We held a nice big party for them today, and I had the chance to grab the mic and present them with a small gift–blank books bound in the original orange carpeting from our library. (Long story, inside joke, you had to be there.)

But before presenting the gift, I couldn’t resist a short speech. Here’s more or less what I said:

Carol and Paul, thank you so much for your work here. I have learned a great deal about leadership from both of you. First, I admire the way you treat all your colleagues with trust and take joy in working with us. Second, I admire the way you keep our mission in mind at all times: to support and enable teaching and learning at this college.

I could have gone on more about this, but I think what I said gets at the heart of what I think a good leader does. With trust and a clear sense of mission, there’s no need to mirco-manage. No need to claim credit or appeal to your own authority.

There’s more to making a good leader than trust and mission, but I’m not sure you can lead without those qualities. They are qualities I hope to cultivate more in myself.

Today, though, I’m mostly interested in the cover (this copy is from the collection of the University of Denver). The cover’s Schedl illustration from 1964…

Looks an awful lot like Tutt Library, where I work, here seen in a photograph from the Colorado College Archives. I can’t be sure, but I think this is from around the time the library opened in 1962.

The library of tomorrow, yesterday!

We asked students to sample at least five online works from Jessy’s page on Netcessary literature and then we looked at a handful in class, mostly chosen by students who had something to say about them. Our group was pretty well split on Felix Jung’s First Snow with some people finding it gimmicky–using multimedia to dress up a weak text–while others found it at least intriguing or successful on its own terms. The class was more complimentary about Jessy’s own work, A Letter from Henry. (And I should mention that the students mentioned Jessy’s work first–she didn’t bring it up.)

Back in special collections, we looked at dozens of examples of artists’ books and fine press books, from fairly straightforward (if beautiful and lavish) books, such as Stuart Klipper’s A City as Once Seen, recently published by the Press at Colorado College, to Soap Story, an artists’ book by Angela Lorenz where the pages of the book are printed on cloth and encased in soap.

Now I need to make my own thoughts about manuscript and early printed books more coherent so I can talk about them tomorrow.

I asked her if she’d be interested in team-teaching a course at the College during the January half-block two-week term on the history and future of the book. Together, Jessy and I decided to pitch something that would encompass a quick immersion in the history of the book, along with investigation of the current state of books and reading and speculation about where trends would take us in the future. We wanted to emphasize getting students’ hands on books in special collections and having them, if possible, set type themselves.

Over the past seven years, we found some sympathetic ears in our Director and a professor or two. The Press at Colorado College has come roaring back to life. The College has a new thematic minor in “The Book.” And tomorrow, Jessy and I begin teaching our two week class. Here’s a slightly redacted version of the syllabus.

I’m tremendously excited and not a little bit nervous. We had more than 20 students signed up, but have been told to expect that number to fall as students realize they’d rather not take a January course. I’m sure our plans aren’t perfect, and the topic is so big that I keep thinking of things that we are neglecting to cover. But I’m happy with where we are starting from, and I’m very curious to see where the students take it.

As the class progresses, I hope to be able to share on this blog some of what I’m learning as I teach. At the same time, expect that I won’t be around a whole lot on IM or FriendFeed or the like.

Here’s to trying new things in 2010.

We don’t get a whole lot of traffic on our ask-a-librarian IM chat, but the people use it seem to like it. A lot.

The beginning of the school year is always an exciting time. I’m especially excited this year because I have a few more opportunities than usual to work with students and understand their work a bit better.

At my library, we make a special effort to get all the First Year Experience (FYE) classes into the library. Given our intensive block plan academic calendar, this means as a group, we are doing dozens of instruction sessions in the first two weeks of the school year, with a few more classes scattered over the next six or seven weeks.

In addition to those classes–usually one- or two-off sessions for sixty or ninety minutes–I’m going to be working with another FYE on something more like a daily basis. One of our history professors has recast her usual “Civilization in the West” course to focus on “Cultures of the Book.” In addition to reading great works by Plato, Augustine, Voltaire, Goethe, and others, they’ll be reading some secondary literature on the history and future of the book (such as the O’Donnell I already mentioned) and–even better–hand-setting type at the Press under the instruction of the College printer. My friend, Jessy, the Special Collections librarian, will also be heavily involved, as students work with materials in her library, and choose a text to print from among the manuscripts in Special Collections. You can see the class syllabus online.

I’m not sure where this is all going to go, but in my experience it is always enlightening when I get a chance to see how students actually work as readers, thinkers, speakers, researchers and writers. I’ll be very interested to hear how they think the historical changes that came with the shift from orality to written language, from scroll to codex, and from manuscript to print can help us think about what is happening now as digital communication is changing how we write and work and think.

As you may remember from last April, I wrote about 365 Library Days and the League of Awesomeness when my library decided to join the 365 Library Days project cooked up by Michael “Libraryman” Porter.

We had to give ourselves an extension–we are an academic library, so we can do that kind of thing–but we uploaded our last images to our 365 Tutt Library Days photoset today. We’ve got 365 photos and two videos.

Did it make us more awesome? Hard to say (we were pretty awesome to begin with). Unlike the projects I mentioned in thet first post, this one was less intense, and I changed the deadline anyway, making it even less intense.

But because of the project, we took some photos that we probably wouldn’t have taken otherwise like the art installation on the patio or circ dog or Chas the pumpkinhead or the poor dude trying to finish his paper at the end of the block.

So I’m going to say it was a success, and a reminder to keep taking photos around the library. I suppose the next frontier is to upload some of them to the Tutt Library Facebook page.

Useless

Originally uploaded by Tutt Library.

My colleague, Marianne, came up to me today with this book she’d pulled out of the return bin. “Look at this,” she said with a grin. “User-created metadata!”

This isn’t usually what we are talking about when we talk about tagging books. But I suppose it was effective for this student, and that’s what counts. Plus it cracks me up every time I look at the photo.

Last week we watched Good Copy Bad Copy, and this week we watched a few videos from the TED conferences. Namely:

• Hans Rosling reveals new insights on poverty: gGeat use of statistical visualization and a wonderful surprise finish. More about his software, Gapminder; give it a spin at Google, Gapminder World (in beta, natch).
• Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth: The talk that first got me hooked on TED when Iris Jastram blogged it. Astounding demo of image browse software, followed by even more astounding demo of Photosynth, which maps photos onto a virtual 3-D space.
• Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity: Is the point of educating people to create college professors? Can’t we do better in helping people unlock their creativity (or at least not crushing it out of them)?
• Anand Agarawala demos his BumpTop desktop: A shorter, fun one. What if the icons on your desktop had heft? And you could throw them around?

I’m sure if I had more time, I could put together an entirely different, but equally compelling hour of TED talks. They are great to watch, not just for the content, but also for seeing some interesting presentation techniques and styles.

I’m not sure what we’ll screen next week; maybe something a little lighter, more fun (though I thought the documentary and these talks were loads of fun, too). Thanks for the idea, Michael!

Chas says "IM in UR library reading UR b00ks"

Originally uploaded by Colorado College Tutt Library.

David at Ironic Sans thinks that the time is ripe (or perhaps overripe) to exploit the LOLcats meme in advertising. Thus lolcatvertisements.

I’m proud to say that Tutt Library is ahead of this particular curve. Before lolcats got huge, there was “i’m in ur base, killing ur d00ds” (AskMeFi discussion/explanation), and, thanks to Jessy, we based an advertisement for the library on that phrase, placing it (as David suggests) in the student paper.

I don’t know if any of our students had a chuckle over “IM in UR library reading UR b00ks,” but we sure did.