I was very happy to hear that my FIMS classmate, John Miedema, will be having a book coming out later this year. I'm also proud to say I may have played some small role in making this happen.
John has said (I think in a comment on this blog or perhaps in an e-mail to me?) that it was the point made in a list by former CLA President Wendy Newman that I reprinted on this blog ("3. In your first three years, become a ranking practitioner-expert in one great thing that becomes your "brand". ) which inspired him to pursue his interest in the area of "Slow Reading".
Through his writing on the topic, he's gained attention from librarians all over the world, has presented at a conference, gave birth to a Wikipedia page on the topic and now, this book.
Congratulations John - I can't wait to get my copy!
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Tuesday, June 24
Sunday, June 1
Chris Dixon Memorial Scholarship - Update
by
Jason
on Sun 01 Jun 2008 03:04 PM CST
I wrote about this when it was first announced. Below is the latest update about the scholarship in memory of FIMS PhD student, Chris Dixon.
If you haven't given anything yet, I would strongly encourage you to do so, especially if you knew Chris - as a classmate or as a TA or whatever. In fact, at the risk of sounding like a telethon, I'll issue a challenge to everyone who knew Chris to do that! --- Hello Everyone
As we approach the 1st anniversary of Chris' death,
I wanted to share with you an update on the fundraising efforts for his memorial
scholarship (http://carpediemchris.blogspot.com/2008/03/legacy-of-learning.html).
So far, just over $3000 in donations has been
received - almost 1/3 of the amount needed to top up my initial 'seed
money' gift of $15,000. Our goal is to build a permanent endowment
fund of $25,000 so that sufficient investment interest income can be generated
to provide annual scholarships year after year. Thank you so much to everyone who has already given in Chris'
memory!
If you've been thinking about making a donation but
haven't yet, the secure online donation site will remain active for a little
while longer: http://www.westernconnect.ca/cdixonmemorial.
(Don't worry that $10 or $20 is too little - gifts of any amount are appreciated
and they do add up.) Monthly gift donation plans and company matching donations
are also available. Charitable tax receipts will be
provided.
If you prefer to make a donation by mail or
telephone at any time, or if you have any questions, please contact Karen Boddy,
Alumni & Development Officer, at kboddy@uwo.ca or (519) 661-2111, ext.
87463.
Thank you with all my heart for your
support,
Sandra Thursday, May 22
Where You Sit in A Classroom and What It Says About You
by
Jason
on Thu 22 May 2008 02:38 AM CST
I don't do a lot of posts that earn the "libraryschool" tag anymore but this one seems appropriate. I was both a "back row" and an "against the wall" type student but also tended to sit furthest from the exit which means I'm "too cool for school", sensitive and apparently committed (assuming people who sit nearest the exit are uncommitted.) In reality, where I sat just meant I liked to have a perch that allowed me to view the entire room in case anybody decided to make any sudden moves!  I know this is only a humourous cartoon but I think somebody could get a lot more mileage out of this idea - perhaps as a full blog post. I'll leave that to others to attempt as my memories of what your seat position in a classroom might mean have long faded. (via Reddit whose comments reveal that law schools often have assigned seating. Didn't know that...)  Sunday, May 4
"[We] discussed who had learned to drive on a tractor [answer: almost everyone, including me]"
by
Jason
on Sun 04 May 2008 08:39 PM CST
Well, the conference is over for another year! We finished off the joint SLA-MLA conference with a great social event at the Cathedral Village Free House where I was finally able to meet Jessamyn West.
Well, that's not quite true - I've "met" her before but this was the first time meeting her in person. Since long before I became a librarian, I've been reading Jessamyn's posts on MetaFilter and librarian.net. I first made official contact with her while in library school (I tried to bring her in as a "Lunch Bucket" speaker but wasn't able to pull it off...one of my great regrets of my time at FIMS) and have occasionally been in contact since then. Jessamyn wrote a bit about her time in Regina on her personal blog (which is where the title of this post comes from) and highlighted the presentation given by Sabina about the BC Evergreen initiative on librarian.net. Very cool! Saskatchewan public libraries had a massive project underway during the past year to create a similar province-wide library system but didn't receive funding in the most recent provincial budget. The project is still moving forward but in a modified form. I don't know if we'll use an open ILS like BC has but I hope so. Perhaps the lack of government funding may turn out to be a blessing in disguise if it encourages the participants to more seriously consider the open source route. I'd seen a presentation by Sabina's boss on the BC experience during a meeting of the Saskatchewan Single Integrated Library System project late last year so decided to skip her presentation for one on "open" libraries by Patricia Moore from U of S (who happens to be in the background of the photo below.) (And as an aside, my preference is conferences where similarly themed presentations don't overlap so you can hit all the "technology" ones in a row or all the "management" ones or whatever without being forced to choose between two similar ones.) One really good point by Pat was that we have to shift the perception of open source software and technology as somehow inferior to its commercial counterparts. "Open source is essentially peer-reviewed software and if that's the gold standard for the journals we supply in our libraries, it should be the gold standard for the technology that we utilize too." What else? Jessamyn's presentation on "Towards Open Libraries" was excellent - full of humour and insight into the current trends in librarianship and seemed to be very well received by the crowd. She usually puts slides and notes from her presentations on librarian.net - the Saskatchewan one isn't up as of this writing but I assume it will be eventually. I think Pace enjoyed meeting Jessamyn too!  [Edit: I see that Jessamyn added some of her own photos from her Regina visit to Flickr. Shea's quote upon seeing the following photo: "You don't even look that drunk." Me: "It was early..."]  Tuesday, April 1
Last Call For Library Student Journal Emerging Leaders Issue
by
Jason
on Tue 01 Apr 2008 04:20 PM CST
Amy Buckland (who was recently named a 2008 Library Journal "Mover and Shaker") has passed along the following notice which is also a great opportunity to highlight some of the emerging leaders in the library community.
Why not take a moment to nominate someone you know who fits the following criteria? LAST CALL for emerging leaders in the LIS student community Thursday, March 20
Chris Dixon Memorial Scholarship (and some thoughts on a random death in the oil patch)
by
Jason
on Thu 20 Mar 2008 07:22 PM CST
It was an incredible shock to hear of the passing of LIS PhD student, Chris Dixon, last summer. (In a freaky coincidence, this happened right in the middle of my posting the eulogies I've given for my grandparents over the years.) In my post about Chris' death, I wrote about how little I'd been exposed to the death of people close to me in my life, at least so far, but that I knew this would inevitably change as I grew older.
Then, last Sunday, my mother-in-law kept the weekend's paper specifically to show me the obituary of a woman who was a resident of my hometown of Indian Head. It turned out that I didn't know that woman but looking over the obituaries, a different name caught my eye. It took me a second to place her but it turns out it was the woman who wrote up our mortgage when we moved back to Regina from Calgary in 2004, dead at 49 of ovarian cancer. As I frequently do, I began composing a blog post in my head based on this chain of events. I thought about how I would talk about the way that we pass in and out of other people's lives - sometimes having a large impact, sometimes leaving a small reminder, sometimes only as a passing acquaintance, meant for some singular purpose before carrying on down our own paths. The core idea for that post shifted quite dramatically a couple hours later and not in a good way. When we arrived back in Weyburn last Sunday, I had noticed a bunch of cars parked outside the neighbour's house. The neighbours were a young couple who had just moved here from Alberta last fall so this gathering seemed a bit out of the ordinary since they didn't really know many people yet as far as we knew. He was busy in the oil patch and she was a stay-at-home mom with a young boy who was a year and a half old. When I arrived at my in-laws', I also couldn't help but notice that one person getting out of a vehicle appeared to be carrying in some food. It could be nothing but that's also a potentially ominous sign for people in rural Saskatchewan (does that happen elsewhere? When someone dies, the family is bombarded with visitors bearing food?) I thought to myself, "oh, it must be a dinner party." I mentioned it when I went inside and my in-laws had noticed the vehicles next door too - their theory was that the couple had joined a church and were being welcomed with a party. This explanation seemed as forced as mine was and reflecting now, I think we were all trying to avoid the most obvious explanation - something really bad had happened to one of the parents or worse, their son. A few hours later, I was downstairs when the doorbell rang. I heard my mother-in-law say "Oh no, oh my God". I raced upstairs to find the elderly lady that the couple were renting the house from had come to tell us that the father, Spencer, had been killed in an accident in the oil patch. His truck had been by an oil tanker that had failed to stop at a yield sign on a grid road. I stood there in shock as a jumble of thoughts cascaded through my head. Only in his mid-20's, he was so young...his wife alone now...their son without a father...the evil fucking stupidity of the oil patch...no family or friends nearby...how I'm complicit by owning oil stocks...Pace tugging at my leg, unaware of what's happened...how this young couple had moved here to create a life for their family...that all gone in an instant...the greed that makes men work 16 and 20 hour days every day for weeks on end...the warning I got from a branch librarian before coming home on the grid road right near where the accident happened..."Be careful at any crossroads - the oil trucks don't stop"...hearing last summer that Shea's uncle was calling in any semi-truck that whipped past his farm, sometimes even chasing them down...how I'm complicit because I hope that they find oil on Shea's parents farm only a few miles from that uncle (and maybe twenty miles from where the accident happened)...the controversy about our premier admitting that he lets his 14-year-old daughter drive on grid roads, something we've all done growing up in Saskatchewan but something I would never let Pace do on the grid roads in this area now. I thought back regretfully on the fact that I'd only had a couple interactions with Spencer and his family. Soon after he moved in (he came out first to get settled before his wife and son joined him a few months later) I stopped by one day when he happened to be outside just as I was getting off work. We had a brief chat, talking about our respective backgrounds and how we came to be where we were. We compared notes on being new parents. At one point, I mentioned that I was a librarian and he asked where he could buy books in town (blowing all my "rig pig" stereotypes to hell in one brief sentence.) We went our separate ways promising to get together with our wives and sons for supper or drinks sometime. Then, last Christmas, knowing they were going to be in Weyburn alone, my in-laws invited them over for Christmas Eve. They came over and we had another nice visit, comparing notes on living in Alberta v. Saskatchewan, holiday memories, tips on raising an active boy and the usual mundane chit-chat that happens as strangers get to know each other. Shea and I could've and should've made more of an effort to spend time with them and now, of course, never having done so, is when we realise that. Getting wrapped up in your own lives, your own worries, your own lack of time to make that effort seems so petty and stupid in retrospect. And so, as the reality that you're still here sinks in at a moment like this, you make the resolutions - I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm going to make an effort to reach out to people. I'm going to spend more time with my own family. I'm going to live healthier, eat healthier, do more, be more. I'm going to live. And you say all that with the knowledge that it's all smoke and that feeling will disappear in hours or days, like the feeling that you have when you leave a theatre after an inspiring movie like "Stand By Me" or "Dead Poet's Society" or whatever. Then you're back to worrying about the stupid shit like what mark you got on that assignment that's worth 5% of your final grade. Or some off-hand comment a co-worker made that you keep replaying in your head. Or that you didn't get a full eight hours of sleep because your son is teething. So yeah, life goes on except when it doesn't and the single most brutal kicker for me in this whole situation is a line that Spencer said during our first conversation on his driveway. Pace was still small, maybe only a month or two old and his son was around the age that Pace is now. He said, "You know what? I love being a dad and there's not a day that my little guy doesn't make me laugh." That's all a VERY long tangent to say that recent events have made it hit home *very* hard that no matter how long you live, life is very short. The blog that Chris Dixon's wife has set-up is called "Carpe Diem Chris" and as I mentioned above, it depends on my daily cynicism level as to whether I believe I truly am seizing the day or not. But no matter how I feel, I do believe that the memorial fund for Chris is the perfect way to celebrate the life of a great person and whether you knew him or not, I hope you decide to make a donation. Every dollar counts whether you give $5 or $50 or $500. I'm going to make a donation and I don't want to take anything away from Chris but I'm going to think of at least part of it as being in memory of Spencer who during that first conversation asked me "Where do you go to get books in this town?" and laughed because he hadn't already thought of it when I replied, "How about the library?" If you've read this blog long, you know that I like to see connections in everything and also to see things come full circle. While I was at FIMS, Chris gave me a couple of his old textbooks and, no matter how I pushed, would accept nothing more than a cup of coffee for them. He told me to pass the favour along to someone someday. I like to think that, indirectly, by helping make this scholarship a reality, someday a future FIMS graduate will be able to convince a rig worker or someone else you might not normally think of as a reader to visit the library for their own books. Mission accomplished. Here's the announcement about Chris' Memorial Scholarship:
(I knew the scholarship was in the works but thanks to the Canuck Librarian for being the first to let me know it was officially a go!) Wednesday, February 13
Automated Genealogy
by
Jason
on Wed 13 Feb 2008 09:14 PM CST
Just the other day, I was thinking to myself "with all the social networking sites out there, when is somebody going to design an online genealogy site that works in a similar way - you enter the information you know about your family and ancestors and then connect to other family members who have entered information you don't have?"
I surfed to MetaFilter that night and lo and behold, there was a link to a new site named Kindo that does something along that line, although not nearly as fully-featured as a hardcore genealogist would want. The comments in the MetaFilter have lots of good information about online genealogy resources including the mention of another Web 2.0 genealogy site named Geni (which also isn't as full-featured as you might want.) The highlight of the thread though was finding a site called Automated Genealogy, a volunteer project to type up digital versions of Canada's early censuses. I took a genealogy class in library school but have to admit that I frequently found it less than enlightening so I honestly don't even remember if this site was mentioned in class or not. It may have been but I don't remember seeing it. So I spent some time poking around and lo and behold, found this which is the record for John and Janet Brown, my dad's maternal great-grandparents who first settled the farm in 1883 that our family still owns to this day. My dad's grandpa, James Leslie Brown, isn't listed in the record but would've been 23 at the time of this census so presumably had left home. (Leslie would marry three years later, coincidentally in Weyburn, SK where my dad also got married and where I am currently living.) Anyhow, very cool anytime you come across records like this that give you a real connection to the people who came before you, doubly so when it's found almost by accident. Sunday, January 13
Spirit of Librarianship Fall 2007 - Nominees and Winners
by
Jason
on Sun 13 Jan 2008 02:42 PM CST
I've had the list of Fall 2007 Spirit of Librarianship nominees sitting in my e-mail in-box for over a month but finally got around to updating my Spirit of Librarianship page last night.
If you click through to the nominees page, you'll see that the SoL organizers added another new innovation last semester by choosing to include the nominees' "stalker page" photo in addition to the nomination blurbs that had been sent out for the past few semesters. I think this is a great idea - when I was nominated, all that got sent out was a list of names and you might know who half of the people were if you were lucky. I pushed for the blurbs to be sent out and that helped you to know a bit about the person and why they were nominated. Now, the photos give a visual cue to who you are voting for - "oh, that's her name. Yeah, she's always helping me in the computer lab" or whatever. Students jokingly refer to the FIMS intranet student directory as the "stalker pages" but I did have a bit of an internal debate about including the photos on my page. I'm probably close to the line as it is by putting up nominee's names and the blurbs about them without their permission so I know that putting up a photo potentially crosses that line in a big way. I thought about trying to contact the seven nominees but a combination of UWO's unique e-mail naming policy which means I might not find the people I'm looking for (I was "jhammon2@uwo.ca" which would be all but impossible for someone to guess unless they started "shotgun spamming" every combination - jhammon, jhammon2, jhammon3, etc.), the knowledge that my page isn't even in the Top 10 of a Google search for "Spirit of Librarianship", and yes, a bit of lack of time/laziness, made me decide that I could let this slide. [Edit: as you see in the comments, a former classmate who still had access to the stalker pages sent me a list of e-mail addresses for some of the nominees. But that made me realise there are other factors that will prevent me from contacting all nominees in the future beside the fact that it's hard to guess the e-mail address they use - some have e-mail addresses that aren't reflective of their given name at all if they go by an alternate - ie. middle or maiden - name. Some were in their last semester and have convocated so aren't on the stalker pages anymore. And so on.] With that said, if any of the nominees read this and want their picture removed, I will gladly do so. If anybody still at FIMS reads this and wants to pass on word to the nominees that I've done this, I'd appreciate that as well. In happier news, this term saw the first tie ever for the award. Gloria Liu and Iona Reid were the joint recipients. I'm happy to report that Iona was part of my starting cohort and, along with Lindsay Holdsworth, means that three different people from my cohort won this award which I think may be a record for total awesomeness. Iona is a deserving recipient - a lot quieter than the usual outspoken loudmouths who tend to win the award  . (Er, I know that two other previous winners, Michelle L. and Barb J. read this blog regularly so I hasten to add that the loudmouths are probably the exception.)Anyhow, one of my personal favourite memories of Iona is her telling a bunch of people early in our first semester that she's always been known to have a calming effect on the people around her. That comment popped into my head one day as I prepared to give a particularly stressful 503 presentation near the end of our first term. I went and crouched beside Iona during a break and said "Are you really able to calm people just by your presence?" That's what they tell me. "Okay, I need calming now, please." I crouched there for awhile as Iona rubbed my head, laughing. But lo and behold, the stress did lift and I was able to do my presentation, play the Alex Trebeck role in a Jeopardy game at the end of it plus convince the instructor to extend our time past the allotted period for the first time in any presentation that semester. Congrats to Iona and Gloria and here's hoping that one of the few remaining soldiers from my original cohort wins the award this semester to make my cohort even more awesome than it already is and was. Saturday, January 5
Survey on Engagement of New Library Professionals in Leadership
by
Jason
on Sat 05 Jan 2008 09:19 AM CST
Kathleen DeLong, a librarian at the University of Alberta, is conducting a survey on the engagement of new library professionals in leadership roles and activities as part of her LIS PhD.
If you're a recently hired librarian (within the last five years), why not take a few minutes to help her out by filling out this quick survey. Here is some more information from Kathleen: This is your invitation to participate in a web survey on leadership engagement of new library professionals. The survey is directed to new professionals who have worked for five years or less since graduating with a Masters degree in Librarianship (graduated in years 2000 to 2007). The survey data is being collected for purposes of a study carried out in fulfillment of requirements for the PhD Managerial Leadership in the Information Professions programs at the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science in Boston, MA. Thursday, November 29
Eight Laws of Library Technology
by
Jason
on Thu 29 Nov 2007 09:54 PM CST
John M., who knows his stuff from both sides of the coin, having been an IBM web developer before beginning library school, has written a post entitled "Eight Laws of Library Technology" that's worth a read.
This is a topic that's in my head a lot having recently been introduced to Evergreen, an open source ILS whose core components were built from the ground-up in less than a year when various libraries in Georgia decided to go this route for an ILS rather than dealing with traditional corporate vendors. And I'm trying to remember - what was the software that they used in the Digital Libraries course at FIMS? I don't think it was Evergreen but maybe something that sounded similar? |
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