With all of the moving around in the last few years, much of what would have been 'vacation' has been taken up with packing and getting from A to B. So this time, I'm not moving, but doing house reno. Not very relaxing, but so much more gratifying. While I was working in Vegas and Toronto, we rented out our house in Winnipeg and just regained possession on Friday. We're puttin' the boots to it before our two new ragdoll kitties arrive on Saturday.

In other news, my job title changed last week to "Instructional Technology and Web Services Librarian." There's lots of exciting stuff happening there, and I'll have more on that when I get back.

Now back to sanding . . . : )

Was I ever relieved to read that blog posting frequency doesn't matter anymore! Ok, I've probably taken that idea a little too far by going on a year+ hiatus. But here I am, happy to be blogging again.

After leaving UNLV in Sept '06 to head back to Canada, I started in a new job at the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto. Yearning for our prairie home, family and friends, the sig_other and I made the decision to move back to Winnipeg and make it permanent (as permanent as permanent can be for someone like me who has moved about 10 times in the last 12 or so years).

I am now working at the University of Winnipeg as the Web and Reference Services Librarian. As with my previous job at the UofW, it's a contract gig lasting until October 2008. In a nutshell, I am the Acting Information Literacy Coordinator, web services librarian (as always - straddling public services and systems: something I love), the DLI representative for the UofW (read: data librarian), subject liaison to Education, and occasional electronic resources duties as needed.

After 6000 kilometres later and a whole lot of U-Hell, I'm back in the 'Peg.

My blogging interests remain largely the same. Though I'm not working specifically with distance education anymore, I continue to be interested in and support the types of tools that former readers of schwagbag may be accustomed to reading about, namely, techy tools for communication and collaboration, technology and instruction, design and architecture, etc. Thanks to Paul Pival for giving me a much-needed kick in the pants ; )

Oh, and if you've subscribed in the past, don't forget to update your RSS feeds to the new one, as the others will soon be decommissioned:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/schwagbag

Screencast-O-Matic isn't as robust or fully-featured as products like Camtasia or ViewletBuilder, but what it does allow you to do is quickly and easily create and upload screencasts right from your browser with no software install (read: free!)

Feature breakdown:

• audio inputs
• 5 minute screen capture maximums
• mouse movement aren't recorded but there is a 'red button' feature' that can be used to highlight things on a screen
• two capture sizes
• ability to add notes
• file upload and URL for distributing and promoting content
• privacy/viewability settings: public or private
• ability to create channels/groups to categorize screencasts together by subject, etc

Screencast-O-Matic is currently in beta. Go on, give it a whirl.

Do you see that? My inbox count is reading a big fat '0'. Thanks to the gtd method, something with which i've recently become completely and utterly enamored with, and MailActOn for mail.app, I'm doing battle with my email and winning. Email: prepare to be conquered.

I've been on a personal productivity kick lately (hence the resuscitation of this blog) and email has always been a huge drain on my time, sometimes taking up the better part of a morning. Hopefully I'll now have more time to work on projects, and, er, blog . . . *blush*

see: 43f inbox zero

http://feeds.feedburner.com/schwagbag

-or-

subscribe to ::schwagbag:: by email

I'll keep the old feeds up and running for a little while longer, but they will be disappearing soon.

I received an email the other day from a librarian who has been working on a interesting new recruitment project: INFO*NATION. INFO*NATION is a:

"participatory website that promotes library and information professions in Canada . . . [in an] attempt to recruit some new blood to the information professions . . . [w]e want to emphasize the diverse elements of library work and break down some of the stereotypes associated with libraries. At the same time we want to recruit personnel that continue to be committed to the core values of libraries . . . "

The site was put together by the Recruitment Working Group of the CLA President’s Council on the 8Rs Report. They've put out a call to gather profiles of diverse people that work in Canadian libraries. If you’re passionate about what you do and are willing to share your story to help promote your profession, visit the submission page.

INFO*NATION is pre-launch at the moment, and will be officially launched at the CLA conference in June, at which point the url will then change to www.infonation.ca.

From the meeblog:

". . . if you have a meebo account, you’ll have the ability to keep your conversations saved (or not saved, if you so choose) for future access. Also included in this release is a brand new preferences framework where you’ll be able to turn on/off chat logging, control when you see emoticons, and choose when you receive sound notifications."

Sadly, I missed Access last year but certainly plan on being there this year!

This is a topic that I have some strong feelings about and I'm so grateful to have been offered the opportunity to speak about it with such a fine panel!

See you in Ottawa! (anyone up for dinner at the Green Door? : )

But before I get to that, let's not get carried away with or discouraged by stats used as a measure of a blog's popularity or worthiness. Well, I suppose that would depend on your motivations and reasons for blogging in the first place (won't go there), but a number of newer bloggers have said things to me like 'nobody is reading my blog so why should I bother to put in the time and effort.' That's a whole other conversation altogether. But stats paint a picture, and it's not necessarily the only one (have I made my methodological bias glaringly apparent?) Stats can be very useful for highlighting posts that are getting attention (perhaps warranting an addition to the 'popular posts' category, etc), where your readers are coming from geographically, and ultimately how many hits you're getting a day. What they don't do as well is measure overall impact: that's much harder to capture.

This is an all-around great tool for capturing all kinds of stats. It's free, includes customizable cut n' paste scripts for pretty much all of the major blogging software out there. Simply insert the script into a few blog templates and you're set. Users can log in to their accounts and access the stats with the dashboard, and/or receive updates through an RSS feed. It captures the activity of visitors, repeat visitors, and search engines:

I've been using Perfomancing Metrics for the past couple of months and highly recommend it.

ClustrMaps
ClustrMaps is a visitor tracker and does not offer anywhere near the level of detail as Performancing Metrics, but what it has that Perfomancing doesn't is a neat graphical representation of visits to your blog, and for those of us who are particularly fond of maps, this is a very good thing:

ClustrMaps has tiered service levels, and is free for 'light' users who get less than 2500 hits a day. Light users have a limited map archive whereas paying users get an unlimited archive. There is also an option to subscribe to an RSS feed of visitors to your site. Correction: RSS is currently not available with ClustrMaps. I've been using ClustrMaps for several months and have found it to be pretty reliable.

gVisit
Ah the mashups! Here is a visitor counter that displays data with, you guessed it, Google Maps. Like Performancing Metrics and ClustrMaps, gVisit works by pasting a bit of code into your blog template. It's free, and like the others, provides an RSS feed. With a small donation, you can get rid of the ads and see 100 most recent visitors instead of the 20 that you get with the free account.

I'm not sure how much stock should put into these reports, but I've read the rumours about Google testing a new expandable search results interface in a few places now. From the three available screenshots, it looks a little underwhelming (see the gangly expandable arrow). Searching within a site from the results screen certainly makes for a great additon.

In light of the recent thread on techie librarians, I thought that this title was particularly timely: Hiring The Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets & Science Of Hiring Technical People by Johanna Rothman. Any book that mentions nerds in its title gets my attention! This book is not written from a library perspective per se (the author is a high technology consultant), but nonetheless relevant. While some of the book covers the standard things such as reviewing resumes, conducting the interview, and checking references, Part I perhaps offers the most valuable contribution. It covers developing a hiring strategy, analyzing the job and writing job descriptions for IT-related work. In my limited experience, these are the most challenging aspects of the whole process, and those that require more work and attention: defining the job's requirements (both technical and non-technical) and writing clear job descriptions. No techie-hiring library manager should be without a valuable resource like this!

Boot camp is public beta software that allows intel-based Macs to boot either the Mac OS or Windows XP. Good or bad, for better or for worse, this is a pivotal moment for Apple.

UPDATE: David Lankes has installed Boot Camp and offers up a few bits o' advice. He mentions that "you can access the Windows partition when you are booted in MacOS, but not the other way around." I wonder if MacDrive would work in this situation?

So getting back to custom web apps, Lankes says don't be scared!

LAMP
A collection of commonly used but independent open source software: LINUX, Apache, MySQL, PHP (PERL, Python). Open source is not the way it used to be (C, Java, home grown, in other words, not for mere mortals), but is now made up of multiple owners and development communities. Once you get over that initial learning curve (and let's be straight, there is one), your options open up immensely and it enables you to offer a wide array of diverse services and software. Need to know about OS integration, databases, web servers, scripting engines. He showed a live demo of WordPress install and TikiWiki. Check out his tutorials for more on that.

In talking about wikis, Lankes says "the website IS reference!"
sv: I love it. This represents quite a significant departure in thinking for a lot of people who view websites as purely informational brochure-ish marketing tools.

How do you do a reference interview online? It starts at the 'form' and this is where the reference interview begins. He provides an example of what he considers to be a really good form at ipl.org. He stresses that we need to personalize it, and too few libraries do this. Put up a picture, humanize the experience. If you don't want to put up your picture, go get somebody else's ; )

Assessment
See Facets of Quality for Digital Reference Services Worksheet

I had to leave the workshop early and unfortunately had to miss the last hour and a half. Right before the 3:00 break, Lankes was talking again about technology in libraries and how there is a tendency to push tech stuff onto the, ahem, newer and therefore perceived-to-be cooler and more technologically savvy librarians. Of course, this is not always the case, because:

"Just cause you're a new librarian doesn't mean you know how to dress nicely . . . we still turn out luddite introverts."

To clarify, and as per David's comments below, he didn't say that all new grads are luddite introverts. But to expect that all new librarians are 'cool by default' and into all that 'new tech stuff' is simply not true.