This is Circulating Ideas, I’m Steve Thomas. My guest today is Laura Bang. Laura is the Digital and Special Collections Curatorial Assistant at the Villanova University’s Falvey Memorial Library. You can follow her on Twitter @laurabang.
Laura, welcome to the show.
Thank you, I’m happy to be here.
I have a, I came up with what I think is actually an interesting first question, but I don’t think it’s going to make sense until you tell me a little bit about what you do, what your job is and what you do on an everyday basis first. So I think we need that foundation for the audience to understand my better first question.
Okay. My official job title is Digital and Special Collections Curatorial Assistant and that means that I do a little bit of everything both our digital library and our special collections. So, I help the, oversee the day-to-day operations of our scanning and I design exhibits and I do rare books cataloging for our special collections and a bunch of other stuff that I just somehow get myself into. So, I, a lot of my job ends up being that other duties as assigned.
[laughs] Yeah, I think, I think I most of our jobs end up being that a lot times.
And a lot of that is self-assigned [laughs]. So.
Yeah, I work too hard, so [laughs].
Yeah [laughs].
So, now that people that, I’m going to ask you my, sort of odd of question that people won’t understand how its library related at first, but it is. I want you to tell me about your friend, Frank Steed and how you spent your summer vacation with him last year.
One of the things that I do, of course, is I help put the actual meta data into our digital library for the items that we scanned and my favorite stuff to work on is the stuff that belongs to the, belonged to a specific person who is now probably forgotten. So, the scrapbooks and journals and letters and diaries and things. So, my good buddy Frank Steed, he kept two scrapbooks from his time serving in World War I and he was a medic at a base in New Jersey before he deployed to France in 1918, so he was there, he arrived in France only two months before the end of the war. But, and he was assigned to the casualties division which meant that he was a, he was a field clerk who kept the records of all those who were killed or injured. So, not a very cheerful task, I’m sure.
But, rather than rake forward anything about that, his scrapbooks are just full of the grand old time that he had in Europe, primarily in France. But, he also visited the UK and Belgium. So, I finished working on someone, one of our interns did the scans for it, but I did the quality checking and then I did all the metadata for both volumes of the book, which was very intense [laughs]. But, I finished all that right before I was going away to Paris myself for a three-week vacation and so I did what any normal person would do and I took some work with me to Paris. But, it was fun work because what I did was I took some photos with my cellphone of some of the photos that Frank Steed had taken in Paris and while I was wandering around Paris I tried to recreate those photos that was 94 years after he had been there. And so that was a lot of fun and I got really, stupidly excited about this one particular lamp post that I found that had been in the same spot for almost 100 years and they had added onto it the street light, stop light mechanisms that weren’t there originally. But, it had the same design work on the base of the lamp, so I was really excited [laughs]. So, I get really attached to the people whose scrapbooks and stuff I work on. So, now they’re, they’re my friends, so that’s why I, why Frank Steed is my good buddy now. Even though I never met, I don’t even know any of his descendants. And then just a couple of weeks ago I was revisiting him as I was putting together a blog post of my photos and his photos and while I was looking at him again I actually looked up his census information and so I got excited again to find more traces of him, find out a little more about his life. So, after the war he was living at home for the, until at least 1940 and was not married, which was sort of surprising to us to find out because a lot the photos in his scrapbooks are of him with various mademoiselles [laughs]
[laughs] A bit of a ladies man, Frank Steed.
Yes [laughs].
So did you guys come to have his scrapbooks in your collection?
So, that was actually one of our purchasers brief stint of buying on eBay that we did. So, for a glorious month or two we were able to buy things off eBay and we were looking specifically for World War I related materials because of the upcoming anniversary, not this year, starting this year the 100 years from the start of the war and so we’re planning our collaborative online exhibit project related to that. So we were looking for World War I materials on eBay and of course our time novel materials which I’m sure we’ll talk about more later.
Oh yes.
[laughs] So, just looking for totally random stuff that is on eBay, which there’s a lot. And unfortunately we were only to do the eBay buying for about a month before we ran into the problem of, I think it’s, they have a limit of $2,000, which is the only, that’s all that you can spend with a credit card without attaching a checking account. And.
Oh really?
And we’re not allowed to do that. So, that was the end of our eBay spree. So now we, we still look at eBay and lament the things that we cannot have [laughs].
You would, you would think they would have some sort of institutional buying program.
Yeah, alas.
Was there anything that, this will be the last question about Frank specifically, was there anything about him specifically that you think drew you to, cause obviously you said you’ve gotten a lot of these scrapbooks and gone through this. Was there anything about his story in particular that spoke to you?
Just spending so much time with him, with all the metadata for the scrapbooks and so getting to know him through that and looking, spending some time looking at a period of history from a very personal perspective of someone who, as I said, is now forgotten. Nobody knows who this Frank Steed dude was and he had a lot of fun with the photographs, so all of the ladies that he met [laughs] and some of them had strange pets, fluffy little dogs and parrots and things like that.
Yeah and you wrote a piece that you linked to from the, for the public domain review about that whole thing of were you learning about history through the not-famous people, that you can actually, and you can actually, I mean you’re learning the big movements of history by learning about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, this, that and the other, but you’re not learning about what’s happening on a day-to-day basis and I think when you learn about that, I think you probably learn more about how similar people were [laughs] back then as they are now.
Exactly, yeah, yeah it just, seeing a slice of life of the more average person who it’s easier to relate to than George Washington or someone else with a big famous name.
Right, like you, you’ll never be George Washington.
Yes.
But you could be a Frank Steed [laughs].
Yeah.
And in that article you talk, the specific example you’re giving is a scrapbook that you all did for New York City Fire Department. Was that something that you had gotten from eBay too? Or.
Yeah, that was another one of our glorious eBay purchases and the intern that I co-wrote that essay with, Ruth Martin, did the actual digitizing and metadata for that scrapbook. So she got very intimately acquainted with the New York City Fire Department and she is a historian sociologist by her previous education, so she was also very interested in the day-to-day slices of life that we got glimpses of, so it’s, it’s a scrapbook full of memos which is not particularly interesting in, to look at, but there’s a lot of interesting details in that scrapbook. So, she was able to pull out a lot of the stuff about the fire department and how it’s from 1906, I think to 1909 and so, that was a changeable time period for New York with the building of skyscrapers and how to deal with fires inside of those taller buildings and.
I thought it was interesting too of the changes in technology and stuff, like the telephone and things like that.
Yeah, so yeah, it wasn’t the first telephone that the department had, but it was a newer telephone so it was exciting for them and she pointed out that the memo about that had the rules about, the telephone is only for department use, not for personal use and that’s, that’s something that we totally still see today.
I was going to say, I was going to say most libraries have that about telephones. So, I mean, and this is a more general question. I did see, the scrapbooks that you’d gotten were not in good physical condition at all, so that would have made it a candidate for digitization.
Yes.
Did you all also try to save the physical item at all? I mean, do you try to do any kind of repair on it? Or is it just beyond any kind of?
We, yeah just are able to put them into Hollinger boxes, acid free, archival boxes and try to store them gently so that they’re not getting too much stress, though we don’t actually have a conservation budget, so we can’t do any of the actual saving work beyond, beyond just trying to keep it in the state that it is now.
So you guys do a lot of digitization obviously, and I did like that I read that all of your stuff, the out of copyright stuff, is all available on the creative common licenses?
Yes. So, I have been working here since 2010 and the digital library had started, I think they formed the team in 2006 and then started scanning things in 2007. And from the very beginning everything that’s out of copyright has been freely available under creative commons licenses. So, for our own materials that we scan, we do the less restrictive creative commons license so that attribution share alike. But, we also do scanning for our partners in the area and they get to choose which type of creative commons license they would like. So, some of them choose the more restrictive attribution, no derivatives, not commercial.
And then you all provide that, and then do you all, for the ones that you scan for other institutions, do you all still host those? Or do you just scan them and give them the files to host?
We host them, so that’s part of our agreement with anyone who wants to be a partner. They actually sign a legal contract with us saying that we get perpetual use of the digital images and we will return their physical items to them still in good condition, of course. And [laughs] that they, they can also do whatever they wish with the digital images. So if they later are able to establish their own digital library, they can use that as well. But, we still to keep our digital copies forever.
And do you all have your own in-house developed software that you designed for your digital library?
Yes, we do. So, we are very big into open source and open everything here, as much as possible and so what we’re better known for is ViewFind which is an open source opaque discovery layer to. It’s for interacting with the catalog and that is used around the world, including at several national libraries, National Library of Ireland, National Library of Australia. And I believe every case, every elementary school in France.
Nice.
So [laughs] And there’s a lot of people around the world who work on the further development of that software. And then our digital library software is called ViewDL and we’ve been working on that. Our digital library has been our own built software, but we just open sourced it two years ago? Three years ago? So, it’s a newer open source thing.
So that’s every, that’s all the software that you use, is all open source? I mean, the cataloging stuff and the, everything.
Yeah, right now the actual cataloging software that we use is Voyager, but we’re partners with the Kuali upcoming stuff, so we’ll be switching to that once that’s ready.
Well let’s talk about your dime novels, cause that’s a really cool thing so I think we can talk about that for a little bit [laughs]. So you have this, you tell me the story. There’s, you all find these dime novels in a forgotten corner of your library’s basement [laughs].
Yes. So it actually started with, in 2012 in June I went to the RBMS conference that year and that’s the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of ALA and so one of the panels that I went to while I was at that conference was on popular culture in special collections and that included the sci-fi collection, University of California Riverside, I believe, and a gaming collection from somewhere in Texas and I forget what the third one was. But, it was really cool stuff and I was, when I left that session I was, “I, I really wish that we had a pop culture collection in my library.” So, the next month [laughs] we [laughs] got a, we got wind of a clue to the whereabouts of the mythical science fiction collection that exists in our library that.
Only whispered about in the past [laughs].
It turns up in the catalog every now and then as being located in the science fiction collection, but nobody knew where this was. So, we had what we thought was a lead to that collection, so we went to go investigate and it was down in the dark basement of the library that was being cleaned out as we were moving stuff around with renovations in the library. And what we found were three or four shelves of books in really terrible, falling apart condition that turned out to be books from the late 19th and early 20th century that were popular works. So, some of them were dime novels and then some them are cheap popular reproductions of more famous authors like Charles Dickens and then some weird 19th century humor that is of questionable taste. [laughs] But, so we found these and we got really excited about them and we went back up to special collections, grabbed some of our empty archival boxes, went back down and rescued these books so that they wouldn’t be thrown away as they were cleaning out that part of the library. So, we were looking at them more closely to see what we had actually acquired and some of, as I said some of them were actual dime novels which were popular genre fiction from about 1865-1915 and there’s a wide range of stuff that fits within the dime novel category, depending on who you ask about the definition, of course. But, these are also, a lot of them are published by a certain publishing company that then published them in series. So, they’ll, they’ll have numbered books that are published in this series run and they’re not sequel books or anything. They’re just published as an order and you can order them from the, from the company by mail for usually 10 cents. Hence the name dime novels.
So these were like the equivalent of the rack of mass market novels sitting at the airport for you to grab? [laughs]
Yeah. A ha. And they’ve got adventure type stories or romances and adventures for kids and stuff. So.
That’s very cool. [laughs]
Some of them read better than others [laughs] now. Well.
That’s something that hasn’t changed too, so.
Yeah [laughs]. But, so one of my colleagues, Damien Katz, is actually one of the world’s experts on choose your own adventure books and since his teens he has been gathering a bibliography of choose your own adventure and other interactive fiction type books. So, he maintains a website, Gamebooks.org for this bibliography and so he really likes doing bibliographical databases and putting, putting books in, in series and order and stuff. So, he got very excited by the fact that dime novels were organized into these kinds of series. So, he adapted the software that he uses for his Gamebooks website to create our own version for dime novels at Dimenovels.org.
And I, I’ll include links to all this in the show notes for people if they want to go find them later.
Okay, great. So, the bibliography we’re working on is actually based on the bibliography of Eddie LaBlanc who was a huge dime novel enthusiast during his life and he spent all of, he had a day job, but he spent all of his spare time typing up on typewriters lists of dime novels and series and whether or not he’d actually seen of the books in that series. So, these now exist in 13 binders in the Library of Congress. So, we, Damien reached out to the dime novels scholar community, which is small, but very enthusiastic and they were very excited to hear that we were very excited about dime novels and so we, through that network got in touch with the descendants of Eddie LaBlanc who gave us permission to use his bibliography for, as the basis for our own bibliography and so we named the bibliography in honor of him. So, it’s the Edward T LaBlanc Dime Novel bibliography.
So that bibliography has more than what you guys have in your collection? Or.
Right, yes. We’re actually trying to compile a bibliography of all the dime novels ever, which will keep us busy for.
Yes [laughs].
Quite a while. [laughs]
And so you guys decided to digitize them as well.
Yes. So, we, we like digitizing things so we can share them with the broader audience and so that’s the philosophy behind our reason for digitizing things and also making them available through creative commons licenses, make them more widely available to scholars who are interested in these works. So that they don’t have to fly all the way to Philadelphia just to consult something. So we get a lot of citations from around the world, which is pretty cool. So we are working on scanning dime novels now, of course, and then one of the other things that’s related to this that we’re doing is, again Damien Katz is also a volunteer for the distributed proofreaders project for Project Gutenberg. He is a project manager for that and then he is, in the last year, year and a half, has been starting to feed some of our own content into Project Gutenberg. We, we take a, as good of an OCR as we can get of our scans and then the Project Gutenberg proofreaders, it’s a huge network of volunteers, who then give each page a personal treatment to look for typos and stuff. So, sometimes we’re actually correcting typos that were in the printed text, so it’s, it’s, the Project Gutenberg edition is not the exact edition. We have it, it’s its own digital edition, and once it’s published, it’s available in many different formats so that people can read it on their e-reader device of choice, or there’s also an HTML version. One of the earliest ones that we did, that was our first dime novel that we fed into the Project Gutenberg was the Bride Of The Tomb and Queenie’s Terrible Secret, which was a two-in-one novel edition of the two different works by Mrs Alex McVay-Miller, who is now one of our very favorite authors.
We have to love the titles too, I love that!
Yeah. [laughs] So, we, we have done, we always try to have a, a different Mrs Miller title in our Project Gutenberg queue so that we can read all of them. [laughs]
And how many do you think you have total?
I don’t know. We have probably at least a couple of dozen.
She’s the Danielle Steel of her day, very prolific.
[laughs] A lot of these authors just sort of churned them out. They were actually originally published, many of them, in serialized form in story papers which were daily or weekly publications in big broadsheet newspaper format that was the entertainment of the day cause they didn’t have TV or radio or any of that fancy stuff.
And that’s what’s interesting, a lot of the Dickens and the Sherlock Holmes stories, I mean those were all done serially.
Yeah, exactly, so it’s very interesting that those ones are remembered and other ones are not. Sometimes we can tell why something has been forgotten. As I said a lot of these are not as, as good with 21st century tastes. There’s a lot of racism and sexism and all kinds of horrible isms [laughs]. But, some of them are actually good and surprising, The Bride Of The Tomb was one of those. So, it was the first one that we read, luckily, so we started out on a good note. And that one actually has a lot of surprises I think. I, I was able to, as I was reading it, predict a lot of the plot twists because they’re such common tropes now and they were in the day too, I’m sure, but The Bride Of The Tomb also had some interesting gender interactions that I wasn’t expecting and different roles for the genders than I was expecting, so. I don’t really want to give it all away, so.
So no spoilers.
Yeah. [laughs] But you should, everyone should read The Bride Of The Tomb at the very least because it is a really excellent story.
Well and then you guys have also done a podcast.
Yes, so you can also listen to me and Damien read it to you if you don’t want to read it yourself [laughs].
And, how, can you talk about how you guys go about doing that? I mean do you do it, do you read batches at a time? Or one chapter at a time? Or how do you guys do that?
So we book one of the meeting rooms in the library as our makeshift sound studio. We read it, usually a couple of chapters at a time because they, they take a little while to read cause you start stumbling over stuff as you’re talking for longer and longer. And also, these are from late 19th century so they’ve got some weird turns of phrase from time-to-time that trip you up. So, we record a few chapters and then I, I recorded them using Audacity and some equipment that we were able to get with some spare funds that we found [laughs]. So then I would, after recording I would do the editing because I was already familiar with audio recording and editing from some fan productions that I’ve done previously. So, I already mostly knew what I was doing [laughs].
It’s, it’s not as easy as it sounds [laughs].
Yeah [laughs]. It’s always an adventure. [laughs] And then just in the past of couple of months we’ve had some additions to our digital library team that I’ve been able to train up to help me with audio editing so that I don’t have to do it all myself because our ambition when we first started recording was to actually do more than one podcast stream at a time. But, since I am only one person and I have many other projects to work on, that was not feasible. So, hopefully we’ll be able to start another type of podcast in the near future. So, the one that we’re reading right now, of course, is The Bride Of The Tomb which is a fiction, work of fiction. And so we would also like to do a podcast reading some random non-fiction book that we have from the time period as well and then we also have a series of oral history interviews with Eddie LeBlanc, our dime novel guy, who was interviewed by another dime novel enthusiast, Lydia Sherman, in the 1980s over a couple of days and it’s actually 24 hours worth of tapes.
Oh wow.
Which we, we’ve digitized all those tapes now and so they’re available on uncut format through our digital library, but we also want to make a few shorter sound bites about dime novels and stuff that we can refer people to.
That’s very cool.
So that they don’t have to listen to the full 24 hours if they don’t want to [laughs].
[laughs] Little more bite-sized chunks. Yeah cause the, the dime novel podcast you generally do is what 10, 15 minutes?
Yeah. It’s usually, one chapter and that usually takes about, yeah 8 to 15 minutes for a chapter, depending on what dramatic stuff is going down [laughs].
The action packed scenes. So I think this, the whole dime novel thing really fits back into what you were talking about earlier about the history of the ordinary stuff. I mean that’s really what, cause we can read the, the Dickens and all this and say, “Well that’s what literature was like back then.” But, they had just popular literature back then too. I mean there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s great, it’s the same as we do now and people sometimes don’t want to have to, I don’t want to say think, but you know, just want to be entertained more than they want to have to figure out the real theme of it and all this kind of stuff. I mean you just want to be entertained sometimes, so.
Exactly. Yeah, it’s, as I mentioned earlier, it was the form of entertainment for everyone back in the day. There weren’t a lot of other options, so reading these story papers and probably discussing with their friends and neighbors the plot twist that happened in that week’s edition, like we discuss TV shows now and that everybody is watching, so.
Yeah, I was going to say TV shows or series on YouTube and stuff like that, that’s really the modern equivalent cause they, and they tried to bring it back in print a little bit. I mean Stephen King did that series what? 20 years ago now. The Green Mile that came out as a serial so they try to bring the serial back, but it never really caught back on in books, but yeah, people do that on TV all the time. That’s what you’re doing, you’re watching a serial, so.
Yeah.
Well I also wanted to talk to you about the PhillyDH, the group you have that you’re, I believe you said you’re a founding member of that?
Yes.
And it’s about people interested in digital humanities. Can you talk about that? Of why you wanted to help form that organization? How that got formed? And what you all are hoping to do?
Okay, so I, I got interested in digital humanities when I was in my last semester of my MLS at University of Maryland. I took a class called Information Access in the Arts with Kerry Kraus and she introduced us to the concept of digital humanities which once I heard about it I was, “That is awesome!” Because it combines everything that I love. It’s digital technology stuff and humanities stuff, so it’s doing all kinds of cool projects and tools with those two things. And, so, as I said, I was at the University of Maryland at the time, they have their own digital humanities center there, the Maryland Institute For Technology In The Humanities, or MITH for short, and then also in the DC area of course there is the Center For History in New Media, CHNM at George Mason University, which is sort of the flagship center for modern digital humanities. So, there was a lot of stuff that I could do while I was in the DC area related to digital humanities and a lot of people that I could talk to. And then I took this job at Villa Nova and I came to Philadelphia and there were no digital humanities centers and I was very sad. One of the, one of the people that I met through our digital partnership here at the digital library sent an email to several people that he knew asking if we would be interested in helping to organize a DAT camp in Philly, so that camp is the, the Humanities On Technology camp and they started that camp at CHNM in DC and it’s a digital humanities unconference. So, the people who go to the conference are the ones who decide what to talk about while they’re there, what types of sessions they want to have and what kind of outcomes they want. And so from CHNM then became this larger movement and anyone who wants to can put together a DAT camp and they’ve been many, many regional DAT camps and they take place all over the world and sometimes it’s just a regional focus, sometimes they have a particular topic that they’re interested in, so DAT camp libraries is one that’s happened a couple of times. So we were starting for DAT Camp Philly and I, of course, jumped right on board when he sent that email and said, “Yes, I would love to, I am very excited about digital humanities and I think it’s very important. So I would love to bring that to the Philadelphia area.” So, that was in 2011 was our one I think. Yeah. 2011 and then at the, its now an annual thing that we do in late September and it’s ended up being hosted each year at the Chemical Heritage Foundation downtown, which is kind of an odd place maybe [laughs] to have it, but they are our contacts, they are very friendly and enthusiastic and into digital humanities, so that’s really cool. And so at the, at that camp in 2012 there was a session there where people talked about maybe putting together a digital humanities network in the Philly area so that we could have cool digital humanities discussions throughout the year rather than just the one weekend in September.
So, do you guys meet in person a lot? Or is it online? Or how do you?
Yeah, so then the following year 2013 we had another get together for the PhillyDH group, so it was all, the core organizers for that are a lot overlap between the organizers for that camp Philly and we are trying to, it’s hard to put things together, especially when we all have so many other projects to work on. But, [laughs] we’re still working on it. So we’re trying to put together more than one even for the year that people can get together in person and, especially just to network and meet other people who are interested in digital humanities, from other institutions, that they might not know of otherwise and connecting people who have complementary skills, so someone wants to do a particular project, but they don’t have all of the skills for that, finding someone who might be interested in helping them with the other set of skills that they need.
Well that actually, that actually leads into the other topic I wanted to discuss with you with those connecting with other professionals. I know that’s, that’s really important to us I know, to learn from other people and we often have to use social media to do that because maybe you don’t have the people in your field right near you and you can make a lot of great connections through there. How do you, how do you find using social media helps your professional development? Twitter, Facebook, anything like that.
I really love Twitter, Twitter is my favorite. [laughs] I, I was actually dragged kicking and screaming onto the various social media networks by my dad [laughs] while I was in library school. I didn’t, at first I didn’t really understand the point of them or what to do with them, so I signed up for Facebook and Twitter but I didn’t really use them that much and for Twitter, I would send out a couple of tweets, but I didn’t really see the point of it until I went to the internet librarian conference in 2011 and that was the first time that I was at a conference with an actual smart device and so once I figured out the whole hashtag thing, I was, “Wow, this is amazing.” The, you can connect with people who are sitting in the same room with you and having the same reaction to the talk that you’re listening too. And you can also eavesdrop on other sessions that are happening at the same time, so you can actually be in more than one place at the same time, which is always a problem with conferences.
Yes, there’s always something going on at the same time at the conference as the session you want to go to.
So it’s really great to be able to get the different perspectives on a conference. So, once, once I had that and made some more library friends and stuff through that conference, then I started being able to actually figure out how to make Twitter more useful to me as a professional. So, connecting with all kinds of other librarians and cool projects and stuff that I follow and following conferences that I’m not even at [laughs], so.
Yeah that’s the most fun I think, is when you can’t, I mean obviously we can’t all travel to every conference, but it’s fun to follow along with people who are live tweeting and things like that.
Exactly. So, yeah, and then now I, I do social media for our digital library, we have a bunch of accounts for our digital library itself and then our various projects, the Dimenovels.org has its own Facebook and Twitter and our open source projects have their own social media presences that aren’t as active as our others, but I still try to keep them live. [laughs]
Yeah, I saw you were having a password problem a couple of days ago [laughs].
Yes. So yeah there was Twitter that was created for our View Find account prior to me being here and nobody has the password for it, so that’s very frustrating. So, I try to make sure that I’ve, I’ve got a sheet that I printed out for my colleagues that has all of our accounts on it and all of the passwords so that if I leave, or if I get hit by a bus, or whatever they will still be able to have control of those accounts.
The Laura Memorial Twitter feed.
Exactly, exactly [laughs]. So I actually manage so many social media accounts now that I just stopped counting them because once I got over a dozen I was, “This is sort of terrifying actually.” [laughs] And because I manage so many, I don’t do all of them as well as I should.
So do you have a system of how you do it? Or is it just you get around to it when you get around to it? I mean do you try and schedule them?
So yeah, some of them, I try, obviously I’m on my own personal one a lot and then I try to keep our main digital library accounts active. I’m usually pretty good at Twitter cause that’s really easy to do in just a minute of spare time [laughs].
Right, it’s easy to spit it out, yeah.
At least retweet something that, or whatever, post a really quick picture. Facebook is a little bit harder because I actually have to sit down and log in and find an interesting picture to post, or something. But I try to keep those more active cause those are our main accounts and then my colleague Damien has been managing the social media accounts for the dime novels stuff, so that’s helpful and he’s very good at keeping those actively updated. And then the other ones that I manage, I just try to get to when I remember, or when I’m racked with guilt over their neglect.
[laughs] All right, well Laura, how can people find out more about you and your work online? Where should they go to find out more about you?
Twitter’s probably the best. So, I’m @laurabang on Twitter. I also have a Tumblr that I sort of remember from time to time and sort of forget for long stretches of time and that’s barefootsong@tumblr. And then I have a website which you can find if you Google me but I’m really terrible at updating that. In the midst of trying to revamp it and that keeps getting put off, so it’s in a very sad state right now.
And we mentioned earlier the URLs for the, your various projects you’re working on, and I’ll include those like I said in the show notes so people can.
Yes. And then we also have a blog that I write for, along with several of my colleagues for our digital library so you can find that on the digital library main page which is digital.library.villanova.edu.
Yeah, I, I don’t want to dig back into another topic again, but I, I did, I was impressed looking at your, at the site for the library, the, at how many blogs you guys have to help keep people informed about what’s going on in the library.
Oh yeah, we have our own media team within the library, so we’ve got a lot of people. So I do all the digital library stuff and then there’s other people from other departments who work on the other blogs and the main library Twitter and Facebook and all of that stuff. So we try to keep each other in the loop, but we have, for the main library accounts there’s one person who’s the more point person for that type of social media. So, there’s one person who does primarily the Twitter feed and one person who does the Facebook, so that we don’t step on each others toes.
Well Laura, I especially have a place in my heart for other people who do podcasts, so thank you so much for being on the show and talking to everybody about the great work you’re doing. I, I just started listening, I listened to some of the earlier podcasts when you were first started talking about it, but I’ve been listening through to them and very entertaining, so [laughs].
We’re getting closer to the end now, so it’s 40 chapters long and I think we’re up to 24 or 25 that’s been released.
Well, I look forward to more.
Great.
Well, thanks, Laura.
Thank you.
All right, bye bye.
Bye.
***
I always forget to tell people sometimes that when I say goodbye you don’t have to get off because it just means I’m stopping recording.
Circulating Ideas 