Organization Monkey

a creative, beautiful friend from high school died recently and i’ve been slowly processing all that goes with something like that.  brian helped me survive high school chemistry, danced to “rock lobster” on stage with me after dramas and musical performances, and encouraged me through an awful sculpture phase in my art career.  his own path led him to a musical profession and i greatly admired his strength to pursue such an uncertain lifestyle.  i didn’t understand the fragility that was under that surface.

and then along comes today, international peace day, to remind me that we are all fragile and fleeting.  be good to each other out there.

the many social networks i belong to are having a field day with today’s “talk like a pirate day.” enjoy this day for yourself by translating your own communications into pirate-speak. my awesome staff member, nicole, pointed me to this translating service: http://www.syddware.com/cgi-bin/pirate.pl.

here’s the organization monkey’s web page, translated into ‘pirate’:

flickr now allows you to embed a slideshow of your images on a website or blog.  find a set of images you like, click on ‘slideshow’, and then when the show starts, hover your mouse in the upper right hand of the screen and click on ‘share’. you can choose to paste a link on your site that takes the viewer back to the flickr site to play the slideshow or you can paste some code to have the slideshow play right on your web page. i should note that you can’t share others’ images this way, just your own, and you need to be logged in to your flickr account to see the share code.

here’s a slideshow of a few of my images:

no doubt you’ve seen pictures of the presidential candidates’ speeches lately, laid out attractively in word clumps.  these text ‘clouds’ aren’t new, but this particular visualization technique has really caught on lately, especially with the free tool, wordle.  here’s an example of barack obama’s acceptance speech, wordle-style:

what’s nice about the tool is that when you see data like this presented visually, you think about it differently than if you were just reading a transcript of the speech. the creator of wordle, many eyes, has other visualization tools for you to play around with at their site. you may use existing data or upload your own (if you upload your own data, please read the terms of service carefully).

here’s a nice visualization of u.s. active physicians, by state.

Part of my job is to negotiate license agreements for the electronic resources my library acquires. There are always a few sections of a license that need to be rewritten to fit our organization; one of those is the section on defining who is allowed to use the resource, the “authorized users.” The usual language of a license defines an authorized user group as “faculty and student,” but at my university we have researchers who are neither faculty or students, clinicians that don’t have faculty status, etc. I usually propose the following definition for “authorized user”: faculty, staff, student, researcher, and other affiliated user. I don’t usually propose adding “monkey” to the category.

The Metadata Education and Research Information Commons (MERIC): A collaborative teaching and research initiative
Education for Information 25 (2007) 169–178
Sherry L. Vellucci, Ingrid Hsieh-Yee and William E. Moen

Summary: This article describes the development of a clearinghouse for metadata teaching tools. The web hub for resources was developed to prove the need for a place to store, share, and find learning objects related to metadata. The finalized version of this hub is found at http://meric.lis.unt.edu/ , but the server is down as of this writing (Sep 3, 2008). The clearing house is still available at http://www.sir.arizona.edu/faculty/coleman/lc/final/. The Activity page is chock full of examples of tasks used in the classroom to further experience with metadata.