Weekly Whaaa…?

Although I aspire to write these “Weekly Assemblage” posts every week, in the spirit of a sort of weekly Library Day in the Life Project, that clearly doesn’t always happen. The last few weeks have been busy in various ways, so I’ll just do a quick round-up of a few things I wanted to record from the last week or so.

DERAIL 2016 at Simmons

Foremost, I’m profoundly impressed by the awesome students at Simmons who put on DERAIL 2016, a student-run forum on Diversity, Equity, Race, Accessibility, and Identity in LIS. They’ve also got a lively Twitter account and hashtag. (Spoiler: their gif level is :fire: .)

I’m hoping that the presentations are made available through videos or slides or something before long. But more than anything, I’m hoping that the trend of powerful student-led conferences that address important social justice issues continues.

Updates to my site

Having thought about doing so for a while, I’ve added a recommended readings page, which has sort of an overview of my very favorite readings. I also added expanded pages on critical librarianship and critical theory since it’s hard for me to stop writing once I’ve started!

The plan is to annotate these recommended readings somewhat, to explain why I find the readings compelling and useful.

My recommendations will almost certainly have a Cultural Studies bent, since I’ve always found that tradition of critical theory to be the most pragmatic and intent on making timely interventions.

I’ve added deep anchor links using Bryan Braun’s Anchor.js. I went with the # marker because:

  • (a) that’s what one uses in Markdown to designate headings
  • (b) that’s what shows up in the url when you go to an anchor ID in a page, and
  • (c) I really like the idea of people repeatedly thinking “lumberyard” when reading these posts

In case you want to add something similar on your site, you’d need to download Anchor.js from Braun’s site, then add the javascript to your site depending on however you’re making it. If you’re doing a Jekyll blog like mine, here’s the lines of code I added to _includes/_scripts.html to effectively make the “settings” for Anchor.js:

<script type="text/javascript">
   anchors.options = { visible: 'touch', icon: '#'};
   anchors.add('.article-wrap h1, .article-wrap h2, .article-wrap h3, .article-wrap h4');
</script>  

For the anchors.options settings, icon: '#' makes the interface icon be a #, while visible: 'touch' tells it to have the selected icon show up on mouse-over for desktop/laptop browsers but always be visible for mobile browsers.

The anchors.add settings line tells it to add the icon for heading levels h1 - h4. One could make it only do them for a particular set of heading levels or for all of them.

Leave a comment