A Wandering Eyre

*drool*

Oh, this is something I simply must have!

–Jane, graphic novels and high brow literature become one

And a story about printing in the library

Once upon a time there was a library that received a dedicated fee from its 35,000 student body in exchange for good service, computers, and free printing. After some years, it was obvious to all the librarians that worked on the reference desk that the amount of paper being used was astronomical. Unfortunately, they had no way to find out exactly how much was being printed and wasted, but the recycle bins always seemed to be full.

The administration of the library was dedicated to offering free printing as a service, so the reference staff looked around for other ways to save paper. Eventually they installed a print management system that required the students to release each of their jobs (or their jobs as a group) at a print station, thus ensuring, they hoped, that all jobs printed would be wanted jobs.

There were a few bugs along the way, but this new system was also able to count how many pages were actually being printed every day. In the first four days of school, 420,000 pages were printed on our 250 computers. That is 105,000 pages a day. The other labs on campus printed a total of 35,000 in those 4 days. The library is not the main computing facility on campus, but it was the only one with free printing.

Librarians were happy to walk around and see less waste sitting around the printers, but 105,000 pages per day is a lot of paper. That is 3 pages for every student every day, which seems to be not unreasonable. But when you add money to the equation, the story becomes different.

The money is the real moral of this story.

If you suppose that a box of paper holds 5,000 pages and each box costs $20. You can assume that the library gets a price break and we will assume a cost of $15 for our purposes. At 105,000 pages, that is 21 boxes of paper per day, 5 times a week for a total of 105 boxes per week. Now I am leaving off the weekends, but less is printed then and that may make up for the page number resulting from the first few days of classes.

There are roughly 4 weeks in a month, making the total for each month 420 boxes. A semester is 3.5 months long thus 420 x 3.5 equals 1,470 boxes. If each box costs $15 dollars, then the library spends $22,050 every three and a half months on paper for the students. If you calculate that b per year (very scientifically ignoring the fact that summer is slower), then 420 x 12 equals 5,040 boxes. At $15 a box, we are paying $75,600 a year on paper. These calculations do not even take into account printer maintenance and staff time needed to upkeep that level of printing.

This is a library supposedly having money issues. I am concerned about both the waste of paper and the waste of money. If we could simply limit the total amount of paper students could use, then they would not be printing every Power Point Presentation in every class one slide to a sheet, every online textbook they have ever had to use, those flyers for their frats, and any other 100 page document their little heart desires.

Give them a crazy limit, like 750 pages. This is a lot, but it would keep the people who abuse the free printing from doing so because they will have to choose between that 500 page online textbook and those flyers for their next frat party.

And a note about that dedicated fee: The university also decided this year that all fees would be put in a pot and distributed through a complex system of begging. That dedicated fee no longer belongs to the library.

I know this is not a unique situation. Are there any other librarians out there that have found a good solution to this problem?

–Jane, frustrated with the system, anyone got a better?

*Update: Obviously, this is all very scientific***sarcasm*** and should be taken as such. 

Friday, on my first date as a married woman, Mr. R took me to see Beerfest. I know that sounds like the most romantic thing in the world to you, but Mr. R knows how to make me laugh. Beerfest is brought to screens everywhere from the minds of Broken Lizard, the ensemble that made Super Troopers and Club Dread.

If you liked Super Troopers, then this movie will not disappoint you. If you, like me, spent almost every weekend of college playing A**hole, Speed Quarters, or Beer Pong, then this movie will definitely not disappoint you.

–Jane, skip you, drink!

There has been some hub bub over at Forbes magazine. You can read about it here, here, and here. I, like Walt, will not give them link love for this kind of shit. It is drivel like this that makes me want to sputter incoherent words and wonder why I even try.

The other problem is that it strikes at the fear that many women who work and want to/have kids hide. Can I really do both? Will I be neglecting my family? I grew up in a two earner household and I had a supermom who worked a full day and continued to work all night with little or no help from my dad. It was just the way things were for my family. Mr. Rochester is a partner in every way and we split duties because we would not be married otherwise. We are partners. We share the yoke (and sometimes the yolks).

Regardless, I have angst. I think many women do. What we really need are supportive partners not men who believe they can blame all their problems on women. There are individuals on all areas of the gender spectrum who are guilty of behaving badly in marriage and not giving their children their proper attention, so let’s not pretend that women are the only ones at fault.

–Jane, anything else and I will just be sputtering

Dear Vendors,

If you ever happen to send a representative to MPOW, I would like to suggest to you the easiest way to convince me to purchase your product. Simply send two young, nice looking men with British (or Scottish or Australian for that matter) accents who know the products. I am, how do you say…. easily persuaded by a nice British accent.

If you would like an example of a company that is employing this technique with good success, please see Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Mathew Drury and Daniel Scott were very informative and made an excellent case for their new product.

It is also helpful to have a demonstration which is to the point and on the right level for people who work with information for a living. We know how most things work, so please just give us the highlights, keep your PPT to a minimum, and show live demos if possible (the gentleman above employed all of these techniques). I would also suggest that your representatives be able to answer both mundane and technical questions.

Sincerely,

Jane Eyre

p.s. I have a running theory that anything, no matter how bad, sad, or ridiculous, sounds better when said in a British or Scottish accent.

p.p.s. True Story: Once during a vendor demo, the librarians at MPOW noticed that Mexico was not included in a database that was supposed to cover business info under NAFTA and other North American company statistics. When asked why this was the case, the representative said, “Mexico is not part of North America.” Really? I could have sworn… Most of us stopped listening after that.

All Your Base made the rounds among the Nintendo Generation when I was in college. It still makes me laugh. What is not funny about badly translated early video games set to techno music? Nothing!

Except, Snakes on a Plane spoofs. Gentle readers, I give you “All Your Snakes.”

–Jane, you have no chance to survive make your time

Special thanks to eprahs who made this post possible 

Our students returned on Monday and the resulting zoo that has appeared in our library is one of my favorite things about the Fall semester. We had a whopping 10,550 people walk through our door on Monday, roughly a third of our student population.

–Jane, thinks the desk is more fun when it is busy

This first step is admitting you have a dork problem. For example:

Today, at a table outside the library at which we were handing out pens, calendars, and water to students on their first day of class, our organizer noticed were out of pens and she started pulling out more pens out of a bag, as if by magic. I commented, “Wow, it is like you very own bag of holding.”

My mouth froze in horror. My inner dork was revealed! Then, one of the guys at the table smiled at me in understanding. We had a conversation about how cool it would be if we really could have a bag of holding and what we would like to put in said bag.

–Jane, maybe a few bottles of Sauvignon Blanc?

Two weeks ago, I went to Costa Rica. It was fabulous. I was on vacation, so I ate and drank whatever pleased me to do so. Is that not what vacation is all about? When I came home, I sat down to upload all my wonderful photos onto Flickr and then hesitated.

Do I really want everyone to see all my pictures? ALL of them? What if I look bad? What if I am tired with a pina colada in front of me? Does it matter? Do I care?

People who know me in “real” life know I am open with who I am. What you see is mostly what you get. I am an adult, so I occassionaly drink. I like to take pictures of my drinks for a reason I have not yet determined.

My boss looks at my pictures. People I do not know, have yet to meet, and may one day work for look at my pictures. Will it taint their image of me to see this?

After about 5 minutes of deliberation, I decided I did not care. We are all adults and I post pictures with the full knowledge that someone, somewhere will dissapprove of something I do. There is a line and I do not feel I have crossed it.

This is the first time I have faced this sort of delemma in regards to images. I know I can make some pictures “private” on Flickr, but having private pictures is not the purpose of that account. I decided when I put my name on my blog that if I ever interviewed with an employer who took offense at something I said or put online and, as a result, would not hire me, I did not want to work for them anyway. I think part of this attitude comes from my young age. Maybe I am just pig headed. (Mr. Rochester would go with the latter.)

There should be room in the world for different kinds of people and expression. I would not want to work for someone who willfully misunderstood the way the world works in an Internet age.

In brief: I decided I did not care.

–Jane, most of my favorite pictures are of this anyway

CFP: Five Weeks to a Social Library
Location: Online
Dates: February 12 - March 17, 2007
CFP Deadline: September 22, 2006

We are pleased to present Five Weeks to a Social Library, the first free, grassroots, completely online course devoted to teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries. The course was developed to provide a free, comprehensive, and social online learning opportunity for librarians who do not otherwise have access to conferences or continuing education and who would benefit greatly from learning about social software. The course will take place in Drupal and on a MediaWiki installation, and will also involve a variety of other popular social software tools. The course will make use of synchronous components, with one or two weekly Webcasts and many IM chat sessions being made available to students each week. The course will culminate in each student developing a proposal for implementing a specific social software tool in their library.

The course will take place between February 12 and March 17 and will be limited to forty participants. However, course content will be freely viewable to interested parties and all live Webcasts will be archived for later viewing.

We are currently welcoming proposals for live presentations and course content on the following topics:

* Blogs
* RSS
* Wikis
* Social Networking Software and SecondLife
* Flickr
* Social Bookmarking Software
* Selling Social Software @ Your Library (no live Webcasts on this topic)

We want the presentations to be as practical and useful to as wide a library-related audience as possible. Preference will be given to presentations that 1) are very “nuts-and-bolts” or 2) describe a successful use of the technology that could be replicated in different types of libraries.

We are looking for presentations in the following formats:

* Webcast – a one-hour live online Webcast that will be archived.
* Screencast/Vodcast – no more than 30 minutes (please note: most commercial screencasting software offer a 30-day free trial).
* Podcast – we welcome proposals for podcast presentations, podcast interviews with innovators in the field or podcast discussions between innovators in the field.
* Text presentations – we will accept a very limited number of text presentations, but we greatly prefer presentations that incorporate audio and video.

In addition to developing a presentation, presenters must also make themselves available via AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) for questions from students for one-hour during the week their presentation is shown.

All presentations will be made available under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Format of Proposal: 250 – 500 words, written. Proposals are a way for the review team to assess your contribution quickly. Please do not submit full presentations.

Proposals should include the following:

* Full name of presenter
* E-mail address of presenter
* Web-site and/or blog URL of presenter
* IM screenname(s)
* Institutional affiliation
* Brief biographical information (under 150 words)
* Include same personal information as above for any additional presenters after the lead presenter (if applicable)
* Presentation title
* Format(s) you are willing to present in (if you are flexible about the format you are willing to present in, please note that)
* Presentation Abstract (250 – 500 words)

Proposals must be submitted by September 22, 2006 via e-mail to sociallibrary@gmail.com. Any questions about the CFP process can be addressed to the Planning Committee at sociallibrary@gmail.com.

Proposal Review: Proposals will be reviewed by the planning committee.

Planning Committee:

* Michelle Boule
* Karen Coombs
* Amanda Etches-Johnson
* Meredith Farkas
* Ellyssa Kroski
* Dorothea Salo

Key Dates:

* Deadline for Proposals: Friday, September 22, 2006
* Notification of Acceptance: October 1, 2006