Guardienne of the Tomes

Slack In/Out Board Integration White board to keep track of people in/out/messages. Names of retired, people need to be reordered. No indications of when status was made, need to change date, sigh. /slack emoji puts in your status. Monitoring bot allows you to see server status. Took Slack status with Slack AIP and messaging, can push to web page, new status board as monitor on the wall. Encouraging people to use Slack, date updates automatically, shows time of status update, can be updated remotely. How works? User updates on slack, moves to campus server visible to outside world inboard.usask.ca uses server-sent data to grab update. Making Breaking Up Easier - Krista Godfrey Change is hard, we can make it easier. UX and usability can help fix - test, test, test. Test always and often. test during RFP, test other instances, training (you are the first tester), sandbox (use staff and users), production (doesn't stop after launch).  Terminology, back end, interface. Usabili...

Session 1: The UX of Online Help - Ruby Warren About 2015-16, web redesign. Back to basics - usability testing was already done, but it was a more fundamental issue. Did interviews about library's website with different user groups - UG, grad students, faculty, regional folks. What they go for, what they do, when it happens. Only when they have a problem that needs fixing and they cannot wait anymore (midnight, weekends, weekend midnights). Needed asynchronous help option. Internally called Help Hub - series of 55 videos and text tutorials arranged according to usergroup (U of Manitoba Libs) built in LibGuides. Usergroup appropriate language. After 8 months, do they use it? Everybody hates new things. Yes, they did. Spike in September, usage follows pattern of academic year. They're going to it, but does it work? 9 usability tests (high) - ensuring users can get to help area, navigating to tutorials should be intuitive, language makes sense; 35 interviews (12 currently comp...

Session 8: The SIMSSA Project: Search as Access to Digital Music Libraries - Emily Hopkins Notated music - images of scores, and making them machine readable and searchable. Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis. SSHRC Partnership grant 2014-2021, many international partners. How it works: Library Digitizes score Optical Music Recognition Music encoding initiative Music search and analysis 1. How do we access scores? Each library has own scores IIIF Musiclibs.net gather in one place - over 67,000 documents with more on the way. But just Pictures. 2. How teach computers to read musical scores? XML analog for music is optical music recognition making it machine readable (mp4, or MEI based on TEI that ends itself well to library collections). Commercial options: Sebelius' photoscore designed for standard music scores (not handwritten). Many researchers study chant (Salzinnes Antiphonal) and other less popular forms of writing. A page or two from documen...

Session 4: Excavating the 80s: Strategies for Restoring Digital Artifacts From the First Era of Personal Computing - John Durno "Avoiding technological quicksand" Rothenberg presentation review: hard copy, standards, computer museums, format migration, emulation. Ultimately he argued all but emulation would be of limited utility. David Bearman's "Reality and Chimeras in the Preservation of Electronic Records" in 1999 D-Lib. OAIS Functional Model. Rothenberg's emulation still at work - see Internet Archive, see code4lib paper (missed cite), Preserving and Emulating Digital Art Objects (Cornell white paper). Usually case-based choosing whatever works, not prescripted. Case Study 1: AtariWriter - no modern software that can read or convert. but if you can play games on an old platform, someone has probably written an emulator for it. Locate, install, configure an open source emulator. Tracking down old software not usually that difficult, though legality ...

Dean Melissa L. Just, University of Saskatchewan - Opening Remarks (My Notes) Hot topics from 19 years ago since last in Saskatchewan: classifying the web for search engine Northern Light; planning for sustainable desktop computing; Z39.50. Here "we come together to discuss current and cutting edge challenges and opportunities." University library worked in collaboration with others on such projects as Saskatchewan History Online (over 100,000). Indigenous Studies portal, or iPortal, with a number of archival entities (more than 33,000 full text resources focusing on First Nation and indigenous peoples. Also the Our Legacy project, extensive collaboration with various archives, libraries, and historical centers and societies. All made possible from small ideas that were germinated at conferences like this one. Keynote - Dr. Kimberly Christen "The Trouble with Access" Director of All the Things (so many my typing fingers couldn't keep up). Cultural heritag...

Hey, y'all. How was your summer vacation? (That was a joke. I know librarians aren't on vacation during the summer. Don't hit me.) It's been awhile. I feel like I'm slinking back onto your screen. Whatever, life is too short, I'm here and I hope you're glad to see me because I'm glad to be here. Consider me jazz-handsing back onto your screen. It has been a big, long year already, and a crazy summer that started with co-presenting with my colleague Dr. Sohui Lee (our director of the Writing and Multiliteracy Center) at Computers in Writing in Findlay, Ohio, middled with a disaster of a move (home, not library), and ended with presenting at the Colloquium on Libraries and Service Learning up in Santa Clara, California. More about at least those summer bookends soon, since they're actually relevant to my librarianship. Right now the big huge work-related thing that has me resuscitating Guardienne is that as of my return to campus August 14th th...

Well, hello, there. It's been awhile. I shut this sucker down because I didn't know that I had anything interesting to say anymore. But it appears I do. And folks have asked me to put it in a place where it doesn't fade as quickly as a Facebook post. And suddenly the world of information, which I was merrily floating along in, has developed some serious tidal waves. Slapped me awake a bit. Sit. Have a coffee. Let's chat. Let's chat about this weekend. The marches! Come now, we can't pretend libraries are not, at their heart, places of political activism. Heck, in our Code of Ethics it flat-out says that we "uphold the principles of intellectual freedom..." For those who are rusty, the American Library Association defines "intellectual freedom" as "the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access to all expressions of ideas through which any a...

How I say BOOM to this day: 1. Two surprise student consults this morning because their professors told them to come see me specifically. 2. A professor just called in an emergency status, needs some research to support a major NIH grant, thought immediately of me. Yep, I can help with that. Due Thursday? No problem. 3. Finished and submitted a complicated "revise & resubmit" research article to one of the top journals in my field. 4. Chatted with a friend about researching grants for her business idea. 5. Made comments on a group report submitted by one of the groups of students in my experiential learning social justice class. 6. Had a phone call to clear up some things about the library leadership book manuscript. 7. Rejoined the local CSA - 12 biweekly deliveries of a giant box of farm fresh veggies. Back onto the Autoimmune Protocol. 8. Submitted a poetry book manuscript to a press 9. Already located some good sources for #2 - sent 5 articles to the faculty member 1...

The research paper. It's funny--I have my FJS students read Barbara Fister's article on " Why the Research Paper isn't Working ," but they still have to write a paper for me. It's an upper-level class, after all, and for the first iteration of this course, the research paper is how I'm scaffolding in information literacy as well as keeping students well on track to completing a larger project as they consider concepts throughout the course. Back on topic: for my FJS 340 course, my students are required to work on a research paper. Essentially, they get to explore any conflict or issue of interest to them that involves questions of freedom and justice, but they must explore their conflict from an information perspective (which is our focus for the class). I leave the subject matter wide open for a reason--the course I teach is an upper-level general education course, multidisciplinary and international in scope. I want students to choose a topic of interest...

Teacher- Librarians In practice here at CSUCI Broome Library, we are all teaching librarians. when I schedule information literacy sessions, all librarians are up for grabs for me--my Head of Public Services and Outreach, Head of Unique Collections and Scholarly Communication, my Collections & Technical Services Coordinator, my Electronic Resources Librarian, my Original Cataloging Librarian, even my dean/AVP. Everybody's on deck when there's an instruction need, and with over 120 information literacy sessions scheduled this fall alone, everybody bats, and everybody bats big. In addition to the many information literacy sessions we teach, many of us also teach semester-long classes. Before I talk about teaching my credit course this semester, some important background. Here at CSUCI, the librarians (who have tenure-track faculty status) regularly teach and co-teach credit courses in disciplines where we're qualified, in addition to classes actually certified under the L...

This semester has been a grueling one--it started with a bang, and is just now beginning to let up. And by 'let up,' I mean it's just now that I can start getting to my long to-do list of things I was hoping to accomplish this semester that fall just outside my primary duties of coordinating and scheduling instruction. That list includes reflecting on my teaching, Summer 2015 Summer was a wild one, with some rough health issues, then a week away at PhD camp for the Mythological Studies degree, then the first week of August in Seattle for the ACRL Immersion program, then coming back to welcoming the new faculty, developing the syllabus for my new class, and scheduling library instruction. September: All Information Literacy Instruction, All the Time In September, I taught 27 instruction sessions across all manner of subjects (including Anthropology, Art, Business, Education, English, Environmental Science & Resource Management, Communication, Psychology, Political Scienc...