Big thoughts

I'm having lots of big thoughts about librarianship and where I'm trying to go next, but just realized I haven't been writing here as often. Oops. I'm here now.

I've been obsessed with developing my plagiarism game. Here is the first room of the game: http://www.lycoming.edu/library/instruction/plagiarismgame.html

If you click on the blue flying fairy (it can take a few clicks to catch him), it asks you a question. If you get that question right, the fairy disappears. The score box doesn't update yet, though.

I drew the next room (the library), but you can't get to it yet. I'm working on drawing the fourth room, which will be the dorm foyer. They look very good and students and co-workers seem to be getting excited about it. Though I really should be working on prepping for LibQual and adding Turabian to my citation tutorial. Sigh.

Does it annoy anyone else that there's an assumption that as a librarian, you will be at both ALA's every year? The posts on liserservs and the mail you get doesn't suggest "If you're there..." it is "when you arrive..." My experience is that I got as much from driving down to Philly just to see the vendors last year than I got at attending the actual ALA conference the previous summer. I know I didn't make the best use of my time (as a conference novice), but when I compare it to my experience at CiL...

Conferences as class reunions

I came into work today on this beautiful, but frigid (12F) morning after being snowed in most of the weekend (pictures to follow as soon as I dig up some batteries for my camera) to find two wonderful Facebook messages from two dear grad-school friends saying one will be at ACRL, the other lives an hour north of Seattle. My best friend who is moving to GA this weekend is also going, and she went to grad school with us.

I love that these conferences allow us to see people we share so much in common with, whom we love dearly, but who live all over the country. In some cases we run into grad-school aquaintences and get to know them better. I am sooo excited for the content of the conference, and to present my poster, but I think what I'm looking forward to most is seeing friends. And hey, we talk about what we do at our respective libraries, so even that is educational!

The day got better

I've had some good meetings today, won a t-shirt for being the last official customer at the campus cafe for the semester plus a free biscotti & orange... and the big news is I just got an e-mail saying my poster for ACRL was next on the waiting list and someone just dropped out. I think after accepting the utter disappointment yesterday, it makes it oh so much sweeter.

I'm very happy I'm getting to the conference many days in advance... that will help as I try and figure out how to get a poster across the country... I like the recent post about this on Please Be Quiet.

Double-crushed

Sometimes I wonder about the timing of life's events. It's my last late-day of the semester, so I didn't get here until 1 this afternoon. It usually takes me a while to wade through my mailbox on this day, and I had two e-mails. One was from ACRL saying my poster did not get accepted, the other was someone asking if I would be willing to present at a focus group at ALA Midwinter because she was so interested in the Reference Universe case study we did. I am not going to Midwinter, I am going to ACRL a few weeks later.

I think I could handle the rejection better if the phoniness of rejection letters didn't get under my skin so badly. I know my poster proposal was good, and I know they get a lot of submissions. But my supervisor thought it had a very good chance of getting accepted, and I allowed myself to become overly optimistic. How do you wait for two months while your proposal is being reviewed, without allowing "might" to become "quite possibly" in the back of your head?

As for Mid-Winter, I would so love to present. If it was anywhere this side of the Mississippi, I might make an effort to go. I really want to be professionally active, and I do love Reference Universe. But it's in Denver. When I went to tell my director about it, she thought I was asking to go, when I was really asking if she would present in my place. I have no interest in Mid-Winter other than presenting and seeing the vendors.

On the bright side of the conference news, though, my best friend who is in the process of changing jobs was asked by her soon-to-be employer if she wanted to go to ACRL and is now officially registered. I am very excited to attend a conference with my best friend, and with someone who is such a good librarian. I know I will get so much more out of it with her there.

I'm Back!

I'm back! I feel like I haven't written in forever. We hosted a regional workshop on Friday on Web 2.0. Here's the program's Web site. Jody Fagan was incredible. I was lucky enough to get to go to dinner and breakfast with her. I was so impressed by her online CV, and it's not even entirely up to date. It's 16 pages long, and she's only a few years older than I am (a.k.a. not close to old). Yet she's very personable and down-to-earth. Most importantly, she's easy-going, which was important because we kept having stuff pop up... our entire campus scheduled an emergency preparedness day for the same day as the workshop and it included sirens, fake shooters and hostages, police in full S.W.A.T. get-up... then two days before she was to arrive, Palin and Biden announced they would both be in little 'ol Williamsport on the same afternoon, and Biden was on campus!

I think my poster and panel session went well. I accidentally set off an audio file during my panel presentation... that was a little embarrassing, at first I though it had something to do with the emergency drills outside! I would have liked to walk around to see other peoples' posters more, but kept keeping an eye on my own poster (for any visitors), so didn't focus well on what they had to say. But I was so impressed with what I saw other people put together and hope to catch up with the handouts I collected and any electronic files they send me to post on the Web site.

One of my best friends from grad school drove 2 hours to present and help out. She is a great public speaker and her lovely personality comes out when she does public speaking. However, she got intimidated by a previous panel session and said in her introduction it made her "scared shitless"... I'm sure more than a few faces turned bright red. Jody thought it was bold, I thought it worked with the rest of her talk (though I'm biased as my husband swears like a sailor at home). She says she didn't notice it until she sat down at the end, then was quite embarrassed!

I'm so glad October is done. I still have a presentation in two weeks that I'm nervous about. Our campus has these "teaching effectiveness" workshops once a month where different faculty share things they're doing that have been successful. I have been involved in one in the past, where I presented a Flash tutorial on plagiarism. It was very well-received. I'm ganging up with the head of the Writing Center to present an interactive tutorial we've created on citation. Professors are so frustrated with students not knowing how to cite, so this is meant to help the utter citation newbie. The thing is, we haven't yet done much testing on students to see how effective it really is, though she will in her freshman comp classes in the next week or so, and I'm really hoping it's enough to be a real teaching effectiveness workshop. I did base it on lots of articles I found on teaching citation, so if I bring that stuff in...

But no matter what, now that this Web 2.0 workshop and Harry Potter Night are done, my life is becoming soo much easier. I have finished the third Twilight book (TEAM EDWARD!), and will soon go home and spend the rest of this Sunday afternoon working on the fourth. My wonderful husband cleaned the house for my friend's visit so I could read the books I've been obsessed with. Now if that isn't prince charming, I don't know what is.

Please, please, please

I just submitted my poster proposal for the 2009 ACRL conference. My director looked over my poster in its current state and read over my proposal that I had worked on over the weekend and thinks I have got a fair shot at being accepted. I really want to get into presenting and publishing. Not hard-core, I'm not that ambitious, but I want to be a contributing part of the community. I'm very excited about this project and where it can go next.

Four days and six hours to Harry Potter Night. Snape had to back out a few days ago, which left us one person short for our scavenger hunt, and it doesn't help that the faculty Halloween party got scheduled for the same night (we picked ours months earlier!). Fortunately, one of the library workers was planning to be there anyway and is happy to wear a green robe and librarian glasses to be the Hogwart's librarian, Madam Pince. She is our savior of the week!

I finished the costumes last night, now I need to finish painting the bricks on muslin. I can't tell if my husband is really mad at me for accidentally painting the basement floor red or not... I didn't realize it would go right through the canvas drop cloth (which is also red, but that was to be expected).

Coming together

I have held back on this blog the past few days because I feel I have so much to complain about (...grrr LibQUAL is all I can say about that...), or sad news to tell about deaths and health crises among our faculty and their families. It's the first time in a long time I haven't looked forward to Friday since we're going to a funeral tonight... I'm nervous about crying as hard as the family even though I don't know them well just because she was way too young to die.

But today there are a few things that are a positive. First is how much I love my office-mate who took over reference for the entire day as I covered for one late-scheduled class and helped cover for another librarian who is at the hospital taking care of her daughter. I had asked her to take over just while I was in class, and without asking she took over the whole day.

Second is I had some good classes today that were enjoyable with lots of participation.

Third is that I just got one more person to sit on my panel and two people asking if they could bring posters to our SLC workshop next month. Oh can you ever! I am so excited, their topics sound great.

Fourth is I got a call saying my pre-ordered copy of Inkdeath arrived at our local indie bookstore. I didn't think it was coming out for another two weeks.

And the fifth thing to be happy about comes from a conversation I had with my mentor yesterday about what women students lives were like even when she went to college. I can't imagine my father not being able to help me move into my dorm room, or having to be back in my dorm by 9, or not being served dinner because I was wearing pants rather than a skirt, or not being able to go to Harvard just because of my gender. I know it's not really equal yet, but I was reminded how much progress has been made even in my parents' lifetime. I'm grateful for my parents and teachers who said I could do whatever I wanted and wasn't limited by my gender.

Reimbursement woes

The hoops that one has to go through to get reimbursed are incredible... and heaven forbid you forgot the right procedure... I used my own credit card to buy my plane tickets and registration for ACRL, then submitted the forms to the business office. They're throwing a fit and saying since I didn't use a company credit card, they might not reimburse me until 30 days before the conference... that's a lot of money to go without for six months...

I'm tired now, I hope to have something more intelligent to say tomorrow.

First step to Seattle

I bought my plane ticket to Seattle for ACRL in March. There was a flight for $300 including taxes, and I know if I waited until a reasonable time to buy the ticket, it would cost $900, which I couldn't afford. I got some money from the provost's office, and it will cover my plane ticket now and early-bird registration, with just $5 coming out of my pocket so far. Everything else will be my expense, but I have a place to stay in Seattle (and people to see!) and that's the biggest expense.

So ACRL, here I come... though it would be nice if you would let me register to keep our business office happy...

On a side note, I'm a little disappointed on something. One of the other librarians runs the local chapter of the honor society Phi Kappa Phi. It seems to be a big headache for her, so I contacted the Miami U. chapter to see if I was eligible. Each chapter has its own rules, and Miami doesn't allow alumni to join. That's fine. But I hate that the national standard is the top 10% of graduating class, but Miami's chapter says only the top 5%. I wasn't in the top 5%, but I was probably right around the top 10%. IU's cutoff for Phi Beta Mu was higher than the national cutoff. Though satisfying that was not a problem.

Thinking about this, I just realized I don't have any of these on my staff page...

Travel Fund Request

I thought my travel fund request was in the dean's office, but once again, I misunderstood the proceedure and hadn't filled out the official form. I am trying to go to ACRL in Seattle, where I have a place to stay and I'm willing to cover some of the cost, but can't cover everything with a new house.

The two librarians who plan to travel in the fall got approved for $700 each. I will be very happy with $700, esp. if it is approved soon and I can get a plane ticket for under $300. I have now turned in the form and we will see what happens. I'm already getting myself worked up for the chance that the money is not distributed evenly among the librarians. I tend to be like that and wish I wasn't.

Computers in Libraries 2008

I just got back late last night from Computers in Libraries (CiL). It was absolutely wonderful, I'm so glad I went. It was an instense couple of days. I wish I were surrounded by this type of people all of the time, I think I could accomplish some great stuff.

I'm still trying to recover from being gone for three work days at this time of year. I've run out of space on my to-do board and almost everything is in red.

For those of my readers who weren't there, keep an eye on my blog and I will summarize some of the stuff that stood out to me the most as I have a moment to sit down and look at my notes.

Of course it was also great to meet some friends from grad school and make a few new ones... as well as see some of the celebrities of the library blogosphere.