I did a lot of reading-while-traveling this year. I got a lot of travel books from random library booksales. I’ve still been reading in paper-book form, as much as I see the compelling argument for ebook readers, I haven’t made the switch. Here are previous year end lists: 2010, 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. My booklist lives over on jessamyn.info/booklist and it has its own RSS feed. Here’s the wrap-up of what I read in 2011.

number of books read in 2011: 56
number of books read in 2010: 48
number of books read in 2009: 39
number of books read in 2008: 31
number of books read in 2007: 53
number of books read in 2006: 60
number of books read in 2005: 86
number of books read in 2004: 103
number of books read in 2003: 75
number of books read in 2002: 91
number of books read in 2001: 78

average read per month: 4.67
average read per week: 1.01
number read in worst month: 2 (Feb/April/Dec)
number read in best month: 10 (July)
percentage by male authors: 72
percentage by female authors: 28
fiction as percentage of total: 54
non-fiction as percentage of total: 46
percentage of total liked: 92
percentage of total ambivalent: 5
percentage of total disliked: 2

I read a lot of books by a few authors that I found and liked the year including Tana French, Geraldine Brooks and Connie Willis. Still not really on the ebook bandwagon. Still enjoying reading paper books in bed. Still finishing a few books I started in 2011, I expect this trend to continue. Wish me luck, and happy reading in 2011! Feel free to link to your own reading lists in the comments.

A few weekends ago I gave a talk at the KU Diversity Summit, an online conference that took place virtually, but also physically at the Kansas University School of Journalism in Lawrence Kansas. As you know, I have a soft spot for Kansas. As you may or may not know, I usually don’t do online conferences because I have a hard time dealing with the technical and social snafus that usually accompany them. I like to give talks, not be told I have to install Windows-only software or register for a site with sketchy privacy policies just to interact with listeners. I know other people can deal with this stuff gracefully and I happily recommend them when I’m saying “Thanks but no thanks” to people. I may be getting a little cranky in my old age, but I’m also just interested in giving higher quality talks less frequently. This is a goal for 2012.

Anyhow, the team from KU charmed me and assured me the tech issues would be minimal; I could do everything over Skype, have slides or not have slides and they’d field questions from the live audience and from Twitter. It went well. They had a tight schedule so asked me if ten minutes was okay. I said “Fifteen?” As it was I managed to do it in about twelve. The full video, all five hours of the conference, is available online here, but I’ve trimmed out the part that I did, short talk, short Q&A session afterwards and links to more information are at librarian.net/talks/ku. It think it’s a pretty concise summary of the major digital divide issues that I think are facing people and libraries.

I had a busy week. It wrapped up in the lovely state of Maine where I got to talk about the digital divide and ebooks to a bunch of Maine librarians. The digital divide talk is probably one you’ve seen various versions of, but the ebooks one is more or less new. My assertion is that the problem of ebooks is the problem of multiple perspectives [readers and authors and publishers and librarians don't even agree on the landscape, much less the trees] as well as the problem of metaphors. At its core, one of the difficulties in teaching people about technology is that it’s teaching people to manage real invisible things [files, websites, social content] through a series of metaphors ["folders" "tagging" "friending"] that are more or less complex depending on people’s level of existing knowledge. While the printed word and language generally is something of a metaphor, you can read a book without really having to think about that level of abstraction. We’re not there yet with ebooks and the metaphors confuse the reality, a reality that is still shifting, hopefully moving towards if not some standards, at least some etiquette.

In any case, both talks are here. I got a lot of good feedback on my general topic from Twitter and other social media interchange arenas. Thanks to those who helped me with this, and thanks to the nice librarians from Maine for coming to listen and talk.

Hi and thanks for having me here. Congratulations to all of you, I’m honored to get to share this important and transitional moment with you.

Like you, I went to an alternative school, Hampshire, and am similarly interested in personal vision and radical thinking as the brochure says that you are.

By way of introduction, I tell people I’m the most famous librarian in Vermont [not as fancy as you might think], an “internet folk hero” dedicating her life to eradicating the digital divide in the US and helping turn libraries into their democratic ideals free from the influence of bad technology, bad people, and bad laws.

It’s as true as any of the other “who I am” explanations. At some level, realistically, what most people in the world know about you is what they see, what you tell them, maybe combined with what they can corroborate elsewhere. It’s important to have a good story and in the age of limited internet attention spans, it helps if it’s short. Wikipedia calls me an internet folk hero (and no I didn’t write that myself though I suppose I could have) and I like that & I’m sticking to it. It’s not actually so tough to be a folk hero, and I think it’s one of the natural paths from this sort of starting point, where you are now. I’ll talk a little about how I got here.

Part one is framing

I’ve got slightly different answers to the “who are you” question depending exactly on what’s asked.

- what I do for a job

(“um I run a big Internet community”)

- how I spend my time

(“I stare out the window and look at birds in-between answering a lot of email and making Keynote slides and reading books for hours in airports”)

- what I love doing

(“I teach email to old people… no seriously it’s the best thing there is”)

but I’m one of those people with a poor life/work balance, or maybe a great one, depending on whether you think that your small-w work and big-W WORK [your calling, your passion, your raison d'etre, whatever you call it] should be the same or different.

Mine are the same: I love the democratizing power of the library and the internet and share it with as many people as possible. I lucky that I get to do this for a job … but I did some work to get to this place, and also some not-quite-work. And the good news for you guys is that for the most part you now get to spend some time watching yourselves, out in the great wide world, figuring out what your Work actually is. It’s a time for doing and you can, in fact you should, put off reflecting until later. Now is the time for screwing around.

I live in Randolph, just up the road from here, and I spend a lot of time teaching people how to use computers at the local vocational high school in town. Every week I get to show someone the internet who has never seen it before; it’s great. I also travel around the country teaching librarians how to teach people to use computers. I wrote a book last year about the digital divide and how librarians can use their community resources to help people overcome it. I also run a giant community website called MetaFilter that has an online Q&A subsite where the community can ask each other questions. That’s how I met Braja, she’s my internet friend. As much as I think the library is important, I think it’s more important that people learn to answer their own questions, ones they maybe don’t need a professional for

I’m the resident librarian there, sort of, though my title is COO or “community manager” depending on whether I’m being fancy or not. You may notice that none of these jobs I’ve mentioned involves working inside a library. The good news is that this is fine. It’s an exciting time to be a librarian, even just part of the librarian diaspora. Even in the age of “You can find it all on Google”. We’ve got a whole Justice League of librarians working undercover on the internet and elsewhere, fighting for your cyber rights and other things. You probably know a few. If you don’t, you probably should.

So, you’re excited about your Big-W work… find ways to make it sound exciting to other people.

So, part one is framing your issues…

Part two is preparation

When I graduated from Hampshire College (a place a lot like this) a million years ago, we had a commencement speaker who I had never heard of who gave us all some advice that was quite useful to me personally.

Her advice: get some sleep.

At the time I’d been working on my thesis — an analysis of generic pronouns in English, very important stuff to me at the time — non-stop for several solid months, and this was actually something I needed to do, REST. You probably do too.

But more to the point, “get some sleep” was a metaphor for the other things I needed to do in my life in order to be effective. Because as much as I also want to be happy, and loved, and secure and … oh I don’t know beautiful, athletic, something? what I really wanted was to change the world. It’s one of the reasons I went to Hampshire in the first place. I wanted things to be different, more like how *I* wanted them to be and I was idealistic enough to think I could do this, still do actually.

In order to do that, as much as I enjoyed just arguing into the wind about my great ideas, I had longer term goals and had to dig in and play the long game with people who weren’t necessarily working from the same playbook as I was. The long game doesn’t just take time, it takes stamina, endurance, some good nature, and grace. And you’ve got more of that if you’re rested, relaxed, at ease. Sleep helps that. Keeping your stress level down helps that. Eating lots of apples helps. I probably get more professional mileage out of not getting angry than almost anything else.

This is a difficult thing to manage if you get wrapped up in the 24 hour news cycle (what I sometimes call the fake news) and divert your attention with inconsequential bickering cultivated by people who are trying to sell you something. Or if you get crabby by other people’s bad behavior and it sets off bad behavior of your own. Stay calm, don’t get cranky.

This long game, which I wasn’t even quite aware that I was undertaking at the time, involved getting to a place where people would actually listen to what I had to say (more on that in a sec) because with an institution as stalwart and venerable as Public Libraries (like many others), you need to come to the table with your bona fides if you want people to pay attention to your advice much less take it. I’m not saying this is always right, just that this is how it is. Sometimes it’s good to know both what’s right AND what’s real.

So you’ve got framing, laying your constitutional groundwork…

Part three is communication

In my universe, people are saying libraries are in danger without filling in the rest of the story … that they’re in danger because people have forgotten how to quantify the social good of democratic public institutions, forgotten how to value having an educated and informed populace and decided that it’s somehow appropriate to employ “belt tightening” library closures in our communities that disproportionately affect the poor and working class. People are using public libraries in America more than ever before, 71% of libraries report that they are the only source of free access to computers and the internet in their communities. They’re essential, not endangered. Or maybe both…

Conflict makes good drama, sells more newspapers, gets more clicks and keeps people from changing the channel but it’s only a small part of the whole overall story, and it’s important to know and to tell the whole story, and be well-rested enough to tell it as many times as it needs to be told, to the right people. The long game, keep telling that story. Keep saying what’s true.

For me this includes talking about the digital divide, reminding people that a third of Americans don’t have internet at home and 1/5th don’t have any internet at home AT ALL. Explaining how challenging it is to teach people to use technology as library funding is getting cut, and how crucial.

These sorts of talking points, updated as they change, made up many of the small campaigns in my larger crusade for public libraries and free information. And over time, it added up. I had a little blog. I talked about what I cared about. I went to conferences. I spoke to people. I always emailed or called back when a reporter contacted me [which they do often when you're on the first page of results for the word "librarian" on Google and your phone number is on your website, reporters are sort of notoriously lazy] I noticed that slowly, over time, people were *asking* me what I thought, more than I was just simply telling them. Every state has a library association. Every association has an annual conference. There are lots of opportunities to step up and tell your stories no matter what profession you’re in.

I didn’t overthink and stay uninvolved because I thought maybe I wasn’t the right person to talk about something, I got involved in what was interesting to me, and I did the work. I went to the Democratic National Convention as an “official blogger” in 2004. I got to meet Barack Obama. I’ve recently been involved in Harvard’s Digital Public Library of America project as an “independent librarian.” It’s a lot of meetings (some of them early) but with a lot of interesting people. I tell them about what I do and go home and tell people about who I met and what they’re doing.

Some of what I do is go places that “my people” don’t go to, represent us, and then come back and tell my folks what I found there, whether it’s being a techie at a librarian conference, a librarian at the tech conference or a rural librarian at the big city meeting. The world needs people who stay and people who roam, cross-pollinate, bumblebee style.

Sometimes I was surprised that I’d be one of very few people in my communities speaking out cogently and clearly for my ideas, against filtering, against digital rights management, for copyright reform and open access, that sort of thing.

Dorothy Day who founded the Catholic Worker movement sometimes called this isolation of idealism the “long loneliness” and said it could only be solved by the love that comes with community. I feel that by sharing your ideas and ideals with others, you’re not as lonely.

So you’ve got framing, preparing and communicating…

Part four is reflection, perspective & recommitment

I’m not so in love with my ideas that I think they’re right for everyone (copyright has its roles, filtering can be okay in certain circumstances, drm may be inevitable), but in the big tug of war that we cynically call the “marketplace of ideas”, I’m okay being way out on one end and helping nudge or pull people away from the comfy center, the place where you wind up if you don’t make many choices.

By doing the things that I’d enjoyed, and arguing for the things I’d cared passionately about, over time I’d created a career and something of a reputation. In the looking back over what I’d been doing it was easy to say “oh hey I meant to do that” but really I’d had no idea, for a long time. By reflecting over what I’d been doing, seeing my priorities laid out as an accumulation of past choices, the path was clear in hindsight, and it also offered me a direction forward. You think you know what you want, sometimes, but there’s clarity in seeing your desires made real, distilling and determining your priorities through your actions and what you’ve been able to do. And if you look back and say “That wasn’t what I wanted” you’ve got the option to adjust, figure out what went wrong and correct it.

The choices I had been making, though they seemed sort of small at the time — to move to Romania between my first and second years of library school, to take a job working for VISTA after library school instead of an office job, to move to Vermont instead of stay in Seattle, to live in a small community instead of one with better restaurants, to say yes when the reporters called or people asked me to write things, to say no when people wanted to advertise on my site– added up to being the primary components of … me.

Along the way I got a fair amount of pushback, people at every transition point saying the way I’d done things in this stage weren’t going to work in the next. In high school they said “that’s not going to fly in college” In college, it was grad school. In grad school, it was “That’s not going to work in the Real World…” They were well-meaning, but usually wrong. I never did have to get up before 11 am unless I wanted to. I didn’t have to cut off my dreadlocks until I wanted to. I didn’t have to move to a big city. I didn’t have to get a PhD. I didn’t have to settle down.

You all didn’t come to Goddard, to do “individualized studies” because you wanted to take the obvious or simple or pre-determined path. People in Vermont really like to quote Robert Frost’s Road Not Taken poem without maybe understanding that, as Frost himself put it

“It was my rather private jest at the expense of those who might think I would yet live to be sorry for the way I had taken in life.”

Frost wasn’t sorry; he was an unrepentant curmudgeon. His poem, if you give it a close read, was about two identical paths and after-the-fact rationalizing that the choice you made was the right one. Re-writing your own story and giving yourself a more active role after the fact.

Your time here (or virtually here) has been about cultivating your interests, nurturing your abilities, finding your narrative whether it’s through dancing, drumming, singing, writing, filming, educating interpreting or re-interpreting. This big accomplishment becomes, over time, one small part in your long story.

You may not also know that there is another Jessamyn West–actually there’s a third Jessamyn West, a holistic horse masseuse living in the Pacific Northwest–an author who was popular in the 50s and 60s who wrote a lot of novels about being a Quaker in frontier America. Her book Friendly Persuasion, about pacifism in the face of the Civil War, was adapted into a movie in 1957 starring Gary Cooper and Tony Perkins and made her a brief celebrity.

She used that celebrity somewhat as a platform for her ideas. She was an outspoken… I’m not even sure if you’d call it feminist, but she had a lot of strong unapologetic female characters in her works. She wrote from her bed, where she was the most comfortable, and was an advocate of all-day pajamas (as am I), solitude and other not-particularly-normal life choices for women at the time. Her story is one I keep with me and this quotation from her is one I keep close to my heart.

“You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood – and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.”

Choose wisely. I could wish you luck, but you won’t need it. Pace yourselves. Remember that everything in our lives is part of it. Tell your own story and make sure it’s a good one, don’t worry so much about keeping it short.

Thank you and enjoy yourselves.

Here’s the video of me talking about Ask MetaFilter and online Q&A stuff that I gave at the Oregon Virtual Reference Summit. I included the slides a few days ago, but here’s the actual video of the talk, as presented. Big thanks to Caleb Tucker-Raymond for making this video up. You might also like Emily Ford’s lightning talk: What Libraries Can Learn From Kanye.

I went out to Oregon to give a talk to the people who staff L-net, the 24/7 virtual reference service for the state of Oregon. They have a yearly conference which is a lot of fun. Video from the talks will be available at some point, but I figured I’d link to my talk now. I talked about Ask MetaFilter and a little bit about what we do there and how it is and is not like other forms of virtual reference. Lots of stats. Lots of anecdotes and sample questions. The Slideshare version doesn’t seem to have the notes attached and functional (attached yes, accurate, no), so while I hammer that out from them, you can also go to the talk’s page on librarian.net and download whichever version you want. Thanks to all who attended on Friday.

I don’t think I’ve taken two weeks off from this website since it started in 1999. A short explanation is in order. I received a box with five copies of my book in the mail on May 18th. The next day I received the news that my father had died. I’ve mentioned this elsewhere and I’m sorry if I should have told you personally and didn’t and you learned about it here.

So, what might have been a PR onslaught of epic proportions–I am very proud of this book and excited to see it done and almost perfect–turned into a completely different sort of set of weeks. I’ll write more about my father on my own blog and you’re welcome to read this thread on MetaFilter which has links to a lot of things to read about him including obits in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. We’ve also set up a memory page on 1000 Memories [free forever, I give these folks the thumbs up]. My father’s death was sudden but not totally unexpected. I had a good relationship with him which was hard-won because he was a difficult and somewhat complex man. I am doing okay, all things considered. I am well taken care of. I am his executor and there is a lot of work to do.

Yesterday I started thinking about the book again. I made a facebook page for it but it also has its own page which includes the full bibliography, web links and appendix. The local newspaper wrote a little article about it and I think I can get the local bookstore to stock it. I’ll be heading to the Oregon Virtual Reference Summit in a few days to talk about Ask MetaFilter and the digital divide. I have a small pile of stuff I’ve been meaning to put here, but wanted to let people know what was up first. Let me know if you liked the book. Thanks for being here.

So there are two reports about what I did in Austin, what I ate and what I did at TLA. Sometimes they overlap. That said, this is the what I did at TxLA post. The other one will be over at jessamyn.com. I’ll add a note here when I’ve posted it.

I went to TxLA to give a talk about the digital divide. I had done a talk the previous month for SXSW but really it was mostly me introducing my co-presenters and then letting them go. I have a little page for that here and you can listen to how it went here. I was pleased with it, but it wasn’t the talk I wanted to give for TxLA. Here is the talk that I gave for TxLA (an all new talk, one that I’m very happy with) and here is a blog-report of it. I felt like it went well, though one of the downsides to being at a giant conference is that a lot of the talks, even ones that I thought would be crazy popular, were only about half full. Here is what else I saw

• The American Warn on Sex – Marty Klein has written a book by the same name. He does a terrific talk about how encroaching fundamentalism is causing people to basically self-censor in order to “be polite” and it’s shifting our ideas of what it means to be American, and how to participate civically. He’s a funny guy with a very professional talk and I think everyone should hire him to speak at their library conference.
• I saw Aaron Schmidt’s talk on user experience. While I know the things Aaron talks about generally, I haven’t seen him give a talk in a long time and it was neat to get to see him really untangle what we can do to make our websites more usable.
• I saw John Scalzi and a host of other authors on a Sci-Fi panel–Science Fiction: Beyond Earth’s Boundaries–which was great fun. I know John Scalzi online through MetaFilter and was mostly going to say hi. The panel itself turned out to be wonderful. Six very different authors who spoke briefly and then answered questions for an hour, talking about their craft and the world of epic fantasy and how they got into the business. Enthusiastic audience and a really great moderator made this a fun panel.
• Library Book Cart Drill Team requires no additional explanation. Was terrific. It’s always terrific. Here’s a video you might like.
• Did I mention that TXLA had an app and a very well-curated Twitter feed and hash tag? Both of them were great ways to see what was happening at the conference in real time. For people with non-app phones that could still use browsers, there was a really simple mobile site that functioned well. Big props to Chris Jowaisas for the work he did on this as a newish TLA member.
• Oh I think I forgot to mention the rally! There was a huge Rally for Texas Libraries which happened on Wednesday. That’s what the photo is from. There were more librarians on the statehouse lawn than there ar in the entire state of Vermont. It was impressive, well-organized and well-planned. Short and to the point and they even got a few reps to come out and say a few things. Inspiring.
• I went to this Dollars for Digitzation panel where three different women spoke about applying for and getting grants for large-scale digitization projects. Tons of good information.
• Small Community Libraries Dessert Social was a great place to chitchat with librarians at small rural Texas libraries. Plus there was a lot of dessert. Very nice people, thanks to Judy Daniluk for stopping by to say hi and encouraging me to go to this.

That’s the stuff I can remember for now, with the help of the app and some notes and some photos. My Austin photoset [including a few photos from SXSW and a few from TXLA] is up and online and you’re welcome to check it out. Thanks so much to TLA for TXLA11 and to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission for having me come down, it was wonderful.

One of my favorite conferences is the October Conference put on by Dartmouth’s Biomedical Libraries. I went once as an attendee several years ago and this time I went as the opening speaker [I said "Please don't call it the keynote, that's pressure!"]. The conference idea is simple: share things that are working for you at your library. It’s a one day affair with ample coffee, snacks and lunch, reasonably priced and wraps up early enough so that you can be home by dinner, no matter where in New England you’re from. Talks are all 30 or 15 minutes and go quickly. None of the topics are “biomedical libraries” in nature, at all. Most of the librarians in attendance are academic, I’m pretty sure.

I did a talk on location awareness which was 100% new [I didn't even repurpose any old crowd-pleaser images] and talked about what’s coming down the pike in terms of mobile stuff — how HTML5 is going to change the idea of “apps” for a lot of people, what some companies and libraries are doing, why people find this fun. It was called The Mayor of Everywhere Using Social Tools to Be More Places at Once and uses my now-old-timey-seeming HTML slides. Scroll to the end and click “printable” to read the talk as I gave it. It was well-received.

You can benefit from this conference even if you weren’t there because everyone’s slides are online in PDF form. Here’s the website for the conference. If you didn’t go this year, you should try to go next year.

1. The book’s title is Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide. The book is already for sale on Amazon. This is sort of weird, watching its sales rank soar and plummet six months before its even available. I set up an author page there, but I’m not sure what to do with it. I’m aware that the book is expensive. I’m aware that I could sell it more cheaply if it were self-published. I know I don’t really need any of the statusing that comes along with publishing with an established publisher. I’ll probably grouse that I could have made a better cover. However, I don’t think I would have written this book without an external deadline, even though I think in many ways this is the book I’ve been “meant to write” for some time now. So, thank you to Barbara for suggesting it and helping make it a reality.

2. I really cocooned while I was writing. I stopped reading my RSS feeds for about the first time ever. I kept my IM client off. I’d peek at Twitter and try to remember to keep adding things to my blog. I sort of checked out from my online and offline communities except for work and occasional Twitter updates. It was an odd thing to do.

3. I woke up every morning determined to write at least 1000 words and would tell myself “I chose this.” but it was still really difficult. Some days the words just flowed. Some days 1000 words would take eight hours. I type about 90 words a minute, when I’m on a roll this would all go fast. I had to keep reminding myself that in many ways I am the expert on this topic and so it was okay to speak from a position of authority and not have to cite statistics all the time.

4. I felt like I was becoming a total dullard. “How’s it going Jessamyn?” “Pretty good, I’m writing a book.” “Still?” This became easy because after a while I just didn’t feel that I had the free time to go out. I’m working on re-entry, it’s going okay.

5. The book has my voice which means I say that some things work and some don’t. I’m sure people will have strong opinions about some of it and I mentally prepared myself for a lot of pushback, more than I will likely get. I make a lot of assertions about how I see the digital divide and what I think is working and not working to mitigate it. I hope people don’t get bogged down in nitpicking. I hope no one that I mention feels that I was uncharitable.

6. I asked for and received a lot of help from people–editing help, requests for pullquotes, some open Twitter requests for information, proofreading–and it’s weird to me that only my name will be on it. I have an extensive “thanks” section. I’m sure I’ve forgotten as many people as I’ve included. It’s odd, in a lot of ways the path I’ve chosen has room for a lot of showboating, doing public presentations, talking on my blog about what I’ve been doing or thinking about, and yet I get timid when there’s actually a situation where it’s useful to be all BUY MY BOOK.

That is the report about the book. You can buy it or not. I think it will be good.

In the meantime I’ll be reading offline more, writing here less, and not travelling out of state again for work until summertime. Thanks to the wonders of RSS, you’ll know when I’m adding more content here [and I've added my twitterstream to the sidebar] but I sadly won’t be heading to Computers in Libraries. Hope it’s fun.

Some of this is stuff you’ve heard before but some is newish. We were lucky enough to give our presentation after the FCC released the results of their broadband study but before they actually released their Broadband Plan, so there was a lot to talk about but not too much to fight about. The talk was well-attended, well-tweeted and folks asked a lot of questions and stuck around to talk more. I’ve just gotten back from Texas so I’ll save more links and discussions for a little later. Thanks to everyone who showed up and who supported us in our desire to get this talk on the roaster at SXSW. I think we gave people a lot of food for thought.

• I run MetaFilter – I am one of two full-time moderators. In addition to the guy who owns the site and the coder who builts a lot of it, we’re it. Running Ask MetaFilter has taught me a lot about how people look for information and how they do or do not find it.
• I give talks – as other people have observed, public speaking opportunities seem to be dropping off somewhat. I was turning down offers last year because I was overbooked, now I’m doing maybe one a month? Works out well for me, but it’s hardly a reliable income stream.
• I am still automating the Tunbridge Library using Koha. It’s slow going. Some of that slowness is me, some is not. I work a few hours a week on it. We’re at the point where everything’s got a sticker and now we’re linking records to items. Exciting.
• I’m writing a book for Libraries Unlimited about teaching people to use computers over on this side of the digital divide. Due in March and I’m doing my own index. Wish me luck!
• I’m still doing drop-in time at the local vocational high school which is a different job from the IT job though also just a few hours a week.
• I got a royalties check from Mcfarland for about $20 so I guess that’s sort of like a job.

I’m sure there are other things I’m forgetting. As usual, librarian.net is just a hobby blog and not something that brings in any money which is AOK by me. This is post #3001 after 10+ years of doing this.