Over the years, I’ve tried a lot of approaches. Dedicated apps like Out of Milk seemed promising at first—until they inevitably pivot to a subscription model and become just another $5/month bleeding out of your bank account alongside all the other $5/month apps bleeding out of your bank account. Shared notes worked until they didn’t: multiple dated lists (“Shopping List 2023-04-12”) became a graveyard of old groceries, and a single running list got unwieldy fast.

What finally clicked was Apple Reminders. We have a single shared list that my whole family can access. The key insight is that it functions less like a to-do list and more like an inventory: it contains everything we buy regularly, and items stay on the list permanently. When we run out of something, we uncheck it. When we’ve bought it—or decided we don’t need it—we check it off. At any given moment, the unchecked items are exactly what we need to buy.

When I described this to a friend, he thought about it for a second and said, “So you keep a list of what you have, like an inventory, and note the things that you need to buy?”

Yes, exactly! It took me years of friction to land on something so simple.

So he started counting to ten.

I do this myself in almost every meeting I lead. When I ask for questions, I pause and count. Most times, someone speaks up. It feels awkward every single time, and it works almost every single time.

This week, Stephen went past ten and was about to give up. He even messaged me privately: ah well.

The question he’d asked was whether their participation in this program had changed how people thought about AI’s impact on the profession. He’d just demoed a reference agent he built for the Graduate Center—it pulls from LibGuides and the Primo API, and in his tests it outperforms the current chat service. He hasn’t deployed it. He’s still thinking carefully about what it means for an AI agent to be someone’s first interaction with the library.

Then Will started talking. He’s in library school and new to the profession and these AI tools, and he was honest about feeling genuinely unsettled. He could see how well AI handles reference questions so that wasn’t really the issue. What gave him pause was what that efficiency means for the person on the other end. The relationships, the friction, the slow work of getting curious about something—are we moving toward or away from those? “What actually is the point?” he asked. And then, almost in the same breath: it’s also really cool to learn how this works.

The rest of the room had a lot of feelings. Robin talked about technology and humanity in the long view, neither doomer nor booster. Jason reframed it as an information literacy question. Ashley raised the political stakes—what are our obligations as librarians when the tools we’re using are developed by companies making decisions we don’t control? Shamiana said she doesn’t fear AI going away; she worries more about access eventually becoming limited to certain groups.

Nobody rushed to resolve any of it, which felt right.

We’re three weeks into a 16-week program exploring agentic AI and its implications for library work, and I’ve been trying to write something about it before too much time passes and I lose the early impressions.

The cohort builds on something we’ve been doing for a few years through our Alma Extensibility Task Force, a group of CUNY librarians who use Alma’s REST APIs to extend functionality based on systemwide needs. That work has produced small but meaningful things: automations, integrations, configuration improvements that Alma doesn’t natively support. The idea here is to expand that model beyond people who already identify as programmers, and beyond Alma itself.

Thirteen library faculty and staff from nine CUNY campuses are spending the semester building AI-enabled tools to address real workflow challenges. Stephen is leading the cohort, guiding participants through development while keeping a consistent focus on critical evaluation: understanding APIs, interrogating model limitations, assessing risk, and figuring out what’s actually technically feasible versus what’s well-marketed.

The projects reflect the kinds of problems libraries are genuinely grappling with: automating faculty publication tracking for institutional repositories, building accessibility checkers for course content, enhancing discovery systems, streamlining course reserves workflows, developing CUNY-wide tools for data access. People’s technical backgrounds range from complete beginners to experienced developers, which makes the dynamic interesting.

A few of the projects I’ve been wanting to pursue for a while—including externalizing Alma letters into version-controlled infrastructure and standardizing access model descriptions across institution zones—are taking shape within this cohort. These were ideas that had been sitting on a back burner for longer than I’d like to admit. With structured time and tools like Claude Code, they’ve started moving.

My role is mostly scaffolding: structuring the cohort, handling logistics, setting up the shared collaboration space in Microsoft Teams, trying to create conditions where people can experiment without feeling overwhelmed. The Teams space is already more active than I expected: participants troubleshooting installation issues together, sharing resources, asking questions about APIs and workflow automation. Several people are juggling a lot right now, professionally and personally, and they’re still showing up.

We’re only three weeks in, but it’s already interesting to watch.

Then I began to get frequent migraines. I don’t think they were related to the blood donations but what freaked me out was that I couldn’t have taken aspirin within some period of donating and I stopped the recurrence because I thought, Well, I don’t know when I’ll have a migraine! I’d rather cancel the recurring meetings and schedule them when I’m not in the throes of a migraine.

Two problems with this:

1. It immediately fell off my radar when it was no longer on my calendar.
2. Something I realized only today when I was filling out the paperwork for today’s donation: the donation center specifically asks about recent aspirin use. I don’t take aspirin for anything! My usual remedy for migraines is Excedrin, which is caffeine and acetaminophen.

🤦‍♀️

This time around, I’m reading that it’s my plasma that’s in demand but the American Red Cross wouldn’t let me schedule an appointment for that because I’ve never donated with them and they don’t know me from Eve. (I donated via the New York Blood Center before.) So once my blood from today’s draw is tested and typed, I should be able to set up a plasma donation. And if that goes well, I can set up recurring donations again!

Every quarter we would review the Alma and Primo VE updates and then repeat the same conversation six different times—once with each of our three working groups and again with our three advisory committees. We’d speculate about what a feature probably did based on screenshots. We’d guess which workflows it might affect. And most of that context never made it beyond the committee representative.

It wasn’t very efficient, and it wasn’t particularly engaging. More importantly, it wasn’t helping the staff across our 30+ libraries feel ready for change.

So in late 2024, we tried something different.

Instead of discussing the release notes in six separate meetings, we started hosting a single open webinar for all CUNY library staff. We call it Shelf Help, and we schedule it the Thursday before Ex Libris pushes updates to production. The timing matters: people get a chance to understand what’s coming before the changes land.

The format wasn’t the only thing that changed, though. The bigger shift was how we prepared.

Rather than summarizing the release notes, we started testing them.

Before each session, we read through the release notes line by line and try the new features in our Alma and Primo VE sandboxes. We decide which changes are actually relevant to our campuses, build examples and walkthroughs, and then share the recording and documentation afterward so people can revisit it later.

Instead of saying, “Here’s what the notes say,” we can say, “Here’s what this does in our environment, and here’s what to watch for.”

We launched the first session in November 2024. A year and four sessions later, we typically see around 70 registrants with roughly 80% attendance. After that first session, we sent out a short survey: 89% of respondents rated their satisfaction as high, and 100% said they wanted the series to continue.

The comments were encouraging:

“Reading a long list of release notes is overwhelming. The format chosen made the information much more accessible and understandable.”

“I really appreciated seeing updates outside my functional area; they still impact the staff that I supervise.”

“I love Shelf Help! I know it takes a lot for the three of you to prepare. I’m grateful.”

It does take time to prepare each session. But it saves far more time across the system. And just as importantly, it reduces anxiety. No one enjoys logging in one morning to a changed interface and a flood of “What the heck happened?” emails.

What this experience has reminded me is that support doesn’t always mean creating something brand new. Sometimes it means taking something dense and scattered—like release notes—and turning it into something shared, practical, and easier to navigate together.

I put it to the test over the last two days. I was going to Manhattan to work on-site and it was raining on Monday so I was going to have to rely on SEPTA and MTA rather than ride my bike throughout the two cities. I still used my SEPTA Key Card in the morning when I took the L to 30th St Station but I used my watch at the subway at Penn Station and it worked flawlessly. So then I continued to use it every chance I got!

It’s great not having to fiddle with a physical card (even if it works just by tapping) and I loved not having to unlock my device to access the Wallet. I just held my watch over the reader and, voila, the gates unlocked as if by magic!

It supposedly works even when the device is out of battery, which is super handy. A few years ago, my friend only had her iPhone on her and couldn’t pay for her kids’ food at a vegan pop-up event at the KCFC Co-op (R.I.P.) after her phone died so Phil and I spotted her. And while Express Mode only works in a few scenarios (certain transit cards/systems, passes, and keys), maybe one day it can be expanded so situations like that won’t happen again.

It was… a lot. Especially all at once.

I had been the last new hire in the unit and, as I said, I’d already been there for eight years. I spent a lot of time working on onboarding documentation, trying to make sure I’d covered all the bases.

But when my new teammate started, I quickly realized I’d taken for granted the relationships I already had with my colleagues—relationships built over years of in-person work.

This new hire? She was brand new to my team, brand new to the university, and brand new to New York City.

It was a lot for her, too.

On the advice of my life partner—who works in tech and had been working remotely for years, long before the pandemic—I decided to try a daily co-working hour on Zoom. It’s a time when anyone on the team can show up for questions, work chat, brainstorming, or just to work alongside each other.

It’s not quite a meeting but, in the beginning, it sure felt like one. It was awkward and stiff. None of us knew what to do or how to act. Were we supposed to talk? Stay silent? Look busy?

But persistence paid off. Though I stressed that attendance was optional, I vowed to show up every day. Slowly but surely, we figured it out and settled into a rhythm. People opened up. We reviewed support tickets together. We supported each other through losses. We read through release notes. We laughed. Some days we worked in silence for half an hour, and that was fine, too.

This shared space is now how we start every day. It’s when the whole team gets together—sharing progress, swapping tips, troubleshooting problems, and usually making each other laugh. It sets the tone for the rest of the day. Attendance is still optional, but everyone shows up.

For three years, though, this book sat unread on my shelves. Then, two weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to make some changes and fitness was one aspect of my life that always felt out of control. Sure, I biked to work on a regular basis and bragged about how I didn’t need to pay for a gym membership. I was still weak and flabby, though, and I was keenly aware of that. Then, in September, I moved in with my parents and lost my bike commute, putting an end to the only form of regular exercise I had. I began to spend at least two hours a day on a bus—in addition to the 8 hours I sit at my desk—four to five days a week. I also have a weekend gig where I assist at a library reference desk so that’s another 8 hours of sitting and 1-2 hours driving to & from work every week. That left me with one free day a week that I usually spent curled up with a book or Netflix, being too tired to do anything else.

Finally, enough was enough. I couldn’t continue living this sedentary lifestyle anymore so I joined a big box gym. Luckily, my sister is already comfortable in the weight room (with the help of personal trainers and time spent in a boxing gym) so she helped me work out that first day. (We had limited time so we only did squats and calf raises.) Then, later in the week, I took advantage of a LivingSocial coupon offered by a local yoga studio and took my first ever yoga class. I went to a basic yoga session with my sister (who had been to yoga classes at her gym before) and a couple of things happened:

1. I managed to keep up with the class, surprising myself, my sister, and the instructor (and gaining the respect of my classmates).
2. I found my sister’s strength and flexibility awe-inspiring, instilling in me a more profound respect for her while motivating me to be more like her.
3. I cried during savasana (corpse pose), releasing some emotional baggage I’d been carrying around with me since July.

The experience was invigorating and solidified my plans to work out on a regular basis. This is when I pulled out my copy of NROLFW, downloaded & printed the workout logs, pulled out some old workout apparel (that needs to be updated, stat!), and hit the gym one more time with my sister to learn how to properly execute the ten exercises I’ll be doing during the first stage of the NROLFW plan (which lasts 6 weeks out of the plan’s total 6-month regime). I then added each workout to my calendar, ensuring that I would be held accountable for my actions and have no excuse for slacking off.

Everyone, even my sister, thinks I’m insane, though: I’ve scheduled my workouts for 4 in the morning, three times a week. This is so I can catch the same bus to work and be in the office at my regular 7:30 AM start time. (This is so I avoid traffic on my bus commute, something I’d never had to worry about before.) I’m usually home by 5 PM, which gives me plenty of time to make & eat dinner, pack lunch, watch TV or read a magazine/book, spend some time with my cats, and prepare for the next day before heading to bed. On the two “rest” weekdays each week, I plan on taking a spin class at the gym as well as continuing a weekly yoga session at the studio. My energy levels skyrocket after physical activity so I expect to be tired but, really, I’ll be invigorated-tired, not lazy-tired.

This has been my first week following this schedule and I’m loving it so far! I’ve always been one of those people who feels better in the mornings (and succumbs easily to sleep in the evenings) so this is sort of my ideal schedule. The gym is super quiet at 4 AM, allowing me to focus solely on myself and feel less self-conscious of my weak muscles. I already feel stronger, which is a great motivator to keep going.

Onward and upward!

It was an amazing experience. I was surrounded by thousands of like-minded cyclists. (A group of cyclists all making the same turn around a bend is a sight to behold.) I saw so many parts of New York City that I don’t normally get to see. I climbed a ton of hills. I was cheered on by passersby. Simply, I was reminded of what a truly amazing city I live in. It’s a fantastic way to see the city and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Some of my highlights from this year’s ride:

• Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge at 5:30 AM, before all the tourists were awake.
• Getting lost in empty & quiet Prospect Park after I got bad intel about the Brooklyn starting line.
• Climbing up the never-ending hills of Highland Park and Forest Park in Queens.
• Enjoying the serene ride along the East River on bike paths in Ralph Demarco Park and Astoria Park.
• Riding along the Harlem River Greenway (along the former site of the Harlem River Speedway!).
• The spectacular views from the many bridges we crossed.
• Being called a “roadie” by an enraged cyclist on the Hudson River Greenway on my way home. (I passed him and he got angry. Started spouting off about road cyclists and races: “Oh, of COURSE. Fucking roadies. Do you see a race here? Are you in a race? How’s your race going?”)

OK, fine, maybe I was decked out in my fanciest road riding gear. But I had to be safe and comfortable for the long ride that went over many types of terrains with the sun beating down on me! Here’s what all I had on this ride:

• Gear:
  • 2012 Salsa Casseroll bicycle (with stock components)
  • Shimano PD-A530 combination clipless/platform pedals
  • Garmin Forerunner 620 watch (with heart rate monitor)
• Attire:
  • Louis Garneau Multi Lite cycling shoes (with Shimano SH-56 multi-directional cleats)
  • Pearl Izumi Women’s Attack No-Show socks
  • shebeest Century Elite shorts
  • Castelli Gustosa full-zip jersey
  • Pearl Izumi Sun Sleeves (slipped on at a rest stop when the sun came out)
  • Pearl Izumi Sun Knees (ditto)
  • De Soto Skin Cooler Helmet Beanie
  • Pearl Izumi Women’s Select gloves
• Other necessities:
  • Scott Watu helmet
  • thinksport Livestrong SPF 50+ sunscreen
  • Tifosi Tyrant 2.0 photochromic sunglasses
  • Assos chamois creme
  • Topeak Pocket Rocket Master Blaster bike pump
  • Topeak MTX TrunkBag EX

I also brought a bunch of my own food so I wouldn’t have to stand in the long lines, including Clif bars & energy gels, Clif Kit’s Organic Fruit and Seed Bars, Pure Ancient Grains bars, Bobo’s Oat Bars, and fresh fruit (apples & bananas). I burned an estimated 2,300 calories during this ride. My calculations tell me I consumed 1,350 calories during the ride. The green smoothie I had for breakfast adds another 250 calories for a grand total of 1,600 calories that I had to burn during the ride. Needless to say, I was ravenous—on top of being exhausted—by the time I got home around 5:30. And then I was out by 9:30 PM.

Freakin’ awesome day.

Life with Pi: Microcomputing in Academia

Introduction to single-board computers

Allie Verbovetskaya, Web & Mobile Systems Librarian / CUNY

Before we began with the “formal” presentation, I showed a brief video:

Once the audience was thoroughly confused, I explained that the BeetBox is a quite literal “beatbox” that uses beets as percussion instruments. To achieve this, there are touch sensors in the beets that are wired to a Raspberry Pi. To emit the drum sounds, there is an amplifier and a speaker also hooked up to the RPi. There is a Python program that’s running on the RPi and translating the touches into drum samples. The RPi powers this apparatus behind-the-scenes.

But what is a Raspberry Pi? It is a type of microcomputer. So what’s a microcomputer? It’s a single-board computer that’s small, cheap, and open source. It’s about the size of a credit card and varies in price from $25 up to $100. As such, it’s quite an affordable little machine, containing all the parts of a functional computer: microprocessor, RAM, I/O, power supply, and so on.

The most popular microcomputer—at the moment, anyway—is the Raspberry Pi. It’s $25 for the base model and $35 for the “souped up” version (with more RAM and ports). Another one that comes up frequently is the BeagleBone (brought to you by Texas Instruments, the calculator guys) and it’s quite a bit more expensive at $89. And, the one that’s been around the longest, is the Arduino. They have several boards but the Uno board costs $30.

So now that we understand what they are… what are they for? Well, they can be used for hobbies, such as building a retro arcade gaming station or home brewing. Or they can be used to solve specific problems, such as the RFID pet feeder which was created by someone who needed to feed one of his cats a medicated food and, therefore, could not have his two cats eating each other’s food. (What the creator did was program an Arduino to move the lid on the appropriate food dish based on the cat that approaches the feeding station. This is done via RFID chips that have been attached to the cats’ collars. That way, when Sick Cat approaches the feeding area, her food is made available to her. When she walks away, the lid slides back over so no one cat eat. Then, when Healthy Cat gets hungry, the lid covering her food opens so she can eat. And so on.) Another use is for data collection, such as the Botanicalls kit which allows a user to measure a plant’s comfort levels (moisture in the soil, amount of sunlight, etc.) and tweet “status updates” so you can tell when your plant is thirsty or too hot. (It will also respond to changes in its status, so if it’s thirsty and you watered it, it’ll submit a tweet of thanks.)

So you can begin to see how microcomputers can be used for more than basic tinkering. But you may also be thinking: “That’s great but I’m not a programmer!” And that’s OK! You don’t have to be. Because these microcomputers are open source, there are large and dedicated communities surrounding each. There are plenty of tutorials and guides online—as well as complete projects!—that you can use to get started. You can also seek help from many places, including:

• http://www.adafruit.com/
• http://www.makezine.com/
• http://www.themagpi.com/
• http://www.element14.com/
• http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/

But why should you bother to do any of this? Well, there are actually uses beyond recreation. In fact, there is evidence of more and more applications in academia. My colleague Junior discussed uses in the classroom while Robin explained how microcomputers can be used in and for research. Steve discussed the benefits of teaching microcomputing techniques and explain why computational literacy is becoming more important in today’s world. The presentation was then rounded out with demonstrations of projects that each of us had constructed, followed by questions from the audience.

Uses in pedagogy

Junior Tidal, Web Services & Multimedia Librarian / NYCCT

Junior discussed uses of microcomputers in the classroom, including:

• Individual research stations
• Cross-disciplinary projects
• Testing environment for coding projects
• Class/course web server per class/student for ad hoc storage or collaboration
• Paperless archive repository for classes

You can also see Junior’s write-up of our presentation for more information about his section: http://juniortidal.com/2013/12/life-of-pi/.

Uses in research

Robin Davis, Emerging Technologies & Distance Services Librarian / John Jay College

Robin opened with several real-life examples of microcomputers currently being used for research purposes. She then outlined other venues for using single-board computers in and for research:

• Cheap, disposable computing in the lab or studio
• Use inexpensive sensors (e.g., temperature, motion, light, GPS, acceleration, etc.)
• Build prototypes quickly
• Maintain tight control over your machine(s)
• Topic of publication (both scholarly and popular)

For a complete overview of Robin’s contribution to the presentation, see the write-up on her website: http://www.robincamille.com/presentations/microcomputing/.

Computational literacy

Stephen Zweibel, Visiting Lecturer (Librarian) / Hunter College

Steve discussed the importance of computational literacy and how microcomputers can be used to teach this literacy to the next generation of learners. He defined “computational literacy” as the ability to use computers and computational technologies to solve problems, and explained how it supports algorithmic thinking and collaboration.

Demonstrations

• I discussed setting up a personal Dropbox-clone using an ownCloud instance on a Raspberry Pi-powered web server, to be used as a classroom repository or just a safe place to store potentially sensitive materials.
• Junior demonstrated his “auto-citation” project. Using the Open Library API, he created a script that makes it possible to scan an ISBN (or enter it manually) and get a citation (in APA, MLA, and Chicago styles) in return.
• Robin showed a light level logger, wherein she used Python to read data submitted by a 95¢ photocell sensor wired on a breadboard (hooked up to a Raspberry Pi).
• Steve described the concept of a LibraryBox (digital file repository available via its own Wi-Fi signal) and encouraged the audience to connect to his LibraryBox network and download some documents to see his project in action.

Presentation Material

The slides are available online: http://www.robincamille.com/jj/cunyit/.

We also created a handout that was made available at the presentation. You can download it from http://www.robincamille.com/jj/cunyit/handout.pdf.

Colophon

The four co-presenters worked on this presentation collaboratively using git and a shared repository on GitHub: https://github.com/szweibel/CUNY-IT-Presentation. It was the first time any of us has used GitHub in this manner and it proved quite successful.

We used the reveal.js presentation framework for our slides. It’s very easy to use and provides beautiful (and responsive!) slidedecks.