There’s always that one day — the day when you spend most of your day putting appointments into your calendar, the day when email volume doubles, the day when deadline work takes over and project work gets squeezed into a corner.
That day was Monday. Fall is coming.
Before Fall Term starts, I need to:
Read a sample of the sophomore writing portfolio to assess evidence of information literacy.
Finish writing up a report evaluating our joint technical and research help service point in the library.
Update a few research guides that are now out of date.
Create several brand new guides for brand new courses.
Plan various orientations and beginning-of-school events (must must must remember to schedule a meeting of that committee I’m chairing…)
Distill 2 days of discussion into a couple of action plans for our department
Remember to eat, preferably three times a day, though that hasn’t happened yet this week.
Considering I have just a couple of weeks to do those things in, and considering that a couple of those things could each take a couple of weeks, and further considering that more and more of my time each day is spent answering email now that everyone’s getting ready for Fall…
… But this is normal. This is August.
(Also, see what I just did here? This is the blogging equivalent of cleaning my house when I know I should be writing a paper.)
I’ve been an Evernote user for four and a half years (which, incidentally, is pretty much the longest I’ve used any single program other than MS Office and Quicken) and recommended it to several of my colleagues. That’s where I keep notes from every meeting and conference I’ve been to since becoming a librarian, all my class outlines, all my notes in preparation for difficult research consultations, many to do lists, my email archive from our old email system, everything. And it’s great.
And I now need to figure out how best to maintain a local backup.
The Cloud: It's great until it isn't
The back story. Early this month I took extensive notes, almost a transcription, of an intense two-day meeting. My department was going to use these notes as the basis of several important projects (a strategic plan for Information Literacy on campus, just for one). I carefully synced with the servers even more often than the automated sync happens along the way, added and edited the note over the course of the next two weeks (on several computers, always carefully syncing with the servers), and then opened the note at the beginning of the first follow-up meeting at which we were going to actually start mining it and using it. But between the time when I opened the note and when I came back to my computer after talking about a minor scheduling thing with a co-worker, the note had gone completely blank.
Totally blank. Nothing there.
So I freaked out (very quietly and over the course of several hours) while we tried to see if we could recover it and opened up a co-worker’s notes to see if we could work from them in the mean time. After searching user forums and even buying a premium account so that I could see note histories (still to no avail), I emailed Evernote in desperation.
Their reply? Don’t worry, there never was a note.
Now, it was good of them to have a technician go back into the server logs for me, for sure. The fact that the server logs showed that the note had never been edited after I created it, though, was much less heartening. Combine this with an email my mom received earlier this month saying that they may have accidentally lost some of her notes off of their servers, and I’m much more motivated to create local back-ups.
So, if you use Evernote, here’s what I recommend (and I’m open to better recommendations if you’ve got them):
Select all your notes
Go to File > Export
Save all your notes someplace easy to remember
Repeat often, particularly after taking transcription-like notes during department-shaping 2-day meetings.
It’s kind of a clunky back-up mechanism, but for now it’s the best I can come up with. Too bad there isn’t a 4-step mechanism to reset my feelings toward the far too happy elephant in their logo.
I’m at least nominally a member of three online communities. Or, rather, I’m a member of three communities that have given themselves distinct names and spaces, and then there are a lot of people I interact with that also function as a community but with much fuzzier edges. Anyway, the Library Society of the World is one of these communities, and I’ve been a member since back before it was a community. It’s a place where I feel comfortable hanging out, trust people enough to have spirited debates with them, and understand a lot about where people are coming from, their jargon, and their jokes.
Just recently I joined two other communities, one where I was invested in figuring out the culture and in participating enough to build up trust and camaraderie with its members (or at least a subset of its members), and one where it’s likely I’ll never be an active participant. Right now I’m watching the first community mourn the death of one of its members, and I’m watching the other one hum along in a way that feels like an interesting but entirely foreign groove. And having both of these things as foils for my other hangout spots has set me to thinking quite a lot about what it means to be a community, and what this means for people who are hoping to build and maintain hang-out spots for groups of people.
I love it that my library is a community hang-out spot on campus. I love it that it has a culture and that there are both written and unwritten rules governing community participation there. And from what I’ve seen of the communities I’ve felt a part of in my adult life, these things are important for community building and maintenance. If these things aren’t explicitly shaped by some moderating force in the community, the community will come to these things on its own.
At the same time, I’m more aware than I was before that the very things that make a community feel like home to its denizens can also pose a barrier to entry for newcomers. Some barriers are higher than others, of course, but they’re barriers nevertheless. And since my job is to help usher my students into the community of academic scholarship, using my library as both a sub-community and a vehicle, I wish I knew how to see and overcome some of those initial barriers for my students. Because you know what? Belonging to these kinds of communities is a wonderful thing.
