TLA Launch: Week 2

As homework for TLA Launch, they asked us to complete a test to get our Style Under Stress Score. You’re asked 33 true or false questions about the way you handle stressful situations. The makers of the Style Under Stress test use Silence and Violence as two indicators of your stress style. On a range of 0-6, you are scored on how you act towards silence and violence. The lower the number the better. 

I could have told you before the test that I’m definitely a silent stress-er. I can’t think fast enough on my good days and I’m very conscious of how correct and accurate I am. There is no way that I’m going to spew things I’m unsure of when I’m under stress. In the Silent section, I received a score of 1 for both Masking and Avoiding and a score of 2 for Withdrawing. 

In the Violence Score breakdown, I received a zero for both Controlling and Labeling and a 1 in Attacking. 

The next range they measure is your Crucial Conversations Score. These can be scored 0-3 in each category. I received a 1 in the Explore Other’s Paths, Move to Action, Start with Heart, Learn with Look, Make it Safe, Master My Stories sections, and a 2 in STATE My Path. 

I am pretty self-aware when it comes to my shortcomings in stressful situations. I am definitely a withdrawer and I have a hard time understanding conversations that focus heavily on emotions. I love taking all kinds of personality tests, so this was just something else I have in my arsenal of self-awareness. Knowing how I react in stressful situations is always helpful. 

"To Think too Long About..."

From ALA; Peters Township (Penn.) Public Library

“To think too long about doing a thing often becomes its undoing.”

Eva Young

On-Demand LibGuides Analytics Another month, another LibGuides asset run. For the “month” of September 26 - October 23, the featured tutorial, Introduction to Interlibrary Loan had 17 views! That is the most views of any video for any month (featured or not). Not sure what to attribute the slightly higher views to. Was it the subject matter, the fact that more staff are starting to look at the Featured Tutorials page, or the addition of the video player to the Featured page so that it looked more like the others? Not sure but I will be keeping the video player on the Featured page from now on. 

This month, the new Featured Tutorial will be How to Use Advanced Search in Scopus. This will also be the first month I’ll update a banner on the library’s website to coincide with the updates so we’ll see if that helps attract people. 

Rare Book Virtual Exhibit This week I finished the Famous Mathematician virtual exhibit. On Thursday, my boss, my co-worker, and I met to discuss. Overall the changes were minimal, a switch of paragraphs here, a change of forward and back buttons there. This means that we’ll be able to start marketing the exhibit to staff members soon. It was decided that we will also have the books available for viewing in the library as we normally would during non-COVID times. The ten books will be displayed in glass cases with an informative printout. Though there isn’t currently a monitor for moving displays, we’re hoping to get access to one so I will also put together a slideshow that has a bit more information than the displays can hold themselves. 

Virtual Escape Room: LibGuides Webinar I attended a LibGuides webinar for creating a virtual escape room. I love how many tutorials and webinars LibGuides has for its customers. The ones I have attended are also very well done and stick strictly to their timelines. The webinar was helpful only in ways to set up the puzzles within the escape room. The host used a LibGuides service we do not subscribe to. However, I've seen the San Antonio Public Library create virtual escape rooms with Google Forms and other platforms so the setup, design, and creation of the puzzles from the LibGuides tutorial was beneficial in that sense. I wanted to create a virtual escape room as part of the Famous Mathematicians exhibit but my brain is fried and it ended up being more of a quiz than a fun appropriately-themed game. Still, it's something we might be able to incorporate in another place. 

TLA Launch: Week 1

TLA Launch is a leadership program geared towards those in the library field who have been in the industry less than five years. Though I’m not interested in being a manager, the fact that I was one means you can’t ever say never. While I was a manager, I learned that there are many skills I lacked when it came to managing, leading, and influencing. Even if I never manage people in the future, I think that this program will help in my overall professional development. There will be some skillsets I’ll know to work on and on the flip side I’ll have a better understanding of what bosses have to go through when it comes to supervising others. 

The first week was dedicated to Emotional Intelligence and Influence. I guess it’s good to get the hard things out of the way first, right? Though I think I’m good at recognizing my own emotions, I’m not comfortable expressing them at work. Even less so to others, with others, about others, because of others, or in any way relating to others. I like to think I have a good handle on my emotions and the way they get expressed at work (which honestly has been easy because of COVID) but part of emotional intelligence (and its relation to leadership) is that you have to be attuned to others as well. Well...I’ll just add that to the list of things I need to work on. 

"The Man who Moves a Mountain..."

“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”

Confucius

Book Club: Pandemic In a totally crazy, random happenstance, one of the books that staff picked to be read as part of Book Club this year was Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond by Sonia Shah. We discussed the book this month. I admit, I didn’t read it. The only book I’ve read on time for Book Club this year was A Man Called Ove. However, I did borrow the book from San Antonio Public Library and after hearing all the good (and harrowing) things about it, I’m more interested than ever to read it. It’s definitely been added to my Goodreads To Be Read list. 

LibGuides Webinar - Google Fonts I attended this quick 15 minute webinar on how to incorporate Google Fonts into your LibGuides. It was helpful but disappointing in that you can only add the font to all your LibGuides, not just individual pages. 

Rare Book Virtual Exhibit This week I spent the majority of my time working on the website for the virtual exhibit. I think I went through five iterations of what I wanted the website to look like. I started with one mathematician, created a page, used it as a template for the next one and then added or changed components. Wash, rinse, repeat. I had to mentally tell myself that this is just the first exhibit and that it doesn’t have to be absolutely perfect or groundbreaking. As I learn more web development, I’ll be able to incorporate those things into other exhibits. For now, I have the content I need, what I must focus on is getting it onto a pretty website that will be functional, engaging, and interactive. 

CORAL Fall Meeting I’ve noticed in life I don’t get invited to much (even before the pandemic). However, when I do, it’s usually for 12 things all on the same day...because, of course. Well, this Friday was that day for me at work. There were three meetings I wanted/had to go to and all of them occurred on the same day. 

CORAL (Council of Research and Academic Libraries) had their fall meeting held jointly with TLA District 10. They had a full schedule of sessions and panel discussions. I watched the keynote with kYmberly Keeton but unfortunately had to jet over to another Zoom call. 

LISSA All School’s Day LISSA (Library and Information Science Student Association) was holding their All School’s Day event on Friday as well. Since I’m an officer of the group, I joined in watching the Dean talk about the importance of research, and saw parts of the three presenters. At 1P there was supposed to be a poster presentation by ASIS&T that I was really interested in seeing. I never got the opportunity to present a poster in undergrad and now feel that it is something I missed out on. I was curious to see what kind of poster presentations LIS students had, but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend because Friday was also the first day of TLA Launch. 

TLA Launch TLA Launch is a leadership program geared towards those in the library field who have been in the industry for less than five years. Though I’m not interested in being a manager, the fact that I was one means you can’t ever say never. While I was a manager, I learned that there are many skills I lacked when it came to managing, leading, and influencing. Even if I never manage people in the future, I think that this program will help in my overall professional development. There will be some skill sets I’ll know to work on and on the flip side I’ll have a better understanding of what bosses have to go through when it comes to supervising others. 

The first week was dedicated to Emotional Intelligence and Influence. I guess it’s good to get the hard things out of the way first, right? Though I think I’m good at recognizing my own emotions, I’m not comfortable expressing them at work. Even less so to others, with others, about others, because of others, or in any way relating to others. I like to think I have a good handle on my emotions and the way they get expressed at work (which honestly has been easy because of COVID) but part of emotional intelligence (and its relation to leadership) is that you have to be attuned to others as well. Well...I’ll just add that to the list of things I need to work on. 

"The Future Depends on What You Do Today"

“The future depends on what you do today.”

Mahatma Gandhi

OpenAthens Meeting  My boss invited me to an OpenAthens introduction meeting. We officially “kicked off” OpenAthens in October and they just wanted to touch base, get a few answers from us to some questions, and make sure that we didn’t have any questions. Right now, the ball seems to be in their court so we’re just waiting. 

Rare Book Virtual Exhibit Meeting This week my boss, my co-worker, and I met for a follow-up meeting regarding the virtual rare book exhibit. I created a PDF presentation with the information and photos so that my boss and my co-worker could give input. I’ve learned from other design projects that communication is key. I’ve put 100% into a project only to have to redo all the work because the client didn’t like a certain aspect. Nothing wrong with that, I just learned how important it is to have that feedback throughout the process so that all of my energy isn’t expended on something that won’t get the green light. 

For this project, it was decided that the PDF presentation probably wasn’t the best platform. Though it could look very nice and be very informative, we want staff to interact with the presentation - clicking, gallery viewing, etc. - and the presentation just didn’t contain enough of those movements. 

So, we decided that a website would be better. I had already started creating a template for the website because I also thought it would be a better way to go so I continued working on it to get a demo together. 

LibGuides Webinar - How to Create an Art Gallery In fortuitous timing, LibGuides had a webinar on How to Create an Art Gallery. I didn’t want to create the rare book virtual exhibit in a LibGuides but I did want to see how to do it, as well as to get ideas on what a gallery in LibGuides might look like.

Well, the process was so easy! And they look really good. Though I don’t plan on using it for the virtual rare book exhibit, it’s nice to know that if we ever need to create a gallery asap, there’s always the LibGuides option.

"Whether you Think You Can..."

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t - you’re right.”

Henry Ford

Using the My Tools Features in ASTM Compass My next on-demand video tutorial, Using the My Tools Features in ASTM Compass, was approved and I uploaded it to our LibGuides. The platform was experiencing some technical issues but I decided just to delete the parts describing the features so that the entire video didn’t have to wait for the changes. Once I receive an email from their technical support that the feature is working as it should, I’ll go in and add them to the already created video. 

Rare Book Virtual Exhibit Meeting This week my boss, my co-worker, and I met for a follow-up meeting regarding the virtual rare book exhibit. We discussed general thoughts and a basic outline on the exhibit. 

Rare Book Virtual Exhibit This week I started designing the Rare Book Virtual Exhibit based on our meeting. I originally started creating it in PowerPoint but don’t like the fact that you can’t keep items from moving by locking them into place. So then, I started working in Illustrator, but as I don’t have a legitimate background in design work, I think I’m missing a key component. Namely that the photos of our rare books are HUGE. We’re talking 3000-4000 pixels, so when I imported them into Illustrator, I was having a hard time actually working in the program. Things were really starting to lag. This is something that I’ll have to Google and look into further. There is no way that all these major designers have issues working with high-res photos. I’m hoping that there is a way for the software itself to just use a smaller version of the photos without me actually having to do the work of editing them myself. 

So anyway, I ended up using Canva. I figured I’d let the platform do all the work of compressing the high-res photos. Which worked well. Well, the photo part worked well. For some reason, the text gets all screwy anytime I make anything italicized. However, if needed, I can work around that by just downloading the slides as a PDF without text and then adding the text in InDesign. With a rough draft done, I set a meeting to reconnect with my boss and my co-worker next week so we can talk comments, suggestions, and critiques. 

Quarterly Library Meeting This was the first quarterly library meeting I’ve attended since I started. I have met the Director on campus before the meeting but I had never met the Assistant Director so it was nice to put a face to a name. The meeting was just a quick overview of what the library accomplished in the fiscal year. Much like our weekly library meetings, we each went round-robin giving highlights on the work we’ve been doing in our area. 

"I Like Work: It Fascinates Me"

“I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”

Jerome K. Jerome

On-Demand Tutorial Analytics With another month down, I ran my LibGuides analytics for the on-demand video tutorials. Last month, I didn’t send out a company-wide email to highlight a featured tutorial because I was curious to see how many people/views we’d get organically. Turns out about half. In the last month, the on-demand video tutorials received exactly half the views as the previous two months. This just helped to solidify the fact that we must keep top-of-mind because with so much going on at work (and in the world) many don’t automatically think to look at the library website as often.

This last month was the end of our Fiscal Year, so my boss asked me to create a few charts. I only started uploading the video hyperlinks as assets to LibGuides in June, so my information was just from June through the end of September. But it’s still nice to see which platforms people are interested in and how much of an impact the company-wide emails make.


Introduction to InterLibrary Loan Tutorial The featured tutorial for this month is Introduction to Interlibrary Loan. As soon as I set the email out, someone caught a spelling error in my video. The horror! He was very nice about it and I’m honestly glad that he let us know. I went in to correct it right away. This month, I also changed up the look of the featured tutorial page on LibGuides. Before, I had a header image that staff could click to view the video. However, I thought that since all the other pages have a square video player, people might be used to that layout and would get confused with the header. So we’ll see in a month what the results are.