Month: October 2010

Categories
Libraries

Instruction and integration

There has got to be some irony in a scholarship of pedagogy symposium leaving me too tired to plan lessons.

My position, while certainly focused on technology, does require (and I enjoy) some amount of instruction. If nothing else, we don’t have enough staff to not have everyone pitch in for instruction. I will also be teaching a liberal arts seminar in the spring, which will explore how technological innovations throughout time have affected work and leisure. The seminars emphasize integrative learning across the disciplines, which is ideal for a “generalist” who often feels jack of all trades, master of none.

For me instruction provides a forum in which I can understand how technology decisions I make for the library actually affect the people who use it for their academic lives. I don’t think I could do my job half as well if I didn’t have to spend a lot of time working with the library’s resources to perform non-theoretical activities.

In a related vein, I was able to finally get some real world help with the website redesign process. Today my boss rounded up some student workers to come help out with website brainstorming, and it was just as helpful as I hoped it would be. They came up with some great non-librarian ideas, and completely shot down some “innovative” ideas I’d read on library technology blogs.

I seem to be lacking a cohesive theme and/or unity in this, but let’s just take it as given that I am tired, work too many hours, but love what I do.

Categories
Libraries Web Design

On Trying New Things

New initiatives are supposed to be what we’re all about in the library world these days. Certainly that is what you read on Twitter. The thing is, what is new in some places is not at all new in others. In my current position, I spend a lot of time thinking about what others have done that would match what we are here. For redesigning the library website, it made the most sense to draw on Dominican’s relationship centered culture, and invite people to work together to build a solution we could all live with. The first such session was today, but no one showed up. There are four more, and I suspect scheduling may be better for some of the other sessions, but it still leaves me feeling a bit worried.

Again, focus groups for user centered design aren’t even remotely a new thing, but it’s a new thing for this particular library. I’m hopeful that this will turn around and will end up working out. In the end, I think everyone who wants to weigh in on the website will get a chance to do so. I want the way I chose to go about this to work out, but I also know that if I have to reinvent as I go along, I can do that too.

Categories
Uncategorized

There’s a certain slant of light

This is the best description of the feeling that comes upon one around this time of year and lasts until about March. Not that this summer wins any prizes for being great, but at least it was light out.

There’s a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
‘T is the seal, despair,—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, ‘t is like the distance
On the look of death.

–Emily Dickinson