[{"id":316,"date":"2026-05-12T10:39:58","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T14:39:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/?p=316"},"modified":"2026-05-12T10:40:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T14:40:00","slug":"evaluation-of-dspace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/evaluation-of-dspace\/","title":{"rendered":"Evaluation of DSpace as a Digital Preservation Platform"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>This post is a copy of my final project for DIG 550 Digital Preservation, for the University of Maine&#8217;s online graduate <a href=\"https:\/\/digitalcuration.umaine.edu\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/digitalcuration.umaine.edu\/\">Digital Curation Certificate<\/a>. The ideas and opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent any official adoption or current project of Vermont Law and Graduate School.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At Vermont Law and Graduate School (VLGS), the library hosts two archival collections: our institutional archive, with materials relating to the history of the school, and a faculty scholarship collection, consisting of books, articles and other scholarly publications. We would like to digitize these materials for preservation and access, and I wanted to evaluate one potential platform to use in this work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I chose <a href=\"https:\/\/dspace.org\/\"><em>DSpace\u2122<\/em><\/a>because I wanted to try an open-source solution for our digital repository and digital archive preservation needs. DSpace can ingest many different file types, including moving-image, audio, still image, text, and other formats. This makes it a potentially powerful and flexible option for a multi-format archive. The development group behind <em>DSpace<\/em>, Lyrasis, has developed other platforms, including <em>ArchivesSpace<\/em> and <em>Fedora<\/em>. There is no publicly-hosted demo of these, so I was not able to test them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Testing <em>DSpace<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Installation of <em>DSpace <\/em>is complex and requires sysadmin level access to a server as well as knowledge of Linux commands. Even though the interface is web-based, there is no &#8220;one-click install&#8221; or drag-and-drop setup process for this platform, and the instructions were beyond my comfort level given the time allotted. I checked with our IT department about their availability to help, but they were not prepared to set up a test server on short notice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Fortunately, I was able to use the <em>DSpace <\/em>public demo site, which is fully enabled with all features and functions. Unfortunately, because it&#8217;s an open and public demo, I couldn&#8217;t be sure that my test data would stay persistent over days. Items and collections I built were erased by other testers (or possibly Lyrasis staff), so I had to conduct tests piecemeal. At one point I realized I couldn&#8217;t create new Communities or Collections, only upload Items to previously-established ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On the positive side, it was easy to intuit how to use the system and where to put files based on the options available. The structure of <em>DSpace <\/em>is hierarchical:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Admin <\/strong>is for overall access control and maintenance of the system (institution level);<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Community <\/strong>and <strong>Collection <\/strong>tiers serve an organizational functions;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Publication <\/strong>level is for specific publications within a collection of similar content;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Item <\/strong>level is where files are uploaded, described, and stored.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While it was easy to understand the basic architecture of <em>DSpace <\/em>as a platform, I realized that the system\u2019s flexibility also means that users have to define an organizational structure for their content and carefully plan out how to implement it. Specifically, <em>Item Type<\/em>, <em>Subject<\/em>, and <em>Subject Category<\/em> could be used for various item attributes, and could vary at the <em>Collection <\/em>or <em>Community <\/em>level. Defining these designations ahead of time will keep the archive organized and make sure that it is searchable as it grows. For these fields as well as other more standard ones (Author, Date, etc), I would use a standardized metadata format such as MODS or Dublin Core and controlled vocabulary to keep the data uniform for better parsing, searching, and interoperability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Other helpful features of the system include the ability to import metadata from an external source. As an example, if we had a spreadsheet with title, author, date, and subject information, that would not have to be re-created. <em>DSpace <\/em>also supports discovery via the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.openarchives.org\/pmh\/\">OAI-PMH interface<\/a> and <em>Google Scholar<\/em> optimizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In addition, the system automatically generates permanent URLs at the Community, Collections, Publication, and Item levels, and one can also attach unique permanent identifiers such as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.doi.org\/\">Digital Object Identifiers<\/a> (DOI).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Limits of <em>DSpace<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At the platform level, the <em>DSpace <\/em>software is free and open-source, so there is a community of users and volunteer developers around it. There is additional support from Lyrasis itself, but not as much official help desk-type support as a commercial product would likely have. For heavily-customized instances of <em>DSpace<\/em>, it will be especially important for institutions to document their data architecture and decision-making reasons at the outset, and \u2013 as a particular project or collection is developed \u2013 to keep the data consistent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>DSpace <\/em>is &#8220;owned&#8221; or sponsored by Lyrasis, a non-profit company that functions similar to a consortium, with paid membership. While they have been around in various forms for about 80 years, shifts in their priorities or mission could affect specific products like <em>DSpace<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As with other open-source software, <em>DSpace <\/em>can be self-hosted or one can <a href=\"https:\/\/lyrasis.org\/dspace-direct\/\">pay Lyrasis<\/a> or other approved vendors to host for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Self-hosting requires more labor and understanding of the underlying server, plus processes and technology for backup, file checking and verification, and migration or updates. In exchange, a self-hosted instance may allow for greater flexibility and customization. Outside hosting offers the set-and-forget ease of use of offloading management tasks like security, backups, and updates, but requires funds and dependency on an outside group to keep the system running as desired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The built-in fields mentioned above are not customizable. In other words, the term Community is fixed; an institution using <em>DSpace <\/em>has to define a Community and cannot call it something else (such as Department, Audience, or Research Area). This may cause confusion with some applications of <em>DSpace <\/em>for groups that are building something other than an academic institutional repository.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I also noticed that <em>DSpace <\/em>can react very slowly. Upload times, searching, and rendering documents sometimes had noticeable lag. This may be a function of the test environment itself or it may be due to the way the platform is built.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Recommended Uses<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>DSpace <\/em>is built as an institutional repository, and I would use it that way for our collection of scholarly publications from our faculty. While <em>ArchiveSpace<\/em> or <em>Fedora <\/em>might better suit archival purposes, <em>DSpace <\/em>appears to be flexible enough to work as an archive as well, and it may be easier to have a single system rather than separate ones for archives and scholarship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Currently, our physical archive and scholarly repository are closed collections, to protect the items, many of which are unique.Members of the VLGS community may request to view specific items by appointment, but the archive is not open for browsing. While it may seem natural to allow anyone to access digital versions of the archive after documents are scanned, we would probably maintain a closed or semi-restricted model for the digital version as well, with input from our internal Communications and Alumni Relations departments. The archives do contain sensitive information, including photographs of alumni and famous persons, copies of speeches given, as well as internal documents such as minutes from faculty meetings. The institution would like to maintain control over this material and present it in intentionally-curated ways for specific purposes, such as fundraising or alumni relations activities. <em>DSpace <\/em>provides access controls at the Community, Collections, and Item levels, which will be helpful in this regard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As mentioned, <em>DSpace <\/em>is a free, open-source tool with an active community of support. Having no budget for a paid service, this tool would allow our institution to get started with an archive or institutional repository without much overhead. We already have server and storage space available that could be partitioned to set up an instance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In my initial tests of <em>DSpace <\/em>I developed an outline of how we might use it for our archive materials. Communities define a set of users or audience: who is the digital archive for? A single institution can have multiple communities to serve different audiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At VLGS, I see a need for two communities, <strong>Archives <\/strong>and <strong>Scholarship<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Archives <\/strong>would focus on the history of the institution (yearbooks, student newspapers, faculty meeting minutes, awards granted to students and faculty, graduation details, degree programs offered, special events and speakers). This set of collections would serve the Alumni, Advancement, and Communications departments, providing access to information that can be used to promote the history and reputation of the institution and attracting new students, faculty, and institutional partners<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Scholarship <\/strong>would focus on faculty publications: books, journal articles, and other research, and the audiences here would be faculty within and outside the institution as well as students and other researchers interested in legal scholarship.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Breaking down an institution&#8217;s overall digital collections into audiences this way helps distinguish how collections are defined and how they relate to each other and to the intended audience. This is a useful intermediate organizational structure between institution and collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At the collection level, we find groups of similar items. Our collection of digitized print yearbooks from 1976 &#8211; 1991 would be an example of a collection; the digitized version of the alumni magazine would be another, the student newspaper would be a third, and so on. Within a collection you have individual items. One yearbook or one issue of the alumni magazine would be considered an item. In <em>DSpace<\/em>, each item can be made of multiple files or parts; in these examples, a page would be one file in a collection, and all the files for a single issue would make up the item, along with its metadata.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One important distinction to make is that <em>DSpace <\/em>is not a particularly attractive interface from a <em>public user<\/em> perspective. However, our archive and faculty scholarship materials are not likely to be made public en masse. We would use <em>DSpace <\/em>as a back end for organizing and preserving digital files and metadata, and then selectively feed items to another platform (<em>WordPress <\/em>or <em>Omeka-S<\/em>, for example) to create digital exhibits or collections for alumni or scholars to browse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In conclusion, while it would take careful planning and coordination with our IT department to set up, I think <em>DSpace <\/em>is a flexible and usable tool for preserving faculty scholarship in digital format (whether born-digital or scans from printed materials). I also think it could work in our case as a digital archives platform, and it would be interesting to link the institutional archive with the scholarly one, so that, for example, one could see a particular professor&#8217;s activities at the school alongside their published scholarship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Vermont Law and Graduate School (VLGS), the library hosts two archival collections: our institutional archive, with materials relating to the history of the school, and a faculty scholarship collection, consisting of books, articles and other scholarly publications. We would like to digitize these materials for preservation and access, and I wanted to evaluate one potential platform to use in this work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[28,35],"class_list":["post-316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology-tools","tag-archives-platform","tag-dspace"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":321,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions\/321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":280,"date":"2026-05-01T15:56:28","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T19:56:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/?p=280"},"modified":"2026-05-05T11:26:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T15:26:19","slug":"why-slack-sucks-as-a-learning-management-platform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/why-slack-sucks-as-a-learning-management-platform\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Slack Sucks as a Learning Management Platform"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I am just wrapping up the second of 5 courses for the <em><a href=\"https:\/\/digitalcuration.umaine.edu\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/digitalcuration.umaine.edu\/\">Digital Curation Certificate<\/a><\/em> at the University of Maine. For some reason, the faculty of this program do not use the university&#8217;s official course management platform, Brightspace. Instead, both have been conducted within Slack. I wanted to share what makes this choice so problematic for students and how it puts the institution itself at risk. Most of what I have to say about Slack would apply to any other commercial chat-centric platform such as Discord, Facebook Groups, or MS Teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Everything All Over the Place, All At Once<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Perhaps one of the biggest complaints about using Slack is that there&#8217;s no &#8220;home base&#8221; or other inbuilt organization to it. Our instructors did create separate channels (chat rooms?) for each week so we could stay on-topic and know where to post our work, but documents we needed to refer to throughout the semester were not together in one place, and announcements from instructors were intermixed with questions and comments from students, creating long threads I had to sift through to find what I needed. There was a &#8220;Reference&#8221; channel that had links to the syllabus (formatted as a public web page) and other materials, including alternative sources for broken links in the syllabus, and we received weekly messages to our student email with reminders and focus points for that week&#8217;s work or discussion topics. That&#8217;s a minimum of 3 different platforms to engage with each week.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignleft size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"777\" height=\"338\" src=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/SlackInstructions.png\" alt=\"A search dialogue box in Slack, showing a username and the channels that person has interacted with. The text is difficult to read.\" class=\"wp-image-292\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/SlackInstructions.png 777w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/SlackInstructions-300x131.png 300w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/SlackInstructions-768x334.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 777px) 100vw, 777px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Assessments were communicated in a combination of weekly comments on Slack (visible to all students), as well as personal summaries delivered by email, another disjointed (and potentially embarrassing) approach to communication. To verify that we had successfully responded to all of the assignments, we were told to use filters in Slack to see our comments, but of course this does not distinguish between original posts, follow-up comments, questions, or responses to peer work. The suggestion to view feedback this way was marginally helpful at best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A further debacle was that messages older than 90 days are unavailable on the free version of Slack (apparently University of Maine does not pay for this tool even though it is an official communication channel for some classes). So, for example, the handy link to the syllabus that was posted at the beginning of the semester was no longer available on Slack by the time we got to the final project, which was unfortunate because it contained specific instructions for our assignment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Unlike Slack, Britespace (and other course management platforms like Canvas) are specifically organized to serve these common components of a course. There are designated areas for the syllabus, announcements from instructors, readings, discussions, student questions, assignments, and confidential assessments, all clearly labeled, all on one platform; no expiring messages, no announcements lost in email, and no exposure of individual success or failure as indicated by the instructor&#8217;s responses to posts. Brightspace even has a <a href=\"https:\/\/community.d2l.com\/brightspace\/kb\/articles\/4794-broken-link-viewer\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/community.d2l.com\/brightspace\/kb\/articles\/4794-broken-link-viewer\">broken link viewer<\/a> which allows instructors to find and replace broken links in the syllabus before students have to point them out (I found 4 across 2 courses).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Privacy? Legality?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">According to Slack, their product:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Logs the workspaces, channels, people, features, content, and links you view or interact with, the types of files shared and what Third-Party Services are used.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Collects information about devices accessing the services, including type of device, what operating system is used, device settings, application IDs, unique device identifiers.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Transfers information outside the European Economic Area, including to Australia, Canada, Japan, India, South Korea, and the United States, to provide, update, maintain and protect our services, websites and business.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I am not a lawyer or legal expert on user privacy, but all of this and other details in Slack&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/slack.com\/trust\/privacy\/privacy-policy\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/slack.com\/trust\/privacy\/privacy-policy\">privacy <\/a>and <a href=\"https:\/\/slack.com\/trust\/data-management\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/slack.com\/trust\/data-management\">data management<\/a> policies raise questions about how their use of data fits with FERPA, the federal laws that protect student privacy, specifically personally identifying information and sensitive student records. When assignments are evaluated semi-publicly on a platform that has made headlines for its questionable handling of data, particularly <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2024\/05\/slack-defends-default-opt-in-for-ai-training-on-chats-amid-user-outrage\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2024\/05\/slack-defends-default-opt-in-for-ai-training-on-chats-amid-user-outrage\/\">in the context of LLM training<\/a>, I wonder about the repercussions of using this type of technology as a course delivery environment. I am very surprised that University of Maine is comfortable with their instructors using a tool like Slack rather than the course management platform that a) they pay for and b) is designed to guard against FERPA and other regulatory violations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A Simple Solution<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Let me be clear that I don&#8217;t believe any of my instructors would intentionally violate school policy or applicable laws; nor are they trying to make the course experience more cumbersome. I am sure that their choice of Slack is directed by the convenience of using a tool like this in other settings. However, it seems to me they have not considered these questions to the degree raised here, and\/or they are comfortable with the resulting tradeoffs in a way that I am not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As I only get reimbursement for 2 courses per year, I am planning to take the summer off from class work. I hope this is sufficient time for the department to reconsider their choices for course delivery and consider moving to the fully authorized and feature-appropriate platform provided by the institution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am just wrapping up the second of 5 courses for the Digital Curation Certificate at the University of Maine. For some reason, the faculty of this program do not use the university&#8217;s official course management platform, Brightspace. Instead, both have been conducted within Slack. I wanted to share what makes this choice so problematic [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[31,32,33],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophical","category-technology-tools","tag-educational-technology","tag-graduate-school","tag-privacy"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":315,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions\/315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":255,"date":"2025-11-12T11:17:15","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T15:17:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/?p=255"},"modified":"2026-05-01T11:25:39","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T15:25:39","slug":"tools-review-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/tools-review-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Tools Review: GitHub, WordPress, Omeka-S"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Part of my motivation for enrolling in a digital curation program was to learn new-to-me tools, and so far my first class has provided several opportunities in this area. Here are some thoughts on each one:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/github.com\/\">GitHub <\/a><\/strong>&#8211; I was familiar with the concept of a collaborative version control system, but hadn&#8217;t actually found a need for one. During our first few weeks of class we used GitHub on the web and the local desktop version to download, suggest edits to, and merge documents. This was at a basic level but it was helpful to understand the terminology and the ideal workflow, particularly in a group project. I can also understand why professionals who have relied on GitHub are aggravated by the unasked-for addition of AI tools and are moving their projects elsewhere, to platforms such as <a href=\"https:\/\/codeberg.org\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/codeberg.org\/\">Codeberg<\/a>. I can see a use for this in collaborative projects, such as creating a database of call number ranges in our stacks so that we can implement collections mapping software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/wordpress.com\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/wordpress.com\/\">WordPress <\/a><\/strong>&#8211; This content management system is not new to me, but doing things like grabbing information from the raw data feed (e.g. <a href=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\">posts<\/a>) to create a custom .php website was new, as was editing the theme CSS to change the primary colors (I&#8217;d always just used the inbuilt color picker for themes). Fun to stretch to new territory, but not sure I&#8217;ll have much need for these features in future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/omeka.org\/s\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/omeka.org\/s\/\">Omeka-S<\/a><\/strong> &#8211; An open-source digital asset manager (DAM) that has both a clunky interface and a surprising number of plugin-like extensions that increase its functionality. So far, we&#8217;ve created a small number of items, arranged them into a collection, added some metadata to describe them, and customized the display using CSS. We&#8217;ve also added a mapping feature that allows us to display the geographic location of items. Given that my institution has a tiny budget and is always looking for the &#8220;free&#8221; version of everything, I could see using Omeka-S or a similar platform as our digital archive, at least in the beginning stages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"710\" src=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Omeka-S-1024x710.jpg\" alt=\"Screenshot displaying items in an Omeka-S collection. the items are recipes and include a title, description and photo of each dish. At the top of the screen, users can select other features such as 'advanced search' or sort items by date created. The custom color scheme is a soft mint green with dark orange text for links.\" class=\"wp-image-257\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Omeka-S-1024x710.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Omeka-S-300x208.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Omeka-S-768x533.jpg 768w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Omeka-S.jpg 1158w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Fancy .php stuff <\/strong>&#8211; It&#8217;s been a while since I used .php and it was fun to refresh on some of the basic functions. Here&#8217;s the site we made after a few weeks of development:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"985\" height=\"752\" src=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/PHP.jpg\" alt=\"A screenshot of the same data parsed into a .php display, with a custom search box at the top. This time, items are arranged in a table with the headings 'thumbnail' 'title' 'date' and 'description'. The color scheme is mint green and shades of grey. The thumbnail images act as links to each corresponding post.\" class=\"wp-image-259\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/PHP.jpg 985w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/PHP-300x229.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/PHP-768x586.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 985px) 100vw, 985px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We started by feeding data from one .php file to a .php display, then we swapped out that feed with the raw data from Omeka-S. Along the way we developed a separate CSS file to style the various iterations of the .php display file. In Week 8, we took the linked data concept and applied it to the raw data feed from WordPress, and added a custom search feature at the top of the page. I can see the usefulness of this to create displays for specific collections of items within a larger archive. So you could have &#8220;newly added&#8221; or &#8220;Vermont History&#8221; or whatnot, with custom colors and layouts depending on the types of content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I realize none of these tools are new, but as they are new to me, it&#8217;s interesting to think about how I could use them for specific tasks and projects. If you have used any of these in your own work I&#8217;d love to learn more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Part of my motivation for enrolling in a digital curation program was to learn new-to-me tools, and so far my first class has provided several opportunities in this area. Here are some thoughts on each one: GitHub &#8211; I was familiar with the concept of a collaborative version control system, but hadn&#8217;t actually found a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":259,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[28,26,27,24,25],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology-tools","tag-archives-platform","tag-github","tag-omeka-s","tag-php","tag-wordpress"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/PHP.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":279,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions\/279"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":139,"date":"2025-09-10T08:58:40","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T12:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/?p=139"},"modified":"2025-09-10T08:58:42","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T12:58:42","slug":"advice-for-would-be-librarians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/advice-for-would-be-librarians\/","title":{"rendered":"Advice for would-be librarians"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A few weeks ago, in the last precious days of quiet before the students returned to campus, I got an unexpected visitor: a college student who is interested in (possibly) becoming a law librarian. She wanted to talk to someone about their experiences, career path, and recommendations. It was fun chatting with her and learning more about her motivations and interests. (She wants to work with folks who are representing themselves in court or otherwise doing legal research on their own &#8211; admirable.) Based on our conversation, here is the advice I offer for someone wanting to become a law (or any other type of) librarian in 2025:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Get some hands-on library experience before enrolling in library school so you have some idea if you like working in libraries. You can probably volunteer at your local public library. If you&#8217;re in college, work in your undergraduate library. Even if it&#8217;s repetitive work like shelving or filing, you&#8217;ll have access to the staff and can ask them what their jobs are like. One analogy my boss&#8217; boss likes to make is that libraries are like restaurants &#8211; there&#8217;s a lot going on behind the scenes that you don&#8217;t see at the public service point or via the website. So get in there and talk to the folks on prep shift, the sous chef, dishwasher, buyer, and see how everything works.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Additionally, or, worst case if you have no entry point to get library experience, talk to librarians of different types, who work in different sorts of libraries. Not only is being a children&#8217;s librarian a very different job to being a cataloger, being a cataloger at a public library is very different from being a cataloger at an academic or government library. For law librarians, there are three primary environments: government, typically working for a court or legislature; academic, working at a law school library; and law firms, providing information services for attorneys.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Develop technology skills. This is necessary for most jobs these days, but ever more important for library staff, especially if you want to work in a forward-thinking, prestigious, or competitive institution. Learning some computer programming and\/or systems maintenance skills will be helpful whether you want to ultimately work in systems, metadata, digitization, public service (marketing), library instruction, records management, data science, or other specialties. Reference librarians often build websites to convey information about specialized collections and have to know how to navigate specialized, complicated information sources. Archivists must understand the relationship between physical objects, descriptions of those objects, digital counterparts, and how to manage all of this information.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Incorporate your other experience and interests, especially if librarianship is a second career. Even if you&#8217;re burned out in your current job, having a background in another subject will give you a practical and competitive advantage for many specialized (and often higher-paying) library careers. In addition to law librarians, there are medical librarians; computer science librarians; business librarians; art, film, and music librarians; language and cultural studies librarians; science and mathematics librarians; political and social science librarians, just to name a few of the more common specialties. Large companies also often employ librarians for &#8220;knowledge management&#8221; or &#8220;business management&#8221; roles &#8211; maintaining databases of products for sale, documentation, marketing assets, and the like. Some librarians manage large budgets, negotiate contracts, develop policies, do a lot of teaching and public speaking, or work as part of a sales\/product support team. Whatever prior experience you have, it can probably be applied in a library setting.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Remember that you don&#8217;t have to be &#8220;stuck&#8221; in your job. As I told my visitor, if you decide to go into librarianship and pick the &#8220;wrong&#8221; job at first, it&#8217;s ok! Librarianship is transferable and fluid. It might take a change of location, but if you don&#8217;t like your role, or your employer, or if there&#8217;s no room for growth in the ways you want to grow, you can typically find another position that will be a better fit. Perhaps you&#8217;ll have to take something less-than-ideal out of library school, but working there for a year or two will give you valuable experience that will help you when applying to your preferred job.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To my fellow librarians out there &#8211; what advice would <em>you <\/em>offer to anyone considering librarianship?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Based on a recent conversation with a student, here is the advice I offer for someone wanting to become a librarian in 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,19],"class_list":["post-139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophical","tag-advice","tag-librarianship"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions\/249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":180,"date":"2025-08-27T14:24:19","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T18:24:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/?p=180"},"modified":"2025-08-27T15:38:51","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T19:38:51","slug":"an-accidental-archivist-returns-to-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/an-accidental-archivist-returns-to-school\/","title":{"rendered":"An accidental archivist returns to school"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After undergrad, I swore I was finished with formal education. Then, I found myself in need of a career path and wandered in to librarianship, as I described in <a href=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/well-how-did-i-get-here\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/well-how-did-i-get-here\/\">a previous post<\/a>. I did briefly consider continuing after my master&#8217;s degree to pursue a Ph.D., but I was burned out. Full time work, part-time grad school, and holding office in my town was a lot to do at once, and on reflection I wasn&#8217;t sure what a doctorate would actually do for me, or my career. I didn&#8217;t want to teach library science or become a full-time researcher, so what would be the point?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I had a similar gander at further education when I joined the library staff at Vermont Law School &#8211; should I get a J.D. or master&#8217;s degree in environmental law? But after considering this, I came back to that same question: what would be the point? I don&#8217;t want to pursue law as a career, and I&#8217;m not interested in becoming a faculty member here (some of our librarians do hold J.D. degrees and they teach legal research courses &#8211; a prospect I admire from afar). I could see the value in auditing a class or two, to be better acquainted with the experience of legal education, or more familiar with certain topics, but a whole degree? It&#8217;s not for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I did not set out to become an archivist, either, though I probably should have, given my background in audio and video production and crossover interest in librarianship. (It was only after we moved out of the D.C. area that I learned about the Library of Congress&#8217; Packard Campus and all the amazing preservation work they do.) Little did I know that I&#8217;d be appointed to rescue a bunch of old video and audio recordings made on various formats. I was excited about the prospect, at least at first. I attended an annual meeting of the <a href=\"https:\/\/amianet.org\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/amianet.org\/\">Association of Moving Image Archivists<\/a> (AMIA &#8211; but not to be confused with the medical group of the same acronym) and got <em>really <\/em>excited. It&#8217;s hard not to when you&#8217;re in a room with people who work with materials from Hollywood, the golden age of advertising, early film and television, the wildly experimental period of 1960&#8217;s and 1970&#8217;s popular music, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Returning to Earth, I did my best with the collection of campus recordings at my former library, and managed a pilot project to have ProQuest digitize a small sample of them &#8211; back when they were still trying to conquer all formats and all subject matter. But I couldn&#8217;t get buy-in for a larger digitization project and the corresponding cataloging work. Too bad, too, because there were some big names among the recordings: Ursula K. Leguin, Sun Ra (giving a jazz master class <em>and <\/em>a concert), Bill Clinton, Sheryl Crow. It was a missed opportunity for the institution and for me personally, to learn how to project-manage and oversee a multimedia archival collection, preserve it, and make it available. I do wonder what happened to those boxes of tapes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That disappointment has lingered, the career version of a romantic &#8220;what if&#8221;. Then, when my current position opened up, I noticed the job description included this nugget: <em>This position manages the library\u2019s archives collections while also participating in the library\u2019s reference and faculty liaison program.<\/em> It was an interesting footnote. At that point, I&#8217;d worked here about 18 months, primarily part-time. While I knew we had something we called an archive, I didn&#8217;t know anything about it, even where it was kept. I got the job, got the lowdown on the most urgent tasks and responsibilities, and archives was mentioned as a &#8220;work on this when you have time&#8221; type of project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Work on what, exactly? Turns out, there are labeled boxes in a storage closet (the door is marked &#8220;Archives&#8221; so you know it&#8217;s legit) and a MS Word document that loosely describes the contents. This finding aid is current through 2009, when the storage closet ran out of space and items started piling up in an &#8220;annex&#8221; room. My predecessor lacked the support, and time, to move forward with the next phase of the archives, so during her 10-year reign nothing more was done &#8211; donations just kept accumulating. She did at one point write a memo that essentially said &#8220;unless you give me money to buy equipment and hire some people to work on this, it&#8217;s going to remain as-is&#8221; &#8212; a fair play and good enough at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" src=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Archives1-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"A shelf of archives materials, stored in grey flip-top boxes. Alongside is a cart with oversized, bound volumes of the student newspaper.\" class=\"wp-image-225\" style=\"width:600px\"\/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Personally, it&#8217;s always been hard for me to be a &#8220;good enough&#8221; type of worker. So for the past year I&#8217;ve been thinking about this most-neglected aspect of my position. Our school archives <em>are <\/em>my responsibility, and I do regularly receive requests for information about school history that may or may not be answerable using the information they contain. (Who was the graduation speaker in 1984?) These requests are coming in more and more frequently now that the 50th anniversary of the institution is in full swing, with all the fundraising opportunities that provides. We need to be able to tell fun and engaging stories about the wonderful things this school has seen and done, but how can a neglected pile of unorganized documents do that? How can we do better? <em>Can <\/em>we do any better given our limited funds, staff time, and facilities?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As I mentioned, one of the former obstacles to working on \/ in our archives has been space. That problem was alleviated when we decided to divide the materials into two categories. We now have another librarian in charge of <em>faculty scholarship<\/em>, which includes all the published books and articles that were housed in the archives storage area. These are being inventoried and moved to the &#8220;annex&#8221; room, to give them a distinct home, which frees up space for the rest of the materials &#8211; historic documents, photos, audio and video recordings (a chance at personal redemption?), and artifacts from the <em>school&#8217;s history<\/em>, a positive step.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is helpful to understand, as a library, what our archives contains and who it is intended to serve. So, working in part from an unpublished prior draft, as well as from our broader Collection Development Policy, last year I created an Archives Policy, outlining what we collect, why, and how we will assess future offers of materials. This is very helpful to have, not only internally but also externally, when another department, alum or community member comes asking if we will take their old records. Do they meet the criteria outlined in the policy, including content, condition, format, and volume? Having a rubric to assess against is another helpful step in the right direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;ve also been trying to learn about archives work and best practices more generally. I&#8217;ve gleaned some basic concepts over the years, but I wasn&#8217;t able to take an archives or preservation class in library school. The lack of formal training has been weighing on me, and frankly, I&#8217;m not that motivated to sit and read the books left behind by my predecessor. After all, how would I know if the information in <em>Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives,<\/em> \u00a91997 is still relevant?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;ve realized I need some structure and inspiration to get moving in a tangible direction. How do I go about integrating the post-2009 items into the existing collection? How do I assess what items need to be preserved sooner than later? How can I raise funds for such a project and what are the details needed to be able to estimate scope and costs? I knew I was out of my depth, but I wasn&#8217;t exactly sure what supports could be most helpful &#8211; a series of workshops, a mentorship?<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" src=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Archives2-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Recent acquisitions to the archive include: 16mm film, 3\/4&quot; video tape, student handbook from 2019-2020, a publication on environmental topics in Vermont, a PowerPoint presentation from the South Royalton Legal Clinic, burned onto CD, and a brochure from Alumni Weekend 2025.\" class=\"wp-image-224\" style=\"width:600px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Archives2-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Archives2-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Archives2-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Archives2-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Archives2-2048x1536.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then, somehow, I found out about the University of Maine&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/online.umaine.edu\/online-graduate-certificate-in-digital-curation\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/online.umaine.edu\/online-graduate-certificate-in-digital-curation\/\">Graduate Certificate in Digital Curation<\/a>. It must have been on Mastodon because I can&#8217;t find email about it. I was intrigued; I investigated. I learned about the department head, <a href=\"https:\/\/jonippolito.net\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/jonippolito.net\/\">Jon Ippolito<\/a>, and his long career as a digital artist, multimedia archivist, and deep thinker on these and related topics (ding! someone I want to learn from and emulate). I looked at the course syllabus from the fall of 2024 for the introductory class and saw that it had a module on the use of AI (ding! not teaching from a position of 10+ years ago, as <a href=\"https:\/\/www2.archivists.org\/prof-education\/certificate-programs\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www2.archivists.org\/prof-education\/certificate-programs\">some programs<\/a> are, but keeping up with current technology and exploring how it fits with current practice). The certificate program is aimed at working professionals and allows students to use real-world projects as examples and test cases for course assignments and independent study (ding! do work for my job <em>and <\/em>get academic credit). This is a defined program from a reputable institution that, if completed, bestows a specific credential (ding! enhance that r\u00e9sum\u00e9). And, because I&#8217;m the &#8220;school archivist,&#8221; accidental or not, I&#8217;ve been able to successfully argue that the tuition should be reimbursed as professional development (ding! free for me).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, I&#8217;ve enrolled and will be taking my first class, <em>Digital Collections &amp; Exhibitions<\/em>, starting next week. I&#8217;m excited and a little intimidated &#8211; it&#8217;s been a while since I was in a formal class, and the syllabus looks dense. (This is probably good &#8211; I tend to get bored easily if not challenged.) And I genuinely want to learn some applicable skills that will help me figure out what to do next with all these helical videotapes, newspaper clippings taped to sheets of acid paper, curling reams of faculty meeting minutes, and photos of people who are clearly affiliated with the school but unidentified as individuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s going to be fun and weird, and difficult and challenging. A big motivator for starting this blog now is to have a place to process my learning and share it. Archives will probably be a sizable topic here for the next few years, so I hope you&#8217;ll enjoy exploring with me. Thanks in advance for reading and joining in on this accidental adventure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When my current position opened up, I noticed the job description included this nugget: This position manages the library\u2019s archives collections while also participating in the library\u2019s reference and faculty liaison program. It was an interesting footnote. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[21,22,9],"class_list":["post-180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philosophical","tag-archives","tag-education","tag-professional-development"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Archives2-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":238,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions\/238"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":153,"date":"2025-08-22T16:02:59","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T20:02:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/?p=153"},"modified":"2025-08-25T15:46:03","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T19:46:03","slug":"well-how-did-i-get-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/well-how-did-i-get-here\/","title":{"rendered":"Well, how did I get here?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The world of librarianship is filled with interesting origin stories: second careers, third careers, accidental librarianship; some folks even choose this path early in life out of a love of reading, or a deep bond with their childhood librarian. Here is my version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I did <em>not <\/em>have a deep bond with my childhood librarian, nor was I a particularly invested library user in high school and college. I studied &#8220;audio technology&#8221; aka audio engineering in undergrad. Most of the classes were project-based, so there wasn&#8217;t much call for research or paper-writing. However, I did work throughout college, and a friend of mine clued me in to the library as a good place to be a student employee. I shelved books for a while, and then she guided me to the Acquisitions Department, where I did something with checking new purchases &#8211; I don&#8217;t remember the details, just piles of Blackwell slips. Librarianship as a career remained a vague mystery to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I graduated I assumed I&#8217;d be working in a music studio, or possibly TV or radio (I <em>loved <\/em>the TV news production class where we got to run all the equipment for the seniors who were putting the newscast together). Then, Napster hit, the cost of digital production equipment fell, audio editing software that could run on a laptop become prevalent&#8230; and the job market for audio engineers dried up. The few available opportunities were in cities I didn&#8217;t want to move to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I didn&#8217;t know what to do with myself when I graduated. This same friend sensed my desperation for a steady job, and got me an interview at my undergraduate library, in what was then called the Database Management Department. Essentially, we were the copy-catalogers. I got a crash-course in OCLC records, some pointers on efficient keyboard shortcuts, a monthly quota assignment, and off I went. It was&#8230; torturous, but as my first full-time job it was also great. I earned enough to support myself and learned how to be an employee, how to navigate weird coworker dynamics, how to make boring tasks fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Just when I was starting to realize I couldn&#8217;t do that job much longer, the lab manager for the audio technology program I&#8217;d graduated from left the position. I was recruited by the head of the program (my mentor), and hired back in to run the production studios, set up labs for classes, manage the schedules for student access. I enjoyed that job and might have stayed; then the head of the department was denied tenure. I saw the writing on the wall &#8211; he was going to leave and they were going to downsize the program. Fortunately, I was able to apply for a studio manager position at a non-profit education company that recorded textbooks on tape for students with visual and learning disabilities. Prior training working as a Talking Books intern for the Library of Congress set me up well for that job, and I enjoyed it. I was working with volunteers who read everything from picture-books (describing the images in great detail), to calculus and law textbooks. The work was rewarding; I liked that we were helping people meet their educational goals and providing access to information that wouldn&#8217;t otherwise be available. The idea of fusing my technology training with an educational mission took root.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I would have stayed on in that studio, but a few years later my partner and I decided to move out of the city, and we picked Vermont (somewhat on a whim). Before we made that decision, though, we came up for a long weekend to visit, and stayed with Jessamyn West, whom we knew through an online community blog. Jessamyn&#8217;s work as a roll-your-own-adventure \/ library technologist \/ fair access librarian activist was inspiring. It helped me see librarianship in another light: expansive, flexible, technology-forward, and intertwined with education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There weren&#8217;t any affiliated talking-book studios in our new area, so I started looking for jobs in higher education in Vermont. The timing wasn&#8217;t great for the job hunt, and I had to take some weird opportunities just to pay the bills (seasonal temp for Vermont Ski Areas was an interesting one). I spent a year as the World&#8217;s Worst Administrative Assistant. Then, an entry-level position in the media center of the Dartmouth College Library opened up. Reading the job description, the pieces started to click in my mind: &#8220;This job combines audio and video production with education. And it&#8217;s in a library. If I get this job, I can figure out if I like working in a library. They have lots of positions in the library; if I like working there and get my master&#8217;s degree, I can probably move up the ranks into a professional position.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m so grateful that Dartmouth <em>did <\/em>give me that opportunity, because it saved my sanity and led me to a career path, something I&#8217;d never had before. (My most dreaded question from childhood through undergrad was &#8220;what do you want to do when you grow up\/graduate?&#8221; I couldn&#8217;t find anything that deeply appealed to me.) And my plan worked. Some folks in our department left for various reasons, there was a bit of a reshuffle about 6 months before I was due to graduate, and the library created a new position just for me: Media Services Librarian. I wasn&#8217;t quite savvy enough at the time to realize they were giving me de facto department head responsibilities while paying the lowest possible salary for a librarian position; I was a cheap solution to some weird personnel problems they&#8217;d been having. But it was a great opportunity to acquire a lot of different skills and experiences. I had 3 full-time direct reports, oversight of our collections, and the chance to teach without having to be a full-time instructor. (Aptitude tests in middle and high school had always suggested &#8220;nurse&#8221; or &#8220;teacher&#8221; &#8212; they weren&#8217;t far off, but &#8220;librarian&#8221; was better because it didn&#8217;t involve grades, lesson plans, or bodily fluids.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Working at a large, well-funded, complicated library system as my first professional gig was helpful in so many ways. I got to learn a little bit about all the possible jobs one could have in an academic research library. I got to see how all those roles fit together; how they used technologies; how they supported different types of patrons; how they designed projects and selected items for the collection. I also got to participate in a lot of professional development opportunities: attending conferences, giving presentations, organizing workshops for faculty, and even hosting an event for other librarians at our school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After a while, though, the Ivy League started to take its toll on my personal well-being. Silent cliques and competition among certain employees, unaddressed personnel issues, a downgrading of promised compensation and benefits, and the daily commute of 66 miles round-trip started to wear. I&#8217;d always wondered what it would be like to work for myself &#8211; the dream of entrepreneurship kept nagging at me, and the idea of serving a totally untapped market seemed like a sure winner.  So I left librarianship for about 5 years. It was the hardest thing I&#8217;ve ever done, physically, mentally, and emotionally. If I had known how difficult it would be, I wouldn&#8217;t have done it. But I&#8217;m also proud of that work; naive and unprepared as I was, I never gave up. And in the end, I was lucky to find a buyer at the right moment, and was able to sell my company to someone so they could keep it going and make it even better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I longed to reenter the world of librarianship, but I didn&#8217;t want to move out of Vermont; a limiting position at the best of times, and this was 2020. I got on the sub list for our local public library network to try to get back in the game. I applied for a position at UVM just before they put on a hiring freeze. Then, a part-time job at Vermont Law School opened up: running the grant-funded program for public access to legal information. I wasn&#8217;t going to apply (&#8220;What do <em>I<\/em> know about the law?&#8221;) but my family encouraged me (&#8220;It&#8217;s a library job that is not 33 miles from your house. You should apply to this!&#8221;) And they were right. Because working a part-time job in an unfamiliar area of librarianship was a great way to re-enter the profession as a whole, and to see if I liked the subject matter and the environment of working in a law library.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And it turns out that I do. The law is very complicated; researching in this field is difficult due to the vast number of sources of law (governments, agencies, case law, etc). Access to the sources is fragmented. It&#8217;s a giant tangled puzzle, and I like puzzles. I also love helping people and getting to grips with new and sometimes arcane technologies, which is where I eventually landed when the Electronic Resources Librarian left for a corporate job. Since taking over this position I&#8217;ve conducted my first big platform migration (a forthcoming post), learned more about serials and electronic resources management than I thought I&#8217;d ever want to know, and gained confidence in helping students with their legal research. Every day is different, and I&#8217;m always learning. I get to propose projects and strive for improvements, and most of the time these suggestions are adopted, provided they don&#8217;t require much funding (a Dartmouth-level budget we do not have). Importantly, I work with a great group of people: caring, knowledgeable, respectful, and gracious. I feel like we&#8217;re all pulling in the same direction, even when we have different opinions on how to do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So tell me, what&#8217;s your librarian origin story? I&#8217;d love to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The world of librarianship is filled with interesting origin stories: second careers, third careers, accidental librarianship; some folks even choose this path early in life out of a love of reading, or a deep bond with their childhood librarian. Here is my version. I did not have a deep bond with my childhood librarian, nor [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[20,19],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophical","tag-career","tag-librarianship"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":169,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions\/169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":50,"date":"2025-08-14T18:00:30","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T18:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sarahtscully.com\/?p=50"},"modified":"2025-08-27T11:13:53","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T15:13:53","slug":"reflections-on-aall-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/reflections-on-aall-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on AALL 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A new blog deserves a timely first post, so here are some musings on my fist time attending the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aallnet.org\/conference\/about\/past-meetings\/2025-portland-or\/\">American Association of Law Libraries Annual Meeting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1920\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/PortlandSkyline-edited-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"A view of the Willamette River and Portland skyline.\" class=\"wp-image-114\" style=\"width:467px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/PortlandSkyline-edited-scaled.jpg 2560w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/PortlandSkyline-edited-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/PortlandSkyline-edited-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/PortlandSkyline-edited-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/PortlandSkyline-edited-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/PortlandSkyline-edited-2048x1536.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For those outside law librarianship, this conference was fairly typical of others that I&#8217;ve attended (regional association and consortial meetings, and the national <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ala.org\/acrl\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.ala.org\/acrl\">Association for College and Research Libraries<\/a> &#8211; a division of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ala.org\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.ala.org\/\">American Library Association<\/a>). There was an exhibitor hall featuring vendors who make software and publish books and journals that libraries subscribe to, a keynote speech, round-tables for informal discussion about specific topics, business meetings of various chapters and committees, and presentations on current topics from folks who work in different types of libraries (academic, government, law firm) or in different areas of librarianship (public service, teaching, technology, etc).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My first impression on arriving at the conference center was that the event had been placed into a space that was much too large for it, but as more people arrived and the exhibitor hall opened up it started to fill in. I arrived in the afternoon on Saturday to attend the new member welcome. I&#8217;m not exactly new to AALL but since this was my first time attending the conference I figured it was a good idea. It was a nice gesture but not as helpful as I&#8217;d hoped it would be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The opening reception was interesting &#8211; it was held in the exhibitor hall, and they offered a cash bar and free food stations. This conference had less overall food than in years past, I heard a few people complain. My only criticism was they didn&#8217;t have enough dietary diversity (hardly any gluten-free or dairy-free choices for most of the snack stations). However, they were serving local beer and wine at the bars, a nice touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was planning to head back to my hotel after the reception (at this point I&#8217;d been up for 24 hours). My hotel was about a mile away from the conference center and I wanted to walk, but not necessarily by myself, so I asked a group of 3 women who were leaving at the same time if they were going back over &#8220;the bridge&#8221;. They were, but it was a <em>different <\/em>bridge. Too embarrassed to say anything, I stuck with them on the walk to their dinner spot. Turns out they all work for law firms, and I was fascinated to learn about that side of the profession. Unlike academic or government librarians, who are trained to give anything that smells like legal advice (or could be construed that way) a wide birth, law-firm librarians are tasked with research assignments that take them right up to the brink of practicing law, and, one might argue, over that brink &#8211; depending on how much the lawyers trust their librarian&#8217;s findings and base their actions on them. It&#8217;s too much riskiness and stress for me, but the rewards (primarily monetary) are there for the type of person who thrives under pressure and likes being part of real-world legal action.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" src=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/AALL2025-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"The opening keynote at the AALL annual meeting. A ballroom lit up in bright orange, red and yellow lights. Attendees are seated at round tables. the AALL President, Cornell Winston, is on stage in front of a projector with the conference theme, Be Bold in large letters.\" class=\"wp-image-220\" style=\"width:408px;height:auto\"\/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first full day of the conference was Sunday, starting with the keynote address from Mr. Roosevelt Weeks, Director of the Fort Bend County Libraries, Texas. His talk centered on the conference theme, <em>Be Bold<\/em>, emphasized not giving up or getting complacent during tough times (as we know libraries of all types and in most sectors are now facing). His enthusiasm, love of our profession, practical reminders, and encouragement to keep working to our strengths for the benefit of all people was a refreshing message.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The other sessions I attended on this day had similar themes around marketing library collections and services, emphasizing value using specific examples (i.e. we bought X database to support our new degree in Y subject; without the library spending money on A you&#8217;re not going to have access to B which you need to run your new initiative). In between sessions I spent time roaming the vendor floor, checking out the selection of freebies and entering as many bingo-card giveaways, raffles, and scavenger hunts as I could find. Top level prizes included a laptop and a $1,000 gift card &#8211; worth the effort to collect stamps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On Monday I attended a tour of Lewis &amp; Clark&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/lawlib.lclark.edu\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/lawlib.lclark.edu\/\">Boley Law Library<\/a>, located at the law school campus in the southern part of the city. Unassuming and almost un-findable due to clever architecture and abundant foliage, the inside of the main collection and reading room is jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Apparently the building was constructed from the inside out so that only a minimum number of trees had to be removed from the site. From the back of the reading room you look out floor-to-ceiling windows directly into the forest, where woodpeckers, songbirds, and deer regularly make appearances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-essential-blocks-slider  root-eb-slider-ukat4\"><div class=\"eb-parent-wrapper eb-parent-eb-slider-ukat4 \"><div class=\"eb-slider-wrapper eb-slider-ukat4\" data-blockid=\"eb-slider-ukat4\" data-version=\"v4\" data-settings=\"eyJhcnJvd3MiOnRydWUsImFkYXB0aXZlSGVpZ2h0Ijp0cnVlLCJhdXRvcGxheSI6dHJ1ZSwiYXV0b3BsYXlTcGVlZCI6NjAwMCwiZG90cyI6dHJ1ZSwiZmFkZSI6ZmFsc2UsImluZmluaXRlIjp0cnVlLCJwYXVzZU9uSG92ZXIiOnRydWUsInNsaWRlc1RvU2hvdyI6MSwic3BlZWQiOjE3NTAsInZlcnRpY2FsIjpmYWxzZSwiY3VycmVudFNsaWRlIjowLCJydGwiOmZhbHNlLCJyZXNwb25zaXZlIjpbeyJicmVha3BvaW50IjoxMDI1LCJzZXR0aW5ncyI6eyJzbGlkZXNUb1Nob3ciOjF9fSx7ImJyZWFrcG9pbnQiOjc2Nywic2V0dGluZ3MiOnsic2xpZGVzVG9TaG93IjoxfX1dfQ==\" data-arrownexticon=\"fas fa-arrow-alt-circle-right\" data-arrowprevicon=\"fas fa-arrow-alt-circle-left\" data-lightbox=\"false\"><div class=\"eb-slider-init eb-slider-type-image\"><div class=\"eb-slider-item content-1\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/LaC_Desk2-edited-scaled.jpg\"><div><img class=\"eb-slider-image\" data-lazy=\"https:\/\/www.sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/LaC_Desk2-edited-scaled.jpg\"\/><\/div><\/div><div class=\"eb-slider-item content-1\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/LaC_ReadingRoom2-scaled.jpg\"><div><img class=\"eb-slider-image\" data-lazy=\"https:\/\/www.sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/LaC_ReadingRoom2-scaled.jpg\"\/><\/div><\/div><div class=\"eb-slider-item content-1\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/LaC_storage1-scaled-e1755192708684.jpg\"><div><img class=\"eb-slider-image\" data-lazy=\"https:\/\/www.sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/LaC_storage1-scaled-e1755192708684.jpg\"\/><\/div><\/div><div class=\"eb-slider-item content-1\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/LaC_Bacon2-scaled-e1755192761729.jpg\"><div><img class=\"eb-slider-image\" data-lazy=\"https:\/\/www.sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/LaC_Bacon2-scaled-e1755192761729.jpg\"\/><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Our very well-prepared tour guide, Meredith Kostek, gave us many interesting facts about the history of the law library in Portland (before and since its affiliation with Lewis &amp; Clark) while showing us around all the beautiful and not-so-beautiful parts of their building. Like any library that evolves with time and trends, the space has been reconfigured to accommodate new ways of working, new services, and variable collections. The lobby and public areas have beautiful cantilevered wooden ceilings, the rare book room was more formal but comfortable, and the study rooms were functional and familiar. I appreciated that Meredith took us to their version of &#8220;the scary basement&#8221; &#8211; a hidden mezzanine that encompasses building innards (HVAC \/ plumbing), compact shelving for special collections and archives, superseded materials, and the all-important jigsaw puzzle collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Like Vermont Law School, Lewis &amp; Clark has strong environmental and animal law programs, which explains their mascot, Bacon the pig. Bacon was commissioned by the law school and sits in the pass-through between the original library building and a later addition that houses an open reading\/events space, faculty offices for the animal law program, and the study rooms. Students can pat Bacon on their way by for a bit of extra luck and support, and they often leave tributes to him in the form of other swine swag, treats, thank-you notes, and poetry. It&#8217;s a great way to make the library feel more personal and friendly. (I&#8217;m thinking we should commission a bronze of our own library mascot, Paige Turner, the VLGS Swan.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We were overdue for lunch so I suggested to a couple folks on the tour that we grab a quick bite before heading back to the conference center. By this point I&#8217;d realized that most of the value and interest for the AALL conference was in making and strengthening personal connections. And I must say everyone I met was so kind and willing to engage with me, whether we were standing in line to speak with a vendor, sharing a ride, leaving the venue for the day, or asking questions after a session. It was also valuable to have engaged conversations with vendors. As someone who works with more than 30 of these companies and organizations, having a personal rapport with reps and seeing them in person, getting a live demo of their latest innovations, and having the opportunity to ask questions about new products was so helpful and gave me a lot of good information to bring back to our team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The sessions themselves seemed to be under-attended and of average quality, which was a bit disappointing. I&#8217;ve been accustomed to conferences where people were showing off their groundbreaking work, innovative ways they&#8217;ve been using tools, and constructive suggestions for tackling common problems. The <a href=\"https:\/\/electroniclibrarian.org\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/electroniclibrarian.org\/\">Electronic Resources &amp; Libraries<\/a> annual program, for example, has been so helpful over the past two years as I&#8217;ve settled in to e-resources management, and has informed many of my recent projects and goals. I was hoping to get this type of inspiration at AALL, too, but I came away from most of the sessions thinking that we&#8217;re already doing what the presenters were suggesting, and in a few cases, that we were more up-to-date with best practices or newer tools.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright size-full is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" src=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Sarah_Eli.jpg\" alt=\"Sarah, a white lady with glasses, on the left, and Eli, a Black lady wearing a purple shirt on the right. Both have big smiles on their faces.\" class=\"wp-image-126\" style=\"width:353px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Sarah_Eli.jpg 800w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Sarah_Eli-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Sarah_Eli-768x576.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Monday evening I had signed up for a reception with the Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Section. I wasn&#8217;t sure if this would be a structured meetup with folks getting introduced to others that serve on the same committees, but it was more of a casual free-for-all &#8211; with a great taco bar! At this event I finally connected with academic librarians; somehow I had been meeting mostly corporate and government folks at other events. It was great to be back among &#8220;my people&#8221; and I made one especially memorable connection. Eli Edwards is a reference librarian at <a href=\"https:\/\/law.ucla.edu\/library\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/law.ucla.edu\/library\">UCLA Law Library<\/a> and it was engaging to talk to her about the similarities and differences in our work, and the scale of our libraries and schools (UCLA is much larger). One program she runs, that I would love to see at our library, is a more formal training program and matchmaking service for research assistants. The students and the faculty they work with could get more out of the experience with a bit more support, but it&#8217;s also a lot to coordinate. (Understanding just how this program works would be a great example of a session to offer at AALL!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tuesday was the final half-day of the conference. I attended a session on working as a law librarian without a J.D. degree, and the presenters were very forthright about how they were hired, what skills they had when they first started and what they lacked, and offered tips for expanding one&#8217;s knowledge and keeping up with the profession without the pressure of getting a law degree. I appreciated their honesty and practicality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Since I had the whole afternoon before my evening flight, I invited Eli to join me for some shopping downtown, and thankfully she was free. Vermont doesn&#8217;t have much in the way of mid or high-end retail or specialty shops, so it&#8217;s a treat to visit a city with access to products I&#8217;d usually have to buy online. Before meeting up with Eli, I went to MUJI, which, if you&#8217;re unfamiliar, I liken to &#8220;Japanese IKEA&#8221;. It&#8217;s not as huge and overwhelming as IKEA, but it has a wide selection of products, from home, bath, and kitchen, to casual clothing, travel, stationery, and Japanese snacks, even a little caf\u00e9 with a robot barista. From here, I walked to <a href=\"https:\/\/oblationpapers.com\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/oblationpapers.com\/\">Oblation Papers<\/a>, a specialty letterpress and fountain pen shop. After perusing their hand-printed cards and testing out some $400+ fountain pens, Eli and I visited another stationery shop around the corner, <a href=\"https:\/\/ecrupaper.com\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/ecrupaper.com\/\">Ecru Paper<\/a>, and then stopped for a coffee and gelato break to get off our feet. From there we wandered a bit further and decided to have dinner at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.zabpintothai.com\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.zabpintothai.com\/\">Zab Pinto<\/a>, a casual Thai place that served amazing duck dishes. It was such a treat to hit it off with a new friend and spend more than 10 minutes chatting about our work and our overlapping personal interests.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright size-full is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/OblationPapers.jpg\" alt=\"Novelty note cards from Oblation Papers: Card 1 features a grim reaper and says &quot;I've come for your houseplants&quot;. Card 2 features an 8-bit graphic of a covered wagon pulled by an ox, and says &quot;You have died of dysentery&quot;.\" class=\"wp-image-124\" style=\"width:405px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/OblationPapers.jpg 800w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/OblationPapers-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/OblationPapers-768x576.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After dinner I beat feet back to my hotel where I repacked all my shopping and conference swag into my luggage, now at 110% capacity, and headed to the MAX station to catch the train to the airport. Portland has very good public transpiration and the airport is beautiful &#8211; it reminds me of an L.L. Bean store, in a good way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I had a great time in Portland. Overall, I would say that AALL was worthwhile, but I wouldn&#8217;t go every year. The cost is high compared with other conferences of this scale ($900 per attendee, plus additional fees for certain workshops, luncheons, and add-on events). And, there isn&#8217;t as much of a long-tail value for information-sharing: many of the presentations were not recorded, even though they overlapped with other events like the tours of Lewis &amp; Clark, Powell&#8217;s Books, and the court library. (Regional conferences are typically a fraction of the cost and offer much more in terms of idea-sharing.) We send one person per year from our library to keep up with the latest developments in law librarianship and new products. I made a lot of great connections, and I&#8217;ll be happy to go again when it&#8217;s my turn, but I&#8217;ll wait until the conference is back in a city I want to visit, to maximize the personal benefit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-gallery has-nested-images columns-default is-cropped wp-block-gallery-1 is-layout-flex wp-block-gallery-is-layout-flex\">\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" data-id=\"123\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/ConferenceSwag.jpg\" alt=\"Complimentary items gathered at the AALL conference: tote bags, plush beavers, sunglasses, notebooks, pens, stickers and various electronic do-dads.\" class=\"wp-image-123\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/ConferenceSwag.jpg 800w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/ConferenceSwag-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/ConferenceSwag-768x576.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" data-id=\"125\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/PersonalShopping.jpg\" alt=\"Notebooks, pens, a zipper pouch and snacks from MUJI; a fountain pen, blank note cards and a bottle of custom ink from Oblation Papers.\" class=\"wp-image-125\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/PersonalShopping.jpg 800w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/PersonalShopping-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/PersonalShopping-768x576.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sharing details about my first time attending the American Association of Law Libraries annual meeting in Portland, Oregon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":220,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,8,10,9],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","tag-aall","tag-conference","tag-library-tour","tag-professional-development"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/AALL2025-scaled-e1756307380180.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":221,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions\/221"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahtscully.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]