LibraryTechtonics

Today is my one-year anniversary at Reading Public Library. It’s hard to believe I’ve been there a year, and at the same time, it feels like I’ve always worked there.

As it turns out, I was reminded of the anniversary of my blog on April 6, when I received the reminder email from my domain host saying that my domain would expire if I didn’t renew that very day. Scrolling back in my list of entries, indeed, my blog is now officially over two-years old, as of April 6. Who knew I’d get this far?

Talking to Meredith on the phone last night, she mentioned that it would be neat if I did a “year in review” post to celebrate my year at my job and blogoversary, since I’ve been so in and out about my posting, and she really wanted to hear more about what I’ve been up to. I think it’s a splendid idea, so I’ll take her up on it. It’s all kinda flown by… let’s see how much of it I remember… ;D

Activities, Achievements, and Whathaveyou, April 2005 - April 2006
(In roughly chronological order)

• Landed a gig as the co-manager of the PLA Blog.
• Started working at RPL.
• The “Free stuff to do in Boston” calendar entered it’s first full year of service to the online world. I’ve gotten emails from people, thank me for saving them all sorts of money, which is really all sorts of shiny.
• LibraryTechtonics.info celebrated it’s first blogoversary, with very minimal fanfare from me.
• Attended ALA Annual in Chicago as an official PLA Blog co-manager.
• Attended Simmons GSLIS Alumni Day 2005, then never blogged my notes :D, but met Claudette Newhall, which led to…
• …Visited the Congregational Library in Boston. Neat, old stuff for which Claudette has been working on creating an online catalog.
• Started a Flickr account for RPL, which is still growing and forming and stuff.
• Started the Geek Out Don’t Freak Out! series at RPL, which has been getting a good bit of play in the library blog realm, or at least in the emails I’ve been getting.
• Working with my boss Lorraine, the town tech guy Kevin, the NOBLE tech guy George, upgraded around 24 public computers from a very locked-down Windows 2000 environment to Windows XP with Office 2003 with a more “normalized” computing environment, just in time for my 8-month review.
• Wrote and article and gave a presentation at WebJunction on using Flickr in the library.
• Thanks to Jessamyn and Eli (where’s your blog URL? I can’t find it in my notes…), got to attend the Big Open Archive Announcement in October, and blog it live.
• Gave my very first conference presentation at Internet Librarian.
• Had my blog cited as having a “broad reach” by Walt Crawford. Shiny!
• Read 12 or so books for leisure (hurray!).
• Implemented a NaNoWriMo program at my library.
• Started the “Why librarians should read posts” — a.k.a. Mag Geektastic — for your reading leisure. Haven’t had much feedback on it, but I’ll probably keep doing it until someone tells me it sucks, and then stop.
• Started a “Train the Tech Trainer” program at my library, training designated contacts in each department (and whoever else can stop by) in various techie things (using the digital cameras, uploading to Flickr, using the wiki), who then go back and train their departments, as well as serving as tech points of service when I’m not around.
• Implemented a MediaWiki installation to serve as the RPL intranet-ish thing (which will then be ported from my domain to an intranet server once we have the money in July), with the side benefit (see also: ulterior motive) of priming the library staff to work on Wikipedia (it seems to be working, slowly).
• Took over the coding of the new item lists for the library, and will slowly be taking over the library website, complete with certain redesign fixin’s.
• Despite unnecessarily epic illness, attended ALA Midwinter in San Antonio, and wrangled bloggers successfully from the confines of a hotel room.
• Cited in an awesomely cool and very well written article by Ellyssa Kroski about the folksonomy (I did get your email, and see the article, and I’m sorry I didn’t talk it up more… It’s in The Long Queue…). I think I got cited in a handful of other articles, too, and I know that I’ve been linked to by bunches of blogs.
• Got mentioned a bunch of times in the Carnival of Infosciences (which I will take up soon) and This Week in LibraryBlogLand.
• Saw Cory Doctorow speak at MIT, and heard him say, so many times, that “librarians are culture heroes.” He signed my laptop, and I turned into a beaming, yammering mess with nothing intelligent to say. I dropped John Klima’s name (Congrats on the job! I’ll email you soon, John, I *swear*), scifi/fantasy zine guy gone rock star librarian, because they know each other. I’m such a geek.
• Was (proudly) dubbed a B-list blogger.
• Coined the term “The Long Queue.” You all know you have one. ;D
• Went to China with a delegation of American librarians and library workers to visit Chinese libraries and learn from Chinese librarians.
• Attended PLA 2006 here in Boston, all sorts of jetlagged-yet-bushytailed, blogging for PLA and writing for the PLA Daily News.
• Attended Simmons GSLIS Alumni Day 2006 and actually blogged *live* (what a difference a year makes :D).

It’s been a busy year. I’m sure there’s a bunch of stuff I missed. I didn’t link to my stuff, since it seemed so terribly gratuitous, but you can always do searches on my site for anything listed here.

At some point, I’ll post a list of things I want to get done this year. My general plan: keep writing stuff you’ll find interesting, but still have a life. For now, I need to get a bunch of stuff done before an Open Archive webinar that I’m attending in a few hours.

Thanks to everyone for reading!

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