Nerds in possible like

Hey boy, why you didn't call me?
-The Blow

Lately, Katie and I have noticed on our ugliblog analytics that people in need of relationship advice are turning to google and landing on ugliblog. There seem to be a lot of people out there who need advice about flirting, flirt texts, flirting in Grand Rapids, flirting with librarians, good comebacks for flirting with nerds, among many others. Over the past three months, people have landed on ugliblog by searching over 20 different keywords dealing with the subject of flirting. In order to stay relevant to the needs and interests of our readers, I will now provide you with some innovative flirting advice (a special thanks to Katie and Greg who helped me brainstorm this system awhile back).

Scenario: You are at the bar. There is a rather cute person in the corner, reading a book. This person is so perfect that you may try to find them on Craigslist missed connections later. You look up from your crossword puzzle and stout, just as the person looks up from their book and i.p.a. You want to wink, but that's soooo 20th century. So go ahead, take those skills that you learned in the chat room and apply them to the bar. Throw that cutie a sign language winkey emoticon ;).


I hope that this helps those of you that are struggling with this whole flirting thing. Please note that flirting with emoticon sign language has never been tried by those who invented it, so the success rate is still unknown. Please share your success stories with us!

The secret about girls is that they want you to like them.
-The Blow

By Special Request: What is Community Informatics?

Questions abound concerning one of my specializations at the School of Information. Even SI is struggling to come up with some set definition. I think that basically it is about sharing information. How is this different from Library and Information Services? LIS is about the how. Community Informatics is about the what and the why. For me this means seeing libraries as community centers (both public and academic) that serve the needs of their communities. I think that a lot of community informatics involves getting librarians out from behind the desk and into the community, visiting different organizations and groups, finding out what they need the library to be. Information is meant to be shared, and this process won’t work if librarians are confined within the walls of the library. Sometimes this might mean creating unlikely connections.
I worked on a project a year ago that connected a public library and archive with the parks and recreation department, our local neighborhood association, and the city commission of my hometown. We brought an exhibit on a local pool created in the archive to the place in the city where it belonged, at the pool (see http://www.historygrandrapids.org or add to and edit the wiki version http://www.viget.org/Richmond_Park_Pool). This made people in the community aware of the archive and the library, while we all celebrated the rich history of our neighborhood pool. People asked me reference questions at the opening of the exhibit. Reference questions while waiting in line to do cannon balls off the diving board? Yes, please.

Want to know more about Community Informatics at the School of Information?
http://cic.si.umich.edu and
http://www.si.umich.edu/msi/ci.htm

Terrestrial Life in Space!

Following up on my July lit review, I am particularly geeked by this recent bit of news... WATER BEARS IN SPACE, everybody!

Like, OMG, you guys. I could talk about this story in relation to popular/scholarly information and its potential uses for library instruction, but I'm really just too overwhelmingly excited that we (Earthlings) have reached the Final Frontier, surviving the vacuum of space without special equipment. It's a good week for science, y'all.

Tardigrades: so incredibly sci fi.

DUCK HUNT, or How I Spent My Mandatory Vacation

A lot of people out there in internetland have been googling "library orientation scavenger hunt" or similar keywords, and some folks have ended up here (you'll have to take my word on this). I wouldn't want to disappoint ye olde googlers or our regular (excessively observant) readers who are curious about what I ended up doing for the Great Indoors. UGLi Blog, as always, is here to meet your needs.

Earlier this summer, I was scratching my head trying to come up with scavenger hunt ideas, but nothing really sang to me until the deadline for the Great Indoors (i.e. the day itself) began to approach. This is typical for me, as I do my best innovating in times of great need. Somehow I decided ducks would be a good organizing theme, specifically rubber duckies. The idea began with "the UGLi duckling" and evolved from there. I go with whatever pops into my head when crunch time rolls around. Here's how it went:

The prizes for the scavenger hunt were rubber ducks with the MLibrary logo (naturally we put these in a much bigger, inflatable duck):

At the reference desk, participants were given a map of the library and Smartypants, their first duck. Each duck handout said FOUND on one side and LOST on the other. The found side gave a short bio of each duck, and the lost side told students the name and location of the next duck to retrieve.

These ducks (Smartypants, Michigander, Hypatia, Arnold, Quackers, Techie and Duckerton) were all associated with an area of the Shapiro Libraries (UGL reference desk, Askwith, Science, stacks, Bert's Cafe, computer lab and instructional center). By collecting all seven ducks and returning them to the reference desk, students earned their very own coveted squeaking rubber ducky. As you can probably imagine, the whole thing went over quite swimmingly.