Don’t get me wrong, I still find it incredibly valuable to attend conferences like these because I get to meet and network with great people. It just leaves me feeling disappointed when I follow a conference tag on twitter and see people getting so excited about the new things their learning, and I’m just sort of nodding along.

It seems like I just need to look for conferences that will offer different types of material. This cold just be larger, broader conferences – I’m looking forward to ALA Annual because I can attend sessions on topics outside of my normal areas of interest – as well as more technical conferences. Any suggestions from the crowd? I think ASIS&T may be a good place to start, I would have loved to go to their conference this year if I could have worked out the scheduling.

Or I guess I could just stop doing so much professional reading! (kidding…)

To give some background: a year ago, UH announced that they were closing the lot where I usually parked. We in the library were fortunate to have an inexpensive lot right next to our building, but an expansion to our campus power plant meant that we were soon to be slogging across campus like everyone else. The thing is, Houston in July is HOT. Here’s a screen shot of the weather yesterday. In the time it took to walk from our new lot, my hair generally increased in volume by about 300%, my makeup would largely have sweated off, and I just generally looked pretty bedraggled. One day I joked to a colleague that I might as well just be biking to work for how sweaty I was, and save $20 a month at that. It really stuck with me. Why COULDN’T I be biking to work? I’ve always hated driving in rush hour traffic anyway. Our fiscal year parking passes expire at the end of the August, so I decided to try it for the remaining 6 weeks or so, and see if I thought I could handle canceling my parking and just bike commute.

My ride is 4.5 miles each way, which may sound like a lot if you don’t live in a perfectly flat city like Houston. Here it’s pretty easy. While I would say that I was in fairly decent shape when I started biking in, I certainly wasn’t an experienced rider, and it hardly took any time at all to get used to the distance. I’m generally pretty sweaty after my ride, but I’m primarily sweating from heat, not exertion. I don’t push myself in terms of speed, with the exception of rare occasions when I’m running late or the weather looks threatening. Door to door, I can get to work in a half hour on my bike – about the same as driving, when you consider the time it took to get all the way around campus to my designated lot, found a parking spot, and walked the nearly half mile in to the library.  Of course, for about half of the year I can’t just ride door-to-door, and I actually ride from home to the on-campus gym, where I clean up and change into work-appropriate clothing. In the heat of summer, I need to leave my house at least an hour before I plan to be in my office.

I only have a few major frustrations with the bike commute. First of all, obviously, it adds commuting time in the morning. I am NOT a morning person – in fact I often refer to myself as being the “morning monster” for the first hour or so after I wake up…sort of like an evil twin who comes out until she can be tamed by a minimum of twelve ounces of coffee. It’s a pretty huge concession on my part to get out of  bed in time to physically and mentally prepare myself to get on my bike. I really need an hour for this, most of which I spend silently drinking coffee in the dark, and then a little while to pack my bag for the day with a change of clothes and anything else I need. If you’re keeping track, this means that I am waking up a full two hours before I can reasonably expect to be at work. That probably isn’t unreasonable for a lot of people, but I’ve been a roll-out-of-bed-and-go type for my as long as I’ve been setting an alarm for school/work.  Additionally, I miss a couple of minor things that went along with a car commute. As it turns out, I was getting a lot of my news from NPR during my commute. I’ve tried to pick up my level of news reading, but I still feel like I’m absorbing less – probably because there is so much more competing for my attention online than there is on drive-time radio. I also miss the ability to easily bring food with me to work. There’s only so much that I can carry with me on the bike every day, and it’s pretty difficult to bring much more than a granola bar or sandwich. Dining options on campus at UH are pretty sparse, particularly during the summer, so I end up spending more money and eating less nutritious food in general.

Still, these complaints haven’t convinced me to abandon my bike. I do quite enjoy the ride most of the time, particularly in the morning. It’s usually quiet and calm, I have time to collect my thoughts, and the route is pretty scenic. I enjoy the feeling of getting to work under my own power, and it saves me money on parking and gas. Dealing with rude drivers has helped me learn to just roll with frustrations that I can’t really do anything about, and carrying everything with me curbs my pack-rat tendencies. I appreciate that biking helps me squeeze in some exercise, even though the ride itself isn’t exactly strenuous. I change clothes at the campus gym, so it’s not very hard to convince myself to work out a little bit since I’m already there. To be honest, if there was a viable public transportation option I would probably go for that over biking, but I dislike driving in city traffic enough that this alternative is just fine with me.

I often get comments about the safety (or lack thereof) of my commute, particularly related to traffic and the economically depressed neighborhood that I ride through. I follow a city-designated bike route, which is pretty low traffic. I’m almost entirely on neighborhood streets, and even on a bike path for a little ways. I can’t say I’ve never been nervous about traffic, or threatened by drivers, or even bumped by a car, but overall I feel that my route is about as good as it gets for an urban bike commute. I also ride at normal commuting times – almost always between 8am and 7pm, during daylight, so I never feel unsafe in terms of crime. I do make a point to be friendly with people who I pass frequently, say good morning and generally establish myself as friendly and respectful, but I would do the same in any neighborhood I rode through. Realistically, the most consistent threat to my safety that I encounter is stray dogs. Some mornings I have seen as many as EIGHT loose dogs on my ride in. Most of the time they ignore me, but some will come running up and even chase me a little bit. I don’t have a good solution for this, I just do my best to stay on the opposite side of the road and get past any strays as quickly and quietly as possible.

One last note: I bike about 90% of the time, but I do drive to work when necessary, such as when the weather is bad or I need to run a car-dependent errand during the day. When I drive in, I have two options for parking – $3/day to park in a remote student lot, or $9/day to park in a garage that is located pretty close to the library. If the weather is bad, I usually spring for the garage. However, I’m lucky in that my husband can usually just drop me off and pick me up when necessary, so I don’t always have to pay to park if I don’t ride. If I didn’t have this luxury, I’m actually pretty sure that it wouldn’t be cost-effective to not have a parking permit. I would love if UH would adopt some sort of incentive program for cyclists. I know many companies give registered cyclists 1 or 2 free parking passes a month to use during inclement weather, or free/discounted gym memberships so that they can clean up. As it stands, I get no benefits related to bike commuting whatsoever, which is a pretty big bummer.

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.

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!

Thinking through your own network connections (parents, parent’s friends, schoolmates, peers), how easy it it to find someone who:

• Can loan you fifty dollars?  Loan you $500? Loan you $5,000?
• Owns a business with more than nine employees?
• Has an executive level job?
• Can sell you weed?
• Does not have a bank account?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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’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!