Categories
academic librarianship

My life as an engineering librarian thus far

I became the liaison librarian for the Engineering Sciences department on the not very auspicious week of March 9. I had a meeting with a student on March 10 and shook her hand with thinking about. “Oh my, I’m so sorry!” I said. “I forgot we can’t do that any more. But I just sanitized my hands.” We then proceeded to sit close together in an enclosed space for 30 minutes. The naivete of March. In any event, it was a hard week to take on a set of responsibilities I hadn’t had for years.

The engineering students were lovely to work with in remote learning, in truth, since they were used to problem solving and adapting and comfortable with technology. Flipping them to remote research appointments was easy, and the major work I did with the students in late spring was social justice in engineering. This mostly involved finding public datasets, which is more or less second nature to me, and talking through systemic inequality with students. Not exactly prescient, but let us say, a perennial topic of relevance.

Over the summer as the research projects were less pressing, and into the fall where the students were some of the few back in the physical campus labs, it felt more pressing to me to go back in time and figure out exactly what skills I actually needed to succeed at working with engineering students in particular. I worked in a science library all through college and was trained to do basic reference there, so I don’t feel uncomfortable with science librarianship, but I knew there was more to learn.

My first step in trying to figure this out was reading blogs and trying to find “day in the life” posts so beloved by librarians to explain what their days look like. I made a nice long list of bookmarks, and set a few initial learning goals. These were:

  1. Read Naimpally, Ashok, Hema Ramachandran, and Caroline Smith. Lifelong Learning for Engineers and Scientists in the Information Age. 1st edition. Elsevier, 2011. While slightly out of date, the overall messages are still relevant and it’s the only thing I have easy access to through work.
  2. Join the public ASEE Engineering Librarians Division mailing list, with an eye to joining the association in the future. I was quite impressed with the outreach from this group, and having been on the list for several months now I think I will put some money down on this. (I did join the Science and Technology Section of ACRL as well when I was renewing).

I’m still working on a new set of goals for the next few months, but this small amount of research and participation has helped me to feel more comfortable with this role. As long everything is still hybrid, outreach is going to feel strange, but that will probably be the most important thing to figure out.

Categories
Music

Favorite Music of 2020 (and 2019)

I missed seeing live music in 2020. I did actually make it to four concerts in January-March, the last one being on March 12, and probably a bad idea in retrospect, but I suppose shows what my priorities are. (I saw Lala Lala/NNAMDI/Sen Morimoto on Jan. 16, Hot Snakes and others at the Empty Bottle winter festival Feb. 22, The Makeup on Mar. 6, and of Montreal on Mar. 12). The story of music I enjoyed this year is mostly one of loss and change–canceled tours, musicians and venues barely hanging on, virtual performances, and a general sense of unease. Looking back, I see phases of where certain albums were particularly resonant in that period of the pandemic or in my life, and perhaps less so after that. There were a few albums from 2019 that still were really important to me to this year.

Here is my Spotify list for Favorites of 2020, roughly in chronological order for when I listened. I’m sure some things are missing, but mostly those would be individual tracks from albums I otherwise didn’t love start to finish, and I haven’t put that together.

Everything up to Sea Wolf is pre-pandemic. Some of these didn’t last for me through the pandemic, though I still like them. For example, Sea Wolf is something I listened to several times a day in the early pandemic days, and not since then. Here’s what I would call my top albums of 2020, without an order in particular.

Hilary Woods: Birthmarks

I first listened to this in January while walking across Philadelphia by myself in the dark to attend a crowded event in a bar. There are so many strange things about sentence. I didn’t like it much then because it was too creepy for me at that moment, but I kept going back. This is best exploration of pregnancy and childbirth in music I have heard. I bought it on vinyl later in the year and it benefits even more from having two sides.

Melkbelly: PITH

This is something I leaned about from Sound Opinions, and I immediately found it completely cathartic. One early listen was on a long rainy sad run on Mother’s Day, but I kept coming back throughout the year. Miranda Winters sings just how I felt so much this year. I am eager to see them in person whenever that can happen.

Midwife: Forever

While this about a traumatic event that occurred in 2018, it felt like the natural backdrop to 2020–not to mention that 2018 was a complicated year for me too. I listened a lot in May as I realized how my life was changing. “Anyone Can Play Guitar” in particular was a backdrop to thinking about all the ways that life can change without any notice.

The Beths: Jump Rope Gazers

The Beths could sing the phone book and I would happily listen, so this one was a given. Since this came out right when I was starting what turned out to be a three month stay away from home, it was so good to have this to keep me company as I missed home and what little social life I had had at home in pandemic times. What I mean by this is that I cried listening to this many times. I got a Carpark Records sticker from the vinyl record and my kid stuck it to his school laptop, so it also helped me to start a new generation of hipsters.

If you look at my most listened to in 2020 list, you will see a few 2019 records on that list, so I will mention those here.

Vagabon: Vagabon

This came out in late 2019, and was absolutely one of my favorites of 2019. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened, and this concert being canceled in the spring and then again in the fall was very sad. Lots of people love “Water Me Down” and “Every Woman”. I love those, but “Secret Medicines” is one of my all time favorite songs.

Emily Jane White: Immanent Fire

I found this for the first time this summer, and proceeded to listen pretty much non-stop after that. It hits all the points of our environmental and social degradation, and while one major theme is prior California fire seasons, it keeps being very relevant.

Here’s hoping that shows can happen again in 2021, and everyone’s quarantine records who weren’t too depressed to make music.

Categories
Productivity

Measuring Podcasts and Other Things

Most days since December 21, 2019, I started the day by opening up a note on my phone and writing down the number of podcast episodes in my “unplayed” playlist. I started doing this because I had 180 podcast episodes to listen to, and I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t get back to that number. I needed to declare bankruptcy on some of them, and I figured I could easily set a goal to make sure that no matter what, I got 5 episodes off the list a day to not fall too far behind. I subscribe to about 50 shows, give or take, and that number went up quite a bit this year as I added pandemic podcasts. Most of these shows are weekly, but some have 2-3 episodes a week, or as many as 5 (though they are short in that case). So on an average week I would have 70 episodes–not hard to end up with 180 on the list. This year some podcasts stopped recording for awhile in March and April as they reconfigured, but then in many cases had even more shows as they added “quarantine” episodes that continued on and on. (The best show to come out as quarantine content has been Stay F. Homekins).

Meanwhile, as my March posts indicated, I was very worried about how I would get any work done. I had no idea in March when I wrote that last post how bad it would get and how hard it would be as I ended up having to unexpectedly solo parent while working full time in another city between July and and October, which corresponded with some of the larger projects I’ve had to do in a long time. I also measure my work time pretty thoroughly using RescueTime, so I have all the data for that. I decided to see how many “very productive” hours I ended up working each week through the same period. “Very productive” means “harder” or more focused work in that I’m not in a meeting or Outlook or something that is work, but perhaps merely “productive” or “neutral”. The news was so much better than I had pictured in my head–I actually got on average a couple of very productive hours per day, which again has many meetings and emails not counted.

I often listen to podcasts while I do that type of work, so I wondered if there would be any connection. There is not, I don’t think, but on both sides I think I got a little sense of sometimes measuring something doesn’t really help, and sometime you’re doing better than you think.