ah…that feels good…

The campus has been migrating to a new email/calendaring software for the last few months and the Libraries’ turn is finally up!

There has been training galore for Zimbra (the new software) and now we are moving to ‘prep’ mode. When you’ve been using the same email client for, oh, 13 years, it’s quite amazing what you accumulate. They’ve asked us to do a bit of clean-up so the migration goes smoothly. I started to look at the folders I’ve created over the years – some had messages going back to 2000! Guess what? I didn’t need those. Delete. (I’m glad to report I didn’t have anything older than that!)

I found emails with attachments. It was highly recommended that the attachments be saved IF we really needed them. I identified maybe a dozen worth saving. Hundreds of others are history.

The sent mail on our current system doesn’t auto-delete. Normally I go through that about once a year and delete all but the current 2 years.  I decided to be brave, take a risk, and deleted everything except items sent since May 2009.  There’s only 1894 items there now! (I have other sent mail buried in specific folders — can you tell I’m a cataloger?)

My trash is set to auto-delete every 20 days. I get a lot of email…there were 1800 messages in the trash before I started the great purge. When I finally hit the delete key–after my clean-up effort–there were over 6400 items in the trash. Delete. All gone.

I just started monitoring posts from profhacker this week and am already intrigued by some of the posts.

We’ve all attended presentations that drove us mad. I don’t claim to be an expert presenter by any means and I’ve read tips on creating an effective presentation and use of Powerpoint, but this video is worth its weight in gold:

Challenging the Presentation Paradigm (in 6 minutes, 40 seconds): Pecha Kucha

A member of our Preservation Team forwarded the link to a CBS Sunday Morning piece on data rot. It is fascinating! Check it out:

David Pogue on Data Rot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-2vv7Y6Rww&feature=PlayList&p=DC897006C2BF91F2&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=31

I’m hoping my colleagues in 509 are surviving the extra noise today. (509 houses binding, cataloging, serials, acquisitions, several gov docs/mic staff, special collections processing, labeling, preservation, and pr/comm/marketing staff, i.e., a lot of staff in a pod-filled room!)

509 has become a temporary staging area for materials from our main collection here in Hale to our remote Regents Annex in Lawrence, KS. Our local annex has been cleared out (over 260,000+ volumes) and transfer operations start from Hale on Wednesday. We need the space!

Thousands of books have been pulled from Hale during the last 2 weeks to meet the first shipment.  They’ve been sitting on Belger carts (the first few pics from the link) which are now being saran-wrapped, hence one cause of noise. The carts are wheeled from the processing area to the elevator (more noise) and taken down to the first floor near the loading dock to await the arrival of the truck on Wednesday.  Elevator bells have been ringing with regularity for the last couple of hours (more noise).

Life is good. We should be able to stand a little bit of noise – it signifies a new, exciting adventure for us as we move little used volumes to remote storage and make life easier for our sorting staff who’d like to shelve the new books and those sitting in temp locations!

The next shipment in 2 weeks shouldn’t be quite so noisy. Only a few trucks a day will go through this process rather than the 40+ ones we have sitting in 509.  Things will get back to ‘normal’ – though as everyone in libraryland will tell you, there really isn’t a ‘normal’ for us!

My short story “Passages”, originally published in the SWAJ in 1995(!!!), is now on Hyperspace. Yay!!! Pablo said he wanted to get all the Alex or Alex-related stories republished online before the new one goes up later this fall.  “Betrayal by Knight”, which I co-wrote with Patricia Jackson, should be next in the line-up. Then on to the new story, “Shades of Gray”.

I think my 15 minutes of fame has been extended to about 45 minutes. What an honor!  Campus media relations is writing up profiles of employees with ‘interesting’ hobbies. They tweeted about my Star Wars writing and a former K-Stater who works as a Ticket Exec for the Omaha Royals baseball team picked up the tweet. He called me last Thursday and invited me to attend Star Wars night on Friday in Omaha – a charity fundraiser for Make A Wish. So what the heck – I went! Along with Darth Vader and 3 others, I got to throw (or attempt to throw) a first pitch!  Members of the 501st were there, the team mascots had lightsaber duels, Chewie and R2 roared over the loudspeakers.

I invited  ClubJaders (my Star Wars friends) who live in Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska to meet me at the game but it was too short notice for all but Sarah who actually lives in Omaha. The Royals provided our seats behind home plate. It was a fun evening with fabulous weather (low 70s) for this time of year.

My pictures here.  Hoping that their photographer got some better ones (or maybe not) – looks like they got a couple of me. And no… my pitch didn’t hit the catcher’s mitt, but it did hit the dirt out in front of him!! I haven’t thrown a baseball since… since…. hm… maybe 13-14 years ago when my youngest was on baseball team.

So… 45 minutes, eh? I’m thinking 15 for the first go-round of publishing in the SWAJ between 1994-1997; another 15 when those stories began to re-surface on starwars.com beginning in 2004 (I think!), and now 15 more with the profile from media relations that was tweeted and picked up in Omaha. Oh… and one more… the campus student newspaper interviewed me yesterday. agh!

Yes, I’m on Facebook. I’m not a power-user by any means. I enjoy reading the status updates from my friends but no, I don’t want to support your cause or  take a quiz. Oh sure, some sound like fun, it’s just more a matter of time – or rather lack of time.

So I found this article, The 12 most annoying types of Facebookers, rather amusing. See yourself in there anywhere?

… didn’t see any of this:

“All libraries are, of course, petri dishes of simmering lust, but the BL is extreme: its walls contain more erotic pressure than an oil rig, a North Sea fishing trawler and several series of Mad Men combined.”
from the Times Online

I must keep my eyes (and ears) open on my visit next year!

By way of Library Stuff & the Washington Post:   NIH staffers get into the wiki world.

I’ve read a couple of interesting posts on the state of the blogosphere:

Blogosphere 2.0

Blogging is Dead (Again)

I’ve posted previously on the state of my own blog. I’ve noticed over the last few months that many of my blogging friends have significantly reduced their posting, so I know I’m not alone. Most are using facebook and twitter for short updates, so I’m still able to follow them, which is wonderful!

Some of the professional blogs (i.e., work-related ones) I follow don’t appear to post quite as frequently. I still find those extremely valuable for keeping me posted on library and information science news and higher education news.

So… things change, eh?

Immortal? Probably not…

I’ve had a little time today to get to some blog reading that has been sitting in my feed reader forever. I stumbled across a recent post on Copyblogger that I’ve been thinking about a while:  It’s Time to Shoot Your Blog.

Okay. I’m not going to kill it, but I do imagine I won’t be posting any more frequently than you’ve seen over the last year. If I travel to exotic(?) places, you may see me attempt to entertain you. I’ll still use the blog for the annual Christmas recitation of ‘look what we’ve been up to’.  As significant life events occur – Jenny graduates from K-State (May 2009); Jeff turns 21 (today!); Joel goes to Africa (in August); Char changes jobs (??); Char goes on sabbatical (Jan-May 2010!); Char’s latest Star Wars story appears on starwars.com – you may see them noted here. Don’t hold your breath.