New Email/Calendar System: Day One

This morning when I arrived at work, only one email appeared in my inbox. The long-anticipated day had come. All my email had been migrated from our imap server to our bran'-spankin' new Zimbra system.

Until today, members of our campus have used not one but several email systems. Faculty and academic staff were on one (but could use one of at least three supported access methods, including webmail and two desktop clients). Administrative and other staff were on a completely separate system (GroupWise). I'm not sure what students were on (though I know it wasn't GroupWise). So as much as we've all been dreading the migration headache, clearly we needed a change.

So today I became one of the first groups of people on campus to migrate over to Zimbra, but most of my day was spent in meetings, so I didn't have a whole lot of time to tinker, play, and futz. So the impressions I have are just that: impressions. And I'm not sure if it's wishful thinking, the "oooh, shiny" factor, or something more substantial that makes me generally want to like it. But I generally want to like it, and I certainly do anticipate the joys of being able to search for common free time when setting up meetings (this will be the first time our whole campus has had a single calendaring system, too). I also like the tagging and message search functions.

But there are a couple of strangenesses, too. For example, there's no way to copy a message to a folder; you have to just flat out move it. I can't customize my view quite the way I'd like. Things seem to take several clicks rather than one or two. I don't think there are any notifications for new messages, or any indication if you're in the calendar view that there may be new messages waiting for you if you click over to mail view. But most puzzling (though not Zimbra's fault), is that I now have three complete calendars, each of which need updating. My palm needs all my information so that it can go with me to meetings. My google calendar needs at least some of my information, but exactly how much will depend on departmental decisions that haven't yet been made. And I'm strangely fond of my published availability calendar, which wouldn't be possible if I dropped my google calendar. Then there's the zimbra calendar, which must be used if people are to be able to easily schedule meetings with me via the new all-campus system. Something's gotta give, but I have to keep them all up until I figure out what I can drop without hampering my work and that of my colleagues.

Planning for New Trading Cards

Today was the first of three solid days of meetings for me. We've blocked off these three days for my department to work on the collaborative summer projects that have been stacking up and not getting done. And today, we didn't do so badly. We learned to use the "Create Lists" function in III's Millennium interface, saw our departmental profile in Blackwell's online collection development interface, developed our departmental goals for the coming school year, and took care of several other conversations that needed to happen but haven't really had a proper venue. What's more, that's exactly what we said we'd accomplish today, so that felt good.

Tomorrow we're going to talk about citation management software, make decisions about databases we have and want, and train each other on some of our new databases or on databases that have changed platform (so, for instance, the social sciences librarian will introduce us to a couple of new social sciences databases that might be useful to us and that we might want to know about as we work at the reference desk).

And then on Wednesday we'll talk about our new trading cards. This meeting always makes me uncomfortable.


The first year I was here it was uncomfortable because I was afraid it'd be hokey. Well... it kind of was, but in the best possible way. I absolutely loved my first trading card. I didn't know how we could top it. So last year I was worried we'd change to a new design or color scheme or... whatever, that'd ruin it. I'd grown really fond of my card. But last year's card turned out even better than the year before, so that fear was averted.


This next year, there's talk of changing our theme. So this year I've started mourning my current card again. I really love my current card. I've grown used to it. I feel like it fits me well... like a well-worn pair of jeans. Only way cooler. How could a new design possibly be better, I wonder?

Back Online

This is just a note to say I'm back.

My blogging vacation was great. I sat on the porch, read Harry Potter, read a few New Yorkers (now I'm only behind by 3 weeks!), watched the grass grow, and generally took a true and thorough vacation. I've got a hefty to-do list here at work, including slogging through email and attending triply my normal load of meetings, but even so I'm not dreading the day, so I guess the vacation worked it's magic (though I wouldn't say no to about 3 or 4 more months of it).

Blogging Vacation

You may have noticed that blogging around these parts has slowed to trickles and little spurts lately. And strangely enough, this isn't for lack of topics. Seriously. I've never been one for keeping lists of posts I want to write, but lately I've developed a ridiculously long list of topics, none of which have made it here.

Well, I've been busy with both work and non-work stuff, and a little bit more susceptible to stress than usual, and a little, well, blah. Fine, but blah.

So I'm going to take next week off from blogging, from stress, from stuff. I'm going to get some power-relaxing in, some reading, and some staring into space. Then I'll be back and thinking about tackling that list of bloggable topics. Or not. Maybe I'll have a whole new bunch of topics to blog about by then. See you then!

Introducing High School Students to a College Library

Every summer a group of high school students, gleaned from high schools all over the United States, comes to campus for a week-long program called CLAE (the Carleton Liberal Arts Experience). There are various courses they can take (everything from "how to apply to college" to "the Harlem Renaissance") with the dual purpose of introducing them to the idea of a liberal arts college and giving them a little bit of experience living and studying on a college campus. The emphasis is really on empowering them to think that college is possible, doable, interesting, intense, and fun.

And every year, one of the classes brings all the kids to the library. For the past three summers I've worked with the history librarian to prepare the students to engage in a modernized Washington/Du Bois debate. But this year the class and professor changed, so the history librarian and I started from scratch to build a class for students studying the Harlem Renaissance.

My part of the class preparations was to develop an exercise that would introduce the students to the 5 reference sets they'd need to navigate as they prepared for their final presentations. But the big question was how to make it easy for them to pick their sets out from the shelves and shelves of unfamiliar reference books, while still letting them see the sets in context rather than pulled out and put on a cart just for this assignment. Well, to ease this particular rub, I made signs for each set that had a full scan of the cover of the one of the set's volumes, and then a cut-out image of the set's place on the shelf.

Then I put these signs up on the shelves above each reference set.

That way, when the students came back to do their research after all of the librarians had gone home for the night, they'd be able to go back to the sets we'd shown them in class. I hope it worked for them.

Oh, and the exercise itself sounded great on paper, but would need more clarification next year. I still like the idea of it, but there were some recurring questions I should have anticipated.

Where Working Groups Break Down

Carleton and St Olaf share a catalog, so there are several working groups between the two schools designed to make this collaboration possible. I've been on the Public Access Working Group (which oversees the function and appearance of the catalog itself), and there are various other groups (Cataloging, Serials, Gov Docs, Etc.) that work to keep the two schools in sync as much as possible. And generally these divisions make sense. We either know what falls under our general purviews, or we know which other groups we need to work with to get a particular project done. My group, for example, often has occasion to work with the serials group and the cataloging group, since the catalog interface is fairly directly influenced by those two groups.

But every once in a while, these divisions are a little bit vexing. And no, it's not when there's a major issue that cuts across all of our areas of interest. That's easy to solve: just call a mass meeting and make sure that representatives from each group are there. No, what's vexing is when there's a little problem, a little change, that could fall equally under the domains of half a dozen working groups. It seems like overkill to call a mass meeting, but lots of people need to know about the changes, and no one group is guaranteed to have a complete grasp on the issue.

Such is the case with a MARC field that was recently brought to my attention. It's the 035 field, and we sometimes need it for gov docs so that MARCive records get overlaid properly. But apparently it's recently been reassigned by the people who assign fields in MARC, so now [See comments for clarification] It's a "system number" full of what looks to me like gobbledygook. So, already this affects the gov docs group and the cataloging group, right? Well, in our case it also affects the Public Access group because the 035 field is set to display with the label "Gov Doc #" in our catalog. (See the bottom of this record, for example, or this record for a government document.) Each group thinks it's somebody else's issue, so none of us are thinking about it, but it's such a teensy little problem it doesn't seem worth the effort of organizing a meeting of all three groups. And the catalogers who are actually working with the problem didn't really know who to talk to about it in the first place.

It's it funny how it's so easy to collaborate on the big issues, and so thorny to try it with the little ones?

One of Those Days... Again

The way things have been going, I could have just come to work for a few hours on Monday and then not come in the entire rest of the week. Every day, I was thwarted in my attempts to work on my projects, and what's worse, all the work I did do (and I was remarkably focused this week... lots to do) ended up vanishing before the end of each day. Sounds incredible, I know, but it's true.

We have a guy who lives in town and spends hours and hours each summer in the library looking up the lives of the rich and famous from the days of yore. He's mentally unstable, a little bit frightening, and incredibly time-consuming for whomever happens to be on call for reference duty. And this week, that unluckly librarian was, you guessed it, ME.

That would have been enough to throw off my productivity for the week, but no. I also got to experience the Revenge of the Evil Content Management System. Every so often (usually a couple of times a day), our CMS would misinterpret my clicking on "Save" to mean "Erase All My Work, Purge All the Saved Versions of My Work Back To Last January, And Then Save." The general mantra for avoiding loss of work is to Save Often... Yeah, well that's exactly what would kill me with this bug. What is a girl to do? So I developed a habit of switching to HTML code view (which the web developers have given only a few people access to see), copying the code into a text file, and THEN saving. But here's the kicker, just before it decides to erase all my work, it also won't let me into the code view. So today the web people set me up with an error console and instructions on how to copy code from several different places whenever these errors happened. Well, apparently I had enough errors today that they think they'll be able to locate the bug... which means I had quite a few errors today... which means I'm not a happy camper.

Then there were all the normal interruptions that come with being the reference on-call person. ... The phone rings and an innocent voice says that she's off campus this summer and wanted to download EndNote and get started setting up her reference library in preparation for her senior thesis project. Heh. Oh the fun-ness. Downloading, installing, creating a library, figuring out how to log in for off-campus access to databases, searching databases, saving records, and importing them into EndNote. Thankfully she thought she could probably wait till she comes back to campus learn how to cite while she writes or create stand-alone bibliographies. ... add to this finding maps from the mid-19th century, finding research on free musical improvisation and it's link to different world cultures, and figuring out what obscure African language a speaker was referencing when he gave a talk that now has to be transcribed. It was quite a reference week, and there's one more day to go.

With all of this, the only thing that's saved me from finally losing the last shreds of composure was my weaving (pictures). For the first time since moving here, I've warped my loom and spent half an hour or so every evening weaving dishtowels for a gift. The rhythmic swish... thunk... swish... thunk as each thread slips into place is incredibly therapeutic. My cat doesn't agree. He spends most of his time sticking his paw under the loom room door and whining that he wants to help play with strings. But for me, it's been the best excuse to think about absolutely nothing for stretches of time every evening.

Comments: Terms of Service

I've been thinking about a blog post I ran across a while ago about laws that apply to bloggers, specifically point 7 on that list of 12 laws: Who owns user-developed content and can you delete it? This reminded me that comments people write here are their own, and that I may not have the right to delete them even if they're threatening or offensive. According to the law, I need a "terms of service" in order to be able to delete any such content.

I have never received any such comments and I hope I never do, but just in case, here are my terms of service.

I reserve the right to delete any comment left on this blog if I think that the comment is inappropriate or harmful in any way.

I hope that I never have to exercise these rights.

Wikipedia Could Help Search Engines Understand Names?

The Search Engine Watch Blog just pointed me to a post that pointed me to a paper entitled "Large-Scale Named Entity Disambituation Based on Wikipedia Data" (PDF) by Silviu Cucerzan of Microsoft. Most of the paper is technical and algorithmic greek to me, but this one sentence makes perfect sense to me (or rather, the first half of the sentence makes sense to me and the rest should have been its own sentence).

The application on a large scale of such an entity extraction and disambiguation system could result in a move from the current space of words to a space of concepts, which enables several paradigm shifts and opens new research directions, which we are currently investigating, from entity-based indexing and searching of document collections to personalized views of the Web through entity-based user bookmarks. (page 9, my emphasis)

One of the main gripes about web search has been that it can't benefit (at least not very well) from human knowledge of the relationships between words. It matches letters in a row while directories gather pages based on concepts. But then, directories got out of hand and people couldn't keep up with them, and then they all turned into search engines no matter how much they still tried to look like directories... Well, if this thing gets off the ground, we could have the best of both worlds. We could have the scale of search with the power of directories.

Another source of this conceptual linking that's so powerful and so difficult to teach to computers may be the Google Book Project. Think of all of those indexes to all of those books. Surely we could harness the power of generations of indexers to map concepts. How hard could it be? ;)

[Updated to fix wonky grammar.]

Keeping Up, Progress, Change, and All That Jazz

While I was on vacation last week, I marked a bunch of posts to "keep new" until I'd have time to go back and read them in a way that would do them justice, and this week I've been slowly chipping away at my marked list. I'm not done yet, but so far I've been really impressed by the amount and quality of the writing that happened that week. Apparently librarians think and write well on the last week of June.

Anyway, one of the posts that I marked to read later was Mark's post about keeping up. "Why does keeping up always mean looking forward?" he asks. Why can't it also include looking back to learn from our past.

I've always been a big fan of looking back and figuring out why people think/thought the way they do. As a new professional, a large part of my "keeping up" time is spent "catching up" so that I can understand the world in which I'm making my home. In fact, it's such a big part of my subconscious work (and I think also that of the other new professionals I work with), that I'd argue it's lack of face time in the library literature does not, in fact, mirror the reality of professional activity. Instead, I think catching up happens in the background, and I think it stays there for a couple of reasons.

First, for those of us that aren't new, a lot of this stuff is old news, so the newbies among us tend to catch up in private so we don't bore our colleagues with information we think they already know. (Notice, they may not actually already know, or remember, but who wants to run the risk?) This is precisely the reason I was shy about an essay I wrote responding to a two-year-old article on blogging. It was new to me and I had a strong reaction to it, so I blogged my reaction, but I was pretty sure everyone would be bored by it or annoyed with me for wasting their time with old news.

Both keeping and catching up both take time, too, so prioritizing becomes an issue.

And then there's the less-functional reason for keeping history in the background: it's uncool, unshiny. People don't get speaking invitations for explicating extinct library theories.

I'm not saying that these are good reasons for not emphasizing the library lit of yore. They're just reasons. And I'm not quite sure why I felt the need to come up with those reasons, but I guess I was intrigued by Mark's observation and wondered what might explain it. I'm often discouraged with how little "keeping up" I can do in a week/month/year, and I'm naturally disinclined to like change (I know, I know... I deserve 40 lashes with a wet noodle for saying that, please wait while I administer them and explain that I'm not against progress, just against change...) so conversations about these ideas pique my interest.

Licensing Permissions from the CCC

For the two or three of you that haven't heard, the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) has decided to license permissions to copyrighted material (note that on the left-hand side of that screen you can read an overview of the license itself in PDF). They say that this will be convenient (well yeah, you've already paid) and that you'll gain "confidence" and "peace of mind."

As much as I hate to say it, I think they'll gain a lot of customers on those last two points alone. Nothing makes people squirm as much as copyright permissions. Everyone always doubts their fair use analysis and forgets that "multiple copies for classroom use" is written right into the fair use clause of the law.

But why might you not want to sign up for that license? James Boyle of the Financial Times has a great piece on that, as does Peter Hirtle of the LibraryLaw blog (his analysis is here). In short, here are the key issues as I see them (both of which figure large in Hirtle's post):

• Paying for permission when you don't have to erodes fair use arguments in the future by increasing the market value of the work.
• Permissions come in many shapes and sizes. What is the use of licensing permissions from the CCC when we already pay licensing fees from databases, for example?
  

I would hate to see my library go this route, especially since I imaging that the CCC fee structures are based on a fairly -er- "optimistic" interpretation of fair use. And yet I feel sympathy for libraries that either don't have the staff to go through the permissions process, or don't have the training to determine fair use on their own.

At the same time, just writing that last sentence makes me feel like I've just said, "It's just too bad some kids don't have the wherewithal to learn to read..." I recognize that licensing will be an attractive option, but I think it'll cripple us.

[Updated to remove typographical error]

Thinking about the Future of the Catalog: MnObe Moving Forward

For the last year and a half, the five liberal arts colleges known as MnObe (pronounced min-OH-bee and derived from Minnesota Oberlin Group Libraries) have been thinking collectively about our library catalogs. We started at very different points (ranging from "what we've got works pretty well" to "what is this thing we're using and where are the punch-card computers it seems to match?"). Then Roy Tennant came and talked to us and everybody got pretty excited about the idea of a next generation catalog. And I was pretty sure we'd stay that way... excited about the idea of change.

But then we held a "debate" between five teams of librarians each proposing an alternative to our current systems. Our biggest surprise that day was the amount of agreement between groups and audience members about a) the need for change and b) the types of things that need to change. (Here's a quick list of features and functions we liked, none of which are surprising.) At the conclusion of that meeting, the directors of our libraries charged a group of volunteers to actually map out our movement forward.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, this group of volunteers met, thought, discussed, and drafted a report. You can read it on the wiki if you want, or the PDF (which is prettier). It's definitely a first step, but the group felt that we needed to clear up the first step first. You'll notice, though, that we clearly and explicitly state that we want some kind of drastic change in the near future, and we map out a few key actions that will start us moving toward that change.

Now it's been delivered to the MnObe directors. We'll see what happens. I'm having to work a lot harder to keep from getting too excited now that we've actually formally recommended action.

Outing Myself

Well, I finally decided to put a link to my blog from my professional web site. I'd been laboring under the delusion that taking this step would send students flooding to my blog where they would read things like "Wow, I really dropped the ball on that class." Surely you can understand why that might make me pause. But then I realized that students only visit my calendar page. They don't care what committees I'm on, or the presentations I've given, or the papers I've written. So I buried the link at the very bottom of that boring page.

Which begs the question, why link at all if I put it in a place that nobody is likely to see? The short answer is, I don't know. I guess now I can pretend to myself that I'm not hiding this little project from the people I work with every day. But really nothing has changed.

Firefox Search Plugins for All

One of my co-workers has started experimenting with custom search plugins for Firefox. So far she has several ready to go, and they're listed on her site. Searching our catalog and A to Z list right from the browser are my two favorites.

She made these using SearchPlugins.net, which apparently makes creation, editing, and other maintenance of plugins pretty easy.

Blogging, Public or Private?

Sarah Ford is doing research on bloggers' attitudes about what is public and what is private online. Here's what she says:

That’s right, the survey is officially live as of ten minutes or so ago. If you’re a “personal blogger”, please fill it out, and pass it on to your friends.