In the middle of dreading going to work tomorrow I started doing some serious blog surfing only to find a familiar name on the comments to this post at TTW. Yep, my fun and passionate library school classmate Josh Neff is out there with a really cool blog.
I'm sick, tired, and generally feeling sorry for myself. Why post anything? Because even in the midst of fighting off what is almost certainly a deadly case of the common cold and moving my best friend into her new apartment (where she's now spending a night with literally no furniture at all, or lamps, or computer), I had to laugh remembering the encyclopedia I found this week in our reference collection. The Encyclopedia of the Future sits there on our shelves... a pub date of 1996 proudly displayed on its shelf label... no kidding! Curious about the creators and their purpose, I glanced through the preface and learned that "a number of persons" affiliated with the project or writing entries for the project had died before the encyclopedia was finished. Somehow, in my semi-conscious state, this morbid detail struck me as funny. All I could imagine was centegenarians speculating about the future.
In all fairness, the encyclopedia seems to be an encyclopedia of trends that can help us see where we're headed. But it still makes me giggle every time I think of it.
Today was ARLD Day at the Arboretum just outside of Minneapolis. Aside from the thick clouds and persistent rain that kept us from taking our planned walk through the grounds after the day of meetings, it was a great day with three main take-away messages:
I'm so disappointed. I've been working for the last few hours to try to get myself into Second Life, but it's just not working. Apparently you can't run this game if you have a graphics card from Intel, which I do. Of course, I only figured this out after spending an eternity wandering through Intel's web site looking for an updated driver because the error message in SL said that my Intel driver was out of date and I needed to update it. They didn't say anything about "updating" it to a completely different company until I got to the tech support wiki.
I was so psyched. I'd have been named Pegasus Ingraham. Just roles off the tongue, doesn't it? But now I have to stay with my feet firmly planted in this life. I guess it could be worse... What if I had the wrong graphics card for this life?!?
Have fun trying new things, all you with better computers than mine. I'll be watching out for all the patrons of my current life while you meet and greet in that tantalizing space from which I am barred.
There's been a lot of talk in the biblioblogosphere over the last couple of days about the library space in Second Life, and I gotta say, I'm mightily intreagued. I don't know if my DSL will die or if my 3-year-old CPU will explode, but I think this weekend I'll have try it. Meanwhile, I'm getting read up on the subject. So far there are useful blog entries at See Also and TTW, or go strait to the Second Life Library Blog. I can see I'll be getting even less sleep than normal in the next few days... (The first time I ever stayed up all night was when I played Sims for the first time.)
Just as I'm lamenting the current state of Copyright Law, I hear from News.com that Congress, in it's infinite wisdom, is drafting a revision to current law that would make things much, much worse. If the new draft becomes law, it will become a crime to intend to violate copyright protections. That just smells of Big Brother...
Here's what the news article says about other changes in the law:
The proposed law scheduled to be introduced by Rep. Smith also does the following:
- Permits wiretaps in investigations of copyright crimes, trade secret theft and economic espionage. It would establish a new copyright unit inside the FBI and budgets $20 million on topics including creating "advanced tools of forensic science to investigate" copyright crimes.
- Amends existing law to permit criminal enforcement of copyright violations even if the work was not registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
- • Boosts criminal penalties for copyright infringement originally created by the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 from five years to 10 years (and 10 years to 20 years for subsequent offenses). The NET Act targets noncommercial piracy including posting copyrighted photos, videos or news articles on a Web site if the value exceeds $1,000.
- • Creates civil asset forfeiture penalties for anything used in copyright piracy. Computers or other equipment seized must be "destroyed" or otherwise disposed of, for instance at a government auction. Criminal asset forfeiture will be done following the rules established by federal drug laws.
- Says copyright holders can impound "records documenting the manufacture, sale or receipt of items involved in" infringements.
Just when I think it can't get worse...
This post, Digitization 101: Google and copyright (moral rights), and in this one, Diglet: Google Takes Down Miro Logo Art, each reference a Mercury News article that makes me fear for this nation's ability to do creative work.
Last week Google put up one of their signature logo-morphs that honored the artist Joan Miro, who's family promptly requested that Google remove the altered logo because:
``There are underlying copyrights to the works of Miro, and they are putting it up without having the rights,'' said Theodore Feder, president of Artists Rights Society. (see the Mercury News article)Now, I'm not a copyright lawyer by any means, so I may be way off base here, but I find it very hard to believe that this logo infringed on Miro's family's rights in any way. First off, this work was transformative more than derivative. It certainly didn't reduce the market value of the original, and it could even have increased interest in the original. In fact, the use seems to fall squarely within the language of Section 107 (the fair use section) of the US Code. This seems to be comment, or even news reporting, more than anything else.
Last term, six professors accepted the challenge to road-test Moodle and Sakai, the two finalists in our quest for a course management system. At the end of the term, each professor and many of their students took surveys. And now a group of IT people, Web department people, library people, and a faculty member are sorting through the survey results to see if they can give us some clues about which system would work best for our campus in the long term.
Unfortunately, after working for a week to analyze only about 55 survey results (ending at 2am last night, I might add), I've realized that our job is even bigger than it seemed at first. I'm not quite sure why I didn't anticipate this, because I haven't participated in any project yet that hasn't become much more complex and labor-intensive than seemed possible at the outset. It turns out that we have to cope with several related issues. In addition to testing the functions of each system we are also:
I spent the weekend crunching numbers (in the hopes of being able to make some meaning out of the survey responses in our CMS evaluation project) and reading Our Underachieving Colleges by Derek Bok (the once and current president of Harvard). The CMS eval headache will have to wait for its own post. Let just say "The Saga Continues." But Bok's book is fascinating.
As part of his look at the history of colleges and universities in this country and how they've arrived at the curricular and pedagogical methods currently in vogue, he points out that most curricular reviews take place in the complete absence of a clear and defined list of goals. Nobody has mapped out what colleges should be teaching their students in the course of four years, or, if they have, the curriculum does not actually support those goals. So Bok lists 8 goals that he thinks are actually actionable as well as being universally important. According to Bok, institutions teaching undergraduates should be teaching:
But what constitutes critical thinking? See if you can see the librarian's role in this list of skills from page 68 of Bok's book.
Nationwide polls have found that more than 90 percent of faculty members in the United States consider it [teaching critical thinking] the most important purpose of undergraduate education. In view of the wide variety of interests and backgrounds represented in a typical college faculty, such a strong consensus is impressive (pages 67-68).
...an ability to reorganize and define problems clearly, to identify the arguments and interests on all sides of an issues, to gather relevant facts and appreciate their relevance, to perceive as many plausible solutions as possible, and to exercise good judgment in choosing the best of these alternatives after considering the evidence and using inference, analogy, and other forms of ordinary reasoning to test the cogency of the arguments.After reading this list and recognizing in it those ACRL information literacy standards that just haven't been resonating with my faculty, I began to wonder why librarians have chosen to develop their own jargonized definition of a habit of mind that faculty obviously feel very strongly about. Why can't we draw upon the vocabulary that faculty are already using to show that developing sophisticated student scholarship (which is the classroom interpretation of information literacy) is part of critical thinking? Why can't we make an argument for integrating this type of critical thinking into curriculum because it is the content faculty are teaching rather than something extra that has to be crammed into syllabi? So far, I've been able to "convert" one faculty member to this view... only 200 or so more to go.
So, remember when I said that our all-staff meeting to discuss the draft of our 10-year vision statement was so surprisingly un-horrible? Well, apparently I wasn't the only one because now we're all supposed to meet again this Wednesday to discuss a draft of our 3-year strategic plan. Meetings breed faster than rabbits.
I just got out of a two-hour brainstorming session with our web team, and WOW! We might be getting some new tools made specially for us (sometime in the next few years).
It all started at CIL 2006. Well, it started long before I started working here, but it had been back-burnered until last week when I mentioned that I'd like to explore the option of reorganizing our subject research guides to aid in resource discovery as well as resource location. I'd been inspired by Chad Boeninger's Biz Wiki. He had everything that normally went into a subject page and more, and (and this was the kicker) it was all keyword searchable! Finally, a subject page that doesn't require students to know what they're looking for before they even start!
So last week at our department meeting I mentioned that I'd like to try the wiki thing, and suddenly everyone got very excited about transforming our research guides from glorified handouts into something more dynamic and useful. Then, the magic that can happen when you work with a knowledgeable, engaged, and explorative group of people began to happen. We wondered what we actually wanted this new thing to do, and this led to a suggestion to brainstorm with the campus web team about our ideal tool and see if they'd be able to build it for us. Then today we ran all of our disjointed goals and hopes and fears past the team, showed examples of web tools that do some of what we want, and talked through possible architectures, bits, pieces, metadata, and functions with people who do this sort of thing for a living. (They already developed the database-driven content management system that our college uses.)
So, here are some of what we said we want. We want the ability to:
I'm not quite sure why it feels like today was three times as long as a normal day. It could have something to do with the fact that I only had 2, count-um, 2 reference questions while at my desk shift today. It could have something to do with the minor slogging away I did on some projects that have no end in sight, so there's no sense of accomplishment. Or it could have something to do with my upcoming evening, which will be spent reading up for one meeting I'm having tomorrow and analyzing survey results for another meeting I'm having tomorrow. Nothing like a little blog-surfing to turn a three-hour prep period into a five- or six-hour prep period... So maybe I should remind myself how much I love my job and get back to it. I've got so much to get up here, but it'll have to wait until tomorrow. Pleasant dreams, all of you who will get to sleep tonight.
I'm torn. I love the idea of tagged catalogs and user comments, but I'm also still in my honeymoon period with controlled vocabulary (having only graduated from library school 11 months ago). I guess I'm stuck here in the middle on the vocabulary issue just like I'm suspended between genX and genY.
For me, it all comes down to control and trust. Well, it may also have something to do with the fact that I'm located at a four-year college, so trust becomes even more of an issue. I've seen the notes scribbled in the margins of used books I've bought (most notably the copy of Frankenstein I read in grad school in which some over-eager and under-informed student had wondered which child Shelley was pregnant with when she made reference to a "pregnant pause"). I've seen the chalk scribbles on the college walkways proclaiming that world peace can be achieved by ... um ... love -- very, very explicit love.
I want to trust that tagging would be a powerful and vibrant addition to a catalog. If my library said they'd be instituting user tagging tomorrow, I'd go for it with good spirit and gusto. But I'd also have nagging doubts. A month ago, though, I also had nagging doubts about the usefulness of blogs....
Well, this has gotten a lot longer than I intended, but I was thinking a lot about this as I sat at the reference desk tonight. I'd gone back to look at a message I'd saved from the O'Reilly Radar about Wikipedia and the Future of Free Culture which contained this quote:
The secret of Wikipedia's content-generating process, Wales explained, is the nurturing and shaping of trust, instead building everything around distrust.I think nurturing and shaping of trust is the heart and soul of the library of the future. I also think that the "nurturing and shaping" of trust does not mean giving up all control (which, to be fair, has never been intimated by anyone I've heard talk about the subject). Plants don't often flourish if they're simply dumped on the ground. They require feeding, watering, weeding, and sometimes even training. I'm eager to see what my somewhat unruly users could do for resource discovery if given the proper environment and ideal amount of training and oversight (what ever that "ideal" amount might be).
This post, ISHUSH: using a book, should be required reading for many of my freshmen. Hey, even some seniors could use a good refresher!
Let me preface this by saying that I'm pretty good at not being intimidated by library patrons. I'm generally shy and avoid confrontation almost as strenuously as I avoid filling my car up with gas theses days, but when I have my public face on I'm somehow able to be assertive, confident, and even out-going! You know where this is going...
Well, I was sitting at the reference desk recently, thinking what I could accomplish in the 20 minutes before the end of my shift, when I noticed The Patron. This guy has the magical ability to cause all reference librarians within screaming distance vanish into thin air. (Note: none of my colleagues are the shrinking-violet types, either.) "It's ok," I thought, "he's probably just coming to warn me that he's about to log on to the computer." (For him, pressing all three buttons -- Control, Alt, Delete -- at the same time is a feat that requires careful practice, limbering up, and a spotter.)
He oozed into the reference area, not quite looking at me, not quite not looking at me. He seemed to decided against bothering the librarian who, even though there's no one waiting for help and she's clearly sitting there doing nothing, must be too busy to help him. Then he changed his mind, only to lose heart once more, steel himself, and finally come to stand obliquely to the side of the desk and turning himself to face the room at large rather than the poor cornered librarian.
"I think," he said, to nobody in particular, fingering a stack of papers that he has clutched to his chest, "I think my problem will take quite a while. Maybe you shouldn't work on it while you're at the desk? Maybe I should come back when you're freer?"
Goodness, no! my brain screamed. There was no way I was going to put this off. Like ripping off a Band-Aid, I told myself, get it over with now or never. Configuring my face into my most hopeful, helpful expression, I suggested that we take a look at what the "problem" was and then decide on a timeline.
He inched his way around to the side of the desk that has a chair for patrons to sit at while we navigate and manipulate the various library and web resources together, but he didn't sit down. No, he preferred to hover, but the chair was in his way, but he didn't think it right to move the chair... He thought about sitting, but then decided against it as it was clear that the librarian would just look at his problem, throw up her hands, and suggest that she work on it over the weekend and get back to him... only she didn't. So was it appropriate to sit? No, she'll give up any second now.
His "problem" was tracking down an unknown article from an unknown magazine by an unknown author. All the info we had was that it contained a reproduction of a painting of a particular place by a particular author. Oh, and it was published sometime before 1932... No problem.
"I've already checked Reader's Guide," he said glumly, for all the world like Eeyore saying he'd looked everywhere for his tail. (For what? I wanted to know, but couldn't bring myself to ask. Already, he'd begun killing the reference librarian in me.)
"Let's just see if we can get in by the back door," I said, stalling for time while all my knowledge of our databases, our print indexes, and even web searching started fleeing to join my vanished colleagues. I got on to Google Images and found a thumbnails of the picture in question, but not any references to a magazine reproduction.
The Patron just sighed. He'd known it, it was impossible, and this librarian really doesn't know what she's doing, and maybe he should just leave, she'd be sure to give up in just a second.
I could only think of one database that we have that indexes back that far, and I sure wasn't going to go read Reader's Guide from cover to cover for a decade or so! So I got into this database and executed a couple of searches. Nothing. And I couldn't make myself concentrate. All I wanted to do was get up and run from the room, go home, hide under my bed, and hug my cat for comfort.
Still sounding bright and hopeful, I suggested that we "try another place." "I've never been able to get this database to go back that far," I warned (already preparing him and myself for my inevitable defeat), "but every once in a while it surprises me." I executed a search...nothing.
"You've got the wrong years," he moans, the depth of his hopelessness stripping all whine from his voice and leaving only defeat.
"So I have, thanks for catching that!" I'm talking way too fast now. Is there no end to the ways I can look stupid in front of this man?
Another search... 10 beautiful hits! And number 7 is IT!!!! (At least, with no full text attached, and no abstract, I can't be sure, but the title is just about as descriptive as it could be and indicates that this article contains exactly what we need it to contain.)
"Why can't we see the article?" he asks, refusing to allow any hope of resource discovery taint his disappointment in the stupid librarian had said this database didn't go back that far when it clearly does.
I informed him that he'd be able to interlibrary loan it and see it, free of charge, sometime in the next week.
"Ok," he sighed. If that was the best we could do, he'd try to cope with it. It was, after all, too much to hope for that this librarian could not only find what he needed in under 5 minutes but also produce the magazine for him in the same amount of time.
He gathered his things and started inching away from the desk, not quite turned away from me, not quite turned toward the door.
"You should keep up on your databases better," he suggests to the room in general, half-way to the door.
Catching up on tips gathered by my aggregation over the weekend, here are some new entries in my Furl.
I guess it was kind of inevitable. With so many lists, each of which lists different facets of web 2.0, all that was lacking was a list of lists! And here it is:
Zulu in Silicon Valley: A List of Web 2.0 Lists
While we're on the topic of customer service, take a look at this post from Library Garden:
Library Garden: On underwear, beanies, and other fashion statements...
Last Friday, my best friend couldn't get her car to run. We both worked for a couple of hours calling, searching the web while waiting on hold, talking to service stations, and searching the web some more to find a place that could service her little asian car, and then to find a tow service that wouldn't cost her the equivalent of a week's salary. Finally, she headed out to her car to wait for the towing service while I started the hunt-and-call process for a rental car so that she could get to work (the place that could fix her car didn't do the loaner thing). Well, we found a place that not only didn't break the bank, but also picked up their customers and dropped them off for free! What a deal!
But so far, that wasn't customer service; it was just good business. The customer service comes in later, after her car is fixed and she's trying to figure out how to time things so that she can drive her rental to the rental company (35 miles south), get a ride back home, take a cab to the service station (3 miles south of home), and then drive to work (50 miles north) all between the time the rental place opens (8:00) and the time she has to be at work (9:00). But when she called the rental place to ask when they opened, the guy on the other end did just what we're taught to do in a reference interview. He recognized this as a "compromised" information need, and went questing for the real need. And when he found out that she had this time crunch, he offered to have her just drive the rental to the service station and give him a call. He'd pick up the rental from the service station... no extra charge. Not only did this completely make my friend's day, but it also ensured that she and everyone she knows has a warm and fuzzy feeling for rental places in general and this company in particular.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could figure out how to make this happen in the library world? I've been struck by a few posts recently in the biblioblogosphere that have dealt with this issue of customer service, especially this post from Library Garden about Nordstrom's culture of serving the customer without being tied to rules and regulations. (It was with this in mind that I [gasp] allowed a student to check out a reference book last week.)
Why can't we offer to photocopy articles and run them to our "customers" when they call to see if we subscribe the journal housing a particular article? For that matter, we could even scan and email articles that aren't available online.
I know I'm not the first librarian to wonder "just what can I quantify and graph that will come close to representing what I do in a day?"
Currently, as far as I know, the public services in our library collect statistics in many forms: usage statistics from most of our online databases, gate counts periodically throughout the school year, circulation statistics, number of questions answered every hour of every day at the reference desk, number and location of people in the reference area at different times in the day, number of classes taught and how many students we reach through those classes, and number and length of individual appointments and correspondences we have with students and faculty. These can all be graphed quite nicely.
Now here's the rub: these things don't actually measure the impact we're having on our community. Unfortunately, "impact" is kind of subjective, and can often happen in unforeseen and invisible ways. So I'm lost. I'm having statistician's block, I guess.
Besides, it's too beautiful outside to think about statistics. I can't believe I just wrote a whole post while sitting on my porch! I love spring.
Want a list of Web 2.0 sites and services? Well, there is one, and it's been creatively named the "Web 2.0 List." Fittingly, it's in beta, and users can rate and comment on items on the list.
Thanks to the O'Reilly Radar for pointing this out.
I kind of hate to admit it, but this morning's all-staff meeting was actually stimulating. This doesn't mean that I think we should have them more frequently, of course, but today went exceptionally well. Now, there were moments... there always are when you get 30-ish people together in a room furnished with 28 or 29 chairs, food sitting there (like desert placed on the table before the main meal) waiting for "after the meeting," and something as meaty as our organization's direction for the next 10 years on the agenda. But I came out of the meeting realizing that I really have found my dream job. This organization values the future and the past just enough to experiment with the new, preserve the best of the old (collections and traditions alike), and build it into the conscious structure of the organization that each of us should be scanning the horizon for innovative tools, methods, and services (see my post on Our Vision and Watch List below).
One of the points that drew the most discussion this morning was the method by which we would watch those tools, methods, and services on our "Watch Lists," and the staff at large didn't even balk at my co-worker's suggestion that we create and update an internal blog! It's very refreshing to know that my department (made up primarily of late-20s and early-30s types) aren't the tech-outliers in the library any more. It was also very refreshing to hear our director saying, "We've got a community of people here that know how to figure things out, find information about things, and teach things to other people, so take advantage of your co-workers." This is the key to getting over Millennial Discomfort and continuing to do what librarians do best: providing timely and excellent information service.
I'll be interested to see how this all plays out.
It's library week at HigherEd BlogCon! Up this week: discussions of blogging, podcasting, RSS, Wikies, IM, and Leveraging Web 2.0, and more. I would list all of the discussions, but you can RSS it or (even better) view it on my scrolling RSS box here.
I'm really excited about our library's new idea for keeping a "Watch List." But first, the backstory.
Our library is in the process of creating its vision statement. It is both an exciting and an impossible task to envision what our library will look like in ten years. So my vote is to envision our attitude rather than our actual holdings, duties, and services. And luckily, as I look at the draft of the document we'll be discussing tomorrow morning, and I'm pleasantly surprised. Here's why: I was at the all-staff meeting we had to brainstorm our ten-year vision statement, and I heard a lot said at that meeting that just oozed Millennial Discomfort (see my previous post) and its cousin Technology-Will-Change-Life-As-We-Know-It-itis. This notwithstanding, there's some pretty good stuff in this draft. For example:
Over the next 10 years, the library will:There's more, but that gives you a taste.
- Experiment with new service models in response to changes in scholarly communication and faculty and student needs. We will adapt our services to meet new user needs, take advantage of emerging technologies, support changes in pedagogy, and contain costs.
- Transform into an organization encompassing the full range of information resources needed to support learning and teaching. We will continue to expand our expertise in the management of visual and sound resources, text, data and other genres as needed.
- enhance intellectual life on campus through a lively program of interdisciplinary discourse that celebrates books an ideas, nourishes intellectual curiosity, and provokes a sense of wonder in the liberal arts.
The Reference and Instruction department will keep and eye on:I hope this fosters a real sense of informed (not hysterical) interest in the future and excitement in new technologies.
- Search technology, including federated searching, new search interfaces, new ways to display the search results, and new models for integrating metadata from a variety of sources.
- Image and multimedia search and management applications.
- Data & GIS in a liberal arts setting and how those fit in with our college initiatives.
- Social software and the research applications for using them.
- New web publishing models and how students use them for research (wikipedia, mashups, ... basically web 2.0).
- Applications that help users organize their research and information (personal information management, bibliographic management tools, etc).
- Future reference models at peer libraries, including virtual reference and new appointment models.
- Licensed streaming video as an alternative to videotape and DVD
Ok, now this is cool! I'd just like to see the lens made bigger... but I'm picky. The idea of being able to interpret just those parts of the digitized handwriting that you need, though, is great. This could revolutionize everything from American Memory to in-house archives!
Jill's post Digitization 101: Using a Magic Lens has a lot more detail.
I have a love-hate relationship with Sunday reference hours. The library's full of students and projects are due tomorrow (the traffic really picks up just as I'm leaving at 10:00 at night!), there's an intresting energy in the place and I get to take a day off later. But at the same time, working all afternoon, evening, and night at the reference desk is kind of draining. And besides, it's finally BEAUTIFUL outside.
In his essay "The Inevitable Gen X Coup," Brian Mathews says that "MARC is dead." I don't think so. I think MARC is under-exploited. Add a touch of FRBR and some interconnection with user metadata, holdings information, and the like, and MARC is still a hugely viable and valuable source of information. It's not MARC that's dead, it's the container we're using to manipulate and display that bibliographic information. Well, I guess OPACs are "not dead yet" (as my favorite British comedians would say), but they're moving in that direction.
(Cool! I just discovered FRBR has its very own blog!)
I was at Paul Miller's session at CIL where he made the now-famous analogy between new web services and legos. Specifically, he was talking about the ways in which new web applications are made with whole sets of loosely associated and interchangeable bits. (Think Firefox and its
