Where I'm at

I've been on a blogging hiatus of sorts lately. It's more by circumstance than design. We've been gearing up for the new semester and I've been trying to get things ready before I leave on vacation. Several things in particular have been occupying my attention, including the rollout of a project I've been working on: the library's fancy new website. We still have a few things to work out, but it's pretty nice. The other big thing is the new responsibility I recently inherited. For this year, I'll be coordinating the library outreach instruction, and I have a lot to figure out in a short amount of time. That goes double because I'm still figuring out how to do my primary job.

Classes start in the morning, and I'm pretty excited to see all the students come to campus. Summer's been great, but fall has always been my favorite time of year. Of course, it's not quite fall yet, and I'm not used to the semester system. Personally, I think it's cruel to make kids start school before labor day weekend, but then, I'm not in charge. In any case, I'm only going to be at work for a couple of days before heading back to Seattle to get my Bumbershoot on; I start driving on Wednesday and should roll into town late Thursday night. It might be an awkward time for a vacation, but I don't anticipate BIs to start heating up until I'm back. So, I'll have four action-packed days at home before driving back here in my new car. It will be nice to actually get to use the vehicle I've been making payments on for the past few months. Plus, having a working radio will make the 1300 mile trip home a bit more fun.

If you're one of my hometown people, I can't wait to see you!

New ideas

A couple of weeks after the all-day planning session at work, I'm still dealing with too many ideas all at once and haven't had time to process much. That might be why I haven't been posting here, but the other strong possibility is that I've just been busy during the days and lazy when I get home from work.

One idea that came up and that I'm very interested in is creating web-based tutorials. My gut instinct is to go with short bits of streaming audio and/or video, rather than using any sort of sophisticated software. I'm hoping to invest some time to go over various options soon. In the meantime, it was a pleasant surprise to come across a post at The Ubiquitous Librarian about using YouTube to create a video channel, rather than just individual tutorials. I'll definitely revisit this post when I start exploring more in-depth.

The other big idea, which is way overdue, is to start offering IM reference at the desk. I'm in the process of pulling together a quick overview of the various IM clients and the multi-network clients like Trillian and Meebo. Again, right when I was thinking about the subject, I read a couple of posts about the new Meebo Me widget that can be embedded in a webpage. I posted about it and added the widget to my other blog. I haven't figured out if the widget could be useful for the department as a whole just yet. I might look into adding it to the library blog, but we'll see.