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it me (#5) ! ! !

Here’s the last set of photos from ALA Midwinter 2016! Many thanks to our volunteer photographer Jazmin for this set and ALL our volunteers for brilliantly capturing so many different styles.  

1. Pamela / Reference Librarian / Academic Library / FL 2. Maija / Public Librarian / MA  3. Alisia / Library Systems Manager / Academic Library / ME 4. Maura / Library Coordinator / School Library / MA  5. Callan / Web Coordinator / Special Library / MA  6. Dianne / Social Sciences Research & Instruction Librarian / Academic Library / MA 7. Gina / Social Sciences Librarian / Academic Library / MA

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yes.

Bodleian Library wants you to color their collections!

The University of Oxford’s famous Bodleian Library has just released a free coloring book featuring images from their collection. You can download a PDF of the coloring book here.

Source of image

“An opportunity to join in with the current colouring trend and apply your colouring skills to images from our collections. We’ve provided a colouring book to get you started, but feel free to use our online resources to find your own. Don’t forget to share your final product on social media with the hashtag #ColorOurCollections! “

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#lismentalhealth

So... about 30-40% of the time, I don’t really sleep at night.

Or, well, I do sleep, for about two hours and forty-five minutes before waking up in a cold sweat, brain on high alert and practically vibrating inside my skull from the amount of racing thoughts. They come in sloppily concatenated frenetic waves:

did I get back to her about that thing i need to buy coffee i’ve got a doctor’s appointment during that scheduled webinar I didn’t approve those new records I wonder how [insert family member] is doing, haven’t talked in a while is it too much to submit talks for both of those conferences and join all three of those groups oh shit i have an incredible idea for improving the display of [insert web property] i really need to buy a new phone that sucks less i’ve really been meaning to start working on that project at work but i keep getting distracted by all the mundane crap and email, why don’t i just get up and work on it now, i’m awake anyway and i don’t know when this will stop ugh i’m so tired my eyes are killing me why can’t i just sleep was it that post 2pm coffee or am i having a panic attack ughghhgghh i should’ve walked longer today should’ve biked to work to burn some of this out but i didn’t so now shit how am i going to get between boston and pittsfield and then back to boston for band practice and then to cambridge for that show on friday well i could stay overnight and ughhhh shut UPPPP

When this is at its worst, as my mind deliriously rants at me, I weave in and out of a pseudo-spindling state in which the hours quickly wear on and I still feel exhausted, but true sleep just won’t come on. I fall asleep readily enough when I turn off the lights, but I get most of the way through a cycle and then I’m tossed into this full-bore consciousness a little shy of three hours later.

If I’m lucky on these nights, I can fall asleep again within fifteen minutes; more often than not, though, it takes one to two hours. When this latter happens, I usually can grab about an hour or 90 minutes more before I’m thrust back into runaway brain town. (And that leaves me, at this time of year, anyway, with about an hour before dawn to use for at least trying to rest my eyes before returning to work.)

This has been going on since adolescence for me, though I’ve had a lifelong history of being a terrible sleeper. Mom tells me I never napped as a child, never managed to sleep in the car on long trips, never could be counted on to make it through a whole night without getting up and listlessly wandering the house. When I was in high school, I could rarely even get myself to fall asleep much before 2AM. My ride left at 7, so that meant five hours on a good night; basically next to none when I woke up halfway through.

Anti-anxiety meds were the soup du jour for a while, but I went off them in college -- somehow my sleeplessness didn’t bother me as much in those years, or it subsided somewhat. The next time it was bad enough for intervention was before and during my final semester of library school. I had plans to move across the country when I finished my MLIS, to take an instructional technology job in Portland, Oregon. While I eventually did do this out of necessity, I had bucketloads of misgivings, including but not limited to the ones surrounding the relationship I was in at that time and the thought of being so far from family.

I started seeing two therapists, one that specialized in sleeplessness. I even had a sleep study done at Tufts, which determined little more than that I seem to run fine on 6-6.5 hours and that my ideal sleep schedule is 2AM-9AM. (Too bad work doesn’t start at 10.) But I ultimately couldn’t stomach the idea of taking a sleeping pill like Ambien or Lunesta. So... I didn’t. And that meant mindfulness and relaxation exercises. And that’s still what I turn to today. And sometimes that’s enough, but often it’s not - often I feel helpless, like I’m just adrift in a sea of miasmic rapid-fire thoughts.

Now, one master’s degree, one back-and-forth cross-country move, one failed marriage, and three jobs later, I’m fighting this pockmarked sleep thing all over again. There are times when it’s useful, like when I organized and played a show at the Middle East Nightclub during last week’s ALA Midwinter, got home at 3AM, and had to get to BCEC for LITA Town Hall by 9. But mostly it’s just annoying, energy-sucking, and painful - staring at computers all day, I’ve realized in the last decade or so of doing just that, can only be noticeably offset by keeping one’s eyes closed for 6-7 hours at night. It also wreaks havoc with my moods, my ability to communicate, and my overall drive and work ethic. So, in the post-conference haziness of the past week, I’ve been thinking it might be time to seek outside help again.

My job is stressful and overloaded, as are many, too many, jobs in LIS-ville. My colleagues and I try very hard to run a state library agency (in a state where 371 of 375 towns have at least one library, speaking of publics alone) with around a third of the amount of manpower we likely require. Sleeping better might not erase all of the work anxiety -- it definitely won’t give me an intern or double the size of my two-person web development team. But it would help me get my work done, to do it better, and to be more consistently positive and reliable in the process: all essential things in a profession partially defined by its willingness and ability to pick itself up by the bootstraps, stare down its adversaries and doubters, and do more with less.

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Fifty shades of customer service

It’s hard to say one industry or company typifies terrible customer service, in a world where Comcast, Sallie M--um, oops, I mean Navient, and AT&T are all still in business. But I think you can be pretty confident in assuming whatever run-ins you have with medical billing departments are not going to be great. I’ll omit the name of the hospital system that’s ensnared me in billing purgatory for the past eight months because I don’t want them coming after me or something. Suffice to say it’s in eastern Massachusetts, they’ve got locations all over Metrowest, and their acronym is invoked in this ad campaign. This situation has been so characteristic of an utter failure at service design, though; I can’t resist sharing it.

In May, after a long winter of walking around in ill-fitting boots, I went to see a podiatrist about the pain in my right foot. While I was there, an x-ray of the foot and ankle was taken to rule out possible fractures. The x-ray came back “clean,” I was diagnosed with plantar fasciitis, and I went off to buy a new pair of sneakers and some arch-friendly insoles.

About a month later, I got a bill for the x-ray for over $300. I was shocked, unsure of why my insurance wouldn’t cover this when I’d only had the usual co-pays for seeing my PCP and the podiatrist. I looked into it and found that the claim had been denied as the diagnosis listed was “routine foot care,” a very vague term my insurance member’s handbook deemed uncoverable. Long story short, I made about fifty phone calls between late June and November, alternating between billing department, insurance company, and eventually the podiatrist himself.

The billing department kept insisting that my insurance company “wasn’t able to view the whole claim” because people in member services “can only pull up a little bit of it on their screens.” (What?) The insurance company kept telling me that the billing department needed to adjust the diagnosis codes and resubmit the bill. (Seems simple enough.) But the billing department wouldn’t just do this. Instead, they continued making bizarre excuses to me, like saying the hospital would have to pay (something? someone? who??) twice if they were forced to resubmit the bill to my insurance. (As if, even if this were true, I am somehow responsible for or related to the practice in question.) Finally, I thought I’d made some headway about a week before Thanksgiving - the podiatrist told me he’d directly spoken to the billing department directly, asking them to change the diagnosis codes so they could resubmit the bill to my insurance in a way that wouldn’t trigger this “routine foot care” business. I checked with him about a week later to see if anything had developed, but he told me to be patient; sometimes these things can take 45 or 60 days. So, I figured, OK, I’ll be patient - I’ve got better things to do than worry about what’s going on with a months-old medical bill. Then, in a letter dated December 18th (which I only received two days ago, because it was sent via certified mail and I am pretty universally not around my house to sign things between 9-5 on weekdays), I see the following:

Account #: xxxxxxxxxx Date of Service: 5/11/2015 Amount: $1,575.00 Pursuant to [insert appropriate regulation number here], this certified letter is being sent to inform you your account is seriously overdue, and you are going to be handed over to a collections agency if we do not hear from you within 20 days.

To give credit where credit’s due, I suppose, this is a great way to get a visceral reaction out of a person (especially the bottom part of this bill, where this number is writ large in fire engine red). Keep in mind the original amount of this bill was around $300, and also that I’ve been paying for all the other medical services I’ve received through the same hospital system (with yes, the same billing department) throughout the past eight months. It's not as if I'm some delinquent medical dine-and-dasher. There was no itemization on the new bill, just a figure that had somehow increased fivefold.

It was around 5pm by the time I opened this letter, an hour past closing time for the billing department. In the meantime, I called my insurance company to see if they could give me any insight. They had no explanation of the $1,575 charge and let me know that they’d never received an adjusted bill for my x-ray. (Iiiiinnteresting.) I couldn’t talk to the billing department that day, and helpfully they have absolutely no billing-related information or FAQs on their website, so although I’d pretty clearly unearthed the root of the problem here, I couldn’t do anything about it until the following morning.

Bright and early the next day, I got through to the billing department. Cheerfully, the woman I spoke to told me that the $1,575 amount and the threat of a collections agency getting involved was all “just verbiage” and that I should disregard it all. Seriously. She noted that my podiatrist had in fact asked her department to adjust the diagnosis codes in my bill and that they’d more or less just let it slip, but would do it now that I’d called. So, they didn’t do their job, they sent me a farcical threat, and they wasted dozens of hours of my time. Nice work!

At the end of the phone call, I asked when I could expect this to be resolved. “45 to 60 days,” the rep told me. (The magic numbers, apparently.) “But we won’t call you and tell you. What’ll happen is, you may get another bill at the end of that time period. If it’s the same amount, you can just disregard that and call us again. All that means is that no progress has been made.” All that means is, I’ll probably get to spend another set of hours attempting to resolve this, possibly also wasting the time of the doctor and my insurance company in the process. My cup runneth over!

I know there’s any number of systemic reasons why this situation exists, chief among them the overall inadequacy, cost-ineffectiveness, and deliberate inefficiency of the U.S. medical industry. But a service experience this abysmal does not have to continue. This hospital system could: ▹ Put a billing FAQ on their website, if only to placate people who are having panic attacks about ~$1,600 bills at dinnertime. Making customers feel helpless makes them hate you. (I think of the MBTA’s woes during Snowpocalypse last year - how much ill will they could’ve spared themselves if they’d been more communicative and transparent.) Put more knowledge in the world, y'all. ▹ Stop threatening people with imaginary numbers and collections agencies. ▹ Proactively call people who are attempting to resolve billing troubles, or even just briefly email them through the hospital’s robust internal messaging system. ▹ Use some kind of CRM-type system to track customer issues in a knowledge base of sorts, so people don’t have to repeatedly explain their situation and/or hope for a rep who’s knowledgeable enough about similar cases to be able to meaningfully help. ▹ Just be more observant. If you’ve got a customer who’s paid 9 of 10 bills, and has all kinds of notes in her record tacked on that 10th one, it’s a little extreme to threaten her with a paycheck-sized charge and debt collection.

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Kate Lawrence, VP of user research at EBSCO - the massive information services (think subscriptions & aggregation for scholarly databases, articles, indexes, ebooks, and other digital resources) provider - gave a talk at the library UX miniconf I attended today.

It was A+ and I assume the TED version must be forthcoming. Here’s a few noteworthy tidbits before I succumb to the siren song of bed & book.

Middle & high school students tell research ethnographers: Google is their "mother," their "water," their "soulmate."

Google & Wikipedia = "comfort research." As in comfort objects, comfort food.

When thinking about school projects, young (elementary & middle school) students say, "I'm looking for a .edu and a .org, they are more reliable." They avoid “the dot coms.”

Page-parking is the new pogo-sticking: opening a whole bunch of new tabs to come back to later. It’s akin to a "shopping cart mentality" for info seekers.

“It's not about page load anymore. It's about cognitive load. And not putting people in forests with too many trees.”

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Finally read this in its entirety. RIYL legit tech journalism and self-effacement.

Potent quotables ▹ Poor, sad, misbegotten, incredibly effective, massively successful PHP. Reading PHP code is like reading poetry, the poetry you wrote freshman year of college.

▹ Too much of what you know today will be useless in six months. Every hard-fought factoid about the absolute best and most principled way to use the language will be fetid zoo garbage by the end of the year. And some sniveling, bearded man-toddler will be looking slightly to your right with his pale, buzzword-infected eyes and awkwardly mumbling, “Yeah, no, wow, it says you have a lot of Gulp and Angular, but I’m guessing you don’t use Fleejob or Grimmex with the Snurt extensions? (Long sigh.) I’m just not sure if you’re gonna like working here.”

▹ Bookstores exist now in opposition to Amazon, and Amazon’s interpretation of an electronic book is the reference point for the world. For its part, Amazon is not really a bookseller as much as a set of optimization problems around digital and physical distribution.

▹ Programmers argue over whether HTML is “programming” or not because they are paranoid about status and don’t want to allow mere tag-wranglers to claim blessed programmer status.

▹ It takes a certain temperament to page through standards documents, manuals, and documentation and read things like “data fields are transmitted least significant bit first” in the interest of understanding why, when you expected “ü,” you keep getting “�.”

▹ It’s a comedy of ego, made possible by logic gates. I am not smart enough to be rich, but I’m always entertained.

▹ “Everything is edge cases,” he says. “Testing and edge cases.”

Things to check out later http://eloquentjavascript.net/ https://twitter.com/hmason https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ https://python-pillow.github.io/ (fork of the Python Imaging Library [PIL]) OG lady programmers Ada Lovelace Grace Murray Hopper

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Why is a Raven Like a Writing Desk? - Gene Kogan (via)

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(via)

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100%

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Oh wow, feeling so cared about rn

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"For me, for now, not being on Facebook is more inconvenience than life-altering hindrance—at its most annoying, it means I’ve sealed my spinster fate because I can’t make a Tinder account (luckily, I already have a heart of ice and refuse love at every turn)."

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I am officially that person who sits around restyling her tumblr on NYE.