Miskatonic University PressAdam Taves and I were down in New Orleans last month to take part in Strange Bedfellows: IT and Reference Collaborations to Enhance User Experiences. It was a day-long workshop run by RUSA (the Reference and User Services Association) the day before the big American Library Association annual conference started.
We did Divisiveness, Communication Failure, and Boundary Wars as Tragicomedy, a revised version of After Launching Search and Discovery, Who Is Mission Control? which we performed at Access last October.
(Photo by Matt Critchlow of me "talking on videophone" to Bess Sadler. Matt and Dan Suchy were also part of the workshop and talked about two projects they'd worked on at UCSD, one of which they wrote up with Lia Friedman for the Code4Lib Journal: Using an Agile-based Approach to Develop a Library Mobile Website.)
We made some cuts and revisions to the script but the biggest change was the addition of new thoughtful and well-informed video clips from Bess Sadler as my fellow systems librarian and Sophie Bury, Patti Ryan and Lisa Sloniowski as reference and instruction librarians saying what they want from IT people. Everything is up in our institutional repository:
- audio recording (about 30 minutes, MP3)
- script (PDF)
- fancy PowerPoint slides that Adam made with embedded audio and video; won't work on old versions of PowerPoint
It's all under a Creative Commons license Attribution-Share Alike license, which means you can perform the play yourself at your own library! If you do, please send a picture.
Most of the cats I saw in New Orleans were moving pretty slowly or zonked out having a snooze. It was hot. I had a fantastic time. Thanks, New Orleans.