November came and went on Mastodon, without almost any mention in my timeline of the anniversary of the previous year’s Eternal September. It was such a non-event, I’m only getting around to posting about it now. I’m not sure why the anniversary was passed over in silence; it seems strange. Perhaps no one really wants […]
RSS is really the perfect way to follow an academic journal. Even better, it’s a really good way to follow lots of academic journals. This is particularly true because journals are generally low volume and sometimes irregularly published. They’re also something you only want to dip into when you have a free hour or two […]
Librarians have long been known to focus on literacy skills in their communities. But literacy is of course not monolithic. Besides reading skills, there are plenty of other literacies, such as financial literacy, computer literacy, research skills, interpersonal skills, career literacy, and so on, that librarians have worked on for decades. Robin Davis and I […]
After a lengthy absence, I am returning to Python. This is thanks to my new involvement with CUNY’s Alma Extensibility Task Force, which I mentioned in an earlier post. I am excited. My recent work in JavaScript has been fun and instructive, but I feel more of an affinity for the Python community, and I’m […]
I think I started on Alma from the wrong end. My initial foray into the software was attempting to keep track of the e-resources budget through funds, ledgers, etc. I hated it. It seemed needlessly complicated and very unintuitive. I got very discouraged and doubted my own abilities as a librarian. I sulked about it […]
A couple of years back, I posted about how I had been working on my own SUSHI client. It seemed like a sensible project at the time, but even back then I knew that getting SUSHI functionality set up in Alma would obviate the need for my own client. Now, a couple of years later, […]
Sometimes it seems like there’s way too much work to do. I know this is a bit of a platitude, but it’s such a common experience in so many workplaces, it bears looking into. In my specific workplace, as a former colleague explained, the problem is that tasks are sticky. Once you do something once […]
As a thought experiment, I was wondering if we could easily get our library homepage up and running on a platform other than LibGuides. On the one hand, this seems like it should be pretty easy, as it’s all HTML/CSS/JS. But nonetheless, I wouldn’t be surprised if there would be some problems lurking in the […]
For me, holidays are a time to do a bilan, to take stock and to think about what’s next. In that spirit, here are some augmented reality things I’d like to pursue in our library in the new year: Use AR.js to render text in the virtual space, not just shapes. Explore more of the […]
It is probably very nerdy that I am as excited as I am to join something called the Alma Extensibility Task Force. It’s basically a committee to work with the Alma APIs, and I am totally here for it. There are a bunch of reasons for this: It’s a chance to work with some stellar […]
