Bibliography: Going Public :-)

Yes, this blog is in a totally vanilla state right now, without any fun stuff going on in the sidebars... yet. I'm trying to get things set up so that I can hit the ground running when retirement arrives, and as I write this, my countdown clock says just 26 days. Maybe that is a fun widget I can put in the sidebar... okay, done: countdown clock is in motion. Update: I livened up the sidebars too. :-)

Something NEW is coming!Countdown

I wanted to write up a few notes here about how I'm preparing to make bibliography a public part of my project going forward. That was something that got totally neglected in the hectic pace of the past year when I was trying to write the Tiny Tales books while still working and also taking care of my dad. Things are going to be different this summer and going forward, and I'm really excited to find ways to make this whole project more open and public so that it can be of use to people above and beyond the actual OER books.

The work I am doing is not — I repeat: NOT — going to be traditional scholarly work, but I am investing a lot of time in collecting books and articles: the books are a mix of public domain and other OER online, plus lots of printed books, mostly used with a few new, plus some Kindle books. I've been enormously helped by published bibliographies of African and African American resources by Margaret Coughlan and Harold Sheub (to name just two), and I would like to make my own bibliographical work openly and freely available to others in case it might be useful. I had nothing but good experiences while teaching-in-the-open over the past 20 years, and I am excited to being a whole new kind of experiment for writing-in-the-open now. (Well, 26 days from now, ha ha.)

Bibliography Goals. There is a lot of research and reading that I do which does not end up being reflected in the Tiny Tales books, so my goal is to make sure that in addition to the books-as-OER, I also share the reading and and research in useful ways. Here are some of my thoughts about how that can happen:

* writing blog posts at this blog about especially useful books and articles

* sharing my reading notes (probably with Google Docs; see below)

* sharing my bookshelf titles (probably with Diigo; see below)

* sharing my public domain PDFs (probably with Google Drive)

* publishing bibliographical books (like Elswit's "Story Finder" series; see below)

* republishing public domain content (edited, with notes, etc. etc.)

Bibliography Tools. So, over the past few weeks I tried out some tools that I thought I might want to use, like Zotero and Pakker.io and Hypothes.is. I learned a lot, and I can see really valuable uses for all three of those tools in the future (especially Zotero). For the initial push, though, I'll be relying on some tools I've been using a long time: Blogger, Diigo and Google Drive / Sheets / Docs plus Inoreader for some RSS integration across my blogs and also Diigo. I might also do some publishing with Padlet since it also offers very nice RSS. Using Sheets will also allow me to build some randomizers quickly and easily with RotateContent. If I do manage to come up with some book-length products, I will certainly be using Pressbooks to publish them (yay Pressbooks!).

I've been focusing on the cataloging so far, which works like this:

Google Docs for note-taking. In the process of cataloging my books (or, rather, re-cataloging, expanding from my previous spreadsheet system), I am creating a Google Doc for each resource that contains stories and, very hurriedly, typing out the titles of those stories. The idea is that I can take notes in those documents, and also spin off linked documents for stories that I want to take detailed notes on. I'm using a simple uniqueID system to number the documents, with a numbering system for the stories that I can use as needed. Right now none of the documents have notes, but they are just a tantalizing invitation for me to start reading and taking notes as soon as retirement arrives. My goal is to spend a few hours starting each day just reading and writing... something I have not been able to do for a very long time. Reading. Taking notes. That's how I learn best, and now I have a very inviting system that will let me do that publicly. Here is the public folder.

Google Drive offers good search options for inside the folder too, although I think (?) those search options are available only to me, not to public users who can only browse/view. But for search... see Diigo:

Diigo for tagging/searching. At the same time that I create each Google Doc, I am bookmarking that document in Diigo, as well as pasting in the table of contents. This offers good search options (Diigo has good Boolean searches across both text and tags), and I will be able to use Diigo tags to track all kinds of features across the different items. For now, I'm just got a simple tag I'm calling "omni" that has all the document links with very basic geographical tagging. So, for example: #omni for all the books, or specifically southern Africa. Or even hyenas in southern Africa. Admittedly, that is only stories that actually mention hyena as such in a story title, but it's a good start! Click on the title and it will take you to the Google Doc. And, unlike with Google Docs, you can do your own searches in that public Diigo space. There are some other inventories in there also, but ultimately I hope to merge all those resources under a single tagging system; I've learned a lot from past experiments and I'm feeling really good about my current/new system going forward.

So, as you can see, I'm just at the very beginning of this whole process; I've got around 150 books set up so far (including over 5000 story titles!), and I am really happy with the process; I wanted to get a good process in place so that I will be really ready to go when the REAL fun begins after I finish teaching in May. I've got literally hundreds of books of African stories, both public domain and also my own personal library, and just documenting that collection is going to be such a great adventure!

Elswit's Story Finders. Also, I wanted to give a shout-out here to the remarkable books by Sharon Elswit in her "Story Finder" series. Her Caribbean Story Finder, in particular, has been enormously helpful (I used it for my Caribbean Anansi book), and her Latin American Story Finder is also going to be really useful to me going forward (one of my main interests is the beautiful persistence of African stories in the Americas). I would ultimately like to create some books like her Story Finder but with two big differences: an emphasis on open resources instead of printed books, and publishing the books themselves as free OER. Elswit's books are on the price-y side, and it's often the case that the books she is using are also price-y or sometimes hard to find at any price. I'll write more about that later but I just wanted to alert people to these very useful books, and also to make a kind of public promise that I will try to write some books like that myself going forward. :-)

You can find out more about Elswit's books at her website: SharonElswit.com.

P.S. A nice note from one of the used booksellers I recently bought a book from reminds me that I should also do a shout-out gallery of the great booksellers that I have relied on, like James Romer's Viator Used and Rare Books just down the road from me in Burlington, NC.