Hello from the weekend reference shift

Hi, all. I'm writing from a snowy Waterville Maine. Not enough snow to do anything with, just enough to make the roads messy, unfortunately. Since Colby College is a residential campus, the students are here, whatever the weather, and so this is my weekend a month to come in and take on all challengers. (But, since it's early afternoon still, there's some free time for blog writing.)

As you probably inferred, we're a small campus with a small staff, so we all work hard to wear many hats. "Reference Librarian" is what it says on the nametag, but I imagine that we have all had to deal with the difficult task of explaining everything that a library job entails. This is a big part of why I am so excited about the 5 Weeks course--Not only is it a great way to get up to speed on a variety of technologies, but it forces me to make that a priority, rather than an "after I get x, y, and z done" sort of task.

In terms of using social software, I'd say it depends on what I'm doing.  I studied in Wales for grad school and many of my friends and family are a long way from Maine, so IM, Skype, Flickr, Esnips, or Blogger, for example, are old favorites.  At work I feel like I'm right on the edge between social software being "cool, but still extra work" and being "impossible to get things done without".  We use a wiki (from pb wiki for convenience) for our internal pages (how to, proceedures, etc.) as well as for managing at least one committee that I'm on.  Bloglines is certainly a staple for me, and del.icio.us is just about to become indispensable, I think.  Beyond that, well, that's what this is for, right?

I can't wait to get to know everyone as the course progresses--I'm really looking forward to talking to people about these issues who have the time, energy, and inclination to want to experiment and explore with social libraries. Hopefully this will also make my coworkers happy so I'm not bothering them with constant "check this out!" type conversations.  Although I can't make any promises about that.

More soon,

Alisia