Ok, so the title of this post may be misleading. I'm not certain I know what I'm doing, other than I'm doing #digiwrimo and #acwrimo this year. This means I'm going to focus on getting a metric shitte-tonne of writing done in the month of November. Follow the links above for the official rules, but I'll be breaking those. These are my rules:
- I'm going to write for at least two pomodoro units each work day. This isn't very much.
- I'm going to make progress on at least my accepted Online Northwest presentation and an article I should have written 18 months ago.
- I'm going to include non-text-entry parts of writing such as editing my own writing and others' work and also my own project management as "writing" tasks
- Twitter and other social networking doesn't count. (They don't move me toward my productivity goals.) Neither do things like writing Goodreads book reviews. (These are things I do instead of writing.)
- I'm going to pursue a thought I've been chewing on until I either have a draft or I've decided it is stupid. The thought is that library public services can be split into two approaches: UX design and the hacker ethic. One has few barriers to access but incentivizes a passive approach to receiving pre-digested information. The other is more difficult and has technology and skill barriers but incentivizes an active approach to creating and integrating new knowledge. For now I'm calling the two approaches "Jobs" and "Woz."
The Main Project
The main project I want to progress on is a paper on the effects teaching search engine architecture and SEO have on students information literacy. I've presented a few times on this subject but need to write an actual paper. It's based on my classroom experiences, but I've also started a review of textbooks used to teach search in Information Science / Information Management graduate programs to track how much information architecture librarians are provided with in their graduate education. My hypothesis is that searchers who understand how both keyword-relevance algorithm search tools and traditional databases, indexes, and well-ordered sets of metadata are structured are able to make better practical decisions in their search processes.
What I need to do is to gather and collate a couple years of divergent projects and false-starts and squish them together into a cogent outline.
Side Project One:
I have promised to build some training materials for the ACRL LITA Code Year Interest Group on working w/ APIs. I've decided to work w/ OCLC's Worldcat Local API to solve an annoying problem with our catalog. (OK, the problem is in the DATA, not in the tool that searches the data.) Currently, government documents in electronic form are cataloged as books. So, when students search our catalog looking for locally held books they can check out, they have to wade through pages of electronic government reports, white papers, and hearings. Weeding out these items that are not physical books on our local shelves takes an insanely complex series of Boolean operations that I once discovered by failed to write down.
My project will be to write a simple search web-app that can be used either as a search box on a web page or as a mobile app that automates this complex search as a simple "find books I can find on the shelf" search box. As I build this, I'll record the steps and publish a training guide to simple deployment of OCLC's Worldcat search API.
Side Project Two:
I mentioned I'm looking into the hacker ethos and UX design as competing priorities in public services librarianship. Perhaps they are in a dynamic balance instead of directly competing, but this is something worth thinking/reading/writing/mulling over.
Side Project Three:
Library Boxen. I've orderd a couple of the routers used in the Library Box project and I have an implementation plan for one of them. I've just hacked a spare home wifi router w/ DD-WRT, so I think I"m ready to install Open-WRT on the hardware, then the Pirate Box software, and then Jason Griffey's Library Box code on top of that.
I'm hoping to deploy my first Pirate Box at the Fort Vancouver Historical Site in support of the CMDC's mobile project there. My CMDC faculty colleagues Brett Oppegaard and Dene Grigar have been developing mobile apps to help present rich historical content available to visitors at the site. The historic fort is remote and out of range of wifi and most cellular broadband signals. The Library Box would be a solution to offer visitors the chance to download the app itself or rich media content to help make their visit to the site more informative.
This is primarily a making/hacking project, but I'm betting I'll find some way to write (yack) about the project before I'm done.
Side Project Four:
I'm currently a blogger for ACRL's TechConnect blog. I'm struggling to get my work in on time. (Translate: missing deadlines pretty badly) If I sit down to write every day, there is no reason I can't hammer out a couple of posts to keep on hand, giving me a buffer. This week, in fact, I'd like to finish my piece on the Hacker Ethos and Librarians. This will detail both mindsets and tools librarians can use to empower us to remake our online and physical environment to meet our needs. No longer will we have reason to complain about our tools. If they don't meet our needs: remake them until they do! I recently gave a talk to a class of undergrads new to digital media on the ethics of hacking and I'd like to modify that content for my library colleagues.
Yack Yack
If I get half way through half of these things, it will be a highly productive month. I'm not interested in 50k words in 30 days. I'm interested in building new workflows that get some work done. I've got plenty of interesting things to think about, #digiwrimo and #acwrimo are, for me, a chance to DO THINGS instead of just keep lists of interesting possibilities.
As the (tenth) Doctor says: "Allons-y!"