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I guest-posted on Hack Library School about two basic tips for working with patrons with disabilities. Check out the post to see how I broke down two main tips: “People with disabilities are people first” and “don’t assume…” (In some ways the post feels ridiculous in a I-shouldn’t-have-to-write-this way. Of course PWD are people first. But the problem is that a lot of us are brought up with mixed or wrong messages about persons who happen to have disabilities and it can be a challenge to correct those.

I’m in my seventh and final semester of library school and I suddenly have a piece of advice for people who are starting library school this semester: Buy a tablet. Ideally, buy a 10-inch tablet. Doesn’t have to be an iPad, there are a few similarly-sized tablets out there, including a Galaxy model. My library school experience has been what I’d roughly estimate at 90% PDFs and 10% books. Possibly fewer books.

The tl;dr is that ebooks are an important piece of the puzzle that is solving accessibility (large print, audiobooks, ebooks, special software, etc.). Remove that piece, and you remove the ability of a certain group to read those books, or you increase the financial or time cost.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A VERY OLD TUTORIAL. THIS POST WAS WRITTEN IN DECEMBER 2010. It has not been updated except with some images many years back.

There are a lot of awesome ways librarians can communicate with patrons with hearing loss. Email and chat reference remove a lot of barriers. There’s always the pencil & paper fallback in person. But what about on the phone? A blog post on how to take a relay or TTY call and basic instructions as a flier.

As I’ve been in library school, I’ve become more aware of disability and the need for accessibility. Some of this came when I suffered a severe injury that put me on disability leave for a month. I had to use Dragon Naturally Speaking to write my assignments and papers for school and Siri to tweet for me. The full healing process took a whole year and I found myself coping with inaccessible doors, etc.

After having worked on it for the last 7 months or so, I’ve finally finished creating EADiva, a site which functions as a friendlier version of the EAD tag library. In my introductory post on its blog, I note that this isn’t a replacement for the Library of Congress’s tag library or excellent resources. I used the resources from the Library of Congress to create to create the site, although many examples are my own.

I’m working on my field study right now, arranging and describing a collection which had previously been kept in piles on shelves and in boxes. One of my favorite parts of going through the materials is putting together stories which emerge in the materials.

In LBSC 605, Intro to Archives, I did a literature review of articles on blog archival. I found so little that dealt with actual blogging that I had to expand it to blogs and dynamic websites. It was a bit disappointing, but preparing that review reminded me of a little blog that I wanted to save. The Blog In the fall of 2004, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. One of her many concerns became the preservation of family stories, mostly the ones she’d told us as kids or the ones which had been told her by older relatives who were already gone.

Sometimes, during a class, I want to write about something it brought up that is in no way related to the assignments and probably not relevant in class discussion. What’s a girl who owns her own domain, used to work as a Wordpress back-end consultant, and writes her own Wordpress themes for kicks to do? Oh…right. This. [n.b. the site moved from Wordpress to Hugo in early 2020.] Right now, I’m taking two classes: Intro to Archives (LBSC 605) and the Organization of Information (LBSC 670).