lauren's library blog

The Awesomeness of Archives and Mashups

lauren pressley — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 18:41:44 +0000

zomg. You have to click through and look at these pictures. Please come back, though. I’ll wait.

Okay, did you see them? Weren’t they awesome?!

Seeing these pictures made me think about mashups again. I often talk about mashups in my lib100 classes. They’re a good tool for helping people think about how technology changes things and copyright. I show a few demos and that’s about it. There aren’t many that I’ve found to be useful for teaching my content.

But can you imagine how much more meaningful a history class would be if looking at those photos? An architecture class? How would seeing photos like this affect your visit to a country if you saw them before hand? Afterwards?

I don’t have much time for a long post on it this Friday afternoon, but stumbling across these photos made me think more about how archives could impact the curriculum, how mashups and technology can make some educational experiences more meaningful and rich, and about how visual learning can impact even those of us who learn more from words. And I thought you all might find it interesting, too.

Have a happy weekend!

A Friday Library Day in the Life: Getting Ready for Monday

lauren pressley — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 21:01:07 +0000

The final day of Library Day in the Life week was all about getting ready for Monday. Our new Fellow starts then (Hi Gretchen!), and I wanted to make sure that I had all of my ducks in row… at least as many as I could get in order. So the bulk of the day was spent in meetings or getting things in order. I met with one of my supervisors to start with to make sure the logistics were all in place: that the office was ready, how to go about getting supplies and necessary items, exactly how Monday morning would play out. Next up I met with the Information Systems side of the project via WebEx. We talked about the corporate side of the position, the technology that would be coming, and how budgeting would work. I also worked with a colleague to move a few things out of the office and make sure it was in a good state for Monday morning. Finally, I communicated with my chain of supervisors to let them know the current state of things and what had changed about the position since April when I last met with Information Systems.

I had expected to hear a talk today on Google Books as part of an ILL conference that happened to be at my library, but another colleague who just had a baby stopped by so we compared notes a bit and talked about transitions. I needed the spare time after our talk to finish getting ready for Monday anyway, but am hopeful someone will blog the talk.

So, in about 23 hours of time, that’s my library week! The next one will be more project related and interesting, though I’m hoping that this might be useful for people imagining how maternity leave might play out for them. Here are the days again:

Sunday: I’m back!
Monday: Re-entry
Tuesday: Pomodoros and Zen to Done
Wednesday: planning
Thursday: catching up

And if you’re interested in past weeks, I’ve done this before.

A Thursday Library Day in the Life: Catching Up!

lauren pressley — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:58:13 +0000

I have finally figured out (it only took me three days!) that every little task I have on my “get back into the swing of things” list is going to take longer than expected. Now it’s all going to be about setting realistic goals. So with that, today I caught up with a few more people and refamiliarized myself with my job and obligations.

See above! This is my job. “IDL” stands for “Instructional Design Librarian.” The three boxes off of the title are the areas we’re evaluated on: our job, service, and professional involvement. The blue circles off of that level are about the types of work that I do in each area. The orange words are things that I’ve committed to or are in place already, and the brown words are the annual goals I still have to meet.

So from here I can get a better sense of what’s up in the air, what projects I could take on, and what areas I can imagine new services or tools to support. I’m feeling that ID and emerging tech aspects of my job are becoming more distributed among library staff and some other departments in the University over time (yay for that!!), so I’m looking for different ways to do this type of work than the classes and consults I’ve typically done. It’ll be a fun few months to reevaluate what I’m doing and how I fit into the organization!

12:00 snuck up on me, so I’m hoping to do some email/scheduling this afternoon and evening. Leif has taken about three short naps which was enough to get this blog post up… let’s see how many naps it takes to accomplish the email!!

A Wednesday Library Day in the Life: Planning

lauren pressley — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:00:03 +0000

This day has flown by. John had an early meeting today, so I dropped Leif off on my own this morning for the first time. It was touch-and-go there for a minute, but it went better than I expected. Then, I headed in and straight to the parking office to resolve issues for the second car. Luckily, it was a speedy exchange and now both cars can be parked on campus. Yay for being able to go to work!

I dealt with a series of emails this morning about a pilot that went on this summer and caught up on the status. I installed the software on my computer to see if I could experiment with it in these last few weeks.

I had a meeting to catch up on a committee that wrapped up while I was away. A lot has happened in such a few short summer months! People think summers are quiet when students are away, but precisely because people are away a lot has to happen fast! Once they get here there’s not much time left for projects!

Next up: I scheduled a meeting with the new director of the Teaching and Learning Center. I liaise with the center and have offered programs with them in the past as part of the Instructional Design part of my job. I’m looking forward to sharing what we can offer and finding out how we can partner.

Finally, I started verifying the schedule I set up for our new Fellow before going on maternity leave. There’s still a ways to go on that, but the pieces are in place.

I had planned to refamiliarize and organize my Evernote account and clear out a folder of email. Hopefully I’ll make it through that tomorrow!

A Tuesday Library Day in the Life: Pomodoros and Zen To Done

lauren pressley — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:01:20 +0000

Day two was a little more productive. Unfortunately it didn’t start out that way. Yesterday I got my first parking ticket ever at a university (and I’ve been spending most of my time on one campus or another for the past twelve years). Over the summer WFU changed how parking works. I did request the new permits while on leave, and put them on the cars. But through a series of complications I ended up not having one additional sticker that goes on the main sticker so I got a ticket. This morning I went to get the additional sticker, but ended up having to spend half an hour outside of parking. They don’t open until half an hour after I get to work. It wasn’t all wasted, though, I did a little email triage and ended up talking with someone from another department who had the same problem. It was nice to see her since it had been three months!

Once I was in the office, I got down to business. I’m starting over with a new time management system since I’m essentially starting back up again. I’m using a blend of Zen To Done and the Pomodoro Technique. Those who know me will know I used GTD for a while and became disenchanted. For me, I ended up getting a lot of stuff done, but a huge percentage of it was unimportant stuff (the 80% from the 80/20 rule). I also felt I was losing touch with my big picture goals and not making time for life. So, hopefully my ZTD/Pomodoro system will allow me to streamline my work, focus on the important things, and open up more time for my family and larger goals. We’ll see how it goes!

So I spent a few minutes setting up the system and got down to work. The tasks today:

Finish setting up my computer/familiarize myself with the OS (pictured above!)
Appeal the parking ticket
Work on the hiring process for our new Fellow
Clean off the table from yesterday’s picture; go through all paper mail
Triage email

All in all, I actually knocked these tasks out! I just traiged email in my work account (though I got through it all). I probably only replied to about five. I have some work related emails that ended up in my personal account, so I need to go through that one, too, and pull out the work ones. But for now, my email is categorized like this: Fellows related, deferred (until some other action is taken), calendar invites, replies needed, emails containing a task that needs to be done soon, and general information that will be good to read when I am done catching up. Though I still have a lot of email to deal with at least it’s organized! And I officially did get every task on my list done! Now… off to get the little one!!