Gretchen's World

Darwinian Librarian

2011-10-24T11:57:00.000-04:00

Check out my guest post on the SLA Future Ready blog.

A Reader on Reading

2011-10-23T22:38:00.001-04:00

I'm a little over midway through Alberto Manguel's collection of essays called A Reader on Reading, but I wanted to review it now anyways to get some thoughts on paper before a book club discussion of it later this week. Unlike his previous volume, The Library at Night, this book is a collection of items previously published in a variety of other places, so it's not quite as coherent in form. An attempt has been made to tie all the pieces together using Alice in Wonderland as an organizing metaphor, but I don't know that it's particulary successful. That aside, many of the pieces themselves are excellent. I especially appreciate Manguel's ability to be both deeply in love with the act and form of reading, while simultaneously aware of its challenges and defects. I rarely mark up the books I read, but fairly soon into this one I felt the need to pull out a pencil and start annotating and underlining various passages that I wanted to remember or comment upon. To me, that's the mark of a successful author, one who makes you want to engage with their text.

Magic Powers

2011-09-23T10:41:00.002-04:00

Due to various staff changes, I'm now working in the library again, doing traditional library things. I am somewhat irrationally excited by this, because no one else around me seems to think that Interlibrary Loan is as exciting as I do. It's sort of magical, this ability to request a book from literally anywhere in the country and have it show up a few short weeks later. Suddenly people are much happier to hear from me, because I'm calling to say that I have the thing they want (instead of asking them to do work they don't like).

The mere existence and huge scope of the Interlibrary Loan system is something of a testament to the enduring power of the printed word and of physical books. Perhaps some day it will all be replaced by electronic transfers (something that's happening already for journal articles), but for now there are still thousands of boxes and envelopes winging their way around the world, carrying books to their readers.

Google+ First Impressions

2011-06-30T23:55:00.001-04:00

Thanks to my awesome brother, I snagged one of the early invites to access Google+, the new social networking service from the search engine company we all know and (sometimes) love.

Despite the fact that it's feeling a bit like a ghost town over there at the moment, since they're limiting the number of users for now, my first impressions of the service are generally positive. The highlights so far:

A clean interface. Google has always been good at fairly minimalist, clean web design, which I really appreciate.
Easy integration. Since Google+ is connected to my Google account, it will be really easy to add people already in my Gmail contacts list. Also, a new top-of-the-page menu bar now shows up on all my Google pages (Gmail, Reader, iGoogle, etc.) with the Google+ share box and notifications info. Since I spend a lot of time on Google Reader this is great for me. It's also connected to Picasa, so if you already use that site for photo storage it'll be easy to share those pictures.
Privacy control. Every single post lets you easily pick who to share with. No more defaulting to every person you've ever met. You can also decide for each piece of information in your profile who has access to it. Want to share your favorite food with the whole world but keep your job title private? No problem! You also don't have to be a sleuth to find the privacy controls, they show up at the point of editing your information.
Circles. These are a little like Facebook's lists of friends, but they're so much easier to manage, with an easy drag-and-drop interface. They let you group people so you can easily share with that particular group. Unlike Facebook, which only lets you exclude lists of people, Google+ lets you decide which circles to include when you share something.

In general, the major difference between Google+ and Facebook is that Google has listened to all the complaints about Facebook's ridiculous privacy settings (and learned, no doubt, from their own experience with Google Buzz) and has given people the ability to easily share what they want, with exactly who they want. Is it ultimately not Facebook that's just like Facebook? For now, probably, and that's okay, particularly if it forces Facebook to quit doing some of the stupid things they do, but I can't wait to see what Google can do with this new toy.

Edited to Add: TechCrunch has a good review that sums up my experience pretty well.

Silence in the Library

2011-06-16T22:48:00.000-04:00

Because all of our library staff people were out for various reasons today I covered the library for them. In the eight hours I sat there, I had an actual, library-relevant conversation with exactly one person who came in to look for a couple of books. I don't know if this is a typical day in the library, since I haven't worked there since I was an intern two years ago, but it was somewhat disheartening. In our new building, the cafe space has become the central staff gathering place, where people go to eat lunch, do some work away from their desks, or just have informal meetings. This space is bright and airy, with lots of tables, a nice view, and a few plants. The library, by contrast, is dark and feels a bit claustrophobic, and isn't a particularly welcoming place. It's so rare these days to even have a physical library that it seems like such a waste that it's not being very well used. I fear that this may lead to a downward spiral of library gets less appealing space > library gets used less > argument is made to move library to even less appealing space > lather, rinse, repeat.

(Bonus points to anyone who recognizes the source for this post title.)

Let's Eat!

2011-06-15T16:47:00.000-04:00

The National Archives is opening a new exhibit that looks like it will be really interesting:

What's Cooking Uncle Sam?
Food. We love it, fear it, and obsess about it. We demand that our Government ensure that it is safe, cheap, and abundant. In response, Government has been a factor in the production, regulation, research, innovation, and economics of our food supply. It has also attempted, with varying success, to change the eating habits of Americans. From the farm to the dinner table, explore the records of the National Archives that trace the Government’s effect on what Americans eat.

I don't get over to the Archives very often, but I've really liked the special exhibits that I've seen there, and of course I love food, so I'm definitely planning to check this out. Also, if you're not already following it, David Ferriero (the Archivist of the United States) has a great blog.

SLA Annual 2011

2011-06-15T16:17:00.000-04:00

On Monday I went to this year's SLA Annual Conference (my first time at SLA) in Philadelphia. Having gone to ALA several times, and to other library conferences, I had a pretty good idea what to expect, but it was still exciting to attend.

SLA has a different feel as a conference than some of the other events I've been to - more slick, corporate polish, fewer children's books - but not in a bad way, just as a reflection of the types of librarians who attend and the places they work. I went to several excellent sessions (for which I'll try to write up posts later), and got to talk to lots of librarians that I know but don't see regularly.

Most of all, I appreciated the conference for allowing me to get out of the office and away from my desk. The last several weeks I've spent almost every minute of every work day on a very detail-oriented micro-level project and the chance to think about big-picture things was a welcome break.

Stuff

2011-03-10T15:30:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow is moving day for my organization. This means that we have all spent at least part of this week packing up the contents of our desks and offices in order to be ready for the big move. The office is full of plastic crates stacked four or five high with all our stuff in them. What is also taking up room are bins - garbage bins, recycling bins, shredding bins - the quantity of stuff that has been discarded in the last week alone (not to mention the dozens of bins that were filled in February and last August during pre-move clean-out days) is somewhat astonishing. If I had to guess I'd say a third of all the stuff in everyone's office is being disposed of rather than moved.

Besides thinking about the obvious environmental implications of all this waste, it also makes me wonder about the psychological implications of it all. If we have so much unnecessary, unwanted stuff in our personal spaces, how does that affect our ability to get our jobs done? My job involves spending a lot of time getting people to clean up their digital clutter, by putting things in databases or making a single version of a document available on our intranet, in the hope that it will make their jobs easier. But too often I think we forget that our physical environment can have just as much impact on our productivity as our virtual one, and frequently the only time we bother to clean things out is when we're leaving a job and it's too late to do us any good.

Book Club!

2011-03-07T08:10:00.003-05:00

The DC/SLA non-fiction book club is meeting on Tuesday, April 26 to discuss Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age by William Powers

Location and RSVP details are available on the DC/SLA chapter website. It's usually a great discussion so I encourage people to come and check it out.

Recommended Fun Stuff

2011-03-07T08:00:00.000-05:00

My friend Emily and her husband have started a new creative writing blog/journal/project thing - Dr. Hurley's Snake-Oil Cure. Knowing them both, it promises to be very interesting, so you should all check it out.

Eventually, they plan to include:

Fiction: short or long, serious, silly, or poetry
Non-fiction: articles, reviews, history, opinion, aphorisms, etc.
Art: drawings, watercolors, photos, comics, etc.
Multimedia: if you have audio and video content, we're happy to post it online, and link to it in print
Dr. Hurley specials: Tonics (i.e. drinks or faux-medicinal recipes - see Dr. H's No. 1 as an example)
Biographical information on the mysterious Dr. Hurley (first-person accounts, portraits of the doctor, historical information, correspondence to or from the Dr. - see the first installment of his Biography on the blog here.)

Diverse Universe

2011-03-06T22:26:00.000-05:00

I recently wrote a guest post for the DC/SLA chapter's blog. They've started a new series called Diverse Universe, about the variety of jobs that members of the chapter have - my guest post is up now, so go check it out.

Books, of the E- and other varieties

2011-03-05T14:16:00.000-05:00

One of the things that many commentaries about the new e-book readers mentions is that they will be the death of print books. However, in one hour this afternoon I performed the following actions: downloaded a handful of e-books to my Kindle (one pay, several public domain for free), pre-ordered one hardback book and bought one hardback and one paperback from Amazon, and put a hold on one book via my local library system.

If other e-book reader owners are having similar experiences to mine, then I think the future of the physical book is not in any immediate danger. I won't argue that the business model of publishing won't change, as fewer copies of those hardback books may be sold, but I suspect that it might end up looking more like the recording industry, where die-hard fans of a band buy CD's online or at shows (because no one can autograph an .mp3) while lots and lots of other buy the digital downloads.

Kindling

2010-12-30T12:12:00.000-05:00

I got a Kindle for Christmas this year. I've only had the thing for a week, and I'm already convinced that it's one of the best things ever. I probably wouldn't have ever gotten around to buying one for myself (I tend to be really indecisive about buying new technology because I'm always afraid that as soon as I do the next generation will be released), but now that I've got it I love it.

Probably the fact that I do a lot of reading on the subway makes me love the thing the most because even with the case it's small and lightweight - about the size of a thin trade paperback, it's easy to turn the page with one hand (even with gloves on), and it will lay flat on a table without being held open so it's easy to read while you eat in a restaurant or coffee shop. No longer do I have to only read paperbacks on the train because hardback books take up too much room in the bag. I also don't have to worry about being out and not having anything to read because I've finished my book.

There's a fair amount of free content if you want to read older classics, but I do suspect that I will end up spending more on books now, in much the same way that I started spending more on music when I could buy albums on iTunes with one click and didn't have to go to the store to get a physical CD. The Kindle seems like the perfect solution for reading books that I don't mind paying for but don't value enough to allot them space on my overcrowded bookshelves.

I still have reservations about the intellectual property issues involved in the Kindle, and the level of control that Amazon has over the content, and I'm very annoyed that the download-able e-books offered by my public library work on every device in the world except the Kindle. I also think that for certain favorite authors whose books I've collected in print I will continue to buy physical copies. Despite these things, I now consider myself an enthusiastic fan of the e-book reader.

Bad Timing

2010-09-29T12:15:00.000-04:00

It's unfortunate that the times when I have the most interesting things to talk about are also the times when I'm far too busy to find the time to write about them.

We're hurtling full speed ahead towards our big move in the spring, and many projects are rushing to get completed before then. Document scanning is finally getting underway, well after the planned summer start date. This wouldn't be such an issue if it weren't for the fact that the two departments we're starting with both have major deadlines at the end of this week which kick off their busy seasons. They had staff members sitting around practically begging for work for weeks, and now they're having to cut some of the metadata entry for the scanned documents because they don't have the staff time for it. In some ways, it's actually a good thing, because it means that they have to be more realistic about what can be achieved, but it's unfortunate that the delay in contracting with the scanning company means that they can't be as thorough as they might otherwise have been. We've been working closely with them to make sure that at least the most important information is captured, and everything will be full-text searchable, but hopefully we won't be regretting the shortcuts later down the road.

Digital Nomads

2010-09-04T11:13:00.001-04:00

"Laptops are not mobile. They are nomadic." -Nicholas Negroponte

I spotted the above quotation in a Wired magazine article about the tablet as the future of computing. I don't have a ton of commentary on it, because it largely speaks for itself, I just wanted to share it as something to think about.

Perhaps as proof of the concept, I read the article and am writing this post on an Amtrak train, where I wouldn't dream of trying to balance a laptop on the plastic tray tables, but I can easily envision using an iPad or something similar.

Bibliometrics

2010-08-31T15:09:00.000-04:00

I just spent most of the day at a Scopus user event put on by Elsevier, the company that owns the abstracting and indexing database. The major focus of the event was some tools that Scopus makes available for measuring the impact of authors and jounals through citations and impact factors. Bibliometrics is a very delicate science, in the sense that it's very easy to take the numbers that you get from these tools and assign more significance to them than they actually hold. In a culture of accountability it's easy to compare numbers, and much harder to compare qualitative measures, but there's always a need to be cautious that you fully understand just what those numbers represent.

We've seen some of this in the initial user group of our own citations data collection. People are very reluctant to have a number associated with their work, for fear that the number will become a way of judging their performance. However, one of the major outcomes of the event, for me anyways, was a feeling that we're on the right track with our database. Not only are we doing similar work to what several other academic and government organizations are doing, we're working on a much smaller scale than many other places, which means we can curate our collection of citations in a way that's not possible for them. I will never be comfortable saying that we've captured every single citation of our work, but do I think we have good enough data to draw some conclusions about the kind of work that we're doing that's getting the widest dissemination, and presumably having the most impact (an assumption that underlies all bibliometric tools), which is what we set out to do.

A Super Fictional Librarian

2010-08-27T11:52:00.000-04:00

Check out this great piece on one of the Bitch Media blogs about Barbara Gordon (a.k.a. Batgirl) and how her writers have made being a librarian into its own kind of super power.

(And if you're not already familiar with Bitch, check out the rest of their site as well, it's a great magazine!)

The Loop

2010-08-18T16:18:00.000-04:00

One of the projects that has been assigned to the knowledge management staff at my organization is maintaining a taxonomy of issue areas that we work on so that we are consistent in using the same terms across the various databases and technologies that we have in place. The only problem with this is that there is a distinct lack of understanding among most of the rest of the staff as to what this means, and why it's important that these lists not be changed arbitrarily. Today we discovered, entirely by accident, that one of the items on our subject list has been changed by agreement among some very senior staff and no one bothered to let us know. We ended up looking foolish because the list that we've made available is out of date.

This incident is yet another in my growing collection of evidence that some people have a really difficult time thinking institutionally about what they do. It's absolutely impossible to maintain consistent subject lists across systems when the department responsible for them is left completely out of the loop on these types of things. Many of the senior staff here have been around since the days when there were only 50 employees and everyone could pretty much do their own thing. We have four times that many people now, and the old ways just don't work any longer, but getting everyone to recognize that is an ongoing challenge.

Summer Doldrums

2010-08-11T11:28:00.000-04:00

We are in the August doldrums at work right now, with large numbers of staff out on vacation. It means that many projects are on hold until the people we need to work with are back in the office. However, this is not entirely a bad thing as the spring and early summer were quite hectic and we didn't have a lot of time for long-term planning as we were simply dealing with urgent needs.

Since my organization is moving to a new building in the spring, much of the current planning revolves around the move - preparing staff for the change, making sure technology systems are working correctly before we move, cleaning out offices to rid them of extra paper before the move. As we gear up for the fall, we're also gearing up for the move, so things are going to be very busy for the next six months. That makes this quiet summer time all the more important, as it's the last chance for reflection and planning we're going to get before the craziness sets in.

Book Club!

2010-07-15T13:01:00.000-04:00

The DC/SLA non-fiction book club is meeting on Wednesday, July 28 to discuss This Book is Overdue! How and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson.

Location and RSVP details are available on the DC/SLA chapter website and in the latest issue of Chapter Notes. It's usually a great discussion so I encourage people to come and check it out.

A Helping Hand

2010-07-15T11:24:00.000-04:00

I want to present the following challenge: you have a group of people who have to learn a new technology. Despite going through training, some of these people are having difficulties and are complaining loudly about the system. You decide that it would be helpful to offer sessions at which they can get their questions answered so that they'll know how to use the system. Seems great, right? It would be, but no one shows up. They complain about not being able to use the system but won't participate in the opportunities offered to solve the problem.

I have a theory, totally unfounded on anything but my own observation, that the reason people aren't attending our follow-up training sessions is that they don't really want to learn the new system because then they'd have no excuse not to use it. Right now, they can claim ignorance as a reason for using shortcuts to get around having to do their work with the technology the way we want them to. Perhaps this ought to be a corollary to Mooer's Law - that training opportunities will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a user to know how to use something than for him or her not to know.

Of course knowing that doesn't solve the immediate problem of how we provide training to people who don't seem to want it.

Swiss Army Software

2010-07-12T23:13:00.002-04:00

Originally uploaded by herzogbr

Listening to a co-worker talk in a meeting today, I realized that we've been spending a lot of time trying to convince people that our new document management system is good and useful and not the end of civilization as we know it, but that's not enough. We also have to do a better job of managing expectations from the other direction, making it clear that the system isn't a magic bullet. It's not, by itself, going to solve every information gathering problem we have in our organization.

I think some people have this expectation that new technology is going to solve all their problems - if they just find the right system, the right software, the one key to fit all the locks. Unfortunately, that's not how it works. Technology, like anything else, is just a tool, and generally tools are only designed to do a limited range of tasks. There is no Swiss Army Knife of software, only hammers and screwdrivers and wrenches. We need all of these things, because none of them will do everything for us. We can't expect to pound a nail with sandpaper just like we can't use Outlook to create a spreadsheet.

In this particular situation the conundrum yet to be solved is that we want to talk this particular user down from his overblown expectations, while still promoting the value of the system to other, still skeptical, staff.

That's (Not) Entertainment

2010-06-28T22:16:00.002-04:00

Cory Doctorow
waiting to speak

As a cap to my days of the ALA conference thinking about the big picture issues of librarianship, I went to an event tonight (actually not sponsored by ALA) featuring Cory Doctorow talking about copyright. The general point of his talk was that engaging copyright issues solely in terms of the entertainment and arts industries, both creators and consumers, is too limiting a framework. Instead, if we're going to get people to care about these issues we need to start talking about the bigger implications of the policies that the corporations are pushing. He summed up his talk tonight with the phrase, "Stop talking about cultural freedom and start talking about freedom."

In particular, he talked about the Three Strikes Rule (of the sort in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) in which three allegations of copyright violations would require an internet service provider to cut off an IP address from accessing the internet. The implications could be disastrous, as more and more of our lives are conducted online, someone who is blocked from accessing the internet (possibly through no fault of their own, since IP addresses rarely belong to a single user), would be unable to exercise rights of free speech, participate fully in political discourse, function economically, and so on. As an example, Doctorow cited a study which looked at similar low-income families and found that those with internet access had far better education and health outcomes for their kids than those without. In response to an audience question he also talked about how network freedom is key to being able to campaign on any other issue, the environment, poverty, etc. because the only way those campaigns are able to function is through the connections made via the network. In his view, he explained, that makes the work he's doing the most fundamental advocacy.

Serendipity

2010-06-27T23:24:00.001-04:00

One of the things about conferences that you can never plan for is the serendipitous moments that are often far more valuable than the planned sessions on your schedule. Today I walked out of the Will Shortz keynote speech planning to kill time for awhile and noticed a sign for the Learning Round Table's Training Showcase. I don't know if this event was on the schedule or not, but if it was I missed it. However, as someone who does a lot of staff training, particularly lately, the title caught my eye so I wandered over, planning to just do a quick walk around the tables and then go on my way.

Instead of my drive-by browsing, I got what was definitely the most useful thing I did all day. I talked to several of the people staffing the tables (a mix of publishers, other librarians, and consultant types) and got a great example of a program that I might try a version of at work, some information about a possible professional development opportunity for myself, and an interesting chat with a publisher setting some books I might recommend to my boss that we buy. Then to top it all off, I won a door prize as well. I'm even thinking of joining the Learning Round Table as a result of the event.

This was also delightful proof that sometimes it pays to be lazy, because my original plan was scrapped mostly because it required a walk to another building, while this event was right where I happened to be anyway. If I had stuck to my pre-set schedule I would never have found this hidden gem of an offering, and would have considered it a mostly wasted day.

Conference update

2010-06-26T14:05:00.002-04:00

ALA day 1: one good session about high turnover training, one okay screencasting session, one LPSS session that I might skip out on early because I'm bored and the first speaker was kind of obnoxious.

ALA Kickoff

2010-06-25T23:23:00.000-04:00

I went to visit the ALA Annual Conference exhibit hall during the opening reception this evening and was reminded again of just how much of this conference is not directed at people like me. Two city blocks worth of exhibitors, and as far as I could tell not a single one of them selling anything that I need or could possibly use for my job.

Other than a few buttons and a National Book Festival poster to add to my collection of them (up to half a dozen now), I actually didn't pick up any swag this year. I just did a major cleaning out of closets this spring and gave away or tossed a bunch of old conference junk, so I'm trying to avoid acquiring more of it. I probably could have grabbed a few books, but I already have a pile of unread stuff, and no room on my bookshelves, so I left them for others to take.

Although I know that the exhibits are a highlight of the conference for some people, this year I just wasn't feeling that enthusiastic about them. Perhaps it was the result of going at the end of the day after a long week, or maybe free pens have just lost their appeal. Whatever the reason, now that I've done my walk through of the hall I can focus instead on attending sessions for the next three days.

I knew those crayons would come in handy some day...

2010-06-23T20:00:00.001-04:00

I have a confession to make - I hoard craft supplies. I don't even spend all that much time crafting these days, though I always intend to get back to it, but I still can't get rid of anything that might possibly ever be useful in some sort of craft project. This includes several boxes of Crayola markers, colored pencils, and crayons.

That's why I love this crayon tinting embroidery tutorial. Not only are the results absolutely gorgeous, but it's an excuse to pull out the crayons and put them to work in a very grown-up way. Also, I have pleasant memories of doing melty crayon art in kindergarten. (Looking back, I can't believe they let us play anywhere near hot surfaces, I imagine they put a stop to that at some point.)

Mobility

2010-06-23T11:29:00.000-04:00

I have finally joined the modern technology world and acquired a smart phone. I had resisted for a long time because I just couldn't seem to justify paying for a new cell phone when I had one that worked just fine, but my old phone broke and as long as I had to get a new one anyway I thought it was time for an upgrade. I still couldn't quite justify shelling out for the new iPhone, so instead I ended up with a fabulous purple Blackberry Curve. That also meant that I got to keep my CREDO Mobile account - a huge shout out to them for fantastic customer service and for being a non-evil telecom company.

It's only been a couple of weeks and already I can't imagine how I lived without this thing. Up until now I had been a little skeptical of how much use I would actually get out of the non-phone features, but if anything I use those far more than the phone itself. Having used it for a little while, I can absolutely see why this is the way that technology is moving in the future. Libraries that don't get on board with providing information in formats that work with mobile devices are very quickly going to be libraries that get left behind.

Another library conference

2010-06-16T20:10:00.000-04:00

ALA's annual meeting is next week, and I'll be attending. The last time I went it was the summer right before I started library school and I found the whole thing a bit overwhelming. This time I have a much more focused sense of what I find interesting and/or useful so it was much easier to narrow down the list of possible sessions to just the ones I want to attend.

Interestingly, now that I'm working in a special library and doing knowledge management, I'm finding that not many of the sessions are really relevant for the kind of work that I do. I've never been to an SLA conference, and I wonder if they would have more sessions that would be more directly relevant?

Despite that, there are approximately eleventy-billion sessions over the course of the conference so I did manage to find a few good ones. I'm particularly looking forward to:

The (Screen) Casting Couch: Tips and Tricks to Effectively Use Screencasting Tools for Library Instruction
Blasphemy! When Religious Values Clash with Intellectual Freedom Values
Will Shortz

And of course, one of the real highlights of ALA is the exhibit hall and the load of free books and posters that one can acquire there.

Computers in Libraries Wrapup

2010-04-15T16:26:00.009-04:00

Note: this post was written back in April but never published at the time. I'm back dating it to keep it in order with the other CiL posts.

Computers in Libraries in now over for me so I wanted to get a couple of thoughts down before I walk away and forget.

First, I really like going to library conferences. It's nice to get out of the day-to-day work world and think about some of the bigger picture issues.

Second, the new Archivist of the U.S. seems like a very interesting person. I didn't take online notes during his keynote/interview, but he was very engaging and funny. He also made me feel much better about how my own government agency is doing on records management.

Third, there's lots of technology out there, much of it for free, and it would be very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you have to try every new thing. However, if there's one thing that I've heard repeatedly these few days it's that free tech is free like kittens not free like beer. It takes planning and preparation to implement technology, even the free stuff (perhaps even more so the free stuff as there's frequently no tech support from the vendor). Don't jump on a technology bandwagon before you figure out if it's the right bandwagon for your library to be on.

All in all, it was a good conference, and I got some things that I think will be useful, as well as some things to think about for the future.

Best Free Web Services & Software for Broke Libraries

2010-04-14T16:24:00.000-04:00

Track C, Cool Tools
Sarah Houghton-Jan, librarianinblack.net

eBooks: Project Gutenberg, AudioBooksForFree, Escholarship, Google Books, Oxford Text Archive

Databases: articlesbase.com, findarticles.com, free language learning sites, free practice test sites, free sites in all disciplines, magazine and newspaper websites

Reference tools: ask a librarian and contact us tools should be a single thing, patrons don't make the distinction and neither should we, put chat windows and help links where customers are angry

Social networking: checkusernames.com to find out what's available, Open ID to claim log-in names; update through a single tool and push to several others; manage multiple account using tools like Seesmic or HootSuite; Metrics can be found through several services - views/follows/etc.

Public and staff computer software: if you can convince IT to not be afraid of open source there are lots of free options

Team meeting tools: for online vs. face-to-face meetings
- Sightspeed or Tokbox for webcasts
- Meeting Space: Today's Meet, DimDim, Wiggio

Tech support tools: Jing for screencasts on the fly, remote support/computer sharing via LogMeIn/Yuuguu/TightVNC

Audio and Video tools: audio recording/editing via Audacity, video editing via Avidemux/Lumiera/Kino, video hosting via YouTube/blip.tv/Vimeo, audio hosting via OurMedia/PodBean/LibSyn (very cheap but not free)

eLearning tools: screencast-o-matic, Jing, Wink, Camstudio, Screencast.com all do screen casting personal interface preference the only difference
- Image Mark-up via DabbleBoard
- Ustream.tv for webcasts

Website management: Flickr slideshow w/o code via Pictobrowser; TagCrowd or Wordle for tag clouds; website hosting from WordPress, Bravenet, Bryght.com, Weebly, SquareSpace (not free but very cheap, will give you template to modify via wysiwyg)

Online book clubs: Google groups or LibraryThing

Blogs for book suggestions: use tags in Blogger/WordPress to create links to types of suggestions

Event calendars: Eventful, Upcoming.org, Craigslist (because they don't come to us we need to go to them)

Online book displays: photos + Flickr notes function for visual bookshelves with links to catalog

Misc. favorites: Book City Jackets, card.ly

Try not to reinvent the wheel every time, there are lots of things out there. Also, don't forget the Google world with all its options.

Cloud Computing & Digital Video

2010-04-14T15:19:00.000-04:00

Track C, Cool Tools
Jason Clark @jaclark, http://www.lib.montana.edu/~jason/files.php
This session: #cloudvid on Twitter

What is the Cloud?
It's internet-based computing, move away from client-server model. Can be storage, functionality, infrastructure. Some options include: Amazon S3, OCLC Digital Archive for storage or Web-scale management services, Google App Engine, Datastores of popular sites like Flickr/YouTube/blip.tv, Google Docs and Fusion Tables.

The problem to be addressed: quickly create scalable digital video platform with bells and whistles
Solution: use online vido services for ingest, datasore, metadata, file conversion, distribuion, and vido player: result is TerraPod - http://www.terrapodcast.org

blip.tv background for uploads from anywhere, generates a whole host of formats, librarians don't have to do conversions by hand
using built-in player means you don't have to generate your own flash player
can queue things for inclusion, view metadata from user when they upload

Cloud = Infrastructure
Cloud = Platform

Access to programming languages
Deployment tools
Application stacks
Blank slate for data

Cloud = Web Scale

Network benefit
Enhanced distribution
Social architectures build in

Advantages: small shop, many contributors with a familiar user interface, optimized search index, metadata entry and harvest, social feature, media player, multiple file outputs, multiple distribution formats (i.e. Blip will give you YouTube or iTunes distribution)
Disadvantages: data is in the cloud so there's a loss of control, terms of service on these sites may affect what you can do (esp. in terms of selling services/content), occasionally a lag in the API for changes, support varies by site

Best Practices

let the cloud architecture do the heavy lifting, esp. if you have a small staff
archive locally if you must
reuse metadata that cloud sites create
outsource file conversion, it's tedious and time consuming

Apps.gov (vetted resources from the government)
Google Data Liberation Front - strategic initiative to allow you to get data back out of its projects

Google Gambol

2010-04-14T14:31:00.000-04:00

Greg Notess

Quick tips on Google Search

Vanishing home page links
Personalize, customized searches without log-in based on geolocation and search history based on IP address, can be disabled (maybe?)
Stars replace SearchWiki, only you will see your stars
Google can't count - take any number of results with a grain of salt, it's an estimate give or take 50%
Search suggest changes are more prominent, rough estimate numbers gone, navigational suggestions/images/answers appear in the dropdown, broadened to images/video/shopping databases
Search punctuation to reduce fuzzy processing (Google trying to out think you), +exact term "exact phrase", stemming of grammatical variants, synonymization, ~forces synonym searching to broaden, use|instead of or, BUT * doesn't work as truncation (never has!) but it can work as word wildcard in a phrase i.e. "let them * cake"
Prefixes: site: for domains or top-level domains (soon will have non-latin characters as top-level domain name, not sure how this will work for that); inurl: for locations beyond the domain; filetype: for any extension, including office 2007; link: pages that link to a designated page but it's not complete (Yahoo will give you more, Google doesn't give all to prevent spammers from revers engineering); cache: for previous version of URL's text only
Country limit advanced option goes beyond top-level domain (i.e. beyond .au for Australia)
Show Options link at top of results give all sorts of filters and options on the left including date limits (including good work they've done identifying date of the content on the page); discussions gives results for forums with posts/authors/dates and some other info depending on the forum; Timeline; Wonder Wheel; Updates/Latest for constant updates
Real-time scrolling of top links for twitter and other things
Displaying longer snippets (keyword in context extracts), especially for longer queries
URL displays now doing some hierarchy displays instead of displaying long URLs
Added information displays - a dateline on news sites/blogs/press releases, "This site may harm your computer" for questionable sites, author and date from Scholar content
Inline site clustering for multiple pages from the same website plus the ability to view more if there are multiple
Hundreds of factors are included in Google's display algorithms, and they're changed frequently to prevent spammers, faster loading pages get a small bump in ranking
Add &pws=0 to the end of a URL it'll turn off the customization (maybe)
Add &filter=0 eliminates clustering pages to display all results
Translate search under language tools
Show options: databases to access various Google databases

Forgotten Databases:

Universal only selects a small fraction
Google groups (including usenet info)
News can now search author: for bylines, added suggestions and ads, archive under the advanced search have expanded to include more free content as well as paid, hosing European agencies, time line display, blog search incorporated and identified
Blogs now has RSS results feed, hot queries and latest posts, indexing posts and not just the RSS feed to include all stuff but picks up some surrounding content as well; includes references for people that linked to a blog post
Scholar lost green triangles identifying free things, changed to links on the side; now also includes patents database and legal opinions and journals (but can't search patent and law together); some things are citations only without links, can exclude those; Scholar only has 3-4 employees which explains why you don't hear about what they're doing
Books lawsuit remains, can link directly to a book page, includes a few magazines and periodicals (bound journals = books to Google so they scanned them)

Labs is relaunched, now categorizes types of developments

Squared puts searches into a chart (to compete with Wolfram Alpha)
Public data explorer for changes over time for specific things
Fast flip
Transliteration for different alphabets
Browser size for web developers to preview

Google Services

Reader can search RSS feeds even if you never look at the feed
Docs can do surveys, now has Draw Together, new spreadsheet
Voice for phone number integration, one single phone number; can integrate with Library Help SMS messaging
Translation - enter URL, text, search, embed translate widget on your page

Recent Travails

Hot topics have 90% of the top links as spam
Buzz fiasco
Photographers suing Books
Search share is down (still 70% but down a tiny bit)

Licensing Content & Creative Commons

2010-04-14T12:15:00.000-04:00

Track A, Content Management
Lesley Ellen Harris, Michael Sauers

Licensing Issues & Strategies: "Keeping It Simple"
Lesley Ellen Harris http://www.copyrightlaws.com

LICENSE mnemonic for remembering the key to digital content licensing

Legal Document - it's a legal contract, use official corporate/legal names, only authorized signers should sign (this includes click-wrap licenses online), enters your library into obligations such as policing unauthorized so be sure you can live up to those obligations

Interpretation - it's a summary of the things you've agreed upon, something that you will refer to again and again to figure out permitted uses, make sure they're always in writing but it's not necessary to use technical or legal language if that makes it harder to interpret

Consistent - use consistent wording within an agreement, and across various licenses if possible; have a checklist of clauses; develop a licensing policy so that everyone works from same written policy

Essential Points - for most content there are about 10 points that you need to negotiate

Negotiate - despite what the other side says, most licenses are negotiable! Be honest and direct, learn to negotiate like a professional.

Standard Agreements Do NOT Exist - there's no ideal agreement for all situations

Exchange Information - talk to everyone, start at home with your users, educate users on terms and conditions allowed; talk to senior management about time, training, money to let them know that it's not as simple as buying a print book; talk to the other side before negotiation, during, and after for questions of interpretation

Creative Commons
Michael Sauers

Copyright is a restriction-based policy.
The Culture of the Copy by Hillel Schwartz has a copyright statement that makes fun of copyright excesses.
Section 113c of copyright law allows for 'useful articles' which includes things like putting the cover of a book in a bookseller's catalog.
Disney's entire
Clearance Culture - you have to get permission for everything, because the first guy got permission everyone else has to as well, everyone's afraid of being sued
Fair use is a defense, someone has to sue you first.
"Copyright treats all creators the same" Cory Doctorow

Creative Commons says you get to decide in advance what rights to retain or give away.

CC is an allowance-based method.
You choose from options for your license: attribution, non-commercial purposes, without derivative works, share alike resulting works
search.creativecommons.org

Problems with Creative Commons

Licenses are irrevocable, though you can change things it creates confusion
Negative market effect - professional photographers' argument
What is 'non-commercial'? Scribd example
Unintended use
Right of publicity for pictures of people

CC in Libraries

Teach your patrons to use CC works
License your own work
Catalog CC works (this one I find problematic based on my prior research)

Questions Raised

Competition with 'publishers'
Collection development policy
Cataloging issues - who is the publisher? what is the publication location?

www.travelinlibrarian.info

Building Communities and Engaging Clients

2010-04-13T16:39:00.000-04:00

Track D, Enterprise Trends & Practices
Nancy Linwood, Mimi Vollstedt, Melanie Michaelson

Social Networking in a Work Group
Nancy Linwood (Du Pont)

Technology issues impeded initial implementation, company lived in its e-mail which didn't integrate with other systems, vocabulary problem with what things were called, training problems with a large geographic area and different skill levels, lack of joint projects to draw teams together

Marketing Journal
US Department of Justice

Standard spiel about marketing the library, nothing new here.

This session was basically a waste of time - the community building was all about problems they had, very little about what works, and the marketing was the same stuff as always.

Virtual Learning & Training: From Classrooms to Communities

2010-04-13T15:05:00.002-04:00

Track E, Teaching: Technologies & Approaches

Virtual Learning & Training: Teaching and Learning with Drupal

Meredith Farkas @librarianmer

In-person classes get lost in translation to online courses. Web 2.0 ideas help some of these issues - participation, wisdom of crowds vs. Sage on the stage. It's also a familiar medium for two-way communication because people are using it for many other things. Drupal blogs website brings everything together in one place, no risk of losing or deleting things. It builds a sense of ownership over the medium. Fantastic for community building, it's a more human/informal medium where they feel like they can be themselves. Allows for reflective learning, discussion and debate. Requires writing for public audience, can result in dialogue with outsiders. Makes everyone both a teacher and a learner.

Blogging at the American University in Cairo
Joan Pettis (Portland State U.) @joanpdx

Working with students who are very under-prepared, no prior library or research experience. Old course was making a difference but not enough of one, changes included:

Started using a wiki instead of WebCT
Made class easier to pass but strict attendance required, it was all about gaining skills
Implemented blogging for students

Project was a near disaster because of not-so-simple WordPress technology, more work for librarians. However, students loved it!

Lessons learned:

looking good on paper isn't enough
take advantage of key moments (times of stress/confusion might be good for change)
own your disasters
the most exciting technology isn't always the best for users
"ill considered ideas hastily implemented can be a great success"

Training in the Cloud or Mobile Labs

2010-04-13T14:08:00.000-04:00

Track E, Teaching: Technologies & Approaches
Maurice Coleman, Bobbi Newman, Delores Rondinella

Stark County District Library's Technology Training Program

Quality verses quantity, longer sessions
Create classroom environment
Learn what needs to be taught not what you want to teach
Create strong handouts for learners to take away
Training sessions for specific groups

Training in the Cloud or 30 Things in 20 Minutes
@librarianbyday, @baldgeekinmd
http://sites.google.com/site/traininginthecloud

Scheduling - 30 Boxes, doodle
Curriculum development - WikiSpaces, Delicious or other social bookmarks
Mindmapping - mindmeister, freemind
Resource sharing - custom start pages (netvibes), Feed My InBox (RSS to e-mail)
Blogs
File Sharing - Slideshare, dropbox, box.net, drop.io
Communication - twitter (private users, class hashtag), friendfeed (has some privacy settings)
Anytime Class Space (aka Asynchronous) - Ning, Jing
Live Class Space (Simultaneous) - Skype (can record with Audacity), tinychat, dimdim
Evaluation - Poll Everywhere (live in powerpoint polling via text or twitter), online surveys (Survey Monkey, Zoomerang)
Archiving - Slideshare to share, Audacity to record and create podcasts to host on TalkShoe, Wink (Screencasting!), UStream does live stream plus archive

Google and Zoho are the two biggies.
Can publish documents to a URL that can be shared.
Zoho is a little easier to use than google, less searching to find the available tools,

Two very different presentations in this session, the first was dry and boring, the second very energetic.

Reaching Reluctant Learners

2010-04-13T11:40:00.001-04:00

Track E, Teaching: Technologies & Approaches

Reaching Reluctant Learners: Planning with Backward Design
Andrea Simzak

First is to determine whether training is actually needed.
Step 1: Identify the outcome - what is the point? what should trainees be able to do?
Step 2: Create and Assessment - how will you know they've learned it? What is your time frame for proficiency?
Step 3: Determine necessary skills - what are the current skills? Do you need to make accommodations?
Step 4: Create the Lesson Plan - how will you provide training? Address time, resources, and library culture. Present new material in familiar ways, rather than using new tech to teach new skills.
Step 5: Provide instruction - is it working? How will you adjust your methods as needed?
Step 6: Administer the assessment - did your trainers meet expectations? Is it time to build on their new skills?

Build training on observable outcomes, know when training isn't necessary, and what the limits are.

Turn Fear to Passion
Veronica Rutter

All Learning has an emotional base -Plato Most staff have fear and disinterest as their primary emotions.

Why does it matter? Because it's your job isn't sufficient or motivating, and unmotivated students don't learn.

Utilize preexisting interests
Make it easy
Provide a tangible reward

Embrace silly, laughter is a killer of fear
Adapt the core lesson - LibraryThing instead of Facebook
Show other alternatives - Flickr/Looking into the Past, Twitter/Woofer
Show why the new thing is different and interesting, compare the old and the new to show positive change
"Don't say it's easy, make it easy"
Step-by-step instructions, like Lego, give a space to write user name and password
Stay away from food rewards, something lasting, to feel proud of. Gaining a tech skill cannot be held or admired on a shelf.

Reaching Reluctant Learners - Connecting with the Boomer Learner
Sophia Guevara

This generation has an ability and willingness to adapt
Create homework for attendees to complete beforehand so they can explore
In class, ask people to buddy up (helps allay awkwardness of not understanding)
Provide a survey for learners to comment on class experience
Continue to connect to observe their evolving relationship with technology
Trainees can become tech ambassadors to draw others into the fold

Tips for Reaching Reluctant Learners
Jill Hurst-Wahl

Really talking about reluctant users
Holding your breath - it's not natural, you're unable to communicate, you have limited ability and appear life-less - communication is like breathing, it's natural, and we're trying to teach things that should become natural as breathing so they don't have to think about it.
Show them the benefits, we tend to focus on the tools, not the benefits
Make it personal - tell them how it will help them in their personal life, connecting with family and friends
Find a work-related reason - make job easier, faster, better collaboration, expand network withing the field
Look for a glimmer of interest - any type of interest can take advantage of the tools
Offer your services - use your knowledge to help them out
Sneak them in the back door - don't tell them what they're doing, find a reason why they should be doing it, get them using it and don't tell them that it is what they hate
Work to get these skills to be natural, normal, like breathing

Web 2.0 Tools: Innovation, Awareness, & Knowledge-Sharing

2010-04-13T10:49:00.001-04:00

Track D, Enterprise Trends and Practices
Christopher Thomas (DTIC), Anna Berkes (Jefferson Library at Monticello)

DODTechipedia
Tech is changing so fast, that multi-year long-term projects are far behind the curve by the time they're finished. Technology is a game changer, but for DoD they're stuck with scaled down Blackberries, so how can they innovate within limits of security? DoD is also huge organization, so communication between departments is a problem. It also requires a culture change w/in the department - official knowledge is not sacred.

What they want to do is combine official knowledge with experience to generate solutions and DODTechipedia is the method for doing this. The traditional problem with the web is that information can be wrong, with no way to fix errors. The wiki allows for rapid changes and functionality like the notes in the repair manuals, also engages new people. New process of telling manufacturers what DoD needs, not necessarily how to do it. Aristotle project combines official records with author updates. Want to integrate official and user information and search across all of it, getting into semantic search and additional analysis tools.

Coming from a culture of securing information, they also realize that not sharing can be equally bad. Identity management issues across the government need to be fixed but eventually you'll be able to work across all the wiki projects (Intellipedia, State, DoD, etc.) "People take a risk when they share things." We know that the next generation of people who work for us will use these technologies to get their jobs done; cultural issues will fade as generations change.

The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia http://wiki.monticello.org

The library receives and directs most of the public queries that come to the foundation, creates something of a bottleneck. Previously Asked Questions database was old solution, didn't work at all, eventually decided to move to a wiki.

Wiki Matrix outlines all available wiki tools and features.

The initial reaction from staff was less than enthusiastic. Interpreters/guides loved it, old guard not so much, with a middle ground of cautious interest. The biggest obstacle was the word wiki, because of negative association with Wikipedia. Quietly rebranded as the TJ Encyclopedia, because of authority and problem of having to explain what a wiki is. With changes, now very successful, particularly in comparison to Monticello's other digital projects.

It's working:

It's infinitely flexible
The ability to do footnotes is one of reasons to use Mediawiki
It's crowding out bad information on the web
Single-handedly eradicating the Fake Jefferson Quote questions
Discussion feature enabled allows outsiders to help provide information
Site is getting noticed by major media.
Saw a dramatic drop-off in internal reference questions.

Now universally liked by staff, even more by public. Staff members don't enter their own articles, which wasn't the original plan but it's a model that works. Content added in bunches mostly, some on the fly.

Recommendations:

MediaWiki
A small committee to run project
Dedicated staff work
Pre-existing pool of material from which to generate content
The word wiki is problematic for some people
Trying to do user training in large groups didn't work, half a dozen or less is best
Can't assume that people will jump right into the wiki pool
Failing to brand and link the wiki to its institutional parent was a problem

Well-Organized Sites and Portals

2010-04-12T16:07:00.004-04:00

Track B, Web Presence & Experience

Chris Jasek (Elsevier), Emily Shem-Tov (Adobe)

What does well organized mean?

Page layout, visual design, perception
User's mental model, user's tasks, intuition

"People don't come to a website to admire it, they come to get things done."

Well organized from whose perspective?

Understand user needs and tasks, and base your website around them
Users want multiple ways to look for information
They want detail on demand
Want help recovering from wrong paths and suggestions for correct ones
Want terminology they understand
Want Speed!

Look at other sites, but don't blindly imitate, ask your users and trust what they tell you.

Follow best practice design:

Use page real estate wisely - key tasks get the most/prime space, minimize junk
Minimize the number of clicks
Use consistent navigation
Treat links according to conventions
Use consistent design elements
Use few colors and minimal graphics
Provide a help link on every page
Make your site accessible

Test your design with users - feedback, usability studies, usage tracking. But what people say and what they do are not always the same, so at least some testing should be observational.

Address issues and repeat - identify problems (not solutions) then identify a pool of possible solutions.

Case Study: Goldmine Research
Internal research portal

People wanted a taxonomy they could use for browsing, have a taxonomy that is specific to Adobe's work, it's revised quarterly! We took six months to do a single review of ours, I can't imagine updating it quarterly.

Most of the rest of this case study presentation was just an overview of what the library's doing, nothing at all about how to organize a website or portal.

My thoughts: this session was pretty basic web design and planning, nothing that seemed particularly about organizing a web site or portal. Both presenters come from corporate backgrounds, and I always wonder if that skews perspective.

Google Wave

2010-04-12T14:29:00.005-04:00

Track D, Collaboration Strategies and Tools

Rebecca Jones, Bob Keith

This session was planned far in advance, when Google Wave was first previewed and seemed like the next big thing. Google took a big risk in putting something out that was still in Alpha stage (not even Beta). Many people joined and then jumped ship because it didn't do anything at the time, now there's lots more happening. The thing about it being a collaborative space is that it connects you with other people, even those outside the library world.

Wave vs. Email (if e-mail were invented today, Google thinks it would look like Wave)

Wave is real time. No delay, see text as you're typing.
Extensible, can add gadgets to go beyond text. Robots can work with the text that's posted to provide extra information based on conversation.
Hosted conversation, a single wave prevents branching of different versions
Playback allows latecomers to see evolution of the conversation over time
Easy file sharing, drag and drop into a wave if you're using Chrome or Google Gears

Gadgets
Open source protocal, they will eventually release software for wave server. List in wave is not extensive, only includes in-house and widespread/stable gadgets.

Robots
Automated participants in a wave, can do anything a user can do, mostly respond to input and do something with it. They're added as 'people' in your wave.

http://wave-samples-gallery/appspot.com/results?api=Robots

What's it good for?

Project Management
Work logs
Event planner

Working on Permissions levels that can be set by the wave creator

Can now get e-mail notification when a wave is updated.

Issues

Low adoption due to Wave being invite only
It can be slow at times
No one but the user can remove themselves from a wave, but waves are private by default.
Can't yet rely on Google to archive/save things. If you need it, you should copy and paste it out to another document. You can drag a wave to another wave to link them.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave by Gina Trapani (competewaveguide.com)

"Somebody has to own the collaboration" - Rebecca

Achieving Org 2.0

2010-04-12T11:16:00.005-04:00

Second Session in Track C

Organization 2.0 (or Can't Get There from Here)

Meredith Farkas

People complain about Web 2.0 gone awry at their organizations.

People feel pressure to do what everyone else is even if it's not required or useful.
They see successful things and what to replicate them without thinking about the local population.
The 'kid in the candy store' effect without thinking about filling an actual need.
We go where our users are without actually being useful there.
They treat the tech as free like beer, when they're really free like kittens.
The super passionate person who volunteers to do everything, but doesn't really have the time.
New responsibilities are added without taking away any existing duties.
People are really excited about new technologies, but it gets less sexy over time and can start to seem like drudge work.

So what's the problem? The graveyard of 2.0 initiatives.

Why does it fail?

It's not seen as integral to library's mission, not tied to strategic goals
Treated as pet project
Not planned for strategically
People less inclined to contribute when newness wears off
Staff aren't given official/formal time for the projects

Library 2.0 is a state of mind. Look outside the library world for best practices examples of social media use.

Tips for implementing organization 2.0:

Know your users, not just generally, but your specific user population (Surveying Students, U. of Rochester)
Encourage staff to learn and play. Keeping up with trends needs to be part of the profession, part of the job description for all library staff.
Question everything
Integrate 2.0 tech and planning into larger planning process
Treat technologies as tools, apply them only to solve real needs and problems
Improve communications with users
Highlight our collections (new books via RSS feed, links in Wikipedia to special collections, photos on Flickr)
Make our services more visible
Improve internal knowledge sharing (Baruch college reference desk blog)
Develop a Risk-Tolerant Culture [I think this one is really key, and a problem for my own organization. -Gretchen]
Beware the culture of perfect, development should be an iterative process
Be agile, don't get attached - if we're adding new things, we have to get rid of something else.
Good ideas can come from anyone and anywhere
Need to nurture talent at our librarians, so many people get passion stepped on by too many Nos
Give staff time for creative endeavors
Encourage network building and create partnerships
Be transparent with our patrons
Devote time to all of the above - create new jobs, reshuffle old ones
Assess! Constantly! We're not doing enough to find out if the initiatives are working to meet people's needs.

My thoughts: these are all good tips, but I would've liked fewer tips with more detail about the actual hows of achieving them. Lots of examples are nice, but aren't necessarily helpful if none of the examples come from situations like yours.

Tips for Fast Tech Project Implementation

2010-04-12T10:05:00.006-04:00

This is the first session in Track C, Managing 2.0

(a.k.a. Black Ops Ninja-Style Tech Projects)

John Blyberg, Sarah Houghton-Jan, Amanda Etches-Johnson

Running into frustration is a common experience, we want to talk about ways to get around those common frustrations that thwart exciting projects. Once you hear No you think No will always be the answer.

John - Things are done just because they're done, tradition! Talking about changing how we do things. People are key, need to win hearts and minds of librarians and users, it won't be successful without their support. Tips will focus on this aspect, how do you change attitudes from within? Every library has staff members who are leaders, who want to implement new things. As a manager, we ought to try to embed those people as change agents.

Amanda - Small department, what's worked is being strategic, knowing the strategic plan and making sure that what you do fits with that plan. Don't implement tech projects just for the sake of new technologies.

Sarah - Blend into the environment and sneak up on people. Make changes without people noticing right away, or without telling them until it's been up for some time. Covertly introduce ideas through e-mail or in meetings, in small ways, because if people have heard an idea at least once before they're more likely to say yes because it's now familiar.

John - Social Catalog system project, merges content management and catalog system. "We didn't want to have the process hijacked by people who didn't know what they were talking about." Because it was public success, we didn't get staff pushback. You need to provide a counter vision for people to latch on to.

Sarah - Follow evidence-based practice, but not to hide behind to avoid risk. It goes hand-in-hand with innovation, it just encouraged due diligence and mindfulness. Start with a literature search, turn to the network of colleagues. If there's no evidence, do it anyway and collect the evidence as I go along.

Amanda - Avoid collateral damage. Try not to step on toes as far as funding, staffing, support, etc. Get stakeholders to cheer lead for you, talk to stakeholders about possible negative impacts, get them involved at the earliest possible stages. We forget that other people are smart too about things we may not know about.

John - When you deploy things, deploy like a fire jumper - drop in and establish a foothold, commit to giving it all the required resources. However, there's nothing wrong with failure. If you are wrong, own up and put the effort into analyzing why it didn't work - was the idea bad? Not enough resources? Not implemented well? Some times an idea just comes too soon, and if you try again later it might work.

Sarah - Sometimes it's really hard to recover from No. No right now doesn't mean No six months from now. It might turn into yes. Committees bad, project teams good. It's not the people on the committees that are the problem, it's the structure - ongoing with no real mandate or authority. The project team is limited time, with specific objectives and goals to do.

Amanda - We knew that this group would present unrealistic fears and expectations, "The world's going to end because there's a new e-mail link", need to consider your past experience with the stakeholders and the possible implications of your action. Trust and follow your instincts, you have a sense of what will help your users. Have the confidence to convince other people that you know what you're doing.

John - Know when to quit, and how to do it properly.

Audience - How much will this undermine trust in my future work? (this = implementing someone's not so great idea)

John - Need to shore up our infrastructure, if we implement things in an unstable environment, people will complain about lack of basic stability while you play with new things. If what they need to do their job isn't rock solid don't bother trying to move on. Need a culture of innovation, not reaction. Become involved with IT to solve those chronic problems, and be high profile about that, so that when you do roll out new ideas staff feels like you've got their back.

Computers in Libraries

2010-04-12T10:04:00.000-04:00

I'm at the Computers in Libraries conference for the next couple of days, so I'll be blogging a lot of the sessions in lieu of taking paper notes.

Judging an International Book

2010-03-05T13:53:00.003-05:00

The Millions has an interesting post up today comparing the US and UK versions of the covers of various books. It's interesting to see the differences, and consider what makes us want to pick up a book.

More Women of Faith

2010-03-01T10:56:00.003-05:00

As a follow up to my earlier Women of Faith post, there's a story via Pursuit of Harpyness today called God is Not a Segregationist. It's about Muslim women who want to be able to worship in the Islamic Center of Washington's main prayer hall, instead of being segregated into a smaller chamber.

This group is part of a larger movement to desegregate Mosques everywhere, and they are quite predictably facing some of the same challenges as their sisters in other religions who advocate for equality.

Running in place isn't good for your health

2010-02-26T12:13:00.004-05:00

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

I was reminded of this line from Through the Looking Glass when I saw this Big Bipartisan Healthcare Summit Review post from Shakesville this morning. Months of work and where is Congress? Exactly where they started, with the Republicans saying no to absolutely everything, no matter what's suggested. If Obama and the democrats had taken this "we don't need the republicans" approach right from the start, we could've had a bill passed months ago. Not only that, it would've been a better bill, one that hadn't been watered down by attempts at bipartisan pandering.

The only small consolation in this mess is the fact that there are still people out there trying very hard to get the public option into the bill. If that could happen I think it might all be worth it.

National Embroidery Month

2010-02-25T16:37:00.002-05:00

I know February is almost over, but it didn't seem like it was too late to point out that it's National Embroidery Month.

Check out Feeling Stitchy for thready blog goodness and Sublime Stitching to get your fix of patterns and supplies.

Perhaps one of these days I'll even get started on the embroidery project that I bought supplies for last year!

Photo credit: angela7dreams

Who works here?

2010-02-24T17:34:00.003-05:00

In order to correctly assign security privileges in our new document management system, I had to put together a list of employees by department. Sounds easy, right? HA!

It took me two hours last week and at least another four hours this afternoon to go through four separate lists of the people who supposedly work here and figure out who was or was not on each list, and which list had the correct department information for that person. In some cases, three of the lists would give me three different departments for the same person. While it's true that some people do work for more than one department, I'm certain that's not the case for all these people. I ended up having to call and e-mail a few people directly to find out who actually works in their departments.

While I completely understand how this happened (HR has one list of who's legally employed, IS has another list of who has user accounts for technology services, and the online Staff Directory lists... well, I'm not entirely sure where that list comes from), I find it exceedingly ridiculous that it took so long to compile what ought to have been a relatively simple request. If ever I've seen a problem just begging for a knowledge management solution, this is absolutely it.

Knitting Olympics Update

2010-02-23T18:00:00.000-05:00

Does it still count as winning in the knitting Olympics if all of the knitting parts are done, but the piece isn't actually put together? The knitting for the Daphne Purse is going really well - the yarn is a joy to work with, and I love the herringbone knit pattern. I'm probably 2/3 of the way through the knitting itself.

However, the ribbon embroidery and construction of the bag (adding interfacing and the lining plus sewing up the seams) is going to require a trip to the fabric store that's not likely to happen this weekend. I don't think it will take long once I have the right stuff, so all I can do is regret once again that there's no easier to access fabric store near me.

Either Or

2010-02-23T16:04:00.003-05:00

The Slactivist blog has a really thought-provoking post up right now called 501(c)(3) free speech that I highly recommend. It approaches the corporate personhood issue, particularly as it relates to the recent Citizens United court case, from the point of view of someone who worked for non-profits for many years. In essence, the post argues that much like non-profits, corporations should have to choose either free speech or tax benefits.

As the law currently stands, certain organizations can opt to forgo the ability to influence elections in exchange for favorable tax status while other organizations can freely work to influence elections but have to pay all the usual taxes. This latter type can still be non-profit, they just don't recieve the same tax priviledges, because the tax payers should not have to foot the bill for an organization attempting to influence the outcome of elections (particularly if that organization is working against the interests of some portion of the taxpayers).

Slactivist argues, and I completely agree, that corporate lobbying should work exactly the same way. If corporations want to lobby, they have to give up some of the tax benefits that they currently recieve in exchange. The taxpayers should not be supporting organizations that may be actively working against their best interests.

The post also puts into words something that I've been trying to articulate since first hearing about the court's decision:

When corporations become involved in such activities they betray not just their legal status but also all of their stakeholders -- their shareholders, employees, customers and neighbors -- all of those who have "banded together" to work corporately for a very different purported particular cause. When corporations engage in such extra-corporate activities, they are thus perpetrating a kind of fraud both against taxpayers, who never intended nor agreed to allow the tax privileges for corporations to be put to use meddling in elections, and against their own shareholders and stakeholders whose investment in the corporation was meant to support its "particular cause" as a corporation and not its extra-corporate activity as a lobbyist or kingmaker.

I have been particularly bothered by the idea used to support Citizens United that people who are part of a corporation are automatically served by the lobbying of that corporation. There are plenty of workers for major companies who would be much better off without the anti-labor policies lobbied for by the uber-bosses in the corporation. People don't become part of a corporation to promote particular viewpoints, the way they join the ACLU or the NRA, they do it because they need a paycheck or to make money. Allowing the corporation to influence elections on the premise that they do it as the voice of all the workers or investors in that corporation is disingenuous.

Librarians are good at...

2010-02-22T23:15:00.002-05:00

Pub quiz trivia. Perhaps it's predictable, but we had an SLA young professionals happy hour/pub quiz event tonight, and our team of a dozen young librarians kicked butt. We came in second out of 30 or so teams, and since it's a tournament week get to go back in a couple of weeks to compete in the final game for some sort of exciting prize.

We had just the right combination of pop culture, history, and obscure trivia knowledge that makes up a good trivia team. We could've maybe used one more sports person, but even there we didn't do too badly.

What's in a name?

2010-02-19T16:14:00.004-05:00

After finally reaching a consensus on our new subject and geography taxonomies, today we sat down to begin the process of matching our existing terms to the shiny new ones. Ninety-eight percent of the time this is really easy. Gender maps to gender, France maps to France, and so forth.

However, for the two percent that aren't obvious there are some very tricky questions:

How do you map the term Middle East to a new system where it no longer exists? Do you include every country in the region? Only the important ones? Only the ones where you're actually doing work?

Who thought it was ever a good idea to combine 'Antipodes and Space' in a single term? How are Australia and the moon at all related? (And if you're like I was and don't even know where the Antipodes are, Wikipedia is here to help.) This is violating basic principles of indexing term construction! What were they thinking?

If a region extends across three countries, do you map the regional term to all three national terms? Does Kurdistan become Iran, Iraq, and Turkey?

What about disputed territories? Argentina still claims the Falkland Islands, so does the old term get mapped to United Kingdom or to UK and Argentina? Are you somehow validating Argentina's claim if you add that term?

In a classic case of the 80/20 rule at work, we'll spend 80 percent of our time on this part of the project discussing 20 percent of the list.

QuickPost

2010-02-18T17:13:00.002-05:00

This is a complete and blatant pitch for a product, but I fell in love with a database today and have to share the love. Actually, to be specific, I fell in love with a database creation tool.

QuickBase is a product from Intuit that lets you create what it calls 'applications' (basically databases) on the fly. Give it a name, a table, and a couple of fields and you're good to go. I went from having never even seen the thing to having a database up and running in less than 30 minutes this morning and it was great. There are lots of controls for user permissions, editing, page setups, and so forth.

I was impressed by the ease of use, and how much of the work the system did for me. I had started this project in FileMaker and the difference is amazing. Granted, all the work of defining the fields was already done, and all the data was in a single organized spreadsheet ready to be uploaded, but even so, the speed with which I had something put together that is public quality was impressive.

Someone Else

2010-02-17T14:59:00.003-05:00

It amazes me sometimes how differently people will react when given the same information or request from two different sources. I have two perfect examples of this from just the past hour:

In setting up our new document management system I gave some instructions to a department about how to transfer their existing file structure to a system profile. In a conference call just now a representative of the company setting up the software gave them more or less the exact same information and suddenly they're much more agreeable and ready to get to work on it.
I tried several times to set up a meeting with someone from another department and couldn't even get her to acknowledge my existence. My boss went up and asked about setting up a meeting and all of a sudden she's quite agreeable to whatever I need.

Whether it's an outside expert or someone higher up the authority chain, sometimes it takes hearing from someone different for people to really acknowledge what's being said. Even if what I had to say was correct or important, it doesn't have the same impact coming from me as it does from someone else.

Contracted

2010-02-12T17:10:00.002-05:00

In general, I quite like my current job, but one of its major drawbacks is the fact that I am not an employee but a contractor. This means that I only get paid for the hours I work and things like vacation time and paid holidays are non-existent in my world. This past week, while all of my co-workers were enjoying 4 1/2 unexpected days off due to the vast amounts of snow we received, I had to work from home because I couldn't afford to lose the income from those days. Monday is a federal holiday but I'll be in the office working because I'm still working extra hours each week to make up for the days I took off at Christmas and for a family funeral in January.

When I started this job I didn't think it would be that big a deal. I'm young and healthy so buying health insurance was simple, and dealing with a few extra tax forms didn't seem like that much of a hardship. And neither of these things has really been an issue. What has most affected me is the fact that I simply can't take time off. Not for anything, ever. No mental health days, no summer vacations, not even a federal holiday or two, unless I'm willing to completely sacrifice all my free time in the evenings to work late and make up the hours. However, doing that makes me miserable and cranky, so I show up on holidays and work through blizzards instead.

At my last job I had abundant vacation time and almost never used it. I always thought that I should take more random Fridays off to enjoy the city or even just run errands, and I'm really regretting not doing that now that I no longer have the option.

Knitting Olympics

2010-02-11T11:14:00.003-05:00

It's Knitting Olympics time again!

Four years ago I knit (and un-knit and re-knit about four times) a lovely pair of purple mittens during the Olympics. This year I'm going to be working on the Daphne Purse from Louisa Harding's Knitting Little Luxuries book. I've had the pattern for ages, and I can't wait to get started on it.

If you're interested in joining in the fun, check out the Yarn Harlot for details.

Cite me!

2010-02-08T16:34:00.004-05:00

I spoke in an earlier post about my organization's new push to evaluate our work. One of the ways that we're using to do that is to track and record citations of our publications - books, special reports, etc.

I've been working on creating a database for these records, and one of the questions that I've been asking myself is whether or not this is truly a valid measurement of the impact of our work. There are so many factors that affect when and where a publication gets cited, that it's hard to imagine this is really representative of their impact on the community of practice. It also leads me to wonder if, like search engine optimization, it's possible to practice citation optimization. Once we have these lists of citations out of the unwieldy spreadsheets they currently live in, I'd love to do some research on what items are getting cited more often than others. Do catchy titles make a difference? Do some authors get cited more than others? Has the number of citations increased as the organization has gained longevity and prominence? What about the length of the work?

In theory, if you could find answers to all these questions, you could design a publication that was optimally designed to be cited by other works, even if the content inside was of lower quality than an un-optimized publication. Given this fact, can citation frequency really be relied upon as an accurate measure of our work's impact factor?

I would argue that it can't necessarily, but it's still interesting to see what sorts of uses our publications are put to. And if nothing else, it may prompt further progress by our own staff as they are able to see analysis and criticism of their work.

The Death of the Snow Day

2010-02-05T16:03:00.003-05:00

I am sad to report the demise of a much-loved friend. After many years of service, the Snow Day has finally met its match in technology. No longer do blizzard conditions require a day spent reading and drinking cocoa. Now, thanks to the advances of technology, even the biggest of snow storms that keeps people off the roads can still be a productive day.

It's a bit sad to think that I don't have snow days to look forward to anymore. Growing up in a snowy part of the world, they were rare enough that they were always a really special treat, and as an adult I think I appreciated them even more since they almost always happened during the busiest time of the year, and I needed the day off. Alas, that is not to be any longer, but at least I can do all my work from home in my pajamas!

How are we doing?

2010-02-03T13:05:00.005-05:00

It used to be so easy to measure achievement. In the days when most industries involved making widgets of one sort or another, or selling those widgets to people, you could tell that you'd made progress if your widget production numbers or your sales went up. But how do you measure the impact of your work when your product is knowledge?

That's something that my organization is just beginning to address in a systematic way. Of course there have always been measures like publication sales and meeting attendance, but those aren't really true measure of the impact of the work we do. Just as in libraries measures of circulation statistics and headcounts don't tell you whether or not the people coming through the door are really finding value in your services. I used to work in higher education and there too the concept of meaningful evaluation (beyond standardized testing) is starting to become more widespread.

So given that the product of a think tank is the thinking, how do we go about measuring the impacts of the work and using those measurements to improve for the future? One approach that my VP seems enthusiastic about is collection of citation information for our publications, on the theory that if others are citing what we write then it must be having an impact in the broader community of practice. The problem with this approach is that it is extremely time consuming, and not particularly useful for improving future work. The number of citations a book or report gets can depend on things like the flow of current events related to the topic, which we don't control.

As this evaluation project moves forward, my particular concern is finding a way to capture the results so that they can be used in a cycle of assessment and improvement. We don't have time to be reinventing the wheel for every new project that comes along.

Photo credit: Segozyme

Dirty Data

2010-02-02T18:16:00.002-05:00

I had a very frustrating afternoon trying to get what ought to be a relatively simple set of data out of our knowledge management database. For various reasons, when the system was created it was shaped largely by the whims of a particular manager in the organization, with the result being an often frustrating situation in which it is sometimes not possible to get at information that one would think ought to be a key part of the system. For example, today I wanted to pull sets of projects based on start dates and duration, and that relatively simple project took me four hours, because our system doesn't capture duration and only captures start dates accurately for about half the projects.

The important lesson that was reinforced by my experience today (and frequently when I use the system) is that database design should not be a one-person endeavor. The whims of an individual should never dictate what does, or doesn't, go into a database system like the one I'm working with.

The second lesson I learned today is that when two systems interact with one another, it's really helpful if the people on both ends have similar standards for data cleanliness, and general maintenance. It's so frustrating to see record after empty record waiting for data that's supposed to be synced from a sister system, but isn't at the moment because the people running that other system can't be arsed to fix their subject taxonomy.

Women of Faith

2010-02-01T17:08:00.002-05:00

Becky over at Pursuit of Harpyness has an interesting post up today about Women of the Wall, a group of diverse Jewish women who go to pray at the Wailing Wall, which is under the control of the Ultra-Orthodox, anti-woman, sect of Judaism. The women endure repeated abuses, both verbal and physical, every time they go to pray, and now the government is taking legal action against them.

I find it interesting that one of the main things that all three of the Abrahamic religions have in common is their stubborn belief that women are some how less godly than men. That simply by virtue of being feminine, they are not allowed to speak directly to god in the formal ceremonies of the religion.

The attitude of the church towards its women was one of the primary reasons that I left the Catholic Church, and it saddens me to see women having to fight this same battle over and over again. At the same time, I can't help but stand up and cheer for those women who are taking their faith practices into their own hands, despite the challenges. I may not share their beliefs, but I certainly admire their courage.

For related reading, see: American Catholic nuns under fire from Rome, and a History of Women as Imams

Photo credit: auntjojo

Librarians are Awesome!

2010-01-29T11:57:00.004-05:00

I went to a happy hour last night with the local SLA chapter's young professionals group and was reminded again of why I love being a part of the library profession. I've met the greatest people both while I was in school and at various professional events I've attended. It's fascinating to hear about the variety of things that people are doing in their jobs.

So, this is my pitch to all recent library school grads - get out there and join groups like SLA and ALA and go meet the awesome people who are the next generation of librarians!

(Post title edited because I can't spell librarian)

Means of Production

2010-01-27T11:41:00.003-05:00

I read in a book recently the idea that knowledge workers own the means of production. That is to say, that instead of production machines owned by a factory, they work with the knowledge that is in their own heads, which can't be taken away from them. Marxism aside, I think this is a very accurate distinction between the traditional laborer and today's employees.

This is good for workers, but presents a major challenge for organizations. Particularly for places where the knowledge is the product, what do you do when a worker leaves to capture that part of knowledge which they posses that the organization need to continue operating effectively? That's something that we're trying to deal with at my organization, and though we have lots of ideas, I don't think we have the magic bullet yet. In fact, several questions remain:

How do we get information from people?
How do we store that information so that it's findable in the future?
How do we turn that information into action?

Wiki Stats and What They Mean

2009-12-01T11:57:00.003-05:00

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:

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.
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.
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

2009-11-25T11:51:00.002-05:00

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

2009-11-24T16:49:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-24T21:21:00.001-04:00

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

2009-03-14T15:52:00.002-04:00

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

2009-03-11T11:15:00.002-04:00

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!

2009-02-23T20:18:00.002-05:00

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

2009-02-15T22:25:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-15T22:21:00.002-05:00

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

2008-11-27T14:02:00.000-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sad Story

2008-11-20T11:17:00.003-05:00

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!

2008-11-18T14:28:00.002-05:00

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

2008-11-17T22:17:00.003-05:00

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

2008-11-14T16:26:00.003-05:00

Brilliant!

OCLC Metadata link roundup

2008-11-14T16:06:00.004-05:00

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)

I voted today!

2008-11-04T10:47:00.001-05:00

I went and voted on my way to work this morning. It was super quick, in and out in under 20 minutes, even though the people at the polling place were a little confused about things and didn't seem to have a very good system for getting folks through the lines.

Perhaps we need more election workers who aren't 80 years old?

Anyway, after voting I stopped to get my free Krispy Kreme donut and was very disappointed that I only got a plain glazed donut and not the star-shaped one with patriotic sprinkles that the ads promised.

Now it's just a matter of waiting, and resisting the urge to hit up all the news sites every five minutes to see if anything has been reported.

Harder than it looks

2008-11-02T20:05:00.003-05:00

My final project for one of my classes this semester is to create a series of screen casts teaching users all about RSS feeds - what they are and how they work. When I designed this project I thought it would be a fairly straightforward task, just go step-by-step through the process of using RSS and describe what you need to do at each step.

Boy was I ever wrong! Perhaps I'm being overly ambitious in what I can reasonably achieve here, but this project is turning out to be much more complicated. First there's the fact that I don't actually have the screen casting software on my laptop, which means that I have to have every detail planned in advance before I go to the lab to do the recording.

Also, describing what RSS feeds are is not as simple as you might think. It seems pretty obvious to me since I've been using them for ages now, but when I actually try to translate it into language that's understandable to a newbie things get complicated. I can't assume that the user will understand all the terminology so I have to work backwards to explain things I hadn't planned on explaining.

Most frustratingly, in order to properly demonstrate how to set up a new account in Google Reader and in Bloglines, I have to do it from scratch as I record it, which means that I won't know until I'm sitting there how it will actually work. I could set up dummy accounts just to practice, but then I'd have to set up two new accounts for each service, none of which I'm likely to use after this project, and that seems a little excessive.

Ultimately I think this project will be more interesting than either of the other two options I could've picked, and certainly will result in my having learned more usable skills as far as creating screen casts goes, but the process is going to be more painful than anticipated.

Cataloging for a Cause

2008-10-31T15:40:00.003-04:00

I just read about this effort on the part of LibraryThing to help St. John's Episcopal Church in Boston catalog their collection of books. I think this is a fantastic idea, and something that it would be really interesting to see done in other places.

For instance, I can imagine a cataloging class taking on the collection of a small non-profit as part of their final project. Or perhaps one of the many library association chapters that exist most places could do a similar pizza-and-cataloging party on a Saturday. They wouldn't have to use LibraryThing, any database or cataloging software would do, and the results would be really helpful for the non-profit since they would have better access to their own resources.

Hmm... I wonder if it would be possible to set up something like this. I guess the major issue would be finding a place with a lot of books that aren't already cataloged but should be.

Obama and Maddow

2008-10-29T22:56:00.002-04:00

Rachel Maddow is going to interview Obama tomorrow night on her show!

This is going to be some must-watch TV for sure, I have to find someone with cable who will let me watch at their house.

Good People

2008-10-28T10:50:00.002-04:00

This story about call center workers walking off the job rather than reading a false, incendiary script about Obama just made my day. It's such a nice reminder that there are still people with integrity out there, even if the Republican party doesn't have any.

Book Review: Self-Made Man

2008-10-27T14:03:00.003-04:00

I just finished reading Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent and I have mixed feelings about the book.

On the one hand, I think the idea behind the book - Vincent disguising herself as a man to enter the world of men and write about it from the perspective of a woman - is fascinating. Although much has been written about male culture and interactions, it's almost always from the perspective of men who are part of what they write about. Vincent's outsider status lets her comment on things in a way that other writers can't. In one part of the book she spends several weeks at a monastery and I found her descriptions of the life of the monks particularly compelling. As a woman, I obviously can't vouch for the accuracy of what she describes, but there were certainly aspects that rang true for me in thinking of the men I know.

However, at times Vincent makes some very broad generalizations about both men and women that made me uncomfortable with her conclusions. She occasionally veers dangerously close to blaming women for the problems of men, and to excusing some behaviors that I feel should not be excused. Particularly in the chapters on dating and on the Men's Movement she explains the ways in which men blame women for their romantic or life problems but doesn't explain well enough why these perceptions on the part of the men might not be true.

In addition, because she interacts with the various groups of men under very specific conditions, she only gets particular subsets of men which colors the perceptions she has and what she writes about. Most men probably have perfectly fine relationships with their mothers, but Vincent discusses only the group that doesn't and is vocal about it. I would have liked to see another chapter like the one in which she joins a bowling league, because I thought that group of men was the most interesting in their typicality and variety, more so than the pathologies that are uncovered among some of the other groups.

Overall, I recommend this book as it is an interesting experiment to read about, and might provide some insights to help communication and understanding across gender lines.

Sea Lions!

2008-10-25T20:45:00.005-04:00

On my last evening in Monterey I walked out to the Fisherman's Wharf to find some dinner and spotted this pile of sea lions hanging out. There were lots of them around the harbor and out on the breakwater and we could hear their barking from our hotel room at all hours of the day and night.

The voices in the background are from the family standing next to me on the pier, the two little kids were really entertained by the sea lions and didn't want to leave them.

Sleep is Good

2008-10-24T16:42:00.003-04:00

Red-eye flights always seem like such a good idea until you actually do one and it takes the next two days to recover from the fact that no matter how much you try to convince yourself otherwise you can't actually sleep that well on an airplane.

Now that I'm back at home and reflecting on the time in Monterey I'm really glad that I went to the Internet Librarian conference. Although some of the sessions were a bit boring or badly presented, overall it was a good experience. It was nice to see some of the actual work that people are doing, as opposed to the mostly theoretical approach that we get in classes, and many of the people that I met were very nice. I've got a long list of resources to check out when I have some time (I'll do another post to link to some of my favorites) and some ideas for projects that I'm currently working on.

The End

2008-10-22T20:27:00.002-04:00

The Internet Librarian closing session was great. Liz Lawley gave a presentation called "Technical/Tangible/Social" about how even though all the web tools we have are great, people still crave tangible connections and things. The first example she gave was the iPhone whose appeal is based not just on its technical abilities but also on the tangible, touchable, and even social properties that it has.

She covered a number of gadgets/websites that connect the digital to the tangible. For instance, botanicalls are little devices you stick in your plants so that they'll let you know via Twitter or text message that they need to be watered. (I should definitely get one of these if I ever decide to attempt to grow a plant again.)

She also talked about the cafe spaces that some libraries are installing, and how those spaces bring together the technology (wifi and power outlets), the tangible (books and materials from the library), and the social (working with or around other people).

I thought it was a great way to bring some of the conversations throughout the conference back down to a more concrete level and acknowledge the fact that just because we can do everything virtually online doesn't mean we want to. It tied nicely into danah boyd's point from this morning that teenagers would prefer to hang out with their friends in real life instead of online.

danah boyd Keynote

2008-10-22T13:41:00.002-04:00

I'm not sure what's up with the weird name capitalization, but her presentation this morning was really great.

A lot of this conference has been about specific technologies or addressing specific information needs, so it was good to hear more about the broader social context in which all of this stuff is operating. I particularly liked her metaphor that putting up a profile is similar to decorating a bedroom or locker - using various cultural artifacts to tell a story about who someone is.

I also had never considered how the fact that kids are much more constrained in their movements than they used to be would impact their need to be connected online. I was never one for hanging out at the mall much, but I can definitely see how if your social networks are really important to you that digital connection to them could be an important proxy for the times that you can't be together in physical space.

I Love LibraryThing!

2008-10-21T16:20:00.003-04:00

I just had a lovely conversation with the LibraryThing folks here at IL. I even managed to snag a t-shirt which is just like the most awesome thing ever!

They're doing such great work, it's amazing that the whole thing was basically just the brainchild of one guy doing something for his own benefit and now it's blossomed into this fabulous resource and is actually influencing what librarians do and how they think.

Skipping Sessions

2008-10-21T14:11:00.004-04:00

So after the excellent plenary this morning (about Google killerettes - small, specialized search engines that do their little thing better than Google does), I took off and went for a lovely walk down to the fisherman's wharf and along the water. The weather was absolutely beautiful and I saw lots of seagulls and sea lions and pelicans along the water. Monterey is a lovely place.

Internet Librarian

2008-10-20T17:04:00.000-04:00

So I'm about to start my fourth session of the day here at Internet Librarian. The first two were good - one about searching and one about quick and easy website updates. The third one, about search widgets was not so hot - people really need to learn to prepare their presentations better if they're going to use live web pages as part of the presentation. There should always be screen shot backups so they don't waste ten minutes getting the internet to work.

It's Alive!

2008-10-19T19:19:00.002-04:00

I'm a terrible, terrible blogger but was just inspired by the session that I'm sitting in to renew the blog and start adding to it again. I'll cover library stuff and politics and whatever else strikes my fancy.

Midterms and meetings

2007-10-23T11:44:00.000-04:00

Is this week over yet?

Between my midterm exam last week, the major homework assignment that I did and now have to redo (thanks Prof for changing things around at the last minute!), the meeting that I've been planning for Wednesday and for which I have to be at work at 6:30 am, and the lousy weather, not to mention the fact that I'm really congested right now and feel fairly miserable, I really need this week to be over.

Of course this weekend I have a ten page paper to write and I have to clean my apartment for my mom to visit next weekend. Who thought going to grad school and working full time was a good idea? Oh, wait, that was me.

Okay, the whining is over now, I just had to get that all out there.

What kind of reader?

2007-10-11T13:19:00.000-04:00

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

What are they thinking?

2007-10-04T14:01:00.001-04:00

Only the Bush administration could possibly think that it's a good idea to declare Child Health Day within 24 hours of vetoing a bill that would protect child health.

Just when you think things can't get any more surreal, reality has to disagree.

Addicted

2007-10-04T13:51:00.000-04:00

I have a new addiction to confess.

At a craft fair last weekend I bought a drop spindle and some dyed roving, and now I can't stop spinning. I completely skipped doing any homework last night I was so addicted to it. It's like magic, the way the fluffy wool turns into sleek, twisted thread so quickly. The first few feet I did were pretty bumpy and knarly looking, but once I got the hang of it and read a few different sets of instructions things were flying along and it got to be a very zen activity. I'm going to have to try really hard to contain myself and not do any spinning until all of my other work is done first.

The cat likes this new hobby too, but she has already discovered that the fluffy roving doesn't taste very good and is hard to eat.

Subway Suggestions

2007-09-26T16:58:00.000-04:00

If you don't know whether or not the train in front of you is the one you want, ask someone before you get on so that you don't have to shove people out of the way to get off when you figure out that it's the wrong train.

This message brought to you by the committee to end stupidity on public transportation. Please remember, CESPT says Stand on the Right!

Objectionable Content

2007-09-19T11:12:00.000-04:00

I came across this story yesterday about a woman who is refusing to return a library book because she objects to the content (it's a sex ed book for kids) and wants to keep it out of the hands of children. She also sent the library a letter and a check for the cost of the book.

This raises several questions for me. First, how is this going to do anything to keep the book away from kids as she claims to want? The library's simply going to buy a new copy, and with the added publicity that the book is receiving it may need to buy more than one as people will be curious to see what all the fuss is about. By making a big deal out of this she's virtually guaranteed that more people will read the book than might otherwise have done so. Plus, if she has children of her own (which I assume she does if she's looking at kid's books in the library) she now has a copy of the book sitting around her house that her kids could find and want to read - because everyone knows that no matter how well parents try to hide things they think their kids shouldn't see, the kids find all that stuff anyway.

Second, what the heck right does she think she has to be the moral arbiter of what's appropriate for other people? If she doesn't like the book no one's forcing her to look at it, but it might be just what someone else is looking for. It's the ultimate in arrogance to think that your opinion is the only right one and that what's true for you is true for everyone else, and that's exactly what this woman is doing.

Finally, since when did educating young people become so offensive? Shouldn't we want our kids to have the facts about things like health and science so that they can be responsible and make good decisions? Would she really prefer that kids learn everything they know about puberty and about reproductive health issues from whispered conversations on the playground?

Since banned books week is coming up at the beginning of October, I thought it was particularly funny that this is just another example of the ridiculous ways in which people try to control access to books they find objectionable for absurd reasons. I almost think that we should thank these folks, because usually these are the very same books that have something worthwhile to say and being banned only serves to make them more popular. They are in fact helping to spread the very ideas that they oppose, and I can't think of a more fitting reward than that.

Unintended Consequences

2007-09-12T16:47:00.000-04:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story this week about a few unintended consequences of the USA PATRIOT Act for Canadians.

Because the new spying laws in the U.S. are overly liberal, some Canadian provinces (so far British Columbia, Alberta, and Nova Scotia) have passed laws or regulations to restrict the storage of personal data on servers or computers in the U.S. This means that colleges, and presumably other companies, are forced to relocate data to servers in Canada or risk paying huge fines. In some cases it also means that laptops with personal info stored on them can't be taken from Canada to the U.S. because that would open them up to the possibility of being searched by U.S. law enforcement agencies. For some U.S. companies who do business in Canada this has mean moving servers up there to avoid breaking these new laws.

Ironically, as the article points out, the Canadian laws require data holders to tell someone when their personal information has been accessed while the U.S. laws forbid them from doing so. One of these days someone is going to end up in a terrible legal muddle over this, the only question is which set of laws will prevail in the end.