Is this thing on?

So, by a few days, I lost the chance to have a great April Fool's day joke at the expense of common perceptions of my new employer. Instead of admitting that I had simply been uninspired/lazy about blogging or consumed by Twitter, one of my new associate directors suggested a few months ago that I could claim Harvard made me shut down my blogging. Heh. But not too likely, really.

I should have just joined my friend Skullsnbats in declaring that I'm officially blogging without obligation.

That said, the blog has not been completely abandoned. I'm hoping to get my notes from two recent conferences up tonight, and from there, we'll see.

So, hello again!

Now that I'm back from Austin, done with arranging and hosting the amazing Sabrina Pacifici's visit to SFALL, and done with the joint faculty-library presentation panel that I wasn't sure I'd be able to prep for with the other two things going on, I can catch up. Or at least that's my ambition.

Over the long weekend, I'm planning to post my raw notes from the SXSWi panels I attended--if I can read the chicken scratch my writing turned into on the small notepad. Yes, my notes, save for the one panel by which I'd lost my writing utensils, are analog. I confess though I popped it open from time to time, I found using the laptop too distracting. No laptop in the classroom for me, though I found that knitting through most sessions--the most extensively I have done this--definitely kept the fidgety portion of my brain occupied and helped focus my attention.

Last week I was welcomed as a contributor to Out of the Jungle, a blog that I respect and admire, and am excited and honored to join. I will likely post more coherent and discussion-inducing (I hope) thoughts from some of the panels there. My ulterior motive, of course, is to lure more law librarians to attend next year's SXSW.

Since we explored Technorati, I thought I'd mention some of the other tools I've found indispensable with my blogging and blog readings:

• Feedburner. Have you ever noticed that when you subscribe to a blog in Bloglines, it offers you two, three, or more RSS feed URLS? Feedburner provides a tool to make sure all your readers are subscribed through the same feed address for an accurate count, and also provides an easy way to customize a subscribe button for your blog or offer an option for readers who haven't been bitten by the aggregator bug to subscribe by email.
• Statcounter. Want to know how many people are reading your blog, what operating system, browser, and resolution they're using, and how they're finding you? Sign up with Statcounter and use the HTML/java script page element option on the Blogger template to add the code to your blog. Like the Technorati authority and rank numbers, it's easy to get obsessed with checking your Statcounter stats. Sitemeter is another site that provides stats tracking.
• Clustrmaps. Clustrmaps creates that neat little widget in my sidebar that geographically displays where my blog visitors are from. Another tool that inspires a little obsession when you first install it.
• Co.mments. Blogger notifies when anyone comments on our blogs, but what about finding out if someone has responded to a comment you left on someone else's blog or staying updated on an interesting conversation another blogger has started? I keep a link to add a post to my Co.mments tracker on my Firefox bookmarks toolbar right next to my Bloglines subscribe link. Then I subscribed to the feed of comments that I'm tracking. Last year I tried another service called cocomment. I liked that it automatically tracked every comment I left, so I didn't have to remember to add them, but I stopped using it after it insisted on tracking comments on every last Flickr photo I commented on.

Like the other 2.0 tools we've been exploring, all of these services are free at the basic level. What other tools do you use? Any alternatives to the above that I should check out?

I don't use Technorati too much for searching--I've found better results with Google's blogsearch--so this was a new exercise. I liked the tabs to access the different kinds of searches. I didn't know one could use Technorati to search videos, which could be useful, and I liked the quick view option.

I've been tagging my blog posts--in a much more orderly fashion than I tag things with del.icio.us--and discovered that this seems to be working as a Technorati search for TLC2.0 brings up my blog entries about it.

I claimed my blog shortly after I started it, and was initially obsessed with my rank and authority number, even though I know they're both somewhat arbitrary.

And to continue yesterday's geekery, here's a cute cake that I found tagged with "learning 2.0."

It's time to admit that I'm just not going to get to dutifully posting all my AALL notes. Not only that, but I've realized I didn't take notes in all of the sessions I attended anyway. Instead, I'm going to try to summarize each day's activities as I get to catching up.

Very busy at the library this week with preparations for the incoming 1L class, who will be at orientation all next week. This Friday we distribute their laptops.

As I've been able to grab some time here and there, I've been working on a re-design of the NSU Law Library in Second Life. I'd been intending to make it more modular for a couple months now, but serendipitously happened upon inspiration when James Bringholf showed me his beautiful new ice palace podcasting studio. Since we're in Florida, I've gone the exact opposite direction climatically. I think it's going to be a lot more fun and user-friendly than our current white brick building, which is elegant and modern, but a little clinical with a weird floor plan.

The subject line is the name of a bath bomb I bought at the New Orleans Lush cosmetics shop, but it's also an accurate description for how I feel about my attempts to get caught up on my email, to-do list, conferences ideas, blogging, and so forth. I've started typing a post-AALL update here at least three times, and never gotten further than a sentence. So this is progress.

Everything about the conference was wonderful. I found myself scribbling ideas all over my notepad, and not just ideas related to whatever session I was in. I really wish the conference had taken place at the beginning of summer, so there would be more time left to pursue all the inspiration at a more leisurely pace. One thing I shall do this weekend is finally sort through my notes and follow the advice of someone I met who suggested rounding up all of the things one really wants to accomplish on a single sheet of paper and keeping it in sight throughout the year.

The best part of AALL this year by far was reconnecting with people I'd met last year and making even more friends and acquaintances, whom I'm looking forward to keeping in touch with and seeing over the years. I'd thought the initial bar for fun was set pretty high last year at my first AALL, but it was easily surpassed.

New Orleans requires a post of its own. I wrote about it very briefly at Novalawcity, but it deserves much more than that.

Part of the reason I've been so slow in catching up is that our law review hopefuls have been spending the week frantically trying to find print or otherwise official copies of all the items they're citing, and I've been on the front line. I'm not sure how I missed this flurry last year, but perhaps I was too new to realize what was going on.

Many of the their queries are basic, others have taught me something about the unique ways different states number and organize their statutes, and a generous handful have been in the "you want what (some book in a library three states away) and you need it when (might as well be yesterday) ?! " category. It has been fun seeing some of them get excited about the vast world of legal sources beyond caselaw, and it's a good warm up for the Fall term.

If I'm a really good blogger, I'll post my notes from the sessions I attended as I get to them. And I'm saying so here in hopes that'll help me stick to it.

In the meantime, I did accomplish putting my pictures on Flickr. The AALL Second Line Flickr pool features pictures from a few other librarians as well. If you were there and have pictures, please join the group!

Photo: a spire of St Louis cathedral taken by me.

Happy Independence Day!

I thought it was time to at least put up a post noting that the blog is not abandoned! I was using up vacation time the last week and a half, and made myself take a break keeping up with the biblioblogosphere. Now that I'm catching up, I have a number of posts started that I hope to finish over the next few days.

In the meantime, inspire yourself today by reading Chris Brogan's urging to declare your own independence:

In your day to day life, declare independence from the habits and “that’s just the way it is” thoughts that drive your behavior. Examine everything as if it were a foreign King flexing unjust muscle against what’s truly best for you and those around you.

Welcome to my blog!

A little about me: I'm a new law librarian, on my first gig as a reference librarian at the Nova Southeastern University Law Library in south Florida. I studied Medieval and modern European history for my undergrad degree in the Midwest, where I was born and raised. In a previous life, I was assistant to an auction house executive in New York City. It was as cool as it sounds. Once I realized that living in NYC for the rest of my life was unsustainable, it finally occurred to me to fulfill my destiny and go to library school. I credit Librarian Avenger's Worship essay giving me the necessary nudge to the path.

I knew at the start of library school that I wanted to be a special librarian, and was led down the path to law librarianship through various experiences in my coursework. It's a wonderful career: challenging, interesting, and far more fun that it may sound to anyone who is not a law librarian.

A little about me and blogging: I've had the blogging itch for quite awhile, but lack one of the things I think of as a necessary prerequisite to a good blog, namely an idea for a specific subject on which to blog. Yet I kept coming across links and having experiences that I knew I'd be blogging about if I blogged. It was frustrating.

Most of all, I wanted in on the social side of blogging, getting to know other bloggers, participating in the memes that float around, attending blogger gatherings at conferences, etc. Those all seem like the most fun part. And I've been missing out.

A little about this blog: While I await enlightenment of the specific subject for the ideal blog-by-me, I've decided to dive in with this, an all-purpose biblioblawg. If you're looking for a blog that strictly sticks to matters of law, librarianship, or legal research, you're in the wrong place. I can't promise that any of the following items will never be mentioned:

• Rufus and Emma (the first felines in my life--pictures linked ARE on topic for legal research)
• The woes of second-sock syndrome
• Politics
• Why I love Battlestar Galactica, and what a huge contrast it is with Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I'm reviewing now and also love
  
• Shameless Mac enthusiasm
  
• Video links, library-related or not
  
• Other totally random things that I find amusing and/or enlightening

On the other hand, there will definitely be librarianship and legal research content. I expect to share some of my observations and experiences as one new to the profession, though the totally new experiences are becoming fewer and further between as I approach the end of my first year. I have a lot to say about Second Life, since I'm working on our library's building there. The biggest unexpected bonus to this career is the fun of getting paid to play with/learn about new geeky stuff. There will be conference blogging. As well as mentions of cool new books and other resources I come across. Anyone interested in a history of ticket scalping since 1850?

Two quick aesthetic notes: (1) The first time I saw blawg used to refer to a law-related blog, it made me cringe. Too clever for its own good. Yet it seems I've come around to it. Also: biblioblog was taken on Blogger, and I was out of cleverness myself. (2) This generic Blogger template is dull, dull, dull. I fully intend to customize the CSS and gussy it up with a few graphics, but if I wait to launch until I've got everything just right, another blogless six months will float by.

So that, in short, is this blog. Or will be. Most posts will be a lot shorter than this. Just like the flour you can use for muffins, cookies, bread, or cake, it has a lot of uses. Versatile. All-purpose.

Welcome.