Category: Random Thoughts

We’re already at mid-term. Even saying that I can’t really believe it, but wishing it weren’t so doesn’t change the facts.

It’s been kind of a rough Fall term so far. More project work and less student interaction than I’m used to. The college approved a new set of graduation requirements, and we’ve got this year to figure out how to implement them, which seemed like a long time for about the first 10 minutes after the proposal passed. I’m also planning a review of our Research/IT service now that it’s been up and running for a few years, and we’re going to look seriously at changing our catalog. The library has merged with the college archives. We’re down by two staff. I’m heading up a project to help all of us keep up with the wider world of librarianship in a way that’s both easy and fun (keep your fingers crossed). We’re getting used to LibGuides and MetaLib… And that’s just the bigger stuff that impacts my life. There’s a whole lot that others are working on, too.

On top of it all, I’ve been sick. Missing a bunch of work sure isn’t helping with the deadlines, lemme tell you. Though honestly, I’m still too tired to feel any emotional pull behind that last sentence. Intellectually I know that there’s a fan pretty close by, and I’m hoping nothing hits it, but it feels for all the world like I know this about someone else’s life and not my own. So my current plan is to get as much as I can done while I’m still in this detached zone so that by the time I wake up and realize that this is my life that’s about to explode, most of the hard work will already be done.

That’s the plan, anyway.

My plan for the next 10 minutes is to convince myself that standing up and getting ready for work is a good idea.

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Working at a small school with deeply ingrained vocabulary and a student population of only a couple thousand, you get pretty used to the way email questions look and feel when they come from students. So this morning when I opened a message and it just felt off, somehow, I took a minute to do a little investigating. The email I’d received said:

Dear Ms. Jastram,
I am doing some research on colonial Latin American literature for my honors thesis and I came across a book that just came out this year and our library does not have it yet.  The title is: __El discurso colonial en textos novohispanos: espacio, cuerpo y poder__ by Sergio Rivera-Ayala (Tamesis, 2009; ISBN:9781855661790) Is it possible to purchase it?

Regards,
[name],
Senior Student
Carleton College

First of all, our seniors do “comps” not “honors theses.” Second, they tend to assume that we know them by their senior years (which we generally do), so the signature seemed odd. And finally, it’s very rare for students to request books here, just generally, unless we’ve already exhausted our InterLibrary Loan options.

The kicker came when the registrar confirmed that we have no such student enrolled here.

Apparently someone is hoping to drum up sales for this book by impersonating students. And here I thought those handwritten letters from authors were a bit much… This is another whole level of “a bit much.”

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Several years ago I met Greg Schwartz at my very first Computers in Libraries conference, and I’ve had the pleasure of renewing that acquaintance at various conferences and online venues since then. (If any of you ever get the chance, I highly recommend being acquainted with him.) Back when I first met him I marveled over how many people he knew. I quickly found that if I hung out with him, I’d meet half the people at whatever conference we were attending and have a blast doing it. This was true even though I’m normally pretty bad at meeting new people and am usually uncomfortable doing so.

Last year I got to hang out with him more than once, and I started to notice a pattern: he’d enter a space, scan for people he didn’t know, and go strike up easy conversation with them. Incredible. This is precisely the opposite way I normally enter a room. But he never seemed to come out of these encounters the worse for wear, so clearly it wasn’t as dangerous as it looked… so I decided to try it at my next social function. I entered the room, told myself to be Greg, and introduced myself to someone I’d never met.

Lo and behold, the trick works. It’s pretty tiring, but I haven’t died from the experience yet, and in fact I’ve met quite a few people. Not everyone was destined to become my nearest and dearest friend, but the encounters have all gone relatively well. Now, every time I have to go into a situation where there will be lots of people (particularly people I don’t know) I take a minute before entering the room to channel my inner Greg.

Little by little over the years I’ve met many people I admire and like, and I’ve tried to take their best qualities into myself. I channel a couple of my co-workers when I need to be thoughtful about instruction or negotiate politically charged situations. I channel Steve when I try to move beyond thinking “that might be a good/funny/important thing to do/say” to actually doing or saying it. I channel my dad when I need to deal with difficult people. And the list goes on and on and on. I rarely live up to my models’ examples, but I usually do a whole lot better than I would have otherwise.

On my best days, I’m a patchwork quilt of all the best parts of all the people I’ve gotten to know over the years. And that includes many, many of you. Thank you.

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My local NPR station has been pushing their new news site. They put headlines there, and ask questions for readers and listeners to answer, read off these responses on the air, and link to the various staff blogs. Not a bad idea, and not a new one either (and it makes me shake my head a little every time they say it makes a great browser bookmark and never mention its feed).So, all in all, not a bad site, if a little busy for my tastes.

What gets me, though, is that they’re having kind of a hard time publicizing the thing because it’s hard to pronounce distinctly. You see, the local NPR station is MPR, which is hard to distinguish from “NPR” in spoken form. And they keep saying to go to “MPRnewsQ.org,” which could also be “NPRnewsCue.org” or “MPRnewsCue.org” or “NPRnewsCue.org.” There’s really no way to tell by listening.

Coming up with catchy names for things is always hard, but it seems like this is the brainchild of a group of people who were communicating with each other in writing, or who had seen it written in a list before hearing it so that they could never remember a time when they were driving to work and wondering which of four versions of a URL they’d heard.

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