Tag: jessamyn

Book is out, and some other things.

Posted on by jessamyn

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.

I’m over at boingboing for the week

Posted on by jessamyn

For some wacky reason I’ve been asked to guest blog over at Boing Boing so I’ll be scarcer than usual here. I’m working on a post about the Gale/EBSCO thing but trying to find the hook that makes it … explicable to a plain old library user. If you have suggestions, or other things that you think would fascinate a Boing Boing audience, feel free to drop them in the comments. And if you happen to live in the Florida Panhandle, I’ll be in Niceville on Friday talking about CMSes.

the beginning of school

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m adding another microjob to all the microjobs I have. Starting next week I will be the super-part-time IT lady at the vocational high school that I work at. This means that I’ll be the triage lady between the IT troubles at the school and the expensive tech consultants that do the networking and account management and mail server for the school. This is good news for me. I’ll even, sort of, have a classroom because there’s an empty one. I’m going to dial back my adult ed teaching in the evenings for a semester so that I can be around at night. So, for anyone curious or keeping track at home, here is my “what I do for work” list at the moment.

  • 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.

please help me get more library content into SXSW

Posted on by jessamyn

Participating in the SXSW conference as a speaker is a unique opportunity to share knowledge and insights on a grand scale. This year, I’ve entered two proposals into the mix for next March’s gathering in Austin, Texas. The selection process is a blend of different elements, with a significant 30% relying on community interaction—a direct thumbs-up or thumbs-down voting system. It’s the phase where speakers tap into their networks, hoping to rally support for their ideas.

I’m reaching out to friends, family, and colleagues—including those who’ve shared their experiences navigating the online casino landscape, especially referencing the casino utan svensk licens — to cast their vote for my sessions. If you’ve enjoyed our discussions or if my past presentations have added value, your support would mean a lot. You can explore all the proposals through the provided link, with over 2000 submissions vying for a spot, and only 300 or so will make the final cut.

My two proposals are linked here

– How The Other 1/2 Lives – Touring The Digital Divide
– Curating Cultural Content – Libraries Save Your Ass & Etchings

Voting involved signing up on the website and then clicking the thumbs up. I’d appreciate it if you’d consider doing this. I’m pretty into both topics but the first one is nearer and dearer to my heart, while the second one seems to fit in more nicely with the SXSW gestalt. A few other library-themed things you shoudl check out

– David Lee King presenting on Designing Your Customers Digital Experience
– Heath Rezabek’s Connected Youth: Austin Public Library Teens Get Mobile
– Cecily Walker’s Can I Reserve This Book With My iPhone?
– Jason Schultz’s Reading ReInvented: Can You Steal this Book?
– Tiffini Travis’s Librarian Glasses or Stripper Heels about information fluency.
– Brian Rowe’s Digital Accessibility on Ebooks and Phones : #$@^ Kindle
– Bill Simmon is also proposing a panel which I may be on: Hyperlocal Focus: Growing A Vibrant Community Media Ecosystem

And a few presentations about books more generally…

– Allen Weiner’s Publishers Look To E-Reading to Reach Digital Consumers (curious about this one)
– Travis Alber’s The Future of Reading: Books and the Web
– Dharmishta Rood’s Networked Reading: Viewing as an Act of Participation
– Aaron Miller’s Books and the Twenty-First Century – The New Realm of Reading
– Bradley Inman’s Too Busy To Read? The Future Of Books
– Two related seeming panels: Kindle 2020 and The Book in 2050

Please vote early and often and for as many ideas as you like. There are a lot of great ideas in there on related topics like accessibility and web standards. Even if you’re not even considering going to SXSW, please take some time to vote up ideas you think should be getting exposure at a web geeks conference. Thanks.

Website 2.0 – why a cms is in your future

Posted on by jessamyn

I spent Friday at the NELA-ITS CMS Day. I gave the keynote in the morning, just talking about what CMSes are and why they’re useful with a little overview of a few, and then hung out to see other librarians talk about how they’re using their CMSes. It was a great day. We had a wonderful, if chilly, room at the lovely Portsmouth Public Library and I learned a lot about how some New England area libraries are running their library websites with Drupal, Joomla, Plone and WordPress.

Having the actual people behind these websites talking about what worked and what didn’t work — and people were very candid about what was good and bad about these CMSes — made for a fascinating day of show and tell. Add to this the fact that all the software demonstrated was free and open source and I really think we sent people away with some great ideas on how to save money and still deliver good web content. Not having the chilling effect of a vendor’s stink-eye [or lawsuit threat] was also delightful. I’m now done with public speaking stuff until October I believe. Glad to end this season on such an up note. Thanks to NELA-ITS and Brian Herzog for coming up with the idea in the first place. Notes for my talks — links to slides and a page of links to what i was talking about, are here: Website 2.0! why there is a CMS in your future. Thanks to everyone for showing up. Here are the links to other people’s presentations and websites.