Educator + Infonista + Historian

Over the last 6th months I have gradually gained more responsibilities and completed a few small projects to help out my fellow librarians: Reference - Every week I do approximately 10 hours per week on the reference desk. General reference is very challenging. I enjoy just about every humanities and social science question, can adeptly handle most questions about sciences, but frequently feel out of my depth when confronted by business questions (especially those doing background research into a company). Instruction  - 20-30 instruction sessions per semester of all types (English, Communications, Criminal Justice, etc). I thrive on instruction sessions, referred to Research Skills Instruction rather than Library or Bibliographic Instruction. Overall I have fewer instruction sessions per semester than I did at the University of Maryland Libraries, but offering discipline based instruction sessions in so many different subjects is a rewarding challenge. Collection D...

On December 31st, I left my position at the University of Maryland Libraries. This was a very hard decision. I loved my work and had a wonderful group of colleagues in Special Collections, however I was not able to afford to live in MD on an interim position. My coworkers understood this and encouraged me to seek out full-time, permanent employment which would provide a livable salary, benefits, and a retirement plan. Fortunately, I was offered a full-time, tenure-track position as the Instruction & User Services Librarian at the University Library of California State University, Stanislaus . I am very excited to start this new position (today). I will be moving out of my comfort zone of Special Collections and into the larger arena of  academic librarianship. This new job is in a much smaller library than the University of Maryland Libraries and so I will have the opportunity to do a little bit of everything: reference, instruction, collection development, outreach, etc. ...

As you now know I began my tenure as the interim Curator for Literature and Rare Books by trying to get more familiar with cataloged items in Rare Books and Special Collections by creating a spreadsheet that would give me an overview of the collection as a whole. Technical Services provided me with a MARC file containing the complete MARC records for every item in these collections and pointed me to MARCedit to be able to create a customized report about the collections. Previously I explained how I used MARCedit in Revealing La Revolution: The EnvironmentalScan & MARCedit, Part 1 . Now I’m going to share how I imported and set up my data in Microsoft Excel so that it revealed the contents of Rare Books and Special Collections to me. I began by opening a new workbook in Microsoft Excel and went to the “Data” Menu Ribbon. Excel Data Menu - Import from Text File In the furthest left column I choose to import my data “from text” and directed the request box to the corr...

As the interim Curator of Literature and Rare Books I am writing the Environmental Scan for the French Pamphlet Project. Two tools I have found very useful to help with this are MARCedit and Microsoft Excel (I sort of love spreadsheets). I became familiar with MARCedit over the summer as I attempted to gain intellectual control over my expanded collection responsibilities and learned a new (to me) feature of Microsoft Excel which has proved very useful for putting together this report. So I wanted to tell you a little about what I’ve learned. After I was appointed interim Curator for Literature and Rare Books in May, I requested a report from Technical Services of all catalogued items in Rare Books and Special Collections. I already had a comfortable grasp of the literary manuscript collections but had not had an opportunity to really get to know the Rare Books and Special Collections volumes. In an effort to become better acquainted with these collections, I asked Technical Serv...

I've added a new page to this website! It is titled " Research " and has a summary of the my current research project available on it. I've spent the last year thinking about Digital Teaching Collections. Last summer I undertook some background research about what Digital Teaching Collections would look like on behalf of the Education & Outreach Coordinator in Special Collections and the Digital Programs & Initiatives Manager in Digital Stewardship at the University Libraries. In the spring of 2013, I completed a literature review for Digital Teaching Collections and an IRB to survey UMD humanities and social science faculty about the use of digital resources for instructional purposes as an independent study project. Over the summer I sent out my survey to UMD faculty and compiled the responses. I am currently editing the final draft of my report for University Libraries about what Digital Teaching Collections should be and how they can be implemented into Un...

Best quote of the conference: Great Technology is Invisible!  Last week I attended the Computers in Libraries 2013 conference. I really enjoyed the conference and think I was able to walk away with some information that I will be able to apply immediately in my work at the University of Maryland Libraries as well as in the future. For now I'll tell you which sessions I attended and provide a link to the notes that I took during the conference, but I'll try to post individual sessions over the next few weeks.  My Agenda: Monday April 8 th : Track B, Web Presence 15 Web Trends for 2013 David Lee King Digital Services Director, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library and and Publisher Seven Deadly Sins of Websites Casey Schacher , Resource Discovery Librarian, University of Wiscosin - Madison, Memorial Library Paige Mano , Web Communications and Social Media Coordinator, University of Wisconsin - Parkside Library Tony Aponte , Science & Engineering ...

This week in ENGL 888D: I found Lukens and DiSalvo’s definition of technological fluency incredibly appealing. Fluency, in contrast to literacy, affords creativity. If I am literate in a language, I can read, write, and speak it, but if I am fluent in a language I can write poetry or a novel or use the language in ways the literate cannot. Technological fluency is the ability to be creative with technology;... What drew me in most was how Lukens and DiSalvo used this definition to advocate for a constructivist pedagogical approach in technological education for the Humanities. To an outsider like myself, it seems that frequently university level Humanities instructors only want to educate about their content and expect students to learn the technology and methodology outside of their classroom (either in another discipline or at the previous education level). Utilizing speculative design in coursework moves away from this mentality. Likewise I appreciate that speculative desig...

Way back in January I had the opportunity to attend Digital Hu manities Winter Institute (DHWI) host ed by MITH .  I was/am t he grateful recipient of a UMD Libraries Scholarship which paid my registration fees. While attending the course Teaching through Multimedia by Vi rginia Kuhn and Vicki Callahan I had the opportunity to practice with some new soft ware, but hon estly the class was not what I expected . I'm sure the course description was entirely clear to the authors, but its brevity and use of the term multimedia were problematic for most course attendees. T hough , Teaching through Multimedia en ded up being different from what I expected , I still really enjoyed it (and it seemed like the other students did as well). I thought that the course would be more along t he lines of DHSI's " Digital Ped agogy in the Humanities " which I didn't know existed prior to registering for Teaching through Multimedia (ot herwise I probably woul d have realize...

Since yesterday's post means that 2012 is officially over (I wish! Working in academia there are no clean year end breaks - especially outside of the classroom), the plans for 2013 can begin! So since I'm always hatching some 'scathingly brilliant' plan (+2pts for recognizing the quote) allow me to update you on a few of mine for 2013. 1. Rock an internship with Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage 's web developer. I am super excited to start this internship and will do my best to keep you up-to-date on both the fun and daily things that I will be doing every Thursday and Friday this spring. 2. Complete a research project that can be published in an academic journal. You might have noticed I am interested in the ways that Digital Humanities projects can be used for instruction, I'm trying to undertake a study of how UMD Humanities faculty are using DH projects in their courses this spring. I just need to get an advisor for the project (I h...

Happy New Year! I realize I'm a little late, but its been a busy finals/holidays/back to work few weeks. Before setting new priorities for 2013, I would like to take a day to reflect on the lessons learned and goals achieved in 2012. School Digital Preservation - Apply international and national standards as best as you are able for the materials your institution has with the resources available. Remain aware of standards as they are updated. TEI is awesome (I would love to work more closely with TEI)!!! Information Access - Listen carefully to what people say their information needs/wants are and ask questions. Not all reference resources are available on the internet (say what!?!). Research Methods - Completing an NEH grant proposal is very intense but a great experience! History of the Book - A great introduction to rare books and the vocabulary of rare books. Special Collections - Are complicated and transitioning (doesn't that just sum up life?) Library Mana...

Today I pitch my research idea for the DH Incubator. The University of Maryland Libraries have held a series of workshops on getting started in the Digital Humanities this last semester. The last workshop (today's) is the pitch for attendees DH projects. My project is the independent study that I am planning to do for the spring semester. I don't anticipate my project being chosen for the DH Incubator, but am hoping that by presenting it I can get the support of University of Maryland Libraries' faculty and staff. Which will help me complete my independent study and hopefully complete the beginnings of a publishable article by the end of the semester. The slides for my proposal explain that I would like to examine "the information seeking behaviors of humanities instructors for digital resources" in librarian speak. Or "what makes DH useful for instruction" for everyone else. Then I have to decide if I want to submit my proposal as a topic for D...

Last week my group presented our perl based internet application. We used a perl module from CPAN called Twitter::Badge . In this module a user enters a twitter handle and the program returns that twitter user's most recent tweet. We adapted the program to display a twitter user's 5 most recent tweets. We allowed a program user to enter up to 6 twitter handles which were processed as an array. The Twitter::Badge would then retrieve the tweet and send it to a sub-array for each user. It was necessary to create a document for each individual user to hold the tweets. The interface was set on an automatic refresh every 3 minutes because that was the maximum number of requests twitter.com will allow by the program per computer. We had problems setting up our program because Twitter updated their API while we were working on the project. This meant that we had several weeks when we were unable to work on implementing our project as our module's author worked to get the modu...

Last week we presented our Perl projects to the class in INFM 743. These are examples of my classmates projects. Project 1 - Indian Cricket League website to aggregate information about cricket teams, players, and matches which is built using MySQL, Perl, and Javascript. Project 2 - Weather website which compares weather underground and geo weather websites. Project 3 - Another website which tells the user what weather specific item might be necessary. Project 4 - Smart email program in which the program reads words written in an email and then searches flickr for an image with the same tag. The image selected by flickr will appear with the email. Project 5 - Where am I? game program is a guessing game in which an image from flickr is uploaded to a website and then the user is given 4 cities to guess where the picture was taken. Each game runs 20 pictures. Project 6 - Another weather website "Simple Weather Stylist" provides clothing suggestions (and an ima...

Most of my peers who already have or are currently working towards graduate degrees in a humanities field decided to take one of the many of the information access courses other than LBSC 751: Information Access in the Humanities this past semester. They gave sound explanations that had to do with diversifying their courses to increase their employability. Their logic gave me pause about pursing this course. However, after reflecting on my purpose for earning an MLS I decided that LBSC 751 would be a good fit for me this semester. I blogged about my reasons for earning an MLS in my post DH is a Service . I appreciated starting the semester off with an introduction to Digital Humanities since this is such a significant way of accessing humanities information. In the future DH projects have the potential to be some of the best cultural heritage resources for humanities information seekers. Though I will admit to being dismayed and confounded by classmates who had no clue what DH is an...

*This week I've edited and republished several previous posts as part of my LBSC 751 Final. Previously I wrote about DH being a public service and the difficulty that humanities scholars have created for themselves by only viewing other scholars as their primary audience. This week’s readings for LBSC 751 follow right along that thread by examining humanities publication in this digital age. I heartily agree with Shawn Graham, Guy Massie, and Nadine Feuerherm’s chapter “ The HeritageCrowd Project: A case study in crowdsourcing public history ” in Writing history in the digital age: A born-digital, open-review volume , when they stated that “the need to reach out to the public has never been greater.” In these times of limited resources, humanities scholars need to stop talking to each other about how significant and relevant they are as interpreters of cultural heritage and prove it to the public through their actions! As Leslie Madsen-Brooks (2012) points out in “ ‘I neve...

*This week I've edited and republished several previous posts as part of my LBSC 751 Final. I decided to earn an MLS because I want to work on Digital Humanities projects. As a high school humanities teacher I frequently searched the web for primary sources to make history and literature more engaging for my students. I knew there should be tons of resources online but I just couldn’t find them! I decided to go to back to school to learn the technology skills necessary to increase the number and findability of quality primary sources on the web. Basic digital collections are useful for instruction but DH projects are more suited to educational ends. I left teaching to find a place for myself merging educational technology and digital collections in order to better the teaching of others. I enjoyed Trevor Mu&ntildeoz's blog post about DH and was excited to hear what he would have to say in class. Listening to students ask questions and the answers Mu&ntildeoz provide...

QUESTION 2. Faculty, English I'm teaching an English honors seminar this spring, and I'm hoping to include a component of primary research. There was widespread discussion in the Victorian popular periodical press of matters related to the concerns of this course -- physiological psychology, mesmerism, evolution, phrenology, vivisection, and so on. But I'm unsure what the best ways of helping students enter into the research might be, and what kind of access is available to original texts (presumably, principally online or in microforms). ANSWER So my first response to this request would be to ask for the catalog description and the syllabus if available so I could get a better grasp of the exact content and original format desired (only popular publications or scientific publications from the period as well? ), along the same lines of Alana’s request . In addition to Alana's description of databases sources available, I just wanted to point out that one of Research Por...

A couple weeks ago I came across a webpage that demonstrated how to install and use a CPAN module which would allow programmer to write Perl code in Latin ! I geeked out a little bit. I was/am amazed and amused that someone would want to write Perl in Latin. I can only read and write in Latin with the help of a dictionary. I am finally beginning to read Perl. The idea of combining the two blew my mind. My INFM 743 has taught me read through simple Perl code so that I'm now able to follow the code well enough to hypothesize about the outcome. Coding is no longer a mess of letters and symbols but it's starting to make sense. Yay! Though how literate I actually am will be shown by today's midterm. For now I need to practice my Perl basics, but someday I just might be able to practice Perl and Latin all at the same time. And wouldn't that be cool? Fine, it would be geeky, but I think geeky is cool! ;) Have a great day and keep smiling! :)

Melissa Terras’ blog post “The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it?” provides graphic evidence that when academics actively tweet and blog about their research that research is more likely to be downloaded. SO? Article downloads are important for tenure. Articles in institutional repositories are accessible to a wider audience than articles only available in subscription databases. Twitter and Blogs can be effectively used to increase awareness of articles that have been published and provide links to those articles. Applications! Keep blogging! Blog posts that are intended for more than a personal audience should be tweeted (maybe I should use my twitter account for more than cyber stalking DHers, huh?). Consider adding a page to the blog dedicated to past publications and current research (in my case only the latter applies). Have a great day and keep smiling! :)