The Now: January 18, 2023

Earlier this week, the reference librarian team talked with a professor about her class which is focusing on archives. It was a winding conversation that ended with us volunteering to teach a few workshops. (Yeah! I'm doing two. One on preservation and another on personal archiving.) It also reinvigorated my love of why libraries/archives/museums are important and have to continue to speak out about things. We are not neutral! We never were. We need to acknowledge our shortcomings to make things better for the future.

Here's what I'm working on:

1. Faculty Webinar Series:  I'm hosting the first session in our webinar series on Friday. This semester, we're looking at research as it relates to funding and publication. Friday's session is all about finding funding. I put together my outline today and will create my slides tomorrow. For the series as a whole, I've done some marketing blasts and other logistics like creating a slide template and feedback form. We're using a new registration system this semester and it notifies me when people sign up. It looks like we may get some good attendance this semester. I'm excited!
2. Website Improvement: Back on this train. Right now, I'm drafting a survey to gather more information about what people like and do not like about our website. I'll collect that data while I'm working on some of the low-hanging fruit fixes our usability testing identified.
   
3. Personal Photo Management: Speaking of personal archiving... I have not completed any personal photo management in over 6 months. Right now, I've got all the pictures finally downloaded off my phone. (I had to figure out how to do that on my new laptop.) Next, I'll weed out the images before renaming and filing the keepers. Then I'll make sure everything gets backed up before I share some select pictures in our family's shared album.

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