We completely forgot that it was St. Patrick's Day. That meant the kiddo went off to daycare not wearing the "wee little troublemaker" shirt her grandparents sent. D'oh! We're going to make her wear it tomorrow. 

WORK

• Still working on the Faculty Webinar Series. At this point, I am in a good groove of handling all the logistics. I'm pleased with how everything has gone so far. I think I'll look in to offering a program like this in the fall.
• I added another webinar event to my plate. I'm coordinating with the DC public library to provide a session for our students introducing them to all the amazing things they have available through this system.
• Reluctantly, I am turning my attention to completing the reading for the customer service proposal I am working on. I really believe in the proposal, but making the literature review (even the tiny one I am including) is a chore.
• I present at Computers in Libraries next week. I just finished the first draft of my outline and slides. I will spend some time later this week finalizing everything and practicing my talk.

PERSONAL

• March Madness starts soon and our friend group decided to get back into the bracket competition. Everyone is allowed to submit three. I only ever submit one (and was shocked to win - handily - one year) and this year is no different. I randomly pick teams and hope for the best. This year, we also decided to let our 19-month-old to submit her own bracket. She's making her picks by choosing between the mascots of the competing teams. I keep making PowerPoint slides with images and we ask her to pick her favorite. Her attention span is only so long, so we have about half of the picks left. She was on a roll choosing the top seeds at first, but she's tossed in some real upsets. I have the strangest suspicion that she will do better than me. 
• I started adding links to the Reading List page I'm developing for this site. Still have a lot to go but it's nice to see progress.
• As a part of my personal development, I'm working through the Everygirl Course, 6-Week Self-Care Challenge. While I tend to have the adulting stuff down (most of the time), it's been harder to find balance between being myself and being a mom. My hope is to find a better way to handle it and set boundaries.
• I like sending snail mail so I recently wrote up a bunch of postcards from my European travels to send to my friends and family. I uncovered a whole stash of them while doing some quarantine cleaning.

I will be speaking next week at the Computers in Libraries Conference on remote productivity and leadership. 

The pandemic pushed many libraries and organizations to pivot quickly to remote work. Remote work and leadership are vastly different from the traditional office experience. An alternative set of skills are necessary to lead a productive remote team. It takes a balance of technology, management, and empathy. In this session, I will share best practices for remote leadership that encourage collaboration and camaraderie. She will also discuss tools and techniques that foster productivity including popular tools like Trello, Evernote, Bullet Journals, and more. Additionally, the session will cover techniques, like the Pomodoro and Getting Things Done methods. The session will show techniques and processes for integrating these tools and activities into your leadership and management to help create strong and productive remote teams.

To register and learn more, visit the CIL website.

There is snow in the forecast for tomorrow which is just rude after the beautiful week of weather we had. I guess that's why this comic about the DC area's 12 seasons feels so funny and true. 

I've been in this area for almost two decades and those first hints of spring when the crocuses pop up always make me so happy. They're little flowers but they're just so cheerful and hopeful. Flowers are one of life's simple pleasures that I relish. I love spotting flowers in our neighborhood and getting bouquets for our home. Once this cold snap passes, I will be walking the streets of our neighborhood and snapping pictures of everything that blooms.

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• Yet another example of top predators being the key to a healthy eco system. [Short Wave]
• I, too, was looking for a reason to not drive. [The Real Question]
• A sad, yet somehow hopefully, look into what happens when someone dies alone. [The Daily]
• The connection between bras and N95 masks. [Throughline]
• The fascinating science of Brood X. [Science Vs]

I think you can tell by my searches that I am itching to make plans for the future. I got to pre-register for the vaccine this week and I am eagerly anticipating my eventual arm jab. 

• ​Barrel Oak Winery - I was plotting an outing for when things are safe again and needed to see the hours of one of our favorite local wineries. I long for the day our kiddo can see a lot of dogs while we enjoy a wine tasting followed up lunch at a picnic table.
• Diana Gabaldon - I was working on my reading list for this site and it reminded me that I hadn't heard anything about the next book in the Outlander series. Happy to find out the book - the ninth in the series - has a title, Go Tell the Bees That I am Gone, and will probably be out this year. Also discovered that book ten will be the last in the series. I am sad about that, but it makes complete sense. 
• Laundry Symbols - I am on our condo's green committee and put together our monthly newsletter. This month's issue is focusing on laundry and I wanted to include a chart of all the symbols we see on clothing tags.
• 3420 Connecticut Ave NW DC - A food truck that often frequents our neighborhood is opening two brick and mortar locations. I wanted to find just where the closest one was going.

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
Robin DiAngelo

I put myself on the wait list for this at the library nearly a year ago. Due to all the attention anti-racist books have received, it only arrived a few days ago. I'm two chapters in and I can see why this book makes people uncomfortable. One - it was designed to do that. Two - it's asking white people to take a good hard look at themselves and it forces people to admit things they don't want.

As a white, cis-gendered woman working at an HBCU, I know I have to be even more cognizant of my own biases and internalized racism. It's not a comfortable act, but it's important to learn so that we grow and improve. 

It may be spring break at our University, but I'm still working. This is a nice interlude of time to focus on things unrelated to library instruction and public outreach. Also, the library never closes. We know that some faculty and students continue to work when there are no classes. We are here to support them however we can.

Here are the major projects currently holding my attention. (Trying a touch of a new format this week.)

WORK

• It's tenure portfolio time. While our deadline did get pushed back a week, I am working as if it did not. Putting the portfolio together isn't that hard, it's just time consuming.  According to my time tracking (shout out to Toggl), I am approaching six hours on this. That might not sound like much, but I would rather be working on other things. I need to write a narrative of everything I completed during the review period and format it according to my job description and faculty requirements. I then have to pull attachments that prove I did what I said. Then everything gets uploaded to a digital portfolio program. Again, not hard - just tedious.
• I'm still running our faculty webinar series. The initial rush is over and now I'm just in the groove of sending emails, running the session, and doing the follow-up logistics. I'm pretty darn pleased with how this has turned out so far. If you're interested in seeing the sessions, recordings are on our YouTube.
• We are hiring a new librarian. That has meant reviewing a bunch of applications and deciding on who we wanted to interview for that pool. Up next, interviews!

PERSONAL

• I finally finished typing up all the titles for the Reading List for this site. Next up, linking everything. That is going to take awhile.
  
• I'm putting together the March issue of our condo's Green Committee newsletter. This time, I am focusing on laundry.
• It was a one day project, my our kid's wardrobe has been upgraded to the next size. I timed this project with the monthly donation pick up our building offers. It's a nice way to keep all the "things" under control.

Finally, does avoiding doing my taxes count as a project? It should. Those are taking up a lot of mental real estate in my head. I should just do them and get it over with.

This was one of those weeks were I was like, "Awesome! I don't have that many meetings! I can work on so many things."

​And then, the things, they somehow did not get as far along as I wanted. I swear lighter weeks end up being black holes of intentional productivity. I got stuff done but not what I intended to get done.

Fairly certain most of my search power went towards tracking down where my kid hide her hair ties every day. Better that than her milk cup.

Here's what I looked up this week.
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• Michelle Williams - We watched the movie I Feel Pretty and I wanted to confirm that the character I thought was Michelle Williams was, in fact, Michelle Williams. She looked so different as this character.
• Sous Vide Chicken Temperature - I needed to know the best temperature to sous vide a chicken breast at. Went with 150 degrees to keep the meat moist but closer to normal cooking texture.
• Princess Margaret - We're still watching The Crown. I did several searches related to to Princess Margaret to see what the show got right and what they dramatized.

Spring Break may be next week. I wish I could say that means I'm getting an easier week, but I'll be focusing on all the projects I want to wrap up this month.

• We're nearing the halfway mark on our Faculty Webinar Series. It's going quite well! You can watch the recordings from the finished sessions here. I've had several faculty follow-up with me after each session to either ask more about the resource or just about library/research-related things in general.
• I've started to dive into all the research I gathered for the customer service initiative. I definitely found more articles than I will use, but I think I will need to find a few more pieces to fill-in some gaps. The difference between my work now and my previous research is that the reading is happening entirely on a screen. Normally, I print out articles and physically highlight them. But, since I'm working from home, I really don't want to do that - so, I am using the highlighting function built in to my Adobe reader. It's taking some getting used to, but it's working.
• I'm working on a few conference proposals. One is for our consortium event and the other is for a webinar. 
• We have an intern working with us (remotely) this semester. He's developing LibGuides for our community college programs. I'm giving his guides edits and final review before publishing them. This is going to be so much help for out students in those programs.
• I am still working on the Reading List page for this blog. I hope to have everything typed up and a good chunk of the linking done this month.

This title ended up on my TBR because someone introduced me to the Accidentally Wes Anderson Instagram.  I love looking at pretty pictures.