Blog of Jami Bryan

One Line Bio: Library Manager of the CGPS Stafford Library at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA

Contact:  jbryan at umw.edu

About Me: I have been the Library Manager at UMW’s College of Graduate and Professional Studies since May 2006. I have a BA in Government and Politics from George Mason University, where I had my first job in libraries. I spent several years doing all sorts of interesting jobs, including archaeology, marketing, and corporate collections, before getting my MLIS from Louisiana State University in 2004. After graduation, I started out at UMW as the Reference and Sciences Librarian at Simpson Library, where I was also the webmaster of the UMW Libraries site. I have worked on several interesting projects during my time at UMW, including the Centennial Digital Archive, the DataSpike marketing campaign, and the ShowMe! tutorial project. Each Spring, I teach a one-credit Library and Internet Resources course for undergraduates. And (prepare yourself for a shameless plug!) I authored a book chapter for The Classroom Researcher: Using Applied Research to Meet Student Needs, a book by UMW’s Dr. Suzanne Houff. I also play nicely with the folks at UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies and am very interested in ways the library and librarians can be a part of teaching and learning at UMW.

About this Blog: I had a blog back in the day just to see what the buzz was about, but I lost interest and wasn’t willing to make time for writing. I love other people’s blogs, as my Google Reader is full of their interesting musings. I thought I was happy being just a passive participant in the blogosphere. But when it came time to update my rather tired LIBS101 course for Spring 2008, I worked with Jim Groom, Instructional Technology Guru, on using a blog for the class. I ended up redesigning much of the course and decided to require that my students use a blog to complete course assignments. And I recently realized that if i require them to blog, it only seems fair that I blog too. What I will write about remains to be seen. I imagine it will be about libraries and technology and higher education. But it may digress into political rants and passionate discussions of Project Runaway. Stick around and find out!

About the Apostrophes: When I sat down with Jim to set up the LIBS101 blog, he had me set up my own blog on UMW Blogs first. When asked to name my blog, I came up with the inspired title of “Jami Bryan’s Blog”. Jim said the apostrophe might cause some sort of technical issue (or perhaps he was prodding me for creativity), so the title became “The Blog of Jami Bryan” - my solution to the apostrophe problem. That got me thinking about how much of what I have accomplished at UMW (and anywhere else for that matter) has been done with similar “work-arounds”. And not a bit of it has been accomplished by my lonesome - thanks to wonderful librarians, library staff, faculty and tech folks. So the possessiveness of an apostrophe hasn’t been a part of my experience either. Hence, the “when the only way to make it work is without an apostrophe” line. And you thought it was going to be some MARC record, Dewey Decimal system, hair in a bun, esoteric librarian thing. Hardly.