Connections

It has been a few days of opportunity to ponder about connections between people, and making connections with people.

On Thursday, I had spent most of the day (including two hours in the early morning before I actually went to work) fixing things on my LibGuides. Which is...kind of boring...

Here is the summary of what I was doing;

Summary
1. A new federal law requires all government‑funded organizations, including universities, to make online content WCAG 2.1 AA accessible, with BYU aiming for compliance by 14 April.
2. This includes fixing common issues like alt text, color contrast, captions, keyboard navigation, and proper headings for web pages, videos, audio, and documents.
3. LIT (our library computer people) is scanning and making system‑wide updates, but we need help from content owners need to update items like alt text and links—especially in subject guides and Brightspot sites.
4. Going forward, sites and new documents must be accessible and LIT will continue regular assessments to maintain compliance. 

The idea behind all this work is to allow people with disabilities to make better connections with information that is available online. So, it is good work, but boring work.

I have too many LibGuides, so I am actually just removing every picture or graphic that I can, because I do not have time to do all the necessary Alt Text language by April 14, but I do have time to remove things. I can fix them later maybe.

However, after eight hours of doing that on Thursday, I was so done! And it was only like 3:30 or something, but I had started early in the day. 

Luckily for me, our friend Susanne in North Carolina reached out to (connected with) me to ask for help finding a family obituary in hopes of getting some surnames of female cousins who had married. I have access to a boatload of newspapers that are behind a paywall, so I was a good person to ask AND I am also a person who loves searching in newspapers, and pairing that research with the records in Family Search. (I just did a presentation on this with my colleagues at the Music Library Association conference a short while ago, so yuppers, it is something I enjoy doing.) I was sooooo happy to stop removing pictures and saving my work! Thanks, Susanne.

I enjoyed finding and sharing obituaries and news and if there were pictures, adding those to Family Search. And of course sharing everything I found with Susanne. So much fun. I will get back to it, too, because this is a large family so there are lots of people, and also I am related to some of them on my dad's side (8th cousins ish) and others on my mom's side (9th cousins ish) and they are such interesting, talented people, really involved in their music and their church communities, and their professions. Such a treat to make connections with them by reading about them and adding content to their Family Search pages!

Then, in the evening, I attended the opening of an art exhibition called Mimi Chen Ting: Make Movement Visible. 

I had been an early collaborator with the curator, Miri Kim, as she was just thinking about bringing this exhibition to pass. It was my privilege to connect Miri with two of our dance faculty, because Mimi Chen Ting was an artist AND a dancer, and movement was central to her ethos as an artist. As a reward for me just connecting people who could collaborate, I was mentioned (out loud) in a speech at the event (as was my colleague Tim and many others) AND Miri emailed me to be sure I knew that my name was also printed in the art exhibition catalog. 

Here is the cover of the book:

It was very fun to listen to Mimi's family talk about her life and work! She died of cancer a few years ago, and this exhibition in honor of her work was so important to the family! I was happy to feel connected to them because of the small role I played in helping this event to come true. (The dance part of the exhibition is going to happen in the fall, so I look forward to being a part of that, too.)

Friday morning, I was hoping to make connection with an HVAC professional because our basement is not airconditioned; only our upstairs. But we have all those full size west windows in our walkout basement, and I hope to make this summer more pleasant for the people and cats downstairs. The guy was not showing up, so I kept on "working" on Susanne's family while I waited.

I was supposed to connect with Janice and Janet for a lunch date, but I had forgotten to put it on my calendar!! AARGH. And then finally I talked to the HVAC company, and their man was delayed at the job before ours, so I reset an appointment for Monday and was going to meet the two JBs, but I couldn't find one cat. They had all been placed where we wanted them so the HVAC guy could invade their space, but when I went to let them out--well, it turned into a big mess of me making bad decisions! (And I missed connecting with J and J.)

I picked Josie up from work and she resolved the cat issue--she couldn't find Cleo either. Cleo was in a very small squishy space inside a box that was so close to the ceiling that she must have flattened herself considerably to slip inside that box!! It was important to deal with the cats properly because Josie was going to take the train to SLC to the planetarium to watch the Artemis II splashdown.

Josie made her train connection on time, and I hurried (finally) to my office to make a connection with another dance faculty member, Marin, who was bringing Maida Withers to meet me. Maida, from Washington D.C., was hoping to give her online archive of dance materials to BYU. But that is special collections, not me, but I had failed to connect with the representative they had appointed to meet with me. I had been trying to call and email him all week.

We were about twenty minutes into our meeting, when he called me!! Hallelujah!! And he came, and I think that BYU is going to come through for her. I hope so. Maida is a 1958 BYU Alum and had a 58 year career and only recently retired--she is 89. Here is her beautiful website! https://maidadance.com/

Here we all are: Maida's daughter (who is a Disney film producer--flew here from California to make sure things were okay for her mom on this long journey at her advanced age) Kristen, Maida, me, Marin, and Greg from Special Collections. (Tim, my colleague mentioned earlier, took the picture.)

Josie's trip to SLC went fine, and also I made a timely connection with her to pick her up from the train. She was interviewed by KSL and here she is, somewhere in here:

Today I got to connect early with my granddaughter Rachel, who texted me at 7:30 AM. That was a first!! She is usually asleep on a Saturday morning. But I picked her up to do laundry, because at noon, I needed to connet with Janice and Janet, because we were invited to Connie's graveside service! Elizabeth texted us because Connie's sister asked Elizabeth who were Connie's friends who would want to be there. So we went.

We arrived at the cemetery early, and visited and Janet laid flowers on her little son's grave, because it happened to be the same cemetery he is in. There is a little children's section there.

Little Andrew was born before midnight, and was pronounced dead just after midnight in that August of 1996. It was nice to feel the connection between him and his mother, and the pathos of that children's cemetery was very evident. So much love, so much sorrow.

Then we went to Connie's burial place, and connected with her sister Caroline, and with other people from the library who also attended.  Here is Connie's sister speaking:

Soon after Caroline's speech, I asked Janet to unlock her car so I could get my coat, because it was super cold and windy. I was freezing. So I am all bundled up in the picture that Janet wanted to get of the BYU people. 

Here we are: Elizabeth, Brian, me, Janet, Janice. Brian's wife took our picture. It was fun to connect with Brian again--he retired a couple of years ago. He and I collaborated on the Black History Month Concert Series for years. You can see that we are all suffering from trying not to blow away!

All of these many connections enriched my life over the past few days!

Then I came home and was digging dandelions, when my neighbor Ardyth ran over because she had gotten an alert that our neighbor Jane had fallen. There were some tense moments as Ardyth and her granddaughter searched for Jane, but she was not in her house. It turned out she had been in a car accident! She is okay, but her car is totalled. Ardyth learned that the emergency alert works, and that we need to be better at knowing where Jane is so that Ardyth can connect with her better in an emergency!