Web Librarian

Once again, I’m participating in the Tour de Cure, to help fund the prevention and treatment of diabetes, a disease which affects many of my friends and family members and which I believe we have the power to cure.

If you would be willing to support my ride with a donation, I would be tremendously grateful! My fundraising goal for this year is $500, and I’m more than half way there, thanks to some really generous friends and coworkers. If everyone that follows my blog (according to Google, but how accurate are those numbers, do you think?) chipped in $5, I would meet and surpass my fundraising goal!

Thank you to everyone who already donated! People have been incredibly generous, and I (and Dale, who is also riding in the Tour) really appreciate it! ♥

So, remember when I was all “Bleh, I hate that we Doodle all the time at work”? Funny story: I am not the only person at my workplace who feels that way. A group of us ended up chatting about just that subject, last week (and I promise I wasn’t the one who brought it up!). We decided that we’re going to start trying to schedule things with Outlook/Exchange, and we’re going to see how that goes. (We might also have decided something else, on top of that? I don’t remember. Ultimately, we’d like to convince everyone to join us, since, if we could get everyone on Outlook, then not only meeting scheduling, but reference desk and instruction scheduling might be easier.)

So, I had to move my Google calendar back into Exchange, to support the effort. I’ll put the techy details below, since I doubt everyone cares how that’s done. (And if all you care about is the techy details, feel free to skip to there. :)) Short story: I’m now using Exchange as my default calendar. I don’t like its feature set quite as well as Google’s, but I’ll take the hit on functionality, to (hopefully soon!) be able to work more efficiently.

But now I have the issue that calendar-sharing with my husband is going to be way trickier, unless I can figure out how to sync Exchange with Google calendar. (Techy details on that below, too.) I can see his Google calendar with my iPhone, and he can see my Google calendar with his iPhone. (He works a regular schedule, so he keeps his work meetings in his work Exchange calendar [because they use Exchange calendaring to set up meetings in his workplace, just like any sane organization with access to an Exchange server would do], which he can’t actually see with his iPhone right now; his off-work-time events go in Google.) If I can’t find a technical solution to the problem, I’ll try to separate out Exchange-for-work and Google-for-home, but I know from experience that that’s a messy road to take, doubly so when we only have one car, which makes our schedules more interdependent, and I try to be flexible and work one evening a week during the semester. The work/home separation only works for Dale because his work schedule is so regular. I can think of a couple of workarounds (set myself “out of office” on the mornings before night shifts, etc.), but none of them are super clean.

So that problem remains unsolved, unless syncing works. Fingers crossed!

Techy Details

It turns out, moving my Google calendar back into Exchange was more than a five-minute process. I had to use CalDAV to sync my Google calendar with iCal, then export my iCal to a file, and then right-click on the file to open it with Outlook. (Which only took 5 minutes to execute, but Googling for that took longer. Silly me, I thought Outlook would have a functioning “import” option.)

Although you can sync a Google calendar with an Outlook calendar on a Windows box, there’s no way to do it on a Mac. Therefore, I think I may install the syncing software on the smallest Windows/VMWare Fusion instance I can get away with on my work machine. Assuming it doesn’t bog the machine down completely, I can just leave my Windows virtual machine running, and that might be satisfactory. If it does bog down the machine, then I’ll just make syncing calendars with VMWare part of my morning email routine. And if there’s some detail to this that I’m missing, that makes syncing impossible, then I may explore other options; in my Googling, I found a couple of paid software solutions. I’m not thrilled at the idea, because they looked a little shaky, but I could live with it, if any of them work well. (I know VMWare Fusion is also “paid software,” as is Windows. But VMWare Fusion + Windows gives me more browsers to test on, which, as a web developer, I value, so I don’t feel like I’m wasting money or time, doing that.)

I’m installing Windows 7 on a 30-day trial of VMWare now. If this crazy scheme works out—and possibly even if it doesn’t—I’ll ask my department head for clearance to buy VMWare Fusion for reals. (I have a personal copy, but it isn’t working, for some reason. It’s several years old; maybe when they say “OS X 10.4.9 or later,” there’s an expiration date on that “or later” part. Or there’s some subtlety in the campus Windows disks that only a new version of Fusion can handle.) It’ll be nice to have access to IE and Windows Firefox (which renders differently than Mac Firefox) on a machine at my desk!

Fingers crossed.

A post on Tad Overdue got me thinking (and laughing, a bit, but only in sympathy, I promise!). I like the idea of never apologizing for taste. Possibly because mine isn’t always that good. ;)

Following Erin’s lead, here are my confessions:

Things I shouldn’t admit I don’t like, but I don’t:

• Classical and orchestral music – with very few (and very pedestrian) exceptions, I find it unappealing. Not offensive, just not interesting. I know I’m a philistine in that respect, and I’m actually pretty OK with it.
• Onions. And peppers. And mushrooms. And olives. And, often, tomatoes. – I was a very unsuccessful and unhappy vegetarian. I end up unhappy in a lot of food-sharing situations, with such a long list of foods I don’t like.
• Zombies. – Sorry, folks. I just… the gross factor, combined with the brutality factor, is a bit too much. I understand the appeal and all, but it’s not my thing. I’ve been semi-faking liking zombies for a while, but here I am, finally admitting that I don’t like them, as a story element, at all; what I like is post-apocalyptic/dystopian future stories.

Things I don’t like as much as I feel like I should:

• Nonfiction books. – I can get into a well-written biography or history (by “well-written,” here, I mean “it could pass for fiction”), or anything with enough narrative element to it to feel like “fun” reading. But most non-fiction is kind of a slog for me. I rebel against book club when we have nonfiction to read. I do read books about design and techy stuff for work, but I always put it off.
• Wireless standards and gadgets – Sure, for a librarian, I do fine. But for a former wireless engineer with techie friends, it’s embarrassing not to have all of these details at hand, anymore. I just can’t make myself stay up on it.
• Boardgames and card games. – I’m simultaneously too competitive and not competitive enough. I find most boardgames and card games more stressful than fun. I’ll play the hell out of Apples to Apples, Zendo, and Mafia/Werewolf, though! (Those last two aren’t actually boardgames or really card games, either…)
• Babies. – I mean, I’m delighted for people who want them and then have them. Life is a miracle and all that. But, cute though they are (when they sleep), I find the prospect of being left alone with one, for long enough for it to wake up, really scary. They cry. And drool. … Actually, drool is the most pleasant of their outputs. And I’m always afraid I’m going to break them, when they’re given to me to hold. Baby pictures: great. Actual babies: scary.

Things I love, but should never admit to loving:

• Stupid vampire and werewolf books. (I don’t mean Twilight, though I did read those, and I did find elements in them that I enjoyed—mostly the inter-vampire politicking and the big vampire throwdown at the end. Also, the chess game. But since I loathed the ingenue, the weird morality, and the offensively wrong definition of “romance” in those books, it goes in the “dislike” pile. Anyway…) – “Urban fantasy,” is it called? I think I’ve read all of Anita Blake, most of Sookie Stackhouse, all of Kitty Norville (probably the best heroine of the bunch, but only because the Blake books got so weird), and both of the supernatural steampunk series I know of. I also like the Buffy comic books. It’s all fluff (some of it weird fluff), but it’s fluff I enjoy, for some reason.
• Astrology. I think astrology is fun and harmless, like fortune cookies, which I also enjoy. I don’t encourage making life decisions based on it, nor do I follow it closely at all, but still I get vaguely irritated when people wax miltant about their dislike of astrology and everyone who pays it any attention whatsoever. (So-called “skeptics,” in general, could probably go in my “dislike” pile, because so many of them are so very evangelical about their views. They call everyone else stupid, which annoys me.)
• Tabletop roleplaying games. – Around most of my friends, this is not an embarrassing thing to like. Around a lot of my professional colleagues, it is. But I am playing in a really excellent superhero-themed GURPS game, right now (we’re doing GURPS-lite, not being all crazy into the rules), plus two not-entirely-regular Dungeons & Dragons games, plus, apparently, Rifts(?). And I think they’re all great.
• Bad pop music. – I mean a wide range of genres, here, probably. I like music with a pretty high BPM, and I am not really put off by crappy lyrics (unless they’re horribly sexist) or overblown emotional content in a song. I’m not giving it its own bullet point, but I also like operatic heavy metal with female vocalists. Turns out, that describes more than one artist! (Pandora, by the way, goes into my “I love it, and I’m happy to tell you about it” post, if I ever make one. :))
• Brightly colored things that normal people probably write off as tacky. Parrot earrings? Love ‘em! Crazy-colored houses? The best! (Dale and I have a deal, based around my tenure and our house color. :))

I sometimes find myself feeling a little competitive (in a friendly way!) with another library in my state university system: their social media has tended to be quite good, they have a banana tree, their library has a giant raven statue(!!) outside and might just generally be prettier than ours, they once made librarian trading cards (link goes to a general pool of cards, not to theirs specifically), and they put up a “Poet Tree” last year, to celebrate National Poetry Month. They are a fairly small academic library staff that nevertheless find time to do some pretty fun things, and I admire them for that. But I also think to myself “We can do all that, too!”

In general, I keep sticking on this idea of making the library more pleasant, no matter whether we’re talking about the web site, social media, physical space, customer service, or any other aspect of our students’ interaction with us. If the library can be fun, at least sometimes, I want it to be. I want people to have a generally positive association with us. So, as part of that, and partially inspired by our colleagues elsewhere in the state, I really wanted to do something “interactive” for National Poetry Month, this year.

Our amazing Student Worker Supervisor, Kristi, usually ends up in charge of displays, so I approached her and our Social Media Team (which she’s on—like I said, she’s great) to ask for ideas. I should admit, Poetry Month was already upon us, by this point. So some of our more involved ideas, such as poetry contests, had to be put off for a year. (I also had to put a warning on my calendar, to plan Poetry Month ahead of time, so we don’t make that mistake again.) But we made a list of poetry books, she and some students assembled a display, and I painted a piece of foam board that I had lying around with some magnetic primer (which I also had—I took the opportunity to paint the thing I had been planning to make magnetic, in my house, at the same time as I implemented this project). We set that and two boxes of magnetic poetry (the college edition and the Shakespeare edition – as you can see from the video, those mix interestingly) out on the display, put up a little bit of example poetry, and left it alone.

Out of curiosity, I took a photo each day, to see how the display would change over time. It does seem to have been used! I’m going to call this one a success: Magnetic Poetry

Folks, I’m going to ask you to do a thing you might not get to do very often: write about how great you are. Or, if you prefer, how great an experience you have had, specifically while volunteering. I know, anecdotally, that librarians and library workers volunteer a lot of our time. (I’m not talking about working late at our own libraries, though that’s a thing we do; nor am I talking about what we do as part of professional organizations. I really mean volunteering, out in our communities.) I used to do stage managing (aka “planning, organizing, and herding cats”) for a local theatre group—and will again, if one of Anchorage’s troupes will have me. I know librarians who go organize soup kitchens, who catalog books and plan events for local non-profits, who teach computer classes at senior centers, and the list goes on. We are definitely out there, making a difference, and I think that needs to be more visible.

Now I’m going to back up, explain what I’m going on about, and then make my request for your story.

Back in the day, ALA used to do big volunteer days at their annual conferences, called “Librarians Build Communities” (or sometimes “Libraries Build Communities,” but we have since settled on the former). The best-known of these was probably the one in New Orleans, when ALA was the first conference back after Hurricane Katrina. They were pretty great experiences, both for the volunteers involved and for the organizations they were helping out. (Most of those organizations were libraries; it wasn’t originally an advocacy kind of program. But I’m getting ahead of myself.) The ALA Chapter Relations Office felt that, while this was great and worth doing, it should really be expanded beyond just our national conference. They envisioned each state matching volunteers with organizations—both libraries and not—that needed them. Thus was born a multi-year Emerging Leaders project.

This year, we have focused on getting a webpage set up, with a primer that will help any ALA chapter, any state, or any city looking to start their own program. On the site, we explain the concept of skills-based volunteering, the idea of volunteerism-as-library-advocacy, the benefits to an individual who volunteers, the history of the program, and, of course, what the program might look like at the state level. To make it all doable within our project’s time frame—and to give states an easy place to start—we have focused on the one-day kind of events, a lot like ALA did. But we’ve changed the emphasis to be externally-focused (not volunteering in libraries, but rather in the rest of our communities) and created a blog, to better showcase individual librarian-volunteers, as well as successful state and local LBC programs.

I’d like you to write your volunteering story for the LBC Blog, please! (It can be fairly short; that’s OK.)

So I’m asking, if you’re a librarian (or library worker, or archivist, or museum worker) who has done any volunteering using your library (etc.) skills, would you please write about that experience and submit it to the LBC Blog? If you’ve got pictures, that’s even better! (You can follow that link and submit your blog post, or you can email the group of ELs at librariansbuildcommunities at googlegroups dot com.) Here’s a pretty fantastic post, to give you an idea of the kind of thing we’re looking for.

And if you’ve done volunteering that didn’t specifically use library skills—for instance, the local chapter of my library association is going to pick up trash for two hours on a Saturday—feel free to write that up, too. We might hold that post for a little bit, until we get more of the skills-based posts showing up, but I still think it would be a valuable contribution to the blog. (I’m going to write about our trash pick-up for sure! With photos!)

Scheduling is generally acknowledged to be a messy process. It is what we developer/geek types refer to as a “Hard Problem.” (I’m pretty sure it’s actually an “np hard problem,” but why risk overstating it?)

But I find myself really irritated by the current “solution” that I and most of the library world seem to utilize: Doodle. Don’t get me wrong; Doodle’s great. It converts time zones automatically, and if you sign up for a free account, it gives you the option to add “I can meet at this time if we really need to, but please don’t make me” (“if need be,” they call it) to your polls. It’s fantastic!

But I just realized that I have created multiple Doodles for the same week, and, in filling them out, I’ve potentially made one of them a lie, once the meeting time is set. That’s happened to me before, and it was awkward. It’s why I’m such a stickler for filling them in quickly: if everyone Doodles (yeah, it’s been verbed) in a timely manner, Doodle-overlaps are a little bit easier to avoid. Once one meeting is set, I can head over to the other Doodles I’ve filled out and change them. If, on the other hand, all of my Doodles languish, then my schedule fills up, both with Doodle-things and with other things, and I end up scheduled for multiple things at once.

It’s a very first-world problem, but there you go.

It annoys me extra, because I even have this problem internally to my workplace. A workplace that has Exchange.

Why is Exchange (or Google Calendar or any online calendaring solution with the option to share) different, you might ask? Because you (hypothetical coworker) can decide to set up a meeting, and you can add me to your invite and then start looking at times, and you can see my and everyone else’s free/busy time within the invite, in real-time. There’s no chance of my accidentally lying about meetings, like on a Doodle poll, because there’s no delay; you’re looking at my actual free/busy time. And as soon as your meeting is scheduled? Bam, it shows up on my schedule as a busy time, so other people won’t schedule over it.

The reason we don’t use Exchange to its fullest potential (read: at all), in my workplace, is that some people keep their calendars on paper. And I get that it’s hard to change how you do your work, mid-stream. I’m venting, here, not recommending that we all be forced to go on Exchange. (I’m not even on Exchange, right now; I’m on Google Calendar. You can see my free/busy time right here. But I’d switch to Exchange in a minute if everyone else would!) It wouldn’t even solve all of the problems with external-to-our-organization Doodling. But it’s so wasteful to spend all of this time sending out polls, waiting for people to respond to polls, bugging people who don’t respond, correcting polls when new meetings come up, and apologizing (and restarting the scheduling process, sometimes!) when two polls come back with the same time chosen.

I’m not saying it was always seamless when I scheduled meetings as a consultant (where we all used Exchange). People had so many meetings that there often were no times when everyone could meet. And we’d just meet anyway, without a couple of people, or they’d come in late. And the world didn’t end. But librarian culture is so different—people get mad that they “weren’t told” about things, when they miss meetings. We have what is, on a good day, a consensus culture. (On a bad day it’s a veto culture.) And this might vary by workplace, but I’ve noticed, in mine, that when someone comes in late, we spend a lot of time rehashing. So it seems like, in libraries (as opposed to IT consulting firms), this whole scheduling issue is a much bigger deal, AND it’s harder.

I dunno. Does anyone else have this problem? Or is it just that I’m on too many teams, committees, work groups, etc.?

I don’t usually use my blog for “notes to myself,” at least not much, but, not knowing when next year’s Snapshot Day is going to be, I can’t very well make myself a calendar reminder, the way I do for National Gaming Day @ Your Library or, now, National Poetry Month. (I don’t know if “calendar reminder 1-2 months ahead of the date” is GTD-approved methodology, but I’m confident it will work better than “scramble at the last minute, because you only remember when Facebook tells you it’s happening already,” which was my approach this year.)

And, anyway, I never forget about Snapshot Day. I’m on the statewide committee (which sounds all prestigious, maybe? but we’re a very small state, personnel-wise; so far I’ve found that, if I’m willing to do stuff, people will let me be on any committee I show up for). So it’s not the calendar reminder I need, but the “Lessons,” from this year. And last year.

First of all, it’s all well and good to make sure the wiki, Flickr, etc. are working well, but I also need to arrange for Snapshot Day to happen at my own library. And I only half did that:

• I contacted our Head of Access Services on Thursday, to see if we could get gate counts and ILL counts for Monday (yesterday), which she delivered, so good work there. I’ll do that again.
• I did not ask her to get the Circulation Desk staff to count how much technical help they provided, or to get people counts for the study rooms, so that data is lost.
• I contacted our Designated Photographer (she likes taking photos and does a great job) ahead of time, and she agreed to participate, which happened, so, again, good work.
• We have reference tracking software, which also counts “technical help,” from the Reference Desk. So all the various help that happened there was captured. People even did a pretty great job of providing descriptions of the reference questions they answered, so I have stats for “e-gov help.” And I have good sample reference questions.
• We have a Sirsi guru, so I didn’t have to worry too much about circulation counts, ahead of time. He ran the report for me today.
• I didn’t get in touch with our Head of Reference, our Archives, or our partner library on campus (“Learning Resources Center,” it’s called), ahead of time, and that means I passed up some information that would have been nice to get. (Actually, I did let Archives know on Monday, before they were open. So they were able to capture data. They sent me their reference count and some photos today.) Major lesson, there: give LRC a heads up (they’ll probably run their own Snapshot Day next year), and talk to Reference ahead of time. Which I meant to do, but there was a preventable communications breakdown.
• I also didn’t set up Google Analytics, or any other automated tool, to count the number of hits from our public computer proxy IP address, which might have given me an estimate of “computer usage” for the day. Our ref staff couldn’t possibly keep up, even if they could see all of the computers, which they can’t.
• I didn’t print out “why do you love your library?” forms, or ask on Facebook, or post them on the website, or anything. We stumbled into one comment, from an organization we’re partnering with on campus, but that’s it.
• And, this one is key: there’s a question on the form that I don’t understand. I’m on the committee, and I don’t understand the question. This happened last year, too, I think. Obviously, if we do this again next year, we’re going to have to talk about what that question means and make it better!

The preliminaries

I sometimes admit things, in my blog, that I probably shouldn’t. Case in point: I didn’t know there were actual resources for readers’ advisory! I just thought we were supposed to know these things off the tops of our heads, or cheat by going to GoodReads or LibraryThing or (sorry) Amazon.

This would be a bit more egregious if I had ever actually been a public librarian. But I haven’t. I came close: I was an assistant in a public library and did answer reference questions and do readers’ advisory—always off the top of my head or tag-team with a coworker, who was also working off the top of her head (and we did pretty great, if I do say so myself)—but I technically hadn’t started my MLIS. By the way, it was the best summer job I’ve ever had. I loved working at that library.

Anyway, I absolutely love fiction, so I really miss helping people find fictional titles they would enjoy. Nobody asks for that at our reference desk. They ask interesting questions, which are also great, but you just don’t bond with a patron over the intricacies of jurisprudence in 1890 Alaska, or whatever, the way you do when talking about what you both enjoy reading. Or maybe you do, but I, unfortunately, do not.

My point is, this is definitely going to be my favorite of all of the lesson topics!

The exercises

I just finished the Parasol Protectorate books, so I put that in and chose Read-Alikes for Soulless, the first book in the series. Several of the recommendations look interesting to me. Although, um, there’s a little bit of genre-switching in the list. (I went and looked one up on Amazon, and the cover, oh my!) The series list is actually better, relevancy-wise (for me), putting the one I find most interesting at the top of the list.

Digression (in which I go way off track and get angry, but do learn a lot about the interface)

And, here, I might be getting ahead of myself, but I am really annoyed that I can’t click on keywords in the reviews and records—what they call “appeal factors.” For instance, “character-driven” could keep me reading for years! Especially if I could add other aspects to it, like “strong female characters” or “action-packed.” (I went and looked up Hunger Games, too. :)) And why isn’t there (or perhaps why can’t I find) an option to add several different books, or several different series, so it can figure out what they have in common and suggest things that way? Netflix does it. Amazon does it. Why not NoveList?

OH! You can get to “appeal factors,” to sort! They’re hidden at the bottom of the right side of the record, it seems. (Wow, this interface leaves some things to be desired. Like Overdrive, it’s a great idea, but poorly executed.) Ugh, “chick lit” is a genre in this database? I find that insulting.

Possibly worse: while searching desperately for “strong female characters” (using phrasing from a review, to start), all I can find are “women slaves” and “women kidnap victims” and, sure, also “women rulers” and “women bounty hunters.” I also got to “independence in women,” which isn’t the same thing but is probably the closest I can get. Not good, EBSCO. Not good.

Back to the exercises…

So, I added a book and two series to a folder. Easy enough.

As for getting series to show up in order, I couldn’t find a way to get that to just happen, even following the directions, but once I had pulled up a series, I was able to sort it by “date” and by “volume.” Good enough!

In bumbling around trying to find the Resources section to read the Readers Advisory Toolbox (I already looked at How To Use NoveList), I found the Book Discussion Guides. Those are neat!

As for the Toolbox, it’s kind of cool. Like a TV Tropes for books, I guess. (Only TV Tropes is not just about TV—it already includes books—and I don’t believe it’s split up by genre at all.) Also, to get back to my digression, I find this interesting: it says “Women’s Fiction,” under Genres, not the far more insulting “chick lit.” Maybe they’re in the process of removing the derogatory term from the database and just haven’t taken it out of their facets yet. Let’s hope.

Anyway, for my patrons, the Book Discussion Guides are probably the most useful thing. I’ve had people show up to get books for book clubs—and next time that happens, I might offer to point these folks to NoveList for discussion ideas. Also, if anyone’s really struggling in an English class, assuming there’s a discussion guide for the book they’re reading, it could help them in the same way as Spark Notes.

On to the article, I would definitely recommend GoodReads over LibraryThing, having done both. There’s just so much more interaction on the former! Friends of mine have used What Should I Read Next? with some success. I thought Shelfari was done, but it seems they’re still up and running; I still think GoodReads is better. … I know very little about the others. Gnooks lists Ayn Rand near Neal Stephenson, which annoyed me—it’s probably not much to base an anti-recommendation on, but it was definitely a bad first impression; I closed the window. And Whichbooks’ sliders amuse me, though I wasn’t sure what “Larger than life,” for instance, meant; I was unable to get more than one book I had read out of the sliders, and I disagreed with the site’s assessment of where it fit… so, while it’s fun to play with, I wouldn’t recommend that, either.

The preliminaries

First off, yes, I know that we’re well into Week 3 already. Er. Week 4. But that’s what “self-paced” means, right? If I finish by the end of May, it counts, and I get some sort of color certificate or something! (I didn’t sign up for the credit course, so there might not even be a certificate?) I’ll catch up quickly, I think: after all, pretty days when I can’t concentrate on “actual work” are MADE for efforts like this, right?

Second, I put genealogy off for a reason, besides general busyness. Professionally, it’s something I have no experience with, but I find it really intimidating. I’ve never had a patron ask me for help with it, though I have dreaded that eventuality for quite some time. And personally, well, I don’t want this post to get too LiveJournally, but suffice it to say, my family history is neither particularly comprehensible nor a source of pride for me. (And because I hate it when people are vague and leave me wondering what’s the story, I’ll add one clarification: there’s nothing interesting, at least that I know of. No mass murderers, no sociopathic royalty.)

But I’d really like to be able to help any patrons who come in with these questions, so off I go!

The exercises

• First off, I started searching for my maternal grandmother, but she wasn’t born until 1933 or so and didn’t show up in any of the article searches. So I went back a generation, to her dad, Elmer. It turns out, he was a machinist (assuming I read that right – how I hate cursive and welcome its demise!) – any idea what the box next to that says, anyone? His wife, rather than “homemaker” or any other term we might use now, was just given “none” as her profession. I didn’t know she was from West Virginia, but it turns out, she was.
• Most of the 1890 census was lost in a fire. That’s sad. As of the beginning of my process of writing this, I don’t know what local genealogical collections Anchorage has, besides what is no doubt available in the UAA Archives (protected from fire by a sprinkler system?). So I browsed around Anchorage Public Library’s site, figuring they would have a page about genealogical resources, which they do, sort of (I’m really not sure why it would be a PDF instead of a web page; it’s full of links, after all). The Alaska Room at the Loussac Library is apparently a good resource (again, protected by sprinklers, I imagine). And I didn’t think about it, but according to the Anchorage Genealogical Society, “One of the thirteen National Archive Centers (NARA) is located in Anchorage,” which would of course also house a lot of good local genealogical information. I’m not sure how that is protected from fire, probably also sprinklers. One hopes we’re digitizing all of this stuff? (Yes, yes, I know that digitization != preservation, but it also doesn’t hurt to make a copy!)
• 1900 was Alaska’s first year in the census.
• To get an image for printing, you click the “Download” button, or right-click on the image and choose one of the “Save” options. Then you go do clever things in Adobe. (Figuring out the technical side is not my hurdle.)

I don’t remember seeing this on the APL PDF. That’s too bad.

Anyway, I’m no expert, but I at least have a better handle on where to go if I get a genealogical question. Bonus: I can now spell “genealogy,” which I could not, before I started this lesson. ;)

Explanation of what I’m doing, for people not taking the course:

Alaska has this very cool thing, where people living in the state have access to a whole bunch of electronic resources through the “Statewide Library Electronic Doorway” (SLED) and “Digital Pipeline.” (I admit, I haven’t the foggiest idea what the actual difference is between these two things, though it appears that the Pipeline is a subset of SLED. I use resources from both, I’m sure, but my library links to statewide, University of Alaska, and Consortium Library resources in the same place, making the whole thing rather opaque.)

As I just intimated, I don’t know a lot about a whole lot of resources. My reference experience, prior to starting here, was in a small branch public library with a perhaps(?) unusually incurious set of patrons, followed by an academic library where we really only served scientists and engineers—and more of the latter than the former, really. My reference experience, since starting here, has been all over the board, of course. Our training regimen is, uh, not very regimental, and training new people to do reference is a hard problem, so there are tremendous gaps in my knowledge, I admit. Luckily, we have subject guides, built with LibGuides, which get me through the bulk of questions that can be answered electronically. (And I have a whole rant about how very unfriendly our physical reference collection is to a new or part-time reference librarian, let alone a patron, but … I digress.)

Anyway, enter this e-course, Introduction to Alaska Digital Resources. I figure this will make me a much better reference librarian, here, and if I ever take a shift at the public library (hey, it’s a thing!), it will help me know what they have available and answer more of the kinds of questions they get there. There will also be lots of Alaska-specific information that I will learn how to get to, which is one of the more serious gaps in my current knowledge.

So, that’s what I’m doing. And this is Week One.

Week One Exercises

1) Go to the Business Search Interface. Find the Microsoft Corporation company report. Open the Datamonitor Report. Who is the Chief Financial Officer? What did he do before coming to Microsoft?

Peter Klein. “Prior to joining Microsoft, Mr. Klein spent 13 years in corporate finance in the Seattle area, primarily in the communications and technology sectors. This included senior roles at McCaw Cellular Communications; Orca Bay Capital, a private equity firm; and several startups, including Homegrocer.com…”

2) Visit the Small Business Reference Center. Do a search for handicrafts. Where could a person sell their work online? In person? Are there any books or book chapters on starting a crafts business? Search using words from a small business owner you’ve worked with recently. Anything of value in the results?

(Point of order: I haven’t worked with any small business owners, that I can think of, recently.)

According to Chapter 13 of the book How to Market & Sell Your Art, Music, Photographs & Handmade Crafts Online: Turn Your Hobby Into a Cash Machine, you can make your own website; use craftmall.com, handmadecatalog.com, or etsy.com; or go through an online auction site like eBay.

A chapter called “Making Art Shows Work for You” implies that art shows are a potential in-person selling opportunity. And festivals (particularly in Portsmouth, NH, and Providence, RI, apparently). Souvenir shops. [I don't feel like I did a great job on this part. I didn't really find much.]

There’s a chapter about crafts in 199 Internet-Based Businesses You Can Start with Less Than One Thousand Dollars: Secrets, Techniques & Strategies Ordinary People Use Every Day to Make Millions. Also, of course, How To Market & Sell Your Art, Music, Photographs & Handmade Crafts Online: Turn Your Hobby into a Cash Machine.

3) Staying with the Small Business Reference Center, find at least one item using the browse by category. What did you find? Use the browse by popular resource to look at one or two books. What did you find and did they look helpful to you and your patrons?

I looked around a bit. I found that I had to search within whatever area I landed in (for instance, industry information about coffee shops :)) to find anything useful. Otherwise, there were a bunch of random articles about very specific things I didn’t have any reason to care about. … Which might have been the point of the exercise. The combination of browse and search is actually rather good!

As for the popular resources, I used a Nolo guide before buying my house. I like them and am glad we have them! I will definitely recommend Small Business Reference Center to patrons.

4) Visit the Alaska Department of Law Consumer Protection Unit. What are the landlord’s responsibility for a rental property? What are two examples of frauds and scams? Where can you file a consumer report?

There are a bunch of responsibilities around the security deposit, disclosure, and maintaining fit premises.

Ooh, the Advance Fee scam! And also Pyramid Schemes. (Alas, why do they not teach these things in high school?)

If you want to make a consumer complaint, you can do so here.

5) Visit Alaska Regional Information. Pick your community from the places menu. How many female workers are there in your community? Who is your top employer?

64,427 female employees (just a bit more than male!). The private sector has the most workers, but the biggest employer is Anchorage School District, followed by State of Alaska.

6) Visit the Alaska Small Business Development Center. What are the stages of the small business cycle? Where can you find a checklist for starting a small business?

Think, Launch, Grow, Reinvent, Exit

http://aksbdc.org/tools/checklist-for-starting-a-business/

7) Visit the Institute of Social and Economic Research. What are two publications done about broadband in Alaska in 2011? Has Small Scale Modular Nuclear Power been considered as an option for Alaska? Do any of the Institute’s research areas seem relevant to you?

ID: 1477, Broadband Policies for the North: A Comparative Analysis, Heather E. Hudson, November 2011, 35 pp.

ID: 1447, Rural Broadband: Opportunities for Alaska, Heather E. Hudson, November 2011, 35 pp.,
presentation to the AFCEA ( Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association)

Yes, they’ve looked into Small Scale Modular Nuclear Power. ID: 1336.

Obviously, Education is relevant to me. Applied Social Policy is relevant to everyone (ooh, “Security and other aspects of the state’s election system”). Some of the others seem interesting, but probably have less bearing on my day to day life.

8) Do you see a need for business information in your community? If so, what kinds? Do you think the resources here can make some or all of your communities business information needs?

I think there are some really great resources that I was totally unaware of, and I think they could absolutely fill the bulk of the needs for business information in Anchorage. (I did get one reference question, “how many Filipina, or Asian, women are working in healthcare in Alaska?” which I am still not sure can be answered with the resources we have available. Thoughts?)