Thing #1: Blogging

Howdy to all the people Learning with CDLC!

This is Thing #1, answering:

Tell us a little bit about who you are, what library you work for, why you’re taking part in this program and what you’ve learned this week.

I'm Katherine over at WKM, the Van Wagenen Library at SUNY Cobleskill. I'm the Circulation & Interlibrary Loan Librarian here, and like a lot of ILL people, I recognize libraries by their OCLC code. I don't know why Cobleskill is WKM, especially since so many of the other SUNYs are X's or Z's, but there we are. (To add other levels of confusion, our CDLC courier code is SUCO, which is an acronym the SUNY College at Oneonta down I-88 from us uses for itself.)


SUNY Cobleskill, if you're not familiar with us, is the State University of New York College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill. We teach agriculture, culinary arts, hospitality & tourism management, early childhood education, business and computer science, and a variety of other technologies, which has led to our library having a diverse and fascinating collection. Our histotechnology program is, so far as I know, unique in the SUNY system. (You're probably wondering how early childhood education slipped into a technology school as a major area of instruction; it was added early on as part of the home economics angle of technology instruction, and it's a huge program here. They bring the little kids over to the library to see our children's book collection.)

So, as I've said, I'm Katherine. I came to Cobleskill about 6 years ago now, doing part-time reference about 6 months out of library school, and I like it here so much I jumped at the opportunity to become full-time when the previous Circ/ILL librarian left about two and a half years ago. I'm now tenure-track, with all the joys that entails. I did all my degrees over at SUNY Albany - history B.A., M.S.I.S., history M.A., in that order.

I live over in Schenectady, so if there's anyone from SCPL doing this program, I'd just like to apologize for my serial tardiness returning things, but dealing with fine appeals from the library side of things, I'm never going to argue about paying my own.

My husband and I bought a house in December (moving in December: at least it wasn't January), and I've actually got ground now that isn't sand to try to plant things in, so working at Cobleskill is coming in really handy - we have a huge gardening and agriculture section. I grew up in Indiana, so waiting so long for the putting-stuff-in-dirt-outside season to start here is still a bit unfamiliar.

I signed up to do this program for a variety of reasons:

• Despite my personal Apple boycott, an iPad would still be kind of neat. (Not that I ever win anything, but still.)
• I have blogs, but I don't blog nearly as often as I'd like to; I'm hoping this will inspire me.
• Did I mention that I'm tenure-track? I do all the continuing education I can afford, and the price for this was awesome.
  
• Poking around the 23 Things other places have done, not all of the Web 2.0 stuff listed is stuff I've tried out, so yay! new stuff to try!
• I'm an introspective geek. Writing about me exploring technology should be fun. :)

Writing this as early in the week as I am, I haven't had a chance to look around at what other people have written yet, so most of what I've learned this week is the two blog sites I haven't used before, Posterous and Edublogs. I've used WordPress in the past, but as the downloaded and installed on my own domain version, and I switched to Blogger at some point because it tied in neatly with my Gmail account and because I wasn't having to update software. I decided to use it again since I could just tack another blog onto my same log-in. Blogger blogs port around easily, so if I decide at some point to kill this blog, I can just fold the posts over into my other blog on this account, and they'll just fall neatly into its archives.

So that's me, and why I'm here! I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.