What could a library do with a gigabit Internet connection?
The promise of ultra high speed internet looms ever larger in on our horizon. Over at BoingBoing, a comment thread is growing under this question. Replies range from the weary (students will just want more YouTube) to the imaginative (library as free ISP to surrounding neighborhood).
My friend and fellow GSLIS alum Jeff Ginger designed and 3D-printed this Alot for me. I’m so happy to have a new desk buddy! It will also be handy to use as an exemplar when talking about what 3D-printed objects look like.
Tech specs:
See also: Detailed info about printing Spore Creatures from the Champaign-Urbana Fab Lab, in which Jeff is very active as a leader
Related reading:
I’m a big fan of Evernote, as anyone who’s ever asked me for app recommendations can attest. In my quest to never ever use Microsoft Word, Evernote has not only enabled this, but has changed the way I do my work.
It’s marketed as a kind of scrapbook that will stay alive forever. They advocate many uses for it, like a food journal, movie log, vacation planner, research helper, and more. Back in good old 2011-12, I used it to organize and compose grad school assignments; now that I’m employed (hooray) it’s become indispensable for organizing projects — see the image at left for my most frequently used notebooks to get a sense of the organization possible. As a librarian, I compulsively categorize everything in my life.
See that “Done today” notebook? That’s been the best way to keep myself motivated, on track, and productive. It’s my professional journal, where every morning I list out that day’s mini-goals, long-terms goals I’m working on, and tasks I completed. It’s easy to lose track of what, exactly, you do all day, when you don’t have a visualization or documentation.
So for example, here’s how one February day’s entry read:
I use my Apple devices in varying levels of light: in my bright office, huddled in bed, and at underlit conference presentations. I’ve found that the Invert Colors accessibility feature is incredibly helpful in dimmer situations, both to save my eyes from being blinded and to relieve people around me from the distraction of a bright screen. Even at the lowest brightness level, a white screen is pretty glaring.
Keyboard shortcut in Mac: in OS X versions previous to Mountain Lion, the Ctrl+Opt+Cmd+8 shortcut is already enabled. In 10.8.3+, you have to go to System Preferences » Keyboard » Keyboard Shortcuts » Accessibility, where you can turn on the Invert Colors shortcut.
Home button shortcut in iOS: Settings » General » Accessibility » scroll to bottom, set Triple-click Home to Invert Colors.
And if you really want to mess with people when they’re not looking, invert their screen color and crank the zoom waaay up. If abusing your friends is not reason enough to get yourself familiar with accessibility features, I don’t know what is.
Lastly, if you’re looking to relieve your eyes in normal lighting throughout the day, I highly recommend f.lux, which adapts your display according on the time of day (lighter in the morning, warmer/softer at night).
We use Drupal 7 as the CMS behind our library website. It’s robust and flexible, but has a notoriously steep learning curve on the back end. One thing we struggled with at first was how best to direct our users to the databases they have access to. (At this time, CUNY doesn’t have a discovery layer, so students must find articles by choosing a database first and searching within.)
Making a good directory for our 200+ databases required getting familiar with Content Types (specifying categories of content, like ‘database’ or ‘blog post’) and Views (how these fields are presented, like displaying a URL as a link). When you make a new content type, behind the scenes, Drupal adds more tables to its core database, where every field you pick is a column and every piece of content you add is a row.
The full page of our database directory looks like this:
Each database we subscribe to has its own row of information and links, like this:
