View of Stockholm

 

Hej (hi) from Stockholm, Sweden! The EBLIP 5 Conference is being held in Stockholm this week. It is a great conference and a wonderful international look at evidence based library and information practice. I will have session summaries later, but just wanted to update on a few ideas.

Information literacy has been a huge theme here at the conference. It has been great to hear about what other librarians are doing at their libraries and universities. We had a great discussion about assessment as well.

Knowledge management is also a huge, hot topic at the conference. It is a good fit with librarianship and EBP (evidence based practice) in general. I will definitely have to look into this more.

So more later, lots more about the research sessions and the keynotes. I just have to say that Stockholm is a great place to hold a conference and everyone has been so friendly and sharing.

More later from the Waki Librarian.

Hi, all. Sorry for the long gap between posts. Between actually taking a vacation (outside, away from technology) and then getting sick, I haven’t really been up to blogging. But never fear, here is a post full of interesting tidbits and summer tips to help you through your day.

Okay, so the serious stuff first and then we’ll have the fun. Okay, I can’t believe that: 1. Chris Anderson plagiarized from Wikipedia and 2. that the “apology/reasoning” for plagiarizing Wikipedia was so weak. And I wonder, with stuff like this happening, why it is so difficult to get my students to understand the huge intellectual and academic offense of plagiarism.

Here is something semi-serious and kind of fun: CNN’s cost of living in another city calculator. Type in your current salary and select where you live and the city you want to compare it to and you’ll get a handy chart of differences in cost and equivalent salaries. It is quite depressing if you live in the Bay Area.

Okay, I don’t know about you, but I always want to tackle new projects in the summer. So here is a really cool project for those of you who want to do something crafty: create an inverted bookshelf. This looks awesome and as long as you aren’t doing this to house your first edition copies, I think you should be safe. I would love to do that in my office simply for the puzzled double-takes.

Now we are getting into the heart of summer. Everyone, but everyone takes vacation photographs. So, do you want to take better photos? Of course you do! So check out these tips on how to take better vacation photographs. Then, go take a vacation (even if it is just to the park down the street or the library in the next town over) and start snapping those pics!

If you anything like me, you probably get stains on your clothes occassionally. Or a lot if it is summer. Luckily for those of us that are slightly more clumsy (or unlucky) than others now have this handy guide to getting out stains. So summer should be less of a disaster on our clothes.

So get out there and enjoy the summer–just don’t forget your sunscreen! Next week The Waki Librarian will be at a conference so check back here for conference session summaries. Fingers crossed for working wireless access at the conference. Until next time, be waki, read a lot and have some fun. Have a great weekend.

It honestly doesn’t seem to make much difference if I’m teaching a class or taking a class, the end of the quarter is still filled with anxiety, last minute chores and lots of panicked students. It also means that I fall behind on bookmarking new web stuff, blogging about new web stuff, and basically just fall a little behind. So here is my attempt at catching up on some of the cool library and tech stuff that has been floating around my RSS feeds–basically just a little of this and a little of that.

So first for the technology bit, here is Lifehacker’s Top 10 Wallpaper Tools and Tweaks. These are amazing tips for creating or just finding desktop wallpapers that not only look beautiful but can help increase your productivity. I can’t wait to start designing a compartmentalized desktop and using the calendar feature– sounds like a good summer project to me. If you have another favorite source for wallpapers, please leave it in the comments.

And for a different change of pace, here is a news post that absolutely infuriates me: Kayne West is a “proud non-reader”. He says in the article that “I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.” One wonders then why on earth he decided to write a book. Thank goodness there are a lot of really awesome people who are very proud readers of books. Suddenly, trying to get my students, who are slightly less than enthusiastic about information literacy class at the beginning of the term, to actually engage in the class seems like a cakewalk. At least no one has ever told me they are proud of not reading books. Sheesh.

So to counteract that negativity, because we really need to, here is a great library hero who is Running a Library out of a School Locker. This student is running a library out of her locker at school, and the library is filled with banned books! Can we say born to be a librarian?! This is so amazingly awesome. The comments to this post are great reading as well. I sincerely hope the student did not get caught or in trouble for enabling students to read what they want. People who do things like this and totally get that banning books is pointless and stupid absolutely make my day.

So that is it for today’s bits of fun technology and library information. I hope everyone has a great week and I’ll be back soon with more goodies from the wide, wild world of information!

We live in a world full of data and it is part of the job of the librarian to make sense of it, among other professions that work continually with data. I think about data and information a lot, as I’m sure many of you do too. And I have a couple of tools today for your enjoyment that make data way more fun to play with than just a bunch of numbers in an Excel spreadsheet.

WolframAlpha

6 easy ways to graph your life

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately. It seems that many of us are driven to always do more at work and are defined by our work. But what, outside of work, is a part of who you are? Not to go completely philosophical on a library blog, but I think it is an important question.

In that vein, check out this short article on taking 1 hour for yourself each day. What would you do with an hour? Sometimes I think I would just sleep an extra hour, but mainly I think about all the non-work things I would be doing. I think I will try to implement this in my life; I’ll let you know how it goes.

If you follow the advice of the above article, and need something to fill your time with, check out these 10 DIY Projects from Lifehacker. These are some very cool, kind of funny, and definitely awesome DIY projects.

And lastly, for the designers and dual-monitor users among us, check out these amazing Dual Screen Desktops available through Smashing Magazine. These are so gorgeous. I can’t wait until I get my second monitor at work to apply some of these desktops to my monitors.

That is it for The Waki Librarian for this week. Sorry for the lack of updates but the end of the quarter is upon us and it has just gotten a little crazy around here. More forthcoming next week.

I’m pretty sure that all of my students have Spring Fever. They seem ready for summer, and they aren’t the only ones. I’m definitely ready for the quarter to be over too. And when spring hits, I always feel the need to do spring cleaning and with the days getting longer (well, technically they are still 24 hours long, but we get more sunlight each day so to me they are longer), I feel like I should be accomplishing more–both at the library and at home. In that spirit, here are a few helpful posts about getting more energy and getting things done.

This is a wonderful article on 55 Ways to get more Energy. These suggestions will hopefully help you get more energy throughout the day and be able to work (and play) more efficiently. Though I have to say I found the fact that the smell of lavender is supposed to wake you up hilarious–mainly because lavender makes me fall asleep. But luckily there are 54 other tips for me to try!

So now that you have more energy, you might just get the bug to do some spring cleaning. If so, then this article on how to organize rooms more efficiently is for you. I think the same advice would help with cleaning my office at work. I wonder how to transfer this advice into the computer realm so I might finally get around to organizing the files on my hard drive.

Do you know what your learning style is? If not you might want to check out these posts on learning styles and organization. Knowing your learning style doesn’t just help you learn more effectively, it can also help you organize your tasks, time and work. Anything, within reason, to help me get more organized is appreciated.

And now, with all this new energy and organizational skills, you will have more time to play and learn cool technology tools. Organizational tools for the win.

Have a great day and the Waki Librarian will be back soon with more library, technology and productivity fun.

I hope everyone had a great weekend. I can’t believe that it is Monday, again. And, at my university, it is the last add/drop day of the term which means panicked students trying to get signatures all day. But today we have some technology news that will hopefully be useful and/or entertaining, so it’s all good. And, amazingly, we are going to talk about some tech news that is not from Lifehacker. I know, wonders never cease.

First, there is the very interesting list by PC Authority on the Top Ten Most Disappointing Technologies. The authors’ discussion of each product or application is very informative and the reasons for the failure of these technologies are intelligently discussed. If nothing else, it is hilarious to read about the $10,000 price tag on Apple’s Lisa computer–especially now when you can get a fairly powerful PC for under $1000. Ah, how times change.

Speaking of technologies and techniques, here is one I hope will work out–new way of catching spammers. If you haven’t already heard about this study, I suggest you read it. The study looked at emailing habits and found out that people fall into two main groups: those that email mainly during the day and those that are “emailaholics.” By determining the emailing habits of people, researchers hope that they can use this data to distinguish between real emails and spam. I think it is pretty cool and I hope it works. I’d like less spam in my life.

Do you love Wi-Fi? I love using Wi-Fi when I’m waiting in airports, but we all know the risks about using wireless internet. So what can you do to ameliorate those risks? Check out this great article on Wired’s Ho-to Wiki: Secure your Wi-Fi when Traveling. This is a good refresher on how to protect your data when using Wi-Fi.

Enjoy the week. The Waki Librarian will be back soon with more technology and library fun.

I love music. I think most people love music. Now I’m not suggesting piping music throughout the library, like they have done at some libraries. I think that is just, well, kind of weird and I wouldn’t want to inflict muzak on everyone. Besides, everyone has different tastes in music. So why am I bringing up music on a blog dedicated to libraries and technology? Well, for three reasons:
1. It is Friday and, well, Fridays call for something a little less serious.
2. I really think music can improve a person’s mood.
3. I love the online applications that let you create your own music stations and find new music.

So I thought, hey, why not share some of those online applications. I’d love to hear which ones are your favorites.

Hands down, my favorite online music application is Pandora. It is a great music discovery tool. Plus, you don’t have to download anything on your computer, so even if your work computer is locked down, you should still be able to stream music from Pandora. I quite like that.

Here is another music application, Sourcetone. Lifehacker talked about Sourcetone a while ago. It is an interesting concept; you move around a box to a spot on the color wheel that fits your mood at the moment and Sourcetone will play music that fits your mood. You can change the genre of music you want as well. I like this concept in theory, but haven’t had much success with it yet. Then again, Sourcetone is getting a lot of heavy traffic, most likely due to said Lifehacker article, that could explain some of the issues I’ve been having with it. Plus the ads on the bottom kind of annoy me. Let me know if you’ve had success using Sourcetone.

Music Artist Cloud is a super-simple music tool–just type in an artist whose music you like and there you go. I think it is a great mash-up idea with YouTube videos and tag clouds of other artists that you might like. This is so easy to use and another great way of checking out some new music. Plus you get to watch music videos.

And because I’d feel guilty if I didn’t link to at least one, obviously useful at work article, here is Lifehacker’s Five Best Free Data Recovery Tools. Seriously, take a look at this, because it is super helpful and at some point, you will need to use one of these tools.

Have a happy Friday and a great weekend. The Waki Librarian will be back next week.

I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time every day writing. Now, most of the stuff I write isn’t creative writing or even writing for publication, but it is writing. All of spend inordinate amounts of time writing emails, Tweeting, IM-ing, blogging and composing memos. Writing is a part of our daily life and is all about communicating–one of the key parts of human life. So this post is about, more or less, writing and communicating.

By now I think my utter love of Lifehacker is apparent, but how can one not love Lifehacker when they have great lists like the five best journaling tools. Because sometimes, you don’t want to share your life with the world and you just want your thoughts for yourself, it is important to have a place to journal. I also love the fact that good, old-fashioned, analog pen and paper completely slaughtered the competition.

Another blog that I’ve just started following is Manage Your Writing. I quite like it so far and there have been a number of useful tips and posts. I like this slightly older post on writing to persuade. Every time we write, we are writing to persuade someone about something, even if it is only to go to the restaurant we want to go to at lunch. So using these tips in your writing might not only make your writing more powerful and persuasive, you might even get more done. And I love getting things done. As The Cult of Done Manifesto says, “Done is the engine of more.”

I also quite like this article on WikiHow on how to stop dealing with someone else’s lateness. I have to say one of my pet peeves is waiting for other people because they are late. I completely agree with this article that it is disrespectful to be continually late. I hope that this article can help you if you are dealing with people who run late. Plus, not waiting around for late people will allow you time to get more done and that’s always a good thing.

And, just because I can’t end a post without something fun, take a look over at xkcd’s comic on philosophy.

Have a great day.

I have to say that I still can’t wrap my mind around the fact that Info Career Trends is going on indefinite hiatus. I think it is one of the best places to go for articles about all sorts of facets of library careers, work and advice. Thank goodness that the back issues will remain on the web, along with feeds from other parts of the blog. So in honor of ICT, I had to talk a little about two of the articles that come from the last issue and touch home for those of us who are new and/or work in academia.

Moving Ahead without Moving Up by Brenna Helmstutler is a great article for those who work as academic librarians. She offers some great suggestions on being involved and evolving in your role as an academic librarian. I especially liked the reminders of what types of characteristics one should cultivate as you move forward.

To the point of what you can do to move forward, here is Veronica Arellano’s article Ask Forgiveness Later. I completely adore this article because it is pretty much how I feel about work and implementing new technologies and tools in the workplace. As it is often said, “It is better to ask forgiveness than permission.” Not to be totally subversive, but it works pretty well. Not that committees, as Arellano points out, don’t have a place in the academic scheme of things, but often change needs to take place on an individual level before it ever moves onto a committee or institutional level. You can’t wait for someone else to give you a project to do, you have to go out and try things. And some fail spectacularly and some succeed brilliantly–luckily there is always something else to try.

I just finished listening to a Webinar led by Darlene Fichter & Jeff Wisniewski titled “How Social is Your Web Site?” today. It reminds me of the points above in that one needs to get out into the social media, but also have a plan. One can be slightly subversive, but still have a plan and that probably is one of the best recipes for succeeding in the ever-changing social media landscape. The best part of the webinar was definitely the ways of measuring success in implementing social media through quantitative measures and qualitative measures. We need to prove the worth of our services in order to move more fully into the Web 2.0 world. More on that later.

Have a great day. Remember to read a lot, think a little about how you can move forward and the Waki Librarian will be back with another missive soon.