I Know What I Did This Summer

....and what a summer it has been! No doubt you have expected me to have been in vacation mode, with my blogging taking a back seat to summer sun. Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth. Summer 2007 has been unusual in that I have not slowed down as I usually do to enjoy the season. I have been pushing through on a number of projects. I now finally get to report back on a few of them:

• First and foremost has been the 4th Northeast Regional Law Libraries Meeting ("NE2007") being held in Toronto October 17 - 20, 2007, which I have been co-chairing along with Steve Weiter from Rochester, NY. Our conference title and theme is Libraries Without Borders II, playing off the last conference held in 1996. Working on this has been a bit like working on a large train. It took a little while to get going since we started working on it 3 1/2 years ago, but now it is full steam ahead! I am just trying to hold on and not get crushed. hahahaha!! We have a fantastic program lined up. I strongly urge you to have a look at the website http://www.librarieswithoutborders.net . News is being posted at our blog http://librarieswithoutborders.wordpress.com and we've created a wiki for participants to post and interact at http://librarieswithoutborders.pbwiki.com . I will be blogging more about this in future posts as I cajole you into attending. ;-)
• I have been teaching a one-day social networking tools course at the Professional Learning Centre, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto. The deal is I was supposed to promote it via this blog, but it filled up so fast I didn't even get a chance to tell you, dear readers, about it before it was full. Much to my surprise! We have run classes on August 9th and 23rd. The next one is slated for September 14th and I believe that one is now sold out as well. Wow! More about that later.
• To be able to teach that course, I have been immersing myself in social networking tools such as Facebook, Google Reader and del.icio.us. If you have been in those spaces you may have seen me. I hope to have some links and observations to share with you as I go along. In some ways at least two of these have started to replace my link blogging over at Connie Crosby Links. This was not part of any sort of purposeful web strategy, but a natural progression. I still have to consider the implications for this blog site.
• I have been participating in the ebb and flow of life and "microblogging" over on Twitter. If you would like to follow along my "tweets", please feel free to find me--I go by connieblogger. (Hint: if you want me to reciprocate and follow you on Twitter, you need to put something meaningful into your profile so that I recognize you or see something we have in common).
• It has been a hectic summer at work. We have been re-evaluating our projects and services at the same time as welcoming articling students into our orientation program mid-summer. Not an easy feat!

My co-workers deserve a lot of credit, working with me and putting up with my periodic comings and goings as I take time off for teaching and meetings. I've done my best to be very present this summer during our changes. If anything has suffered, I would say it has probably been my blogging. Getting home in the evenings, I have barely had the energy to fire up the macbook much less think about putting two words coherently together.

Which reminds me, I have been also neglecting my column on LLRX.com. Owner/editor Sabrina Pacifici has not only been patient and understanding with my many excuses, but also been a strong personal support to me. I have at least a column or two buzzing in my brain after this summer of working and thinking, so I hope to rectify that shortly.

So, now, back to our regularly scheduled program! Happy reading, and I hope to be a little more connected all of you going forward.

Cheers,
Connie

Third Winner Found in Blog Anniversary Draw!

Congratulations to Heather Acton who is the third winner in my third blog anniversary draw! Heather has been away from her email and just saw my message today.

Again, congratulations to all our winners! I'm still waiting for our Cafe Press store to open up.

Cheers,
Connie

Connie Crosby's Big Fat 3rd Blog Anniversary Giveaway Draw!

To celebrate my third year of blogging, I have decided to thank my friends and readers with a little informal giveaway draw. We are just in the process of setting up Cafe Press with Swag (t-shirts and maybe a couple other things) for the 4th Northeast Regional Law Libraries Meeting, Libraries Without Borders II. So, I thought it would be fun to give a few of those items away. Since that is not *quite* set up just yet, what I can say is I will be drawing for 3 items from our lineup.

To be eligible for the draw:

1. You must take my Big Fat 3rd Blog Anniversary Survey
2. You must provide me with your email address in the last survey question.
3. If you get selected in the draw, you must give me a mailing address.
4. You must be in North America or have a North American address I can send the Swag to, 'cause this is out of my own pocket.

I haven't seen the full swag line-up, but I expect prize winners will be able to choose your own groovy item from the list. Woo hoo!

Okay, click here to take Connie Crosby's Big Fat 3rd Blog Anniversary Survey! And best of luck in the draw!!

Thanks so much, everyone!!

Cheers,
Connie

Carnival of the Infosciences #67

Welcome to the Hangover Edition of the Carnival of the Infosciences! It was a slow week for the Carnival, no doubt because of a combined effect of Spring break, the early North American time change, and St. Patrick's Day celebrations (commemorated over at the Vincent G. Rinn Law Library blog) . We had only one submission for Carnival #67, so I am afraid you will now be subjected primarily to picks from my blogroll and maybe even some personal promotion. I'll try not to shout.


St. Patrick's day parade originally uploaded to Flickr by chidorian.


Superstar submitter Chris Zammarelli kindly submitted this post by cindiann from Chronicles of Bean: Library Agitprop . It riffs on this post by Karen Schneider at ALA TechSource: Dear Library of Congress... and takes a good, long, look at what we are doing with Library 2.0. Thank you for a fantastic submission, Chris!

Top on my list is those who have just concluded taking part in Five Weeks to a Social Library, the ground-breaking web-based course put on by the biblio glitterati:

• Meredith Farkas, Chair
• Michelle Boule
• Karen Coombs
• Amanda Etches-Johnson
• Ellyssa Kroski
• Dorothea Salo
  

I was going to list individual blog posts, but I suggest you just go over and explore the whole website, including blogs, wiki and course content. Meredith Farkas has also been blogging the experience over at Information Wants to be Free. And congratulations to Amanda Etches-Johnson for just being named one of LibraryJournal.com's Movers and Shakers of 2007!!

Turning my sights to the other side of the globe, CW at Ruminations based in Perth, Australia, discusses her trip to Margaret River to meet with a number of viticulture (wine-making) students and academic staff and provide them with some information literacy seminars and EndNote training. She talked about the trip beforehand, her plans to use Twitter to communicate with the biblioblogosphere while she was on the trip and away from blog access, and then summarized the experience in What we did in Margaret River.

One of my favourite law library bloggers, Michel-Adrien Sheppard who works at the Supreme Court of Canada and blogs at Library Boy, celebrated International Women's Day with a list of Feminist Legal Theory Resources. Michel-Adrien always picks up on the best of Canadian and international legal information.

At the cooperative group blog Out of the Jungle, Betsy McKenzie celebrated International Women's Day by taking part in Blog Against Sexism Day with a post called Letter to My Daughter. It is a touching read.

Also at Out of the Jungle, Marie S. Newman responds to a New York Times article about digitization, whether anything not digitized will be forgotten in the future, in Digitizing History.

Over at the Vancouver Law Librarian Blog, my west coast counterpart Steve Matthews created a fantastic summary called Biggest Hurdles for Law Firm RSS Adoption just before heading off to Disney.

Scott Vine, at Information Overlord based out of the UK, has shared with us his secrets for finding music in places other than iTunes: Let the Music Play On...

Since we last met, the lo-fi librarian celebrated a first blog anniversary. Happy blogaversary, lo-fi!! Keep on blogging! And check it out--each week lo-fi puts together a list of This Week's Latest Tools - March 18th list and March 11th list.

Which reminds me, Jim Milles is currently teaching a class on how to teach legal research, and he has been blogging and podcasting the content of the course over at TLR07. The students are learning how to incorporate new technology into their teaching. I strongly recommend having a look if you are involved in adult education.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention the new cooperative blog we have created for the Northeast Regional Law Libraries Conference, librarieswithoutborders.wordpress.com . Wendy Reynolds has written a fantastic post called Pushing the borders of the profession . I hope you will have a look. (Okay, that is the blatant self-promotion part. I hope it wasn't too loud and painful!).

Everyone! Show the love and submit your blog article picks to the next edition of Carnival of the Infosciences using the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival wiki page. Our next host, on April 2, 2007 will be Grumpator (just missed April Fool's by one day!).

Cheers,
Connie

NE2007: Libraries Without Borders II - Now Blogging!

I mentioned it somewhere in a past blog message, but thought I would mention this again more formally We are now blogging about the 4th Northeast Regional Law Libraries Meeting (affectionately known as NE2007) over at the new blog Libraries Without Borders II which happens to be the conference title! For anyone who would like to link over to it, the URL is http://librarieswithoutborders.wordpress.com . The main website (which will soon be nicely updated) is still http://www.librarieswithoutborders.net . But do check out that blog for the inside scoop on everything that is happening.

Later this week we will be releasing initial conference details to help everyone with conference attendance planning. Woo hoo!

Cheers,
Connie

Can You See the Wind Rushing Through My Hair?

In my usual style, I am over-committed and should be committed! Too many things on the go, doing my best to do them all somewhat brilliantly.

I just finished penning an article on trends in legal research training for the National, the Canadian Bar Association magazine. Whew! It is overdue and they have been very very patient with me, so it is good to have that finished.

We have also been working on NE2007, the planning of which has been heating up to a frantic pace. I had been anticipating it being this busy in June/July, not already in February/March. Meetings and email messages galore, and a growing concern that we are not getting enough information out to people in a timely fashion. That is being addressed this week. We are going to put out some "hard" details for people by next week and I have started up a blog for us so we can start talking about what it really is we have been doing. Have a sneak preview at http://librarieswithoutborders.wordpress.com.

Work has been a flurry of large projects including research outside the office, and the redrafting of our business continuance plan for the whole office. This time we are taking into account a pandemic scenario since that was not on the radar back in--what?--1999 when we last put some elbow grease into this thing.

In my spare time I have been thinking about and talking about podcasting and video podcasting, figuring out what I want to do. I definitely want to do something.

Oh yeah, and I have been taking a fabulous survey course through the PLC on Web Site Management and Implementation. My group project is to create a website for a real legal aid clinic. I have enjoyed being the liaison between the clinic and the rest of the team. I have also been working on the project report we have to submit, giving the team feedback on the site we have been creating, and being all-round cheerleader. Heh.

And I still have to create a personal site for myself in the next week. We have been creating one as we have gone along in class, but mine managed to somehow go awry and I have to start over. I am envisioning something that will incorporate my blog, a CV which I can update as I complete my growing list of professional activities, and a schedule so people can see what I am doing next. It would also be nice to have a place to post documents, such as presentations I have given, and maybe links to my various web presences. Tall order, but would be very useful!

Oh, yeah, and my next LLRX.com column has to be on the radar too. The plan is to write it on networking. Not the computer kind, but the people kind. It is something I am always coming back to somehow in the column, but haven't addressed it specifically as a topic. I met a bunch of super-networkers at Podcamp and learned a thing or two about networking, so am itching to share it.

So, enough about me. What have YOU been up to?