* p.s. yes, i would be a willing (and eager!) recipient of a monkey phone call, if you’re wondering what to get for me this holiday season
i hang the shirts in my closet in rainbow color. well, actually i hang all the white ones on the far left, then go with the reds through the purples, and then close with grays and black shirts on the right. i do the same with my sock drawer. my feeling is if there’s something to organize and make neat, i should organize it and make it neat. and yet, for some inexplicable reason i cannot put a music cd back into the case it came in. i’ll even put two in one case. this makes for road trip music surprises: i pack a cd box full of music i think i might like on a road trip but when i open the cd case i see that instead of u2 i have tom waits. this doesn’t bother me. it makes dave crazy. tee hee.
at the internet librarian conference this year in monterey i heard sarah houghton-jan’s (a.k.a. the librarianinblack) presentation on cultivating technologically savvy staff. as a person organizer (i.e., boss) with quite savvy staff already, i listened eagerly to see what tidbits sarah had to offer. it turns out that what she was talking about was not so much about encouraging just those who are already technologically inclined, but rather creating an environment in which everyone has their own bar to reach.
it’s a brilliant idea, really. the library as a group gets together and decides what everyone who works there needs to know about technology to do their jobs confidently, and then figures out how to train each other to make sure they get the correct information. it serves to offer training to those that may be too shy to ask, and it creates an opportunity for those that know the stuff to show off a little bit. by requiring that everyone adhere to the competencies no one gets out of the training. at the end of the day everyone’s technology knowledge is raised a bit (or a lot, depending on what you didn’t know at the beginning of the day!).
so now it’s time to begin shopping this idea around at my library, making a mental list of things we all need to know, and figuring out how to get started.
Image snagged from SkyMaul, a spoof on the in-flight shopping catalog, SkyMall. As an organization monkey I found this imagined product to be quite tempting. Wouldn’t it be nice to keep your bananas organized?
Summary from Peter Suber’s Open Access News blog. I found his steps 1-4 to be specific and do-able:
Self-archiving advice for authors Stevan Harnad, Cornell’s Copyright Advice: Guide for the Perplexed Self-Archiver, Open Access Archivangelism, September 20, 2006. Excerpt:
Summary: Cornell University’s copyright advice pages are numerous and confusing because they cover everything — from Cornell user rights for the use of other people’s work to the negotiation of rights for Cornell authors’ own work. One can give prospective self-archivers far more specific advice: The “Immediate Deposit, Optional Access” policy (ID/OA):
(1) Deposit all your final, peer-reviewed, accepted drafts (postprints) in your Institutional Repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication.
(2) Set access to the postprint as Open Access immediately if it is published in one of the 69% of journals that are already green on postprint self-archiving.
(3) Otherwise provisionally set access to the postprint as Closed Access and notify the journal that you will set access as Open Access on [Date, one month from today] if you do not hear anything to the contrary.
(4) During any Closed Access interval, make sure your IR has the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button to handle any individual requests for a single email copy — Fair Use — from would-be users who see the postprint’s openly accessible metadata: available for DSpace IRs and for EPrints IRs.
“Prozac, Thorazine, Zoloft is a group of large pillows crafted out of hand latch-hooked rugs, which have been sewn together and stuffed. These soft, oversized anti-psychotics and anti-depressants provide a different kind of comfort than their prescription counterparts. The time consuming nature of the latch-hook process provides a sufficiently mind-numbing effect. Latch hooking is a simple but tedious craft that has traditionally been used to depict idealized and romanticized images from domesticity and nature.”
http://www.laurasplan.com/files/pills.html
mention of the pillows found at BoingBoing–thanks, guys!
Monkeyphonecall.com