This social model of intellectual support is a form of invisible college, a term Diana Crane used to describe the networks of scientists that contribute directly or, more often, indirectly to their research paths. You may or may not ever co-publish with a fellow of your invisible college, but his or her intellectual influence on your life enriches your own work. (I’m paraphrasing and extrapolating the idea pretty heavily here, as I don’t have a copy of Crane’s original study on hand. A good overview, with editorial by Crane, is available here: http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1989/A1989AT41600001.pdf. I was introduced to the concept during coursework on scholarly communication with Debbie Rabina at Pratt.)

These kinds of relationships, paired with modern ease of information sharing, are helping to fuel not only formal interdisciplinary study but also the general tide of awareness of current ideas. Yesterday I posted a congratulatory note here in support of the bedrock of my personal invisible college. She and my friends in disciplines ranging from architecture to international policy to law help enrich my intellectual life through the sharing of articles and news items from their areas of expertise and through challenging me to act as a nascent expert in information science and cultural studies. My close colleagues from library school help keep me up-to-date on the aspects of the field that I don’t interact with directly but benefit from familiarity with. We use social media not only to share personal information or the latest comedic video, but to expand the horizons of our understanding.

I’m grateful for the tools at my disposal and the ability to use them with ease. I’m also enormously lucky to have been part of a vibrant intellectual community at Pratt and to have stumbled into friendships with brilliant people.

We are living in an age of shifting social options, a deluge of information, and enormous challenges to the academy. I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that we may some day return to the personal model of scholarly pursuit illustrated in The Age of Reason.

Then again, maybe I’m just a romantic.

Mazel tov!

I rely heavily on Google Reader to get my information about what’s going on in the library world. I follow blogs on mobile computing, library operations, and intellectual property law in my own feeds, and I get a lot of news about other aspects of library and info science from my friends’ shared items. Once upon a time, I used Livejournal’s RSS functionality to get my blogs because I was on it constantly (every day, at least twice a day – this is the days before Facebook, people). Livejournal was, like Reader is currently, social but asynchronous — you could catch up on things and people because they were in a static, logical page. Reader has added functionality, of course, but the ability to highlight specific stories of interest from the deluge of news and information – WITHOUT getting lost in the stream of “meh” and “omg awesome” and party pictures — is the key aspect here.

I like Google+. I’ve been wishing since I started using it that there was a way to export my Reader shares into Plus (like I do to Twitter). What I never wished for was a reduction in usability of Reader in favor of Plus. If Google can keep ALL the functionality of Reader in a smooth integration to Plus, then bully for them. If they can’t, I think we’re going to start to see the beginnings of the exodus of power users and content creators out of the Google world.

The best and brightest of my LIS class are Reader users. They are thoughtful, insightful, and engaged with the world around them. They understand information use and they understand tech. These are the people Google needs to be listening to.

Don’t be evil, Google, but more importantly, don’t be dumb.

We in the library field are pretty geeky ourselves (or nerdy, or dorky) and we have the luxury of being able to be open about our off-the-beaten-track passions without much fuss from our colleagues or patrons. Whether we’re knititng enthusiasts, balletomanes, comic book fans or even just diehard Twitterers, most if not all of us are geeks of some kind. We live in a world of information that offers us a universe of possibilities. We are smart and dedicated, and channel our passions in a myriad of ways.

In my first month as a reference intern during library school, I was approached by an undergraduate student doing work for a 200-level class on Slavic history. The assignment was a fairly simple book review, but she was having trouble translating the assignment into a set of criteria she could use to find something in the library. Fortunately or unfortunately, she got me at the reference desk. My last course as an undergraduate was an absolutely outstanding advanced history course on Byzantine history gave me a serious geek love of Slavic and Byzantine history. I’m pretty sure I overwhelmed her a bit with my suggestions (though my supervisor assured me that most new librarians do that at some point), but I was excited — not only by the chance to share what I knew but also to introduce her to a field she’d barely been aware of before.

As a librarian, I am immensely lucky to be able to pursue that feeling of wonder and excitement in the world around me. Whether it’s the challenges of arts metadata, the intricacies of digital mapping projects, the vast promise of the semantic web or just the simple joy of learning something during a reference interview, the information universe is forever showing new vistas to me.

If that makes me a geek (and I’ve been assured it does), then so be it. I’m a geek.

And I’m proud of it.

Thanks!

For Valentine’s Day, blinking, apprehensive men wander into our rooms full of pink confections looking for “well it’s kind of a soft material? and I think it’s pretty stretchy?” or “well I just want something that goes together” or “she told me it’s a low-rise lace-top cheeky, but I don’t know what that is.” (Heaven help them when we tell them we actually have six different kinds of low-rise lace-top cheekies.) Every patron services librarian knows this kind of attitude. Some of our patrons (particularly our undergrads) are sure that there’s A Thing that they’re supposed to get, and hopefully they’ll know it when they see it, but if not, they depend on us, the experts, to tell them that yes, this is what your instructor wanted, and we’ll explain to you WHY it’s what you need. We’re there to help them identify the general class of Thing they’re looking for and then coax them to make their own choices.

Victoria’s Secret has a vocabulary that’s just as opaque to these kinds of customers as the language of librarianship is to a student new to research. It’s our job as customer service providers to be intrepid translators not only of the original assignment but also of the result of the searches we guide our patrons through.

So happy Valentine’s Day to all you retail workers and patron service librarians. I hope it was full of satisfied customers.

The ACRL Instructional Section Mentoring Program’s purpose is to contribute to the professional development of academic librarians interested in information literacy instruction and improving their teaching skills by pairing librarians experienced in teaching with librarians new to instruction or to the Instruction Section.

The program creates a forum for learning opportunities, networking, and the exchange of ideas between paired mentors and mentees. Conference attendance is not required. In fact, much of the mentoring takes place outside of scheduled conferences.

ACRL/IS Mentoring committee is seeking experience librarians to become mentors and new librarians to become mentees.

If you are interested please fill out an application on the IS Mentoring Program web site http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/about/sections/is/projpubs/mentoring/index.cfm

Applications are accepted year-round. Priority will be given to applications received by October 15 for matches to be made in time for Midwinter. If you are thinking about registering for ALA Midwinter and Annual Conference, please consider applying for the mentoring program at the same time.

If you have questions about the ACRL Instruction Section Mentoring Program, please contact the Committee Chair Wendy Holiday at wendy.holliday@usu.edu.

Pass it on!

Edit: Please note that if you’re not interested in mentoring or don’t have significant experience you can still recommend our efforts to someone you know that WOULD be a great mentor. Word of mouth does wonders!

When I moved back to North Carolina I got a retail job with the company I’ve worked for since college, thinking it’d be an easy stopgap. Then I realized that sharing a car with two other working adults meant I didn’t have a lot of other employment options… so I accepted a temporary management position to help get the store through the insane holiday rush. While it was in many ways rewarding, it also meant getting up at 5 a.m. 5-6 days a week and working long, physically demanding hours. (Add in chauffeuring duties and cooking for the family and I’ve barely had the energy to check Facebook, much less anything requiring thought.)

Now that the post-Christmas sales are pretty much over and I’m back to being a regular employee, I’m looking forward to catching up on the pile of professional magazines sitting accusingly on my desk and getting back into the swing of things again.

Long story short: Hi, world! I missed you!

A bit of background: I’ve been editing publications in some form or another most of my adult life. I was on the newspaper staff in high school. I helped found an undergraduate history journal in college, and I spent five years working for News & Information at Washington University, including working directly on the weekly newspaper the Record.

In 2004 I met one of my best friends, Eddy Webb, who was at that time an independent game designer and also working at WashU. I’d just recently discovered the world of pen-and-paper gaming, though I was a longtime computer gamer. Eddy had gotten the opportunity to write an RPG book for a licensed property and asked me if I wanted to edit the book. (He and I had had many grammar- and language-nerd chats in the months we’d known each other and he knew I was looking for something interesting to fill my free time.) Thus my career as a freelance editor began with the … quirky… RPG, Tomorrow Knights.

The experience was eye-opening. Editing prose is generally pretty easy – if you know the basic rules of English and have some kind of style guide, you just scan and look for errors and idiosyncrasies. Editing game rules, however, is trickier. There’s a bit of math-checking involved (does this number in this stat plus that number in that ability add up to the bonus indicated in this rule?); a bit of scenario-testing (if a character did this with this power, would it be likely to overpower other aspects of the game?); and a bit of flavor-tasting (does the supernatural effect described here fit in with the other pieces of the game world as written?). Some days it flows easier than others, but it’s always more of a challenge than any other kind of editing I’ve ever done.

Over the next few years, Eddy got more game work and often offered me the chance to edit. I got to work on his awesomely weird science fiction-noir game Midway City along with layout maestro Adam Jury. Eddy was eventually hired by White Wolf and in early 2008 (after some pestering on my part) gave me the opportunity to work for the company as a freelancer. I’d played WW’s games for about five years at that point and was familiar with their style and the semi-fantasy world of their World of Darkness game line (and to a lesser extent, their Exalted game). I had reference books and I was ready to go. My probationary job apparently went well, since I’ve been editing now for almost three years.

It’s not a thrilling job – there’s a lot of tiny nitpicks like fixing smart quotes or making sure “Willpower” is spelled out instead of abbreviated. I see a lot of really terrible purple prose (amateur romance novelists, you’ve got nothing on game writers). I’ve rewritten some manuscripts pretty heavily to remove evidence of poor English, close-minded attitudes, and concepts that are better suited to some other company’s games than White Wolf’s.

Despite all that, it’s a FUN job. Since the majority of projects I work on are set in the World of Darkness, an alternate reality that mirrors real life, I do a lot of fact-checking and research to make sure things have the ring of truth. I get to learn more about games that I enjoy playing. On one occasion I was even given the chance to write a chunk of an “in-character” religious text, drawing on my background in religious history.

While I continue the hunt for a library or education job, I’m glad I have the opportunity to keep my brain going with a deadline-driven, language- and research-heavy, deeply weird job. (Though I’m going to continue to use that Oxford comma on my blog, even if WW’s style guide won’t let me!)