we want to do and places we want to go one last time before leaving Atlanta.
Hopefully I will be able to update throughout the process of moving, settling in, and starting the new job, but I wanted to go ahead and share the good news!
As an undergraduate, I lived in dorms on campus until my very last semester. Even in library school my apartment was within a 15-20 minute walk of everywhere on campus I needed to be. Okay, I always saw students around campus who had commuted in for the day, and we would always have a few people sneaking naps in the “quiet study room” at Pitt Engineering, but I was largely blind to the plight of the student (or faculty member) who has time to kill between classes and nowhere to kill it.
A large number of our students take slow, expensive public transportation to and from campus, which means they arrive in time for their first class of the day and don’t leave until they finish their last. There is also nowhere other than our campus facilities in walking distance. Now, our students are certainly not all work all the time, but they mostly seem to be of the mindset that if they are stuck at school for a few hours between classes, they might as well use those hours to get their work done. The library is the place to go for this. We have ample tables and workspaces, but a large portion of our students don’t have consistant computer/internet/printing access at their homes, and for them it is critical to get any computer-dependent work done while they are on campus.
We’ve had our computer availability cut in half since the flooding incident a few weeks back, and the ensuing shortages have really opened my eyes to how vital it is that we offer consistent computer access for our users. The sheer lack of sufficient numbers of computers is certainly the biggest factor, but other issues have come into play as well. We’re located in an old train depot, and are physically limited as to where we can put computers – as it stands they are all located inside our two labs. What this means is that when one or both of the labs is in use or unavailable, there’s no other option for our users. Not even for a catalog search, or to quickly print an assignment. Finding a workaround for this situation is vital, in my opinion, and urgent.
Currently, we’re down to just one computer lab. There are two regularly scheduled classes that meet in one of the library labs this semester, so those get priority during their time slots and other patrons are unable to use the computers, print, etc. Additionally, we had other reservations for the labs from financial aid, the dean of academics, classes coming in for one-shot instruction sessions. Everyone has been as flexible as possible about sharing the space, but there have been at least 2 or 3 prime hours in the middle of the day, every day, that students have been unable to use the library computers.
Seeing the frustration on these students’ faces (and again I say students, but there are definitely a couple of adjunct faculty members who don’t have their own offices in this group) really struck me this week. It hadn’t previously occurred to me that it could be such a problem to have all of our public computers silo-ed off in this way. I want to see what we can do about moving at least one or two computers out into the main area of the library, and having those computers print to the front desk. Even if these were just 15-minute or similar short-use workstations, it would make a huge difference for our users. The thing is – we wouldn’t even need to buy any new equipment, just move an existing computer or two and figure out how we can run power from the few outlets we do have.
Next post will be a project update, but this was at the front of my mind this week.
2 1/2 weeks in, I have to say – I’m certainly not bored.
In addition to plugging along with planning for the website (and general technology planning), I’m now diving in to managing our electronic resources, reaching out to faculty to get them on board with the website & libguides, helping coordinate administrations of both SAILS and LibQual+, working on my first proposal for a conference presentation, and dealing with the aftermath of a water break and resulting mold issue.
Dealing with the electronic resources is the biggest challenge for me – as a library student and in various internships, I really never did anything on the back end of electronic resources. This is the one thing that I have been going into pretty much blind…but I really want our students and faculty to be able to access this content from one centralized location (our website), rather than the several different sites and passwords they currently have to navigate. So I’ll figure it out, and it will be another skill for the resume =). Really I’m not sure that the catalog we’re currently using can handle it, but I’m pushing for a switch to something better and more extensible in the near future so I may actually consider it a plus if this helped expedite the change.
My only real frustration is getting approval / money to start doing testing for the website. Well, and getting the head IT guy to get back to me about CMS issues. If I haven’t made any progress on either of these by the start of next week, it’ll be time to start twisting arms.
And as to the mold, just don’t ask. All I have to say is, keep your library dry.
So, I finally have something interesting to write about! Let’s get right into it, shall we?
Nearly six months after finishing my MLIS, I finally have a job. It’s a temporary job, but it’s still a job, and I have some hope that it may become permanent, so yay! to all that.
What I’m doing at this job is pretty interesting…I’m working in the library of a small school here in Atlanta, and in 2010 they did not have a library website. My primary job, at least for now, is to change that. They DO have a online catalog access, and access to databases through GALILEO, but that’s it. there isn’t even any information about the library on the main college site aside from the statement that there is, in fact, a library. We’re starting from scratch.
In some ways, this is actually good. To start with, we won’t be dealing with any patrons who like our current site just how it is and do not want to see anything change. There is no precedent for what the library website is/isn’t. Also, basically anything we come up with will be a huge improvement over the status quo.
The library did have a subscription to LibGuides that they hadn’t started using, so in addition to creating subject guides for each academic program, I spent this week (my first) uploading and roughly organizing as much library information as I could find into libguides, into something of a demo site. This way, we have SOMETHING that we can point users towards if they need to find info, and we can also start there for developing a full website. If I get my way (which I expect to do, since I’m pretty much the “expert” in this situation), this site will always be presented with the disclaimer that it is a demo, and with some way to elicit feedback from users towards the development of the actual site. Of course, I also want to get the library’s users involved in the design process in a big way…starting 100% from scratch provides a really great opportunity for this.
What I’m thinking I’ll start doing this week and next is holding a couple of focus groups (probably 4-5 students and 2 faculty per) and do some exercises to see what people like in terms of general design aesthetics and site organization. Feed them pizza as an incentive, etc. I got a Flip camera for christmas, so if the school doesn’t have any recording equipment for me to use I can just bring that in. I’d like to have them do a card-sorting exercise with all the different headings and subheads we identified for the demo site (as well as a few blanks for anything they feel is missing). I’d also like to show them examples of several different library websites (preferably not local schools that are likely to have other associations with our students) and get feedback on what they like/do not like about each, then finish with some discussion about what types of tasks they are likely to use the library site for, what is most important that they be able to do easily, that sort of thing. I obviously need to write this out more formally, but I’m just brainstorming at the moment. And probably start it off with some general icebreaker exercise to make sure they’re comfortable talking freely in the group setting. Any other suggestions for activities to do with these groups? I don’t want to get into anything that will last longer than the 45mins – 1hr range if I can help it, but I want to make sure we cover as much ground as possible.
Once these groups are completed we’ll move on to usability testing, probably get 8ish volunteers to complete a series of tasks on the website while being recorded and explaining their reasoning in doing what they’re doing (this is the technical definition of usability testing, ha). Take the results from the focus groups and these usability tests and use them to develop the actual site, then repeat the usability tests once that site is ready. More to come on this phase of things as I get things planned out.
I’m thinking I’ll definitely try to write something up for publication and/or presentation about this project, as I find the prospect of creating an organization’s very first website in 2010 to be pretty interesting, and definitely different from the experience of redesigning/updating a site.
It’s good to be back – expect more frequent updates now that I have something worth saying!
I hate to be constantly apologizing for sporadic updates. My internet access is still limited, and whenever I AM able to spend some time on the webz, it tends to go towards writing cover letters and scouring job boards rather than blogging and reading interesting articles.
I’ve settled into volunteering at a branch of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library and looking for part-time work until I can find something professional. The library work isn’t exactly THRILLING, as it’s mostly backed-up processing and projects that the librarians have gotten behind on thanks to the hiring freeze, but hey – can’t be too picky. It’s in the field, and my time is definitely appreciated.
A couple of bright spots – first, we are moving into a new apartment at the end of the month which will be substantially nicer than our current situation and in a better area. Second, I think I am going to be able to set up a work exchange with a local yoga studio so that I can get some free classes in exchange for helping them out with cleaning and other little tasks.
Hopefully in the near future I’ll have a bit more time to post my thoughts on library-related issues and stop with the constant apologies!
I hate to be constantly apologizing for sporadic updates. My internet access is still limited, and whenever I AM able to spend some time on the webz, it tends to go towards writing cover letters and scouring job boards rather than blogging and reading interesting articles.
I’ve settled into volunteering at a branch of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library and looking for part-time work until I can find something professional. The library work isn’t exactly THRILLING, as it’s mostly backed-up processing and projects that the librarians have gotten behind on thanks to the hiring freeze, but hey – can’t be too picky. It’s in the field, and my time is definitely appreciated.
A couple of bright spots – first, we are moving into a new apartment at the end of the month which will be substantially nicer than our current situation and in a better area. Second, I think I am going to be able to set up a work exchange with a local yoga studio so that I can get some free classes in exchange for helping them out with cleaning and other little tasks.
Hopefully in the near future I’ll have a bit more time to post my thoughts on library-related issues and stop with the constant apologies!
So, as my Internet access has been extremely limited lately, I haven’t had the chance to mention something I’ve been thinking about…recently, the main library in Louisville, KY (my hometown) was severely damaged by flash flooding. Here’s a link to a Library Journal interview with the director. Things are really bad =(
As I am not working at the moment, I’m thinking about trying to go up there for a few days and volunteer. I’m still trying to track down the best way to get in touch with them, but if you’d be interested in doing something like this let me know! We can stay at my parents’ house for a few days.
