Long distance sprint, LibParlor, and building up my habit of research: A spring recap

“Once February is over, things will slow down…”

“Once March is over, things will slow down…”

“Once April is over, things will slow down…”

“Once the semester is over, things will slow down…”

During the last few months, this has been my revised mantra. At one point, I believed that mantra to be true, however, the more I said it, the more laughable the phrase was to me. Nothing was slowing down.

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ACRL Immersion 2017: A Librarian Summer Camp

Some of my best summer memories are when I went to some sort of camp. I’ll never forget Badger Girls State, summers at Whitewater learning volleyball, and wandering the UW Madison campus during College for Kids. This past week I get to add another camp to my list: ACRL Immersion.

This isn’t your typical summer camp. It’s technically a library teaching workshop, but we fondly called it librarian summer camp. The program helps us reflect on our teaching process, dig into some theory and our own assumptions, and ultimately, put it all together to take back to our home institutions. I was hyped.

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The Collective Conference Recap

It has been one week since I was in Knoxville, TN for The Collective Conference. It was a fantastic conference where I got to meet lots of new people, learn new things, and take some ideas back with me to Pennsylvania.

Things I learned included:

  • How to ACTUALLY use Trello, a project management platform.
  • Tips and trick to manage social media (done in a well played Harry Potter theme)
  • The wide variety of student-advisory groups institutions have (so many!)
  • How to marry two ideas that seem to have nothing in common (it's fun!)
  • What digital humanities is (still wrapping my head around it but I've gotten a better idea)
  • Librarians know how to throw a shindig
  • Knoxville is a cool city that I'd like to visit again
  • New ideas for assessment and planning for outreach
  • How to make videos that don't suck

I am also trying to put these new skills to use. For example, I've gotten on Trello and am attempting to manage my bi-weekly newsletter on it (more on that later if I can make it work). And, I've made a video (below) that I hope doesn't suck. It's a recap of the conference, paired with some footage I took during the session on making videos. Enjoy! As usual, one of my favorite parts of making a movie is choosing the free music to play underneath.