Towards the summit

Source: Flickr user Loren Sztajer  

Oh, winter break, how sweet you are.

I'm sitting in my parent's house, in my Mom's home office. She really has created a beautiful space, and it would be a shame not to take advantage of it for some writing. Especially when there is a full pot of coffee down the hall and my hometown is buried in a few inches of freshly fallen snow.

I thought I'd write up another year in review post. I wrote one at the close of 2009, when I first started the blog and had just finished my first semester in library school. And I really enjoyed writing it. Yes, "best of" lists and "year in reviews" are cliche and overdone, but reflection is an important part of the human experience. So here it goes...

2012 was a big year. Biggest accomplishment: finishing my Masters. Not going to lie, it feels really good to have gotten the degree before I hit thirty. Not only am I thankful for the opportunities it is going to provide, I am thankful for all the amazing people I met along the way.

Next big accomplishment: landing a full time job. For the past two months, I've been the Resource Sharing Library Technician in the Public Access Services department of Portland State University's Library. Not only do I feel incredibly lucky to have a job in a market where the typical new-graduate experience is to piece together part time, on-call, and temporary jobs but the job that I landed is amazing. I oversee the inter-consortum borrowing and lending of library materials, working with an amazing team who process a few hundred books a day. It's so wonderful to be back in access services, especially at such a large university with such a dynamic circulation desk. While I have loved my experience with digital library production, I am thinking my home is going to be in the public services arena of librarianship. And I'm really looking forward to making PSU my new home.

Other accomplishments of the year: working on my first conference committee, meeting and handing over my cover letter to Rachel Maddow, and volunteering with EveryLibrary helping to raise money for the very first National PAC in support of local libraries.

Like I said, 2012 was a big year. And I hope that 2013 will be even bigger.

The only specific projects I have coming down the pike are a few possible writing projects and helping out when I can on the Infocamp Portland 2013 planning committee. There is nothing concrete to base my optimism on other than the fact I am optimistic. My path into professional librarianship is unfolding in the same way a trail up a mountain does. It takes lots of little steps to get to the top. But the steps add up, and pretty soon you can see how far you've come. At the close of 2012 I am reaching a vantage point: I  see how far I've come, and the path to the top is become much clearer.

I know that optimism for the sake of optimism is probably just a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I am okay with that. I'm doing my best to take the positive energy I do have in my life and running with it... up the path and towards the summit.

InfoCampPDX Recap

AJLouie's sketch of Jason Sack's keynote.

InfoCamp was a success. And its success was completely due to our participants.

It has been said before that unconferences are perfect examples of the "if you build it, they will come" phenomena. Last weekend proved this for me. I am not going to lie - I was a bit nervous going into it. Building an unconference involves a giant leap of faith. You get your ducks in a row: order coffee, slice up bagels, rent a space, market the heck out of your event. But the day is only successful if folks show up and fill you break out sessions with interesting topics that create conversation and collaboration. And that is exactly what happened at InfoCampPDX.

Here is a list of the presentations that were offered throughout the day:

• Modeling - Tips & War Stories: A Discussion  
• Passionate Research: How do you find info when you’re on an obsession?
•  Information visualization, what is it good for? Much more than absolutely nothing.”
  
• Instrument Resonance: Finding the Bach in city noise” or “Creating meaning out of chaos with semantic model resonance filtering"
• You should talk to your doctor. And so should your phone. Information in a healthcare context.
• The confluence of: Information literacy, Information Retrieval & Information Architecture
• You don’t pay attention to what you’re NOT looking for. User expectations & the world of information
• Taxonomy Madness 
• Wiki at 16: Wikimedia Strategic Planning 
• A work session for library people interested in supporting a student and new professionals round table in OLA 
• Get Sketching: DIY Information Visualization Design 
• Designing Awe: The science of surprise and delight 
• Information Analytics: What is the role of measurement technology for encouraging accuracy of returned results? 
• How to Throw an InfoCamp

If anyone is interested in helping plan next year's InfoCamp - and we already have some momentum built up after Saturday's success - send the organizing committee an email: infocampPDX@gmail.com.


Again, thank you to the fellow organizers, the sponsors, the volunteers, and especially the participants for making Portland's first InfoCamp an excellent day!

#nerdingout

First. Why you should come to InfoCampPDX:

Last: I obviously have way too much time on my hands:

That is all. Good day.

InfoCamp is coming to town!

I'm pretty excited to announce that InfoCampPDX is going to be a reality!

The unconference is going to be hosted at the Q Center on February 4th, 2012 from 9am to 5pm.

Registration is going to be $30, with $20 discounted registration for students.

For those of you who are not familiar with InfoCamp, it's a one day unconference for people excited about connecting people with information. This includes visual and user experience designers, librarians, web folk and other InfoNerds. It started in Seattle (which I've attended the past two years - you can read about my experience there last year)  and the model has been recreated in California, South Carolina and even Germany. 


User experience (UX) has been the most exciting topic I've learned about since starting library school. And now that I am continuing down the path toward a real career, I hope that UX continues to be a focus of my professional life.

That's why I got involved with the planning of InfoCampPDX. I'm always wanting to learn more about UX, so I figured why not help get the unconference up and going here in Portland. So far I have stepped up to help coordinate volunteers (if you want to volunteer - email me at infocampPDX@gmal.com), build our website and manage our twitter and facebook accounts (with Kirsten Himes). 

Since I love social networking, I thought it would be fun to think of creative ways to market our event. I remember the first time I went to InfoCamp Seattle, I knew nothing about UX, so I thought it would be fun to send out some online video clips that examine UX from different perspectives. I know that this will ruin the suspense of following our social media sites, but out of my excitement I wanted to post the videos I found here. These videos all play nicely together because A) it shows the development of human computer interaction and design over the past ten years and what might be waiting in our future and B) it shows how UX is integrated into so many different industries: education, academia, media, entertainment, retail, medicine, non-profits etc. Where ever you find technology and innovation, you find user experience.

This one looks at the value of user experience:



This one is hilarious because it is so old:



These next two show cool ways users will be able to interact with visual information:





Who doesn't love a really good hack: