Jessamyn C. West's Blog

This started out as just a fun postcard I bought for fifty cents, intending to send it to my cousin. We had been to this train station together a zillion years ago when I visited him living just over the border in Kentucky. Like “Haha, remember that cool building and also there’s a librarian involved.” but then I wondered… The paucity of name/address, the possible double entendre message (from a woman), what else could I find out here? And then, along the way, it became another goofy “libraria...

It’s been a time. I have been talking a bit on social media but mostly just out and about trying to be useful. Everyone’s going through it. I’ve been getting to the point where I’ve got a bit of capacity and have been cleaning off my real and virtual desktops and came across this bit of a shared talk I gave with a friend for Public Philosophy Week back in April. He did the hardware stuff, talking about the tool that is a computer, and how it can really only do what it was designed to do (abbrev...

I haven’t written a post like this in a while. The last one was in 2016. My work life got fractured, not entirely in a bad way, and harder to describe. I was speaking to a friend this week and mentioned working for the Flickr Foundation, a position I’ve held since 2023, and he asked “How many jobs do you have anyhow?” and I thought I’d spell them out. Both of my parents have died, both had IRAs so some of my income nowadays comes from that, but it’s not work. I made about 25K last year at my va...

I do work on Wikipedia sometimes. Since I’ve been working for the Flickr Foundation, my life overlaps more with free content. Sometimes I try to combine work and play and add things to Wikimedia Commons, or to Wikipedia, or both. My username in the Wikipedia extended universe is Jessamyn, so it’s pretty easy to see what I’ve been up to. Here’s my wrap-up of 2024 Wikipedia stuff I did.

– Uploaded 81 images to Wikimedia Commons (see them)
– Uploaded 15 images to Wikipedia (usually for obits, or ...

Here was the Mastodon thread of what I read last year and here’s my 2024 booklist. This is the thread of the books I am reading this year. This was a slightly challenging year of navigating some health stuff (which has been working out well; nothing serious just getting some age-appropriate attention) which meant a LOT of reading. I didn’t mind it but I might have liked being out doing more other things. Most of the non-fiction I read was graphic novels (my library tends to like “graphic memoir...

Totally a homebody this year; seventy library visits and most of them within a half mile of my house. I liked working at my library. I didn’t feel the need to go to other libraries with my free time. Amusing side note, I use Daytum to track my library visits and I have a display that show’s “this year’s” visits. However, I didn’t change the display over LAST year and somehow didn’t really notice (I mostly just add visits, don’t look at the pie chart). All fixed now!

I got an ISSN for no real reason. Richard pointed out on Mastodon that you can get an ISSN for a blog as long as it’s not a personal blog. I have a personal blog and it’s not this one. So I got an ISSN for this, partly just to learn the process. It was very simple, just walking through some steps on an LOC website. I applied on November 24th and received my number today.

My ISSN is 3066-120X.

My drop-in time work used to be a lot of teaching basic skills. “Here’s how to click. Now here’s how to right-click.” Then for a time it was teaching people about software. “Here’s how a menu works in Microsoft Word.” Then it was more about social media, then mobile phones. Lately it’s still a bit of all of those things, but the major thing I do is something I call “How do I connect this to that?” A few examples:

– I want to be able to use Google photos on my iPhone
– I want to figure out why O...

A difficult part of technology instruction is not that things are unknowable, but that no one is ever starting at the beginning, not in 2024.

I was reading this post by my colleague Alex talking about digital decluttering. Like Alex, I can get stuck into a hyperfocus jag where I am doing nothing but cleaning up data and I enjoy it a lot. My email archives go back to… 1996 which was actually further back than I was expecting. I periodical...

“Public.work is a search engine for public domain content.” The site claims to have over 100,000 public domain images. This in and of itself is not that special, but the interface is. It’s gorgeous, a fun and engaging discovery layer where every search becomes a URL that can be shared [example] and the page of images endlessly scrolls up, down, and even sideways. Of course, the endless scroll is a bit of a fiction because many niche searches have few results and thus you see images repeating al...