With ALA travel, then my ALA information backlog, I fell a bit behind on 23 Things. I’m back, though. And, short of house-buying madness, I should be punctual through the beginning of October (when Dale and I hold our belated wedding ceremony & reception on the east coast).<\/p>\n
A couple of notes about last week’s “Thing”: I don’t put a ton of effort into my online brand, per se. I mean, I use my real name (which is freaking me out more, the closer I get to owning a house and therefore being easier to find in physical space), and I tend to use real photos of me, though very few of them would be all that useful in helping someone find and recognize me at a conference. It was too hot at ALA, for instance, for me to wear my sock monkey hat. Most of my summer photos show me in a bandana, either because I’m at a messy-hair event (like a creek cleanup), I’m out biking, or I just haven’t put the effort into taming my hair’s natural frizziness, that day–also not very helpful for meeting up at conferences. <\/p>\n
I’ve gone through more than my fair share of usernames, as I’ve grown, online, “settling” in recently around csheldonhess, artificialinanity, and web_librarian, depending on the context. (I’ve also gone through more than my share of actual names; I stopped using my given name, right before I went into libraries as a career, because I got fed up that it rhymed with my surname. Then my husband and I hyphenated names–a very egalitarian, but logistically annoying, choice.) My identity is therefore rather fractured, for better and<\/em> for worse. I’m OK with it, though I regret the loss of followers I suffered when I abandoned coralhess.com. And I really wish the moniker “Liminal Librarian” weren’t taken.<\/p>\n I honestly don’t put a lot of effort into “filtering.” I don’t think it’s reasonable to be coy about my political views, online–I was once told that, within 10 seconds of meeting me, anyone would know I was a flaming liberal, and, besides, Alaska has an unfair “red state” rep that I’d like to help it overcome–or to hide the fact that I find curse words unalarming (fun, actually) and have dropped my share of f-bombs, in the past. In online spaces and in person, I’m just me: easily amused, easily bored, easily angered, easily cheered up, geeky, imperfect, and, honestly, still learning where I fit within librarianship and the world at large. I also insist on the Oxford comma at all times. Why not be honest about all of that?<\/p>\n Anyway, on to this week’s Thing: I’m in love with RSS, and I’m a Twitter addict, already. Actually, to bring it back around to branding, I’ll point out that I’m still unsure whether to collapse my two Twitter identities, or to keep them separate. On one hand, it’s nice to have a “local” account and a “library” account, but in practice, I ignore one or the other on any given day. And since I’m also supposed to be watching two organizations’ accounts at the same time as my own, my TweetDeck panel is really unmanageable, right now. Since I bought a stamp with a QR code pointing to this website and listing my Twitter username as @web_librarian<\/a>, that’s the safe one to follow, if you’re interested in what I’m up to on a semi-daily basis.<\/p>\n As far as Pushnote, it sounds kind of interesting, but I sort of already use Google Reader’s sharing capabilities, delicious’s “refer to this later” functionality, and copying-and-pasting things into Twitter or Facebook by hand, for sharing more widely. Also, I’ve been asked to share more of my reading on user experience design in an internal blog. I probably don’t need another tool for sharing or rating websites. <\/p>\n That said, I’m interested in the idea of sharing published papers within my peer circles in library science–an idea I got from John Meier at the STS Research Forum at ALA this year (OK, I was one of his test subjects, as he was gathering data, yes, but the Research Forum is where he formally shared the idea). He has some thoughts about co-opting something called Mendeley<\/a>, instead of trying to make his own site popular, and I’m thinking of trying [a little harder than I did in the first study] to be part of the librarian community there, as well. <\/p>\n I’m not just in it for that, though: I am also wondering whether, if my library were to fall victim to a drop in funding, Mendeley might serve as a good replacement for RefWorks (the cost of which is, I feel, exorbitant–at least until it plays really nicely with Summon). I’d been thinking of trying Zotero out, for those purposes, but I don’t really have any pressing need for citation management software, in my day to day life, meaning that my Zotero plugin sits there, sad and unused. Perhaps having a community of other librarians would be that value-added push I’d need to really learn this Mendeley thing, instead. <\/p>\n So I will look at that, this week, and install it, and learn to use it, instead of PushNote. If anybody wants to be Mendeley friends–that’s a thing, right?–leave me a comment! If you want to be Google Reader friends–I warn you, there are lots of photos of cute animals, a fair few left-leaning infographics, and a ton of techy librarian stuff–I’m on there as csheldonhess at gmail. If you have advice on the Twitter thing, I’d be interested in that, too. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With ALA travel, then my ALA information backlog, I fell a bit behind on 23 Things. I’m back, though. And, short of house-buying madness, I should be punctual through the beginning of October (when Dale and I hold our belated wedding ceremony & reception on the east coast). A couple…<\/p>\n