Motivation & Direction
The Big Picture
A lot of professional development for library workers happens through conferences, talks, presentations, webinars… all sorts of things. We can’t all attend everything, nor should we expect ourselves to do extra labor while we’re off the clock.
Information privilege pertains to institutions, just like to communities and individuals. Those of us with the institutional resources to do professional development can help share the wealth with our under-resourced colleagues.
By sharing our notes, we can be stronger together.
The Personal Picture
I type much faster than I write by hand—and the results are far more legible! This kind of note taking helps me focus during presentations, but trying to chunk the ideas into social media-sized bits adds a different type of distraction.
So at one of the first library conferences I attended, I took some notes to share using Goggle Docs. Then, later, I felt unsettled.
Amplifying work whose creators want it to be shared is great, but I didn’t feel comfortable drawing people to that particular platform. I spell that company’s name “Goggle” intentionally. They’re a prime example of what Shoshana Zuboff has termed surveillance capitalism. I don’t want to encourage any colleagues to have to exchange private information / metadata to access professional development resources.
Then I remembered Etherpads. Myself, Kate Deibel, Achintya Rao, Carrie Wade, and other folks from Mastodon and Twitter compared the accessibility and ease of use of RiseUp’s Etherpad to those from CryptPad. RiseUp won because it is simplest and, unlike CryptPad, doesn’t break the ability to press the tab button for keyboard navigation. (That’s fixed but is still far more cumbersome). And here we are!
The Procedure
I don’t claim credit for all the notes shared here, but they are shared CC-BY. Since RiseUp’s Etherpad service is geared toward privacy, note-takers have to identify themselves in order to get credit.
At the moment, this is a collection of notes I and other attendees have collectively taken at conferences. In order to help amplify peoples’ work, I might add additional links to notes taken by others.
I’m still refining this practice. But currently it looks like:
- Making a new RiseUp Etherpad, naming it something easily readable, and setting its lifespan to one year.
- Sharing the link to that pad with any relevant hashtags on social media… which for me is Twitter or Mastodon.
- Taking the notes. This is usually in Markdown format that uses
#to note heading levels and favoring bullet points. The bullet points should make things more accessible for users of screen readers once the notes are exported from the Etherpad to their longer-term home on GitHub. - Exporting those notes to both html and plain text.
- Cleaning the notes up to create a version here, probably including an embed link to the original Etherpad.
Initially I thought I’d just leave the notes in their GitHub repository. However, it’s a little overwhelming, especially for new users. I also did more reading into whether GitHub is friendly for screenreaders. As far as I can tell, it isn’t particularly accessible. So in order to make this as accessible as possible both cognitively and in terms of visual disabilities, I adapted Dean Attali’s Beautiful Jekyll theme.
The Future
For ease of sharing and contributing, this is hosted on GitHub Pages.
More specifically, this is a GitHub Project Page. That means that currently, the base domain is my own website. I’d be thrilled if other people want to contribute, so I’ll offer to add things from others here and give credit accordingly.
If other people are interested in helping moderate this, I’d be equally happy to make this a GitHub organization. This change would give it its own domain at GitHub. Let me know if you’re interested in making this happen.
Attribution
I’m hoping this kind of note taking will take off—and I’m very keen not to have the content of a session accidentally attributed to the notetakers instead of the presenters.
Collectives?
So I’m currently thinking it might be best to attribute the “authorship” of these notes to a collective. That can place the “authorship” somewhere on a range that includes collectives like J.K. Gibson-Graham, the Otolith Group, Drexciya, Guerrilla Girls, or CrimethInc.
Contributors?
Simultaneously with the above paragraph, credit and acknowledgement are huge motivators, particularly in a field that’s profoundly underfunded and underresourced. So perhaps it would be best to make space for notetakers and other participants to identify themselves as “contributors”? Now that the subtitle for each presentation lists the presenters, confusion over the correct attribution seems like less of a concern.
Scope
A couple people have asked on Mastodon whether they should contribute notes from other disciplines, like philosophy, linguistics, or physics. For the moment, I’m thinking that such a broad scope would counter-intuitively make this collection increasingly less useful.
Current Scope
I’m currently thinking this as a space for things:
- related to library work
- “related” here is up to any potential contributor who’s worked in a library or is in library school
- closely adjacent to library work or interests of library workers
- this can range from cultural studies to computer science to critical race theory to things that also do not start with “C”
- in other words, I’ll keep posting notes from most conferences or events I attend, even though they’re often more directly related to literature than libraries
- the collection can always be split in the future if it becomes unruly
Fork It
I’d love it if people were inspired by this idea enough to fork this into collections of notes related to things outside of this collection’s current scope! That’s a large part of why I’ve chosen GitHub as the platform and licensed this CC-BY.
Credits
Check out this project’s readme page for details about the technologies and projects it uses.
Contact
If you’re interested in contributing, moderating, linking to your notes hosted elsewhere, clarifying or removing parts from one of your presentations, etc…, please reach out!
I’m on Twitter and on Mastodon. You can also create a GitHub issue if you have a GitHub account.