Librarian Avengers

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.

riving home through rural Ithaca I saw, within 30 seconds:

1. A snapping turtle crossing the road, long prehistoric tail dragging behind her. The turtles are laying eggs this week wherever they can, including parking lots, trails, and ditches.
2. A great blue heron
3. A vole running across the road. Voles are apparently susceptible to some sort of brain parasite that makes them go nuts and do stuff like this. A few weeks ago, cow-orker Mary Winston and I watched one running in a small circle for five minutes. I finally caught him and put him under the dock so he wouldn’t get stepped on. It was all very Wrath of Kahn.
4. Two horses and riders walking toward me in my lane. Can anyone tell me if that is standard horse-in-street protocol? Because it was hella surprising.

30 seconds. Ithaca.

NYC game developers Large Animal Games have created a downloadable PC video game based on bird sounds and expertise provided by the Macaulay Library at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology.

Which is where I work.

The game is called Snapshot Adventures. It was recently was acquired by Yahoo! games, which is a great for both the Lab and for environmental education, since part of the money it earns will directly fund our ecology work.

You can play it for free here.

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:

1. 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”
2. 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.
3. A MIRACLE OCCURS HERE
4. The patron mysteriously knows that she can have her books delivered.
5. 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”.
6. The patron chooses “Book Delivery Services (9996 available)” from a dropdown list conveniently located below the fold.
7. 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.
8. The patron is familiar with the names and locations of the dozens of small on-campus libraries and selects her nearest branch.
9. The patron knows that, unlike use of the weight rooms, climbing wall, or campus cinema, the library book delivery service is free.
10. The patron clicks “submit request”, then repeats the process for each item she wants delivered.
11. The patron celebrates her triumph with a fine malt beverage.

Still, mad useful if you know about it.

The financial advice site Get Rich Slowly suggests using the library as a frugal way to save money on books. I agree, and am going to endure more bad OPAC design in the interest of financial progress. Stay tuned.

Cornell librarians: Please do not kill me. I’m glad to have your services. Bad online user experiences are common in the library world. I’m sure you are busy right now improving the OPAC and writing clear non-jargon filled text describing your services. Go Big Red!

got sent in as a pinch-hitter for this small local web conference for Higher Education. I’m listening to a keynote-speaker-who-shall-remain nameless reading Google’s mission statement. Which is interesting. At eight in the morning.

Ok, this is interesting. He gets 36 work-related emails per hour at Google.

The Google Book Search got a passing mention…

Hm. Google’s nice, but I like my 40-hour work week.

I could use a nap.

Did you know you can dial 46645 and do a google query on your cellphone? Could come in handy for those ambient askability moments of freerange librarainship…

Question…
Do you know anything about the Google CMS?
Answer…
Nope. Can’t answer that.

Question…
I’m really pretentious and want to insert the theme of the conference into a sentence, could you address this?
Answer…
Blah blah blah.

Great. It’s snowing.

called in sick to work today, with a sore throat and general upper-respiratory grossness. I spent the day lying on the couch with cats floating on pillows around me. Our two cats are huge wooly monsters. Rescued from cat-jail, they resemble bobcats more than housecats.

Fortunately, they don’t seem to know how huge and potentially ferocious they are. Curled up in sleeping cat-balls, they resemble furry manhole covers. Occasionally one will purr and try to shove himself up my nose.

Sick days for me usually involve DVDs, Tylenol PM, and tea. Recently however, I have discovered a wonderful website called eBay.

I’ve been online since 1994 and Mosaic. I was one of the first librarians to have a blog (Jessamyn at librarian.net was and always will be waaaay ahead of me!) I subscribed to A List Apart back when it was a list, and learned CSS by copying code from Webmonkey. I’ve been e-around for a long time. But I’d never gotten trapped by eBay until now.

It started innocently. We needed a rug. Rugs are expensive. I found an eBay seller with deeply discounted Pottery Barn rugs. I bought one and got it almost immediately. Then I found people selling Anthropologie clothes for crazy prices. I created a favorite search. It was all over.

Living in a rural area like Ithaca is almost ideal. There are mountains, gorges, parking spots, and very few car thieves. But the shopping is terrible. Unless you have a penchant for Old Navy, or hemp clothing, there are no recognizable stores within an hour’s drive. Since I refuse to buy my work clothes at the Farmer’s Market, I tend to shop in short bursts while I’m traveling. EBay has opened a new world for me. The combination of librarian ninja query skillz and quality stuff for a dollar has made online auctions dangerously profitable.

I’ve mostly gotten it under control. Now I just log in to explore new categories.

Your sickly, addicted, digital librarian friend, Erica

’m heading out to my second day of Cornell Supervisor Training in a few minutes. We’ll be spending the entire day focusing on HR law. I anticipate a healthy round of “I’m not TOUCHING YOOOU!” from my coworkers afterward. Accompanied by jabbing index fingers.

I’m speaking from experience here, folks.

Eat my educational interactives baby! The Cornell University Lab of Ornithology project I designed won second place in Science magazine’s 2006 Visualization Challenge.

Plus, we were on the front page of Der Spiegel last week, so Germans love us!

What does this mean for you? It means you can now go online and visit the world’s largest collection of animal sounds and video. Listen to animal recordings and watch videos for free. Explore the crazy world of animal behavior.

Right now you can use Realplayer to listen to sounds, or you can download our plugin that lets you watch and manipulate spectrograms in real-time. Which has never been done before, incidentally.

So, to summarize, alligators, elk, robins, and whales, all online and free. Good? Go nuts. Version two should be out in a few months.

Photo by パックマン

10:40pm and I’m still at work.

Science Magazine is publishing a blurb about our library of animal sounds on Thursday. We got an award for second-best “educational interactive”. Yay.

Unfortunately, this means that a huge group of people are going to visit our site.

And our site was, up to a few weeks ago, still half-baked. We’ve got one of those higher education software teams, consisting of five underpaid geeks and a couple of CS students. Ebay, we are not.
These last few weeks have been a blur. Everyone on my team is pulling dot com hours, working for twelve hours on Sundays, and generally being foolish with work-life balance.

Tonight we ate dinner at the mall food court.

The weird part is, I love this.
I love the focus.
I love the commiseration.
I love the feeling of doing something good for the world that I get working at a nonprofit.

But right now, I would really love a beer and some sleep.
Goodnight, all.