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Getting Back into Meebo Rooms

Getting Back into Meebo Rooms

Published by Iris on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

For those of you who haven’t yet gotten back into Meebo rooms after they went kerplunk last week, here’s what you’ve gotta do.

If the room is still in your buddy list, you get to do the short version.

  • Open the room. It will probably look like the screenshot to the right.
  • Click the little bar which, among all the nothingness, looks like it would open the media player (kinda up, kinda right). The room should now look like it’s taking on more structure, with spaces for typing and viewing. The problem is, it will still be completely blank. Fear not!
  • Close the room with the media area open.
  • Open the room. You should be well and truly in the room, and it should even function! You can now keep the media area closed while you’re in the room, but be absolutely sure you open it before you leave or you’ll have to repeat this whole process. (This is a bug Meebo is working to fix.)

If the room is not on your buddy list any more, you have to do the long version (by which I mean “may take longer and be more annoying” rather than “has more steps”).

  • Send your Meebo login name to a helpful friend who has access to the room. (If you send the name to an unhelpful friend, I cannot guarantee results.)
  • That friend must now add you as a buddy under the Meebo network (not AIM or Google Talk, or any of those other networks).
  • Then the friend can enter the room, click “invite,” and invite you’re Meebo name to the room. The friend may have to “re-invite” you a couple of times (by right-clicking on your grayed out name in the room and selecting “re-invite.”)
  • When you receive the invitation, be sure to “Join and Add.” Soon, the room should appear in your “recent rooms” area on the buddy list. Remember to make sure the media area is open before you close the room, though, or you’ll have to do the steps above.

And there you have it! Meebo says they’re working on the two bugs that require the media area to be open and that have disabled the “Become a Member” button in the rooms.

Oh, and may I just say that Meebo people are awesome! I sent them an email explaining the problems we were seeing. They wrote back and forth with me for a couple of days getting all sorts of additional information. Then they even sent MeeboTester3 into our room to hang out for part of an afternoon and do some mysterious tests. A few of us spent time explaining to the tester what we were seeing and the work-arounds we’d figured out. In the end, Dorothea was the one who figured out the media area trick and told the Meebo Tester. Woohoo for beating things with rocks!

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On Appearances and Legitimacy

Published by Iris on Monday, November 5th, 2007

For quite a while, now, I’ve been simultaneously intrigued and disheartened by how much we have to wade through assumptions in order to be taken seriously.

That’s a very vague sentence, partially because it has to be. Here’s an example of what I mean. Another librarian was telling me about her feeling that people who approach her for help must assume she won’t be expert in database searching because that involves interacting with computers, and surely she can’t be comfortable working with computers at her age, right? She commented that it’s probably a lot easier for me to gain trust simply because someone my age is assumed to be highly computer proficient. I, on the other hand, had just been feeling like being 20 or so years older would help people trust me because, after all, how could anyone my age have the experience necessary to be an expert at anything?

In my experience and that of other librarians I’ve talked to, administrators, consultants, the occasional professor, and even other librarians can take a rather indulgent attitude toward young-uns like me. “You’re so young” becomes a complicated statement. Is this a problem? Are you surprised that I’m young because I did a good job? Are you surprised that I did a good job because I’m young? Or is it an explanation for a less-than-perfect interaction?

Because of this, on the days when I’m in important meetings, interacting with new professors, or doing anything else where I need to be taken seriously, I feel like I have to work harder to make the pace and pitch of my speech function on a professional level, and my clothes have to be just so (not too business-ish, because that’s just not me, but no too casual either). This is especially important during the beginning of Fall Term when there are lots of new staff and faculty on campus whom I need to condition into interacting with me as a professional. Basically, I engage in an elaborate process of appearing legitimate.

This plays out in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I had never considered, for example, that there would be people who might use relative amounts of busy-ness as a measure of legitimacy (this was especially true at one job I had in grad school). Once, a long time ago, a researcher “thanked” me for spending so much time on his research question while pointedly implying that having this kind of time to help him must mean that I was probably being paid too much for the amount of work I contributed to the library. At various other times, people have “complemented” me on things like this blog or an updated research guide or a report delivered on time and backed up with evidence, but they’ve left me feeling terrible rather than bolstered. I’m sure you’ve heard it: the “you’re so lucky you have time to do this kind of thing.” Complements like this can sap the energy right out of me because the implication is that I’m not busy “enough” to be a legitimate member of my department. (Note that simply complementing me on something that takes time is not a bad thing. Anything but. It’s the “you must not be as busy as everyone else if you have time to do that” kind of thing that I’m talking about here.)

Whether people actually perceive me as too young or not busy enough I don’t know. Just as I had never thought to question my friend’s computer competence, maybe people don’t actually question my experience or time management skills. But I’ve heard many librarians express the need to fight these real or imagined assumptions, so in the end it doesn’t matter so much if they’re true or not. What matters is that we’re think they’re true, and so we work against them. In fact, whether consciously or unconsciously, we work against them so continuously that when we hear comments about age or expertise or… whatever it is each of us worries about, we are left to wonder if we’re hearing complements, insults, or simple statements of fact.

I wish I could say with confidence that I’ll just decide not to think about this anymore, but I don’t think it’s that simple. And I don’t think it’s just me. I think this plagues a lot of people. It’s not like we go around second guessing everything anybody says to us. Context and tone are really important, as always. But I’ve been wondering for the past year or so if this is connected with something inherent to our profession (and other similar professions) or if it’s just part of human nature and our constant quest to be useful and respected. What I do know is that there are better things by which to measure legitimacy than relative appearance of busy-ness, age, or any other appearance. I just don’t know how to completely divorce appearance from reality.

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Reflections

Published by Iris on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

It’s been kind of a rough Fall Term for me. Beginning a month before classes started, I’ve been swamped. Then classes actually started…. Not pretty. For a few weeks there I came as close to being truly overwhelmed as I ever have. And according to the normal order of things, that’s precisely when more deadlines appeared and my support systems crumbled. But I survived. I’m out of shape, I’ve had a lingering cold for a month now, and I feel like I could sleep for a week, but I survived.

The term (which ends in two weeks) wasn’t all bad, though. There were exhilarating moments, happy moments, and moments of clarity where isolated incidents gelled into identifiable trends. I also started to feel, for the first time, that I might be on the verge of understanding where I fit into the constellation of people and functions and services on my campus. By necessity, my skin is thicker than it was 8 weeks ago; I’ve learned to bury certain fears deep inside of me in order to get things done, only freeing them once I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, replaying my day for analysis, critique, and release. All in all, the prospect of upcoming classes on unfamiliar research topics, or that late-night email from a student in desperate need of help with some impossible research question, or even the task of telling a professor to trust me that students can’t possibly learn everything there is to know about library research in 20 minutes… these things used to paralyze me. Now they cause some anxiety, but nothing to bowl me over.

At this point, I think I’m finally almost qualified to hold the job that I have. And I mean that in all seriousness. My first year here, my amazing co-workers held my hand through everything from class-planning to composing emails. My second year I was able to teach and meet with students and sit at the reference desk with more ease, but I still felt a little like I was pretending to be a librarian and that at any point a student might stand up in the middle of the room and accuse me of being the impostor that I was. And how would I deny it? By showing my diploma? This year, I’ve finally begun to feel that I contribute to the team I work with. I no longer feel like it’s evidence against me if I can’t answer a question; it’s just part of life and reason to thank my lucky stars that I have amazing co-workers to whom I can refer the question.

I can’t wait until qualification blooms into expertise. It’ll happen, but it’ll take time. I’m schooling myself to patience.

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