Blog

A brief overview of how to write a useful tech support ticket, aimed at an audience of librarians of varying tech levels.

This is one of those posts which I realize has to be done in several parts because it’s going to be very long and include a lot of photographs.

I spent Friday 3/3 and Saturday 3/4 at the Indiana Heritage Quilt Show and related events in Bloomington. It was a wonderful trip and I’m very grateful to the friends who hosted me, since I went down there without anyone. This was my first Quilt Show (I’ve been to auctions, the relief sale, our guild’s quilt show, but nothing like this) and it affected me on a fundamental level. I’ll try to express what I brought home from it. The trip wasn’t just about the show. In fact, it was hearing that Teri Klassen would be speaking about the Polk’s Fancy (see her 2006 article) and what she’d discovered in the decade since its publication that made me decide the drive would be worth it to do both the show and the talk.

Mennonites don’t vote.

That’s what I heard growing up. Not that I was raised Mennonite, mind, but even before I knew enough of the beliefs that I knew I wanted to be one, I knew this one fact about them.

Of course, like any “fact” about Mennonites…it depends.

But it’s definitely a part of our history and our spiritual heritage. My husband says we’ve lost our way, but he still votes. I’m not sure I agree with him about where we lost the way though.

An introduction to the basic concepts of RDF, how it can be expressed, and what its potential actually means. This post is aimed at metadata librarians.

Presentation notes and code from a process used to create a local linked data reconciliation service and augment other local metadata in Fedora.

Follow-up to the Introduction to SQL for Librarians, this tutorial sets you up with an easy online space to practice your SQL queries.

Several years ago, a reference coworker with some technical aptitude sat me down and asked me what SQL was about and whether she could ever learn it. My answer was that, knowing what I did of her work, she probably wouldn’t need to know anything about SQL for her job. But yes, I did believe she could learn it. I think librarians, particularly the ones who spend the most time in subscription databases, have the right mindset to work with SQL.

Four years ago I wrote a post on my thoughts one year after donating bone marrow stem cells. For medical information about the procedure and my experience with it, I refer you to that post. At the time of the post, I had not yet met my donor. I knew that he was still alive but that his health wasn’t yet in a state where they’d introduce us. I signed a form, I don’t remember know if it was right after or a full year after, letting them know I’d be willing to have my info given to the recipient and receive theirs.

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.

[In 2025 I’d say: Buy a Remarkable or other e-Ink 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. My brain recalls—3? Maybe 4? That’s out of 12 classes. I thought that having a Kindle would get me through a lot of PDF reading. Just load it up and read on the train, at lunch, etc. Sadly, I was mistaken.