A bonus quilt which accompanies the trio of quilts which I made for triplets born in 2019. This large llama, also from a pattern by Elizabeth Hartman, was made for their older sibling who was going from being an only child to the oldest of four. I found some really fun colors for the llama's embellishments.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Years created: 2019 Piecing technique: machine Quilting technique: hand Summary: One of three quilts I made for triplets born in 2019. Each repeats a single animal three times. This uses a fox block pattern by Elizabeth Hartman, tripled and embellished with flowers. The other two triplet quilts are: otters and hedgehogs. The actual fox block comes from the Elizabeth Hartman’s North Stars pattern. I took it and made it more Pennsylvania: vivid orange foxes, vivid appliqué flowers, and a gre...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Years created: 2019 Piecing technique: machine Quilting technique: hand Summary: One of three quilts I made for triplets born in 2019. Each repeats a single animal three times. This uses an hedgehog pattern by Elizabeth Hartman on a green background with pieced and applique mushrooms. The other two triplet quilts are: foxes and otters The actual block is Elizabeth Hartman’s hedgehog pattern. They share brown fabric with the otters, two darker and one richer. I needed an appropriate accent a...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Years created: 2019 Piecing technique: machine Quilting technique: hand Summary: One of three quilts I made for triplets born in 2019. Each repeats a single animal three times. This uses an otter block pattern by Elizabeth Hartman on a bubbly-ish water background with other water creatures. The other two triplet quilts are: foxes and hedgehogs. The actual otter block comes from the Elizabeth Hartman’s North Stars pattern. I thought it would be perfect to depict the otters floating on their ...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I’ve been a licensed ham operator since December 2020 and active in my local ham radio club since Spring 2021. I enjoy our nets, public service events, fox hunting activities, and occasional special outings like POTA. I sometimes use APRS while hiking. I upload contacts to QRZ. I have not been able to get LotW to renew my certificate when it came back online after the disaster. I’m saving those to upload once that’s been sorted out. At some point I hope to have a proper QSL card, I’m ...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Years created: 2025 Piecing technique: machine Quilting technique: machine Summary: The lyrics of Rage Against the Machine's 1996 "Bulls on Parade" have been in my head quite a bit as I've watched budgets and bombs over the last couple years. I raided my fabric stash and inscribed what I was thinking and feeling into this quilt. It's going to my church for now, as a hanging. WEAPONS NOT FOOD, NOT HOMES, NOT SHOES, NOT NEED I heard it as the Biden administration sent money and weapons, over an...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Years created: 2016-2017 Piecing technique: machine Quilting technique: machine Summary: This was my first machine-quilted quilt, using the walking-foot method. I got it as a kit from another quilt guild member who was downsizing her stash. It's not quite a log cabin but feels log cabin-inspired. I was particularly drawn to the rich medium-tone colors in the kit. The pattern is titled Light and Shadows, printed by Pacific Patchwork for Block Party Fun. The pattern is by Paula Stoddard, 2010. ...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Another mini quilt from in 2020. There were only so many places we could walk and all but one of them took us past this neighbor. Their blue fence had a gorgeous circular gate. A row of prayer flags hung between their main house and an outbuilding. I combined the two in this very small quilt.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Supporting research by Stephen Woods about citation practices in sociology dissertations. I used WorldCat APIs and Z39.50 queries to determine which journals were held in some manner by which BTAA institutions (and comparing with Stephen’s citation analysis). The project was a fun opportunity to test some methods of querying data. As mentioned in the article, there is no way to review actual holdings so our test was simply for the presence of a record, indicating some degree of holdings at ...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I don't have a name for this quilt, but the base block is one I'd call "Big Goose, Little Goose" (there may be a name I'm blanking on). It's just that, repeated and arranged so the big geese form diamonds and the little ones form up around them. I saw a photo online and felt inspired by the idea. I started it in Indiana and finished after moving to PA. It was a trade to a friend for a 1913 Singer treadle sewing machine which had been in the family for several generations. Her house and aesthe...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Years created: 20??-2017 Piecing technique: hand Quilting technique: hand Summary: This quilt sat partially-finished for many years, I think between 2012 or 2013 and 2017, when I finished it while living in Indiana. I took the repeating star and pinwheel pattern of the "All Hallows Variation" examples I saw on Quilter's Cache and asked myself "but what if it were flowers in a garden?" I saw the pinwheels as leaves enclosed by borders of more leaves separating the flowers. Looking at it now, I...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Even as librarians have spent the past twenty years documenting the rich world of scholarly communication beyond the catalog, repositories and catalogs too often remain completely siloed from each other. Current practices and tools to unite the two focus entirely on matching names, an imprecise method requiring substantial time spent on review. This article presents results of an experiment incorporating the attribute and citation data present in Library of Congress Name Authority Records and...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I made this trip around the world quilt to celebrate my 10th wedding anniversary. Blue is my husband's favorite color, so I chose a variety of blues and leaned into a gray/steel contrasting color with some light blue and one light cream (vs white) fabric. I pieced the quilt using a strip-based technique while at quilt retreat so he wouldn't see any of it. It has very basic machine-quilting along the diagonals and borders because I only worked on the quilting part when he wasn't around. It was...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
This is an old one, so old that I'm unsure of the date. I know that I made it in the first few years after I was married. Micah and I were on a date in the coffee shop at Barnes and Noble, where I was browsing the quilt pattern books. I was taken by this one, the "American Beauty" pattern by Evelyn Sloppy from the book 40 Fabulous Quick-Cut Quilts. I had one of my notebooks with me and jotted down some info about the block and the overall concept of the pattern--it was long before 2012, when ...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I made a lot of mini quilts in the early days of the 2020 lockdown. It was a chance to try creative experiments despite my wildly varying levels of capacity. I had checked out a book of Kaffe Fassett quilt patterns shortly beforehand and used a template to make this quilt with some batik scraps I had on hand. I made a quilting template based on the piecing template and echoed the fan pattern in the negative space.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Additional pattern details: “Atlantic Compass” (Northcott Pattern PTN2454 10) created by Reeze L. Hanson of Morning Glory Designs for the Northcutt “Atlantic Shore” collection of fabrics.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
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Something bad has happened and it is once again time to make a statement. Or, more likely, if you’re the member of a professional organization, to demand that the organization’s leadership make a statement. As we’ve endured the first month of a second Trump presidency, I’ve been reflecting on the last time around. In early 2017, I was in a digital collections role and active in the Society of American Archivists. That was also the last year of the (dysfunctional) Archives & Archivists...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Content note: this post discusses the “calories burned” during workouts, but mostly really absurd numbers It all started when I bought a heart monitor. Well, back up a little bit. In Spring 2023, I started powerlifting. I’d done some weight training before, mostly dumbbells in the 12-25lb range, but powerlifting is a completely different adventure. It turns out I love it! I’ve done regular cardio for ages and I did ballet as a kid into my teens, but never had a sport give me either th...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
January 21, 2025 marks the 500th anniversary of the small gathering of Christians who chose to re-baptise each other, setting off what would become the Anabaptist movement. As a Mennonite, I’m an Anabaptist. So are Church of the Brethren and Brethren in Christ, with whom we often find ourselves teaming up, as well as our cousins the Amish and the more distant Hutterites or the more modern Bruderhof. In light of this anniversary, I’m writing about my journey to becoming Anabaptist. This is...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
After last week’s talk on making use of the period between now and fundamental shifts in cataloging, regular expressions (regex) came up during the Q&A as one of the things I think it’s helpful for catalogers to learn. Afterward, one of the attendees emailed me asking for more specific recommendations on how to learn them. I’m sharing the resources I pulled together, since I think they could be of use to more folks. I would also recommend that, if you get the opportunity, this is a good...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
With Dorothea Salo. This chapter appears in Ethics in Linked Data, eds. Alexandra Provo, Kathleen Burlingame, and B.M. Watson, Library Juice Press, 2023, 978-1-63400-133-5. Pages 23-39.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
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With Elizabeth Russey Roke| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Contact me at my first and last names at gmail. Learn how to index and use my name. Employment Pennsylvania State University Libraries Cataloging Systems and Linked Data Strategist, Associate Librarian July 2023 — present (tenured) Cataloging Systems and Linked Data Strategist, Assistant Librarian September 2017 — July 2023 3-year endowed position: Sally W. Kalin Early Career Librarian for Technological Innovations July 2021 — June 2024 Leading a project to improve the libraries’ disc...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Part of Lighting the Way: Illuminating the future of discovery and delivery for archives (IMLS LG-35-19-0012-19). With Kelli Babcock, Regine Heberlein, Anna Björnsson McCormick, Elizabeth Russey Roke, and Greta Kuriger Suiter.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
What’s up in the Society of American Archivists? On January 15th, breaking with 30 years of precedent, a group of 52 SAA Members1 (mostly retirees, past-presidents, fellows, library/archive heads, and other senior community members) challenged Nominating Committee’s selections for Vice President with a written petition conforming to Bylaws Section 5.C to add a third candidate: SAA Fellow Kris Kiesling.2 For those unfamiliar with the normal process, a Nominating Committee are elected and e...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Several times a year, the same question comes up on Twitter or in one the metadata/library/archives Slacks: “Does anyone know working reconciliation service for LCSH?”1 The person tends to be using something like OpenRefine to match a bunch of textual subject headings with their appropriate LC linked data URIs. For example, the complex subject “Brewery workers–Labor unions” is represented by http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85136543. But the Library of Congress doesn’t off...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
You can reach me at a gmail address comprised of my first and last name (same as the domain name). For work purposes, you can contact me using my Penn State contact information.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
This post is based on the eulogy I gave at my father’s funeral. Although we had a difficult relationship, I learned some extraordinarily valuable life skills from him. I do not think I would be who I am today without that. I don’t recall precisely when my local library adopted Dynix.1 I know I was old enough to remember when it happened and that we had a card catalog running alongside it for a while. Based on other life events, I can say I was 8 or younger—first few years of the 90s. I ...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Recently, I conducted a workshop with catalogers at Penn State on how we might use our skills to create or enhance records about people on Wikidata. I’m sharing a zip file download of the slides with speaker notes and handouts1 from the workshop for folks who want to learn or adapt these for local use. This post provides details on the exercise I devised for the workshop. I could not include it in the handouts because it was very specific and we’d already done the work. Instead, I’ll wa...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
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When I picked up “Out of the Hollinger Box: the Archivist as Advocate” at Eira Tansey’s recommendation, it was with rather minimal expectations. The piece is from 1984. I was not ready. An informal survey revealed most of my peers haven’t read it either, so I decided to excerpt the parts which I’d describe as blowing. my. mind. Motley’s piece is a strong rejoinder to anyone who gives Society of American Archivists grief for being too political when they bring up global warming or ...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I let them bury my father in a sealer coffin. I knew how and why to say no. But I’d just won the battle not to embalm him and they recommended that, in that case, we should do a sealer coffin. No extra cost to the original. My best self would’ve argued. But I was not alone in that room, or alone with my sister—who trusts me on these things. I wasn’t even in the room. I was video conferencing from the phone screen of my dear aunt, who was grieving the loss of the big brother she called...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Here at Penn State, we recently redid our “Get It!” page in Summon to include results from the Open Access Button. When we don’t have online access to an item, our system is configured to load a full page (1-click without sidebar) with options for requesting the item via ILL, asking for help, etc. Now, if the system identifies an OA copy, the Open Access Button link appears before the ILL link. Thanks to feedback from the heads of Access Services and ILL, I streamlined the on-page text ...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
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This is observational. This is autobiographical. This melds my own experiences as Metadata Librarian and Digital Collections Librarian with those of dozens of metadataists I’ve known over the years. This is born of hearing the same existential crisis again and again. If you are somewhere on the ouroboros, you are not alone, you are not broken, and you are not hopelessly behind. The library is going to adopt a new repository and you just got hired to make it happen. You may be fresh out of l...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
My name is Ruth Kitchin Tillman. It should be alphabetized and indexed Tillman, Ruth Kitchin. My name is not hyphenated. Kitchin is my original last name. Kitchin is (legally) my middle name. You can call me Ruth Tillman, that’s fine. Ruth K. Tillman works too. Ms. Tillman, not Mrs., please. Mrs. Tillman is my mother-in-law. She has been in my life for decades. I changed my last name to Tillman because I got so very tired of spelling “Kitchin” to people. Tillman is pretty easy to spell....| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
As I’ve written before, I’m a Deathling, a member of the Order of the Good Death, and what’s called “death positive.” It’s not a phrase I’m wild about, but calling myself a “Deathling” makes even less sense to people, “into death” is even less helpful or accurate. In the last couple months, I’ve found myself traveling with death and grief, from the loss of a kindred spirit I never knew to the death of my father after decades of illness. It’s forced me to sit closely ...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
… and that’s why it can be so hard to learn. When I was attending LD4 last week, a session on tools/cataloging moved to the subject of linked data fatigue. One attendee noted that when she’d graduated library school a decade ago, she was told the move to BIBFRAME wasn’t far behind. Others, including me, recounted similar experiences, or struggles we’d had in learning linked data. To be entirely open, although my job title currently includes “Linked Data Strategist,” I responded ...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
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For the first 8.5 years of our marriage, my husband spent his life as some combination of grad student/grad teacher/dissertation writer or adjunct professor. He worked nearly constantly—writing his dissertation, doing course prep, grading, writing articles, applying for jobs, and driving. We lived on the border of Washington, DC, with its high cost of living, to be close to his school. Fortunately, I found work along the nearest metro line and eventually began my own graduate program. Three...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I revisit my childhood library in dreams. From infancy to 16,1 our family visited every Tuesday night—barring illness or travel. From an early age, my parents released me in the children’s area. I know, unattended small child. But as an intense rules-follower who learned to read at 4, I hope I didn’t cause much stress for the library’s workers, all of whom I soon knew by name. The children’s room was a site of many happy memories and engaging stories. I can also recall four distinct...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
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While I was working as the Metadata Librarian at the NASA Goddard Library, one of the projects I tackled was providing public access to 488 issues of the Goddard News, from 1960-1999. These issues had already been digitized and turned into PDFs. However, they were only available for internal use. Almost every newsletter, particularly from the earlier years, included protected PII. For example, a profile of one secretary included the high school from which she’d graduated, the names (and age...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
This tutorial is aimed at metadata workers who may be using Traject, a ruby gem which can index MARC records for Solr. Right now at Penn State, we’re using it to index our entire catalog in Solr for a Blacklight project. I’ve got a lot of tickets to choose the right fields and subfield for our index and display, so I needed a fast, easy way to test on my own computer. My computer runs Windows, which added some challenges. The tutorial assumes you understand: Some basics of the Windows DOS...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
As someone who came of age and into the peace movement during the first years of the Iraq war, I’ve been going to protests, rallies, and demonstrations—if sporadically—for nearly 15 years now. You could make a bingo card with the types you’ll encounter there… which I say in love. And if one were to make such a card, the free square is the guy with the acoustic guitar. And at any given protest, perhaps as a scheduled part or perhaps as it wraps up, someone will burst into an unironic...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
When I started off at Notre Dame, I already knew that getting contraceptive health care would be complex. The university was in the middle of a court battle, University of Notre Dame v. Sebelius.1 The government had already reached a compromise with the school—the school didn’t actually have to cover contraceptive insurance for its employees. Instead, it had to say that it wouldn’t, and then the employees would get their care funded through the government. Even this was too great a burd...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Sometimes, when you’re passionate about a thing, your friends start to notice it to and tell you whenever they see it too. This can be a curse. At points in my life I’ve had not to scream when the fifth person in the day sends me the same thing — it’s so lovely they thought of me. Should they get a less enthusiastic reaction than the first because they saw it a few hours later? When it’s quilts, though, they’re amazing and everywhere. If it’s not trending online, I haven’t see...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I am an information scientist. “Wolfram Alpha, tell me how many days my mother lived.” I am the young woman in a fairy tale. “Wolfram Alpha, tell me the day I’ll die.” 2018-04-22, I’m twice the age now of most fairy-tale girls, I think. Perhaps older than Juliet’s mother. I’m not yet 35. It feels young. But it’s also maybe half the life I’ll get. At 30, I realize the day’s approaching. I call on my technologic oracle to work it out. I mark it on the calendar. I tell my o...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
5 years ago, on May 18, 2013, posted introduced EADiva to the world. I’d been working on the project since the previous fall—I bought the domain name in September 2012. Looking back now, I’m still on board with the objectives I stated in that first post: My goal in creating this site was to make a resource oriented toward people who are attempting to learn EAD but may not have much more experience with XML than one gets in basic library school classes. The Library of Congress’s tag li...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I had to put this together for another purpose today and I tracked down how to do it through a video, I thought I’d make a screenshot/instruction blog post of the steps I took. NB: Per Terry Reese, it works the same way in MarcEdit 3.x on Mac. When creating these screenshots, I was demonstrating how to add a new XSL transformation from the MarcEdit xslt directory. MarcEdit comes with a number of these transformations registered as batch operations you can perform. However, MarcEdit comes wi...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
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On Friday, I attended the Penn State Commission on Women awards lunch. It reminded me of the kinds of choices we all can make, if we remember that these are things we can do and don’t talk ourselves out of them. You can: Send someone a note congratulating them, telling them something you admire about them, thanking them on their work for something, tell them a difference they made in your life Send a kudos to someone’s boss Set a reminder during performance review season and send out posi...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
There’s yet another journal article making the rounds in which researchers find that, sure enough, men in the study generally overestimate their abilities, underestimate those of women, and women underestimate their own abilities. Lately, I’ve been reflecting a lot that, in terms of my eventual career prospects… I will never be as attractive a candidate to (many) folks looking to improve their tech as a man who comes in and overpromises the impossible. Because while I’m ambitious, I w...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
…that nuclear weapons haven’t killed Americans. Don’t let anyone get away with the implication that the US government hasn’t killed Americans with nuclear weapons on US soil. Don’t let anyone get away with the implication that the US government hasn’t killed with nuclear weapons those people whose lands they have taken in “trust.” The Diné, whose lands were tainted mining the uranium and whose water tainted. The Marshallese, whose lands were destroyed and who were exposed in ...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
cross-posted and adapted from a post on our internal staff blog In our work on the Penn State Libraries’ Bento search project, part of our larger-scale work to improve discovery, one of the challenges we encounter is that we really do control what goes into the system. Not that we control what’s indexed in the Cat or Summon, or how databases or archival materials are described (kind of), but in how we choose to search against these things and what we do when we don’t get any results bac...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
At first, we tried to continue as before: hacking our cars free of the clutching tendrils which grew up every night, bumping along highways until our combined weight pulverized vines into a grimy sludge. One-by-one, buildings blacked out as the weight of growth downed power lines. We left our offices and tried to support the linemen. Then cell towers choked. Signal not found. We drove plows 24/7 to keep the roads clear. We salted the roads. We salted the earth. The blacktop crumbled. Creepers...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I’ve just had an article come out in Journal of Archival Organization. You can get a self-archived Author’s Accepted Manuscript, etc., here. I thought I’d write briefly about what I intended to accomplish in it. I was invited as a (now-former) member of TS-EAS to write along the prompt EAD3 and linked data. This seemed extremely in line with my work and some upcoming plans, so I was excited to do so. However, as I began writing, I realized that a trajectory occurred and that one couldn...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
My article on the development of support for linked data in Encoded Archival Description (including an overview of support which existed before EAD3), “Opportunities for Encoding EAD for Linked Data Extraction and Publication,” published by Taylor & Francis in the Journal of Archival Organization can be viewed at. https://doi.org/10.1080/15332748.2017.1400725 Citation: Ruth Kitchin Tillman (2016) Opportunities for Encoding EAD for Linked Data Extraction and Publication, Journal of Archiva...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
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At Penn State, we’re planning a discovery revamp which will include presenting our catalog with a Blacklight layer over the MARC records and creating a Bento landing page for the front-page search, which currently goes to Summon. We’ve been reviewing other institutions who’ve implemented such approaches, determining their choices, and assessing how they do or don’t meet our own needs. The box causing the most conversation right now has been our Summon search. We don’t plan to serve ...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I want to preface this by saying that I’m not about to die. Unless I am. I’m certainly going to die and have no way of knowing when. This post shouldn’t scare folks any more than facing all our mortality does… and if it scares you, I encourage you to keep reading. This is about making a death plan! As some friends know, I’m a member of the Order of the Good Death (or “Deathling”). It coalesced at an important time in my life, right around when my mother died and it was made up o...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Unlike Eira, who I totally get on this, I’m not quite yet ready to say goodbye to Twitter. It’s been a part of my life since 2007, in some account or another. I’ve actively engaged with libarch Twitter since 2010 (although even in 2007, I was somewhat involved). Now that I think about it, it’s almost a third of my life that I’ve used the platform and… perhaps as importantly, most of my post-college life. I could say a lot about it — I wouldn’t be the crafter, the librarian, th...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
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As a part of my ongoing interest in reading about death customs in modern and historical societies, I spent some time on Goodreads, recently, adding books to my to-read list. One of these books was Joshua Slocum’s Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death (2011). However, when adding it, I saw this little blurb about the author in the sidebar: Joshua Slocum was the first man to sail single-handedly around the world. He was a Nova Scotian born, naturalised American seaman and advent...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Writing a useful technical support ticket can make a huge difference in the kind of interaction you’ll have with the people providing support. As an analogy, think of it as being the person who comes to the reference desk with a well-constructed research question, vs. “I need to write a paper about cancer” or “I want to reread this book, I know it was blue.” And just like our students learn how to construct that question from a generic one about cancer into a fully-fledged research ...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
This is one of those posts which I realize has to be done in several parts because it’s going to be very long and include a lot of photographs. I spent Friday 3/3 and Saturday 3/4 at the Indiana Heritage Quilt Show and related events in Bloomington. It was a wonderful trip and I’m very grateful to the friends who hosted me, since I went down there without anyone. This was my first Quilt Show (I’ve been to auctions, the relief sale, our guild’s quilt show, but nothing like this) and it...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Mennonites don’t vote. That’s what I heard growing up. Not that I was raised Mennonite, mind, but even before I knew enough of the beliefs that I knew I wanted to be one, I knew this one fact about them. Of course, like any “fact” about Mennonites…it depends. But it’s definitely a part of our history and our spiritual heritage. My husband says we’ve lost our way, but he still votes. I’m not sure I agree with him about where we lost the way though. The State First, let me expla...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I’ve talked for a while about possibly writing a brief introduction to linked data aimed at librarians who are still figuring out what it means/library students. What’s held me back has primarily been the fear of saying something imperfect or incomplete.1 But as I did with the Introduction to SQL, I’m going to recommend some books which I think will give you a fuller picture. Reading Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist helped me solidify things that I’d pieced together from other ...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Update, I redid my presentation as an article published in issue 31 of Code4Lib Journal. At the DC Fedora Users Group meeting (October 7-8), I presented on a project I’d done at work on data in our repository. You download my presentation PDF and PowerPoint along with code samples and walkthroughs on the presentation’s GitHub repository. The PowerPoint/PDF contain a textual version of my presentation as speaker notes so you can read along with the slides. In the project, I used the data f...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
When writing my introduction to SQL, I included sample queries that all dealt with the same hypothetical database. The database wasn’t especially fancy or well-planned, it just had a book’s title, location, publisher, and publication year. While you could read it and imagine the query, it didn’t give any hands-on experience, which I’ve found is the best way to learn. Rather than expect you to set up a database, I used a site called SQLFiddle to make a version of this hypothetical data...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Update! This post has been adapted into Spanish with permission by Profesor Jose A. Senso at the University of Granada. After August’s local Code4Lib meetup and SAA meeting, I’ve begun to consider blogging more about technical subjects. The biggest reason I haven’t so far is the fear of not being comprehensive enough or being too wordy. But if you want comprehensive, I suggest getting O’Reilly books and/or Database Design for Mere Mortals.1 And I’ve accepted I’m going to be wordy...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Four years ago I wrote a post on my thoughts one year after donating bone marrow stem cells. For medical information about the procedure and my experience with it, I refer you to that post. At the time of the post, I had not yet met my recipient. I knew that he was still alive but that his health wasn’t yet in a state where they’d introduce us. I signed a form, I don’t remember know if it was right after or a full year after, letting them know I’d be willing to have my info given to t...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I guest-posted on Hack Library School about two basic tips for working with patrons with disabilities. Check out the post to see how I broke down two main tips: “People with disabilities are people first” and “don’t assume…” (In some ways the post feels ridiculous in a I-shouldn’t-have-to-write-this way. Of course PWD are people first. But the problem is that a lot of us are brought up with mixed or wrong messages about persons who happen to have disabilities and it can be a cha...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I’m in my seventh and final semester of library school and I suddenly have a piece of advice for people who are starting library school this semester: Buy a tablet. Ideally, buy a 10-inch tablet. Doesn’t have to be an iPad, there are a few similarly-sized tablets out there, including a Galaxy model. My library school experience has been what I’d roughly estimate at 90% PDFs and 10% books. Possibly fewer books. My brain recalls—3? Maybe 4? That’s out of 12 classes. I thought that hav...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A VERY OLD TUTORIAL. THIS POST WAS WRITTEN IN DECEMBER 2010. It has not been updated except with some images many years back. (Also, how to return an ebook to Overdrive before the lending period is done. This post has been been moved from an old site of mine, where it was written in December of 2010. I’ve updated it with images of OverDrive’s new look. Additionally, if you have a newer model Nook with app capability, check out OverDrive’s Nook app. This tutorial...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
On my Accessibility for Librarians blog, I wrote up basics for librarians taking a relay or TTY call. Because it’s gotten lost in the great Tumblr deaths, I’m repeating it below the flier. I’ve also put together a very basic flyer which can be kept by a phone or given to staff who may find themselves taking a TTY call. View or download the flyer. The text of the flyer is as follows: Just Got a Relay (TTY) Call? Go Ahead! It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3! Not sure what to do when you get a Rela...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
As I’ve been in library school, I’ve become more aware of disability and the need for accessibility. Some of this came when I suffered a severe injury that put me on disability leave for a month. I had to use Dragon Naturally Speaking to write my assignments and papers for school and Siri to tweet for me. The full healing process took a whole year and I found myself coping with inaccessible doors, etc. There was a point where we were unsure if the injury would heal and I had to accept tha...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
After having worked on it for the last 7 months or so, I’ve finally finished creating EADiva, a site which functions as a friendlier version of the EAD tag library. In my introductory post on its blog, I note that this isn’t a replacement for the Library of Congress’s tag library or excellent resources. I used the resources from the Library of Congress to create to create the site, although many examples are my own. Each page links to its comparable Library of Congress page. However, th...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I’m working on my field study right now, arranging and describing a collection which had previously been kept in piles on shelves and in boxes. One of my favorite parts of going through the materials is putting together stories which emerge in the materials. Sometimes, because I’m describing at the item level, I’m able to convey the story within the finding aid itself. For example, from the documents of the library committee: Letter from Professor [redacted] re: library staff member’s...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
In LBSC 605, Intro to Archives, I did a literature review of articles on blog archival. I found so little that dealt with actual blogging that I had to expand it to blogs and dynamic websites. It was a bit disappointing, but preparing that review reminded me of a little blog that I wanted to save. The Blog In the fall of 2004, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. One of her many concerns became the preservation of family stories, mostly the ones she’d told us as kids or the ones wh...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Sometimes, during a class, I want to write about something it brought up that is in no way related to the assignments and probably not relevant in class discussion. What’s a girl who owns her own domain, used to work as a Wordpress back-end consultant, and writes her own Wordpress themes for kicks to do? Oh…right. This. [n.b. the site moved from Wordpress to Hugo in early 2020.] Right now, I’m taking two classes: Intro to Archives (LBSC 605) and the Organization of Information (LBSC 670...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Wednesday, the 27th, is the one year anniversary of losing my mom. It’s been a rough year for our family, but we’ve made it through. I’m no longer crying regularly…so that’s an improvement, right? Mom was only 65 when she died and had been facing terminal cancer for more than 5 years. Yet up until the last 6 months or so, when she started truly dying, she did her best to live as full a life as she could. Between bouts of chemo and downward spirals, she taught, she traveled, she gard...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Last November 16th, I donated hematopoetic stem cells (the stem cells that form bone marrow–adult stem cells) to a man with MDS whose best chance of surviving was a stem cell transplant. I can’t believe it’s been a whole year now. Last I heard from the program, he was still alive. Now that it’s been a year, I have a chance of learning his name, maybe even meeting him! Back in college, the National Marrow Donor Program did a drive on campus. I have to admit, I was not in a healthy fram...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
At the end of August 2022, OCLC released a completely new WorldCat.org website. It looks better on mobile, but library information is now tiered on a pay-to-play basis and links intended to keep people within WorldCat.org are prioritized over links to get the patron where they're going. In this post, I examine and analyze specific areas of concern for academic libraries.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
The MARC 041$a may initially seem like an important field to index for catalog faceting or collection assessment. However, its use for handling optional dubs in DVDs, Blu-rays, and streaming media may confuse patrons if we index it at face value. It may also contribute to incorrect assessments regarding the languages of material held in our collections. This post provides further context and recommendations for assessing language of the media in our catalog.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
The MARC field for Incorrect ISSN has ended up taking on two very different functions. This post explores both functions and their history a little and explains why they've made automated processing of the field completely impossible.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Links are to the publisher or author’s site or, barring that, to bookshop.org. In previous years, I’ve managed to write full descriptions book. 2023 has been its own difficult year, with family illness and the death of our dog, so I’m just listing the things I want to share. In some cases I could write a sentence or two, in others I couldn’t. But if they’re on here, I thought they were worth sharing.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Writing about an art quilt I made with reused textiles and what I hope it reminds us about the clothing that we wear and the people who created it.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
A revision of a post about Mastodon with some introductory information, definitions, and tips for how to jump in and get started. I pull from 5 years of mastodon experience and will create a second post with some information to help you become a more skilled user.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
An overview of the challenges in assigning field weights in a library catalog. This uses the example of a book about Hillbilly Elegy to explain demonstrate where challenges arise.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I’ve previously shared highlights from my 2018 and 2019 reading. By the end of 2020, I was exhausted. So, while I had actually read quite a few books, I just made sure that I had a written log of them for my own reference and called it good. While I’m not necessarily feeling better now, I managed to pull together books from the two years. This isn’t a complete list. I’m sharing some highlights organized thematically.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Reflections on the occasion of a Code4Lib Journal article which deals with non-deidentified patron data. I consider my own time as an editor, why I stepped back, and what might be useful in the future.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
When building data integrations into our library systems, we must consider time as a key attribute of that data. When time is not considered, even the most trusted source becomes, at best, laughable and, at worst, dangerous.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Examples on the EADiva tag library have been changed to remove all examples derived from the Harry Potter Universe.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
A reading list of books on race, white supremacy, war, pacifism, and more.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Reflections on the death of Rachel Held Evans and what her work meant to me.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Books on the anthropocene, race, white supremacy, nuclear war, pacifism, and more.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman