The Clock Spins Faster

@aht25 @lokiroslin @brentkincade 

@aht25 @lokiroslin @brentkincade 

It’s always fascinating to me that some people have gone years without realizing that just about anyone with half a brain can see their private social media pages. Many people, due to the knowledge that the latter can happen, use aliases online to avoid business and home life clashing online. It isn’t uncommon to see people bemoaning a lost career after decades of success due to a single social…

Civility and the Latin Rite

Everyone has their moment of realization that what is happening on the internet is not the real world and should not be accepted as such. At some point, one must stop where they are with arguing with internet trolls and realize that the conversation will never go anywhere because both parties are not there to debate but merely to argue. There is no “agreeing to disagree” because that never truly…

Knowing circulation numbers do rise in the absence of fines, and knowing that this phenomenon is recurrent in public libraries as well, it would best behoove the academic library director to also do away with fines.

Wilson’s “Circulation Policies in Major Academic Libraries” seeks, ultimately, to find the best policies to boosting circulation numbers at Brigham Young University by looking, via peer-reviewed studies, at fellow academic libraries’ fines, loan periods, and personal circulation policies. It was determined that the libraries that got rid of fines all together, though some saw no improvement, none…

No library will have the same patronages’ needs and wants, nor should they.

Litsey and Mauldin’s “Knowing What the Patron Wants: Using Predictive Analytics to Transform” does a brief dive into a way in which libraries might better understand their patron’s needs and wants (2018). A method used in nearly every business created or successful twenty-first century, predictive analysis computer tools are suggested in the article as a way academic libraries can stay abreft of…

In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be talking in more in-depth on the topic of the Society of Saint Pius X in Catholic circles on the web and how those interactions on social media directly affect on real people in the real world. On Twitter, this is most obviously seen (in recent times) at the beginning of the pandemic quarantines in the large scale “non-debates” between the Gordon Brothers and Taylor…

Social Tagging and Getting a Clean House

I’ve always struggled with keeping anything clean long term, or sticking with anything long term quite honestly. Having an infant and now expecting our second 13 months later has meant more chaos in the house, not to speak for maintaining 6hrs of grad school a semester so I can graduate in this lifetime. My husband and I went from a 525sqft apartment with no yard or courtyard to a 1980sqft, 2.5…

In my earlier post, By Way of the Tag, I spoke on the use of modernized, virtual tagging as found in fanfiction sites (i.e. AO3), and how this method might serve libraries struggling with social media presence. This colloquial system of shared user hive mentality is best demonstrated using the term, folksonomy. Verhulst describes the term as an informal classification system, something adopted by…

Benson and DeSanto’s “The 360° Feedback Model for library instructors Observing, teaching, reflecting, adapting” is on the topic of instructor review, the method they decided upon, and the specifics of why they wanted instructional review and not evaluation on a career scale (2016). Lasting two weeks, with 17 classes, instructors were expected to all teach from the same outline, the same class.…

Just Throw it Away…

Miller’s “Making Room for a Learning Commons Space: Lessons in Weeding a Reference Collection Through Collaboration and Planning” covers the rather interesting endeavour of weeding a library without actually weeding it, pre-weeding, so to speak (2016). Due to not knowing whether or not they’d have the funds to create the learning commons space with the full amount originally thought, the library…

Where many have answers, but few take action.

Ameen, Kanwal, Clara M. Chu, Spencer Lilley, Ana Ndumu, and Jaya Raju. (2020). “Multiple Ways of Knowing: Global Perspectives on Academic Libraries Re-Imagining Systems of Knowledge.” College & Research Libraries News 81 (9), 426–33. Ameen, Chu, Lilley, Ndumu, and Raju’s “Multiple Ways of Knowing: Global Perspectives on Academic Libraries Re-Imagining Systems of Knowledge” speaks at length on…

By Way of the Tag

I. Intro “Focusing on only the initial creative act undermines the potential of fan fiction to serve as both a classroom model and a source of academic study in a much broader context,” (Johnson 2014). Fan fiction has long been the butt of jokes, the lighthearted (and not so light hearted in some cases) excuse to take a person’s reputation from them in some way. You can have a PhD, but as soon…

There aren’t many websites quite as user-friendly as archiveofourown.org (ao3); it could well be argued that ao3 is more user friendly than anything Facebook or Google could ever hope for.

Ever since another student mentioned fan fiction in relation to metadata, metadata has clicked in ways it never did, even when I assumed I had a firm grasp on the what’s what of metadata. I love that fan fiction has further entered the world of academia as something that can be used towards education, even if only as an example. There aren’t many websites quite as user-friendly as…

“For my will is as strong as yours, my kingdom as great.”

“For my will is as strong as yours, my kingdom as great.”

A coming of age story, Labyrinth (1986)is a cult classic film with reviews ranging from abysmal to superb. Defined, a labyrinth is a highly difficult to navigate, irregular maze with secret passageways, and is what the family film’s adventure portion is based around for the protagonist to travel. Released on 27 June 1986 with a PG…

It is only due to its reliance on modern techniques in storytelling, editing, and scores that it has become a cult classic three decades after its release flop.

A medieval fantasy, Ladyhawke (1985)relies on the audience perceiving the film from the same perspective as Philippe, wondering if everyone in the film is “…more likely,…asleep dreaming that [they’re] awake wondering if [they’re] dreaming,” (“Ladyhawke”). Generally defined as an unrealistic, magic-containing world with medieval elements in which an adventure, quest, or journey is made by a…

Boomers and Gen X’ers are not going to be in the library for the long haul, not at this point in time. Trying to bid on more phone apps when no one likes them anyway is a redundant endeavour.

Corporations love to focus on the generation most likely to die and leave a large donation. In libraries, this manifests in workshops and, more prolifically, how the basic organization of library looks like. Usability, as defined by the Nielson Norman Group, refers to both the ease of use and the methodology for creating an easier to use design (2012). The World Health Organization (WHO) explains…