lis.dom

Laura Crossett on the LIS domain

three little candles

Posted on 7 May 2008 by laura

I’ve been trying to remember lately how I first figured out RSS and when I got myself set up with a Bloglines account. I remember that Morgan told me there were a lot of great radical librarian bloggers during the summer of 2003, but since that was before I even thought of going to library school. I stowed that information away somewhere, I think, and dimly remembered it when a friend sent me the Wired article about Jessamyn West. I know I saw the early announcements for Radical Reference through some lefty discussion list in the late summer of 2004, just as I was starting library school.

I can’t quite figure out just how I got into this reading blogs business, but I do know that three years ago today I decided to plonk my marbles down into the virtual dirt circle that is the blogosphere, and I started a little blog called lis.dom.

Posted in me, the biblioblogosphere | 6 Comments
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she started to sing as she tackled the thing

Posted on 24 April 2008 by laura

Meredith Farkas says such nice things about me that I’ve had to spend the better part of the last few days keeping myself from repeating them, ad nauseum, to everyone I know. (I feel rather like the other lion at the end of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe: “‘Us lions,’ he said, ‘us lions.’ That means him and MEEEEEE!”).

Dorothea Salo says things that are so true they hurt — though I mean that as a compliment. You get more points in this world for being pretty than for being truthful, and we ought to acknowledge that, unpleasant as it is. But it is true that if not for Dorothea and the goth cats, my knowledge of open access would be close to nonexistent. It’s also true that if Meredith (among other people) hadn’t responded so kindly to my first half a dozen or so idiotic questions about editing wikis, I might well be one of the people who goes around saying they can’t do wikis (or blogs, or cataloging, or whatever.

I do not generally get questions about how to become a rock star (in fact, I’m fairly sure I’ve never gotten one). Since I’m not particularly a rock star, this doesn’t bother me, although I will add, for the benefit of anyone hoping to glean such information from this little ditty, that moving to a town of 351 people is not really the best way to go about rockstardom. (Had I only thought to move to a town of 300 people, and acquire a coyote, and live in a cabin, and take beautiful photographs! Ah well.)

In the course of thinking about all these things, though, it has occurred to me that perhaps the way I go about things is a little peculiar. I am the branch manager of a tiny public/school library. Most of my day at work is spent reading book reviews, ordering books, helping patrons find stuff (mostly books), doing various interlibrary loan tasks, walking down to the post office to get the mail, organizing programs, submitting people’s timesheets, and trying to remember to schedule people to work on Wednesday nights. Now that I’m also (by self-declaration) the virtual branch manager, I do a little website maintenance and a little statistics gathering from databases and such, too. But there’s really very little call for me to know much about open access, or link resolvers, or college-level bibliographic instruction, or any of the other things that I spend time reading about almost every day.

There’s no call for me to know all of that as the Meeteetse librarian, it’s true, but I feel there’s plenty of call for me to know it simply as a librarian. I can’t advocate for net neutrality or open access as a member of my profession if I don’t know what they are or how they affect it. And, quite frankly, like Dorothea, I can’t imagine going through day by day without at least trying to learn something.

I’ve been lucky to have found myself a place where I can do some of that learning and a community of people who provide friendly encouragement and answer even the stupidest questions. This morning I started my new project, which is learning PHP. PHP is actually directly related to my job, in that I’m learning it in part in order to build a little application for the library. All I’ve managed to do so far is build a little form that captures a word you type in and redeploys it as part of a sentence. Not much, but it’s a start. And, thanks to the many people I know out there doing cool things, I felt that it was a start that I could make. My mantra in such projects is always, “Hey, if John Blyberg / Jessamyn West / other librarian rock star can do it well, then surely it’s worth it for me to do it poorly.” Or, as the godawful poem I learned in third grade put it,

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That maybe it couldn’t, but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.

Posted in libraries and librarianship, me, the biblioblogosphere | 2 Comments
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my tech-nots

Posted on 15 February 2008 by laura

After Jenna and Rochelle. . .

It once took a friend and me three or four different tries to watch a movie. First his DVD player got busted. Then we tried to use the set up our friends had at the coffee shop, but there were way too many remotes. Then we tried someone else’s setup, which I think finally worked when someone else came in to press buttons for us. I myself only recently acquired a DVD player. So far it hasn’t given me problems, but we’ll see. . . .

I’ve never used Skype or done any video or audio chatting.

I had an iPod, but it just bit the dust, and it pisses me off so much that they’re only made to last a few years that I’m not going to get another one. Besides, I like listening to my LPs and cassettes. I plan to go on using both until they completely fall apart. Occasionally I think I ought to get some kind of mp3 player that I could use to listen to downloadable audio books, but really, the process of downloading audiobooks and synching them to devices is one of the banes of my existence.

I am generally intimidated by cash registers, fax machines, and telephones with more than one line.

I don’t know how to use Photoshop (or the GIMP), although that’s something I’d like to learn (and is on the endless list of things I’m planning to teach myself, if I ever get around to it).

I have nothing against gaming, but I don’t do it myself. Ditto Second Life. (Well, I may have some issues with second life–if we’re going to bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old, let’s do it here in first life first, please.)

Probably as a result of being a life-long Mac person, I am extremely ignorant about computer hardware. When people start talking about core processors and graphics cards and things, I just hope they aren’t going to ask for my advice.

I get asked a lot of techie questions both in my library system and in my town. A few I can answer right away; some I can’t answer at all. And the rest — well, I do my best to find answers. After all, that’s my job, right?

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sociability

Posted on 2 October 2007 by laura

Last Friday we hosted a little get-together for thirteen librarians from northwestern Wyoming. Meeteetse has a four-day school week, so that meant we could use a school computer lab for the sessions, which turned out to be an even better deal than I thought.

In the morning, the school’s IT coordinator talked to us about viruses, anti-virus software, and basic computer security and troubleshooting. I learned that shortcuts on your desktop take up extra space, and I resolved to get better about scanning, defragging, and generally maintaining our library computers. I think everyone learned something from the presentation. Yay IT guy!

We all went out to lunch at the Elkhorn, and then we returned to the lab so that I could talk a little bit about social software. Here’s where the computer lab set-up came in handy–and where I got to feel that there was a practical reason for using Jessamyn’s slideshow set-up rather than simply an I-hate-PowerPoint reason. The projector (which had worked fine in the morning, of course) decided suddenly that it didn’t want to turn on. So I gave out the handout, told everyone to bring up the presentation page on their computer, and gave the talk with everyone following along. Since their computers were hooked up to the school filtering software, I couldn’t show them my lame MySpace page, but on the whole, it worked pretty well.

I haven’t completely figured out how to give presentations of this sort. It’s hard to know how much detail to use when you know some of the audience wants a “and then you click on the blue box” type of thing and others want a “here’s a bunch of stuff–go out and try it” deal. This time I leaned very much toward the latter, with a lot of “please feel free to contact me if you need to know when to click on the blue box” interjections.

I also installed a Meebo Room on my site thinking that it would be fun to let people play around with it during the presentation. We did not end up using it, in large part because I made the fatal error of assuming that everyone is as fond of multitasking as I am. Several people said, “But I can’t chat–I have to take notes!” It’s good to be reminded of these things once in awhile.

Posted in library 2.0, me, wyoming | 2 Comments

in which I ask for your advice

Posted on 17 August 2007 by laura

Dear Blog Readers,

Most of you are far, far cleverer than I am in many ways, not the least of which is your knowledge of all things technological. It dawned on me just recently that instead of muddling around on my own, I might get some advice from the biblioblogosphere. And so, dear bibliobloggers, I have two questions for you–a hardware question and a software/reader’s advisory question. I’ll put them briefly first and then expand.

Short Version

  1. What kind of new computer should I buy?
  2. What books or other things should I recommend to a potential budding computer program programmer? [thanks, Greg]

Long Version

  1. I have an iBook that I got in 2003. I like it (though I curse myself on a regular basis for getting just the CD-ROM drive and not the combo one), but the battery is dead, and it currently runs at the speed of frozen molasses, especially if you want to do something really crazy, like run more than one program. I have deleted extraneous programs and done other things that people have suggested. Lately, though, people have suggested “Get a new computer.” I am trying to talk myself out of the idea that I need to have a Mac, but as I’ve been using Macs since 1986, I’m not having much luck. From what I’ve seen of Windows Vista, I do not like it, although I guess I’ve gotten used to XP. There is the whole open source operating system option, which could be good, but realisitically, I am not going to buy an old computer and install Ubuntu myself, so if I went that route, I’d either have to buy it already installed or find someone to do it for me. And finally, although there are many nice ergonomic aspects to having a desktop, I’ve had a laptop for ten years now, and I think I’d like to continue with them. So, any suggestions?
  2. There’s a kid in town who seems like a budding geek, or at any rate a potential budding geek. He said to me one day, “I’ve learned more from 15 minutes of talking to our sys admin than I have in 5 years of computer classes.” Earlier this summer I showed him Jessamyn’s Ubuntu video, and he got interested, so I downloaded it for him and he brought in a CD so he could burn a copy and play around with it on one of his old PCs. He now routinely comes in and talks to me about partitions and other stuff about which I am totally clueless. Awhile ago he asked for “some books about computers.” I couldn’t determine from the reference interview exactly what that meant, so I got him one about website building, one reference book, and one copy of Beginning Programming for Dummies (translation: the three books in the system that were less than five years old–I admit that we have no books on Ruby on Rails–but we also don’t have much demand). He’s gotten very interested in the programming book. I’m going to recommend The Cuckoo’s Egg for one of the books he has to read for English this year, and perhaps some Neal Stephenson. What else should I point him to, either educationally or recreationally?

Thank you all in advance for whatever advice you may have–you can leave it here in the comments, e-mail it to newrambler at gmail, or catch me on IM sometime. I am happy to return the favor should you ever have any questions about chronological order vs. publishing order in The Chronicles of Narnia (though actually Wikipedia has that covered) or how to translate things into Latin (though mine is kind of rusty) or recommendations for serial killer murder mysteries (I don’t read them, but my coworkers do).

Posted in me | 12 Comments

accomplishments

Posted on 8 July 2007 by laura

Though I’ve mentioned them in several other places already, I’d like to mention a couple of things once again.

This past week I did two things: I finished my last library school class and I finished paying off the last of my credit card debt. I am actually much, much prouder of the latter. When your parents have three doctorates (two Phs and an M) between them, it’s a little hard to get excited about a master’s degree, even if it’s a second master’s degree. School has always been easy for me, but money never has been.

I tend to tell people that my credit card debt was the result of unemployment and moving expenses, and while these things are partly to blame, the average $3000-$5000 I’ve carried since I graduated from college was really the result of plain old stupidity. Since a lot of people have problems with debt — some smaller than mine, some greater (and it’s worth knowing that I still have another year of car payments and many more years of student loan payments) — I thought I’d write a little about how I finally got mine paid off.

I will note at the start that it is much, much easier to pay off debts when you have an actual job. The job that I have now is the first full-time job I’ve ever held — I got through my twenties on temp jobs and tutoring and graduate employee stipends and dog-walking. It is also a lot easier to pay off debt if you are a single person with no dependents and live in a place where the rent is cheap.

I was never given much of a financial education. I was told, of course, that I ought to pay off credit card debt in full every month, but I was also lead to believe that actually doing so was optional. I never learned to make a budget, and though I was frugal in many ways, I also had expensive tastes, most notably for travel and food. But the lack of a budget and a plan meant that every time I got the debt paid off, it soon rose again, because something came up — my car broke down, or my cat got sick — and I didn’t have the money budgeted to pay for it.

This year, thanks to the advice of Jessamyn, I started using Pear Budget to track expenses and to make sure that I was putting aside money each month for car repairs and school tuition and visits to the vet and various other exigencies. I used the calculators at Bankrate.com to help figure out how much I needed to pay on various debts each month, and I took a lot of the various advice they offer on that site. I also realized that it wasn’t a good idea to deprive myself totally, and so I thought about what kinds of things most improved the quality of my day, and which of those could be substituted or given up. For me, that meant that I stopped buying books and CDs but still got to have goat cheese and good coffee.

In writing about this, I feel like maybe I’m making it sound easy, which it wasn’t — but it also wasn’t as impossible as I once feared. Now I have no credit card debt and I have money in the bank to cover most minor disasters. In a few more months, I should be able to cover at least one major one. In two weeks, I go on vacation with a plane ticket I’ve already paid for. I am, yes, feeling a wee bit chuffed pretty damn proud of myself.

Posted in me, school | 15 Comments

eight things

Posted on 27 May 2007 by laura

Having missed out on the five things meme, I’m picking up on the eight things one. Blame it all on Josh, who tagged me.

    1. On Friday I found both my father’s and my grandfather’s World War II military papers–a registration card for my grandfather, and the enrollment data for my father–via Ancestry.com, which is making these records available for free through D-Day.

    2. Yes, you heard that right–my father and grandfather. My father was born in 1923 and his father was born in 1896. My father was a lot older than my mother, which is why he was trying to get into the army in WWII instead of out of it in Vietnam.

    3. Actually, my father probably wouldn’t have been trying to get out of going to Vietnam. How he ended up with me for a daughter is kind of a mystery.

    4. I dislike grass. Partly that’s because I’m allergic to it and partly it’s because of the amount of energy it requires–in this part of the world it usually has to be watered, which diminishes our already scarce water, and almost everywhere it has to be mowed, which, unless you have a push mower, uses up either gas or relies on coal or nuclear energy for electricity.

    5. The other day I learned that 80-90% of the water used in the West is used for irrigation, which does make it seem like taking shorter and less frequent showers maybe isn’t the solution to our water problems.

    6. I am a bad librarian and don’t have a source for #5, but it’s a statistic I have encountered in several places.

    7. Yesterday I went to the shortest graduation I’ve ever attended. Everyone here said it was actually really long, since there were so many seniors here this year. For “so many,” read sixteen. I live in a very small town.

    8. Today is the feast of Pentecost this year, which is my favorite of the major Christian holy days as, unlike Christmas and Easter, it lacks any commercial component. I read the lesson from Acts (chapter 2, verses 1-21),* which I used to sometimes read in Greek at my old church, where we tried to have it read in as many different languages as possible, simultaneously. It’s much easier to read in English.

There. In my generally verbose fashion, I’ve managed to tell you far more than you wanted to know. Go thou and do likewise, if you are so inclined.

*Actually, I read this text, from the New Revised Standard Version, but I like to provide multiple translation options. It seems in keeping with the spirit of the day, and also in keeping with my nature as both a Classicist and a librarian.

Posted in me | 4 Comments

one year in, lots more to go

Posted on 6 March 2007 by laura

One year ago today I started my job here in Meeteetse. I put together a handout of some of the things that we’ve done–and I should emphasize the we, because most of these things would not be possible without the work of my coworkers–in the past year for the Legislative Reception last month. I thought that for my one-year anniversary, I’d post it (with various self-promotional hyperlinks) here.

In 2006, the Meeteetse Branch Library. . .

There are many more things I’d like to do, and many I’d like to do differently, or better, but for today I’m just focusing on all the stuff that we have done, which, if I do say so myself, seems like quite a bit.

Posted in me, rural libraries, wyoming | 5 Comments

misinformation quotation

Posted on 19 February 2007 by laura

I wish I had a source for this quotation, but I assume it comes from something I was reading in 2001, when I was teaching at the University of Iowa. I taught this nutty class called the Rhetoric of Drugs, and I was also reading a great deal about the civil rights movement and its aftermath at the time.

I’m spending the day packing for my upcoming move to a house in town (no more frozen pipes–hurrah!). I ran across this scrap of paper, which contains some notes on student speeches, a rough outline of what we were going to read and discuss in March, and the following:

Information is the raw material for new ideas; if you get misinformation, you get some pretty fucked up ideas.

–Eldridge Cleaver, former Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party

It seemed relevant to, well, I could make a list. I’m sure you could make your own.

Posted in me, miscellaneous, political world | 2 Comments

planes, trains, and automobiles

Posted on 2 January 2007 by laura

I live a long way from just about everywhere.  (When the New York Times claims that they have nationwide home delivery, what they really mean is “nationwide home delivery if you live in a relatively populated place near a coast or major urban area.  They do not mean Meeteetse, WY, or even Cody, or, for that matter, most of the state of Iowa.  The Cody library usually has the Times about 3-4 days after it comes out, because someone who lives in Cody and gets it by mail, 2 days late, brings it over when he’s finished.  I know, I know, you can get it online.  And I do.  But I still find their advertising offensive.)

But never is it clearer just how far away I am than when I decide to go someplace else, as I did over the holidays.  By some string of miracles, I avoided all the bad weather on my drive to Denver, flight to Chicago, drive to Iowa City, train back to Chicago (detouring to Morning Sun, IA to meet up with my friend Sara and her mom and stepdad and then proceding to Burlington, IA to catch the train), flight back to Denver by way of St. Louis, and drive back to Meeteetse.  I even made a little map on Google, though it’s somewhat deceptive, since some distances were as the crow flies rather than as the car creeps. 

Anyway, I mention all of this mostly by way of saying how thankful I am to have had such an easy (if long) trip, and how sorry I am for all the folks who got stuck at Denver International Airport.  I hope you are all home and sleeping on comfortable beds by now, and that the holidays are starting to be a good story and ceasing to be such a vividly miserable experience.  I mention it also, though, because I think it’s worth remembering, from time to time, that, as I’ve noted before, the world is not flat.  We don’t all travel at broadband speeds, and things like the weather often have a greater impact than we imagine.  I find that strangely comforting.

I hope that all of you who travelled over the holidays did so safely, and that the days were merry and bright, even if the nights were long.  Happy New Year!

Posted in me, miscellaneous, wyoming | 2 Comments