Preparing for TLA

The past few weeks I have been preparing materials to take to conference. I am doing two presentations there, one that I don't feel very confident about and one that I think will blow the socks off of lots of people. Oddly, I have put the most work into the one that I am not very confident about.

What am I presenting on? First, I have a poster presentation that I am giving to show off my screencasts of the Tennessee Electronic Library (TEL). My partner, Alisa Breece, and I have been creating screencasts to help students navigate some of the databases supplied by TEL. These tutorials are aimed at students who may be working at home or just generally outside the supervision of the librarian. Students notoriously wait until the last moment to complete assignments and often find themselves at home trying to navigate resources that they do not understand. These screencasts are meant to guide them through the research process in these various databases. We have currently hosted them on another blog that I author - http://tutorialsbychristaandalisa.blogspot.com - so check them out if you get a chance.

My bigger presentation - and I say bigger only because it is a more dificult subject for me - is on design practices that can help libraries market themselves more effectively. Too often we focus on the methods of "marketing" - flyers, web advertisements, word of mouth - but we don't focus on the aesthetics of what we produce. The fact is, librarians often just don't have the time to study current trends in design or even to learn how to apply these designs to their productions. So this is what I and my partner, David Green, have attempted to do. We have simply gone through and identified what are the current graphic and web design trends. Yes, most of the librarians present at this conference will probably not be the web designers for their library website, but we hope that they will be able to take away things to suggest to their web designers, whoever those parties might be.

What am I learning from this process? Lots! To begin with, I knew absolutely nothing about graphic design when I began this process. But much research later, I sort of realized that I didn't have to be an experts. There were already lots of experts out there who already had an opinion. I simply needed to analyze and interpret the data that they had already made available. Sounds simple, right? WRONG! It was a very time consuming process to go around looking at millions of websites and determine, based upon what the experts were saying and what I was seeing with my own two eyes, what were the most popular design practices.

Questions that have popped up that I don't have time to research? Libraries don't seem to be doing a great job allowing users to share their content. This was one of the greatest webdesign trends from the corporate world that was just not present in the library world. At all. A handfull of libraries did link to their facebook or twitter pages - they do have them - but they didn't make a way to share actual content. You know that little share button that you see on millions of webpages? It is just not there on library websites. Why? I don't know. That would be the question of the century. I asked a couple of practicing librarians and one technology guru and the answer was simply I don' know - and that sometimes things take a long time to catch on in libraryland. Anyway, it is a question that I would be curious to find the answer to, if I had the time to actually research it and do something about it. Libraries, where are your social networking options?

Well, I have now rambled on about things most of my readers probably don't care anything about. But look for my response to the TLA conference soon because it is next week!

Girl in the Arena

I think I tweeted about this book not too long ago, but I am going to do a more in-depth review now. Girl in the Arena was an absolutely fabulous book. I picked it up, originally, because I had just finished reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, in which a girl and boy are selected to fight to the death in an arena in order to try to get food for their hometown. Girl in the Arena sounded very similar in that, there was a girl who was going to have to fight to the death in order to be able to live her life as she wanted. Sounds good, huh?



Well, it was! It ended up being this giant metaphor for society. The women in the "Glad" culture were completely dedicated to their men... to supporting their time in the arena, to raising their children to be gladiators, to subscribing to a completely restrictive lifestyle. It was rather sickening. Lyn, the main character, sees the phoniness of the situation. She sees that there is more to life than being a gladiator's wife... but there is one problem. Another gladiator takes Lyn's "dowry" bracelet from her dead father on the battlefield. And this means, according to Glad culture, that she must marry this man.

The solution? Fight to the death. She wins, there is no marriage. She loses? Well, she'll be dead, so it won't matter.

The suspense is riveting!

And I won't ruin the plot for you or tell you the ending, but suffice it to say that this was a very entertaining read with many levels of understanding. It is a story of the struggle for freedom and the absurdity of societal traditions that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Additional (Shorter) Book Review Source

As you have probably figured out by reading this blog, I review around 1-2 books per month (when I don't forget). Obviously, as an aspiring librarian, I read a lot more than that. I just don't have time to write full length articles on them all. For that, I apologize.

HOWEVER, I have come up with a GREAT solution to this problem. I have begun reviewing books on my twitter account. For those of you who are not familiar with twitter, you have to post your "status" in 140 characters or less. This isn't a great resource for book reviews but I think it is going to be a very valuable way to document my opinions about books (for those who want to know it) in a brief format that takes me almost no time to spit out.

So if you are interested in all that I read, follow me at twitter.com/ChristaC1. You never know when you might find a great read through twitter. :-)

P.S. - Over the Christmas break, I had put up an opinion about a book on twitter. I will admit that it wasn't a great opinion, because I was confused over many aspects of the plot, but I posted my opinion anyway. The author of this book almost immediately responded to my tweet (because I have a public profile there) and wanted to know why I was confused. He posted links to help me get over it and, overall, we had a great little discussion about his book. It is amazing what technology can do for you sometimes!