But enough about me - what about you?

I'm not one of the mentors (!), but I am on the RAO steering committee, so a) I should have been keeping up better... and b) I've been asked to create the Thing on surveys, and to develop the survey for everyone to fill out, evaluating your experience with this program. It's been quite interesting discovering all the free survey sites that are out there, looking at what you get (and don't get) for free, and then playing with Google Docs to try to create my own. I'm sure a more experienced surveyer could have come up with a more succinct survey instrument, but I hope this one gets the feedback we need before RAO offers 23 Things for Archivists to all of SAA. Thanks in advance to everyone for filling it out. And thanks, too, to Kate and Amy for your editing!

Of course, I have yet to do the results gathering and summarizing part, eh?

I am so impressed with all the time everyone has spent on this program.

Can you be too linked in?

I'm a bit all over the map with my assignments. I set up a Meebo account, which, so far, has just meant that every time anyone with Gmail that I know logs on, I get a popup on my screen. TMI! I am still committed to embedding a Meebo widget on my library's webpage, though, for patron questions. Soon...

I already had a Linked-In account, which I generally doubt the value of. People keep asking me to link to or recommend them, and I barely know them. The oddest yet is a young man who did community service work at the library - and wandered about in a haze most of the time he did his work. But -- just today I got a notification that Kate had posted a link to a really interesting PowerPoint from Cal Lee (http://www.ils.unc.edu/callee/personal-archives-2010-lee.pdf) I would never have seen that otherwise. I found I was less interested in Cal's points (not being an acquisitions archivist) and more impressed by the way he actually made good use of the PowerPoint format to make an effective presentation.

And now I have a Twitter account. I have been a Twitter detractor for some time, so this should be interesting. I found a few folks to follow whose tweets I thought would be interesting. Sort of rushed into it, so I don't even know how I'll get the updates. I'm sure I'll find out! I am one of those people who discovered Facebook a few months ago and have "fallen in and I can't get up." I like the connection to friends in far away places with whom I'd never otherwise be in intermittent contact. I've been discovered by my best friend from ninth grade, which was especially fun. I stay up way too late at night scanning people's posts, so I know I'm hooked. But I'll still have to be convinced of the value of tweets...

I also signed up for everyone's blogs on my Bloglines account. I kept thinking there was probably a quicker way to do this than cut and paste, cut and paste into the the Bloglines "add feed" feature, but I didn't see how. If I had chosen to go with a Google-based feed I could have just clicked to add them, but I didn't want to set up another aggregator when I already had one I was using. Did I miss something?

Off to proctor an exam for a culinary school student at work. But first a stop at the drive-through latte stand (yes, we do have those in Laramie!)

Behind already!

wow - one gall bladder operation (not mine, the husband's) and I'm so many Things behind! Thanks to Kate for the tip on including a URL. It's a link now, but not very elegant. Next time.

At the moment, I'm off to train 9 elderly volunteers at our public library's outpost branch in Centennial WY in the joys of catalog and circ database use. I am dragging along with me Erin, the wife of our very own All-Accessioner. She will share the secrets of database searching. Wish us luck.

Off I go into a very snowy day...

But wait, there's more!

Having said how difficult it was going to be to keep up this blog, already I'm thinking of new posts...

I follow an archival blog aggregator called Archives Blogs (http://archivesblogs.com/). It's an odd assortment of blogs by archivists in the U.S and Europe. The best part about it is that it contains many blogs from the UK, which I wouldn't normally run into. (Unfortunately, I can't read the ones in German or French...) Many of them are clearly for local consumption: fun things from our archives for people at our institution. But one of my favorites is called A Repository for Bottled Monsters. A recent post captured the joys of being an archivist - and of using Web 2.0 to connect with a patron. Read it and see: http://bottledmonsters.blogspot.com/2010/01/why-we-do-this.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ArchivesBlogs_eng+%28ArchivesBlogs+%C2%BB+English%29&utm_content=Bloglines.

Blogging about blogging

OK, this is my second attempt at blogging. The first was a group blog for a group of archivists who visited China last year. No one seemed to want to add posts from that group - maybe I'll have better luck when I'm the only one blogging!

I will admit that so far I've spent most of my energy playing with font colors, adding and deleting photos, and naming my blog. Content? What content? I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what it's like to try to keep adding posts. I have several friends with blogs, and they're irregular posters at best. It's hard to be pithy on a daily, or even weekly basis. I'm enjoying reading everyone else's blogs, though.

Tomorrow I'll move on to the RSS Thing.