"...Then Success is Sure"

"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure."

Mark Twain

Rare Book Exhibit Meeting As promised, we had our Rare Book Exhibit Meeting. Both my coworker and I showed Michelia examples of virtual exhibits we liked. We decided to forge ahead with the interactive presentation/PowerPoint examples we had. Now that that’s settled, we start on the actual doing. Because my coworker is in charge of the Rare Book Collection and has a more intimate knowledge of the contents, she’ll be compiling the content. I’ll work on the technical aspects like creating the website/PowerPoint, etc. I’m excited to get started! I’m sure some staff will be happy to interact with some of our collection virtually. 

Rare Book Database Update As of the end of this week, I have upload a total of 2975 images which equals a total of 138 books. 

They Published Where?!: Analyzing Faculty Publications for Scholarly Communications Assessment I watched another on-demand video from the 2020 ER&L Conference. This one was about predatory publishers. It was a great introduction to analyzing various publishers. The presenter also shared some of their top resources to use when looking into whether or not a publisher may or may not be legitimate. 

2020 koha-US Annual Conference September 22-24 was the koha-US Conference. I watched a few sessions as I was able. There was a session on the second day that walked through the steps of the advanced editor. Though, I don’t catalog all that often, I think it would be impressive to go into the advanced cataloger and type in things like I know what I’m doing. But since I don’t, know what I’m doing that is, I watched the session. It seems pretty easy and I think the term “advanced” is a bit of a misnomer. I think the more you use it, the more you understand how it works and the faster you get with the keyboard shortcuts. I also watched a session titled, Very Very Basic jQuery. Though I don’t particularly know what I would need to use jQuery for in koha, the session was helpful because I’ve never used jQuery in my life and the presenter did a very good job of breaking it down. 

Introduction to R for Libraries Part 1 This week was a week of webinars, I guess. I watched the first in a three-part series on using the statistical software R for libraries. My boss asked me last week if I was familiar with the program. Though I had heard of it in undergrad, I never had the chance to actually use it. She’s interested in seeing if R can help make sense of the different reports from COUNTER4 and COUNTER5 where the data is structured differently. I reached out to an old professor and she said that she did think R would be able to do what we are looking for. So even though my boss is in charge of the reporting and all that I wanted to look further into it. I stumbled across this webinar and thought, “what a coincidence - let’s watch”. The presenter is very good. He explains all the parts of the software, what they do, what they might be used for, etc. He even made handouts and...can I just say, swoon? There is nothing more exciting than a well-done presentation. I still need to watch the other two sessions to get a better understanding of how he specifically uses the software for his library though.