TILT #46 Some things I learned in Canada
Hiya. This week I mostly want to talk about one conference. Before I do, an apology. Thanks to a misreading of this page of Congress.gov (UX, so important!), I thought the Copyright Office had already been wrested from the Library of Congress. Not so! I regret the error, and was able to fix it in the web page version of this newsletter! Appreciate people pointing it out. Hope it never happens.
I was in Edmonton, Alberta last week for the Netspeed Conference, a fun conference for “librarians who love to tech.” Advice for travelers: tell customs people at the border “I am going to a library conference!” They will immediately get sleepy and wave you on so that you will please stop talking about it. They do often ask me about my license plate though, as directed.
I gave the opening keynote at Netspeed (at the very civilized time of 1 pm) and then stuck around for the rest of the conference. I saw a lot of things I wanted to share. My keynote is here. Some photographs of Edmonton are here.
I had some trepidation about this talk since it was the first one this season, also the first one since my mom died. I can remember the first talk I did after my father died pretty vividly. As I was getting introduced, a well-meaning librarian leaned over and whispered to me “I was so sorry to hear about your father” which… right sentiment, wrong time. I’m not sure if people noticed, but I felt like the talk was a mess after that. I’m generally doing okay lately, but it feels like a balancing act some days.
Here are the talks I attended and enjoyed.
Decolonizing Description (slides) — a project of University of Alberta Libraries to assess and revise catalog subject headings so that they accurately reflect Indigenous peoples and contexts. This means no more subject heading for “Indian Schools” and no more subject headings for First Nations people using outsider terms for them. Here’s a poster from that working group outlining more of the issues. Fascinating, and a big project; so far they’ve identified over 9000 subject headings in need of revision. The biggest question asked: “Is OCLC on board with this?” (harkening back to this)
All Technology is Assistive, but not always accessible (slides) — talk given by John B a self-described “Autistic IT Monkey at a Regional Library System.” about accessible tech. Full of examples and first-person real talk about his personal and professional approaches to accessibility. Big takeaway, in response to a question I asked: “People with autism agree on almost nothing but they all hate the puzzle piece.”
Bridging the Digital Divide with Data and Tools (slides) — Cybera is a not-for-profit “technology accelerator” which offers organizations access to high-end cloud computing options. I learned about Project Jupyter, an open source way to get web-based access to spaces where you can try out programming languages and run live code.
Embracing Anarchy? A Code4Lib YEG Retrospective — Always great to see what the local #code4lib is up to. Want to know more about these folks? Check this wiki to find ways to get in touch.
A Dance With the Unknown: How Gamification of Digital Literacy Training has Staff Excited about Tech Troubleshooting (slides) — Super fun talk by Kim from Edmonton Public about how to get staff a bit more on board with tech troubleshooting. Useful takeaway for me: people don’t have to know how the technology works in order to help troubleshoot it. Problem to be solved posed as “How to stop staff from doing this [see image] when someone shows up at the desk with a tech issue?”
The second day keynote was a lively discussion of gaming and education by Dr. Sean Gouglas mainly discussing the Understanding Video Games class he teaches and why turning it into a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) got totally thwarted by university lawyers being very rigid about copyright. A really great talk, one I wasn’t expecting to be that excited about.
More slides from other things at Netspeed available at The Library Toolshed, a cool collaborative project for sharing information among Canadian librarians.
I have a standard news alert for digital divide topics which is how I found this article — Bridging the digital divide for people with intellectual disability — also of Canadian origin. Upshot: how can we make sure people with intellectual disabilities don’t fall into the inclusion gap, an important and often overlooked aspect of the digital divide? A very data-rich article with suggestions for being proactive about managing this.
Between the travel and my small claims lawsuit against Equifax (barely library related, but it’s a fun story and they always work “librarian” into the news articles) it’s been a busy month. I’ll be heading to Wisconsin next week for WLA. Please say hello if you see me. I’ll be the one pretending to dislike the orange cheese.
Today in Librarian Tabs is written irregularly by Jessamyn West who also maintains librarian.net. It’s also available in your inbox via TinyLetter. Thanks for reading.
