Sarah WernerInterview
Independent librarian, book historian
Adapted from Sarah Werner's interview on Uses This, published 6 February 2018. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
I rely heavily on my crappy old laptop, a Dell Latitude 6430u that I bought I don't even know when -- I think 2013 when I had to take a research trip to England and it was pretty new?
I also rely heavily on my iPhone -- I'm using a 6s Plus at the moment, which was a hand-me-down from my spouse after I dropped mine in the toilet.
Apple Watch Series 3+ 4 others
I recently got one of the new Apple Watches so I could take walks without having to carry my phone with me, since it doesn't fit into my pockets -- I worry about being out of touch if something happens to one of my kids, so this has been freeing.
(Pockets, by the way, are an important hardware issue that drive women nuts.) Rounding out my Apple ecosystem is an old iPad; my son tells me it's an iPad Air 2.
Other odds and ends: I do a lot of pleasure reading on my Kindle Paperwhite -- I think it's the 3rd gen, but it could be the 2nd.
Communication
The website itself is built on WordPress with a whole lot of modifications from the standard themes.
Productivity
Shorter pieces, like talks or manuscript reviews, I still do in Word, even though I know everyone hates it.
It's only just been released, and I can already see it will meet my photography needs the way Zotero meets my reference organization needs.
Notes
Coding & Development
I wrote my book entirely in Scrivener and it made the whole thing possible.
I often feel like I don't know quite what I'm doing, but between the Wordpress Codex and the PHP and CSS tutorials in W3schools, not to mention the assistance of my teenaged programmer son, it's going pretty well.
Media
Once I have specific images and time to download them, I use Tropy to organize them.
Once I've got the highest possible resolution of the images I want downloaded, I use IrfanView to resize and compress them so I can then upload them to my site.
Storage
I keep all of this and everything backed up on SpiderOak, because I am a packrat and a hoarder and if I lose my work it will never get published and I will never get paid.