PhDs, Palimpsests, and Presentations, Oh My!

(I could actually add "photographs" and "politics" to my list of "p" words for this post, but ah well. That's what you get for letting an English major have a blog.)


To continue the "To PhD or Not to PhD" discussion, my husband Alex sent me a link to this Census Bureau document yesterday: "The Big Payoff: Educational Attainment and Synthetic Estimates of Work-Life Earnings." Not only is it a fascinating report, but it shows that I've got my husband using govdocs now!

This is a fascinating Smithsonian article about X-rays revealing a hidden text by Archimedes--it had been scraped off and the parchment re-used for a prayer book. (Thanks to my Rare Books classmate--and GovDocs GLA--Tessa Powell for this link!)

This Thursday at 1pm CST, I'll be co-presenting about wikis with Chad Boeninger for Five Weeks to a Social Library. Chad will be presenting "The Wonderful World of Wikis: Applications for Libraries" and then I'll present "The 'How' of Wikis." Our webcast will be available archived afterward; I'll post the link.



I just posted the "best of" from our photoshoot for the Denton Reads project on my Flickr account. I took these last week to use for flyers and posters. I'm printing them to take the to DR meeting tomorrow at Barnes & Noble, so that committee members can decide which images they'd like to use for various purposes. Chuck and I have a Graphics Team meeting Friday to discuss our progress on the poster and bookmarks, and to brainstorm what events will need flyers.

I've also rasterized the logo so that it can be blown up to larger sizes, and I'm trying to do the same with the logo text... but Adobe Illustrator keeps crashing.

If I'm going to continue to be involved in producing various library graphics, I'm really going to need to take a graphics design course at some point. I think I'll consider taking one in the fall.

A geek's view of politics: reviews of presidential campaign websites.

CyberCemetery Story

Read the print version of the story here:
"UNT's CyberCemetery keeps dead federal agency websites alive." by Catherine Cuellar, KERA 90.1 Reporter

Or listen to the MP3 here.

(This story played on KERA 90.1's "Morning Edition" on 8:36am, 2.19.07.)

Publicity, Of Several Kinds

This week Catherine Cuellar, a reporter for local NPR affiliate KERA 90.1, interviewed myself along with Cathy Hartman (assistant dean of UNT Libraries) and Garret Rumohr (UNT-L Web Server Administrator) about UNT's CyberCemetery (which I maintain). The 4 to 5-minute story will air soon on KERA's "Morning Edition" show, perhaps as early as Monday, 2/19 (the show runs from 5am to 9am). You can also listen to KERA streaming online.

For more about the CyberCemetery, see the recent UNT InHouse story on it.

I've already mentioned the Denton Reads blog, but wanted to stress that there have been a number of updates to it and the official Denton Reads website, such as the addition of Book Club information and publicity materials.

Monday, I'll be testing the OPAL webcast software (along with my nifty new headset/microphone) in preparation for my March 1st Five Weeks to a Social Library presentation on "The How of Wikis." (Hopefully by then I won't still sound so stuffy--I had the flu earlier this week, and I still sound ridiculous.)

Denton Reads...

I've been so busy with work, the Denton Reads project being just one of my current tasks, that I don't even have time to blog it all here.

Briefly, I've made some updates to the Denton Reads website, and also created a Denton Reads blog. I really love using blogs for things like this--the ability to add multiple authors, categories, widgets, photos, and other fun things just thrills me.

I'm currently working with the other member of the DR Graphics Team to create a poster, book club flyer, bookmarks, and other promotional images for publicity purposes. Next week, I hope to take the photo that will be the main image in the poster, and then I'll probably have to give myself a crash-course in using Adobe Illustrator (oh, mercy).

And the logo has had one more change: the courthouse is larger, and the outline is thicker. This is it. I promise. No, really.