5. you have to fight an urge to offer uninvited help when you overhear conversations at the coffee shop / post office / in line

4. you create spreadsheets / databases… at home

3. an ex has ever accused you of loving them for their books / bookcases / bookshelves

2. you wear corrective lenses (ooo, stereotype.  But no really, do you?)

1. when you hear a movie based on a book is coming out, you read the book anyway

If you can think of 5 more clues to librarian-tude, please share in the comments.

If you wear many hats but use gmail to send emails from these many hats, I bet you’ve wished for a way to have different signatures, depending on the context and the recipient.

A-ha!  Look in “Labs” and you’ll see a neat trick called “Canned Responses”.

Enable that, save your settings.

Now compose a new email but in the body just type one of the signatures you want.  Click the drop down “Canned Responses” (it should be in the same line with “Add CC” and “Attach a file”…) and select “Save >> New canned response”.  Give it a name and click OK.

New Canned Response

Now after you’ve typed an email that needs that signature, just go to “Canned Responses >> Insert >> signature” and voila.

Insert Canned Response

Hurray!

Saturday, July 11th

The Exhibits

I remember my first ALA Annual in 2007 at Washington D.C. — I went through the Exhibits in a daze, having no idea what I should be doing or looking at and consequently left within about an hour, no freebies in hand.

Then at the last Midwinter (Denver) a friend gave me the low-down on Exhibits:  see a pile of books?  They’re *probably* free, especially if they say “Advance Reader’s Copy” on the cover.  Voila, I suddenly had my arms full in just minutes.

This year I grabbed not only books, but bags, too and immediately took advantage of the ALA Post Office to ship my heavy load back home without even taking it out of the convention center.  Bliss.  Now I have all sorts of interesting, fluffy / serious, free books to read as soon as my last graduate class is over!

Later in the day when I caught up with the Chinese group, a few of them said they got several vendor demos in the Exhibits.  Something for everyone.

Sessions

In the afternoon, I went to a session called America’s War on Sex — which was *packed!*  And kept getting even more people!   The speaker, Marty Klein, was terrific as a presenter – animated, enthusiastic, funny – but the content sometimes seemed to be too much “preaching to the choir”, with a big assumption that we were all liberal, left-wingers.  And maybe we were.  But there was just enough “us and them” kind of rhetoric to make me wish for a bit more balanced approach to the topic.

The topic centered around the fear-mongering about sexuality so popular in our culture.  He talked about the “illusion of the threatening sexual other” and made two major points:  1) the illusion is partly built on lumping sex and violence together when they are actually separate; sex is consensual, violence is not, and 2) exaggerating statistics of violence to make it seem scarier.

One of my favorite quotes from his presentation was “Sexuality is one of the last human rights to enjoy the American Revolution”.

After this session of “rah, rah, rah!” I grabbed a bite to eat and headed over to the Opening Session, mainly because I heard the Gay Men’s Choir would be performing.  I had no idea who the speaker would be.  Well, it was Christie Hefner, former CEO of Playboy.  In many ways, Christie’s talk was much like Marty’s — the emphasis on freedom of expression, the First Amendment, the role of libraries to protect our right to expression.

But I have to admit – I have very conflicted views of Playboy.  On one hand, I think women should feel good about being beautiful and sexy but on the other hand, I think Playboy’s presentation of “beautiful” and “sexy” is so freaking narrow it does more of a disservice to women than a help.  So I wasn’t sure what to think of her talk and I’m still not. I find it extremely ironic that I was attending these kinds of sessions while the ALA Secrets tweets were getting shut down.

Social Hours

After the Opening Session, I joined the Library Society of the World crowd at Giordano’s for pizza.  Let’s just say… I have video.  Mwah ha ha! 

I read my copy of Codslap on the bus this morning and I have to say it is a sweet little publication – just like a love letter, as the intro says.

ALA Annual is coming on the heels of (and sort of overlapping with) our most recent program at work with a delightful group of Chinese public library directors.  I rode the train into Chicago yesterday with them and what seemed like half the librarians in Champaign-Urbana.  It was fabulous!  I think almost our whole car was librarians and I had great conversations with colleagues.

Yesterday afternoon was spent in Chinatown where we saw the Chinatown branch of Chicago Public Library and had a nice big Chinese dinner at House of Fortune.  I had the wonderful sensation of feeling like I was in China — Chinese jokes flying around me from all directions and Chinese food all over the table.  I was delighted to find I could recoginze a few of the characters in the big calligraphy poems hanging around the restaurant.  Just a very few.  I wondered if this is how we start reading as kids — we see a word here and there that looks familiar (“cat” “mom”) and the rest looks like jibberish.  However, I haven’t connected the sound to the characters yet, only vague meanings.

This morning we all took the very first conference shuttle to McCormick and everyone was registered in mere minutes!!  It was amazing!  I was so happy.  They ran off to their pre-conference and I went to the Emerging Leaders session.  The most interesting part of the day for me was when we broke into small groups of 3 to each talk about one specific goal we had for the next couple months.  My little group of 3 had excellent recommendations and suggestions for each other.

Then followed the poster session and it was nice to see what the other teams had been working on.  It was also surprising to hear that our  experience with our supportive, responsive mentors was not the norm across all teams.  We also had one of the few tangible projects — many teams were doing research or surveys or maybe a website.  Our team had to get a commemorative booklet ready for the printers by June 1st.  Done.  If you’re going to the International Librarians Reception on Monday night, you might even get a copy. 

After Emerging Leaders was over, I went over to the International Librarians Orientation to check on my Chinese library directors.  Lo and behold two of them won door prizes!  And our Fulbright Fellow from Japan won a prize, too!

Tomorrow morning bright and early I will go with them to the Exhibits Opening.  I’m not exactly sure how many options they have, as far as vendors go so this might be interesting.  Good night, all, and good conference!

Calling all library conference organizers!  Please look at this website:  http://thatcamp.org/

This is one of the friendliest conference websites I’ve seen in a long, long time.  Why?

The When, What, and Who are neatly laid out in the top navigation bar (as “Schedule” “Blog” and “Campers” respectively).

The conference’s name could not be clearer – front and center on the main page with the acronym spelled out and a very brief description underneath.  Wonderful!

The home page is simple:  navbar, info, blog and twitter.  That’s it.  The other pages are also neat and clean, with the schedule laid out in a simple table and the Campers all presented with little icons for eye-candy and plenty of white-space to make for easy skimming.

The only things I would do differently:

Put the Campers in some sort of order (!) … are they in any order?  I know the alphabet is arbitrary but it’s better than nothing.

Create a “Trends” tab that gives some auto-generated visuals of the current hot topics — such as a tag cloud from the blog or a Wordle cloud from the tweets.  Some sort of topic browsing somewhere would be nice as a way to filter the information from those lucky, enthusiastic campers. 

I must say the website alone makes me a little jealous, but the content coming out of THATCamp *really* makes me wish I was there.  All sorts of fascinating questions coming up!  I only wish I had time to follow it all.  Keep up the great talks, THATCampers.

from Milan Kundera’s, The Joke,
Czech: 1967 / English: 1992, Harper Perennial

p. 164

“… I only asked with a calm (and well-rested) heart: why did I meet her? what did the encounter mean and what was it trying to tell me?
Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live comprise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.”

Me:  But more specifically, I want to decipher the now of my life as it is happening.  Some things I have deciphered – long after the thing passed and was just ready to be forgotten completely.  But that doesn’t satisfy.  I want the sense of right now, the meaning of right here.

The good:
…this quote from a news story I read this morning:

“The rarest of all commodities in this world is love. It is that thing that we all yearn for at some level — to be simply loved unconditionally for nothing more than who we are — not what we can get, give or become.”

The bad:
It’s from the S.C. governor who admitted to having an affair with an Argentinian woman.

The ugly:
Their emails to each other have been made into a news story ( http://www.thestate.com/sanford/story/839350.html )  and what sounded like a very beautiful relationship has come to an end because of politics.  I actually feel very bad for the man.  He certainly made a lot of bad decisions but I think the worst one was choosing to go back to the career and give up the love. When he says he spent a week crying in Argentina… I kinda believe him.

In a few moments I will attempt to juggle the following spinning plates:

- start preparations for cooking mini pot pies (leave the butter out to soften) while I…

- start importing recent photos, while I…

- get logged into the various websites I need for a work project, while I…

- listen to my “unrated” playlist in iTunes and add ratings.

On your mark… get set… go!

This post has been in draft mode for a long, long time and resurfaced in my memory thanks to various conversations including this one at FriendFeed and this post on e-book reading.

It seems like a great way to get a bunch of librarians really going is to ask “Is paper dead?” and let them have at it.  For the most part, people immediately think of books and that’s how this post started, too.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my own personal paper-to-computer transition has been happening gradually for a few years and didn’t really involve the book aspect until recently.

I’ll start with music.  I’m including this in “paper-to-computer” because CDs are, after all, digital music so it’s not really “analog to digital”.  The change is really in packaging.  In 2003 I went from carrying CDs and a Discman to keeping all my music as MP3s on an iAudio.  Oh, the great magic of shuffle! And playlists that could be longer than a 70 minute CD-R! My listening habits started changing right away.  I eventually moved to an iPod after switching to a Mac and only in the last year have I started downloading a few songs off of iTunes and Amazon.  I still primarily like to own my music on CD because of the paper and physical media (or my perception of something closer to permanence than MP3s).

Gallery Leather

My calendar switch took me by surprise.  Before I started grad school, I used the same brand of beautiful little day planners each year.  In my first year of grad school I started using Google Calendar and within two months I wasn’t looking at my paper planner at all.  I was still optimistic that I would find some reason to use the paper planners (and still bought the same brand of beautiful little planner even last year) but found that I was adding events to my online calendar from too many different places (home computer, work computer, cell phone) to keep my paper calendar “synced” anymore.  For a back-up, I use iCal.

Grad school also changed my reading habits to some extent.  Perhaps reading blogs paved the way, but I found myself reading most of my articles for class as PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Pro, where I could highlight, bookmark, and annotate very quickly and then easily search my notes during class discussions.  At ALA Midwinter this past January I used a friend’s iPod Touch rather than lugging around a laptop.  Out of sheer boredom I started reading an e-book (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) on the plane trip home.  Once I got my own Touch, I continued reading on the bus trips to campus each day.  It was just so darn convenient!  The downside for me, however, was the lack of a trusty paper bookmark that I’m accustomed to using for jotting notes and quotes.  Right now my bus trip book is a hardback paper book again, and the trusty paper bookmark is almost full.  I could possibly keep a scrap of paper with the Touch for such notes, but I usually use the book as support when I’m writing the note and I wouldn’t want to press on the Touch like that.  For the most part, I think I would just use e-reading for the kind of books I would check out from a library and not actually own.  In other words, fluff books for pure entertainment.  All other books, I will continue reading as paper for a while longer.

And now in the last couple weeks I’ve made the paper-to-computer transition that was the hardest but the best:  journaling.  I have a small chest full to the brim of paper notebooks I’ve used as journals from the past 20 years (what?? not going to think about the implications of that…) and I’ve been toying with the idea of moving this very personal ritual to the computer for over a year but kept resisting.  I was too attached to the physical act of using pen on paper to give up paper journaling until recently when I looked through my current paper journal and realized that in the last 3 months I’ve only written 11 entries, the most recent being a month ago.

The final push came from talking with a good friend who had been using Word as a journal platform for some time now and who was generous enough to show me how he set up his files.  He used a new Word document for each month, with many entries that were simply a line or two.  Some days had several of these brief entries, some days were skipped entirely, and some entries were longer, more reflective.  For some reason, I never gave myself this much flexibility in my paper journaling and that is most likely one of the reasons my journaling had become so infrequent.

VoodooPad Journal

So I started journaling in VooDooPad, creating a page for each month with links to the page for each day that has any entries.  Sure enough – in the month of March alone I had 21 entries.  The most surprising benefit to me was how much more easily (and flowingly?) I could write when typing than when writing by hand.  I also appreciate the ability to search all my entries at once and back up the journal in multiple places (a factor that worries me a little re: my paper notebooks).  I’m not convinced yet that I have the right structure going (year / month / day) but it’s working for now.

With such big parts of my life now in my computer, I wondered what paper habit might be next to make the transition.  I looked around my apartment and here are some of the paper things I found:
to do lists / grocery lists
checkbook (only used for rent, though)
hand-outs from presentations
concert programs / tickets / flyers
class hand-outs & notes
receipts
doodles / outlines / sketches
paper scraps from collage book workshop
coupons
greeting cards

I have a shelf full of blank notebooks of various colorful bindings and another shelf of blank notecard box sets, one of which I use each month when I send my paper rent check to my landlord.

And honestly… do I *want* all these paper things to turn into bits & bytes?  I have to say “no” because I do still have a love affair with paper.

I fall prey to the New Year’s reflection & introspection tendency as much as anyone else. It’s been a strange week of having to look backward in order to look forward.  I’m applying for jobs and trying to beef up my resume and cover letters, but doing so requires going back through my scattered paper and digital memories to assemble a list of Great Things I’ve Done To Convince You To Hire Me.

But the memories are all mixed up, so with the records of job projects there are also notes from the personal side of life.  In my paper journal for last year, I found this entry:

—————————————–

Monday 29 October 2007

While waiting for a bus home, I imagined that aliens had asked me what I would like to see happen in the world, what would I want them to do if they were set on doing something to change us.

I would ask the aliens for a moment which required a build-up.  For several weeks beforehand, people might find themselves planning trips, slightly adjusting their routine, changing their routes home from work.  Then one day, the Moment comes.  At this Moment, everyone in the world will turn and see beside them the person they will love all their lives, and they will recognize this person for who they are, what they will mean to each other.  All around the world, people will embrace, introduce themselves, or laugh to find they’re standing next to their spouse and had the right answer all along.

I don’t believe we each have one specific “true love” person out there.  I think each of us has the potential for lifelong happiness with a variety of people, but circumstances will only put us in contact with very few of them… hopefully at least one of them.

What the Moment would do is open our eyes and finally reveal to us something we might have already known, or something we would have never suspected and been oblivious to otherwise.

It’s the oblivious possibility that bothers me.  What if I’m walking by my person on the street and not even seeing who it is?

————————————————-

Now, over a year later, I would amend that wish just slightly.  I wish for a Moment in which we all have a eureka moment and realize what IT is that each of us are so gosh-darn good at, and we’ll be able to use that knack to be helpful, productive, and happy.  I think both wishes are pretty similar — they’re simply about finding some missing piece of information about ourselves.