The Wonderful World of Webinars

Never let it be said that I am afraid of trying new things.

Earlier this week, I was given the opportunity to teach a webinar (hosted by Connecting to Collections museum community), the audio and materials for which can be found here.  It was really an enjoyable experience, and was very interesting.  I was shocked to notice that I had 138 people listening to my presentation, and amazed that people are finding what I do interesting.  Growing up is weird, something that I feel is particularly symptomatic in my generation.  Regardless, I was impressed that so many people are interested in digitizing their collections, and really hope that many of them make some interesting things and put them out there for nerds like me to view and drool over.

With The Skeptiseum being complete, I have begun the arduous project of tidying up the artifacts in archival storage and making finding aids for all cabinet displays and storage areas.  This is going to be fun.  Thankfully, I have the load lightened due to my wonderful volunteer and friend, Kat.  She has been awesome, and I'm really glad that I have a like-minded partner with which to undertake this task.  More updates on this business as it comes.  Be sure to follow @TheSkeptiseum and @CFILibraries on Twitter to see more of what I do, and for fun bits of history, skeptical quotes, and treasures in our collections.

On a lighter note, my segment for the podcast is all ready to be recorded this weekend!  Hooray!  The theme this episode is the 1980's, and I'm rather excited for it.  Also in podcast-related news, The Thirteenth Four is up on iTunes!!!  So follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and now SUBSCRIBE TO US ON ITUNES!!!  Do it!  We are working on getting some analytic feedback on our website and RSS feed so that we can keep closer track of our audience, it's something that interests us, and makes us feel like we're doing good things.  If you subscribe, be sure to leave a review to let us (and Apple) know what you like about us and what other things YOU would like to see.  We're always open to topic suggestions, and soon we will be featuring guests on our episodes!

Now that all that is out of the way, I'm off to edit some documents, schedule some Tweets, and figure out what the hell I'm going to write about in this textbook chapter.  In my spare time, I'm going to relentlessly search Amazon to find more pages for my wedding album, and hopefully I will succeed.  Otherwise, I may have to think my (still incomplete) wedding album (sorry, Husband).  Really looking forward to tomorrow - wandering around the Roycroft campus with my husband and having dinner, then recording.  Woo!

Being a grownup is hard.  Sometimes I wish we still lived in a culture that had adolescence rituals or ceremonies, so responsibilities and adulthood had some sort of concreteness, and less of a mysterious shift in states that randomly materializes.  Some certainty would be nice.

Digital Collections Presentation

OK, so apparently I'm dumb, or just not seeing the easiest way to link a page on my blog to the blog's home page itself, but I created a page on here of my presentation that was given at the Small Museum Association annual conference back in February.  This presentation can be viewed here and any and all comments and feedback would be greatly appreciated.  I hope you enjoy it!

Nope, haven't forgotten about blogging!

Where have I been, you may ask?  Aside from working on a bajillion various projects, I have been utterly consumed by a trivia game phone app, QuizUp (Plain Vanilla).  It's totally awesome, and I absolutely recommend it.  So many topics and categories, and I like being urged to learn new things and challenge myself in topics that I hadn't really thought of myself as familiar with (I am really really surprised by how much ass I'm kicking in Sports trivia).  So yeah, check that out.

Aside from being in a trivia cave, I have finished and recorded two podcast segments, the topics of which are Space and Ireland.  They can be found at the podcast's website (the first three episodes are posted, we're just currently having some issues with the RSS feed, so it's going to be a day or two before they're available on iTunes and Stitcher and Soundcloud and all those other lovely services).  If you like the podcast that myself, my husband, and our two friends are putting together, you should follow us on Twitter (@thirteenthfour) and like us on Facebook.  We record biweekly, and will be posting episodes regularly.  We're also feeling out what should be on the site, whether blogs and things like that will be relevant and fun (and if we have the time for them at this juncture -- I have another major project coming up that's due by the end of April, so I'm going to be pretty jammed until the summer), and the possibility of Twitter contests and pub events.  I hope you like what we're doing, and that you tell your friends to listen to us if you do!

Additionally, I have finished my tremendous, looming, digitization project of converting The Skeptiseum to a flashy, user-friendly Omeka-based platform!  Woo hoo!  It's really lovely, and you should check it out as soon as it's posted.  For a sneak peek, you can check out dev.skeptiseum.org and see what it looks like, but it will be a few days before the URLs are officially switched over.  It's come a long way, and I'm really proud of it!  To see what the old website is like and compare the change, you can still find it here and see the difference.  Now we just need a logo!  

As a reward for all my hard work as of late, I've decided to do more work (!!!) and catch up on some small projects and try some new recipes.  Stay tuned for further information and possibly recipes and photographs of things that I am proud to say I made.  Failures will report to the rubbish bin, as well as the area of my memory allocated for lessons learned the hard way.  Today will be reserved for finally putting together a wedding album and framing some honeymoon pictures.  Shameful, I know.  Better late than never, right?  RIGHT?  Speaking of which, sometime later today I will be posting the version of my Small Museum Association conference presentation with an audio accompaniment (so you can have a mild idea of what the hell is going on in my Prezi) - and I will attempt to re-post it to my LinkedIn.  

There we have it, your answer to where the hell I've been for the last few weeks!  I swear that I will be better about this, because there's actually a lot of fun goings-on in my life as of late (like our awesome new volunteer at the CFI Libraries/Skeptiseum), and I would like to relay relevant events and happenings in the near-present tense for once...