Blog

I’ve tried adopting notetaking tools before, even an earlier version of Joplin. But whether it was circumstances aligning or the tool advancing to provide exactly what I needed, this time it stuck. After using Joplin for over a year, I’m outlining why I find it so useful.

A deep dive into the methods I used to estimate institutional holdings for over 5000 journals in the Big Ten. I walk through steps from ensuring I had ISSNs for both print and electronic versions of a resource to the multiple methods I used for querying.

This one’s mostly administrivia, but possibly of interest for those of you who only want a subset of what I post here. A quick guide to the URLs you can use to get sub-feeds from library-specific topics to just the quilts.

There’s a common misunderstanding that the land that was granted is the land that the university is on. But the land grant involved far more land and the displacement of far more people than just the land occupied by the university. Penn State’s endowment, for example, was created through the sale of three quarters of a million acres of the lands of more than 100 other nations, tribes, and bands to our west.

This spring, we tested Summon’s new “Research Assistant,” a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) tool which queries a subset of their Central Discovery Index. This post outlines the few good things we found along with its many shortcomings. It may still be better than random tools they find online, but the bar is in hell.

An exploration of how we are using macros in our current system, contrasted with what we’re getting pitched by vendors. We want to: enter consistent data, avoid typos, improve system design, add conditional logic, and generally save the user repetitive, mindless work. Right now, that seems to require macros.

After so many years, missing her ranges from something raw to something similarly conceptual because I simply have no idea what it would be like to be 25 or 30 or 40 and have a mother. It’s mostly the small things, or the big things that are made of small things that I wish I could with her.

Library workers have an age-old complaint: if anything distracts you while checking in/discharging materials, it’s easy to miss informative popups. Even worse, the next item you scan clears the popup screen while not getting checked in itself. Recently another library blog shared cute documentation that represents an even older solution – audio cues which alert the worker that they need to perform specific actions on the item.

While extremely rare, Nasacort nasal spray can have the side effect of severe anxiety or even suicidal ideation. This post describes my experience going from fully managed anxiety to planning suicide after only 3 days of using Nasacort. I wrote about it primarily so that others experiencing similar side effects can know they’re not alone and that stopping Nasacort was very effective for me in returning to normal.

I manage this site and several of my others using Hugo, a static site generator based on the “Go” language. I’ve learned a little bit about Hugo themes over time, not as much as I used to know about Wordpress, but enough to whip up a few mini site themes from scratch and heavily modify the academic theme I use on this one.

A little knowledge is, of course, dangerous. As I posted on the 15th, I’ve added a quilt module to the site. These publish to the main RSS as well as their own local RSS (thanks Trip K. for suggesting I put the main RSS link in the nav bar). But the metadata fields I’d built to describe the quilts weren’t showing up in the RSS feeds.