Category Archives: on a personal note

Alternative Medicine

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | June 18, 2013 - 3:11 pm |
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just water

Have you ever seen a post go across your Facebook, and you thought “Wow, I want to reshare that and comment on it, but I’ve got too much to say”? That’s what this post is. Dennis Moser shared this really good article about the business of alternative/integrative/complementary medicine. Go read it. I’ll wait. And, having recently been a patient of an “integrative medicine” practitioner—two, actually—I had some thoughts. One practitioner is a doctor of naturopathic medicine (ND), and one is a myofascial therapist. And although I am no longer seeing either of them (possibly temporarily, in the case of the … Continue reading →

Not going to ALA Annual (and bummed about it)

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | May 3, 2013 - 10:36 am | , ,
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It’s funny. Earlier this week I compared conferences to summer camp. You have your conference/camp friends that you only get to see once or twice a year—though today’s world beats the world in which I went to summer camps, where our options for staying in touch were “hand write and mail letters” or “nothing”—and you really look forward to seeing those friends and hearing about what they’ve been up to. I’m going to miss campALA this year, and that makes me really sad. It’s taken me a week to 1) realize, 2) accept, and now 3) act on this reality, … Continue reading →

More about be(com)ing a woman in STEM

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | March 19, 2013 - 8:03 am | , , , , , ,
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tech-women

“STEM” is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. We have a shortage of STEM majors of any gender in the US right now, but the shortage of women in STEM is particularly damaging. Although librarianship isn’t really a STEM field (at least the way most people practice it), I come to it via engineering, and I’m on the tech side of the library house; after all, computer programming is a STEM field, and web development stems (heh) from that. I might still be pushing it to claim I’m “a woman in STEM,” now, but let me at least tell you a … Continue reading →

Playing Fiasco

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | March 17, 2013 - 10:15 pm | , , ,
2 Comments
standoff

I’ve been writing a lot of serious business kinds of posts lately (and I have another queued up), so let’s take a bit of a break, shall we? I just spent several hours playing a tabletop roleplaying game called Fiasco with some friends. If you’re not familiar with tabletop roleplaying games, Wikipedia explains it fairly well. If the idea of acting out a character in an improvised radio play without a script doesn’t sound fun to you, I’m probably not going to sell you on it with this post. But if you are vaguely into the idea of RPGs but … Continue reading →

Career Direction, Women’s Work, and Other Musings

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | March 8, 2013 - 9:29 am | , , , , , , ,
1 Comment
girls-computer

Anyone I talked to at ALA Midwinter (and probably anyone who reads my social media accounts closely—which I suspect is no one :)) has caught on that I’m thinking about next steps in my career. I’ve passed the magical “three years of experience,” after which many more jobs seem to open up and become possibilities. More importantly, I’ve laid some really good groundwork at my current job, which I can use over the next two years to improve not only my organization’s web presence but how the organization makes decisions about our web presence. That is real, lasting change. Coincidentally, … Continue reading →

Happy holidays!

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | December 19, 2012 - 4:55 pm |
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Happy holidays! This has been a hectic year for me—I might do one of those “end of the year” posts, with lists of the things I want to remember about 2012, or I might not; I don’t know that people get much out of reading them, but I do get a lot out of writing them. Either way, it’s been a pretty great year for me, both personally and professionally. So don’t let the grumpy-looking gargoyle fool you; I’m in high holiday spirits, just in a sleepy kind of way. Like all Alaskans, I’m looking forward to winter solstice and … Continue reading →

Writing as a new [web] librarian

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | November 4, 2012 - 4:37 pm | , , , , , ,
1 Comment

For someone who doesn’t publish (at least not on work time), I’ve spent a tremendous amount of my work time—and a fair bit of non-work time—reading and writing, lately. I am trying to pull together a plan for my library’s web presence, and because I work with a bunch of librarians, it can’t just be a good plan; it also needs to point to research that backs up its main arguments. (Forgive me for sounding snarky. While it’s awfully tedious finding research to cite, to make some very basic points, e.g. “the site has to be usable by novices,” I … Continue reading →

Website facelift

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | November 3, 2012 - 12:57 am | , ,
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You know how sometimes something can be a very small deal, in the scheme of things, but can begin to wear on you over time? My old website design was one of those things. It wasn’t necessarily actively bad (actually, I really think it was), but I kept meaning to change the banner image, and I didn’t like how some of the edges looked in certain browsers… You know what I mean—or, if you don’t, I won’t be able to explain it. It was stressing me out, in a really low-level way, though. I guess I was doing too much … Continue reading →

Biking for Charity

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | May 10, 2012 - 2:26 pm | , ,
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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, … Continue reading →

Taste

  By Coral Sheldon-Hess | May 6, 2012 - 9:07 am |
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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 … Continue reading →