2024 in Libraries

a foot in a sock that is yellow with thin black stripes and it meant to evoke a checkiout card in a book. It's standing on a tiled floor with black and white colored hexagons.

Totally a homebody this year; seventy library visits and most of them within a half mile of my house. I liked working at my library. I didn’t feel the need to go to other libraries with my free time. Amusing side note, I use Daytum to track my library visits and I have a display that show’s “this year’s” visits. However, I didn’t change the display over LAST year and somehow didn’t really notice (I mostly just add visits, don’t look at the pie chart). All fixed now!

  • Kimball (67) – I worked here nearly every week and did a few sub shifts.
  • Rochester (1) – I did one drop-in shift here just like last time.
  • Kilton/Lebanon NH (1) – Parked here and took a hike out behind it, there are some neat trails.
  • Hartness/Randolph (1) – I continue to think that I should go by this place more often, it’s such a nice library.

Previous years: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and some reviews from 2003.

I have an ISSN

Illustrated comic page called "Joe's Dope Sheet" which is part of PS Magazine outlining the way the Federal Supply Classification Numbering scheme works

I got an ISSN for no real reason. Richard pointed out on Mastodon that you can get an ISSN for a blog as long as it’s not a personal blog. I have a personal blog and it’s not this one. So I got an ISSN for this, partly just to learn the process. It was very simple, just walking through some steps on an LOC website. I applied on November 24th and received my number today.

My ISSN is 3066-120X.

Connecting this to that

A screenshot of a very pixelated image from a clip art CD which is being opened with software on a Mac emulator

My drop-in time work used to be a lot of teaching basic skills. “Here’s how to click. Now here’s how to right-click.” Then for a time it was teaching people about software. “Here’s how a menu works in Microsoft Word.” Then it was more about social media, then mobile phones. Lately it’s still a bit of all of those things, but the major thing I do is something I call “How do I connect this to that?” Continue reading “Connecting this to that”

be organized from the very beginning

A difficult part of technology instruction is not that things are unknowable, but that no one is ever starting at the beginning, not in 2024.

a woman in a fancy dress siting at a typewriter with a cigarette in her mouth. She is lookig over her shoulder ta the camera
How I work – image from State Library of New South Wales

 

I was reading this post by my colleague Alex talking about digital decluttering. Like Alex, I can get stuck into a hyperfocus jag where I am doing nothing but cleaning up data and I enjoy it a lot. My email archives go back to… 1996 which was actually further back than I was expecting. I periodically archive my websites. I’ve had the good fortune to have suffered no major data losses other than a few months of pictures between backups once, before I got good at doing those regularly. I like doing digital tidying tasks.

a man sititng in front of a desk which is piled high with neatly organized mail
Image from the Smithsonian Institution

 

Most people I see at the library for tech help are not like me. They don’t enjoy messing with tech just to mess with it. They’d like to spend less time fussing with technology and more time using it to do the things they want to do. But they feel stuck in a rut. They know they have “deferred maintenance” on their tech lives and are not sure how to start tackling the problem.

When I am helping someone with a computer issue, it often only takes me a few minutes of looking at their device to see if their problem is technological in nature or not. Sometimes people need help doing a thing, learning a task, or understanding a concept. I can help them with that and then they wander off and do okay on their own. Sometimes people have memory issues and we can talk about memory strategies: using password managers, making lists, setting reminders. Other times people are just disorganized, and this both is and is not a tech issue. Continue reading “be organized from the very beginning”

The mining of the public domain

A colorful circular fan type image showing a sun with a face rising above a green hill, the smiling moon looks on from the site

Public.work is a search engine for public domain content.” The site claims to have over 100,000 public domain images. This in and of itself is not that special, but the interface is. It’s gorgeous, a fun and engaging discovery layer where every search becomes a URL that can be shared [example] and the page of images endlessly scrolls up, down, and even sideways. Of course, the endless scroll is a bit of a fiction because many niche searches have few results and thus you see images repeating almost immediately. As someone who has seen a lot of repositories of public domain images come and go, I realized I’ve become something of an expert in them. Here are some of my thoughts. Continue reading “The mining of the public domain”