Fall Semsester Flyby

Where HAS the time gone? Somehow, amidst events and conferences I lost the end of September and all of October! There were epic spider battles (🕷👢) at home and some epic goblin drider (glider?) battles with my friends as we played D&D on the weekends.

At work, I settled into Special Collections and tried to keep up with all the things!

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Native Voices

The Native Voices exhibit was a great success. We had a few events that were sponsored by the library. The day we set it up, we had an opening reception with a few people speaking about how important it was that it was here. A few days later, we tried to have a panel discussion in two locations. We ended up with a panel in Blacksburg and a lecture in Roanoke due to technical difficulties. Finally, we partnered with the department of Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise and the American Indian Studies program to bring in a Native horticulturalist to talk about the Native garden at the Turfgrass Research Center. It was an amazing event but was sadly not recorded. Beyond our events, there was definite interest on campus. I was interviewed by the campus newspaper as part of a story on the library. I was also interviewed by VTTV and The News Feed at Virginia Tech but I must not be all that great on camera since I've not seen either of those segments go live. 🤔

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Virginia Library Association Conference

As the Native Voices exhibit was being packed up to send off to its next destination, I headed off to beautiful Hot Springs, Virginia for the VLA Conference. My main reason for attending this year was the Diversity & Inclusion Forum's Graphic Novel Diversity Award - for which, I was a judge. Check out the brochure (below) for the full list of winners and honor books. It was a fun time judging and it was nice to be at the conference to honor the winners.

Winner: Adult Category

Winner: Youth Category

Graphic Novel Diversity Award Brochure (PDF)

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Charleston Conference: Issues in Book and Serial Acquisitions

Following VLA, I got one weekend at home and the headed south to sunny (sweltering - for November) Charleston, South Carolina. I spent the first week of November attending the Charleston Conference. This conference is HUGE and somewhat unique. The vendors exhibit for one day and then become regular conference attendees. They go to (or present) sessions and take full part in the discussions about the industry. I was there to present about the database (Albatross) that I designed last fall. The database is meant to help determine return on investment (ROI) for electronic journals (and someday other formats). Basically, we want to know how much we spend for every time the journal gets used. My work was figuring out the relationships between data points and creating the entity relationship diagram. It was wonderful presenting to interested people who asked questions and wanted copies of my diagram. Annette, Tracy, and Leslie took on other parts of the presentation such as automation scripting, data cleaning, background, and future plans. Check out our presentation slides if you're interested.

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Albatross presentation slides (PPTX)

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Now that fall semester is rapidly coming to an end, I have to delve back into my other projects: processing collections, designing and implementing a survey of all existing collections, advising the LGBTQ Center on book purchases, helping the Black Cultural Center plan their Black History Month exhibit, helping plan MLK Day events, working on a digital forensics pilot project, creating a Media Literacy Safe Zone course, and planning a major week-long institute for residents from other institutions. So far, I'm loving my job. Even more since I settled permanently in Special Collections.