iHCPL Spring Cleaning #30: Take a Load Off Our Drives

Exercise:
1. If you have never used the S: drive, place a file there. Then go back and delete the file.

I have extensive experience with the S drive. It’s where I put the current illustrated edition of the agenda for the next branch meeting. When I post a new one; I delete the old one. I’ve also used it to share work with other committee members for One Desk, Roving Reference, and Staff Awards and for sharing pictures of furniture, furnishing, and equipment with branch librarians. For LPC and iHCPL I use their respective wikis.

2. Look over the P: drive and see if you have created any and determine what can be deleted/moved and if need be combine into a new folder for better organization.

Much to my surprise the P drive has flown under my radar since I started working here. I see it every day when I use Explorer (formerly known as Windows Explorer) to navigate my computer, but I’ve never had any occasion to use it. So I had nothing to clean out.

3. Repeat step 2 with your personal folder on the Z: drive. Write an entry in your blog about what you found. What was the oldest file you were able to delete or move to another location? Did you find you were more organized than you thought?

This was like cleaning out the basement of the old home in Tennessee before I moved to Texas. However, I’d lived there for thirteen years and I’ve only been here for two-and-a-half. How did all this stuff accumulate? Surely somebody else must have saved some of those files. I never checked those files out of the library; I don’t even recognize them; I don’t even read files like that, and besides I retuned them on top of the bookdrop at least six weeks ago during the big rainstorm. [<-- Library humor :)] I arranged all the folders and files by date and worked my way through them from oldest to most current. I either deleted or moved to my portable jump drive anything that I thought might be useful in the future. I saved 44,171,264 bytes of space on the Z drive and added only 7,948,439 bytes to my jump drive. I plan to trade in the 36 million plus bytes profit I made for one hour of training credit.

The oldest file I found was a Word document "Combining School and Public Libraries" 33KB last modified at 3:33 PM on May 9, 1997.

Spring Cleaning #28: Don’t Clutter Up Expensive Cyberspace

Discovery Exercise:
1. Read about GTD.
I read the Wikipedia article to refresh my memory. I read Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen in August 2007. Although there is a more to the book, what I found most useful was his suggestion on page 14. Get it off your mind and onto paper. To do this, “describe, in a single written sentence, your intended successful outcome for [a] problem or situation. …Now write down the very next physical action required to move the situation forward.”

2. Try one of the online calendars or to-do lists.
I signed up a Ta-da List account when we were planning this module a month or so ago, but I still have been unable to imagine what use I might make of it. I prefer my own ancient (33-year-old) to do list which made its great leap forward in 1995 when it migrated from legal pad to excel spreadsheet. I carry it around with me in my flash drive or print it out for gadget-free MBWA(Management By Walking Around).

3. Write a post about how you can use GTD or what organizational system you already use.

My basic system that I've used for about a decade now is Barbara Hemphill's Taming the paper tiger: organizing the paper in your life (Washington : Kiplinger, 1997), while it says little about computers, the system is not significantly different from Allen's. At a presentation she gave for the Tennessee Library Association in March 1997, Hemphill referred to the in-tray on the desk as a pile of guilty procrastination. It certainly rang true for me. Like Allen she recommended putting everything in a big pile to sort. After this there were only three things to do with each piece of paper in the tray.

1. Toss it in the wastebasket. The art of “wastebasketry” is an essential skill. Put a trash can next to the fax, the meeting room, and the file cabinet.
   
2. Act on it
   
3. File it for future reference
   

Alas, searching the web now for information about Taming the paper tiger only returns the software that Kiplinger is currently peddling. Fortunately, the 2002 edition of Taming the paper tiger at work is available at your local public library.

Run

Run / Ann Patchett. – New York : HarperCollins Publishers, 2007.

295 p. ; 24 cm.

ISBN: 9780061340635

1. Boston (Mass.) – Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. 3. Family secrets – Fiction. 4. Interracial adoption – Fiction. 5. Maternal deprivation – Fiction.

813.54

On a cold and snowy night in Boston, an adopted son of the former mayor is almost run over by an SUV. At the last moment he’s shoved out of its path by an unknown woman who is hit by the vehicle. In the hospital his family meets her family, an eleven-year-old girl who says that her mother is his birthmother.

Patchett tells a richly textured tale of family relationships, bereavement, spirituality, parental expectations and achievements that subtly juxtaposes economic divisions in American society.

Walking the Choctaw road

Walking the Choctaw road / [sound recording] / [by Choctaw storyteller Tim Tingle; read by the author]. – [El Paso, TX] : Cinco Puntos Press, c2004.

4 sound discs : digital ; 4 3/4 in.

Statement of responsibility from container.

"Stories from Red People memory"--Container.

Contents: Disc one. Crossing Bok Chitto – The beating of wings – Trail of tears – Disc two. Bones on the Brazos – Caleb – The Choctaw way – Disc three. Brothers – Lizbeth and the madstone – Tony Byars – Disc four. Archie's war – Saltypie – We are a people of miracles.

1. Choctaw Indians – History – Anecdotes. 2. Choctaw Indians – Folklore. 3. Tales – Southern States. 4. Indians of North America – Folklore. 5. Folklore – Southern States.

398.2089973

This book comes in two editions, an audiobook on four compact discs (0938317822) and a 142-page print version (0938317741). The print version has a glossary of Choctaw words, lyrics for two hymns in Choctaw, a short bibliography, photographic illustrations, and some introductory material not included in the audio. The audio, however, has the voice, intonation, accent, and timing of a master storyteller. The print version is a handsome book, but compared to the audio it’s like reading a play of Shakespeare silently versus attending a performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It’s interesting supplementary material, but it might only be interesting to the reader who’s experienced the original mesmerizing performance.

The eleven tales and concluding poem are arranged chronologically and geographically beginning at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Mississippi and Alabama and moving with the Choctaw people on their Trail of Tears to Oklahoma to Mr. Tingle’s own childhood in Pasadena, Texas and on to the beginning of the twenty-first century. There are supernatural stories of shape shifters and Christianity, of good and bad people, pride and humiliation, history and miracles. It is a trail well worth taking.

iHCPL the next generation Spring Cleaning #29: Email

I set up a Gmail account before I moved to Houston. It’s useful not only for personal mail, but also for listservs, that way they don’t overwhelm my work mail, and I can read them without distraction at home. The only downside of this is that I now have two e-mail inboxes to keep up with. Which leads right on to the next topic: keeping them up-to-date.

Oooo, I did it I went through every single e-mail I had in my work account following the mantra:

• Do
• Delete
• Defer
• Delegate

I did all the ones that I could do in two minutes or less. I deleted all the ones that were out-of-date or unnecessary. I deferred by converting anything that I thought might be useful in the future to a text file and saved it to the Z drive, and occasionally I sent it on to someone else and asked them to deal with it.

I arranged by date all the e-mails that I had in my Furniture Fixtures & Equipment file in Outlook and deleted everything that was older than three months, because any quotes that I was saving in there would have expired by now. I arranged by date everything in my sent file and deleted everything over six months old. I did the same with my deleted file but deleted everything over three months old.

For the next ten minutes my screen looked like this:

I updated my Contacts in Outlook. There were a number of @nhmccd.edu addresses that had to be changed to @lonestar.edu and a few people who had retired or otherwise left the employ of the library to be deleted.

Good masters! Sweet Ladies! : voices from a medieval village

Good masters! Sweet Ladies! : voices from a medieval village / Laura Amy Schlitz; illustrated by Robert Byrd.— Cambridge : Candlewick Press, 2007.

85 p. : col. ill. ; 27 cm.
ISBN: 9780763615789
Original title: Villeins and vermin, simpletons and saints
Bibliography: p. 82-85.

Contents: Hugo, the Lord's nephew -- Taggot, the blacksmith's daughter -- Will, the plowboy -- Alice, the shepherdess -- Thomas, the doctor's son -- Constance, the pilgrim -- Mogg, the villein's daughter -- Otho, the miller's son -- Jack, the half-wit -- Simon, the knight's son -- Edgar, the falconer's son -- Isobel, the Lord's daughter -- Barbary, the mud slinger -- Jacob Ben Salomon, the moneylender's son and Petronella, the merchant's daughter -- Lowdy, the varlet's child -- Pask, the runaway -- Piers, the glassblower's apprentice -- Mariot and Maud, the glassblower's daughters -- Nelly, the sniggler -- Drago, the tanner's apprentice -- Giles, the beggar.

1. Great Britain -- History 13th century -- Drama. 2. Middle Ages--Drama. 3. Monologues.

812.6

A series of monologues and two dialogs introduce the lives of twenty-three children near an English manor in 1255. There are interspersed with short one-page essays on crop rotation, pilgrimage, the Crusades, Jews in medieval society and the legal status of runaways. The plays were written by a school librarian to teach young students about life in the middle ages. They were written so that everyone in the class could be a star “for three minutes at least.”

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! was awarded the John Newbery Medal in 2008 for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children by the Association of Library Services to Children, a division of the American Library Association.

Blood and thunder

Blood and thunder : an epic of the American West / by Hampton Sides ; read by Don Leslie.— Westmister: Books on Tape, 2006.

17 sound discs (21 hr.) : digital ; 4 3/4 in.

ISBN: 9781415933152

Unabridged ed.

Subtitle from container.

Directed by Staci Snell.

1. Carson, Kit, 1809-1868. 2. Indians of North America – Wars – West (U.S.). 3. Navajo Indians – History – 19th century. 4. New Mexico History 1848- 5. Southwest, New – History – 1848- 6. United States. Army – History – 19th century. 7. United States – Territorial expansion. 8. West (U.S.) – History, Military – 19th century.

978.02

This is the history of the New Mexico territory in the early nineteenth century, centering on the life of one of its most famous citizens: mountain man, scout, and United States Army officer Christopher Carson. Kit Carson was so famous in his own time that he regularly appeared as a hero in the “blood and thunder” popular fiction of the day. Short of stature and speech Carson struck many who met him for the first time as the antithesis of his fictional portrait. He drank little and swore less, As Sides puts it; he “was a loveable man. Nearly everyone said so. He was loyal, honest, and kind. … He was also a natural born killer. It is hard to reconcile the much-described sweetness of his disposition with his frenzies of violence. … If you crossed him, he would find you. He pursued vengeance as though it were something sacred, with a kind of dogged focus that might be called tribal—his tribe being the famously grudge-happy Scotch-Irish.”

True to its subtitle, this is more than just a biography of Carson. It chronicles in vivid detail the character and actions of a series of American Army commanders in the Southwest from the war with Mexico through the end of the Civil War and their Mexican, Confederate Texan, and American Indian adversaries. The aggressively expanding United States, in its rush to claim and keep the Pacific Coast of California, its “Manifest Destiny,” found itself in the middle of a two-century old war between its new Spanish speaking conscript citizens and an earlier claimant to the land, the Navajo. It was a clash between town-dwelling settlers and roaming pastoralists, and it was carried on by the young men of both cultures in brutal raids of murder, stolen livestock and slaves, the slaves being the women and children of the defeated.

Hampton Sides exceptional work of narrative non-fiction has been made into an excellent audio presentation by reader Don Leslie and director Staci Snell.