The Info Babe Turns Thirty...

...and surprisingly, no tears were shed. There was nary even a frown. In actuality, it was a quite good birthday, with my friends and co-workers throwing me a lovely surprise party (one of them, who is a pastry chef, even made me a cake!) I really didn't even need the flood of "30s are the new 20s" sentiments that came my way. I'm 30, and I'm perfectly ok with it.

I have to admit, I'm feeling pretty lucky lately. I finally found myself a nice, geeky boy to settle down with (in fact, he's in the process of moving in with me right now.) I am surrounded by a great family and good friends. I have a job I like (most of the time), and a career I love (all of the time.) Oh, and a cat, a really awesome cat.

I celebrated the actual day like any mature, 30-year-old adult would, with a new tattoo and cheese fries at the diner. Oh, and ice cream cake, of course.

The Next Big Project

So last post I mentioned wanting to get back into working on some of my own pet projects, and I figure I might as well mention the big one at the top of the list.

A professor at my university has a collection of interviews with famous scientists (he's a science journalist, so he taped his interviews for reference when writing them later.) These are mostly on cassette, and in decent condition (although sometimes the sound quality is not great due to background/ambient noise.) This professor now wants to showcase these interviews on his website, so, seeing that he works at an engineering school, he Googled "audio engineer" and "stevens institute", figuring he could find an actual sound or audio engineer right here on campus.

Well, instead he found little ol' me :) I am by no means an audio engineer of any sort, but I do have a masters in audio production (a field that moves so quickly that anything I learned way back in 2001 when I was in school is now sadly out of date...) Also, I have worked on a few audio archiving projects before, namely at Rutgers' Institute of Jazz Studies, and at a poetry library in Manhattan called Poet's House (for which I created a website of audio archiving resources now located at AudioArchiving.net). But these were projects that I was involved in only briefly, as a student in library school, so the idea of working on a project like this from start to finish scares the crap out of me.

In preparation for the project, I have been brushing up on my reading (most notably: Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation, the CDP Digital Audio Working Group Best Practices, and Matrix @ MSU’s Historical Voices.) I have also been taking some CONTENTdm workshops (that's the digital repository software we use.)

I advised the professor in charge to send the cassettes out to a company that specializes in audio reformatting and transcription to convert the files to digital, but I think he is trying to get students to do it instead (NOT the best idea for conistent, superior quality in my opinion, but certainly the most cost-effective.)

So mostly my role will be to import the compressed (probably mp3) versions of the files into CONTENTdm, and to catalogue them. This is pretty intimidating to me, seeing as I somehow managed to skip taking any cataloguing classes in school (there were just so many interesting tech ones to take.... Oops!)

Oddly enough, I think my toughest challenge has been convincing the professor to use the library's software to catalogue and make these recordings available. He seems to think it would be easier and better to just have a student build a website around them from scratch, or just post them on their website (which I guess results in something like this, with no good search interface or descriptive records/pages.)

Ok, I've gone on way longer than I intended. I just wanted to put this out there, in case anyone else is working on anything similar and wants to trade advice, experiences or just complaints!

(Oh, and the CONTENTdm rep recommended that we set up a 'streaming server' for the files. Does anybody have any knowledge/experience with doing that?)

Remember me?

Well, after many months of being m.i.a., I'm finally back in the good ol' web 2.0 mentality, trying to get back into the world of the social web. Mind you, I've been good and active on Facebook, Twitter, feed-reading, etc., and even trying new apps like friendfeed and Digsby, but just haven't found the time, energy or inclination to blog. Go figure.

Anyway, my library's new website is almost ready for the public (the official launch date is July 1st, but the content is pretty much all there, we're mostly just doing user testing and working out bugs at the moment). Yes, this will be a full 9 months after we were supposed to launch, but rebuilding a site from scratch is not an easy task, no matter how badly the powers that be want it to be one...

But with most of the stress involved with the website out of the way, and the campus nearly empty for summer break, I feel like I have a little time to myself again, to ease back into my own projects and pursuits, blogging being one of them (cleaning my desk/work area being another one... I'm ashamed, librarians should be more organized than this, shouldn't we?!)

Turns out we've been hip all along...

I just loved this article in the Washington Times, reviewing Heidi Ardizzone's new book "An Illuminated Life", about librarian Belle de Costa Greene, curator of J.P. Morgan's massive personal (now public) library. Given all the hype lately (does it count as "hype" if it's just within the library community?...) about librarian stereotypes and images, this article does a great job of actually talking about the professional side of this intriguing woman's life. The book is not getting great reviews in general, but I definitely want to learn more about this woman, who proved a long time ago that librarians can actually have (gasp) lives.

I think she may be new my idol... :)

Back in Business...

Well, I'm finally back from vacation, still freaking out about the upcoming semester and the new website... The new students arrived this week, so we've been pretty busy with orientation and outreach efforts.

On an entirely different note, did anyone see Andrew Keen on The Colbert Report? Is it just me, or is his entire persona pretty much pretentious and obnoxious? I mean, I definitely disagree with most of his viewpoints, but I had never actually seen an interview with him, and I didn't realize his whole personality and demeanor were so condescending in general. Ick-o-rama.

And seriously, what is his deal? Can he really believe the internet is killing culture, or is this all just a guy putting on a show to be controversial and sell a lot of books (which would make it kind of ironic that he was on the Colbert Report, no?) I mean, I can't seem to grasp his argument that the internet is putting "real" artists out of business.

What the heck is a "real" artist anyway? I would think the internet just allows all artists to put their work out there, and let the world decide what's good and what stinks. I see it as a great tool for discovering talent and a promoter of the arts. I just can't seem to wrap my head around his argument enough to really find all that much sense in it...

Panic, Setting In...

Well, it's already two weeks into August, and I'm officially starting to freak out. I can't believe the fall semester starts in two weeks! On top of planning our library instruction sessions for the term, as well as our outreach and promotion, we just found out that we are a go on the new website, but the person who will be designing the CMS template (and so basically, the site) will be leaving at the end of September, so we need to be ready to launch by the end of August.

Wait, what?!!! You'd think with all my complaining and scheming and daydreaming that I would be ready for this by now, but when you actually start to put your ideas in motion, all sorts of problems and issues arise. Suddenly we are getting very critical of our planned navigation, and how will we deal with third and fourth-level nav, and what about server stuff, and what are our online forms coded in?! Oh, and we want to overhaul the content too, so new pages have to be created for all the first and second-level links. Yikes!!!

Some issues we've already encountered:

• What to call that pesky database page? People obviously get confused by the term (and rightly so, in my eyes.) So far we've settled on Online Resources.
• What links should go down the left-hand side of the page? These will be our main navigation, and will stay consistent on all pages, so they need to be helpful and fairly self-explanatory. (Right now we're thinking of using Research Tools, Library Services, Special Collections, About the Library, FAQ, and Contact Us.
• What size screen/resolution to design for? Too big and there will be side-scrolling, too small and there's way too much white space. We're thinking 1024x768 might be a good middle ground...

The homepage will also feature a box that gets populated from our blog, and a MeeboMe widget for IM reference.

So, yeah, I'm definitely freaking out a bit here. But alas, my dream of a site redesign is finally being realized, so the scary deadline is also a sign that we will actually get the new site we were hoping for in the foreseeable future.

If anyone has any insight on good library website design, or sites they think are particularly well-done, please send them this way, I know for a fact that I am in over my head, and would be so thankful for any tips!

No Lolz

This is how you know you read I Can Has Cheezburger? way too much. Here is how I "called" in sick last week: