This is my first semester as a tenured library faculty member, and I think I’ve been pretty productive.
I’ve presented on Pinterest and Instagram at the ALCOP association. I recently learned that ALCOP will be no more, yet it has led to subscribing to the prtalk listserv and make new connections with librarians across the country.
I had a poster session for the City Tech Faculty Research conference.
I finished up a PSC-CUNY grant funded research study on my library’s mobile site and how usable it is. This will be super useful when we relaunch a responsive based design later next year.
I presented at the CUNY IT conference with a bunch of excellent librarians about Raspberry Pi.
I also co-chaired NYC’s code4lib chapter aka code4libnyc-sig. This is a great group that was brought back from the dead after a beer meetup in Brooklyn.
A few other librarians and myself also received the Created Equal: America’s Civil Rights Struggle grant. It gave us some money and videos to screen a few PBS documentaries so we could have a scholar facilitated discussion on the continual struggle.
I’m also working on an upcoming LITA guide on mobile usability which will be done by May.
I also really, really, really got into my professional Twitter account. I’ve had a personal one for a long time, but who knew you could use it for work too?
I’ve also had a few “failures” that I would rather like to call learning experiences. Stuff like unaccepted articles, turned down for scholarships, and broken tech projects for one reason or another. It can be a drag not to take those things personally, but I think failure spurs innovation and even creativity.
Things for Next Year
Here are a few goals to work on:
– Publish another article after this LITA guide
– Present at another national conference, most likely on mobile usability
– Work on this redesign
– Move to library website to the cloud
– Write more
Oh yeah, and I’m getting married. I guess that’s something for next year too.