RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-09-21T23:44:21Z

You're still young to us, Sharon!

(PS: I hope this post shows some improvements in everyone's RSS reader formatting!)

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-08-28T17:13:17Z

At first I was excited to see Gen X'ers included in the "young" category, but then read further down that one must be under 40 to contribute to the site. Since I was born in the Summer of Love, guess I'm a Gen X Geezer. But I will be sure to stay in touch with her site as a reader. :-)

Sharon

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-08-28T16:09:18Z

Just thought I'd plug the Young Librarian's Series:

http://blogs.tametheweb.com/younglibrarian/2009/08/11/hello-world/

There's some nice stuff and they need to be heard.

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-08-11T19:11:18Z

Here you go! Thanks for all your work under the hood.

(Yours is from the tap.)

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-08-11T19:05:51Z

Bob Watson:

Thanks, Tim. I found myself "unsubscribed" and changed it.

(Wondering how that happened.)

I can't even begin to guess. I'm just glad you found the culprit

Bob Watson:

Can I get you a drink now that you've wandered into St. Jerry's?

Sure Bob, how about something simple. Maybe a draft IPA? Really, anything on tap and cool would be fine.

-much abliged!

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-08-11T17:30:20Z

Thanks, Tim. I found myself "unsubscribed" and changed it.

(Wondering how that happened.)

Can I get you a drink now that you've wandered into St. Jerry's?

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-08-11T00:22:24Z

Betha Gutsche:

I got it the other way round ---inbox alert for "shameless" but not for St. Jerry's. I could have sworn I was subscribed to this thread.

Oh well, I 'll take a glass of champagne anyway.

Interesting.... We're seeing bounces for folks (ie, with non-functioning email addresses) for both threads, so that tells us subscriptions are "technically" working for both those threads. Please check to make sure you are subscribed -- If you see "Unsubscribe" at the top of the first page of the thread, you _should_ now be getting the updates.

If you aren't, will you let us know?

Other tips: Check your spam filter (probably not an issue if you are receiving updates for one of the threads and not another). You an also try toggling (click Unsubscribe, then Subscribe) the setting to see if that fixes it.

These subscriptions were enough effort that we really want it working for everyone.

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-08-10T19:15:19Z

I got it the other way round ---inbox alert for "shameless" but not for St. Jerry's. I could have sworn I was subscribed to this thread.

Oh well, I 'll take a glass of champagne anyway.

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-08-10T18:46:23Z

Indeed! Leastways I got an e-mail for *this* thread.

(And not one for Shameless Self-Promotion.)

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-08-10T18:36:19Z

champagne please. email subscription appears to be working again.

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-06-30T20:05:18Z

It's mint julep time indeed.

(Let's see. I need something to bruise the mint leaves .... Ah ha!)

Here you go.

I suspect attendance *may* be down, but one advantage of Chicago is generally cheaper airfares since it's centrally located. Virtual, of course, has its place (heck, *I* like it) but also its limitations, especially when it comes to being hands-on with vendor products.

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-06-20T00:39:11Z

Well about those email notifications ---it is a known bug, one that crawled in unexpectedly when other changes were implemented. It's in the development cycle for the next install. In the meantime, you can still use your My WebJunction activities to keep up with things. That's where I saw that you had posted here.

St. Jerry's may be sleepy but work sure is fast-paced. ALA is approaching rapidly. I'm excited to be going (I *heart* Chicago) but I've got a lot to do before I get there.

Let's talk about conferences. Do you think attendance will be way down? It certainly was at our state conference in April. I'm noting a trend toward more virtual conference options. I'm seeing it in the corporate world. ASTD has just packaged selected sessions from their recent international conference and is selling the content. How enterprising.

"Missing the conference no longer means missing out on the valuable content you need to do your job more effectively."

Isn't it the season for a tall cool mint julep?

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-06-08T22:15:16Z

No alcohol is always a problem. We were talking the other day at work about Jim Beam now offering a black-cherry flavored bourbon.

I chalked that up to us older folks not taking the time needed to teach younger ones how to drink.

(BTW ... I didn't get an e-mail notification of the above two posts. :-( )

Things have been slow at St. Jerry's, I'm afraid.

Is there anything anyone wants to discuss?

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-06-05T02:57:41Z

without the alcohol? that doesn't sound like us!

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-05-14T01:00:00Z

So, librarybob, that's explains a lot. I see that it was your natural professional affinity that led you to open St. Jerry's and become an online bartender.

This makes me think I could have saved a lot of money and gone to bartending school instead of getting my MLIS.

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-05-12T16:05:36Z

I had a discussion with one of our reference desk paraprofessionals ... who likens his role as being like a bartender. It is. He listens and helps, albeit with somewhat less emphasis on psychology and alcohol.

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-04-07T18:05:36Z

I'm leaning more towards "who is your library?" and why do "they" matter? I don't think we need to know how to decode, but we certainly can help, as Bob says, users, specifically to "focus", as Paul Holdengraber suggested at CiL last week. He described the library's role as one to help "focus" in this age of info distractions.

And I don't think it needs to be just the "librarians" who take on this role, but I think instead we as the "library" provide the tools, platform and "commons" to help the whole community of library users (regardless of which side of the "desk" they're on) to be the "focusers" of information.

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-04-07T17:20:28Z

<rant>

And not just the resources ... the "matrix of understanding" (if you don't mind my combining movies with Brown/Duguid and language theory).

Understanding (leastways of subjects having any complexity beyond Look Out!!!) is done through "languaging." This is social. There is no such thing, excepting in the odd pathological case, of people having personal languages.

Media contain language, with non-print media also containing signs (semiotics). Signs are also social, having agreed upon meanings.

I view the librarian's roles as vastly more than the organized storage of frozen language or signs. That is arguably (I think) all we would need to be except that no one has all of the socializations needed to decode or discriminate between them.

Consider the case where someone is stranded on a desert island with nothing but a library ... written in Greek. Is it, from his/her perspective, functionally a library? No, not really. It is a pile of books. But add one librarian who reads Greek ....

The thing is, *all* of us have subject areas where the topic might as well be Greek. Ask me about Arabian history, genetics, or computer programming and I'll demonstrate how very little I actually know.

The large problem, the intractable problem despite the web and despite things like Wikipedia, is that people do not know what they do not know. Hence, they stumble even more when looking for knowledge about topics where they lack a basic understanding.

Our job is to help. Collections are just the beginning.

</rant>

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-04-06T19:03:20Z

i agree. people *are* resources.

RE: St. Jerry's Virtual Scriptorium ... a new beginning

2009-04-01T17:27:16Z

The thing is, in my view, that we tend to push "the machine" (the collection, real or virtual) over the people who make it work.

From my perspective the people are equally important in "creating" the collection and vastly more important in using it (or in teaching others to use it).

That said ... great campaign idea!