Tattooed Librarians, on the radio...

As I mentioned last month, it has been awesome seeing where the Tattooed Librarians of the Pacific Northwest Calendar has been popping up. Seeing it on a librarian's blog from the Netherlands was exciting, but today's discovery blew that out of the water:

Ziba Z, a distance-learning library student with University Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, stumbled across our calendar on the internet, she tracked down the cover girl, Amber, and finagled aninterview with her....

...and it's awesome.

They talk about Amber's journey into librarianship, the intersection of social justice and public libraries, Seattle, music, Amber's alternative identity as DJ Dewey Decimal and (of course) Tattoos.

Be sure to check out the other radio shows on Ziba's awesome blog.

And Ziba, if you're out there, the world would love to see a Tattooed Librarians of California Calendar (and I think a zebra tattoo would be rad, too) !!

Tattooed Librarians of the Pacific Northwest

One of the great things about attending a distance learning program is that our cohort has the autonomy of planning our own graduation ceremony. However, with great privilege comes great responsibility: we have to pay for it ourselves.

To try and circumvent this (if we're already in debt for the degree, we don't want to have to pay for anything else), the graduation committee has come up with a nifty little fund-raising campaign:

The Tattooed Librarians of the Pacific Northwest 2010-2011 Calender!!

This has been quite the endeavor putting it together, but we are really proud of the end product. We are selling them through a print-on-demand website, you can check out our online shop here: zazzle.com.nyssaj

We know at $25 dollars it's a little spendy: we had to add on a royalty so we could actually raise funds through the calender. But, if you band together with friends, the more calenders you buy, the cheaper it is - and we still get our royalties!!

So please check it out, and if you like what you see: help us out and buy one!! They make great gifts and are the perfect calender to spice up any drab office wall!!

Facebook is a learning tool. No really, it is.

Haters love to hate Facebook.

I think it is one of those phenomenons where a cultural artifact (or a meme) circulates through certain thresholds of popularity: starting underground, moving onto edgy, then widespread, loathing, and finally ironic. Kind of like Dave Mathews Band.

I think Facebook is teetering between widespread and loathing. In one moment people will cry foul about privacy issues and parents creating face book pages, threatening to cancel their account, yet in another moment they will turn around and chronicle myopic details about their lives on their Facebook wall.

While I think there are serious concerns about Facebook's privacy policy (I would love to write a blog post about it someday, but that would take too much research and I have enough on my plate as it is), people have to realize that Facebook is the internet, and unless you want something to say completely private, DON"T PUT IT ON THE INTERNET. Now that she's has a Facebook profile, I fully realize that my Mom could find anything I post online.

While I think people are always going to rip on Facebook (as they should - it is a corporate entity whose only mission is to profit off of it's users), it is forever going to be a part of our lives. And now that I'm undertaking internet-based scholastic endeavors, Facebook is fast becoming part of my classroom.

Case-in-point: this semester an instructor assigned our class a take home exam. Having some foresight, the instructor explained that she believes that adult learners work best through collaboration, and highly encouraged us to work together on the exam. Being young adult learners, most of took to Facebook as our collaboration facilitation.

One member of the cohort sent our a message to the rest of us, initially to try and set up a time when we could all get together, but we all started posting questions we had about the exam, and soon our discussion grew. At this point there are almost 50 posts in the thread, occurring over the span of a week between fourteen students. It's been the most intense Facebook experience I have had in the half decade I have had an account.

Yet, it's not very surprising that it's been natural for us to discuss our exam through Facebook. Posting an electronic message, regardless of the venue (Facebook, a Blog comment, Black Board, etc.) is like school for us. Online posts and comments are fast becoming a ubiquitous form of communication. My friends and I joke that with the proliferation of social networking, email feels really formal now...

Pedagogy Without Borders

So here is an interesting article - especially if you have ever taken an online class.

To sum it up: teachers who teach online classes are better than ones who don't.

It's a really interesting argument, and one I can see the logic behind. I'm sure teaching an online class is way more difficult than teaching a traditional class. As the article states, you are forced to think more and more about the objectives of the course and the best implementation needed to meet those objectives.

I wonder if this could be carried into the library realm? Could librarians offer effective online research instruction? Already libraries have email/chat with a librarian programs" and social networking opportunities (facebook, twitter, etc.) available from their websites. As a distant learning student myself, rarely have I visited a library for my resources - which is ironic since I'm studying library science. This is mainly because my library is in Kansas. All of the materials I have used for classes and research have been downloaded from their website.

In essence, my library is just a website. It makes sense to me if I'm contacting the librarians there electronically anyways, instruction could also be provided electronically. And, if one were to adhere to the rules of logic and correlation, the actual instruction might be better, too.

Something to think about....

okay folks. I'm back. srlsy.

Man two months go by fast.

Maybe it wasn't the wisest decision to start a blog and go back for a master's at the same time, but I haven't always been known for making the smartest choices.

For those of you out there who don't live in Portland and are not my immeadiate family, here's a little update of Turner's life in library land.

Working for a medical library has been awesome. At first I thought it was a relatively small library - and physically it is, but the abundance of resources is staggering - and a little overwhelming. Most of the patrons in the library don't realize that A) I'm not a librarian and B) I have absolutely ZERO medical experience WHATSOEVER. Except for watching a kid in summer camp throw up once.

I think the medical students just see a dude with a beard and square glasses sitting behind a desk and they think he knows what he's doing. If only they really knew what was really on my screen. I mean really on my screen. I mean really on my screen.

In all seriousness, I may not understand the content that they are searching for, but I am getting pretty good at pointing them in the right direction. And my coworkers and supervisors are all amazing and supportive. That's the other great thing about working here: working along side fellow library students. The online aspect of library school is great in the relative flexibility it offers, but it can get kind of lonely, too. And its really nice to see other students, even if they aren't in my same cohort or program, on a weekly basis and know that we understand what we all are going through. It's pretty grand.

Along with working in the medical library, I'm also volunteering once a week in a small art school library. Which rocks my world. The library feels like it is a major artery of the school, which has a tiny student body, but they all come through the library - whether it is to research, to document their work, or to eat their lunch. There's artwork everywhere. It's located near the center of the city. It's vibrant.

When I get overwhelmed at the medical library (which is often - it can feel like a behemoth that I will never fully understand), the art library feels safe and comfortable. And while both libraries will continue to grow - the art library feels like a rocket about to take off. There is a lot of potential there and it seems that there is very little bureaucracy to hold it back. Not that there isn't a lot of potential at the medical library, it just feels more like an elephant plodding it's way to the watering hole...

It creates a really nice juxtaposition between the two libraries. I'm gaining invaluable experience from two diverse perspectives, using what I learn through school at work, and what I learn through work in school.

So here we go. Another post. I'm back. And as the semester wraps up, I'll be sharing a lot of the lessons I've learned. For those of you who constantly asked about the blog, thanks for showing that you wanted to read more, and I promise you more to read....

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, Off To School I Go...

I have spent the past few years in anticipation, leading up to one day, yesterday; the official start to my masters program.

I moved east to west thinking I would be out here six months to a year on an academic holiday, and then move back to New England to continue my studies. I did not factor in falling in love with Portland and the Pacific Northwest. After deciding to stay, I spent the next two years researching a masters program that would be a nice fit for me, perfecting my application, waiting on application dates and deadlines, and fretting over financial aid. It has been a lot of mental energy spent waiting for something to finally start, and that day finally came.

It was a long day, a bit overwhelming, but I left feeling even more motivated and excited than I expected.

There are forty other members in my cohort, with a wide diversity of life experiences. Folks who have already started careers and families who just need this degree to get to the next step, folks looking to enter into a new profession and folks (like me) who want to get a profession started. Being a distance learning program, members of the cohort are traveling from all over the Pacific Northwest – Oregon, Washington, Idaho and even Utah.

I have to admit that at first I was nervous about the distance learning aspect to this program, having always relished the face-to-face discussions that take place in traditional classrooms. After yesterday, there is still some apprehension that will remain as I adjust to new learning methods, but I feel that the online structure of the program will set me up perfectly for the future of the information management industry. More and more information is communicated digitally, and earning my masters, I will be in the position to handle the increased changes this industry is going through….

So the fun part begins: the work.

But like I said, I left yesterday feeling excited and motivated. Unlike my undergraduate degree, where I enjoyed my studies but felt little direction as to where they would take me, I now feel a sense of urgency to the work that I am doing. The industry is changing, (take for example the role of the reference librarian. With the advent of wikis and the increased sophistication of online search engines, the frequency of reference requests might be diminishing, but the requests they do receive tend to be more complicated) and I want to be a steward of those changes, ensuring that the industry remains accessible, digestible and democratic…

Alright, before I get any more philosophical, I think it’s time for me to step off my soapbox, sign off and get back to studying…