Fun Stuff and Why I Have a Headache

First, the Fun Stuff.

My co-worker, Heather, presented at the Minnesota Library Association conference on using social software to keep up with government documents (ppt here). Then she brought Jenny Levine back to Minneapolis with her so we could all meet for dinner. What fun! [Update: Here’s a picture of us having fun with Jenny.]

We also discovered the William College Liaison Librarians must have liked our 05-06 trading cards. Wow.

I’ve become a del.icio.us convert. I’ve even received a link from Steve in that oh-so-cool “Links For You” section. Now I wish all my co-workers were on del.icio.us so I could send them links. I still haven’t imported my links from Furl yet, but already I’ve more than doubled the number of links in my collection. Two things I’d like from del.icio.us: an easier to type name, and more than 255 characters to describe my links. (Two things I’d like from Furl to make me go back: faster/easier bookmarking, more social features like “links for you.)

And now… Why I Have a Headache.

Because it’s been a rough week, that’s why. I haven’t had the time or energy to blog at all, so the backlog of things I want to blog about is getting distinctly overwhelming. (I’ve started using the toread bookmarklet and in only a week I’ve accumulated 60 unread items! Yikes.)

I relearned how evil Elsevier is, though I’m not sure I’m at liberty to discuss their new act of extortion and peevish tantrum-throwing just yet.

I also spent almost all of three days trying to help one class of students answer impossible questions only to be told by a professor (not the professor class I was helping, btw) that I was doing their homework for them. Oh, and he copied the professor I WAS working for. He’s not even a professor in my liaison departments. Coming at a particularly vulnerable and tired time for me, this criticism completely shook me. I kind of expect to be told that I could do more, and I generally welcome constructive criticism, but the only two times I’ve been completely and utterly shaken by criticism at work were times when I’d worked extra hard only to be (figuratively) patted on the head and told “that’s nice, dear, but we didn’t want you to work that hard and we don’t really think the effort was worth it.” I guess it comes with the territory.

Basically, I’ve had one of those weeks a librarian dreads: all impossible questions with no sense of accomplishment. I even made people mad over the fact that we have electronic access to the Chronicle of Higher Education but aren’t allowed to give out the password or copy and paste articles. No, it’s all freely available, but you have to come “all the way” to the library and have one of us log you in. Yes, I realize that you might as well just read the paper copy we have at the library, but that’s life (and our license agreement).

Oh, and I’m facing a 6-day week since this is my Sunday to work and there’s no time for a comp-day next week. Bwah-ha-ha-ha.

But, I resolve to get to some of my backlog of blog stubs.