Guides and More Guides

How sad that I haven't blogged since June. Since then I've had a vacation in the Black Hills, and have been short on sleep. Two colleagues and I went to Duluth to do a presentation on our high school research. I've also been working on LibGuides, the oh-so-wonderful new-to-us product for presenting our subject guides. It's addictive!

Gotta go - I have to work on a LibGuide for biography.

What I've Been Up To

So, what HAVE I been up to since April? Darned if I know. I know I've been working with students, teaching (talked to a graduate International Marketing class this week), preparing for our poster session next week at the Association of Christian Librarians conference (more on our high school research, and the poster is VERY well done, thanks to Donna!) Transitioning our subject guides to LibGuides. Keeping up with our databases, and reviewing "mine" as they come up for renewal. Had a retreat/strategic planning meeting for our latest reorganization, which is partially triggered by the several early retirements we'll have at the end of the fiscal year. Using up vacation time before the end of June.

I really, REALLY like LibGuides. I treat myself to working in it, when I'm caught up on my other projects. Our goal is to migrate our guides for fall. The business librarians will be meeting in a few weeks to review our business guides, decide who will handle what, and decide which guides can be combined or go away. I've already been looking at the usage and working on some of my guides. I haven't figured out yet how I'll migrate the international business guides: we have eight, which could be trimmed down - but how? Do we need separate international marketing, company, and industry guides? What about country information (used by other disciplines than business)? And the regional guides, which overlap a lot? I'm still pondering this.

In a week, I'm off to the Special Library Association (SLA) conference in New Orleans. I've never been to the city, so I'm looking forward to that, mixed in with my recent dislike of travel and utter confusion about how this conference is organized. Although I've been to SLA more than once, their conference and their online site for it bewilder me. But, onward I go!

Subject guides, netbooks, and Cary Grant

I'm on a task force at my library looking at various options for subject guides (aka research guides, pathfinders, etc.) I've registered for a free webinar that OCLC is doing next week on Library à la Carte from the University of Oregon. I'm glad we're finally going to do something about our guides. This has been one of my interests for years, and I remember being excited some years ago when I first heard about SpringShare's LibGuides. We've needed products like this for a long time, and it's great that there's now competition (I feel like I've been ahead of the pack in MPOW on this for one so long.)

In netbook news, I watched a movie on my netbook this week. Now this is no big thing for many people, but my personal movie-watching time has been quite limited as a working parent, and my chances to play with my netbook haven't been plentiful either. This week my family wanted to watch "Coraline" on the dvd we'd just bought (they'd seen it a week earlier, at the World Science Fiction Convention, but what the heck?) I'd noticed that "An Affair to Remember" with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr was on Turner Classic Movies, realized that we had dvds of both films, and I said, "We can watch one on the TV and one on the netbook. I don't care which one I get." So I got to sit in the comfy chair and watch my movie, while they watched theirs. Very nice.