Lazy Summers

Throughout each school year as I run crazily from meeting to meeting, class to class, and project to project, I keep a little list of all the projects I want to do over the summer. And during the academic year, this seems to make perfect, logical sense. Summer shimmers out in the distant regions of my imagination as this expanse of unscheduled time just waiting to receive these projects into its outspread arms.

Then summer arrives. Classes let out sometime in the first half of June (This year graduation was on the second weekend of June), and then it takes us all until the end of June get ourselves back on our feet. During this first half month of the summer, our fiscal year ends (read "we panic and run around getting facts and figures nailed down so invoices can be issued"), we have our end-of-year all-staff meeting, we realize that in the mad rush of the end of the year there are still hundreds of emails buried in our in-boxes, and the piles on our desks have become so entrenched that we don't even notice them any more... they are the decor.

In July an academic summer camp or two comes through, so we teach classes for those kids. And any real projects we wanted to get done must also happen during this month because next comes August, and August is crazy busy.

In August we meet with new faculty, host a picnic for faculty and academic staff, design and print our new editions of trading cards, plan for new-student week, start learning of the classes we'll be teaching when school begins, get ready to facilitate common reading groups, and generally get by on very little sleep and a lot of adrenalin.

So what do I have on my list of summer projects? Well, just a few little things:

• Learn our new database and add them to appropriate subject guides for my disciplines.
• Update all links everywhere on our site for our new MLA International Bibliography platform.
• Clean up and update my disciplines' EndNote filters and styles (and build an output style for a department on campus that have come up with their own citation style).
• Update all my subject research guides (especially two that I've hardly looked at since I arrived here two years ago... yikes).
• Learn how to support two new faculty who are coming in with very different research areas and needs from anything we've had on campus to date.
• Develop a working knowledge of which journals are important to my area studies, and which databases are the best starting places for each of these somewhat interdisciplinary majors.
• Become a better music librarian (yeah... really, this is jotted down in my notes... wish me luck).
• Work on the MnObe group that's envisioning the future of the library catalog for liberal arts schools in Minnesota.
• Explore the possibility of a workshop offered jointly by the library and the WAC program on campus on the theme: Writing from Sources... What makes a good research assignment?
• Read Common Reading book and come up with ideas for the library exhibit that will use this book as it's theme.
• Write up a couple of Moodle guides that people have requested.

Besides this, there are a couple of pretty gigantic department-wide projects that I might explain later. And yes... this is what I hope to accomplish in July. I think I'll need two or three clones of myself. But since I don't think "Clones of Iris" are listed anywhere in the library budget, I'll probably have to content myself with prioritizing this list and only tackling the more important items, which is what I did last year, which is why some of these are left over from last year's list, which is why I fear that I'll go through my entire library career with a few of these things perpetually on my list of summer projects. Maybe I should get stationary printed with those things permanently printed in nice, neat bullets.

At times like this I remember that when I took this job (coming from a non-professional position in a very small library where everybody did everything), I worried that I might get bored with "only" reference and instruction duties. Heh.

Appreciation

Every year, the Dean of the College sends a small note of appreciation to each academic staff member on the anniversary of the day they started working here. It's a sentence or two on letter-head note paper, signed by the Dean, and expressing appreciation for that staff member's work over the past year.

And by all reasonable standards, this shouldn't be something to get so excited about. And yet, as my anniversary approached I found myself looking forward to getting that note. It's funny how such a small thing can be so heartwarming.

Of course, it helps that I really like our Dean. He interviewed me before I came and has always done and said those small things that make me feel he actually knows and cares that I exist. But beyond that, I enjoy being part of an organization that takes even a small amount of time to pat people on the back and thank them for working hard. It really is the small things that make a difference.

Late on the Uptake?

We're having our mid-meeting break at the moment (all-staff meeting from 9 to noon, followed by lunch and a photo). But I wanted to share my favorite quote of the day. It came from a co-worker, who quoted a speaker he'd heard at the Frye Institute.

The library is pregnant with change. In fact, it's nine month's pregnant, and it's in the delivery room. And the library has just decided it's time to go out and buy a pregnancy test.

But... What do you Do, Exactly?

I attended a cook-out this past weekend and had a wonderful time sitting around in lawn chairs talking, listening to others talk, or listening to the breeze whenever we all fell silent. The gathered group was actually comprised of two sub-groups: people who work at Carleton with one of the hosts and people who don't work at Carleton but are cool and interesting anyway. By chance, I ended up spending most of my time sitting with the latter subgroup, and twice the Dreaded Question came up.

The DQ, as I like to call it (since I am a librarian and am thus compelled to make acronyms out of any phrase of two or more words), is only slightly less difficult for me to answer than that ubiquitous question: "So... where are you from?" Every time that omni-present conversation opener rears it's ugly head I have to quickly assess whether the person wants to know where I was born, where I spent my early years, where I spent mostly of my time, where I'm mostly recently from before moving here, or if they just want to know where around here I live. The only thing I know they don't want to know is everywhere I'm from. It's very complicated.

But I digress. The DQ, as I'm sure you've guessed from the title of this post, comes just slightly after "Where are you from?" and it's inevitable follow-up, "What do you do?" It's the thing that comes after you say, "I'm a librarian."

First there's the instant smile and the comfortable "oh, that's nice."

Then there's a pause.

And then comes the kicker: "So... what do you do, exactly?"

Long days at the office, dashes across campus to help professors conquer research emergencies, days spent agonizing over classes and preparing for student appointments, weekends spent "catching up," and hours at the reference desk all flash through my head. But there's not much that's coherent, not much that I can latch onto and say "This. This is what I do." So I rambled both times about working through research processes, sources, and analysis with students and faculty, teaching classes of students before they start out on research assignments, working with intellectual property policy on campus, and sitting at the reference desk several hours a week. We got into how the internet has changed this job in recent years and explanations about why people need a degree to do this job. And then people moved on to talk about a bar somebody liked, the neighbor's dog, and how much money farmers can make from growing mint.

And maybe that's ok. I have very little concept of what the woman next to me does all day even though she explained it, and her fiance told me the job is eating her live. Maybe there really are only a handful of jobs in the world that we all know and understand well enough that we don't have to walk away from newly met people and wonder how they fill their time. Besides, maybe it's more interesting to work in a job that has so many disparate parts to it, each one with it's own challenges and rewards.

It's also gratifying that people actually ask what I do rather than jump to the conclusion that I must shelve books all day. I never ask a lawyer what he or she does all day because I think I know. But I don't, actually. And it's only since my cousin became a lawyer that I bothered to find out that there are many branches and specialties in that field. Maybe having people assume our jobs have been usurped by Google is the best thing that's happened for this profession in a while. Maybe now they're curious about what happens when we aren't sitting at the reference desk.

So as much as the DQ is frustrating and unsettling, maybe it doesn't need to bother me any more. Maybe I can learn to love it as much as I love having people ask me what kind of dog my family's mutt is, or what ingredients go into my soups.

The Problem of the Younger Generation

I O.D.ed on millennial generalizations after only three professional conferences and meetings last year and have since consciously avoided sessions about those crazy aliens we've spawned. So maybe I'm not educated enough on the topic to have an authoritative opinion. But that doesn't stop me having a non-authoritative opinion, and here it is: throughout all of history, the younger generation has always been alien.

"But their brains operate differently," you say.

"How do you know?" I reply. "How many generations of kids have had their brains scanned?"

Well, TCM is playing the 1968 movie "The Impossible Years" right now and guess what, it's all about how teens are wired differently and how teens and adults are completely incomprehensible to each other. The mother in this film just told the incredulous dad, "And what do you suppose our daughter is doing right now? She's reading." Nobody can believe it. They think it's a miracle. And yes, I said the movie was from 1968.

So the specific differences between adult and kid may differ from year to year and from research study to research study, not to mention from specific adult to specific adult and specific kid to specific kid. But the younger generation is always alien... and this is completely natural.

Anniversaries

I just realized that today marks my second anniversary as a librarian at Carleton (and, incidentally, it's also my co-worker's birthday). It's incredibly cliche, but it feels simultaneously like I've been here a couple of months and a couple of lifetimes.

Anniversaries are strange things. They make me all gushy about the good times, but they also remind me how hard those first months were. And somehow it's the memories of those first months that are dominating my thoughts this morning, months when I'd work hard and then come home and feel every single one of the 330 miles between me and everything I knew. And even now, two years later, I still miss my family every single day.

Moving here was one of the harder things I've done in my life. But I'm glad I talked myself into it because I could never have asked for a better job, better co-workers, or a better supervisor. It didn't take me long to realize that I'd somewhat accidentally landed in the dream job I hadn't known I wanted.

So yes, anniversaries are strange things. I wonder what next year's will feel like, and what new experiences I'll have between now and then.

Reunion Weekend

Over 2000 alums are here this weekend for the annual reunion festivities. 2000 may not sound like a lot to some people, but when you consider that it's just over the number of students we support each year, you can get a sense of how full the campus seems at the moment.

Here in the library (one of the few air conditioned buildings on campus on this very hot day, by the way) it's been fun to see people's reactions to the various renovations that have occurred over the past 15 or so years. And there's been a pretty steady stream of alums into my office asking everything from "where's the bathroom" to "where's such and such a collection that was donated 18 years ago."

Now, it should be noted that I'm not the librarian on call for questions today, but I am the only one here who's door is open and who's door is near the reference desk, the stairs, and the elevator. Next to mine is the office of a librarian who's on vacation today, and next to hers is the office of a co-worker who's also an alumna and who's doing the whole reunion thing this year. Next year, I should just take today as my day on call.

But I'm not actually complaining. I love reunion weekend. Every year I think I won't (don't know quite why), and every year I end up having a blast.

Meanwhile, the college archivist has set up shop in the Athenaeum (our gathering/presentation space here in the library, and also the room that houses works written by Carleton people). He's collecting oral histories today and generally having a grand old time. Every year at this time he becomes one of the most valuable employees here. He's pretty much the only one who can talk to the two or three people from the class of '37 as if he'd been there. He teaches people about their time here, and he soaks in the experiences and memories of generations of alums. I keep seeing him walk past my office toward the elevator carrying boxes of photos and letters and other memorabilia to be added to his collection. What fun.

Navigating Copyright Agreements

I've been learning more and more about copyright ever since I landed in the group on campus that wrote our copyright policy. But I've almost exclusively learned about copyright from the content user's perspective rather than the content creator's perspective. Well, lately I've begun to learn about that other side of copyright law.

A few months ago I was asked to write a chapter for an upcoming ACRL publication. Right away I asked, "Can I have a co-author, and can we put our finished product into our institutional repository?" The answers came back in the affirmative, which was very encouraging all around.

Then we got our copyright agreements in the mail and the cover letter said, "This form grants you the copyright to your work, allows you to use your work elsewhere after the original publication, and allows deposit in your institutional repository." Woohoo! But....

The agreement itself said, ".... the Author hereby grants and assigns to the Publisher ... all copyrights therein or relating thereto..." Hmmmm...

Further down, the agreement says that "Publisher hereby grants to Author a royalty-free license to publish the Work in any book of which the Author is the author or editor, provided the Work is identified as having first been published in the original publication cited above. The Publisher also grants to the Author the right to file the work in their institutional repository." So that's very, very nice, but it's not the same as keeping our copyrights.

So, after talking it over with some people in the LSW chat room, I asked the publisher if I'd gotten the right agreement. It's been known to happen that there is more than one possible agreement and that the author receives the wrong one.

But it turns out I got the right one. ACRL's response was very encouraging, though. They said they've never been asked about this before and wondered what would be better. So I suggested removing that bit about "you get to keep your copyrights" from the cover letter, and then adding a clause saying that copyrights revert to authors X number of months or years after the book officially goes out of print. Sound reasonable? I hope they think so.

Meanwhile, I've suggested to our copyright group on campus that we should add a "what to think about before you sign away your rights" facet to our copyright training.

[Update: It looks like ACRL thinks this is reasonable! They are even thinking of asking their lawyers to draw up something even more permissive.]

[Update 2: They're thinking of making the agreement explicit that they own the copyright, but we get to use the work in any old way we want as long as we cite it as having been published first in this ACRL volume. Sounds wonderful to me!]

The Wonders Never Cease

I go a way for a few days and come back to find that Gorman has decided to blog, or at least write blog posts on somebody else's blog... wow... Gotta love that irony.

Worst Trip Ever

I've been unplugged for a lot longer than I thought I would. I thought I was traveling home for the weekend to attend my sister's graduation (she graduated with highest honors, by the way!). But as it turned out, I was starting out on the worst car trip ever. On the way there, my cat had an asthma attack (only his second in two years) in the Middle of No Where Wisconsin. It took my dad, his internet connection, and my cell phone to finally find a vet 30 miles away who could see him and shoot him full of steroids.

Then came the graduation, which was nice.

Then on Monday I started out to drive home, but wrecked my car instead. I did it not even half a mile from my parents' house, and I didn't hurt any one else or anything else, which is good. But I did completely wreck my car, and suffered the effects of being hit in the head by an air bag. I don't recommend it.

But I'm home again and fine, except for being kind of shaken up. I'm hoping for a really, truly, bone-numbingly boring rest of the week.

It's Not a Secret Any More

For the past week or so I've been working on a "secret" project. What is this secret project, you ask? Well, a few motivated people thought ALA needed some shaking up, so they're putting together the first online unconference associate with ALA annual. It's the Social Software Showcase (still under construction), and it features 11 short "presentations" about emerging technologies.

I'm doing the presentation on Meebo Rooms, and my name is listed there right next to people who's names make my eyes pop right out of my head! I had NO idea. None. Wow! (Now I'll have to spy on their presentations as they go live and make sure mine isn't totally lame in comparison.) But lame or not, here are the relevant links:

• The LITA Blog announcement of the project
• The Social Software Showcase itself
• My presentation
  
• My presentation's accompanying Flickr image set
• An example library meebo room and it's embedded versions
  

Doing Freakishly Cool Things with Social Image Tagging

Well, I'd thought things would be less busy for me this week, but it seems that I have one more week of crunch time before life settles down. Such is life, I guess. Or such is my life, at any rate.

But while you sit and ponder how lovely it'll be when I start really blogging again, you can pass the time by watching this video. All I can say is, "Wow... Wowy-wow-wow-wow."

I've now subscribed to the TED talk videos. (Here's the feed, which was surprisingly difficult to find.)

Breathe In... Breathe out

Classes are done. Now we're in the "lull" period of reading days (i.e. students doing the research they should have been doing for weeks, panicking a little, and not having time for interlibrary loan... Meanwhile we stay open until 3am and have added reference hours). Finals run Saturday through Monday. And then we're DONE.

To celebrate that we've made it this far, we set up an ice cream sundae bar outside the library last night from 9 to 10 and served gallons and gallons of ice cream (I believe 7 gallons? maybe 8?) to crowds of students. And I have to say, it was the best thing we could have done, both for the students and for ourselves. Students got ice cream (what's bad about that?) and we got to do something really fun after a long and very stressful day. I started the night grumpy and over-tired, but when I went home I'd almost completely decompressed and could go to bed without dwelling and stewing about the horrible day we'd had. (We even ended up doing a few impromptu research consultations over ice cream, which was interesting and rather unexpected.)

So this weekend will be busy, filled with extra reference shifts and polishing off a manuscript that's due. But then I hope to figure out what "normal" life looks like, again (and maybe get to some of the blog posts I've been meaning to write over the course of the last month and a half).