What have I been up to?

"I'm a Florida boy."

I have to keep repeating that to myself. "I'm a Florida boy." Sometimes we all need reminders that things could be worse, although after the sweltering weather of this past week, I'm not sure how. We broke triple digits a few times in the last few days, and just when I start to think it's not so bad, the humidity hits. Climate change or good old-fashioned heat wave? Who can say?

In an effort to clear this question -- among many others related to the weather (chief among which is "WHY?") -- from my mind, I read Generation A by Douglas Coupland.

I've heard a lot of stuff about Coupland. Most of the hoity-toity literary blogs I follow have mentioned him from time to time and it's usually in a very positive light, so I figured he must be pretty close to unreadable.

Except it turns out that Coupland is actually really readable. Generation A is the story of five individuals distributed across the world -- New Zealand, India, France, the U.S., and Canada -- who get stung by bees.

Given that the novel is set in a near-future where bees have been extinct for several years, rendering almonds, apples, and other fruits of assisted pollination (pun intended), very, very expensive, this is a global event. Coupland does a terrific job sketching in a future that looks eerily consistent with our present; the first person to get stung is an Iowan corn farmer who has a live Web stream of himself in his combine as he destroys a cornfield full of an "undesirable gene variant." The second is an Indian call-center operator for Abercrombie & Fitch, the third a New Zealander who's using her cell phone to make an "Earth sandwich" with a woman in Madrid, and so on.

So these five people are stung by bees, and this quite literally throws the entire planet into a tizzy. They become instant celebrities, their lives dissected by millions of people who are curious about what it is that attracted the bees to these people. The stung people disappear into quarantine for a few months while -- cue sinister music -- tests are run on them, and then reunite after being set free. However, they discover that there's a lot more to the story, involving a mysterious pharmaceutical called Solon, a native village on a remote Canadian island, and Belgium.

Truthfully, if the world the novel was set in were less realistic, the plot would probably exist on an astral plane with the works of people like Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, and Dan Brown. But it's weirdly believable, very funny, and completely worth your time.

Also worth my time: The things I've finished so far this summer.

First on the list: Weeding. I've mentioned this a few times over the last couple of months. It's time-consuming and less than wildly enjoyable, but it's necessary and healthy. I set my goal as a specific percentage of the books under my control, and I'm pleased to report that I met -- and exceeded -- that goal. I've focused mostly on older books in the linguistics area of the General Stacks downstairs (call numbers 420-428). Truthfully, a sizable proportion of those books were histories of the English language -- published before 1938! This was before World War II, the 1950s, Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, Nixon, NASA, greed being good, the Internet, and the entirety of the George W. Bush administration, which gave our language a good workout on a daily basis. Those older books were only good for historical curiosity, but served no real academic purpose, which is our main focus.

Actually, they're perfect examples of books that have fallen through the cracks over the years. We're a busy nest of librarians, and weeding is an activity that we tend to perceive as something that goes on in the background all the time. It happens while we're doing other things, incrementally, and -- in my case, especially -- in one big whoop per year. That doesn't mean it isn't important to us, though. I've gone into detail before about why we weed, so, just as a refresher, let me sum it up: sometimes books are moldering on the shelf, dangerously outdated, never used, and are taking up space for books that have more to offer our students these days, so we get rid of them. It's easy to get into the habit of thinking that books are sacrosanct, especially where librarians are concerned (apparently we worship them; ridiculous! Ignore that altar in my bedroom closet, though); however, we have a specific mission to serve the students, faculty, and staff of Gallaudet University, and it is poorly-served by the neglect of our collection. So we prune the collection in order to encourage healthy growth.

Then the Deaf Research Help pages on our Web site. Those have needed to be updated for some time; we refreshed a few of them last year, but were barely able to make a dent. This year, we're making a big push to transfer all of that information to LibGuides. I worked on the FAQs about deaf statistics and ASL, which were pretty heavy by themselves. They're both information-heavy. The deaf statistics pages focus mainly on offering starting points for estimates of deafness within a population; the United States in general, then each state, then each country. It took me nearly a week to hunt down and tabulate the statistics for the U.S. alone; the Census Bureau and other data-collecting entities don't do things in as clear-cut a manner as they used to, so some figuring was necessary. The rest of the world took another couple of weeks -- it's not easy trying to find official statistics on the prevalence of deafness in Ethiopia, for instance, or the number of sign-language users in Brazil. Although I managed to put together a decent update, this will have to be an ongoing product as more information becomes available.

Sign language, on the other hand, was a little easier; some quick run-throughs of our catalog and major vendors, along with the advent of YouTube and Vimeo, among others, made life much simpler. All told, maybe a month's worth of work was spent on those two LibGuides, and I'm partly glad it's over and partly glad I was able to learn so much. For example, did you know that 95% of the Japanese deaf population is at age-level literacy? That's something the U.S. can't accomplish even with hearing people. Fascinating!

We've also set up a new chat system for our Meebo widget on library.gallaudet.edu. You'd be bored with the details, but it'll make our lives much easier; the main thing I'm excited about is that now, when we get a question over IM about something specific to someone's subject area, we don't have to run to their office and call them in to the Service Desk so they can answer it -- we can just transfer the IM directly to their office! The new system should also reduce the delays that sometimes occur when the person answering IMs at the Service Desk is busy helping other people and can't respond to an IM right away; someone else, in their office, will also get the same IM and answer it themselves if necessary. Overall, this should help ensure faster and more accurate responses.

I've also been working on a new program we bought earlier this year that'll let us create video tutorials (with captioning, of course) for various aspects of our online resources. I'm starting out with LibGuides, explaining how they work, what each important element is, and how to use them to your advantage. It should be appearing somewhere on the Web site within the next few weeks; I'm just about done, but what with one thing or another, it may take a little while to get up and running.

The ALA Conference was another big thing on my to-do list. It sounds funny, but a few days away from work was definitely included on my list of important things to work on this summer. You saw my post last week; most of those events were selected specifically for key aspects of my work here at the Gallaudet University Library, and I came away super-enriched with more information and ideas!

And then, last but definitely not least, I'm redesigning our home page. Yes, again -- I can hear the groans from the peanut gallery. Although our current design is much nicer-looking than the one we had before, one of the most common questions we've been getting for the past year is, "How do I search the catalog?" It only beats "How do I find e-Journals or databases?" by a very, very slim margin. The answers to both questions are right on the home page, but people are having a hard time finding it. So I'm shuffling things around a little bit, reducing the current number of boxes by a third and reorganizing information so things are a little more unified, grouping like with like. Above it all, I'm sticking a honkin' big search box for our catalog, so you can guess what our emphasis is. The result of all this is that the layout is more compact, logically compartmentalized, and much easier to take in within one or two spins of the scroll wheel on your mouse. Here's a tiny, not-at-all-clear preview of what's to come:

All of the above is what I've been working on for the past month and a half or so, ever since we finished ordering new items and put a nice little bow on the Spring semester. The sad thing is that although I've gotten a large amount of stuff out of the way, I'm still not done. The projects you've been reading about are the ones explicitly related to the Library. Now that they're just about over with, I'm going on vacation next week, and then when I return, it's time to focus on projects that don't involve changing out anything in the Library itself: preparation for the First Year Experience course I'll be teaching in the Fall (if you're an incoming freshman and you're reading this, I may be teaching you starting this August!), gearing up for the Common Reading, which will be The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, by preparing LibGuides and planning campus-wide events, and getting started on writing questions for the 2011 Academic Bowl competition. It'll be a busy late July and August!

I'm sure you didn't miss the bit where I said I'm going on vacation next week. There won't be a blog post then. But when I come back, there'll be a Thursday post on the 22nd (unless I don't get called in to jury duty) about Jane Rutherford in anticipation of her retirement, then Friday, July 30, will see more about the Common Reading and what we're doing for it. Following that, the month of August, as it was last year, will be devoted to the incoming class!

Enjoy your weekend!

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Question of the Week
I'm here at Gallaudet for a summer program, and I have Library borrowing privileges. But I read the sign you have up on the Service Desk, and it doesn't say anything about me or how long I'm allowed to borrow Library things for. I just checked out a book, and the librarian told me I can only have it for a week. What's up with that?
That sign only addresses regular borrowers: students, staff, faculty, alumni, and members of other Consortium universities. When you're on campus for a summer program and have obtained an ID that allows you to use the Library, your borrowing period is determined by your expiration date if it's less than four weeks away. The main program going on right now wraps up on July 17, which is a week from tomorrow, so that's when your ID -- and, by extension, your ability to borrow Library items -- expires. It makes sense: when your program is done, you're likely not sticking around; why risk incurring fines if you'll be in another state long before The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is due?