Your neighborhood librarian + heavy weapons
Librarian?
Data junkie? Obsessive compulsive? Come to the Freebase hack day on July 11, 2009 here in SF. There’s food, drinks, an excellent network, plenty of powercords, and a nice room full of geeks to chat with.
It’s a fun way to dive a bit deeper into making cool data mashups, relationally documenting your brain contents, and getting your questions answered by actually standing in front of Metaweb developers and staring at them until they make go.
Drop me a note if you are going. :)
-Erica
A listing of grievances:
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Oh hello Library of Congress. I didn’t see you there. Nice running into you like this!
You know, I’ve always admired your electronic resources and open-minded collections policies. My undergraduate university and career have both profited from your generous grantmaking, and your reading room sure is fun to visit when I’m in town!
Being a big organization sucks, doesn’t it? You do your best but, well, you can’t keep track of everything. Sometimes you just end up with people in charge of the Congressional Research Service, who for whatever reason, act like complete dumbfucks.
You must be very embarrassed. I mean, rescinding a job offer because you thought the candidate’s upcoming gender reassignment was…what? Icky?
You had better be fucking embarrassed. The federal court recently fined you $500,000 for your treatment of former Army Special Forces Commander Diane Schroer, who, I suspect, has better things to do than get jerked around by library staff.
I mean, career damage and humiliation aside, it seems like an anti-terrorism analyst’s time might be better spent out of court FIGHTING TERRORISM. A subject you DC dwellers seem to get pretty excited about under normal circumstances.
What’s going on here Library of Congress? Couldn’t think of anything better to do with 500 grand? I wonder how many smaller libraries out there could say the same.
So tell me, is it really easier to house decision makers capable of grossly immoral and illegal actions than it is to cull employees who show these traits? Are Library jobs really so stable that a hiring manager feels comfortable acting on overt prejudice?
And who is this legacy codger you’ve been harboring anyway? A political appointee from the 1880s? Are there really adults in this world who have never met a transwoman and are ALL AFLUTTER by the idea?
If so, perhaps it might help to read a book or two on the subject. You might enjoy this one from your own extensive archives:
An examination of discrimination against transgender Americans in the workplace: hearing before the Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions, Committee on Education and Labor, U.S. House of Representatives.
Anyway Library of Congress, It’s a brand new administration and I’m sure you’ve learned your lesson. I expect your excellent reference staff will happily direct anyone who has experienced this kind of hiring discrimination to the ACLU.
Dear Librarian Avengers:
Gus Andrews, nerd savant and mastermind behind The Media Show‘s MySpace-whoring puppet twins, writes the following:
Hey, if your readers are looking for unusual work at a really neat and forward-thinking library, they should watch the Teachers College Library jobs listings over the next few months.
Most of what’s listed right now is in video production, graphics design, museum curation, and technology development. I’m pretty sure we will also be looking for event managers over the next few months. We just had some big university functions folded into our operations (distance learning and conferences), and I’m guessing there will be more hiring in those areas soon.
As I’ve probably mentioned, this is a fabulous place to work — the higher-ups have somehow managed to make a really supportive space for creative work and being a self-starter.
The museum/graphics department in particular has recently been doing a lot of fascinating work with our archives — for a recent show we unearthed a bunch of lantern slides and are still trying to figure out what to do with them :)
We’re also starting an heirloom seeds garden.
cheers!
Gus
A lovely fellow from The Austin Chronicle wrote to my fellow South by Southwest panelists asking for a definition of our enigmatically titled presentation. He wanted to know what a “Funologist” was, and rather than sadden him with the news that our moderator made it up, we all took a shot at defining it for him.
The full article is available here: How to Speak Geek – SXSW Interactive has landed. Can you talk the talk?
I’m quoted about halfway down. Fame!
Greetings from an ethnic librarian working in the games industry!
I’m posting this review of my experience last year at GDC (the Game Developers Conference) held every year here in San Francisco. It was originally part of a letter to my team here at Linden Lab, but I thought you librarians might be interested/amused, considering the gender ratio at most library conferences.
-Erica
Hi guys –
I went to the Game Developers Conference last year and found it to be of dubious value.
The best part of the conference for me was the Expo room, which proved to be a valuable source of alternative employment opportunities. I learned that if I want to move to Las Vegas and design slot machine interfaces, I can more than double my salary, which I’m keeping in mind for when I have a stroke and develop an unquenchable desire for polyester and/or chicken wings. I enjoyed scanning the various game interfaces set up to demo motion graphics products, and filed away a few ideas from the Pirates of the Caribbean MMORPG.
For me, however, the most memorable moment was riding the escalator of the Moscone center and gazing across a sea of black-clad gamed developers among whom I was the only woman.
As a Person of Estrogen and part of a numeric majority in this world, I’m used to seeing many female developers, operations experts, and release managers at work.
This isn’t the 1970s. Nerdy women exist and thrive. San Francisco is a welcoming place.
GDC. Was. Not.
I get the feeling that all is not well with an operation that returns such a limited array.
The scene: riding the escalator, about five years too old but still worried about being mistaken for a boothbabe.
Behold my personal benchmark for outsider discomfort.
In summary: meh to the GDC.
Borrow someone’s pass and check out the Expo. Cruise the demo games. If you really care about a session, read the person’s book or website instead. And if you really care about making better games, spend the three days watching user observation videos.
Happy news! I was invited to be a panelist at the South by Southwest Interactive conference next month, as part of their ScreenBurn track. 
I’m on a panel called “Funologists live and in person: Guerilla Game Research.”
I’ll share my experience starting some low-budget user research cycles for Second Life, and my work translating those frustrating observations into shippable engineering requirements.
There will be pretty pictures, and possibly cake.
The cake is a lie, but you should stop by anyway. There could be cake.
There certainly won’t be cake and not cake. Not at the same time, I can assure you.
Librarians see themselves as the guardians of the First Amendment… I wouldn’t mess with them. I really didn’t realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group.
— Michael Moore, after outraged librarians saved his book
*As usual, all proceeds go toward the Erica family “mortgage and random charities” fund
