Wiki Stats and What They Mean

On the first of every month I pull the statistics for our intranet at work, which is a wiki system (MediaWiki to be precise). In the months of September and October there were about 4,000 page views for each month. In November, the stats I pulled today are telling me that we had 11,000 page views, more than the past two months combined.

What isn't clear from the raw data is why that might be the case, but I have a few ideas about that:

1. New features - the HR training schedule and sign-ups and a look-up page for our contacts database are now both on the wiki, along with the staff directory (via a frame of the existing non-wiki page). These are high-demand services, so having them on the wiki drives traffic to it.
   
2. Critical mass - the wiki has now been in place for several months, so perhaps people have finally become comfortable enough with it that they turn to it as the default place to go looking for information.
   
3. Front page - the page view stats for the main page of the wiki show the most dramatic change, more than doubling in a single month. I suspect that we have finally gotten people to change their bookmarked links so they're going automatically to the new intranet home page instead of the old. In fact, the total increase in page views can be almost entirely accounted for by the number of additional front page hits beyond the expected increase.

What will be most interesting is to see if these new, higher numbers hold in the future. December is likely to be a fluke month, with everyone off on vacations, so I'll probably have to wait until February 1, when the January statistics are pulled, to confirm whether this is a blip or a trend. I hope it's a trend, because I happen to think that our wiki is a really amazing resource for staff, and I'd love to see people taking advantage of that.

Change Management

My organization is currently in the process of implementing at least five new databases for various things. Each project is at a slightly different stage in the process, but for each of them the constant is change. It's amazing to me that the biggest issues that the staff are having relate not to the software itself, but to the process of doing something new, even if the new way is infinitely better than the old.

A lot of what is happening in these projects is simply managing the change. Getting people to realize that these new tools will make life better. Getting them to accept that we can't keep working in the haphazard and fragmented way that we used to. In the past decade the organization has grown to four times its original size, and what worked for a staff of fifty simply doesn't work for a staff of two hundred. The challenge for knowledge managers is to get people to think beyond their immediate needs and see how their work affects the organization, both current and future.

I heard a great line recently that was something like, "responsibilities as stewards of information," and I think that the real task, more than developing new tools, is to get people to acknowledge those responsibilities and take them seriously.

Giving Thanks Again

I love Thanksgiving, it's one of the best holidays because not only do you get a four-day weekend, but it's all about food and family and friends. There are no expectations to decorate or give gifts or send cards. Just a time to come together for a good meal with the people you love.

So Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

(And I'll be back with 2009 NaNoWriMo updates soon, as well as some more new content.)

Bad Blogger, redux

I'm such a terrible blogger, I really shouldn't let things go this long without posting. National Novel Writing Month is coming up again soon, so I'll be sure to post more in November.

Book buying

In my collection development class last week we had a very interesting discussion of the ways that libraries buy books. The macro-level purchasing that so many libraries do has generally been working well for many years, but the professor pointed out that as library budgets are shrinking it may be necessary to take a more micro-level approach. Of course so many of the digital resources that libraries buy these days are only available in the bundled, all-or-nothing packages that individual item purchasing is a virtual impossibility for these items. This ties back into the conversations we had earlier in the semester about the journal pricing issues that libraries are facing. So much of the control over what a library acquires has been taken out of the hands of the librarians who actually work with patrons and either centralized to a small number of acquisitions people or handed over to publishers who determine how they're willing to sell to libraries.

The thing that I thought was most interesting about the whole discussion was the fact that so few people, even among librarians, really understand acquisitions and the advantages and drawbacks of working this way. I've worked in two libraries now and while I wasn't exactly at a level where I needed to know about this, it's interesting that I had very little idea about this whole process. If librarians don't understand this process it must be hard for them to use the system to really get the best materials for patrons.

Image Credit

Licenses and Learning

This Hoyden About Town post is a great example of why we need better education about copyright and licenses. I'd bet money on the fact that the designer who included both a GPL statement and an all rights reserved copyright statement had no idea if or why those two things are contradictory. Just like the Creative Commons/Flickr/Virgin Mobile case, there are plenty of people who apply these licenses without the least bit of understanding of what it is that they're agreeing to by using them.

Perhaps high school civics classes (Do they still teach those?) ought to start discussing copyright law and licensing issues.

Cataloging is Fun!

When I started library school I heard from several people that cataloging was one of the hardest things to learn. Certainly I can see that it takes a particular way of thinking to be a good cataloger, but so far I'm finding it fairly easy and quite enjoyable. Something about it appeals to both my logical and creative sides simultaneously.

When you've searched through the whole of the LCSH and finally come across just the perfect heading to describe the item you're holding it's a great feeling. It can also be incredibly frustrating, when you know what you want to do but can't seem to find it.

Then We Came to the End

For the book club I'm in I've just finished reading Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. It's his first novel, and a very impressive start.

The whole book, with the exception of one key chapter, is written in the first-person plural about the employees of an advertising agency in Chicago. The combination of "we" + verb and the knowing details about office life that are included very quickly draw the reader into the story. Although the characters in the book are a quirky bunch, they have elements that we've all seen among our co-workers, so it's easy for anyone who has ever worked in an office to see themselves in these people.

The story, told through a series of short vignettes, plays out over the course of a fairly short time, though with occasional flashbacks to the past. It is at times funny and heartbreaking, but by the end I actually cared about what had happened to each of the characters, and fortunately Ferris provides a chapter in which all is (mostly) explained. I highly recommend this book to anyone who works in corporate America, because it may just make your workplace seem a little more interesting. At the very least you'll be glad that you don't work at this place!

The thing formerly known as free time

So this blogging thing is a lot harder than it looks when you're trying to work two jobs and go to graduate school. Apparently some people have this thing called "free time" that I have often heard them speak of but do not seem to recall ever having.

Anyway, crazy life aside I am now actually working in a library for the first time since my undergrad years and so far loving every minute of it. My job description is very open-ended so I get to do a little of everything from wiki pages to journal processing. It's the perfect thing to get me some experience before I have to go look for a real job at the end of the summer.

Turkey Day

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sad Story

A monastery and its entire library burnt to the ground in the California wildfires recently.

This is a really good argument for libraries having a good disaster plan. And although digitization is not the same as preservation, situations like this demonstrate why digital books, with off-site backups of course, can be useful to help keep things available even if their print counterparts are damaged.

Accepted!

The proposal that I submitted to do a presentation on my Creative Commons and libraries research at the department's research symposium in January has been accepted.

Eek! Now I actually have to finish the work and put together enough material to fill half an hour. I usually hate public speaking so I can't imagine what I was thinking when I agreed with the Dean that this would be a good idea. At least there's a decent chance that it'll be like all the other department events that no one attends, so I'll only make a fool of myself in front of a tiny handful of people.

And who knows, maybe I'll be amazing and someone will see my fabulous presentation and offer me a job on the spot. (Hey, a girl can dream right?)

Stephen Abram Presents

My program had a special presentation by Stephen Abram tonight and it was wonderful, really informative and inspiring all at once. For example, did you know that having a library can increase a school's standardized test scores by an average of 25 points?

His talk was overall about the future of libraries and how they ought to be at the forefront of the radical economic change that is coming now. He had lots of really good examples about how librarians have influenced the development of the web (did you know that the Google guys' adviser was a librarian?) and how library skills fit into the new information economy. He also talked about the importance of librarians advocating for themselves and their services, and the ways in which we need to think differently about marketing. One of my favorite lines was about promoting the verbs in the library, not the nouns.

I was happy to note that many of the things he recommended that librarians should do I am in fact already doing - blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

XKCD does EULAs

Brilliant!

OCLC Metadata link roundup

There has been a lot of chatter round the library community about the new OCLC policies for sharing metadata. I don't have much to add to the discussion but just wanted to pull together a couple of good pieces that I've seen on the subject.

After Delay, OCLC Lays Out New Policy for Records Use and Transfer (Library Journal)
OCLC Updating Records Use Guidelines; Confusion Over Effective Date(Library Journal)

Maelstrom Over Metadata (Inside Higher Ed) - particularly good for non-librarians who need a primer on what OCLC does

Terry's Worklog (also see this post on breaking up OCLC)