My professional life and my personal life are enhanced and grown by links to people, organizations, authors and patrons. I want to look into how some of these links have added to my profession as a librarian and my growth as a person, because mine is just one of many stories of linkages across the internet.

As a reference librarian who works primarily for students along with researchers at the University of Michigan, my job is to help along the path of searching out sources. In this moment in time that is mainly done by tracing a citation to a full text article or learning to navigate a database or catalog to find what’s needed. Each step of the process is made up of links beginning with the researcher explaining what they’re looking for, I need to understand them and we create a human connection. From that point, we have to translate questions into language that will be understood by our search tools such as Proquest and there the links become incredibly powerful. Once the right phrase is found, it’s possible to go ever deeper and seen multiple pathways to explore a question and follow the chains of thoughts. The reverse of this is using a citation to trace back to a source and here the power of links is staggering. I’ve had people grading papers ask for my help to track back a citation and when the right one is found, there’s a moment of oh, I see how they got there.

The other side of this story for me is the links of the world of fandom where thanks to the internet creators and fans find new ways to connect and fans are constantly connecting with each other. It’s possible for me to let an author know that I loved their newest book through a tweet and know they received the compliment. I can also find new shows and books thanks to the web of connections of my friends who all have different networks and we touch at many points. We encourage each other to keep looking and searching and make the world smaller. As I’ve learned, you never know what image or music will inspire you or change your day, but I know that on the internet if I find something that touches me, I can find where it began. From that source I can found out how to follow the creator or purchase from them just as a citation shows a teacher how you began. We can’t lose any links in these chains.

A difficult part of this is figuring out which links to present for extra information as there are some incredibly good ones out there. I’m going to link a lot of them.

From Wikipedia, definitions: SOPA, PIPA

From Pajiba.com, one of the best write ups I’ve read: The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act explained with profanity

From Google: Take Action

From WordPress.com: SOPA Strike

Please think on how you connect and trace links and take action.

This poem was inspired by a meeting I had during the summer where I realized that I’m in the right profession. Over the Thanksgiving break, I talked to librarians and had fantastic informational interviews and was struck by how much this world works for me.

This semester, I am working as an online reference librarian more than an in-person one and the interactions with patrons occur through an instant messaging program. They see me as Ask a Librarian and I see them as a randomly generated number or a screen name if they choose to enter one. A major part of my interaction is to create an conversation and show that there’s a human behind the name, who wants to help them succeed in their research. Recently I had someone try to take advantage of the fact that I am a human by pressing me to give them personal information in the hopes that I would create a non-professional relationship with me. It was done in a creeping manner that made me uncomfortable as mixed in with the boundary pushing questions were valid ones that I tried to answer. It also took advantage of the fact that in a normal exchange, I will discuss what I have researched and my own knowledge if it will help the patron. The instant message system created a false sense of knowing that I diverted by pointing out that I was online in a professional capacity, but the interaction shook me. The main reason it did was it felt like once the other person realized I was a woman, they moved on that more than librarian and even insulted librarians in a bid to get my sympathy. In the end I had to close the conversation in a firm and professional manner, but it reminded me of how the combination of false intimacy and lack of a personal connection makes it easy to hurt someone you can’t see. Comment sections and the harassment of women bloggers shows how this has become a daily part of the internet as pointed out by Mencallmethings on Twitter, warning for harassment and threats.

The second experience was one that occurs from time to time in my roleplaying circle where the majority of out of character conversation happens in instant messages. There’s a main chat room that is open throughout the day and night as players come from a variety of timezones and this allows for a constant conversation. I consider this chat room somewhere between a table in a college dining hall or the break room in an office, people are always moving through, different threads of conversations happen at once and the feel changes a lot depending on who is inside. This chat room is where I’ve created many strong friendships but there are many people who I only speak to in the chat room and consider acquaintances. Outside of the main chatroom, there will be one-on-one sessions and email chains, which deepen friendships. One of the tricky parts of all of this is due to the lack of tone on instant messages, there can be the sense of intimacy on one side but not the other. An example that happens often and happened to me again this week is someone messaging with a link or a quick observation, but without a clear sense of thought to who they’re contacting. In a face-to-face conversation, it’s possible to pick up clues and have a quick laugh over something small and move on. Yet in the world of instant messaging, it’s rude to simply not respond but it can be uncomfortable when it seems as if there’s a presumption of intimacy that doesn’t exist. I find these exchanges confusing as usually they come from someone who I’ve interacted with in chat but not deeply. I try to be a friendly person but at times, another window appearing and saying pay attention to me is tiring. The difficulty is to find ways to set boundaries without destroying acquaintances in the mainly toneless environment of instant messaging.

In both these situations, the main issue is how do you create boundaries in spaces where interaction is fluid and the social cues are different. Online it tends to be a case of choosing who you extend intimacy to and finding the ways to be polite and not rude as you draw a line. Due to my experience of understanding what doesn’t come across well through instant messaging in fandom, I’ve been able to keep the professional line stronger as a reference librarian. For the work interaction, I stated that I was online as a librarian and not in a social capacity and would not continue the dialogue and in time, the person left. I think when talking on an instant messaging platform, Twitter or Facebook is to remember that your intentions don’t come through so you have to be go out of your way to explain what’s behind your words. It makes the internet challenging but also rewarding when true intimacy can be created.

To start out, I need to provide some context of what I mean when I say roleplaying as I’ve used a number of different systems throughout the years but the general idea stays the same. I began roleplaying at a summer camp with Dungeons and Dragons which is based around dice rolling to decide outcomes combined with in-character discussions. In high school and college, I did Live Action Role Playing where we used rock, paper, scissors to figure out random outcomes combined with improvisational acting for character interactions. Currently I roleplay online on a blogging platform where actions are decided through player discussion and interaction happens in comment threads and collaborative writing. In this form, roleplaying creates for me the perfect balance between improvisational acting and collaborative writing, because as a roleplayer you have to understand how your character might react in a number of situations. A roleplayer has to know their character well enough that they can decide how they will react to various situations but also write it in such a way that the person who’s responding will have something to interact with. A tricky part of roleplaying is how do you make your characters seem three dimensional, actors and writers are faced with this same question and for all three creators the answer is the same, understanding of the underlying motivations and choices the characters make. The type of research that I do for my roleplaying is exactly the same as the kind of examinations I’ve done in the midst of my writing and acting and in my job. How does a character define themselves? How does their day to day life work?

I prefer to play characters that are from other times or other worlds, because as I said in my previous post, the past is truly another world. This means that I’m constantly researching small and sometimes odd details to understand how a character might approach something. For instance in a recent interaction, I had a character from the American West offered a deal for a certain amount of money, I had to figure out how much that amount of money would mean to them. This meant that I looked online at various resources about inflation and what the cost of living was in the Arizona in the 1860s, so that I could have my character decide, no this is too much. Simulations are a common practice in education because they put students into a place where they have to consider if I were living or doing something in a certain time or place how would I react? Roleplaying is the same idea but done as a hobby.

In my daily work as an academic reference librarian, I spend my time teaching students where to find the resources they need and helping them to think about how to approach these resources. For me the hardest part of starting a research project is find a specific thesis that I can investigate and craft a paper around. The beginning of this is the same as when I consider a character or a new story, what do I find interesting and what do I want to know more about? Once I have that then I can do the broad work of what’s out there and how can I go deeper? Most of my undergraduate career and graduate work in New Zealand was based around this idea as I did in-depth textual readings of Greek poets and English literature. The joy of research for me is in the little details of everything from how much was a dollar worth is 1868 or why did Pindar make a certain choice in an ode, because as I understand them then I can truly add depth to my writing.

I would like to try and bridge all these various parts of my life and think about how as a youth librarian, I can show that research is simply a way to get into the hows and whys of the past and the present. Roleplaying is personal for me, because it is something creative that I do everyday and so research is part of my work and play. One of the best ways to teach someone to research is to find what’s personal for them and figure out what are the questions and use those. Roleplaying isn’t going to be the answer for every young person but the idea of going deeper into their interests is and then research isn’t a chore but a way of being curious just with different tools.

The power of historical fiction in print or on TV is that it invites you to enter the world of the past on street level and amongst perhaps characters who are even your age. As a librarian, I started to wonder what programming possibilities might be lurking in one of my favorite genres. In college one of my favorite experiences was social watching, sharing a new episode of a TV show together is a simple joy. My thought would be to combine that joy with a show like Leonardo or a book group about a fairly historical series and go from there. With every episode have the watchers pick on something to pay attention to, are they curious about art or clothing? Then before the next meeting, they do some research enough to find out what’s real and what’s not.

As my friend showed in her entry, a lot of these answers are easy to find online, but the joy comes in discussing them. To think about not only why was this presented this way but does it make sense? Was it done because the creators don’t have a large budget or did they change the story to involve more characters? What’s the driving force? As historical fiction or fantasy in a historical setting is a common setting in books and television shows, this could become a long running program with changes of medium depending on what the group finds interesting.

It also draws out ideas about what is important to us as the watchers in terms of what is acceptable to change and what isn’t? In terms of how people interact with media, we all have our points that make us go, no. These are key things that we learn as we’re growing and testing out genres to find out not only what do we enjoy but what pulls us out of a work. To create programming that gives young people a chance to discuss and experience various genres and think about how they work will help them become better readers and writers. At this point in time I don’t have a library to run this program at but someday I hope to as historical anachronism is a gateway to research and discussion brought by statements like, “But he’s wearing sneakers!”

One of the main challenges for me of this course is that by the end of it we have to create a grant. I took this grant as a challenge to design a program that centers around storytelling as its one of my great loves. Today I turned in a draft of a few parts of this grant and I realized that my ideas are in this fascinating place where I know what I want to do, but I need to think forwards and backwards so they fit into the grant format.

I’m also preparing to apply for my first couple of jobs and its exciting to realize how much knowledge I’ve acquired and how many previous experiences led towards being a librarian. When I was in college, I worked for the Swarthmore College library one summer and enjoyed all the things going on around me. I’m also constantly volunteering at my local libraries as they’re truly my favorite places and after college, I had an internship at a museum library. When I did all of those, I wasn’t considering being a librarian, I simply wanted to be somewhere I enjoyed. Its just turned out that they all helped me to get to this place of preparing to step out into the world as a librarian.

The first stages of creating Manga Mania were full of what at times felt like too many ideas and quite diverse opinions such as that we shouldn’t have too much structure or too little. A challenge happened because this was the first time this particular event had gone on and so there were no expectations of how many or what age of children to expect. The North Quad staff was helpful because they had held events in the community space before so knew what was possible within it and that helped us to build ideas around that. After much discussion, we decided to create activities that would work for all ages but aim for the eight to ten range as by observation those seemed the children most likely to appear. On the day of the event, this was true and our predictions were mainly correct. As we had a sense of the age of the children, we then had to think about the activities, here it helped that a few of the organizers had done events such as this before and knew what worked and the flexibility of the North Quad space.

We decided to create a few different stations; illustration and character creation, pop ups and 3D art, and lastly puppetry. In the end a map was created of these stations and represented them as a participant going from their house, character creation, city hall, storytelling and finally the amphitheater for puppetry, face painting and 3D art. This map didn’t fully map onto the arrangement of the room on the final day but did provide a way for children to be aware of what was available for them to do. Character creation was something that I brought up as an idea for a template that the participants could have with them and as a way to think about characters within stories. As a roleplayer in various mediums, I have a lot of experience with how creating a character can stimulate creativity and understanding of how people and stories worked.

As the focus of this activity was to be about manga and art, we planned to include a large space on the paper for drawing characters alongside some basic traits; strengths, weaknesses, name, age, zodiac sign. On the day of the event, most children were proudly carrying these templates that had been filled in off with them alongside 3D art and spoon puppets. A benefit of the space we used in North Quad is that all of the tables are covered with white board, which meant children could draw on the tables or on papers we ended up providing. This made for a relaxed event as everyone was drawing on the tables no matter their ages and sharing what they created. The day of the event things came together wonderfully as slide shows with manga and other action characters showed on screens along the walls, the artists predrew on some of the tables to make things easier and wonderfully inspiring handouts kept appearing with character ideas. The North Quad space has tickers to show words and alongside the already chosen words, character names, skills and qualities were added.

I spent most of the event at the front door where I explained what was happening and helped people find what they needed. One of the disadvantages of North Quad is that its a confusing building and since we had a clearly marked open door for the Book Festival, I fielded questions from many participants. We did have a small issue with our sign and the door but that was something we couldn’t have predicted alongside the strong wind.

I was also able to say goodbye to most of the participants and see what they had created and give them handouts to take with them so they could continue creating. It was gratifying to see how much every child enjoyed the event. I think next year this event will be even stronger as an expectation has been formed of what it is like and parents and children will remember. For me this was one of the best experiences I’ve had since it helped me to learn what it takes to bring such a large event together and what good programming looks like.

I think the aspect that helped me the most were all the various hands-on assignments because they showed me places to start. I know that when someone asks me if I know how to run a book club or a one shot workshop I’ll say yes. If the semester was longer, I would have liked to have time to polish some of the assignments but I feel like I have a start and a good base knowledge.

One of the best lessons I took away was making sure that everyone who might come to your library has a way to learn and feel connected. I think this is one of the trickiest parts of being in the world of public libraries and one of the most important things. Libraries have to be safe and welcoming.

For this last reading reflection, I’ll be reading three articles and then after class tomorrow, my final reflection will be on the class as a whole.

The first article is called The C’s of Our Sea Change: Plans for Training Staff, from Core Competencies to Learning 2.0 by Blowers and Reed. This article looks at how the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County trains their staff and keeps them constantly learning which seems so key. As librarians if we’re not learning all the time, how are we going to encourage our patrons to be more curious about the world. I like that this article starts off with the basic challenges of knowing how to deal with technology and making sure that the staff understand what they’re doing so they can help the patrons. In my own reference work, I know I sometimes am unsure what things I should fix and what I should call for help with since I know how to fix some printer problems but not all. And sometimes the computers do things that I have no idea how to approach.

The author’s discovery that classroom teaching didn’t fit the Web 2.0 tools makes a lot of sense and I find the fact that they worked to get their staff discovering on their own hopeful. It seems such an intelligent way to get people involved in technology and help it become part of their life so its not a strange thing to talk about with someone else. I’m not surprised to read about how a community was created, blogging amongst a circle of people is so powerful and how I’ve found many of my best friends and connections online. This article brings together some wonderful ideas for using free tools to help staff stay connected and learning.

Next I’ll be reading an article by my professor Kristin Fonticharo called Planning an Online Professional Development Module from 2008. The first thing I’m struck by the when needed approach sounds like it makes sense when you’re in a small environment where there is time to train and help. Sadly with budget cuts that time doesn’t exist as much so other solutions need to be found. By using the 23 things created by Blowers and Reed above as inspiration but shifting them to fit a school, a good one was found. Its so inspirational how quickly ideas are passed around in the world of libraries. We maybe a small world in comparison to other professions but we talk to each other. The fact that the teachers asked for chances to do the module when they have more time speaks to just how effective it is that it can be revisited.

The last article for this week is by Semadini and is from last year called When Teachers Drive Their Learning, which seems like the natural place to go after the prior articles. Those looked at how to help get librarians and teachers learning on their own through a module. This program from Wyoming is called Fusion and is built around the idea that teachers will be more active in their professional development if they have control of when and what they learn. A number of options are created and then teacher facilitators work with small groups of teachers to help them learn what they want. The idea of small group learning makes a lot of sense and seems as if it would provide a lot of flexibility to get the teachers together. It seems like this plan is built around creating a comfortable environment for teachers to learn from each other, which seems like the best outcome. As it gets rid of the problem of teachers only focusing and worrying about what happens behind the closed doors of their classroom. The addition of a money incentive makes sense to help get the program moving as it creates extra work for the teachers but its hopeful to hear the teachers note how they enjoyed the program for its own sake.

Professional Development is a constant challenge in any workforce and I think as librarians, we need to be constantly pushing ourselves. If we don’t then we won’t be able to provide ways for our patrons to discover things they might not consider. I like the idea of sharing learning and having constant education going on through online modules that helps librarians connect with teach other.

Elluminate is rather strange, it works but I’m still not sure how I feel about it. My group did our webinar last night and it went quite well. We created a presentation about how libraries can help the unemployed called From Let-Go to In-the-Know, Michigan Libraries Helping the Unemployed. There’s a link to the archived record on my links column. Since we didn’t have any reading and don’t have class this week, I’m going to use this space to write about the experience of a webinar. I was in charge of the chat and so worked to create a discussion that added to the presentation being done by the rest of my group. This was challenging but one thing that helped was we created questions that were in the presentation to engage the chat. Also since we’re one of the first groups presenting people were patient with us, I think we were the second group. Another webinar was done at 6 pm and ours was at 7 pm. We had a small audience of about four people who asked wonderful questions and seemed quite engaged. I think the balance of not just presenting and not just focusing on the chat is the real trick of webinars. I’m not sure if its something that I would rely on too much, it feels like a great way to open a conference up to people who can’t get to it. I’ll be curious to see how the other webinars go.

I want to share something about my work with America Reads that makes me incredibly happy. I’ve been working there since June of this past year and in that time, I’ve inventoried and cataloged the books. Now things are at the point where tutors are going into those records and adding particular searchable references for the literacy objectives that they work with. In the next few weeks, I’m going to be polishing things and putting together a manual and more screencasts to teach when I’m not there.

At first it was strange to realize that other people were doing what I thought of as my responsibility, but now I see how good it is. I picked a system and set things up in such a way that America Reads has a functioning library and doesn’t need a librarian anymore. Instead they can make the changes that they know are best while knowing I’m reachable to help.