I just got back from CALL/ACBD.  I had a great time and am scheming for ways to go to it every year.

This was actually my second CALL conference, the first being in October 2007 for the joint CALL/Northeast regional conference (also held in Toronto.)  As that conference took place right before my birthday, I decided to extend my trip and have a mini-vacation afterwards.

I’m one of those people for whom birthdays are always exciting.   Not because I like being the center of attention – I don’t – but more because after surviving several major illnesses and medical issues in my life, I’m somewhat surprised and delighted to be growing old and still alive.  So I take my birthdays seriously.  They’re always a good time for me to reflect on the past year and make plans for the next.

Back in October 2007, I was wrapping up my second year as a librarian and first year as a legal research professor.   I still really didn’t know shit from apple butter (as we say back home) but I was starting to get an inkling of where my professional interests and strengths lay.  Specifically, I realized that I was fascinated by technology.  Not the nuts and bolts of how things work – I still frequently cite Arthur C. Clarke’s idea that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and am quite content to believe that most technological applications run on magic.   No, what I am interested in is how people use technology to make their lives and work easier and how they use it to connect with each other.

So while walking around Toronto on my birthday in October 2007, I got the crazy idea that I should start a blog.   Just because I like to write and I wanted a place to hash things out when it came to figuring out all this technological stuff.  Maybe meet some like minded people.  And thus The Technological Tortoise was born.

Since you’re reading this that obviously worked out pretty well.

Fast forward four and a half years.  My life and career have taken turns that I never could have dreamed possible back in 2007.   I recently stumbled upon St. Gregory of Tours’ opening lines to his History of the Franks: “A great many things keep happening, some of them good and some of them bad.”   That pretty much sums it up for me too.   Seemingly the only thing that’s the same as 2007 is that I was back in Toronto with time to think and reassess.

The past year has been very, very difficult. (For the JDs among you, it’s felt like the first week of law school for eight months straight.)  Definitely the hardest of my professional life and in the top five of my entire life with regards to non-career stuff.  Which is not necessarily a bad thing.  Triathalons are difficult but people willingly sign up for them because, as I’m told, there’s a joy to be found in extreme physical exercise.  (Personally, I wouldn’t know about that.  Every now and then I have to run a block to catch my train and then my side starts to hurt and then I’m pretty much angry the rest of the day because of it.)  I haven’t discussed  much about the changes I’ve gone through in the past year (or talked about much of anything) because I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve while writing and I didn’t want to produce the blog equivalent of an image of a person crossing the triathon finish line with feces running down their leg.

SERIOUSLY. WHY DO PEOPLE DO THAT TO THEMSELVES?  TRIATHLONS DO NOT LOOK FUN OR HEALTHY.  But I digress…

In my analysis of my life and career while walking around Toronto, I realized that one thing I really miss about my old job is the chance to directly help people.  I mean, I help people every day in my current job but it’s a more general distributed help.  I miss the “someone asks me a question and then I give them an answer” type of direct help.  I also miss writing/blogging but I don’t know that I’m quite ready to get back in the saddle full time.

I think I have a way to scratch both of these itches.    Presenting…..

The Boss of You

I’ve been threatening to do this for a few months now – basically, it’s an advice column for libraryland.  Tough love type of advice about careers, intra-library staff issues, patrons and life itself.   This is sort of a soft roll out for it. (And a waaaaay buried lead.)  As with a lot of things in my life that I try, who know if it will work or if anyone will take advantage of it, but you never know until you try.   So if you want me to tell you what to do, shoot an email to bossofyoublog AT gmail DOT com.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andreyca/4517068920/

I was an academic law librarian for a little over five years. I was very happy in my career, but in retrospect, things didn’t always…fit. Then one day out of the blue, John Mayer offered me a job as the Director of Content Development at the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI). Actually, it was a lot like  Charlie’s Angels except John doesn’t send me out on secret missions where I have to dress in elaborate costumes and then beat people up.

Yet.

I’ll leave it up to you, Gentle Reader, to decide if I’m still a librarian or not. I feel like what I do in my job furthers what are (or should be) the one of the ultimate goals of libraries and librarians (i.e. making information available and accessible) and I also use more of my librarian hard skills (e.g. knowledge of information containers and needs of users) than I did as an “official librarian”, but I also feel very disconnected from Libraryland.  As I mentioned in my year in review wrap up post, I lost my tribe last year and I’m still struggling to figure out where exactly I am welcome and who my people are.   I notice on the Library Day in the Life Round 8 List that just about 1% of participants work for a vendor or publisher so maybe I’m not alone in my struggles.

As in past years, let’s start from the very beginning of my day.  To wit, I wake up.  I’m still not a morning person and I still greet each morning and the fact that I must get out of bed as an unspeakable tragedy.  After a quick check of email and slug of coffee, I start my day.   One surprising benefit of my new job is the wardrobe.  All my previous jobs were business casual at a minimum and on days I taught I aimed for professorial.  Now…I basically have to be clothed.  It’s amazing how the freedom to wear  jeans to work makes mornings so much easier.  (And on days where I’m not quite feeling well or have things to do at home? I can telecommute.  SCORE.)   I rely on public transportation for my commute – which was a huge adaptation – but I’ve now got my system down where I know when I have to leave the house to get to the train station without having to rush.

I hate having to rush.

Especially in the morning.

After a (leisurely) 20 minute walk and 17 minute train ride then a 5 minute walk, I arrive at my office. I’m still not really awake at this point and would just assume avoid all human contact, so I hide in my office and check my RSS feeds (which cover web 2.0 news, education tech news, legal information blogs, AALL listservs and some library blogs) and my twitter feed.  I had a hard time at first deciding if it was appropriate to spend time at work doing this – when I was an academic librarian I chalked it up to “professsional literature” time.  But now I realize that I still need to stay up to date with trends and news in these worlds so that my employer can direct its activities accordingly.

As for the rest of the day, it depends.  I have some pretty divergent job duties and I’m like an iPhone…I do one thing at a time and do it well but trying to run multiple things at a time…just isn’t a good idea.  So to pick one day and just list its activities wouldn’t quite be a full picture.  The following are all activities that I did during the Day in the Life Round 8 week, grouped roughly by subject.

CALI  Lesson Editing/Sheparding

The product that my employer is most known for is its lessons.  These are written by law professors and librarians and cover a wide range of topics.  They act as study aids and course materials/supplements for law students.    I oversee the Legal Research lessons, which are about 15% of the total amount of lessons we offer.  I didn’t realize how much quality control was done on these lessons until I had to do it.  This week I…

• Received reviews from our editorial boards of some lessons that are in the pipeline.  We use an anonymous peer review system, so I went over the reviews, stripped out identifying details and sent them on to our authors.
• Prepped some legal research lesson proposals for initial approval and review.   We have rounds of legal research lesson proposals and one ended on Friday, February 4.  This led to a flurry of activity in talking to prospective authors, making sure their proposals had all the required parts and then getting them posted to an internal site where a committee of law librarians can review and offer comments on them.  (I’ll have to being the process of trying to organize a conference call with 9 people on Monday.)   Some proposals are accepted, some are accepted with proposed revisions and some are rejected with encouragement to resubmit with changes.   It’s definitely not a cake walk to be able to author a lesson for us.  If lessons are accepted, I’ll draft a contract and send it off to the author.
• Wrote up and sent off a contract for a lesson revision, which was the culmination of a process similar to the above, but not quite as arduous.
• Processed a contract from an artist that we use to create the drawings you see in the lessons.  If you ever want to see them, as part of the contract CALI puts a creative commons license on them and then posts them to flickr for anyone to use.  Check them out and help yourself.

That’s pretty much all I did in the Legal Research lesson area this week.  Some weeks if I have a new lesson coming in I do a review of them for content and then send my remarks to the author for either required or suggested changes to the content  of a lesson.  If it’s a lesson towards the end of the editorial process, I go through the lesson’s images and contact the copyright holder of them (for example, screenshots of a Westlaw database would be owned by Thomson Reuters)  and ask for permission to use.

eLangdell Publishing

People think it’s a new function of CALI, but really the eLangdell open  publishing project has been going for about six years now.   I actually spent a large amount of time working on eLangdell stuff this week.  Generally, my part of our production process is to take the manuscripts towards the end of the production process, after they’ve been checked by an outside proofreader for grammar and punctuation, and do the transformation from MS word doc to the formats we distribute in (more about that later) and do clean up of them in these formats.  This week was a slight change in that.  So this week I…

• Spent A LOT of time editing an epub manuscript.   For various reasons, we don’t have this manuscript in word, so I’m doing both the grammar/punctuation/bluebooking editing as well as the physical editing of the code so that it works right in various electronic formats. (No hanging or missing tags, links work and go to appropriate sources, etc.)    I am not a natural grammarian OR bluebooker, so it’s taking me some time to work my way through it.
• Put the finishing touches on another manuscript and got it posted to our “bookstore.”  I get really excited every time I release an ebook into the wild.   There’s definitely something to be said for producing an actual “product” that is much more satisfying than answering a reference question that may or may not help.  This particular publication was about the Rape Shield Rule in evidence and I’m not going to lie…I am really glad to not have to read the details of rape cases anymore as well.  That really put a damper on the week.
• We’re really committed to “open” at CALI and that means we make our books available in as many formats as possible…even print.  Printing ebooks sounds counter-intuitive but part of being a technologist is making sure that the technology is not becoming an barrier to the information.  We’re in the process of setting up a store at Lulu so that people who absolutely want print versions can get them at cost – we’ll receive no profit from this.  (I got to see beta versions of this and they look really good!)  But this leads me to my point…when you work for a publishing company, you have to think about EVERYTHING as part of constructing books and ebooks. In this case this week, it was…”oh. If we’re doing this in print, where should be put page numbers?”   PAGE NUMBERS.  Who’d have thunk?
• eLangdell is really a team effort and so every week we have a conference call with “Team eLangdell.”   Even though we constantly email and IM each other (or  in the case of Austin and Deb, we just pop into each other’s offices..but still mostly IM), it’s nice to take an hour a week and touch base and sort things out.  One library centric topic of discussion was how to get eLangdell titles in library catalogs and whether or not libraries would want to purchase physical copies or store electronic ones in IRs.  So I still have meetings…but just an hour a week.  HA!

Community outreach/education (and Booth Bunnying)

When I was offered my job, John made it clear that I could still be in AALL and should still be active in the profession.  It’s good for me to stay involved with what  the trends in librarianship are and that makes it good for CALI because we can adapt accordingly.   I’m not going to lie..there is a slight marketing benefit to me being out and about, but as I said in my Booth Bunny post, this ain’t Glen Gary Glen Ross here.   I don’t want to cross into creepy treehouse territory with my conference presentations, so basically as part of my own personal code, I only mention CALI products in presentation if I would have anyway. To that end…

• I have two conference presentations in March.  I’ve been in denial about such things but I promised myself that as soon as February got here, I would start thinking about what exactly I was going to say.  I have an idea, but am still very much in brainstorming mode.  When I pick a powerpoint background is when Things Get Going.  I also really need to book my travel, but I am terrible about doing that.
• I am also a lecturer in CALI’s Topics in Digital Law Practice MOOC.  I am REALLY in denial about planning for that.   I only have a half hour for the topic of “free legal research” so…yeah.  I’m torn between doing a straight skills lecture or bringing in some of the history and challenges of the free law movement.
• Agreed to do a workshop on ebook production at our conference in June.
• Submitted a volunteer form for AALL committees.  I cut down on all of my professional activities and committees when I started at CALI because I wanted to get my sea legs and wasn’t sure how much time I had to devote to such things.  I still don’t have a lot of time, but the committees I volunteered for seem like they would be a good fit between my professional and personal interests.  We’ll see if I’m picked, I guess.  At least I don’t feel the desperation of “I need this for my CV!!” like I used to back when I was an academic.  No matter what, I still am in the Library Consumer Advocacy Caucus, although not as active as I was.

In there I spent an entire day stuffing envelopes with our CALI awards.  This is normally a student worker job, but we’re currently inbetween workers and in a small organization (just 7 employees total) everyone pitches in and does what needs to be done to makes things run.  I never think myself too good to do any type of work – I dusted books, rewired study carrels and picked up used kleenexes filled with mystery substances when I was a practicing librarian, so stuffing envelopes is nothing.  And it gave me a nice opportunity to zone out and think about my presentations.

So that’s pretty much it.  Am I still a librarian?  I don’t know.  But if I’m not, what am I?

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jhoweaa/

Why would you want to make eBooks? They are a lot easier to read on tablet computers than a PDF, so if you’re taking the time to type up a research guide or something similar in MS Word and then PDFing it for web posting, you might as well take another 15 minutes and make an eBook out of it.  But there’s also lots of government information out there that you can scrape and make into a new, more usuable product – either for benevolent or not so benevolent reasons.   For example, if you’re an academic law librarian, imagine taking your state’s Rules of Court, making them into a nice ePub, putting a cover on it saying “complements of Jane Smith Law Library, University of X College of Law” and then sending it out to all of your alumni.   Or substitute “firm librarian” for academic and “practice group” for alumni.  A more benevolent example would be to partner with your faculty members that assign statutory supplements for their classes, offer to make them and distribute through library website and save the students about 100 bucks per class.

Really, once you start looking around, you’d be surprised about how much you can transform into an eBook format.  And it’s sort of fun. When my co-worker Elmer showed me how to do it, I sort of went into a crazed “I WANT TO EBOOK THE WORLD!” mode. Hopefully you’ll keep it together a little more.

So, everyone excited about making eBooks?  Excellent. Let’s do this.

There are several ways to create eBooks.  This is just how I do it.   A basic over view is that I  transform a word document into an .epub ebook.  Epubs can be read on iPads, iPhones, android tablets, Nooks…basically anything but a Kindle.   The .epub version of the manuscript is then transformed into a .mobi format and this can be read on a Kindle.   You don’t have to have an account with Amazon, iBooks, Barnes and Noble etc. to distribute your ebooks after you create them.  If you can link to a file like a PDF, you should be able to upload the .epub and .mobi files the same way and provide links.  When a person opens the file on a tablet, iPad or phone, they will automatically be able to view them like a commercial eBook through the eBook viewer of their choice.  I don’t know how or why this happens, so I just chalk it up to magic.  Otherwise, they can download the files and manually put them on their device.

You’ll need the following pieces of software downloaded to your computer (assuming you start off with an MS Word manuscript to transform into an eBook.) All of them are free and open source, with the exception of MS Word.

1) MS Word
2) Open Office, an open source version of MS Word http://www.openoffice.org/
3) The Writer2ePub plugin for Open Office http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/project/Writer2ePub
4) SIGIL, an ePub editor http://code.google.com/p/sigil/
5) CALIBRE, an eBook viewer that allows us to convert ePubs to mobi http://calibre-ebook.com/

1) Get manuscript in MS word. This can be something you typed up, something from a public domain or Creative Commons licensed source…basically, I feel like I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that you should make sure you’re not violating copyright laws by transforming and distributing whatever it is your going to make an eBook.   As an example, here’s the offerings of the Indiana Court system.  Look at all those Word documents just waiting to be transformed!

2) Download and save the MS Word manuscript.

3)Then open up Open Office and open the MSWord manuscript in Open Office.  Save it as an .odt extension, which is the Open Office Open Document Extension.

4) The Writer2ePub extension will appear as a green e button on the left hand side of Open Office tool bar.  Press the Writer2ePub button and it should generate your ePub. (You may have to close Open Office and reopen the .ODT version of the manuscript. I have no idea why it gets fussy about this.) A dialog window will pop up and ask about cover art and author/title metadata. You can skip the cover part for now.

5) The ePub of your manuscript should be saved automatically to your computer and it will have a SIGIL icon on the ePub one. (Instead of how word documents have the Word piece of paper one.)
(6) When you open the .epub Manuscript in SIGIL, you can edit it either in the WYSIWYG “book view” or if you are familiar with HTML, the “code view”. But really, at this point, it’s an eBook ready for viewing on nooks, iPads, iPhones, android tablets…anything BUT a kindle. For example, even footnotes transfer through the conversion and jump back and forth.

WYSIWYG view:

Code view:

(7) SIGIL lets you manipulate it if you have special requirements. At CALI, we take this time to add in our own CSS style sheet (ePubs are basically mini-webpages) so the fonts look pretty and so that cases that appear in the books have special formatting. We also add a .jpeg cover art.   Under the “tools” heading on the toolbar there’s a metaeditor so you can add in metadata like title, creator, date, etc.

Also, sometimes the transformation isn’t perfect.  In this example, the Table of Contents didn’t transfer through cleanly.  No problem..SIGIL can create a Table of Contents based on the headings.  To do this, I just went through the document and applied headings (by highlighting and then selecting heading size) to the sections of the manuscript.

And then SIGIL can generate a Table of Contents based on this by clicking “generate TOC from headings”.

(8) To make it kindle compatible, I upload the saved eBook epub file in Calibre. It has a “convert books” button on the top of the tool bar and it allows for conversions of .epubs to a variety of formats. The .mobi format is the one that Kindles can read.

I do this now a lot, so admittedly I’ve got the system down, but it takes me about 15 minutes from MS Word to .mobi, assuming that there’s no major editing that needs to be done in files such as fixing links or headings or changing the style.

The above assumes that you’re working from a pre-written MS Word manuscript.  You can always start with SIGIL and type right into it.  If you have webpage that you’d like to make into an ebook, you can click “view source” on it, select all the code you see there, copy it and then directly paste it into a SIGIL file’s code view. Just delete everything there and paste the webpage information over top of it. Here’s how to get the source code of a webpage  if you’ve never done it before.

So that’s the basic process. I hope it was somewhat helpful and if you have any questions or have suggestions, please don’t hesitate to ask/offer.

 eReaders photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/libraryman/

I have been admittedly in a bit of an academic bubble.  Sure I had heard about (and skimmed) the Carnegie Report about legal education and knew that more practical legal education was needed, but wasn’t quite sure what that meant.  That started to change once I moved up north.  I could go to events like the ABA tech show and then once I started at CALI, I really got exposed to some of the new advances in legal practice.

Virtual law practice.  Unbundling. LegalZoom. Open law. Even social media. These are all huge changes that are affecting the way law is practiced in the 21st century. Unfortunately, not many law schools are touching upon the subject and to hear experts talk about it costs a lot of money, either through CLE costs or conference attendance fees.

CALI is giving people the chance to learn about these topics from the WORLD’S experts on these topics. (And it is seriously not hyperbole to say that about them. Except for me. I mean, I’m not bad, but I’m basically on the program because I work here.)  Best of all?  We’re doing it for free.  FREE.  Starting February 10, a MOOC (massive open online course) on Topics in Digital Law Practice will be offered.   Registration and a speaker list can be held found on the TDLP Website.  The classes will be held Friday afternoons, but if you’re busy then or don’t care about watching live and asking questions, the screen casts will be posted later to the website.

Please please please think about participating in this. Not because we’re trying to get our numbers up but because I really think this is a fabulous, one of a kind learning opportunity for law students, law librarians, law professors and even practicing lawyers.

I know of at least one law school that is hosting group viewings for students (with cookies!) and I think that is a great idea!  Feel free to do that.  If you are a firm librarian, maybe you can do that too and provide an excellent educational opportunity for the attorneys you support and learn about the changes yourself.   Law profs?  Maybe you can adapt some of these lectures for your own classes (or just show them.)  And I know I get a lot of undergrad academic librarian readers here – if you support a pre-law program, these recorded lectures are going to be a valuable insight into how law practice is changing.

I really didn’t have too much to do with the creation of this MOOC, but I’m still very proud to work for an organization that provides such a wonderful learning opportunity for the community.  It’s a good feeling.

Just in case you like to keep abreast of my writing, I wrote a post for my employer’s Spotlight blog on ebooks and recent developments about them.   It’s called The Enhanced Book. Check it out!

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidortez/

Holy cats, y’all, I had no idea.  Maybe you have no idea.

I got it in my head today to look up the 1L second semester schedule at a law school here in Chicago and then go to their bookstore and see how much they would cost. Grand total for required and recommended texts for four courses purchased new from the bookstore?

$969.00.

NINE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-NINE DOLLARS.

I honestly felt a little nauseous when I added up the numbers and got the final amount.  And I didn’t even have to buy them.  Now, granted, there are lots of ways to cut back on that cost….buy used or rent, not get the recommended text, shop around online.  But still.  Even if you manage to shave 50% off of your cost, that’s still about $500.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I work for a non-profit publisher that’s creating free casebooks for law students.  But I don’t want this post to be an advertisement for that and that’s not why I wrote it. (I keep that sort of stuff on the blog I write for them.)  I’m really just sharing this because I was honestly stunned at how much textbooks cost once I saw some concrete numbers.

So, if you work in a law school – or any branch of academia, really – check out the book store and look at the prices of the books.  I mean, really look at them.  You might be surprised by what you see.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidortez/

The CALI.org Swag Table

It has been mentioned to me, on more than one occasion by more than one person, “I never thought I’d see you work for a vendor!” Well, yes.  I have thought the same thing myself.  Life is a rich tapestry of surprises, I guess.

Before we get too far into this, I probably should mention that my employer is not a vendor, but rather a consortium of over 170 law schools and other members that “advances global legal education through computer technology, employs research, collaboration, and leadership to assist a diverse audience in the effective use of this technology in legal education, and promotes access to justice through the use of computer technology.”  (That’s the CALI mission statement, by the way.) We do create products for our members, true. But we give them away. To the members. Who have to pay for a membership.

Listen. It’s confusing, I know.  I thought CALI was a vendor, albeit a non-profit one, until my first day of work and I got the consortium of law schools speech.  I’m not going to argue semantics, least of all with the person that signs my paycheck.  So if you ask me about working for a vendor, that’s okay…but it’s technically not true.  I really only bring this point up because it does slightly inform the rest of this blog post.

I’m saving up discussing the main part of my job duties for “Library Day in the Life” week later on this month, but I thought I’d write separately about the one job duty that I was dreading the most when I took this job….working conference exhibit halls.  Or as I like to ironically refer to it, “being a booth bunny.”  I say ironically, because if you’ve ever been to a conference/convention exhibit hall, especially one that caters to people that have more money than librarians (e.g. ABA Tech Show), you would see that many companies hire booth minders that (a) ooze personal charm and (b) are very conventionally attractive.   I mean, I’m not hideous, but I don’t really fall into either one of those categories.

If you’ve been around here for awhile, Gentle Reader, you know I have a somewhat complicated relationship with vendors and swag.   When I was a practicing librarian, I always felt that exhibit halls had almost a of reek of desperation about them…coming from the booth minders who – if you made the mistake of making eye contact – would pounce on you and try to get you to sign up for something as well as from the frenzied swag hoarders who would go booth to booth collecting pencils and tchotchkes until you just wanted to shake them and yell, ‘SHOW SOME DAMN DIGNITY. IT’S JUST A PEN, FOR CHRISSAKES.” (And yes, I was one of those people once, I must admit.) I pretty much avoided exhibit halls altogether by the end of my tenure.

So, to say I was dreading this duty was putting it mildly really.  I don’t schmooze well.  I’m pretty introverted. (And I know it probably seems like I beat this dead horse in every blog post, but I really hate the idea that someone is going to think I’m mean or rude or don’t like them when in all likelihood I really am just not up to talking to someone right then.) I think most swag is a waste of materials and money.  I hated the idea of being a ‘sales’ person.  Really, when I see it written out here, I do wonder why I ever agreed to do this in the first place.

It is with much surprise and relief that I can report that I actually really like being a booth bunny.  Really, really like it.

In many ways, I have it easy because CALI *is* a consortium of law schools (and other related entities) and pretty much every law school in the country is already a member.  So while it is amusing to think of my mild-mannered boss in a Glengarry Glen Ross scenario with him yelling at us pre-conference to sign up more members and, like, throwing a coffee cup at Elmer‘s head or something as he storms off, that’s not really how things are at CALI.   We aim to keep our members happy.  We’d love to sign up more members, but the ones that we could sign up would either pay nothing (government libraries) or a ridiculously cheap membership rate (law firms, foreign law schools, etc.)

I found that in many ways, booth bunny-ing is not that different from being a librarian.  I was basically telling people, “Here’s stuff you already pay for.  Let me show you how to use it and/or how it could make your life more awesome.” So it scratched that itch I have been feeling since I left librarianship. Not completely, but it was fun to be back in the training/explaining mode for a brief period.

The other happy surprise was how much fun it was to talk to people.  You know how at conferences you run into someone in the hall between sessions and you chit chat and then move on or grab a cup of coffee or dinner and these discussion often end up being the best part of the conference?   That’s what I spent most of my time doing! And I didn’t even have to move! I just stayed in my booth the entire time and a steady parade of friends and acquaintances streamed by and basically kept me entertained all day.  (And when there were no “customers”, I talked with my co-workers, who are also a highly entertaining group of people.)  I just wish we had couches or bean bag chairs to hang out on.

As for swag, yes we give some out at our booth, but you don’t have to listen to a presentation or sign up for a newsletter to get it.  My inner environmentalist does worry about the waste, but CALI has a long standing tradition of giving out swag that is aimed at the kids left at home while their parents are at a conference, so I like to think it’s well loved and used swag.  This year, in honor of our own interlocking plastic building block themed conference this year, we have a build-your-own Lego minifig station and other Lego items scattered around the booth.  I wasn’t sure if people would like it, but it turned out to be a pretty popular and successful giveaway.   And, as I also learned, there’s a bit of swag-swapping amongst vendors, so we were popular with the other exhibitors as well.

I can’t say I love everything about Booth Bunny-ing…business travel isn’t as fun or glamorous as I thought it would be when I was growing up and prayed fervently for a job that would let me travel and standing around in cute shoes makes for one tired bunny by the end of the day.  But it’s not horrible and actually quite enjoyable.   Now that I survived my first major conference (AALS) as a booth bunny, I feel like I’ve unlocked another achievement on my way to figuring out this new gig.

Um. Yeah. That didn’t quite happen.

The past year hasn’t been a bad one by any stretch of the imagination.  Actually, it’s been quite good and huge improvement over 2010.  2011 ain’t been boring, that’s for darn sure.

I tried to be boring.  I really did.  The first six weeks or so of 2011?  Super, super quiet.  I hunkered down and really concentrated on doing the best I could at my job.  I pried myself away from my computer and got some hobbies aside from ranting at people on the Internet. I mean, Thompson Reuters could have announced that they were merging with Lexis and I wouldn’t have really batted an eye.

It was kind of nice.

It didn’t last.

A quick summary:

• Early in the year, Harper Collins announced they were going to limit libraries’ ability to circulate ebooks to 26 checkouts.  Essentially, instead of “owning” an ebook, libraries were only being offered a one year license.  That shook me out of my fog and I wrote “We All Live Downstream” which is one of my more favorite things I’ve ever written but no one seemed to pay attention to it so I’ll just shamelessly link to it again here.
• AALL hosted a Vendor Colloquium.  I wasn’t invited.  But that’s okay, because I could watch the live stream and follow tweets OH WAIT NEVER MIND.  I don’t know what long term effects that meeting had/will have on librarian-vendor relations, but it did seem to act as a wake-up call to AALL and they are making an effort to be more open and transparent.  So yay.
• Because of the above two, I met Michael Ginsborg, a firm librarian from California.  Eight months after that first phone call and a ton of hard work from Michael and a bunch of other librarians, the AALL Consumer Advocacy Caucus was born.

Then things got really exciting.

• I went on an amazing retreat in Cambridge, England where I spent an intense week discussing the meaning of higher education in America and considering what my role in the academy was.
• I got invited to the OTHER Cambridge – the one in Massachusetts – and attended the Future of Law Libraries Workshop at Harvard and basically had a master class in the history and culture of law libraries.  I got to meet Bob Berring and I didn’t say “fuck” in front of everyone when they actually let me take the podium and speak, so I was pretty thrilled with the day.
• What made both of these events EXTRA interesting is that in the middle of them, John Mayer offered me a job at CALI pretty much out of the blue.
• I got to be on a panel at AALL to discuss law.gov with sort of an amazing line up of speakers.
• And I won an award! Which I’m still thrilled and shocked about.  (It may seem a little tacky and humblebrag-y to mention this, but I never win awards! And I’m still shocked! Write your own year end summary if you don’t like mine.)
• I moved to a new city (Chicago – and I’ve never lived in a big city before) and started a new career (the details of which I wasn’t exactly clear on at the time I agreed to it.)
• I hosted a British law librarian that I met via FriendFeed for  week as he toured around Chicago area law schools, which was a fun cultural experience for me too.

Yeah. It hasn’t been boring. And y’all don’t even know about all the private life stuff that I don’t ever publicly talk about!

I think 2011 will be remembered by me as the year where I had to make a lot of really big decisions in a really short amount of time.   I think I did okay.   I’m very content, at any rate, with occasional trips into outright happiness.  Which is not to say that I don’t miss being a librarian – I do, sometimes so much my chest aches a little.  I loved the actual work of the job and interacting with law students, and also because my identify as a librarian was so important to me and now it’s gone; I feel like I lost my tribe and I’m not quite sure exactly what my new tribe is or who all is in it.  I mean, I’m not wandering the desert alone like the guy in Kung-Fu, by any means, but I definitely feel like I’ve lost an automatic entry into some spaces.

As you may have noticed, Gentle Reader, I don’t blog (or tweet. or Facebook. or Friendfeed. etc.) as much as I used to.  Partly it’s because I am still figuring out when it’s appropriate for me to join certain public conversations, partly it’s because whatever itch was getting scratched by blogging etc.  in the past is being satisfied in other ways, and partly it’s because I have better things to do.  That last bit is not a comment on the value of professional blogging – even the kind I do that sometimes feels like me vomiting out my thoughts and feelings on a subject instead of substantive “reporting.”  I think all blogging (and other dialog avenues) are important in their own ways.  The fact is that I’m really quite shy and introverted and in order to get up the requisite head of steam to write something for public consumption and then steel oneself for the reactions and interactions…man, that just harshes my buzz and takes time away from things I’d rather be doing and people I’d rather be interacting with.  And I honestly just don’t care about a lot of things that don’t directly impact me on the day to day right now.

(ETA: I think Jason Scott [who I get to meet next summer at AALL! SQUEE!] sort of summed my feelings up in a blog post I saw after I hit publish here. “These days I’m the Archive Team Guy. I’m the Archiving/Preservation Guy. My speeches are still fiery, my rage is still in effect, and my boundless need to make things better and more accessible still burns bright. It’s just getting things done now. I like being this guy. I think I’m going to stay being him.” I’m maybe not as fiery or ragey, but I’m getting things done which is a better feeling outlet than blogging about what I’d like to see happen.  )

So, 2012?  Who knows. I think it’s clear that I suck at making predictions or plans.  And another thing I’ve learned this year is that sometimes the big things don’t really appear to be big at the time – and good things happen completely randomly and without any expectation of it at all.  So I guess my only plan for 2012 is to be open to possibility.

SO. Anyway, a little over six months in, and I’m declaring LISvendor.info to be a fabulous success.  Granted, my definition of “success” was “someone other than me adds to it” and “I don’t get sued.”  I’m pleased to report that people are slowly starting to use it and I haven’t had even a whiff of a cease and desist order.  The latter is possibly because no one’s added anything truly juicy to it, but the important part is “Sarah Glassmeyer – Lawsuit Free Since 1975!”

(Although I must note that I have no real assets and a pantload of student loan debt, so anyone getting a judgment from me is gonna have to get in line behind Sally Mae and Bank of America.  Good luck with that.  Say what you will about the student loan debt crisis, but it does give one a certain sense of freedom.  But I digress…)

One of the things that prompted me to remind y’all of the existence of LISvendor.info was a recent blog post by Barbara Fister called “Occupy Knowledge: It’s Ours After All.” Go on, go read it…I’ll wait.  You back?  Okay.  So as you’ve seen, she presents a really interesting parallel between Occupy Wall Street movement and the scholarly publishing world.  And like the OWS protestors, she creates a version a protest sign listing out the price increases her library has seen in journal subscriptions. (If you didn’t read her post, SPOILER ALERT: American Chemical Society journals have risen from $29,705 in 2010 to $41,741 in 2012.)  Fister also encourages others to do the same, either by tweeting or facebooking it.

You could also post it on LISvendor.info…that is one of the reasons I created it.

Although I’m declaring LISVendor.info to be a fabulous success, it could be better. A lot better.  I would love to see more people contribute to it. And not just “secret pricing information” either…for example, I love how the proposed AALL Consumer Advocacy Caucus is using it to organize and share information.

A few weeks ago I saw a report of a study on the roots of collaboration in humans.  The pull quote:

When it benefits them, chimpanzees willingly work together. Otherwise, they can’t be bothered…For humans, collaboration is rewarding for its own sake, a behavioral split that may underlie key differences between human and chimpanzee societies.

Having participated in a couple collaborative projects now, I can’t say that this is true.  I’m not sure that people will work together on something without an immediate reward.  I really believe that contributions to LISVendor will ultimately be very beneficial to all, but I must admit that any benefits will not be realized immediately.  It will be a slow building process before the collected knowledge reaches the usefulness tipping point.  So, long story short, if you can think of ways to encourage participation in this, please let me know.

Finally, some housekeeping notes…initially I wanted to keep this wiki as open and anonymous as possible because I thought people wouldn’t contribute otherwise.  Unfortunately, the spammers keep swooping in and wrecking the joint.  (A big thanks to Nicole Engard and Amy Buckland for helping me to clean them out.) I’ve since reluctantly added an email to register requirement and then earlier this week a captcha, Hopefully that will cut down on the spamming.  (And hopefully people will learn to not be ashamed to ask their doctor for cialis and stop relying on sketchy people on the Internet for their drugs and spamming innocent library wikis becomes impractical.  HEY. A GIRL CAN DREAM.)  Amy has been deputized as a admin on the wiki and if anyone else would like admin privileges, let me know…I will be happy to add you.  I really didn’t want this to be “my thing.”  I’m happy to pay for hosting and stare stupidly at the mediawiki php and attempt to fix problems, but this is something that the community needs to take ownership of for it to be successful even more fabulously successful.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sunsetgirl_creations/

I have a new blog post up at the CALI spotlight blog about Open Access week and legal scholarship.  It’s called “Why We Fight.”    This isn’t so much a guest post as part of my job at CALI…we (the staff) are going to blog about issues that are relevant to what we do at CALI and that interest us.  CALI is much more of a “do tank” than “think tank” but we do think about stuff.  You know. Occasionally.

So…enjoy!