2 presentations down - 1 big one to go!

Home from 4 days on the road, with back to back conferences and presentations. The first was a Digital Commons Users Group meeting in Worcester, MA at Holy Cross College. Totally worth the 7 hour drive, and the 2 nights in an uncomfortable bed. The morning session consisted of 2 panels; the first was newer users (2 yrs or less) who spoke about their experiences getting the repository up and running. The second panel was more experienced users speaking on some of the advanced features they use. The afternoon was spent with bepress talking about new or planned improvements, and gathering feedback from us and what we would like to see. During lunchtime, it was spontaneously decided to do lightning rounds, and I volunteered to go first. I presented on what we have been doing for promotion (email, FB, twitter, and our lobby presentation). I also talked about the bookmarks, which I had left on the registration table.

Conference two was the ENY/ACRL Spring 2012 conference, held at MVCC in Utica. The theme of the conference was on assessment, the keynote speaker, from Drexel, spoke on Why Assess? and told about using assessment to deal with their greater undersized library (added research pods throughout campus). Then we went to breakout session; the one I attended was on Contextualization of E-books. One of the presenters was Scott Warren, from Syracuse University, and he told us about the process they went through to start their e-book collection. They have decided to go the buy individual title route, as opposed to renting collections - except for Books 24/7, which does technology books. They decided that buying technology books was pointless, since they were outdated so quickly. The second presenter there was an ILL guy from Sienna, but frankly, he rambled, and in the end, I had no idea what the point he was trying to make was.

After a great lunch (they always do good food at this conference!), we went back to the theatre for another plenary session, this time a speaker from Cornell University, on piggy backing onto the Senior survey and using the data to help with publicity.

Finally, it was time for the lightning rounds. I was sitting between someone from Skidmore who was presenting on a survey instrument, and 2 librarians from Univ of Albany talking about errors in citation formats. I was next to the last to present, and talked about using Digital Commons to promote our thesis collection. I thought it went well, several people commented on it, and half the questions afterwards were for me. One was from Michele Parry about copyright issues, another was about whether we cataloged the theses (and DA told me today she had 20 in ALEPH now!). Both of the presenters on other side wanted to follow up with me, one about thesis workflow; the Albany folks wanted to know about the bepress platform and service.

All in all, a very successful day, and enjoyable, to boot!

The bee-box-broken-nose adventure

So I take full responsibility for the broken nose. No, I didn't punch John. But when the bee guy who we called to come and take the swarm from the tree couldn't make it, I said to John, "Now normally I wouldn't mind if you did this, but we have to go to Utica tomorrow, and I don't want to cancel the trip because you got yourself stung so many times that you're in the hospital". Note that I didn't say, that you tripped and broke your nose trying to escape the bees you riled up. He didn't get stung, though. I guess that is something, right?

Happy Mother's Day

Well, mama, it's been a dozen Mother's Days without you now. I love you and miss you so much. Thank you for being my mom. love, Kim

It's all over but the grade

With the submission of the last paper on Thursday, and the posting to the last discussion boards after that, Management 607 - Organization and Management Theory is all but done. All the remains is the grade. Going into the final week, I had 52.5/55 points, with 2 discussion boards (10 pts) and a major paper (25 pts) still unknown.

This has been my favorite class, so far. The workload was reasonable, the teacher was good, there have been no surprises, so far. I enjoyed my classmates, and the subject matter was timely and interesting. If I have one disappointment in it, it would be the fact that the instructor is a little slow to provide feedback, which is fairly common in online courses, I have found.

On the matter of feedback - sometimes it seems that online courses are something that are left to adjuncts, and their "real job" takes preference over this part-time endeavor. The discipline of online courses applies both to the student taking one, as well as the instructor teaching one. At least, it should in my opinion.

And now 24 days until the summer class Quantitative Business Analysis begins. 24 days in which I am going to enjoy life, read books for pleasure, attend two conferences, present at one, and dare I say - clean house? But first, we must celebrate - dinner and a movie, anyone?