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was crawling through my archives this morning and came across this little rant that I wrote years ago, during my first, horrible, post-grad school job at the Cornell University Library. I know several of you Gentle Readers are in school right now, and I thought you might enjoy the sentiment:
First of all, and lets just get this out of the way: a full-time job is actually a pretty shoddy reward for 2.5 years of graduate school stress.
Yes, I’m grateful and all, glad to be here, nice to meet ya, etc. but frankly, I think I was looking for something along the lines of “congratulations on your degree, here’s your houseboat, now get out of here you scamp.”
I suppose having a stable schedule and slightly-more-realistic paychecks is reward enough, but lately I’ve had to face what seems to happen any time you put enormous effort into something. Which is, a rather slow transition into something different that requires enormous effort.
Like learning not to scream when someone suggests you attend the Metadata Working Group Meeting.
By: Erica Olsen,
on 5/8/2008
Blog:
Librarian Avengers
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took a stab at writing a Wikipedia stub on one of my favorite Second Life locations, Caledon, the steampunk/Victorian sim. I’m a Wikipedia n00b, and my stub got flagged for deletion (rightly) due to a lack of notable references.
Any of you SL-lovin’ librarians out there wanna take a crack at improving it?
Link to deletion discussion
Notability guidelines
Link to Caledon Stub (fictional places???)
at on face… typing this from beneath the fur….halp!!!!
am so happy.
ep. That’s some good grammar there.
In the future, I’ll make sure not to park my imaginary “car” under THIS vaguely menacing sign…
ou may notice a slew of broken links on the site today. I’m hunting down a bug that happened when I upgraded WordPress yesterday. Thanks for your patience. If you know anything about this error, please let me know:
“Fatal error: Call to undefined function: bloginfo()” … etc.
**UPDATE** Problem solved. Ugh. Line endings.
t’s the Holiday Season, which means new stuff in the Librarian Avengers Store.
I’m pimpin’ some new oval stickers this year. They look just like those European country abbreviation stickers that folks have on their Toyotas. Only these are cooler, because they signal that you are secretly a member of the United Nation of Librarianship!
Yep, there’s lots of new products, posters, shirts, and stuff sitting around the store, just waiting for you to order. So if you are a librarian, know a librarian, or love a librarian, consider giving them a thoughtful Librarian Avengers product this year. Or hell, just give them the money. They probably need it.
n my new role as a user experience goon at Second Life, I’m often called upon to participate in rap battles with other employees.
Because we’re all busy, rap battles tend to be text-only and asynchronous, conducted over IRC, twitter, or instant messenger.
Past themes have included: My prowess as a Developer, My (imaginary) Car, Linden Lab Office Culture, and Various Programming Languages.
Below are a few examples of my amazing rap power, mostly gleaned from IM logs. Enjoy responsibly, and please remember check yourself before you wreck yourself.
Killing jira issues like Rambo kills commies / Tasks and subtasks crying for their mommies /As&Os got me going mental / Yoz wants to rap but he’s too CONTINENTAL
Chillin wit’ Jonhenry / Talking ’bout JIRA / Drank me some coffee / Wish it was a beerah
open up email to try and cat-heard / 60 threads later / time is going backward / I just get in when wham! it’s lunch / wtf have I done besides data-crunch?
think you bad / ’cause you so much taller? / you may be blue / but I’m white collar / rollin’ in my office working on a search / you think you’re rapping but its SO MUCH WORSE
Kickin’ it smoove in my GTO / ops wants to have a meeting / but I’ve got ta go!
got a call about 20 minutes ago from a friend telling me that my website, this website, the website I HAVEN’T UPDATED IN WEEKS was mentioned in the NY Times. So, um. Hi. I’m updating! This is me. Updating. Just for you. La de da.
If you are interested in becoming a librarian, you might want to take this quiz.
If you know some librarians that you want to get gifts, I sell some cool t-shirts and mugs here.
Here are some of my favorite posts.
Here’s a quick summary of this website:
I’m Erica Olsen. I am a librarian (religion) and interface designer (profession). I just moved to San Francisco two weeks ago. I work doing User Experience at Second Life. I’ve been blogging since 1998, but in those days of yore we just called it “having a web page.”
If you wanna write to me and say hi, I’m ericaolsen (AT) gmail (DOT) com.
More analog tagging from South by Southwest Interactive…
photo by noneck
I’m trying to start a trend. Conference badges need more than just geographic metadata.
Together we can raise the level of schmoozy conference discourse!
Grab some stickers and tag yourself! It’s your duty as a librarian!
’m going to show my political underpants briefly (har har. briefly.) and write about Medical Students for Choice.
Lately I’ve tried to keep my politics off of this website out of respect for the wonderful diversity of people who have taken librarianship as an identity.*
However, I promised to keep you updated on the research topics I pursue in my off hours.
One of the topics I follow obsessively is the state of reproductive law in the US. I attended the March for Women’s Lives in 2004, and I came away with a new awareness of the scope and diversity of topics affecting women’s health, including poverty, contraceptive access, sex education, sexual violence, racism, and medical research, to name a few. The topic of women’s health goes well beyond the ethics and philosophy of the abortion debate.
One of the groups I most enjoyed seeing were the Medical Students for Choice, young mostly female medical students dedicated to raising awareness of the need to train abortion providers among the medical community.
Imagine a sea of women.
Imagine the mall in Washington DC on a warm sunny day. Imagine the grass and the voices. Everywhere you look there are signs, women, booths, friends, groups, people walking, people sitting, young women, old women, men of all ages and stripes, people of every color, signs from every US state and territory.
Imagine a group of women wearing white lab coats with stethoscopes around their necks, walking in small groups, smiling, talking, and holding signs saying “Medical Students for Choice.”
Some wore badges saying “Future abortion provider.” Some carried signs showing the number of women and young girls who die or are injured from unsafe abortions.
It was like watching a herd of beautiful gazelles as they walked through the chaos of the largest protest in US history. These women snapped with intelligence, kindness, and competence.
Seeing them made me stronger.
I don’t write this to inspire the same old arguments among friends. We can all agree that women’s physical safety is important, regardless of our deeper beliefs.
I love you guys. I’ll get back to writing trivia soon, I promise!
______________
*Yes, I think librarianship is an identity as well as a profession. More on this later.
rew sent me a Pastafarian Bible. Now I can properly proselytize! Unbelievers beware!
Thanks Drew!
Elyse Sewell came in second place on America’s Next Top Model. I know this because I spent two solid days watching it on YouTube this winter while battling the flu.
Why should you care about Elyse Sewell? Well, she’s funny, she has a livejournal, she’s smart as hell, and she visits libraries for fun. Libraries like the François Mitterrand Library.
Enjoy, and remember: Librarians can be hot and models can be smart.
And vice versa, probably. But we don’t talk about that here.
Locking down your in-home wireless network is like paying the cable company to take your neighbor’s money.
It’s to everyone’s advantage to fill their neighborhood with wireless access. It should be a municipal service. We benefit as a community when a resource is widely available. The tragedy of the Commons only applies when the shared commons is a limited resource.
The only people who don’t benefit from open community networks are companies who profit from the marketing-created illusion that bandwidth is rare, precious, and costly.
Do you scream at your neighbors: “get your OWN cell phone network and stop using mine!”
Do you call the cops when someone takes a shower using YOUR aquifer?
Does your radio’s signal belong to you?
Remember when it was illegal to make a free long-distance call? Were we going to run out of phonelines? Or was it because, for awhile, “long-distance calling” was the only established business model available to consumers, and eventually legislation built up to protect the market?
Once cellphones created a different profit model, did free long-distance calling stop being “wrong”?
“Ownership” of a wireless network connection is marketing, not reality.
Nobody is going to break into your computer. Nobody cares about capturing your keystrokes. There are better ways to secure your computer than hiding inside a little ComCast/TimeWarner-generated moat and trembling in fear of imaginary baddies who want to eat your bandwith.
Bandwidth is not a limited resource. You are not gonna run out of Internet.
Do you know anyone who has ever run out of Internet? No.
Get a firewall and quit whining.
Salon has obtained an internal 117-page draft proposal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The document proposes to:
“limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail the acres of wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to enforce the act from the federal government to the states, and dilutes legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or mining.”
Read more here. I guarantee the final draft will be titled “Helping Endangered Species Act” or something similarly compelling. The “Saving Wolves Act” would be nice. Or how about the “Freedom for Endangered Species From Government Interference Act”?
Drunken blogging is ALWAYS a good idea.
I had minor surgery today, removing a non-dangerous-kind tumor from my shoulder. So, anesthetics. And beer, which also helps.
Want to lose a pound? There’s no faster way.
I’m taking tomorrow off work to search for a car and get my shit together. It’s been one hell of a week. Hell being the operative word.
Here’s some good stuff:
- new laptop. macbook duo 2gig ram. eat my processing dirt.
- friends.
- tattoo. I’m gonna have one hell of a scar. Researching scar-covering tats is keeping me entertained. There are some wicked literary tattoos out there.
- drunk. did I mention drunk?
Love ye all. Thanks for support.
xoxo
Ericalibrarydork
Thirty seconds to post - I’m in a computer lab in the Austin Community College campus.
Things we’ve seen today:
Peacock in the neighbor’s yard
Peacock in the tree at Mayfield Park
Peacock with his tailfeathers up
Chris in a kilt
Turtles
Agaves growing in bunches along the road
Spanish moss
The House Across The Street from where Chris grew up where they filmed a Willie Nelson/Kris Kristoperson movie once in the 70’s
The Stevie Ray Vaughn Car Wash
Rosemary bushes as tall as me
Migas at Kirby Lane Cafe
Palm Trees
Blooming redbuds dogwoods dafodills tulips apple and cherry trees
People in shorts and tank tops outside a sno-cone stand
Cactus growing on the roof of a coffeeshop
Kayakers on Town Lake
Sorry for not writing yesterday. Someone snuck peanut-laced almonds into my mint chutney, and I had to give myself a shot.
Anaphylaxis is a bad dining companion. It was a rough night.
Also? I got a new camera.
Chris and I are off to Vancouver, BC for the week. He’s attending a conference. I’m stalking the sea otters at the Vancouver aquarium.
We get in tonight. If any CUPE 391 members want a beer, I’m buying. Organized librarians rock.
I tried out Cornell Library’s book-delivery service this week. A nice stack of David Foster Wallace books quickly appeared at my workplace yesterday afternoon, and I got a friendly call when they arrived.
If you are a Cornell student or staff, you can have library books delivered to any library-location of your choice for free. For me, this means walking upstairs to our sunny little ornithology library overlooking the pond, and sitting by the fireplace for a bit.
I’m an irredeemable Amazon.com addict, so I view as a right the ability to learn about a book, click a few links, and have said book delivered to me. Imagine my pleasure at being able to do this without paying for it.
Unfortunately, you pretty much have to be told about the service to find out about it, unless you are the type of user who clicks links labeled “requests” on library websites and enjoy library jargon. Like many public services in the country, the crucial step of communicating to humans was overlooked.*
*Many nonprofits seem to say to their clients: “Look, we provide a valuable and benevolent service. You could at least be arsed enough to jump through a few design hurdles in order to discover our valuable service that you don’t know exists because of our design hurdles.”
I’m not sure, but I think the Cornell Library Patron narrative is supposed to go like this:
- A student or staff member goes into the library catalog and searches for some interesting books, thinking “Hey, I’ll go pick these up at the five separate library locations where they are housed”
- The patron adds each book to her “bookbag” (navigating a series of hurdles involving ID numbers, multiple passwords unique to the library system, and cute-not-descriptive service names) to create a list of books she wants to get.
-
A MIRACLE OCCURS HERE
- The patron mysteriously knows that she can have her books delivered.
- The patron clicks into the catalog page for each book (students love catalog pages!) and separately clicks “requests” at the bottom of the page, knowing instinctively that book delivery is a “request”.
-
The patron chooses “Book Delivery Services (9996 available)” from a dropdown list conveniently located below the fold.
- Assuming the patron does not receive the helpful error message “Your Patron Initiated Call Slip Request failed. This item is not available for Call Slip requests.” like I just did (Patrons Love Call Slip Requests!), she enters her ID number again.
- The patron is familiar with the names
Chris and I went to see Children of Men today, which was fantastic, disturbing, hopeful, and cautionary. I cried a bit, but left not resenting the movie for making me sad.
Beforehand, we saw four trailers which ALL fell into the new Librarian Avengers Film Rating System. There was a Creepy Child Singing, Two Overly Patriotics, and a Jim
Carrey.
Beware.
Movie ratings suck. “Rated R” doesn’t tell me anything I need to know.
I need to know if a movie contains cannibalism, synthesizers, or Jim Carrey. I need a rating system that reflects the diversity of obstacles lurking in today’s cinema. Introducing…
The Librarian Avengers Film Rating System
Rated A for Animal Gets Hurt
Rated B for British Accent Faked by American
Rated C for Creepy Child Singing
Rated D for Dialog Written by Committee
Rated E for Escape-in-front-of-a-fireball
Rated F for Fun-filled Frolic for the Family
Rated G for Grab-my-hand!
Rated H for Heads chopped off/Hearts pulled out
Rated I for Italian Stallion
Rated J for Jim Carrey
Rated K for Keyboard hacks Pentagon in two clicks
Rated L for Lead Actors’ Real-Life Romance
Rated M for Motiveless Villain
Rated N for Natives
Rated O for Overly Patriotic
Rated P for Pacino Yelling
Rated R for Remake of a Better Film
Rated S for Scientific Content ≠ Reality
Rated T for T&A
Rated U for Un-ironic 80’s Soundtrack
Rated V for Veh
It snowed in Chris’ hometown of Austin, Texas yesterday. Schools and universities were closed, giving his dad an unexpected day off.
Long lonesome roads became treacherously icy. Heartbreak hotels shut down. Cacti cooled. Longhorns lost heat. Scorpions shivered.
Corrupt Texas Governor Rick Perry wasted a bunch of money.
The governor used state funds to build an outdoor stage to host his two-million dollar inauguration ceremony. When it snowed, the ceremony was moved indoors, and the stage was torn down unused.
Today, Texas teachers return to their elementary school classes, many of which are held in trailers that supplement tiny school buildings.
I’ll say one thing for New York State, we may not have the biggest cows, or the biggest hats, but we’ve got the damned biggest snowplows you’ve ever seen.
Adios, y’all.
his is an excellent study of the many aspects of cats. I, for one, regularly check my cat’s depth, as it often changes depending on the shedding season, and sometimes I loose my cellphone in the fur.
With the recent news of Yahoo’s 
I visited my local Bernal Heights library branch this afternoon, in search of a place to sit and read. It turned out to be one of the last weeks the building is open before it closes for an extensive renovation. On a kid-filled sunny spring Saturday, the current building gives the impression of being a community center rather than a library, with more conversations, computers, and chaos than visible books.
rom a conversation with my friend Jenny on the implications of library censorship…
