Where in the World is Aaron the Librarian?!
edit: btw the “**” means I **must** attend the meeting & “*” means I sorta oughta attend
ok, a beef with the “Agenda” view: Why does only one meeting with the same start time show up?! I know I’m double-booked for at least three “must attend” meetings, but only the alphabetically 1st one shows up 
Hey all us Voyager Libraries out there, our friends at Villanova’s Falvey Library just GPL’d their code for their PILOT replacement, VuFind. This looks great to me, though I don’t have access to the required tools and applications from the documentation on any university servers.
Anyone in KLN-land have access to all that, some extra disk space, and a hankering to try a consolidated catalog search with facetted browse functionality? Anyone with a different ILS want to help extend VuFind to your vendor? The project is looking for help in this area.
Here’s a rough outline of what I’ll be saying…
Bouncer -> Librarian
Or
How I learned to market my past lives to get a job in a library
Aaron W. Dobbs
Systems and Electronic Resources / Web Librarian
Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania
I will be an ALA Councilor at Large Candidate in 2008!
May I please have your vote?
*Shameless Plug*
NMRT’s Annual Program at the ALA conference is “Using Past Lives to Launch Your Library Career.”
Are you a new librarian? Just starting out? This is the program for you!
A panel of speakers (including yours truly) will explain how they launched their library careers with skills they learned in previous careers. Topics covered will include highlighting these skills in the job search, resumes and interviews, and using prior skills on the job.
Panel members have had a variety of job experience, including working as a bouncer (<- this is one of mine), truck driver (<- this is one if mine, too), secretary, fundraiser, manager, and sports marketer.
Hope to see you there — if you can’t make it, I’ll be posting an outline of my stuff soon (like in the next few days; yes, *before* the conference)
I can’t believe I almost completely forgot I’m a panelist for NMRT’s program “Using Past Lives to Launch Your Library Career”
Holy Cow!
As I Twitter’d earlier, I just watched a YouTube video from TEDtalks by Hans Rosling which forwarded me on to the Gapminder Google Tool, a mashup of UN and other public data sources to make really easily understandable [and amazing] graphs of comparative world data.
Here’s the link to the [20 minute long] YouTube video
Here’s the link to the GapMinder Google Tool
Play with the data in GapMinder, I think this resource would be a fabulous source for data display in any number of subject areas (though I didn’t search for the citations of the datasets). I’m thinking about contacting professors in Poli-Sci, Business, International Studies, etc. to ask for their comments and how they think it might be useful for their students. If you think of other subject areas that might find this type of thing useful, let me know.
So I was persuing the ACRL Conference Blog & saw several posts about PennTags. Intrigued (again), I Googled up more about PennTags and caught some of the discussions about how some people think PennTags ignored the existence of del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites. Which made me think, “hm… could I add a way for my users to socially tag records directly from our catalog?” Turns out I can, with a few wrinkles still needing ironing out, and have thrown a beta “Tag with del.icio.us” link into our ExLibris / Endeavor Voyager Catalog (see example, the link is at the bottom of the record)
The cool part of PennTags, which my little hack doesn’t do, is the FRBRized tally of tags per catalog item. I would love to figure out how to show a tag cloud of potential future tags, too. I would love to add a pre-populated tag entry to better discover tagged items from our catalog, but I do not see a way to turn on the autocomplete function for the “tags” entry in del.icio.us.
For my LITA program specific comments, see LITAblog.
I’ll be light on posts here for a bit (fyi)
Got profiled for the library newsletter today, too.
This is major snark, but we’re soo happy!
We had a *real reference question* that had us searching hither, thither, and yon for an answer. I expanded the brain trust working on the question from me to four other librarians and we finally tracked it down.
Oh, what was the question?
I forget, but it was a fat blue book about this *holds fingers apart ~2 inches* thick…
No, actually, it was a request for a breakout of Native American faculty in higher education by state, there was also a variant for African-American faculty by state (which was a touch easier) and another by the same prof for the same class about a census of native american or african american studies programs by state nation-wide… drat, I don’t find the sheet I wrote the exact wording of the questions on so this will seem like an easy (set of) question(s) now.
I’ll leave the detective work to you to cuss in the comments, when I find the sheet I had for the answers we finally came up with I’ll re-post or answer in the comments here (depending on which seems easier for continuity)
I should, like, talk to people in the middle of summarizing spreadsheets… got a great suggestion about organizing the data I’m summarizing - powerpoint ‘em. Of course, that great equalizer of data and summarization, but did *I* think of it? Nooo. I’m still in the all Powerpoint is evil camp
Sure it has it’s uses (like for summarizing complex data) but it’s evile. Ok, maybe not, but it’s fun to say & I *was* zombified by complex data — so that’s my excuse
What kind of data was I summarizing, you ask? Basically, I was summarizing IPEDs data and some specifc query responses from our “Peer Institutions” (data which were gathered by my wonderful colleagues). Who do we identify as peers? Well, in one sense we include all our sister institutions in the PASSHE; but in this particular project, we selected three of them: Millersville, West Chester, and Indiana as well as six out-of-state institutions: Radford University, Salisbury State University, SUNY Geneseo, The College of New Jersey, Truman State University, and Winthrop University.
We pulled reported budget data, FTE counts, monog + serial collection size & growth, database holdings (which are a bear to summarize), building size & renovation age, and some odds & ends (like restroom facilities) to draw a statistical picture of the Ship Library its standing.
To frame it in the most positive light, we have a hill to climb.
Hrm… I think this post fell victim to subject creep…
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