Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
In April, I drove down with a colleague to Indianapolis for ACRL, the biennial national academic librarian conference. While not as large as ALA, it was definitely as overwhelming. Since this was my first ACRL, I put together my schedule for the conference online to keep me in check and because the official mobile app was terrible.
At conferences like this, I do a lot of my best learning, sharing, and connecting while networking in social and impromptu situations over sitting in conference rooms listening to a presenter drone on. Because there is so much over simulation, I’m going to wrap-up a few key pieces for me.
Session: Planning Programs for Bridging Cultures: Muslim Journeys Bookshelf
GRCC Library is a proud recipient of the MJB grant and by the time the conference was approaching, we already had one event planned, Muslim Journeys Poetry Night, which turned out to be a huge success. The MJB round table was the chance to connect with other institutions who were also awarded the grant and find out what they were doing for MJB, how they are doing it, how they were marketing/promoting it, as well as outreach, and everything else in between. I got a lot out of this round table, and also a lot of great resources to use for future planning of events for the rest of the academic career.
Henry Rollins is a punk rock icon, writer, publisher, traveler, musician, actor, and activist. And that does not even cover half of his interests. Rollins was selected as one of the primary keynotes for ACRL 2013, and he is the main reason I decided to attend. Henry’s passion for protection, curation, and preserving information is contagious. He spent his much of his keynote regaling the audience with stories of his own preservation works, starting when he was younger by collecting flyers and promotions for bands he knew, saw, or played in and his love for and about archives and librarianship. Rollins’ is immensely quotable, but one of his most accurate statements in this keynote is, “Life is short. Show up and do stuff.”
Session: THATCamp ACRL
The Humanities and Technology (THATCamp) is an all day (sometimes multiple days) unconference in which the sessions are collaborative, participatory, and most importantly, small. Having attended other unconferences in the past, this type of learning and sharing is definitely on par with my literacy style over say a structured lecture or something else along those lines. Since everyone in the unconference is participating, almost everyone involved is passionate about the topic, which makes sharing of ideas much more fun. The informality of the conference allows for flexibility and spontaneity that one normally wouldn’t find at a regular conference session, which also helps stimulate the projects and allows for growth that wouldn’t necessarily come.
I participated in the MOOC sessions, which was a small (less than a dozen people) group. The idea was to create an information literacy MOOC that would or could be dropped into instructors sessions and could be completely modular. So instead of creating a MOOC that is geared for say one class or say one college, this would be a general enough MOOC that could be dropped in a community college in Vermont or a big state college in California. While we were not able to complete the MOOC by the end of the day, there was a lot of interest to continue the work long after ACRL was finished.
Below is links to tweets, Google docs, and other materials for the MOOC as well as other links of interest for ACRL. Interesting links of note about ACRL 2013
On Friday, May 10, I had the pleasure of presenting at MLA Applied Technologies & Trends Workshop, If you caught my show before, at Library Tech Conference, you may notice some similarities. The presentation I gave at MLA is updated with a lot more content and recent revisions as well as I even have a checklist put together that I PDFed for people to use that I promised to have for people back in March.
Since I was one of the last persons to present, below are my notes on the other presentations I attended along with links as appropriate.
By Matthew Reidsma / Grand Valley State University
Why are decisions made for design not carried over to digital tools? Meaning, why do we apply strict questions to physical items but not to digital ones.
Functional: How does it function?
Behavioral: How do behaviors change?
How to do it?
This is where most people stop.
These are internal questions, that we ask ourselves on everything.
“The library world has been fa too gullible, far too willing to regard any technical advance as a service advance.” – Jonathan D. Lauer & Steve McKinzie
Human: How does this affect human experience?
Need to think more about the person who comes into our library, less about what we’re doing about them.
How do people FEEL?
How you treat people is more apt than what you did or will do. For example, if you treat a customer nicely, they will tell maybe 1 or 2 people. If you treat them badly, they will tell, on the average, nine people about their experience.
“User experience isn’t about expert intuition, it’s about expert listening.” – Whitney Hess
External questions: How to find how these technologies are going to affect not just people, but work flows, and technologies themselves.
Adding the human element
A way forward: Ditching the label maker
Prioritize users over process
We could be reactionary (train industry of people to undo the work of crappy vendors) or say to the vendors, “Makes this easy to use.” Demand it to be easy to use.
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
The Woman Who Died A Lot: A Thursday Next Novel (#7) (Amazon | Local Library | GoodReads)
By Jasper Fforde
I’ve been purposefully making time to read every day, even for 5 minutes, so that I can get back in the habit again. I know depression and other factors have been a huge influence on my attitudes towards things, so it’s even more important I make and keep habits to keep myself inline.
I started this title months ago, and in the last week have made great strides (a hundred pages!) in getting it finished. But I am finding that depression or not, this title seems to have less of the pizazz that was so prominent in the previous novels in the series. The plot seems to center around someone is trying to kill the real Thursday, and others near her, and replace her with day clones. We know it’s probably Goliath (so we’re lead to believe…), but what is the real reason?
Thursday is also named Chief Librarian of Swindon, and one thing I’ll give Fforde many hat tips for is how he captures the essence of librarianship without making Thursday come off as being cartoonish or stereotyped.
Watching
Rectify
Sundance is now throwing its hat into the ring by starting to produce original series content. Produced by the same people who give us Breaking Bad, Rectify follows the story of Daniel Holden, a man who may have been unjustly accused of rape and murder of his girlfriend at the age of 18. 19 years later, he’s freed from prison based on new DNA evidence that shows his potential innocence. TheHusband and I found out about the show after the first episodes ran so we ended up mainlining them in toot suite order. Verdict? Show borders on excellence, and this opinion by me surprises myself because slowness in television land has never been something that caught my eye. One critic said it makes Mad Men look like a pulp action thriller in comparison, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Rectify is deep character study of not just Daniel, but his family, friends, and others around him. There is some moments of implausibility where it seems the writers are trying too damn hard to showcase the difference between 1994 and 2013, but those moments are few and far between. Watching Daniel struggle not only with coming to terms with the fact he never really grew up (he’s a man’s body but an 18 year olds brain) but also the intersection of past versus present, which is more compelling over whether or not Daniel is the killer.
Justified
Will Ava go to jail? Will Raylan and Winona get back together before the baby is born? Is Raylan going bad, or has he always been bad? Will Boyd save his woman and the world? WHY DO I LOVE BOYD SO MUCH? I love this show far too much and now that the fourth season has ended, there is a loss in my heart.
How historical figures would have looked today Apparently it took 3 motnhs to create the images, ranging from Shakespeare to QE2, but to me they look like they were badly photoshopped.
What have you read/watched/listened to this week?
x0x0,
Lisa
Dear Internet,
A coulpe of weeks ago, after many months of planning, myself and nearly a dozen of my closest friends met up in Chicago to hook up for C2E2 to present on best practices, programming, and more for graphic novels in libraries, have karaoke good times, and other fun shenanigans.
Overall, as a conference, C2E2 rocks the fuck out of all the other conferences I usually attend. The registration price is super inexpensive, it’s close by, we get work with great people like Toby who acted as our liaison to ALA, we get to meet new people from the Internet, and we get to have a lot of fun while doing our jobs. THIS Is what makes being a librarian awesome. From a comics and pop culture experience, I also love C2E2 because everything is easily accessible, the guests are approachable, and the panels are excellent. This conference is a win-win situation all around. And the city itself ain’t too shabby either.
The cherry on cake this year? Several of us cosplayed as Doctor Who. L-R: 11 (Kristin), 4 (Julie), 10 (Carolyn), Donna Noble (Sarah), Rose (Val), Captain Jack (Beth), 9 (me)
Hilights from C2E2, including vines and more:
Myself, Kristin, and Andrew presented on The Silver Age of Comics in Libraries: Programming, Best Practices, And More
Dear Internet,
To celebrate our third anniversary, we took off for our cabin and get it opened for the season. We were beyond excited, I think me more than TheHusband. Wednesday? She was ambivalent of the entire thing. Pug says hello.
Upon our arrival, as we started unwinterizing the plumbing and such, we couldn’t figure out why the water pressure in any of the faucets or toilets was inconsistent. Then we realized why: We were flooding our crawl space.
The plumber we worked with last winter told us we didn’t have to contact his company to unwinterize the plumbing when we came back in the spring. As long as we followed these steps (turn well on, turn water heater on, turn heating elements on, etc) we’d be fine. Except, he didn’t tell us all the damned intake pipes in the crawl space would have their valves open to prevent excess water from freezing during the winter. Hence, turn well on, flood crawl space.
We called the plumbing company and someone was going to come out in a few hours to take a look so to kill some time, we decided to head to Good Harbor beach and walk the white sand. The drive to the beach is less than 5 minutes from our cabin.
County road ends at water. Lake Michigan, 5 minutes from our cabin. Sand cut by the recent rains. Snail shells.
We did a lot of exploring along the beach, collected rocks and shells, and followed inlets that were created from all the rains. TheHusband skipped rocks across some of the flatter pools of water and we talked about spending lazy days on the beach this summer. Amg! Just leave me here to DIE!
The pug was not amused at being left alone during all of this. Ever. But her age and arthritis makes it impossible to do long walks, so she pouted at home.
Our original plan was to come up on Saturday morning, unpack, take note of what we needed, make a run to the nearest village to get supplies, THEN take a walk on the beach and do a fire on the sands while drinking a variation of sparkling wine while toasting our anniversary. Sunday and Monday would be lazing around, with plans to leave late Monday morning. Quack.
Instead we flood the crawl space, find out TheHusband burned out the elements in the water heater, and by the time the plumber was gone1, we had enough time to get supplies and then come home and crash on Saturday. And of course, with discovering other things that needed to be immediately done around the cabin, we made a second trip to get home supplies Sunday morning. After spending a life time in Home Depot and Lowes, we come home to get shit done. I used the reverse camera function to guide where to hold the wrench while TheHusband tightened bolts in the toilet tank. #realmarriage
One of the problems was discovering the seal had broken on the 1st floor toilet and the toilet on the second floor had some mechanism wrong. We spent most of Sunday in various positions under toilets either fixing or cleaning them. Hello fire pit.
The original plan was to have a beach campfire on Saturday night, eat s’mores and swig sparkling wine from bottle like the classy fucks we are. Since that didn’t quite work, and TheHusband wasn’t digging any of the fire pits we were finding in various stores, we built our own fire pit at the cabin.
At some point in the cabin’s history, someone spent some serious cash on landscaping due to all the intricate circles, trails, and other formations of rocks everywhere2, so I followed a trail of them and gathered them to create a circle around a small pit dug by TheHusband. Thanks to the knowledge of YouTube, we had a blazing fire going in minutes. The pug agrees.
We had stopped in our village earlier that day and picked up a bottle of local sparkling wine for the evening’s festivities. After finding out it was our anniversary, the clerk serenaded us in front of the store’s growing line of an audience. Overly friendly people make us nervous, so we made haste to the cabin where that evening, we had a feast of salami, crackers, s’mores, and swigged the wine from the bottle just as the good lord intended. The duck. (Temporary location until we get furniture.)
On Monday, TheHusband changed out the shower head in the bathroom, we finished out a few small projects, and then packed the car to come home. It’s all about the tots.
We decided to stop in Glen Arbor for burgers at Art’s Tavern and cherry lemonade at Cherry Republic on our way out of town. We discovered that Wednesday was turning the interior motion alarm on inside the car so it took minute to figure out how to turn that off. Ping pong, 7PM Wednesday.
Then we can home.
Our plan is to start going up every weekend we can, hit as many festivals as possible, and learn how to relax, without the use of drugs. You may need to pray for our souls.
xoxo,
Lisa
1. Due to the misinformation relayed to us by the plumber from last winter, the plumbing company did NOT charge us for the house call or for fixing the broken on Saturday. Now we know that just as we schedule to winterize, we must also schedule to unwinterize.
2. Or aliens.
Dear Internet,
In all the excitement of the last six months, I forgot to mention something big:
We bought a cabin.
If you would have told us 15 years ago, when we were living not quite hand to mouth in San Francisco, one day our lives would be 180 degrees from it was then? We would have thought you were lying. I think we both would have recognized we would have end up with good lives but to the baller extent we’re apparently living up now?
Inconceivable.
And yet, here we are.
Today is our third wedding anniversary and to celebrate, we’re heading up to Throbbing Cabin to open it up for the summer. The cabin needs a lot of inside work (more like it needs to be gutted), it has no furniture or working appliances, but it’s on 1/2 acre of land, 5 minutes from five miles of white, sandy beach, and we’re in spitting distance of all the awesome places in northern Michigan.
And it’s all ours.
x0x0,
Lisa
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
The Big C
I really liked this show, while TheHusband was so-so about it but after the last season, it’s really gotten awful. The dialogue is cliched and trite, Cathy is at the core a terrible human being, and the plots are all over the place. We watched the opening of fourth season and that was enough to cement we would not be watching it again. I see this is apparently the last season, but nothing can get us to finish it out. I should have some kind of feeling for the main characters, but when I can’t even be arsed to finish out the final season, you know it’s bad.
Vikings
Ragnar, Lagertha, and Floki are done for the season and I’m terribly sad to see them go. Sure this show had some growing pains, but over all, it was one of the better things on TV this past season and I’m beyond thrilled it’s coming back as a second season next year.
Evernote Hello
I’m an Evernote evangelist and just about every product of theirs I love. But Hello? Meh.
The idea is brilliant: Scan in business cards, they get OCRed, and you can assign them to meetings and add notes. Each scanned card gets its own note in Evernote, and in theory, all of the OCRed information is supposed to get populated in the fields. After all the conferneces I attend, my business card pile is inches thick. The idea of assigning cards to meetings and giving them notes is genius! Also available for free on Apple Store, AND iPhone and iPad compatible? Brilliant! Also takes advantage of your premium features from Evernote? Even better!
Except it doesn’t work quite the way
Cards are easy to scan into the software, but the OCR is off and doesn’t populate the fields as intended, so you still have to manually fill in the fields.
To start the process, you have to either scan in a card or manually add the card THEN you create the meeting. You can’t just add cards and assign them to meetings later.
Meetings are automatically set by location. So if I sit there scanning cards forever that I’ve gathered from various places, they all automatically get added to the same meeting at the time I’ve scanned them in. So then you have to go in and manually change each and every card to its appropriate meeting place/location.
Meeting locations are powered by Foursquare — which one one hand, I understand, but on the other — seems odd.
Each card becomes its own note in Evernote, so you can view them on any device but you can’t edit them in any other version of Evernote other than Hello.
I can’t figure out, after scanning in cards, how to view individual cards or cards by meeting. The cards in the HOME option act as a scroll but I can’t sort by meeting. It just tells me I have X number of cards.
Searching is only available in the HOME option, which seems clunky.
Hello is very insistant on connecting to Facebook and LinkedIn, which I don’t want to do. But it keeps driving me nuts on making connections. No. I just want to sort business cards. I don’t need you to make new connections for me.
This could be really awesome but instead, it’s just meh. It’s getting deleted. Jolidrive
Launched a few years ago as a netbookOS whose sole purpose was to turn netbooks into a cloud devices, Jolidrive has now expanded into an online service to collate all of your cloud computing apps via the browser. Sounds like a great idea: Jolidrive runs as an extension in your browser and loads in an empty tab. After logging into your Jolidrive account, you can add other services and have them easily accessible in one location. Problem is: Its execution and design is terrible. Here’s why:
Accounts are added into one of two places: Jolidrive’s applications and services tabs. Services are vendors they have partnerships with, such as Twitter and Facebook, whose application will run natively within the Jolidrive interface. Applications are vendors you can add but do not run natively within the Jolidrive interface. When clicking on an application, it will launch that application it its own tab. Clicking on Evernote brings me to the Evernote web login. In short, the applications tab is a page full of bookmarks that don’t really add any value.
If the confusion of applications vs services isn’t enough, in order to add services, you have to “share” with your friends/followers on various social networks. You’re given 3 or 4 “free” services and any services added after that require the social promotion fee to get added to your Jolidrive dashboard. This is probably the dumbest method of social promotion because it’s annoying AND you can change the content of the Tweet to be something other than they append for you. Which I did. Since the content is not hard coded, all the dashboard is registering is that I tweeted/FB something, so it unlocked applications even though the content in my tweet had nothing to do with Jolidrive as I changed the tweet to say, “sugar.”
The Jolidrive dashboard within Chrome, regardless of Mac or PC, is slow to load since it’s just a front end to drive.jolicloud.com and not a local native client.
The interface is clunky and unintuitive.
Some of applications refuse to connect or authenticate, like Facebook, despite browser/computer.
When you delete your account, you get a notice stating your account will be deleted within 2 weeks – er what?
Bottom line: Terrible.
What have you read/watched/listened to this week?
x0x0,
Lisa
