By popular demand, I am resurfacing. I may not be embedded, but I am still solo and going strong. Stay tuned for more news from the "Fourth Corner." Grassroots knowledge management, tagging experiments, budding web development skills and more Task Management 101 tips coming to you soon from www.embeddedlibrarian.blogspot.com!
Peace.
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"...Working in the white spaces of the organizational chart..." (Susan Fifer Canby)
About
I am an information specialist serving a Washington, DC non-profit. I hope this blog is a resource for other solo and embedded librarians. Learn more about why I blog or view my complete profile.
Read my post from DC/SLA's Diverse Universe series.
Read my post from DC/SLA's Diverse Universe series.
What I'm Listening to This Week
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On Deck
- Explaining What I Do
- Information is Meant To Be Used
- The Internet is Paper.
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Blogroll
Try it for a Week
Task Mastery 101
- Worth repeating: Give yourself a time limit.
- Worth repeating: Take care of now and later will take care of itself.
- Clear off your desk except for the one item you're working on right now.
- Bring nothing to your next meeting. Just listen.
- Thinking about putting something online? Don't just do something, stand there.
By the Numbers
- Google Bookmarks: 105
- Google Bookmark "labels": 63
- Office 2010 Trainings: 1 in development, via GoogleDocs
- Windows 7 Trainings: 3 completed
- Google Docs Training: 1 in development
- SMUG (Social Media Users Group) Meetings: 3 completed! Round 4 in development
- Official Twitter Search Tips disseminated: 6 and counting
- Acronyms: 219
- Tags created: 1196 (last count on Delicious; can't figure it out yet in Google Bookmarks)
- Tagged Resources: 2329 (last count on Delicious; can't figure it out yet in Google Bookmarks)
- Information Overload/Filter Failure Trainings: 1 completed, 16 informal conversations
- Web Accessibility Trainings: 6 formal sessions completed; 1 in development; 55 informal conversations; 12 formal conversations; 4 blog posts; for colleague publication-1; intensive volunteer projects-1 in progress, online toolkits rescued-1!
- Web Accessibility statements drafted: 4. Approved: 4.
- Social Bookmarking training: 3 in development, 12 completed; many informal conversations;1 piece of writing in press; 1 effusive blog post; 1 sad and confusing week
- Tweets: 5,516 (personal) and 2,184 (professional)
- Twitter trainings: "power of the hashtag"-in development; 1 best practices list created, 4 formal presentations, 92 informal conversations, 1 blog post, 1 conference presentation completed, more and more "formal conversations" happening. Twitter style guide releases: 1!
- Google Alerts Sent: 144 and counting
- Gmail tags: 370
- Google Groups Trainings: 4 formal sessions completed; 3 informal conversations
- Webinars I've participated in: 51 and counting...
- Wiki projects: 15 in various stages of development
- Wiki training: 8 completed
- Wikis started by staff members (on their own): 9 and counting...
- YouTube trainings: 3 informal conversations
- Number of times I have sent David Carr's Twitter article around: 59 and counting
- Number of fan letters to David Carr: 1
- Number of responses to fan letters to David Carr: 1
- Number of ReTweets by @carr2n: 1
- Number of ReTweets by @doctorow: 1
- RTs by @RonCharles: 1
- Mentions on JD Roth's blog: 1
- Mentions by @kathryncalder: 1!
- Mentions by @richardroeper: 1!
- Mentions on Mike Rowe's blog: 1
- Mentions on Dan Pink's Blog: 2
- emails from @dannyschmidt: 2!!!
- Emails from Gretchen Rubin: 1!
- Direct messages from @euxautres: 1!
- Number of ReTweets by @OnPointRadio:1! Number of Twitter haikus authored by me, read on air by Tom Ashbrook: 1 (twice)!
- Tweets from @AlexisMadrigal: 1!
- Mentions by @msamywallace: 1!
- Fan letters to Amy Wallace: 1
- Responses to fan letters from Amy Wallace: 1!
- Mentions by @CommonCraft: 1!
- Costumes dressed up in: 1 very hot penguin suit
Easy Button Hits
- Other people's: 187 and counting...
- Mine: 824 and counting!
- Virtual hits (via phone or email): 179 and counting...
Search Strategy Training
- Search Scenarios discussions led: 3
- Search papers published: 1!
- In Informal Conversations: 43
- In Information "Blasts": 15 completed
- Point of Need: 57 and counting...
- Formal Sessions: 13 done
- Me getting schooled on search by another staff member: 2 at least
- Missed opportunities: 2 for sure, and probably many others
- Meditations on search in this blog: 1, finally.
Going Beyond Google: Where I Look for Information
- Our website
- My email
- TRIS: The Transportation Research Information System
- Our print catalog
- Our staff members
- Our internal file network
- Our magazine archive (we publish 2 trade mags)
- del.icio.us - maybe whatever it is is something I found once before
- My newsletter archive: If I vetted it once, why do a new search?
- Our internal correspondence tracking database
Carr Barn
Best Twitter Articles for Skeptics
- 7 Reasons People Give For Not Using Twitter And Why They Can All Be Rebuffed With The Phrase: It's a Conversation
- Twitter Feed Evolves Into a News Wire About Egypt
- What are Twitter Hashtags? (Aztec Internet Marketing)
- How Twitter Hashtags Can Start Medical Conversations
- How Social Media Helped Travelers During the Iceland Volcano Eruption
- National HIV Testing Day Twitter Town Hall
- Twitter Now the World's Fastest Growing Search Engine
- Why Twitter Will Endure by David Carr (@carr2n)
Web Accessibility Resources
- In Defense of “Checklist” Accessibility
- PDF Accessibility
- HTML Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (W3C)
- HTML Best Practices
- Firefox Accessibility Extension
- "We expect to see ramps, extra wide doorways and adapted toilet facilities, but what about the equivalent online?"
- Digital Discrimination: Ten years after Section 508, libraries still fall short of addressing disabilities online (From Library Journal, August 2008)
- WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool
- 10 Tools for Evaluating Web Design Accessibility
- Dive Into Accessibility
- Developing a Web Accessibility Business Case for Your Organization: Overview
- Testing the Accessibility of Web 2.0
- Accessibility Basics for Librarians
Sample Accessibility Statements for Your Website
Great Slide Presentations
Read This Article
- During a slow moment, Fairbanks reference librarian is BoingBoing, gone Read more: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner - During a slow moment reference librarian is BoingBoing gone
- Library Adolescence. (Or: how can we avoid growing up?)
- Space Invaders: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.
- Revealing the Man Behind @MayorEmanuel
- Daniel Pink on the 'Passion' Question
- How to Get People to Read Your Emails Faster
- Winter is Icumen In (Ebert)
- Beyond Books: What it Takes To Be a 21st Century Librarian
- Clive Thompson on Coding for the Masses
- Jonathan Safran Foer’s Book as Art Object
- Clive Thompson on the Death of the Phone Call
- The Master’s Degree Misperception
- From the Library: And Then There Was Oracle
- Feed Me, I’m Hungry! New Yorkers Skim, Freak, Purge as RSS Reading Mounts
- Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution
- Nil by Mouth (Ebert)
Watch This Video
- Mellow Brick Road (Wizard Of Oz Remix)
- Folk Rendition of The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air Theme Song
- Gretchen Rubin on the Happiness Project
- BitTorrent - Explained by Common Craft
- Try a Week of Extreme Nice (Gretchen Rubin)
- Social Media and the Workplace Explained by Common Craft
- Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From (TED)
- It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure. (Clay Shirky)
- Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation
- Mike Rowe on Anagnorisis and Peripeteia
Read This Book
- Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky
- A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau
- The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong
- Ground Up by Michael Idov
- Lessons in Becoming Myself by Ellen Burstyn
- The Night of the Gun by David Carr
- If We Can Put a Man on the Moon by Bill Eggers and John O'Leary
- Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker's Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life by Bruce Rosenstein
- Cartwheels in a Sari by Jayanti Tamm
- A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink
Read This E-Book
Listen to This Podcast
- Nerdist Podcast #97: ZOOEY DESCHANEL
- The Poetry of the 'Verse
- Dan Savage: For Gay Teens, Life 'Gets Better'
- Trent Reznor: Iconoclast To Icon, Via Oscar
- Jesse Eisenberg on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!
- Nathan Fillion on Nerdist
- Loudon Wainwright III on Mountain Stage
- KEXP's Music That Matters
- Gretchen Rubin on the "Q" Podcast
- Haiku and You (On Point Radio)
- DeVotchKa in Concert
- The Eagles Cover Story on Coverville
- Work is a Blessing by Russell Honore
- Doctorow on Makers and the Writing Process
- My Coffeehouse Nightmare by Michael Idov
- Bus Chick's Manifesto by Carla Saulter
- The Smiths Project on Coverville
Buy This Album (couldn't resist)
- Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons
- Two Bedroom Apartment by Danielle Ate the Sandwich
- Lungs by Florence + the Machine
- How It Ends by DeVotchKa
- Consequences of Speech by Sons of the Never Wrong
- Charm of the Highway Strip by the Magnetic Fields
- Tribute to John Hartford: Live From Mountain Stage
- Milwaukee At Last!!! Rufus Wainwright Live
- Across the Universe by Trip Shakespeare
- If I Had a Song (The Songs of Pete Seeger, Vol. 2)
DC Speak
- "advertorial"
- "alphabet soup", said to assuage the weight of too many acronyms in one conversation
- "antiproposal": a written credo against a pending proposal (Thank you, Susan Fournier of ICBA)
- "backfill": I think it's actually Canadian for "fill in the gaps"
- "champion, v.t., as in 'We need someone to champion this effort.'"
- "I don't want any grass to grow on this; let's move."
- "I'll follow-up with you offline."
- "low-hanging fruit" - outliers, or tasks easily accomplished to get a project underway
- "obligate your funds"
- "paywall(ed)": post an article online that requires login/payment to view
- "promising practices" (cf "best practices")
- "ROOF"-ing: running out of food
- "ROOM"-ing: running out of material
- "upsell," as in when you have agreed to a certain number of beverages for your event but when you arrive your vendor tries to sell you more (gs)
Embedded Wisdom
- The democratization and fragmentation of media play to introverts’ strengths. Influence no longer depends on commanding the masses or controlling the levers to power. Now it’s enough to speak authentically. If even a tiny fraction of people hear you, that’s still a lot of humans. ~Susan Cain
- You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. ~Tim Ferriss
- It's not getting better; you're getting better. ~Jacob Bailis
- Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. ~Victor Frankl
- Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to. ~Alan Keightley
- If there’s something you want to be or do, the best way to become that thing is to actually take steps toward it, to move in that direction. Don’t just talk about it, but do something. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. Just take a small step in the right direction every single day. ~J.D. Roth
- You cannot break the law; you can only break yourself against the law. ~The Buddha
- If you have the same problem over and over again, maybe it's not a problem. Maybe it's a fact. ~Clay Shirky
- If you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities. ~Jim Collins
- A focused collection is an information service; an unfocused or overwhelming collection is a disservice to the user. ~James A. Jacobs
- I found that by looking at the white spaces on the organization chart – the gaps between jobs, where no else had responsibility -- that there were new job opportunities, like building an intranet, starting a corporate university, creating a daily business intelligence report, that needed to be done. As it turned out, sometimes I was promoted into a job and sometimes I was promoted because I created the job that needed doing.(SFC)