I received this email recently from a person whom I don’t know. He mentions that he noticed that I haven’t been writing a lot lately, but perhaps I’d be interested in publishing something by someone else? Here’s an excerpt:
Dear Mr. Lawson,
… The attached article isn’t by me, but it is something that I have found and thought you might be interested in. After [other library bloggers names] refused to publish it, you were the first one I thought of.
The article, or position paper can be thought of as a “provocative statement,” not unlike those from the Taiga Forurm which you have written about so eloquently in the past. But unlike those statements, this piece goes on to explain its reasoning and make a case for its provocation. As a librarian with over ten years in the field, I found myself intrigued, then somewhat ashamed and angry to be taking this position seriously. Now it occurs to me that it might be parody. I simply don’t know what to think, but it seemed as if it might be worth sharing with you and your dozens of readers.
This explanatory note was signed “Nelson V. Waste.” The attached WordPerfect file had no author’s name on it, and it seems entirely likely to me that the whole thing is a put-on, most likely the product of Mr. Waste’s fevered mind. Less likely, but still possible, is that the provocative statement is, in fact, what it appears to be, and Waste is a cover story for the anonymous assistant director (after all, “Nelson Waste” certainly sounds like a pseudonym, doesn’t it?).
Regardless, I believe I share Waste’s estimation of the inherent interest of the statement, and am happy to publish it here for further discussion. -Steve
Libraries are Dying (And That’s A Good Thing) by Anonymous
Within the next 25 years, libraries will become wholly unnecessary. This is a good thing, not a tragedy. Librarians should embrace this fact wholeheartedly, and shift our professional mission to actively bringing this result about and preparing people for a world without libraries.
Just as economists and geologists speak of “peak oil,” the point where humans have extracted half of the Earth’s petroleum deposits, I would posit that somewhere around the year 1992, we reached “Peak Libraries” where half the demand for library services is in the past. But where that demand took place over hundreds or even thousands of years, we are now seeing an acceleration in the need for library services which will culminate in a rapid drop-off in demand, ending, inevitably, at zero.
In my long career as an Associate University Librarian, I have seen the trend increasingly from a world where libraries are one of a very few means of accessing trusted information, to a world where libraries are frequently the last place that people think to look when satisfying an information need. Nearly all the ways that we have distinguished ourselves over the past few millennia–and here I am thinking of collections, cataloging and metadata, and public services such as reference and instruction–are increasingly irrelevant.
Collections are paradoxically becoming privatized and opened up at the same time. Librarians were unable and unwilling to assemble the necessary capital (by which I mean cash, credibility, and chutzpah) to undertake a project to scan our collections en masse. Only a commercial entity like Google is capable of taking on the work and the risk. And yet the result of this private project is not a disastrous locking up of the world’s literature and information, but rather a great opening of the vaults, where previously invisible, unknown, and unloved works are accessible with a brief search. It is only a matter of time before libraries realized that many expensive subscriptions to full-text historical archives are unnecessary in the age of Google.
In terms of academic journals, we have a polarized position, where there is much activity on the front of Open Access to the journal literature. More and more of these publications are available for free. At the same time, more and more of the not-free literature is being collected under the umbrella of very large, very expensive packages from commercial publishers. Librarians tend to praise this first trend and decry the second, but in reality, both trends are in the researcher’s favor and both trends point to the disappearance of libraries and librarians. In 25 years, universities like my own will simply assign someone in the business office to ensure that a few extremely large bills are paid each year, ensuring access to the entirety of the for-pay journal literature.
Popular literature is destined to go the way of the Kindle or the iPad or the next popular device. Librarians may despair of the lack of users’ rights or the tethering of texts to particular devices, and we may yet have a role to play in the next quarter-century through lobbying for a “Reader’s Bill of Rights” that would pass on some of the liberties bestowed in the print world by Fair Use and the First Sale Doctrine. But regardless of our efforts, readers and consumers will vote with their dollars. There is no turning back the clock on this one, and there is likely to be no workable solution for “loaning” digital copies of books by libraries.
Librarians could once point to their cataloging and classification as a defining feature of our relevance. Yes, we would say, information is abundant, but how are you likely to find anything without us organizing it for you? This time is, of course, long over, with keyword searching long since winning the crown as the people’s choice. We may argue that keywords are no substitute for a controlled vocabulary, and in some instances we’d be right. But it is apparent that very few user groups care. Besides, when we make this argument, we conveniently ignore all the ways that controlled vocabularies have let user groups down in the past, as anyone who has studied the history of LCSH terms for homosexuality (or, to use a sillier example, “cookery”) can attest.
When the idea of the death or disappearance of the library comes up, librarians often point to library users and note that people still have difficulty using the library or finding the information they need, and require expert native guides to navigate the hazards of the information space. Librarians would have you believe this is strictly a maternal impulse, as a lioness may have for her cubs. Instead, we need to see it as a predatory instinct, as a lioness may have for a gazelle. We are fast approaching the point where the librarian needs the user more than the user needs the librarian. Librarians are scared of this, and have thus far worked hard to keep users docile and ignorant, happy to be complicit in information vendors’ plans for balkanization, obscurity, and compartmentalization. Various factors (not the least of which being the need to compete with the likes of Google, the continuing monopolization of content by a few commercial producers, and competition with the remaining vendors for scarce municipal and education dollars) will lead vendors to make interfaces smoother, thus streamlining searching, finding, organizing, creating, and publishing. It is time to end the epidemic of Munchausen by Proxy in our public service librarians, and instead acknowledge that if the patrons we patronize can’t walk without assistance, it is only because we continually kick them in the kneecaps.
Many librarians take a liberal or libertarian position with regard to information. Strong supporters of limited copyright, Open Access, free public services, and so on, librarians believe that information should be free, that “free” means “libre” as well as “gratis,” and that individuals should be empowered to find and use information as they see fit. What librarians don’t see is that the librarian’s position in this field is contingent rather than necessary, an historical blip of a profession rather like the travel agent or the town crier.
Librarians are often reduced to creating new reasons for their existence, reasons that have virtually nothing to do with the library qua library. When librarians speak of “library as place,” know that they have reached the tipping point, and are almost ready to concede that the library has little use anymore besides a place for the homeless to sleep and college students to check their Facebook accounts (or, quite likely, vice-versa). Your town would be better off with the library dollars going to free municipal broadband and better services for the homeless, unemployed, children, and the socially inept who make up the majority of their clientele. The university library could be gutted in favor of a live/study space combining student residences, study space, computer labs, and food courts.
Rather than digging in our heels in an attempt to prove our usefulness beyond any reasonable argument, I propose that librarians do the following:
Establish a “drop dead” date for our profession. I propose midnight of December 31, 2034.
Promote this date with web sites, posters, TV ads, and other appropriate public relations media. Think of a librarian sitting in a cooler next to the milk and yogurt with 2034-12-31 stamped on her head. Or tearful librarians leaving readers with the slogan “it’s not you, it’s us.”
Meet with authors, professors, and others who create the content currently stored and managed by libraries. Explain to them how they can better manage their own information and guard their own interests in the future.
Lobby unceasingly for shorter copyright terms. Promote Open Access, Creative Commons, and other means for creative works to reach the public free of charge and free of undue restrictions.
For those areas where information is hardest to liberate, support government contracts with information oligarchs such as Google, Wiley, Elsevier, and so forth.
Work with creators and consumers of technology to make media technology invisible, easily understood, and ubiquitous, like the television, cell phone, or automobile.
Lastly, the American Library Association and its many divisions, sections, and so forth should be reorganized so its efforts begin with a great promotion of this planned extinction, and, as the time nears, switching to career retraining for younger ex-librarians and the provision of retirement/elder care facilities for older ex-librarians. The great retirement and librarian shortage that has been long predicted will be upon us soon, but those positions should not, will not be filled. The world will thank us for stepping aside with grace, rather than hanging on in desperation.
I don’t intend to turn this into a newsblog about the Nature Publishing Group vs. California Digital Library clash of the titans. Others are better suited for the task. I’d start with Dorothea’s Book of Trogool blog, as her posts Musings on worms turning and Gauntlet volleying are excellent for her own writing and for the links to other sources.
I did want to post again today to share my email to the Humanties Division faculty here at Colorado College. I think this is a great opportunity to foreground how this is important to faculty and to institutions, and not just to libraries and librarians. Edited to add: If anyone would like to use any of my language in drafting emails to your own faculty, of course you may be my guest.
Dear Humanities Division faculty,
I wanted to be sure that the confrontation between
Nature Publishing Group and the University of
California faculty and library didn’t slip past
your notice.
In short, The Nature Publishing Group (NPG) (which
publishes “Nature” along with many other journals)
wanted to re-negotiate its contract with the
University of California system, with a price
increase amounting to about 400% (or over one
million dollars). The University not only resisted
such an increase, but some faculty there have
organized a boycott of Nature journals: no
submitting papers, no peer review, no editorial
boards, and so on. In short, withholding their
mostly-free labor in the face of this price
increase. Since then, NPG has responded and
UC/California Digital Library has responded to
that response.
I would welcome further discussion of this matter
and how it affects the humanities. For a
discussion of the humanities vis-a-vis science and
technology publishing, I recommend you read the
excellent blog post “Fight Club soap” by the
University of Virginia’s Bethany Nowviskie:
http://nowviskie.org/2010/fight-club-soap/
If you would like to read more (and I hope you
do), here are some links for you:
The response from Nature Publishg Group raises the
novel idea that other institutions are currently
“subsidizing” UC’s “discount,” and characterizes
the UC position as unreasonable.
http://www.nature.com/press_releases/cdl.html
The response to that response from the
California Digital Library — pointing out the
idea of a discount from a set “list price” is
meaningless, and containing the wonderful line “In
fact, we would welcome more transparent means of
determining what UC Faculty contribute and how
this virtually free labor gets factored into
revenue calculations or potentially could be used
to offset subscription rates. “– is also attached
to this message, with the filename
“UC_Response_to_Nature_Publishing_Group.pdf“
Thanks,
Steve
I would love to see how others are talking to their faculty about this, too.
Just as a financial analyst is suggesting that the global recession may lead to big problems for Elsevier as libraries can no longer weather the high cost of the Big Deal and are forced to cut back, Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has seen fit to hike subscription prices 400% (sic) on the University of California system’s subscription to 67 NPG journals. And we all know what California’s financial picture is like these days.
Please read the response from UC’s California Digital Library (PDF link), which suggests not only that the libraries for the entire UC system should no longer have online subscriptions to NPG journals, but that UC faculty should decline to have anything to do with NPG journals going forward. That means submitting no papers, doing no peer review, resigning from editorial boards, and talking to others outside UC in their disciplines about what they are doing and why.
I love this. I would like nothing better than to see commercial STM publishing collapse under its own greed and hubris. It’s probably too much to hope for, but a guy can dream.
I just finished reading Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, and yes, there’s no way to make that sound like I’m not making a joke. But I was thinking about reading conference reports for events that I haven’t attended.
It’s too tempting to take quick conference blog posts (or worse, Twitter posts) at face value, and assume that
what was reported is actually what was said;
the person who said it belives it; and
the person who reported it appoves of the sentiment.
None of that is necessarily true. So it’s tempting to decide simply not to comment at all. I know that Walt Crawford tries to do that.
But thinking about the ideas in Bayard’s book, I realize that I need not be so circumspect. In the context of of a discussion of Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist, Bayard sums up Wilde’ point this way:
Criticism is the record of a soul, and that soul is its deep object, not the transitory literary works that serve as supports for that quest. (176)
As with criticism, so too, I would argue, with the blog post, or the presentation.
So let’s talk about the “Dead Technology” session at Computers in Libraries earlier this week. I’m not entirely sure who presented. I don’t really know what they said. But the mere existence of such a panel prompted people to create their own lists of dead tech and have their own arguments online, and it also prompted people to second-guess the technologies that were reported by eyewitnesses. You can sample the #deadtech hashtag on Twitter, or read a fairly interesting FriendFeed thread kicked off by Meredith asking “Help! Need clever/funny examples of dead tech for Marshall Breeding. Anyone?”
But just as you don’t need to have seen this panel to say something about it, the technology doesn’t have to be “dead” for you to bring it up at this panel, and neither does the “deadness” of the technology ensure that it is interesting or appropriate to talk about.
In that FriendFeed thread, people really picked up on Meg vs. Meg’s suggestion of “velcro.” It seemed to drive people nuts that they use velcro every day, but that someone would have the temerity to suggest that it is a dead technology. I’d say that Meg was exactly right. Velcro’s ubiquity proves that it is dead. When every kid has a yard of velcro on his shoes, backpack, and jacket, is that still a “technology?” Is it something that you have to maintain? Is it a feature that sells a product? Are we waiting to buy this velcro product because we hear that there will be better velcro released next month? It’s no longer technology; it is lint.
Of course, if you wanted to take something that was undeniably dead and talk about it, you’d have to go a different direction. How about microcard? I doubt there are many librarians who would argue that microcard still has much life left in it. So it’s boring to talk about unless you can show why we should care that it is dead. You could talk about how in 1944, Fremont Rider devoted an entire book, The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library: A Problem and Its Solution, to a passionate case for microcards. You could talk about where that solution took us and how it informs what we think today. Lastly, you could talk about how a current-day technology that looks very much alive is actually rotting from the inside, and likely to take us the way of the microcard. I wonder if that’s what the speaker was getting at who said the iPad was dead tech.
Anyone can pick a technology out of the hat and say that it is “dead.” What is interesting is what happens after that–can they make you care why it is dead? Can they make you mourn that dead technology, or swear to avenge it? That’s what the dead tech panel is about.
Addendum
If the whole idea of “dead technology” is interesting to you, let me recommend two books, one of which I have read and one of which I haven’t (I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which is which.)
Carolyn Marvin’s 1988 book, When Old Technologies Were New is a fascinating look at how people reacted to an assimilated new technologies in the late 1800s. It examines issues of class, art, work, and public discourse in the age when the electric light, telephone, phonograph and even the idea of an “electrician” were new and untamed.
A great companion to Marvin’s book is Klaus Musmann’s Technological Innovations in Libraries, 1860-1960: An Anecdotal History. He covers some of the same ground as Marvin, in looking at technologies like the electric light and the telephone, but in this case how they specifically were seen to relate to libraries and library work. His book documents a world where librarians are not technological innovators, but are restlessly reactive, forever adopting and adapting technologies.
Henry Fuseli’s Odysseus Between Scylla and Charybdis
Cory Doctorow says you shouldn’t buy an iPad if you care about your mom and freedom and stuff. This idea should have at least some resonance for librarians who historically have been interested in free access to and dissemination of information.
People who buy an iPad and jailbreak it will be part of the problem and not the solution. People who buy an iPad and then complain about the closed environment are delusional and easily distracted. Collection development librarians are caught between the Scylla of powerful patron needs and desires and the Charybdis of vendor pricing, bundling, licensing, and so forth.
As a rule, academic patrons (faculty and staff) are very interested in access to the literature and very disinterested in the relationship between authors, journals, publishers, databases, vendors, and libraries. It is this disconnect between what is wanted (instant access to a particular work) and what we have to license (access to big bundles of “content”) that is the crux of the problem.
I don’t really think Apple or EBSCO or any of these companies are doing anything “unethical” when they bundle content or create unfriendly licenses, or negotiate exclusive deals. I think that their business interests conflict with the interests of some of their customers, and these controversies make those disconnects plain. Libraries and vendors do not have the same goal.
I do think calling a person’s supervisor because of a blog post she wrote is sleazy, hostile, and wrong. Send me the names of those reps and I will call them (not their supervisors) myself to tell them so. EDIT: No need to send me his name, because Sam Brooks, the Senior VP of Sales and Marketing for EBSCO, called me himself today. He’s the guy who called Meredith’s boss, and he says he did so because he wanted to talk to the library’s EBSCO contact (i.e., Meredith’s boss) about their options for getting the journal they wanted with just one database subscription, instead of two, as Meredith had thought. I think he is sincere. So I’ll scratch “sleazy” and “hostile” and say “ill-advised” and “undiplomatic.” He should have called Meredith first, pled his case, then let her know that he’d be calling the library’s official contact next.
Libraries are hindered in any negotiations with “content providers,” because we aren’t their real customers. Library patrons are their customers and we write the checks.
Meredith wants to see libraries band together and use our collective weight. Others remind us that mass boycotts might run afoul of racketeering laws. I wonder if a better approach than boycotts and protests would be a way to encourage good behavior. How about an agreement among libraries that certain contract provisions or corporate actions are unconscionable and we will no longer sign contracts containing those provisions? How about a list of practices that we prefer, which would give a vendor an edge in competition if they adhered to those practices? And how about the biggest groups in the library world (I’m thinking of ARL for academic libraries) getting behind such an act?
Really though, why should libraries worry about solving this issue? Can’t we just make the best decisions we can with the money we have, and let the chips fall where they may? When you lose access to something important because a Big Vendor signs an exclusive deal with a single journal, shouldn’t you direct complaints from patrons to the journal? The less we work around these problems the better. Let the journal feel the pain of fewer readers and citations. Let the researchers feel the pain of waiting for ILL. Refuse to apologize or mitigate crises that you did not create.
Some “content” (look, I’m sorry for the scare quotes, I just hate the word “content”) is big enough that it can always take its ball and go home. Notice how the Beatles still aren’t on iTunes? Nature and Science will always be able to do whatever damn fool thing they want.
If I were the head of EBSCO, I’d likely be following the same business strategy which they are right now. I’m not sure why I should care much if librarians start to hate my company and a few bloggers make some noise about it, as long as the people in charge felt that they couldn’t cancel their subscriptions. I’d be responsible to my employees and my board and owners, and I could live with librarians saying “we hate you” as long as the renewals kept rolling in. Librarians need a more compelling story than “we hate you.” We need “as soon as this [very likely and very immanent] thing happens, we will all scrape you off our shoes and never look back.”
So I wrote a book. The experience of writing the book–even a pretty short, straightforward book like this one–was far more difficult than I expected it would be, so you might imagine that it would make seeing it finished to be that much more rewarding.
I really don’t expect individuals to buy the book, because it’s priced for libraries. But if you have the authority to spend money on librarian’s professional development books, you could find worse uses for your money than the ten books in the series, The Tech Set. I’m happy to be listed alongside such witty, accomplished, and attractive people as the other authors on that list.
Lastly, if you are reading this blog post, there is a strong chance that I thanked you in the acknowledgements, either by name or by implication. So take a look below, and thank you again.
The votes are in and the winner is clear: entry number nine from Suzie DeGrasse! If you haven’t looked at her entry full-size, you owe it to yourself to click on the image below and check out the details.
For submitting the winning entry, Suzie will win our (to-be-named-later) Grand Prize. In addition, the voters named her the recipient of several special prizes, such as: Best Depiction of Reality in Libraries Over the Last 40 Years; Coloring Outside the Lines Award; Gratuitious Metadata Award; Best Mashup of Humor and Depression; Best Re-Purposing of a Pony Tail; Stereotypical Librarian Attention to Detail Award; Wordiest Coloring Contest Entry Evar.
Edit: Funny stuff redacted at Suzie’s request. Sorry, Suzie: didn’t mean to get you in trouble with humorless overlords.
All the entries had strong points, points that were recognized by the voters with the following special awards:
Entry 1 : Best Use of Color as an Accent; Best Use of Grayscale
Entry 2 : Best Use of a Rainbow Wig Outside a Sporting Event; Best Hairpiece and Implants; Taste the Rainbow Award
Entry 3 : Advocacy Award for Including the Value of Library Materials; Best Use of Hearts Award; Best Promotion of Scientific Literature
Entry 4 : Twilight-tastic Award; Best Redheaded Character Since Pippi Longstocking; Best Tattooed Librarian; Best Reader’s Advisory Dialogue
Entry 5 : Best Use of Purple Hues; Best Depiction of Fluevogs
Entry 6 : Best Striped Desk; Best Non-Hazardous Alert Use of Diagonal Lines; Diversity Award for Depiction of a Non-White, Non-Fluroscent Librarian
Entry 7 : The Vividly Green Patron Award; Best Use of Vivid Colors; Outreach to Leprechaun Patrons Award; The Pretty In Pink Award;
Entry 8 : Best Use of Library Supplies; Most True-To-Life; Most Like My Library Award
Thank you so much to all who participated and for your patience as I let this contest go on longer than intended.
Watch this space for more news about upcoming LSW zines.
My friend Jessy has been keeping track of library shenanigans–tomfoolery, pranks, silliness, and so on–for a few years now on a static webpage. Recently she took the plunge and started the Library Shenanigans blog. If you like Tetris or dominoes, or sexy librarians, or yetis you will love Library Shenanigans, I assure you.
I gave a little talk about social software for library people at the Pikes Peak Library District‘s staff day today. It was similar to the talk of the same name I gave a few years back to the Jefferson County Public Library staff day. The goal is not for me to tell a public library how to use social software. First I don’t really know what a public library should do, and second, PPLD already has blogs, Twitter, etc. On the level of the institution, they have this stuff going on.
My intention is more to talk about how I see the web now, especially the part that we still call the “social web” or “read/write web” or whatever. (One of my points is that this is really all just “the web,” as people don’t log into Facebook and say “I’m gonna get my web 2.0 on!”) I try and show that even for things that look trivial from outside, there is real communication happening between real people and real communities forming that transcend websites and screennames.
I did the same talk twice in a row this morning, which was great, because it meant that it wasn’t the same talk. In the first session, I was too concerned about getting through what I’d planned to talk about. I think people enjoyed the talk–they were polite enough to say so, anyway–but after me gabbing for 45-50 minutes, no one was really interested in questions or discussion. I’d talked them into submission.
For the second group, I didn’t wait until the end for questions. I picked a spot right after talking about this idea that social networks look different from the inside than they do from outside. At that point, I stopped and asked for comments and reactions, or for people to share their stories about their own use of online social networks.
By stopping in the middle, I think I left them enough room to enter the conversation, and not feel that I had already said everything that needed to be said. People talked about how they found long-ago neighbors on Facebook; about the perils of the library trying out every new thing; and about wikis and authority and etiquitte. It was great. I had to thow out my last dozen slides or something, but who cares?
I kinda kicked myself a little bit, because this seems to be a lesson I have to keep learning. Just as with an unconference, it’s the people actually in the room that count, not what I thought would make for a good talk the night or the week or the year before. Just as with my instuction sessions for students, it’s probably best to go in with a few outcomes in mind and leave the details to work themselves out. Just like online social networks themselves, presentations can be about sharing and conversation and community instead of just an information dump.
Now, in her post Sergio Rivera-Ayala’s Book Strikes (out) Again, Iris has published the fact that the IP addresses of the two comments signed “Verga Parati” (or “Dick for you” in Spanish) point to two different institutions that Sergio Rivera-Ayala was associated with. It’s circumstantial evidence–there’s no way to know exactly who was trying to minimize the problems with the kind of sock puppetry that started the whole thing, or who was using hostile and obscene Spanish words for a fake name. But the IP addresses pointed to a connection in the Waterloo area (where Rivera-Ayala was visitng at the time) while the second came from a UC Riverside VPN address (where Rivera-Ayala was employed at the time).
Now Iris gets a new fake email pimping Rivera-Ayala’s book supposedly from Tamesis Books. It’s not. It’s a fake. And this time, she can tell exactly who it’s from: sriveraa-fr09.artsfaculty.uwaterloo.ca.
So. Yet more evidence suggesting that Sergio Rivera-Ayala is a liar and a fraud. I’m shocked.
Later this month, it will be seven years since I started working at Colorado College. So it was just a little less than seven years ago that I went to talk to Jessy Randall about an idea I had. Jessy was then, as now, the curator of special collections and college archivist, and is now my friend and frequent commenter on this blog.
I asked her if she’d be interested in team-teaching a course at the College during the January half-block two-week term on the history and future of the book. Together, Jessy and I decided to pitch something that would encompass a quick immersion in the history of the book, along with investigation of the current state of books and reading and speculation about where trends would take us in the future. We wanted to emphasize getting students’ hands on books in special collections and having them, if possible, set type themselves.
Over the past seven years, we found some sympathetic ears in our Director and a professor or two. The Press at Colorado College has come roaring back to life. The College has a new thematic minor in “The Book.” And tomorrow, Jessy and I begin teaching our two week class. Here’s a slightly redacted version of the syllabus.
I’m tremendously excited and not a little bit nervous. We had more than 20 students signed up, but have been told to expect that number to fall as students realize they’d rather not take a January course. I’m sure our plans aren’t perfect, and the topic is so big that I keep thinking of things that we are neglecting to cover. But I’m happy with where we are starting from, and I’m very curious to see where the students take it.
As the class progresses, I hope to be able to share on this blog some of what I’m learning as I teach. At the same time, expect that I won’t be around a whole lot on IM or FriendFeed or the like.
Iris says on FriendFeed “I have to give a 10-minute presentation on information literacy today. I wish I knew what information literacy is.”
I know Iris is up to the challenge of explaining what information literacy is and then saying something useful about it in ten minutes. But it is true that “information literacy” can be slippery, and not everyone has the patience to get through ACRL’s Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. ACRL’s one-sentence definition is as follows: “Information literacy is a set of abilities requiring individuals to ‘recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.’”
If I were going to give a talk where defining information literacy or showing the difficulty of defining information literacy was part of the brief, I might start with the difficulty of defining “regular” literacy. I believe once upon a time, to be legally literate, a person had to be able to sign his or her own name. Now, even incoming college students who are fully “literate” by contemporary definitions still need to boost their literacy to be able to read complex academic writing and to write in a way that the academy values.
In a similar way, in the recent past a person might have been reasonably information “literate” if she or he could find a book in a card catalog. Now our incoming college students can find all kinds of information on the web, but need to come to a more nuanced understanding of what’s available and what is considered relevant in academe to be literate enough for college work.
Or perhaps instead, if I were in Iris’s shoes I’d start with “information.” It’s a word that has bothered me ever since I started library school. Look back at that ACRL definition. It’s easy enough (perhaps) to know when I have an “information need” when I don’t know how to get somewhere and need driving directions. But when I’m looking for articles to support my paper where I’m arguing that the tension between Wallace Shawn’s work as an actor and his work as a writer leads to a public persona that is self-deconstructing–well, what kind of “information” do I need there? We often talk about finding sources so the student can “join the conversation,” and I sometimes say they need to find multiple viewpoints they can get in their papers “and make ‘em fight.” In that case it seems less like finding “information” than it seems like finding “dinner party guests” or “sparring partners.”
If a person’s idea of finding information is determining how to get from here to there, or the chief exports of Bolivia, no wonder so many of them are in search of what Wayne Bivens-Tatum calls the improbable source. As with so many areas where students need to adjust to college, I think the role of information literacy in higher education is to take what students already know and complicate it, extend it, deepen it, and test it.
Two recent articles in Inside Higher Ed have me feeling a little down about library/faculty relations in the American academy.
In A Win for the Stacks, we hear about how Syracuse University faculty are petitioning and protesting a plan for the library to move a portion of the collection 250 miles offsite, where they would be available for next-day delivery to faculty and students.
Then there is Reviving the Academic Library, an opinion piece by Johann Neem. Neem believes that “The library is a means to an end: enabling students and faculty to access archives.” And from his essay, it seems like he thinks that is the sum total of what a library should do. He blames “the emergence of the field of library sciences” (apparently a recent event in his mind) for librarians’ desire to convert libraries from archives into “vague learning environments which, when boiled down to their essence, are nothing more than computer labs with sofas and coffee.”
I’m not going to pick these articles apart. It has been done in the comments on Inside Higher Ed (an alternate title for this post is “Supercilious faculty and
defensive librarians”) and also in the FriendFeed threads where I first heard about the Syracuse situation and the Neem piece.
Instead, I’ll do something I usually try (and fail) not to do here, and that’s give advice. Not directly to the players in these articles, as I don’t really know the background for the Syracuse story or how Neem arrived at his conclusions. This will be more general advice. First for faculty, then for librarians.
Advice for faculty
Click to enlarge.
It’s fun to get riled up and self-righteous on behalf of the preservation of Western Civilization (believe me, I know all about rile and self-righteousness, and you can check the archives of this blog if you doubt me) but it’s more productive to get to know the librarians and make your case for what role you think the library should play before things blow up in public meetings.
I understand faculty and students who value browsing the library stacks (see my advice for librarians, below), but I think it’s time to recognize browsing the local stacks as a pleasurable, useful activity, rather than a core research strategy. Even if you are at an enormous, inclusive library like Harvard’s you are still missing a great deal that is electronic-only. And you should certainly re-think passing on that strategy to your students who are likely to end up at institutions where the library has far narrower collections, or where the library has already moved to a collection that is more online than printed.
Putting aside that libraries have long been more than an archive for books, if you wonder why the library is taking on amenities that you associate with a student center, I’d like you to do two things. First, talk to students about this. Talk to a lot of students, not just the ones who know what you think and will tell you what you want to hear. Find out how students want to do research and homework, and why they still choose the library over the student center (if, indeed, they do). Second, please visit your library after 10PM during a busy time of the term. Too many faculty never see the library when it is fully in use by the student body. Perhaps you will be surprised by the variety of activity going on in the library, and how students move from quiet solo study, to group study, to social conversations and back again.
Advice for librarians
Click to enlarge.
I have misgivings about the truism “the user is not broken,” but let’s think about that for a minute, since it’s a commonplace in library blogland. I think one of the most useful readings of that phrase is that when readers tell us something, we should assume that they are speaking in good faith and that they know what they want.
So when student and faculty readers tell us that they want books they can open and handle and that stacks that are browsable are one of our core services as far as they are concerned, shouldn’t we respect that? Yes, budget and space problems are causing friction at many libraries, but I think too many of us think that people don’t browse any more, and some users are telling us that we are wrong.
We keep telling students that we have a hybrid library of printed and online sources, and that they shouldn’t privilege the online sources just because they are easier to use. Shouldn’t we take our own advice there?
Lastly, I think we all (librarians and readers) need to re-think what browsing and serendipity mean now. I think librarians have not done a great job in helping people browse that hybrid library. It used to be we could go to the reference stacks, plant our feet and look around for well-known or likely sources. Now, a big chunk of our reference books come to us from online packages that are segregated by publisher and have no call numbers so we can’t easily browse them alongside the printed works in the catalog. I’d love to see an iTunes style interface for libraries that can flip back and forth between “cover flow” and text lists, and which incorporated links to online sources and catalog records for printed books.
I have mentioned Jason Scott several times on this blog. He’s the guy who runs textfiles.com, blogs at ASCII, and came up with the Archive Team to save orphaned/closing websites (like, say, Geocities). He’s an outspoken pain in the ass and I admire him immensely. ALA or ACRL or SLA or somebody needs to get him to come talk to librarians about archiving in the 21st century. I am sure he would be funny and scandalous, piss off most of the audience, and people would talk about it for years to come.
Anyway.
The guy lost his job recently, which prompted his newest scheme: The Jason Scott Sabbatical. The idea is that if he can raise $25,000 in donations, he can devote himself to his myriad projects in computer history. People like you and me pledge money. If he hits $25K in pledges by 22 November 2009, the pledges will automatically be paid out of pledger’s Amazon accounts, Jason gets a pile of money, pledgers get various premiums based on how much we pledged, and Jason keeps us updated on how he’s spending his time and our money. If he fails to meet the goal, nothing happens.
I pledged $25, the minimum suggested pledge (though you could pledge as little as $5.00). I want to see this succeed for him. I’m also very intrigued at how Kickstarter works. It could have been a good way to do the Louisville Free Public Library fundraiser. It could be a way to do a project like the LSW Zine (more on that very soon) and ensure it gets entirely funded before making a single photocopy. It could be a way for a library to run a fundraiser for a specific project. It looks elegant and fun.
I doubt many of you will want to pledge to the Jason Scott Sabbatical if you aren’t familiar with him, but if you are, then please consider pledging. And if you aren’t familiar with him, why not?
Also, if you have any experience with Kickstarter or have other interesting Kickstarter projects you’d like to point me to, please leave a comment.
Ah, what fun. I got an email today from Dr. Rivera-Ayala that was cc’d to my Dean and the President of my college. I thought you’d like to see the exchange, starting with the email I sent to Sergio Rivera-Ayala after my last post about the strange emails and comments about his book.
I’ll put a few notes after the emails.
Steve Lawson slawson@coloradocollege.edu
Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 10:18 AM
To: Tamesis Books trading@boydell.co.uk, Sergio Rivera-Ayala sergio.rivera-ayala@ucr.edu,
Sergio Rivera-Ayala sriveraa@uwaterloo.ca
Dear Tamesis Books and Dr. Rivera-Ayala,
I thought you both should know that someone has been sending emails to
at least one librarian posing as a student at that librarian's
institution with the purpose of getting her to buy Dr. Rivera-Ayala's
book, "El discurso colonial en textos novohispanos: espacio, cuerpo y
poder."
When my friend, Iris Jastram, who received this email posted something
about the incident to her blog, she got a few comments from someone
calling him or herself "Verga Parati." You probably know better than I
that "verga para ti" in Spanish means "cock for you." The comments
were much like the original email in that they appear to be wholly
fraudulent.
You can find the post that Ms Jastram wrote here, along with the
comments from "cock for you":
http://bit.ly/knear
I wrote about it on my blog, too:
http://bit.ly/2dSmqk
If either of you are responsible for these incidents, I suggest a
public apology to Ms Jastram is in order. If you are not responsible,
perhaps you could look into finding out who is?
I think it might also be necessary for me to say that any attempts to
intimidate or silence me about this matter will be met with as much
publicity as I can muster.
Sincerely,
Steve Lawson
--
Steve Lawson, Humanities Librarian
Colorado College, Colorado Springs
slawson@coloradocollege.edu
719-389-6857
Sergio Rivera-Ayala sriveraa@uwaterloo.ca
Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 9:51 AM
To: Steve Lawson slawson@coloradocollege.edu
Cc: Richard@artsservices.uwaterloo.ca, F.@artsservices.uwaterloo.ca,
Celeste@artsservices.uwaterloo.ca, president@coloradocollege.edu,
Susan@artsservices.uwaterloo.ca, A.@artsservices.uwaterloo.ca,
Ashley@artsservices.uwaterloo.ca, sashley@coloradocollege.edu,
eferguson@boydell.co.uk, sriveraa@uwaterloo.ca
Dear Mr Lawson
I have received your email and I very much regret that someone has sent
anonymous emails to personnel of the library at Colorado College in
connection with my book. But neither I nor Tamesis is in any way responsible
for the initial request or the subsequent messages on the blog, and we
therefore do not feel that it would be appropriate for us to become
involved.
I would urge you to remove your unfounded accusations.
Respectfully,
--
Sergio Rivera-Ayala, PhD
Assistant Professor
Dept of Spanish and Latin American Studies
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada N2L 3G1
Phone: 519-888-4567, ext. 38906
Fax: 519-746-7881
http://www.spanish.uwaterloo.ca//rivera.html
Steve Lawson Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 10:28 AM
To: Sergio Rivera-Ayala sriveraa@uwaterloo.ca
Cc: sashley@coloradocollege.edu, eferguson@boydell.co.uk, Iris Jastram ijastram@carleton.edu
Thank you, Dr. Rivera-Ayala. I'll update my blog posts with your
message just so it's clear. I'm pretty sure I took pains not to make
any accusations; I'll re-read the post and if I did accuse anyone of
anything, I'll address that as well.
Thanks, also, for emailing my Dean and attempting to email the
President of my college [I was wrong about this. In that mess of CCs in
his message, I think he actually did manage to email the President of
Colorado College]. I'll make sure and note that on my blog, too.
Keep it up and I promise to respond in kind.
Lastly, you or your publisher really should get in touch with Iris
Jastram (I'm copying her on this email), as she has the IP addresses
of the person who left the comments with the insulting pseudonym. Of
course it would be hard to pin those comments on any one individual,
but they make for pretty interesting circumstantial evidence as to who
is lying and trying to intimidate librarians. If I were you or your
publisher, I'd really want to know who is making me look bad.
--
Steve Lawson, Humanities Librarian
Colorado College, Colorado Springs
slawson@coloradocollege.edu
719-389-6857
OK, so. I took the messages copied to the Dean and President as “attempts to intimidate or silence me about this matter” which is why I’m posting it here. I looked back at my post and I don’t believe I did make any unfounded accusations. I noted that while my first assumption upon reading the email that Iris posted was that it must have been the author or publisher, I also noted that it was impossible to tell and in fact could have come from anyone.
I’m guessing this goes nowhere after this, but that’s what I would have said yesterday before getting this email. Stay tuned.
A senior student sent Iris Jastram at Pegasus Librarian an email suggesting that she buy Sergio Rivera-Ayala’s new book, El discurso colonial en textos novohispanos: espacio, cuerpo y poder. That’s a pretty normal thing for librarians at institutions like Iris’s and mine. I tell students working on theses to let me know if they come across books we should own.
But this email was strange enough to ring some warning bells for Iris. She tends to know the seniors in her subject areas, and they call their senior projects “comps,” not “thesis.” So she called the registrar and found no student by that name registered.
So the message was spam. Sleezy spam. From the publisher, Tamesis? From the author Sergio Rivera-Ayala? It’s impossible to tell, and Iris is wise enough not to speculate.
So that was a little kerfuffle, but it cooled right down. Until the comments tonight.
Someone using the name “Verga Parati” makes a comment wondering why she wouldn’t just buy the book anyway. I mean, besides the lying fraud, it’s probably a good book anyway? The commenter ends with “Jesus, what kind of librarians are you?”
I wondered what kind of commenter this was, so I googled the name to find out that “verga para ti” is Spanish for “cock for you.” Boy, I’d hate my parents if they somehow accidentally gave me a name that was a Spanish obscenity. Then every time I showed up in someone’s blog comments to give them a hard time about not adding a Spanish-language book to the collection, they wouldn’t take me seriously and would assume I was trying to send a veiled sexually hostile message to the librarian. Man, that would be a drag.
Then another comment comment from Mr./Ms Cock came in, trying to be a little nicer, but still implying that Iris should buy the book. Iris’s last reply makes it clear that she knows where the cock person is posting from and that this information is perhaps incriminating to some degree.
I’m sorry that this post is mostly a play-by-play rehash of something on Pegasus Librarian. But this is the kind of thing I simply hate: people using the anonymity of the net to try and lie and defraud and intimidate. I’ll be contacting the author, Sergio Rivera-Ayala, and the publisher, Tamesis, tomorrow to be sure they know that someone is doing this. If I were Sergio Rivera-Ayala, I’d be most distressed that someone was griefing librarians about my book and I would make every effort to find the real emailer and commenter and make them apologize publicly.
(This also reminds me that I need to make a comment policy. Basically, anyone who uses a pseudonym or otherwise falsely identifies themselves in my comments gives up all right to privacy. Try and pull any crap like this with me and I will publish your IP address and everything I know about you.)
More than one person had a problem donating to the LSW for LFPL fundraising effort, and it’s all because I am a doofus. In two seperate blog posts, I put the wrong email address for donations.
It should be LSW.LFPL@gmail.com (I had google.com. I don’t work at Google. I am a doofus.)
The “Donate” button worked fine, obviously–there’s no way I would have received over $3,500 via Paypal if it didn’t–but if you tried to go direct to that email address, it hiccuped.
At this point, if you feel moved to donate, I encourage you to go to the Louisville Free Public Library Foundation page and donate there. They have a PayPal button of their own, or you can mail them a check.
Thank you all for helping with the Library Society of the World fundraiser for the flooded Louisville Free Pubilc Library.
My mom said she’d match up to $200 in donations, and people came through with $195, which is excellent.
I realized that I hadn’t put in my money yet, so I did that.
After all is totalled up and PayPal takes their cut, I count $4,202.28 raised in just over a month by the Library Society of the World for the Louisville Free Public Library. One hundred and thirty six people donated through the LSW effort, with an average contribution of $33.40, and a median and mode of $20.
I set a goal of $5,000 and thought it was a stretch. It turns out I was right, but we didn’t fall that far short. I’m very proud of what we accomplished together, and very grateful that so many people trusted me with their money. I’m waiting for the PayPal transfer to come through, after which I’ll send a (real) check for something like $1,658.84, to go with the check for $2,543.44 that we already sent.
There is still the matter of the prizes. I didn’t do a great job of pushing the prizes as incentives, but we are certainly ready to use them as rewards. Everyone who donated before this blog post is elgibile to win. The available prizes for the dozen or so winners will be:
From photographer Jamie Powell Sheppard: one each of six different photo prints of the LFPL Main Library. That’s her work over my shoulder in the photo above. The prints are beautiful and so are the images. Please click on the thumbnails below, as the originals aren’t square.
Leo Laporte’s voice on your hope answering machine. Leo is the host of the TWiT (This Week in Tech) podcast and The Tech Guy radio show. He’s a pro, he sounds great, and apparently he’s an awesome guy since he just saw us discussing these prizes on FriendFeed and volunteered.
Eric Sizemore’s voice on your home answering machine. Sizemore is a librarian and a DJ. If you want people to think you have a deep, smooth voice or think you are involved with a guy who has a deep, smooth voice, this should be your pick.
An LSW Cod of Ethics mug (courtesy of Nichole Dettmar). Make an ethical stand! Makes everything taste like cod!
Beautiful, luxurious Black Forest Malabrigo yard from Abigail Goben
One item from the way cool libpunk store from Amy Buckland. I’m not sure, but I think my netbook runs faster and cooler since I put that libpunk sticker on it.
I still need to talk to the other people involved–Abigail and Amy had their own plans for selecting winners, which is fine–but my overall plan is to randomly select names of donors to match the number of prizes, contact the donors and let them pick first-come-first-served which prize they want. We’ll see how that goes.
This is my entry in the LFPL Blogathon, organized by the energetic and imaginative Andy Woodworth to benefit the flooded Louisville Free Public Library: please donate to the Library Society of the World fundraiser or to directly to the LFPL Foundation. I may have said some of this before. I have certainly used this image in a post before, but I think it’s quite appropriate here. -SL
Don Quixote in his library by Gustave Doré
Whenever I hear someone–an elected offical, often–say that “libraries are for research and information and literature, and not for X” where X = video games or DVDs or comix or books that aren’t in English or Goosebumps or Madonna’s Sex or boardgames or sewing circles or popular novels; whenever I hear that, I think “this is a person who doesn’t really like libraries, who is scared of libraries and what they represent, and wants others others to be similarly scared.”
I think that research and information and literature are all wonderful things, and that almost every library must put some or all of those things at the core of their mission. But that’s not why I think libraries kick ass.
I think that libraries kick ass because libraries help people expand their imagination.
And there is more to the imagination than the serious, gray, DOA literature that people envision when they say that libraries should be for “serious” stuff. Libraries need to collect broadly to reflect the cultures in which they are embedded.
Libraries do many other things, too, many more obviously utilitarian things that even elected officials can get behind, like helping people learn to read or find a job. But in order for people to want to learn to read or get a better job or discover a cure for cancer or write a haiku, they need to have their imagination awakened. Before we can make ourselves better or make our world better, we need the imagination to envision something better in the first place.
To be able to be in the midst of thousands or even millions of volumes containing the expression of human thought and feeling in all its multitude of forms is an awsome thing. Even more so when you think that there are many more libraries like the one you are in, none of them complete. I have memories of being a child and realizing that whatever I happened to be interested in, I could go to the library and come home with an armful of inspiration. I get this feeling from every library I visit, and I hope that I can pass some of that feeling on to students where I work.
The first line of the Darien Statments says, “The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization.” Grandiose, perhaps, but it’s something I tend to believe. The Library, and even the small-l-library, provide a way to immerse yourself in the present and past of a culture or a civilization, and come to the surface ready to create the future.
Michael Stephens says that “libraries should encourage the heart,” which I have always thought is kind of corny. But now I think that perhaps we are saying the same thing. Libraries kick ass when they allow our hearts and minds to expand and roam freer than before.
Tomorrow is the deadline I set for the Library Society of the World to raise $5,000 for the Louisville Free Public Library (LFPL).
At this moment, we have **$3,638.95** after PayPal takes its cut. So that leaves us with more than $1,300 to raise today and tomorrow.
It still could happen. I have had over $100 in donations come in already this morning. Today is the [LFPL Blogathon](http://lfplblogathon.pbworks.com/) where you donate some money to the LFPL, then blog about why libraries are awesome. Look for my post in this space later today.
If you donate using the LSW donation button below, you will be eligible to win one of the fabulous prizes [mentioned in my last post](http://stevelawson.name/seealso/archives/2009/08/one_week_to_go_in_lfpl_fundraiser.html). I heard from photographer Jamie Sheppard that the prints she’s donated are 11×14, so those are going to look quite nice on someone’s wall.
I’ll resist the urge to write some kind of wrap-up until tomorrow. Until then, please donate using the LSW button here, or [directly to the LFPL Foundation](http://www.lfplfoundation.org/). And my thanks to the 120+ of you that have already donated.
Three weeks ago today was the storm that flooded the Louisville Free Public Library. In that time we have raised over $3,200 in the name of the Library Society of the World. Over 100 of you have donated. Thank you. If you’d like to donate now, please do:
We got Boing Boinged. Louisville Public Media interviewed Greg Schwartz and me about the flood and the fundraiser and ran a radio news story with audio clips from us both (that link isn’t working right now, but I’m pretty sure it’s the right one).
But when we started all this, I kind of stuck my neck out. I said we’d raise $5,000. Which makes us still about $1,800 short.
So if you meant to donate, but haven’t yet, please do it now. If you have already donated, thanks very much. I’m planning to bug my co-workers one more time, and here I am bugging you. If there are people you can send my way this last week, please do so.
If you aren’t sure if you want to donate, consider this: you could win fabulous prizes!
Shortly after September 1, we’ll have a drawing. Or multiple drawings. We haven’t really got this figured out yet. But know that Abigail Goben is giving away three skeins of “luscious” Black Forest Malabrigo yarn, Amy Buckland is donating libpunk merch, and Nicole Dettmar has donated a lovely LSW Cod of Ethics mug.
As if those incentives weren’t enough, photographer Jamie Powell Sheppard has offered to donate six prints of photographs of the Louisville Main Library (seen above). Every donor to the LSW effort will have a chance to win one of those classic-looking prints.
So. Please donate. Please mention to other people that they can donate. And maybe you’ll win cool stuff!
If you’d rather send a check, send it to the Library Society of the World Clubhouse, PO Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933. Make the check payable to Steve Lawson.
This money goes into my personal accounts and then I will write a check to LFPL. If you don’t like that idea (and if you don’t know me, I don’t blame you), here is the information for making a donation direct to the LFPL Library Foundation:
The Library Foundation
Attn: Flood
301 York St.
Louisville, KY 40203
(502) 574-1709
So one of these days I’ll write a blog post where I try and make sense of some trend in libraries or analyze someone else’s writing instead of just posting wacky announcements of wacky projects.
Someday.
But today, it’s wacky project time! I posted this to FriendFeed several days back, but if you haven’t seen it, I put together Classics of Library Science Mad Libs, Volume One. Fill in the blanks (lots of nouns, I know), click the button, and see what monstrosity of Library Science theory you have created.
In addition to displaying the results to you, the web page will post your creation to my Posterous account. (You might not want to go to that site until after you do the Mad Lib, as I think it’s more fun if you don’t know what’s coming.)
I have to say that Posterous is a very strange and interesting web site, the most minimal instacloudblogsite2.0 I can remember seeing. Basically, email something like text or a photo to post@posterous.com and you are pretty much done. The site emails you back to tell you where to find your post online. If you want to take the time to set up an account and customize your URL like I did, that’s great, but you don’t have to. So it’s great for something like this where I’m just emailing form results that get posted to the web almost immediately.
Since your Mad Lib creation posts immediately and anonymously to someone else’s (i.e., MY) account, it would be easy to be a jerk. Please don’t be a jerk. I reserve the right to delete anything from my Posterous page that seems jerky or in very bad taste. A little bad taste is OK. I’m more likely to be lenient if you put your real name on it, too.
The Mad Lib itself came about when I was looking at some forms that Laura was working on, and dug out my copy of Head First PHP & MySQL and looked at the first chapter which deals with simple form creation and emailing the content. Seemed tailor-made for Mad Libs. (Which I’m sure is a trademark of someone. Please don’t sue. Unlike the vast majority of mankind, I have actually purchased Mad Libs books recently for my kids.)
Sorry I haven’t updated here in a while. A lot has happened in the last two weeks, and while I have posted a lot of information to my FriendFeed, I have neglected to post here.
The short story
At this moment, 94 people have donated $3,143.19 via PayPal, check and cash. On Saturday I mailed a check for $2,543.44 to the Louisville Free Public Library Foundation, which they received today. So we have done good, but still have a ways to go. If you haven’t donated, please donate today. If you have donated, thanks, and please help spread the word.
The longer story
On August 11, we got Boing Boinged. Here you can see what your blog stats look like when all the librarians hit your blog on a Wednesday, and you get linked from Boing Boing on the following Tuesday.
As a result of the boingboinging, an anonymous donor (someone previously unknown to me) donated five hundred (500) dollars via PayPal. This is astonishing to me that someone would trust me with their money like that, and I’m very grateful. I’m almost as astonished that a faculty member at my college congratulated me today on the boingboinging.
After that $500 donation came in, I transferred all the money from my PayPal account to my bank account. PayPal takes a small cut of everyone’s donation, which is how we end up with that $2,543.44 figure (no, nobody donated $3.44). Once the transfer went through, I wrote the check, wrote a dopey letter, and sent it all with delivery confirmation. It arrived today.
(I know these are tedious details, but I am trying to be transparent as possible without, like, giving you the login for my bank account.)
I got a very nice call from Mary Hunt at the Library Foundation today, thanking us for our donation. I wish you all could have heard her say how much it means to them to get the amount of support they have had from their local community and from people like us. When I told her that we were all moved by the photos of the flood, she said “it was much worse than it looked in the photos.”
So that brings us up-to-date. Donations have slowed to a trickle (two Sunday, one Monday, none Tuesday, one Wednesday). There are plans afoot to get some more attention and perhaps motivate more people to donate, and I’ll post about that as soon as I can.
But if you have thought about donating but haven’t yet, this would be a great time to do it, and help me feel more confident that we’ll hit that $5,000 goal by September 1.
And to all those who have donated so far, I can’t thank you enough. People keep complimenting me on this, and I’m proud to have gotten things started, but I haven’t donated a cent yet. It’s all of you who have donated, linked, tweeted (and retweeted), facebooked, submitted the link to Boing Boing, donated items for incentives (more on that tomorrow) and otherwise got us to where we are today.
Four years ago, I had an 11-week old baby at home (as well as a three year-old). The academic year was about to begin. And I started this blog. Seems like odd timing looking back, but it worked out.
Things have changed over those years, which seem simultaneously like a long time and a blink of an eye. The tone and purpose of this blog would seem to have changed a few times. I’m posting less often, but more convinced than ever that I need this “home base” on the web.
As always, my thanks to those of you who still read See Also… regularly. And for those of you who have gone from being readers and fellow bloggers to being professional contacts, dear friends, and co-conspirators, I am profoundly grateful.
On Tuesday, August 4, 2009, the Louisville Free Public Library (LFPL) was flooded. Late that night, with the encouragement of other members of the Library Society of the World, I started raising money to donate to their library foundation. I set a goal of $5,000 by September 1.
At this point (August 27 at 11:00AM MDT), *110 people have donated $3,431.29 *.
If you’d like to help, you can donate any amount you wish with the PayPal button below.
If you’d rather send a check, send it to the Library Society of the World Clubhouse, PO Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933. Make the check payable to Steve Lawson.
This money goes into my personal accounts and then I will write a check to LFPL. If you don’t like that idea (and if you don’t know me, I don’t blame you), here is the information for making a donation direct to the LFPL Library Foundation:
The Library Foundation
Attn: Flood
301 York St.
Louisville, KY 40203
(502) 574-1709
Then there was this, which amazed me. When LJ reporter, Norman Oder, asked what offers of help they have received from the library community, Craig Buthod said this:
Very strong offers. The Library Society of the World [is raising money]. I got a call from Mary Ellin Santiago. [Project Manager of Gates Foundation’s Gulf Coast Library Project]. We’ve had offers from Cedar Rapids [IA, which suffered flooding last year.] The state librarian has been on the phone daily.
It’s really neat that he mentioned us first. He knows better than I do that $5,000 is only one-tenth of one percent of five million dollars. He might or might not be aware that we are still pretty far short of five grand. But I hope it means that Buthod and the other folks at LFPL are cheered up a bit by the knowledge that a bunch of librarians from all over are scraping up $10 and $20 and $50 donations because we are thinking of them and we empathize with them and we wish we could do more.
I knew donations would fall off today. We saw the same thing with people participating in Shovers and Makers. But with this Library Journal mention, I’d really like to see us hit that $5,000 goal by September 1. Here’s the button and the addresses:
If you’d rather send a check, send it to the Library Society of the World Clubhouse, PO Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933. Make the check payable to Steve Lawson.
If you’d rather donate to the LFPL Library Foundation directly instead of using me as a middle man, please do:
The Library Foundation
Attn: Flood
301 York St.
Louisville, KY 40203
(502) 574-1709
Lastly, Abigail Goben-with-a-”b” and Amy “Jambina” Buckland are encouraging contributions with prize drawings. You can win beautiful yarn from Abigail or “libpunk” merch from Amy. (See their blogs for details, must be 18 or over, odds of winning depend on number of entries, offer not valid for Elsevier executives.) I have been trying to think of a similar promo to bring donors out of the woodwork. But other than “for $50 I’ll take my clothes off; for $100 I’ll put them back on,” I haven’t thought of anything (and I think the nudity thing might be illegal in Kentucky anyway). Send good ideas my way.
Edited at 3:50 MDT: Clinical Reader has changed their site, and blamed the legal threat on a junior employee. I think the only thing missing is a brief public apology to Nikki. The below is still an interesting case study on how overreacting in social media can come back to bite you very quickly.
Original post:
The great and terrible thing about Twitter is the way it makes it so easy for an organization to shoot itself in the foot. About an hour ago, I had never heard of Clinical Reader. Now, I would never use, trust or recommend them, and am happy to share my opinion with you, dear reader.
And it’s not because of what Nikki Dettmar wrote on her Eagle Dawg Blog entry, Starry ethics fail about how Clinical Reader seems to be misrepresenting themselves as recipients of awards and recommendations that don’t exist. I might not have even seen that post, and if I did, I might have been inclined to give Clinical Reader the benefit of the doubt and assumed it was a minor lapse in judgement that they would soon rectify. Hanlon’s Razor and all that.
But when they respond to that blog post not with an apology or explanation (or even silence), but with bogus legal threats, they immedately move from the “possibly clueless” category in my brain to the “toxic and dangerous” category. (Also: love the “too” and the way they say they are “kindly” threatening someone. I feel warm and fuzzy.) And I’m not the only one.
Way to shut up your critics, Clinical Reader.
Edited at 2:02 MDT:It just gets better! Quit while you are behind, Clinical Reader!
So. I haven’t been around here much lately. I’m not sure if you noticed. I’d understand if you didn’t. The whole “blog” thing has seemed a bit underwhelming lately, no? Caveat Lector is dead and I’m not feeling so hot myself. Or something.
One of the reasons I haven’t written much here in the past few months is that I have been working on writing a book. (That sound you just heard was my editor laughing. “‘Working’ he says? ‘Writing?’ I wonder what ‘slacking off’ looks like!”) It has been a humbling experience. The ego boost from having someone say “would you like to write a book?” doesn’t quite make up for the months of inertia, self-doubt, and ever-growing dread as the sound of the deadlines wooshing by starts to drown out the Muse of Library Science whispering in my ear.
I have also been busy fighting off depression. I have been prone to mood swings and so on since I was an adolescent, and the blues have been getting harder for me to shake. Nothing dramatic, nothing worth making an after-school special about, just a lot of quality time spent staring into space.
So yeah. I AM A BARREL OF LAUGHS.
You may be asking yourself (as, indeed, I am asking myself) “why is he telling us this?” And I’m not sure. I don’t think I have ever deleted a post after publishing it, and this could be the first.
But I guess I’m trying to say that even though I have neglected this blog (along with many other things) I’m not quite ready to give up on it. I have things I want to write, some about libraries, some about other things. So this blog may be a bit more personal or a bit more random. I sort of miss the days before Twitter and FriendFeed where blogging and commenting was the primary way to communicate publicly on the web.
And I hope that the things that have kept me away from blogging are turning around. The book’s not quite done, but it will be. Soon. Really. And I’m doing what I can to keep my mood from flatlining. I’m feeling a bit more optimistic and energetic right now than I have in a few weeks, so I’m going to try and keep that trend going rather than regressing to the mean.
I have never been to Louisville, but I sent them a book this morning because I really like this idea, and wanted to blog about it and would feel like a dope if I hadn’t actually sent them a book first. It sounds like this is the last week of the drive, so don’t delay.
Incidentally, LFPL is where Greg Schwartz works. So if you know Greg and that gives you more of a reason to want to support this little project, so much the better.
I got a chance to talk to Derik during a break at the recent Computers in Libraries conference. We started our conversation by talking about that blog, which has made a name for itself rather quickly with its relatively novel approach to blogging: regular publication (at first one new post every week, now every other week) of longer essays that are peer-reviewed by other members of the group blog as well as outside readers.
Drawings of In the Library with the Lead Pipe authors by Derik Badman
Steve: So right when everybody was saying “blogs are dead, the library blogosphere is out of gas,” you and a bunch of other people started In the Library with the Lead Pipe. Why’d you do that?
Derik: I can’t take credit for the why. That came from Kim Leeder, who is out at Boise State, and Brett Bonfield who is at the Collingswood Public Library in New Jersey. The idea is we wanted to do something that was somewhere between blogging and writing for journals. We wanted to try and create a model that is more open, that is free, but that also has some kind of peer review and authority to it. We wanted to do longer posts, but there is the worry that people don’t want to read long posts on the web. We said we were going to do it weekly and we just switched to bi-weekly because even those of us involved would be saying “I’m still two posts behind in reading.”
It’s an ongoing, evolving experiment. We’ll see how it goes.
Steve: Well, how is it going? What do you think you are gaining from the peer review and the longer posts?
Derik: The peer review I think has been really helpful. We get at least one person in the group and at least one person outside of the group to read every post before it gets published. The real purpose of peer review is you get to see your writing from a different angle. Some people will say “oh, that’s a really interesting avenue, you should have talked about that more,” or “maybe you don’t need that.” It definitely makes the writing better.
Steve: It seems like the blog has gotten a good response.
Derik: We worked a little bit to get people to link to us by using our social networks, which was very helpful.
Steve: You also write about comics, and you do your own webcomic. How does the webcomic compare to writing and doing other stuff for the web? You keep a pretty strict schedule for the comic?
Strip from the “Mars and Venus” section of Derik’s webcomic, Things Change. Click the comic to view full size at the Things Change site.
Derik: Yes. Of all the things I do, that’s the thing that I always make sure is on the schedule. I’m not on a schedule for my blog and my writing. But the webcomic, I made the schedule and you gotta stick with it, that’s just something that’s expected. You gotta do it if you are going to do the comic and keep people paying attention.
There’s no time to stop, I just have to keep producing, regardless. Even if I have to cut corners and copy and paste something or use the same background twice–which I did before coming here because I was thinking “I gotta get stuff done for while I’m away!”–I still get the stuff done and I make progress, because that’s the goal, to create a body of work.
Strip from the “Pentheus and Bacchus” section of Derik’s webcomic, Things Change. Click the image to view full size at the Things Change site.
Steve: I am trying to draw a parallel between this and the library blogging. Is blogging an end in iteslf or is it a means to get noticed? With your web comic, obviously you are putting so much work into it that it must be satisfying in and of itself. Are you trying to promote yourself for other kinds of work with that or is that the medium that you like?
Derik: It is an end in itself and it is something I really like. I think the main step past that would be getting an actual book published of the webcomic. It’s more about the work. I don’t think I have a ton of readers, but it’s what I like to do more than any library stuff I do. If I could retire and just draw comics, I totally would.
Steve: Do you see much of a connection between the library stuff you do and the comics stuff that you do, or do you think of them as separate spheres?
Derik: I have mostly thought of them as separate spheres. I guess there are times where they start to intersect, like drawing at conferences. Which is kind of one of those “do something as a way to get somewhere else.” I do it for fun, but it also became this way that I met people and networked more.
A page of Derik’s illustrated notes from Computers in Libraries 2009.
Steve: People notice that.
Derik: Yeah. There’s probably tons of people that I would never have met, but they were like “oh, your drawings are cool.” So that’s kind of neat. I’d like to work it more into my actual work at my library. I have been thinking about how I might use comics in an instructional context, like by explaining Boolean logic in comics. The visual aspect would make it clearer than anything else I could do to try to explain it.
Steve: One of the cool things about that is–if this were something you wanted to do–we were talking before about libraries duplicating effort, so if you wanted to…
Derik: I could share it out…
Steve: …and if you CC-licensed it or whatever people could use it. If you did it in a way that was really understandable, people would use that all the time.
Derik: Actually, on Saturday I had an art show up in Second Life and I was talking about it and somebody there asked me about the library-comics crossover, and I mentioned how I had this weird idea about Boolean comics, and there was another librarian there who was like “I would totally buy that!”
Steve: Tell me more about the Second Life presentations.
Derik: My total experience in Second Life thus far has been public speaking, which is interesting. I was talking about webcomic art, and on my screen the images were smaller than you would normally see them on my site. But through the viewer of Second Life, they are like two times the size of a person. And with that kind of secondary scale, it just made them look really cool, like Stonehenge or billboard comics. I could never do that in real life. It would not even be technically feasible because I just don’t draw them at the resolution to where you could blow them up that way. So that was fun.
Derik’s Second Life avatar admires the Stonehenge-sized comics.
It opened my eyes to one valuable use of that virtual world environment. It’s definitely more social than a webinar or a lot of that junk. It’s not the same as coming to an actual conference and talking to people, but considering how much travel budgets have been cut lately, it might be something we see more of. It was certainly more interesting than the ACRL Virtual Conference. Calling that a “virtual conference” seems a little dicey.
The Second Life art show was part of a “virtual worlds in education” conference. It’s kind of weird, because every time I hear that there’s some kind of Second Life conference it’s always about using Second Life for something. It’s always so strangely meta, like they can’t say “let’s use this tool to talk about other stuff,” it’s always like “we gotta use this to talk about this.”
Steve: OK, last question: what does it feel like to come to a conference and know you aren’t going to meet anyone with a cooler name than “Derik Badman?”
Derik: [Laughs] I don’t know. People always say things like “oh, I bet they made fun of you as a kid” or “I bet people thought your name was cool as a kid.” When I was a kid, no one ever made jokes or anything. It has always been completely normal. It’s all metacommentary on the name and not actual commentary. It is my real name, though. I did not make that up.
The next post on this blog will be the first of what I hope will be a series of interviews. About a year ago, I started to think that this blog would be more interesting if I pulled in some voices and ideas that aren’t my own. Since it has taken me a year to actually do an interview and get it posted, I’m expecting that this won’t exactly be a regular series, but the plan is to do it from time to time.
I have a mental list of people that I’d like to interview. There’s no one obvious thing that unites all these potential subjects, but they seem to have some general things in common. While none of them are obscure (some of them are better known than I am), neither are they name-brand library bloggers. So as much as I still admire my blogging heroines, I doubt I’ll interview them. Otherwise, I mostly want to talk to people who are working in areas of the profession that don’t get blogged about so much, or librarians who have an interesting background outside of libraries, or people who aren’t librarians at all, but are working in areas that touch upon the library. Or maybe I just wanted an excuse to approach people whom I find interesting and beg a bit of their time.
One of my inspirations is Deborah Solomon’s Questions for… column in the New York Times Magazine. I like the way they are short and punchy, edited down from longer interviews. I’m not such an experienced, confident journalist, so my interviews aren’t likely to be as short and tightly-edited, but I do intend to do a lot of editing so you won’t just be reading the transcript of the tape.
If it took me a year to do the first one, who knows how long it will take until I manage to do another one. But I hope you enjoy them and find them worth reading.
Yes, now you can show everyone that you aren’t merely common rabble: you live by a Cod. Right now, I have men’s and women’s shirts for sale, plus mugs and mousepads. I can add other products if there is demand.
I think it’s fair to ask where the money goes in cases like this. About 10% of the purchase price is my profit, though it looks like Zazzle takes some fees out of that profit, too. If that bugs you, download the full-resolution image (2.12MB PNG image) and make your own shirt.
Since librarians are likely to care about this, the cod image is in the public domain. It’s from The Fisheries and Fisheries Industries of
the United States, a publication from the 1880′s. I first found it on the Wikipedia page for cod, then followed up the documentation to find a higher-resolution image on the NOAA Photo Library – Historical Fisheries Collection. Dorothea Salo cleaned up the source image.
Word is that Dorothea will be sporting her Cod shirt at ALA this summer. Don’t be left out.
Note: the LSW CafePress site is still up and running, so you can get your LSW logo shirt or Shovers and Makers shirt there.
But you know what? Forget it. If you want snark from me, see my comments in that FriendFeed post or the comment I left on Meredith’s post. If you want thoughtful, pointed commentary on the Taiga thing, see John Dupuis’ post or Dorothea Salo’s Allaying fear. I don’t want to waste any more time on Taiga.
And let’s talk about provocative. Taiga wants to provoke us to discuss whether the library will be completely culturally irrelevant in five years and whether faculty and administrators hate us more than we hate ourselves. Darien wants us to discuss just what it means to say “the purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization.”
I know which discussion I’d rather have. Thank you John, Kathryn, and Cindi.
I don’t think I have said anything about it here yet, but there’s no place like the airport to do a quick blog post about an upcoming conference. I’m on my way to Computers in Libraries 2009 in Crystal City (let’s pretend it’s DC, OK?). I’ll be presenting Tuesday afternoon on library camps and unconferences along with John Blyberg, Stephen Francoeur, and Kathryn Greenhill.
Please look for me and introduce yourself. As long as the supply holds out, I’ll be handing out Shovers and Makers buttons, though I might try to extract a promise from you that you’ll do a Shovers and Makers post if you haven’t done one already.
Back in November, my fellow carping nerdboy, Joshua M. Neff, came up with a new Library Society of the World slogan and t-shirt: Shovers and Makers. I liked the shirt and thought we needed an award to go with it–an award that would provide a fun counterpart to Library Journal’s annual Movers and Shakers awards.
So with Josh’s approval and input, I built shoversandmakers.net. We had a bunch of “teaser” posts being fed into the LSW FriendFeed room for the past two weeks, and the site went live today.
In short, Shovers and Makers is open to anyone who wants to call herself a Shover and Maker. Go to the site, read the about page, hit the front page and read some of the other Shovers’ and Makers’ posts about themselves, and then go to the winners’ page where you can write up your own profile and have it posted to the blog. Tell everyone about something that you did that you are proud of, or share some big plans for the future. If you have a blog, you can spread the word by linking to your post or the front page, or by using one of our badges like the one above.
This is supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be a little inspiring and a little absurd. I’m thrilled that there are already more than 20 people (besides Josh and me) who have participated in the first few hours the site has been open, and I hope we get many more.
Mid-March. The time when much of the nation is looking forward to NCAA basketball’s March Madness, and when library blogger nerds look forward to Library Journal’s Movers and Shakers. There is always a contingent of librarians in M&S who are prominent online presences as well; this overlaps to some degree with the group that Jane Dysart would call the ITI discoveries, though I prefer to think of them as Iris Jastram does: these are the representatives from the Library Society of the World.
I’m pleased to be personally acquainted with several of those folks, and am thrilled particularly to see Dorothea Salo’s profile, as I seconded Laura Crossett‘s nomination of Dorothea. Thinking about what such different personalities as Dorothea, Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, Jason Griffey, Michael Porter, and Sarah Houghton-Jan have in common, I realized that it is generosity. They are all trying to share what they know (or what they don’t know and are wondering about) through their writing and presentations, and they have all been personally generous to me through their kindness, thoughtfulness, and considerable brain power.
The people on that list whom I know less well but have chatted with online or exchanged a blog comment or two (like Dave Pattern, Rachel Walden, Lauren Pressley, Karen Coombs) have the same quality of wanting to share their ideas and expertise. I expect if we asked the friends and coworkers of all the Movers and Shakers, they’d say the same thing.
This is one of the things that makes me happy to be working in libraries. Hoarding information and keeping secrets isn’t a legitimate way to get ahead in libraries. We aren’t competing with one another, so there’s no real reason not to share or be helpful. I’m proud to know these particular Movers and Shakers, but I’m more proud to be part of a profession that values openness and sharing.
Next week, the Library Society of the World will kick off the Shovers and Makers awards, which promises more sharing and openness. I hope you’ll all be able to join us for that.
Sweet Juniper is a blog that I subscribe to, but often don’t get around to reading. The entries–written by Jim and Wood, parents of two small kids in Detroit–are often more like long and thoughtful essays than your typical short blog post (like the one you are reading now), and when I’m zipping through library blogs, I’m often not in the mood to really give these posts the attention they deserve. Perhaps I need a separate feed reader for blogs like this.
Photo by Sweet Juniper’s “jdg.”
I’m happy that when I came to today’s post by Jim, I, Scrapper, I was in the mood to read. It’s about exploring abandonded schools and saving a small amount of what can be saved. The photos from the school library are powerful enough, but the story is of even more pathetic, criminal neglect than the photo can show. Here’s a small excerpt:
Just a few weeks before this trespass, a principal at an operating school in this same district sent home a letter with her students pleading for their parents to sent toilet paper and light bulbs to school with their children. The school I’m in was closed so recently that only now are the smoke detectors running low on batteries. The devices are chirping birds in the hallways and classrooms, with songs like cooling embers.
From Caveat Lector, I learned that the Association of Research Libraries’ Ad Hoc Task Force to Review the Proposed OCLC Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records has released their final report. It is a concise, well-written report that anyone who has been following this story will want to read.
Given that the task force itself had trouble understanding the intent of some parts of the proposed OCLC policy (and they found at least one area where “OCLC staff seem unaware of this provision and unable to explain its intended meaning,” (5)) and given that the Task Force points out numerous areas of ambiguity and contradiction, I feel better about my own inability to really understand what was going on in the OCLC policy change.
Some of the most interesting parts of are a discussion or critique of the process by which OCLC wrote and put forward the policy:
The task force began its work with intent to focus mainly on the content of the policy document rather than on the process of its introduction, a process already widely acknowledged as flawed. In the course of our analyses and discussions, we came to the conclusion that in the context of the collective endeavor necessary to create and maintain the WorldCat database, process and content are inextricably intertwined. (7)
. . .
In the eyes of the community, the guidelines expressed a mutual social contract, and the new Policy represents an authoritarian, unilaterally imposed legal restriction. Given that “together OCLC and its member libraries make up the world’s largest consortium” (emphasis ours) [i.e., ARL's] and that the substance and nature of the new Policy is so significant, it comes as no surprise that the membership has responded negatively to the introduction of a unilateral contract by OCLC as a fait accompli. (8)
I also found one paragraph on unanimity and consensus to be particularly interesting:
There is not, and will not be, a universal viewpoint on all issues that are covered by a policy. There is not unanimity within the task force on the core issue: while the majority of members believe that it is desirable to have a policy that limits large-scale redistribution of records that could be harmful to the collective, it is not a unanimous view even within the small membership of the task force. But it is realistic to aim for consensus on a policy, i.e., agreement to follow a policy even though it is not identical in all ways to one’s individual, or even institutional, views. Certainly a process for member input and engagementnecessary for such consensus. (9)
And all those interesting parts don’t even begin to cover the part where they really fisk the policy itself, nor have I yet mentioned the appendix by a technology law and policy lawyer who examines the “Enforceability of OCLC Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records.” Again, if you care at all about this subject, you’ll want to read the report.
There is a good chance that in about a year, my friend and colleague Jessy and I will be teaching a short, two-week undergraduate course on “The History and Future of the Book.”
What should be on the required reading list? Of course we already have many ideas of our own, including some pretty traditional historians of the book and some more recent articles and blog posts on Google Books and the like. But I won’t itemize them, as I’d rather hear what you all suggest.
Remember, these are undergraduates getting a half credit here, and can’t be expected to know much about the history of books and printing or to have already read much about electronic publishing, changes to the nature of reading, and so forth. On the other hand, no one will be forcing them to take the class, so we can assume they are at least a little interested in the topic.
Via Karin Dalziel on FriendFeed, I saw a link to Sage Ross’s post Libraries and copyfraud. According to his “About Me” section on the blog, he is a grad student in the History of Medicine and Science Program at Yale, and according to the blog post, he has been working on putting together a collection of portraits of Charles Darwin for a Wikipedia page on Darwin Day 2009. He located an interesting image in the Huntington Library, a distinguished private, nonprofit special collections library in San Marino, California.
I hope you’ll read Ross’s full post, but here is the quick recap of what happened next. According to Ross, the photo was taken in 1881 and published as a postcard around 1908, meaning that there is no controversy as to whether the image is in the public domain. In addition to charging a reproduction fee, the Huntington asked about Ross’s intended use and quoted further fees based on what the use might be. When Ross pointed out they can’t do that with a public domain image, the library said, in effect, “all libraries do this,” to which Ross replied something along the lines of “so what?” It is, he says, a crime called copyfraud.
It’s my understanding that Sage Ross is entirely correct about this. If it’s a photograph of a public domain image, the decision in Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. applies, and the new photograph is also in the public domain. If anyone can show that his take on the situation is incorrect, I would love to hear about that. I am, god knows, not a lawyer.
I went to library school intending to be a special collections librarian, so this isn’t really news to me. Special collections libraries seem to have these kinds of policies as matters of course. It’s not because special collections librarians are evil snobs. (A few are, most aren’t, but either way it’s beside the point here.) I don’t want to be an apologist for these policies–my sympathies are entirely with Ross–but I think I understand how this comes about.
As Ross says, libraries can charge whatever fees they wish to make the copy and send it to you. Researchers can’t force the library to copy anything, or dictate the price. But why do libraries fail to separate that fact from their authority over the use? I think there are several reasons.
Special collections libraries deal with unpublished collections that are still protected by a very long copyright duration. For manuscript collections, the library may own the copyright as part of the deed of gift, or the library may be the intermediary between the copyright holder (typically the subject’s estate) and the researcher. So in many cases, there are legitimate copyright concerns and the library is justified in asking questions about use and granting or withholding certain rights.
Also, copyright is confusing. Fair use is confusing. It can be difficult for a non-lawyer to keep straight the difference between section 107 and section 108 of Title 17 of the United States Code. Unpublished works and orphan works and foreign publications confuse things even further. It can be hard to tell if something is in the public domain, though tables like Cornell’s Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States certainly help.
But it’s not like we do ourselves any favors when it comes to understanding these nuances. It didn’t surprise me a bit that the Huntington fell back on “everybody does this. Go ask Yale!” In libraries, we have a culture of surveying our peers rather than consulting experts. When you start a new service or adjust a policy, is your library more likely to consult to a lawyer to check into the legality of your move, or to conduct a quick survey of what similar libraries are doing?
There is also an interesting mix of the cash economy and the reputation economy at work here. Reproduction fees are one of the few direct revenue streams available to research libraries, so it’s possible that a library could depend on that revenue more than they care to admit. But money aside, libraries also want credit and respectability. The Huntington’s permission to publish policy leads off with restricting use to those “which support the Huntington’s mission of the advancement of learning through research and the production of scholarly works; or for Huntington-approved commercial purposes.” They also expect you to meet “standards of appropriateness established by the Huntington,” and to credit the source properly. This is all to maintain the image of the library. Your special collection isn’t so special when images from your library get cropped, collaged, used for non-approved “inappropriate” commercial purposes. The problem, of course, is that you can’t assert those rights in cases where you don’t have them to begin with.
Lastly, owning the book or photograph or other item feels like it should come with copyrights. After all the library bought the book (or other item) or held complex negotiations with a donor to get it, described and cataloged it, made it findable, kept it at the right temperature and relative humidity and in the best possible condition. Were it not for that research library, it’s possible that the thing you want wouldn’t have survived at all, let alone be available for you to copy. And now you want to waltz in, pay your twenty five bucks for a high resolution scan, and then publish the thing all over the Internet? In the words of Max Fischer, they saved Latin; what did you ever do?
I hope libraries get this straightened out soon. People are becoming more and more aware of their rights to use public domain materials, in part because libraries and cultural institutions are leading the way in making those materials visible on sites like the Flickr Commons. I hope libraries can continue to be leaders in making things available and put behind us customary policies that are regressive (and possibly illegal).
AOL Hometown shut down with very little notice to the people who still had their sites hosted there. Google is closing, stopping development or otherwise 86’ing Google Video, Notebook, Catalog Search, Jaiku, and Dodgeball (ReadWriteWeb article). LiveJournal laid off a bunch of people and sorta forgot to comment on it publicly for a while, leading people to suspect that they have something to hide and may not be long for this World Wide Web. Social bookmarking site, Ma.gnolia, had “data corruption and loss” on Friday, and at the moment they still haven’t recovered. (WebCite cached version of Ma.gnolia home page with apology and explanation.) Thomas Hawk has been blogging occasions (one, two) where Flickr permanently deleted users accounts with little notice or negotiation. (Please note that Hawk is CEO and Chief Evangelist [*gag* -ed.] of Zooomr, a Flickr competitor.)
I didn’t watch the whole LITA Top Tech Trends video, so it’s possible that the actual TTT panel talked about this. Karen Coombs certainly comes close with what she calls “the one which scares the sh!t out of me”: “The waking digital preservation nightmare.”
I admit that I’m conflating some not-entirely-related phenomena: sites where the owning company pulls the plug; sites that have one-time serious, possibly irrevocable losses; and sites that are too eager to not just suspend users’ accounts, but to delete everything they have posted.
But it goes back to something I wrote about two years ago in a post called When good sites go bad. It’s great to put stuff on these sites to increase your media’s visibility or to find a more convenient way to share documents or something. But what happens if your free hosted wiki site suddenly goes bankrupt or your document sharing site’s servers are accidentaly sold for scrap, or the video hosting site you use objects to the hot book-on-book action you have posted?
Jason Scott got me thinking about this again with a series of posts on his blog, ASCII: Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse, Stand Back, We’re Archivists, and Fuck the Cloud. (N.B.: If you are offended by that last post title, please don’t click any of the Jason Scott links. The man uses profanity like a Thai chef uses chiles; his writing might not sit well with those used to blander fare.) Scott is a self-made historian and archivist of the recent but rapidly receeding digital past. His stuff is provacative and fascinating, and I think you should read it all, but I’ll highlight two things here.
The first is Scott’s Archive Team, logo seen here. As he said in the “Eviction” post:
Our little technorati, our people who cry for open source and beg us for money to Fight For Electronic Freedom and make their rounds at all the right cocktail parties at tech shows.. where the hell are they now? We’re talking about terabytes, terabytes of data, of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, crafted by people, an anthropological bonanza and a critical part of online history, wiped out because someone had to show that they were cutting costs this quarter.
Archive Team is his answer to his own question, with the idea that the team will swoop in and back up (by any means necessary) users’ files on sites that are in danger of going under.
We might well ask the same question: libraries and librarians and archivists who care about preserving the world’s cultural output: where are we now? Do we have anything to add to an effort to help keep online culture from going down the drain. I fear that most libraries can barely deal with the digital content we are directly responsible for, leaving the wilds of the Internet to people like Scott and Brewster Kahle to deal with, but I’d love to hear examples of libraries taking on this kind of responsibility.
The other thing is a nice quote from the “Cloud” post:
If you want to take advantage of the froth, like with YouTube or so Google Video (oh wait! Google Video is going off the air!) then do so, but recognize that these are not Services. These are not dependable enterprises. These are parties. And parties are fun and parties and cool and you meet neat people at parties but parties are not a home.
(Note that Google Video isn’t “going off the air”; it’s discontinuing uploading of new content.)
So that’s my top tech trend for 2009. There’s a reason it’s called “cloud” computing. It looks beautiful now, but could be gone in a moment.
Edited 2009-02-04, noon MST to add:Walt Crawford is certainly talking about the same trends when he suggest that we consider sites’ business models before placing too much trust in them, and that we “should think several times before relying entirely on the cloud.” I knew I’d seen Walt mention these issues, but didn’t have a link when I wrote the post.
ALA’s Midwinter meeting for this year was just up the Interstate from me in Denver and I missed it. I’m not an ALA member, so I wasn’t planning on attending the whole meeting, but I was hoping to get up there to meet up with some people. But between my getting sick last week and important family commitments this weekend, it just didn’t happen.
I did, however peek in on a Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) meeting bright and early one morning while I was still in my pajamas and making pancakes for my kids. LITA’s popular “Top Tech Trends” panel met at 8AM on Sunday (hallelujah?) and LITA had the foresight to use technology to make the meeting more accessible to those of us who couldn’t be in Denver to participate.
In addition to the now-familiar stream of Twitter updates from meeting attendees, LITA took things a few steps further, first by using something called Cover It Live to add moment-by-moment liveblogging updates to a post on the LITA Blog, then by streaming live video of the session on Jason Griffey‘s Ustream.TV account (a recording of the session is available there now).
This seems exactly like one of the things LITA should be doing right now: showing ALA that it can cheaply and easily reach out to members and non-members by providing some live conference coverage. My experience of watching a little of the streaming video and reading a chunk of the liveblog can’t really compare to the experience that actual attendees had. Video quality and selective liveblogging aside, I was a bit distracted making sure my kids didn’t pour maple syrup on each other. But I heard enough to be intrigued and to have a little side conversation online with some other people who were similarly keeping an ear and an eye on the proceedings.
Opening up a meeting this way can only help LITA and ALA. It’s not a substitute for being at the conference, it’s more like an advertisement for the conference and the association in general. The more people who get a chance to put their eye to the keyhole, the more people who will eventually decide they need to step through the door and be in that room for that meeting the next time around.
Yesterday, after sitting there quietly minding its own business for over a month, my post LITACamp: How much would you pay? received twelve comments.
Mostly, I’m posting now just to get you to go back to that comment thread and catch up, but here are a few thoughts anyway, partly provoked by my conversation with Iris Jastram (whom I hope will either comment here herself or post something to Pegasus Librarian).
The idea of the “unconference” or “library camp” is only a few years old, and people have different associations when they hear the term. For some people, the defining characteristic of the library unconference is that it is free to attendees. For others, it’s that the event is local and informal, or that it lacks any pre-scheduled sessions or keynotes, or that the schedule is created by the attendees on the day of the event.
That’s not to imply that people are so rigid that they can’t imagine an unconference that doesn’t meet their defining characteristic. But I do think that for those people who think “no registration fee” when they hear “library camp” or “unconference” will immediately think twice about an event with even a relatively modest fee. Those who expect a fully-unstructured schedule will wonder about an event with a keynote speaker or pecha kucha sessions. And so on.
For my part, I think one of the great things about the unconference format is that it can be whatever the attendees decide it is, and that many different kinds of events can fluorish. As long as people are interested in doing unconferences, there will be a spectrum from borderline anarchy to fairly buttoned-down events with a bit of flexibility in the schedule.
The only really surprising thing to me was in one of Roy Tennant’s comments where he mentions that LITA is expecting to lose money on their LITACamp, despite the fact that registration starts at $150 for members. I find that rather shocking if it is true, and if I were a LITA member, I’d be asking to see some spreadsheets.
I’m looking forward to 2009. I have a lot of things I want to get done in the new year, both personally and professionally, and I’m ready to get to work on them.
But I can’t ignore the fact that 2009 is likely to be a difficult year for libraries and our institutions due to the economy. I don’t think I have read many librarians’ blog posts about it, but through the less formal electronic grapevine I have heard of raises canceled, travel budgets slashed, jobs or entire departments being eliminated, and furlough days (mandatory unpaid days off) imposed. I can only assume that budgets for collections and services are suffering universally as well.
It would be impolitic to write in any detail about my own institution (which is probably why I haven’t seen others blogging around this issue). I’ll just note that even though I work at a private institution and we are shielded from state budget problems, much of our budget comes from endowments which are tied to the financial markets. We will all be feeling it this year. (See the New York Times article, Tough Times Strain Colleges Rich and Poor.)
Like most people, I try not to worry about things I can’t control, and like most people, I still end up worrying an awful lot anyway. Instead of worrying, I have been trying to think about what I should be doing in tough economic times. Both on the library level and the personal level, it seems to come down to something we–library people, not just people at my library–should be doing anyway: striving to be indispensable to as many people as possible.
As times get tougher and budgets shrink it will be tempting for librarians everywhere to want to hunker down and try to ride things out. But that would just marginalize libraries and librarians even further. Instead, it seems like we need to increase outreach, increase marketing, and increase our focus on helping people do what they really want to do. We will have to talk to our users more than ever, and look for ways we can get them the things they need, promote the things we already have, save their time, and continue to change in response to tough times. (Sounds familiar right?)
I hope that my library can be a leader in our institution during difficult financial times. I hope that we can aggressively cut expenses while remaining utterly committed to our mission, and being innovative in the service we provide. I resolve to re-dedicate myself to communicating with the people I serve, learning what makes them tick, and giving them the best service I can. My hope is that if someone asks them about the library they will say “the library makes it possible for me to do the work I do. Cutting library services or personnel would be a false economy.”
To get people to think that way about libraries, library people will need to remind them of all the great things we are doing, and that means more marketing and better understanding of the stories we need to be telling. You might see more “how we done it good” posts from me this year, not because I’m trying to market to you, dear reader, but because I’m trying to get the story straight in my head. I might also try some “how we done it bad and what we learned” posts, too (assuming not everything is perfect).
Reading this over, I’m afraid it sounds a bit preachy and/or obvious. I’m posting it anyway, because I think I need a little pep talk to get this year at work started, and maybe others do, too.
You may remember the “passion quilt” meme from this past spring, where bloggers were making a little image macro or slide that encapsulated a little nugget of advice. My contribution (seen here small, click to enlarge) was “do it now” with an image of my older son with saftey goggles and a drill.
Recently I came across a link (via Waxy) to an old episode of Ze Frank’s The Show. The episode is titled washington, ideas, brain crack. I hope you’ll watch it: it’s short, it’s funny, and he uses the F-word an awful lot in a way that I find silly and amusing, though YMMV depending on how you feel about the use of the F-word in general.
Ze’s “brain crack” is the other side of “do it now.” If you don’t do it now, the larger the idea will loom in your imagination, making it harder and harder to do it at all.
The other “do it now” I wanted to share with you was one of the main inspirations from my original passion meme post. I heard it when Lian Amaris, one of the drama faculty at Colorado College, gave a talk on her performance art piece, Fashionably Late for the Relationship. As a way of partially explaining how she came to embark on a demanding performance piece, staged on the Union Square traffic island in New York, she read a passage from the end of Anne Bogart’s book, A Director Prepares:
Allow me to propose a few suggestions about how to handle the natural resistances that your circumstances might offer. Do not assume that you have to have some prescribed conditions to do your best work. Do not wait. Do not wait for enough time or money to accomplish what you think you have in mind. Work with what you have right now. Work with the people around you right now. Work with the architecture you see around you right now. Do not wait for what you assume is the appropriate, stress-free environment in which to generate expression. Do not wait for maturity or insight or wisdom. Do not wait till you are sure that you know what you are doing. Do not wait until you have enough technique. What you do now, what you make of your present circumstances will determine the quality and scope of your future endeavors.
Announcing the Library Society of the World Zine, a planned dead-tree compilation of writing about libraries by library people.
If all goes well, when librarians gather in Chicago in July of 2009 for the American Library Association Annual Meeting, LSW agents will be packing copies of the first ever issue of the LSW zine along with their “FRBR? I hardly knew her!” t-shirts and Roy Tennant thongs. We will then sell or otherwise distribute the zines to an unwary population of humid, bus-riding librarians.
If at this point you are asking, “what’s a zine?” I’ll just say briefly that it is a small-circulation magazine-style publication, often photocopied and produced on the cheap. If you want to know more about zines, I refer you to the Barnard College Library Zine Collection and to the Wikipedia entry for “zine.”
This particular zine will be a collection of work by many people, including, I hope, YOU. Here is what I am thinking so far:
Articles or artwork should be your own work, not previously published (though some collage or “found” submissions would also be welcome).
Pseudonyms are fine.
Personal attacks are not fine.
The LSW Zine will not get you tenure, so save the longitudinal studies and the content analyses for the Journal of Tedious Librarianship (though parodies of such articles would be great).
Cursing is fine. Keep that in mind if you don’t like cursing,. Your submission will inevitably be next to someone who does like cursing. A lot.
Keep it fairly short. A one-to-five page submission is more likely to be published than a twenty page monster.
Keep it on the personal level. What do you love or hate about libraries? What gets you excited? Tell us about you worst day on the job or the day it all clicked. What is in your desk drawer? Draw the magic library unicorn. Who would win a Texas Cage Match, Meredith Farkas or Sandy Berman (assume Farkas isn’t pregnant and Berman can use whatever subject headings he chooses)? Just keep it personal and specific.
I, Steve Lawson, am the editor, and while I aim to be inclusive, it’s entirely possible I won’t be able to accept everything submitted. You are welcome to start your own zine titled “Steve Lawson is a Tool.”
The zine will be black-and-white, probably photocopied, and “half-letter” size (or the size you get when you fold a US Letter Size sheet of paper in half, or 5.5 x 8.5 in.). It will as many pages long as it takes, though the cost of printing will be a factor in how long we can let it get (see below).
In the grand tradition of the author-pays publishing model, authors will be expected to help print the zine, either by being responsible for making a certain number of copies or kicking in a certain amount of money. I haven’t really figured this out yet, but if you aren’t willing to spend $10 – $20 to get this thing printed, please don’t submit. (If $10 – $20 is a legitimate hardship for you, please let me know and we will work something out.)
I expect to have two deadlines: those people who just want to submit raw text and/or images and leave it up to me (and, I hope, the lovely and talented Tim Keneipp) to design the pages will need to get things in a little sooner. Those who want to go the whole nine yards and design their own 5.5 x 8.5 in. pages can hold out until a little later. In any case, ALA is in mid-July, so expect to see deadlines in April and May to leave time to print the crazy thing.
ALA Annual is merely a convenient deadline, far enough away to make this all seem plausible, and a time when many of us will actually be in close physical proximity. The American Library Association has nothing to do with this zine.
Will we sell it? Give it away? How would we handle collecting money? What format should submissions be in? Is anyone going to want this thing anyway? Will Michael Gorman have a column? Answer: That all remains to be determined.
Will this work? Heck if I know. But it should be fun to try. Leave a comment on this post or email steve at stevelawson dot name if you want in.
I am also thankful for tacky glitter animated gifs.
I have wondered from time to time just what it means for an atheist to be thankful. Exactly whom would I be thanking? I suppose it is just a convenient way of acknowledging that life can be very hard indeed, and it is worth pausing to note those people and things, happy accidents and long-sought accomplishments, that make our lives worthwhile.
I’m most thankful for my family and my health. I’m thankful that I have meaningful work that pays me a living wage and for my home. Expressed like that, those things sound like cliches, banal even. Yet we all know what complex and highly personal emotions and relationships lurk behind simple words like “family” and “work.”
I’m thankful for libraries, the ones that I have worked in and the ones I have used or visited. When I walk into a library’s stacks and start browsing and pulling down books, I still get that sense of “this is so cool” that I have always had.
I’m also thankful for the Internet and the World Wide Web. I’m glad that I am part of the generation who was born into a world where computers were not common household objects, and have lived through the coming of the microcomputer and the household connection to the Internet. There’s no point in pretending that computers and the Internet are uniformly good (any more than “family” or “work” are always fun and easy). But I value the Web for the way it has brought me closer to people all over the country (and to a small degree, all over the world).
Kate Sheehan has a recent post on ALA TechSource entitled Making Friends where she gets at some of the “drama” surrounding making friends online. She mentions some of the fragmentation we have seen in the online community of librarians as blogs have lost some of their gravitational pull and people have put more effort into communicating on sites like Twitter and FriendFeed. We wrestle with keeping things public versus taking them to more private spaces on the Web.
It’s messy. As Kate points out, we don’t go into these sites with “focus and purpose” in mind. People screw up and people’s feelings get hurt, and sometimes we share too much. But the people I have met on the web over the last three years have become my closest friends. Outside of my family, they (you) are the people I look forward to seeing every day, the people who know me best.
I was going to write a post wherein I mentioned the OCLC policy changes or “clarifications” or whatever they are and linked out to a few library blogs and sites like Inside HigherEd and Slashdot and the like to show how this is being discussed inside and outside the library world.
My main original contribution was going to be the observation that perhaps in the library blogosphere we have been so busy hating ALA and ILS vendors that we have forgotten to hate OCLC, too. In truth, I wasn’t inclined to be too sympathetic to OCLC’s point of view, but (as I would have said in this now-mostly-redundant post) I would really like to read something written by a person who wasn’t either on OCLC’s payroll, or intimately involved in a project directly threatened by the OCLC “clarifications.”
So let me just say this before Jessamyn can say it. Mazzocchi has a lot to say about OCLC’s monopoly and how they can best protect it. He says in part:
OCLC can do exactly one of two things now:
open up itself so that it becomes the de-facto centroid of an otherwise opened and more diverse ecosystem, where people are excited to contribute to them and not forced to.
try to use all the power they have to stop others from competing with them and displace them.
The first one seems like the most risky one, but it’s really the second.
and
By locking the place down even more and alienating a bunch of alpha-librarians, they’re doing nothing but catalyze the movement that will eventually lead to their obsolescence and the establishment of another organization, similar in every aspect to OCLC save for one: the short sightedness in how to entice contribution without alienating the contributors.
Coincidentally, I was reading Matthew Battles’ Library: An Unquiet History today and came across this interesting tidbit on page 29 about the Library of Alexandria:
In an effort to stop the growth of the libraries at Rhodes and Pergamum, both of which threatened Alexandria’s preeminence, the city’s rulers banned the export of papyrus. The move backfired, however, spurring the Pergamenes to invent parchment (charta pergamenum), which for its strength and reusability would prove to be the preferred writing medium in Europe for more than a thousand years.
That seems like a reasonably appropriate cautionary tale.
SCENE: An urban artist’s studio, the home of AL. Posters and clippings representing Dadaist icons and avant-garde performance artists are on the walls. The “READ” poster from the American Library Association depicting Stephen Colbert is on the wall, with AL’s photo taped over Colbert’s face. Prominent among the books and letters liberally strewn around the room are volumes by Lazlo Toth, The Hitler Diaries, and Atlanta Nights.
AL–a “downtown” artist type–sits cross legged on the floor, typing on a laptop. Nearby are copies of Library Journal, Journal of Access Services, and other library trade publications and journals. As AL types, he pauses to shake a cocktail shaker, and pours himself a martini, which he drinks with evident pleasure.
There is a knock at the door.
AL: (Loud) Who is it?
CY: (On the other side of the door) It’s me, Cy!
AL: (Gets up to answer the door and shows in CY. CY is another artist/actor type, black clothes, disheveled.) Hey! Glad you could come. Want a martini?
CY: Dude, it’s like 10 AM. No thanks.
AL: (Shrugs, takes another sip.) So how is your grant application going?
CY: Ah, not great. Nobody wants to fund anybody to do a “Kabuki Three’s Company.”
AL: I’m shocked.
CY: I know! Japan is cool, 1970s sitcoms are cool. What could be better? (Sighs.) So how about that online performance art thing you were telling me about?
AL: “The Annoyed Librarian?” Oh man! It just gets better and better!
CY: Explain this to me again. You got a grant to impersonate an obnoxious librarian in a blog?
AL: Yeah, basically. It’s such a great gig. I read librarians’ blogs, come up with a contrary position, write that up at length, and wait for the reactions to roll in.
CY: Wait, there are librarians’ blogs? Like “blogs” plural?
AL: Just one of the many odd facts I have learned doing this performance art piece. But yeah, I see what they are into–like something called “Library 2.0”–and I find a way to say that it’s stupid. I figured it would mostly piss them off, right? That I’d get tons of hate mail and everything, and then I’d have some kind of performance project where I’d read it all out loud and call it “Hate Mail from Librarians.”
CY: You aren’t getting hate mail?
AL: Oh yeah! Tons of hate mail. And hate blog posts and comments and stuff. A while back one of the editors at Library Journal called me the “Annoying Librarian”…
CY: Bet you never hear that one…
AL: … and went off about how I was a “right wingnut,” and a “bad guy” and a “coward” for being anonymous.
CY: Buy you aren’t anonymous. You are pseudonymous.
AL: From your lips to John Berry’s ears. Anyway, I’d show you thoseposts, but the folks at the Library Journal website are total incompetents and the posts are missing and the comments have devolved into links to “midget porn actresses” so there’s no real point. But it’s great for my art.
CY: So the librarians hate you.
AL: Right, but no! Also lots of of anonymous comments from people who LOVE me. Or love the Annoyed Librarian.
CY: Right, Brando. They don’t love you, they love him. He’s a character.
AL: She’s a character.
CY: So you just see what the library bloggers are saying and you say the opposite?
AL: If only it were that easy. No, sometimes it would be just silly to take the opposite position. Like this recent thing with OCLC. Ever heard of OCLC?
CY: Uh, no.
AL: Of course not. But every librarian has. And OCLC is doing this thing where they are saying that all these data records that government employees and librarians around the country have created are now somehow the property of this non-profit corporation OCLC.
CY: First, that sounds nuts, and second I can’t believe you read and understand all that crap.
AL: Yes, and also no kidding. So obviously the Annoyed Librarian can’t come out and say this OCLC thing is actually a good thing–it’s satire, not fantasy. Instead I have to say that librarians are too spineless, slow, and disorganized to actually do anything about the situation.
CY: Smart.
AL: Yeah, but at this point I have lots of practice. I have been doing the same thing with he Amercian Library Association since the gig started. The bloggers all hate the ALA for being too big and too slow and too far behind the times and too generally irritating. Did I tell you I had to go to Anaheim to spy on the last conference?
CY: (Shudders) Sadists.
AL: Right. So it would be obvious this whole thing is a put-on if I said that the ALA is like not bureaucratic enough or too far out on the cutting edge, so instead I say that they hate it for the wrong reasons.
CY: That is twisted.
AL: I haven’t even told you the most twisted part. The blog got picked up as an official Library Journal blog.
CY: These are the incompetents with the editor dude who called you a wingnut?
AL: Yes! Can you imagine that meeting! And now they are paying me! I have them leave the cash behind a dumpster in the park. And that’s not even the newest news. I’m the sole author of an entire issue of The Journal of Access Services.
CY: What are “access services?”
AL: Heck if I know. I didn’t really have to write anything new, either. I just repurposed some old blog posts and prettied it all up.
CY: So you got paid a bunch for this?
AL: Naw, that’s not how it works. Academic journals don’t pay anything.
CY: You really are getting perverse. You said you wrote this whole issue, but there’s an intro by “Wayne Bivens-Tatum?”
AL: Oh yeah. Great name, isn’t it? He seems to dig my stuff. But the great thing is the reaction by librarians. I can just feel the spittle gathering at the corners of their mouths as they write post after post and comment after comment about how this is going to ruin this journal in particular, library journals in general, peer review, and the library profession in general.
CY: You can feel the spittle? Dude.
AL: It’s a figure of speech.
CY: So you must think these librarians are a bunch of losers.
AL: No! That’s just the thing. Some of them are dopes, or a little bit dim. They haven’t figured out who I am yet. But mostly they are reasonably good people, trying to make their libraries better. They are just really easy to provoke.
CY: So what are you going to do for an encore?
AL: Well, the Amercan Library Association encourages self-nomination for the office of President-Elect. Want to be my campaign manager?
November 4 is my birthday. As happens from time to time, it is also Election Day.
At this point, you probably don’t need me to remind you to vote. Like me, many of you have already voted. And given the close elections we have endured over the past 8 years, you don’t need me to remind you that a small number of votes can make a big difference.
I voted for Obama, and I hope you will too. If you want to know why, I’ll point you towards John Scalzi’s endorsement. His reasoning is just about identical to mine, and he put it better than I likely would.
But regardless of whom you vote for, if you can vote in the US, please vote on Election Day. And if you want to help give me a really big present, vote for Barack Obama.
But for various reasons, the conference never came together for me. The biggest problem was that I wasn’t there long enough. I had planned to miss a day anyway, flying out late Tuesday afternoon, but then United Airlines decided to rebook me by pulling flights out of a hat (including a layover of negative one hour on the return) and even after a few fixes I was still stuck leaving on Tuesday morning. That, plus the fact that I started feeling queasy on Monday made everything a bit hazy for me.
I have caught up a little by reading the blog coverage. I suggest the aformentioned posts by Jenica on her blog, Attempting Elegance, or Sarah Houghton-Jan’s posts on Librarian in Black if you want detailed play-by-plays that go well beyond just a semi-intelligible transcription.
But two of the post-IL posts that I have found most interesting aren’t session reports, but ideas about presenting. Iris Jastram, in a post titled A Side Effect of Social Networks that I Hadn’t Anticipated, identifies a kind of positive peer-pressure at work when it comes to creating quality presentations. It is interesting to watch those experienced presenters, or even the folks who are new to presenting who I have known from online contacts for a long time. I watch them less to learn about what they are presenting (though they usually have something new to teach or show me) and more to see how they present it.
The other post I’m thinking of is Aaron Schmidt’s HOWTO give a good presentation where he runs down a list of tips like “So don’t ‘give a presentation.’ Just talk to your audience. Have a main point or two and tell the story surrounding those points.” and “The podium is not your friend.” I can get behind Aaron’s ideas as one way to give a good presentation. As Jessamyn West points out in the interesting comment thread on Aaron’s post, there are many different kinds of presentations, and I’d add that there are many different kinds of presenters with different strengths. Anyone who is interested in seeing a variety of effective presentations should take a look at the TED talks from that other conference in Monterey. Check out the difference between the way Hans Rosling uses data visualization and Ken Robinson tells stories and Blaise Aguera y Arcas does a tech demo.
In fact, you could say the only thing those talks have in common is that they present you with a new way of seeing. In other words, it’s the actual content that is compelling, and the style highlights the content. It goes back to that Walt Crawford title: First Have Something to Say. Given my schedule, I only saw a few session at Internet Librarian, but by far the most useful and interesting to me was a fairly traditional presentation by Eliabeth Edwards of George Washington University. There were several of Aaron’s tips that she didn’t follow, but it didn’t matter because she had participated in actual research on an interesting topic: students’ perceptions of librarians on Facebook (looks like Edwards and some colleagues did a very similar presentation at Reference Renaissance, and it was blogged at Emerging Librarian).
I’m all for better presentation technique, but for it to really work for the audience, you need to be presenting some interesting research (and I’m using a pretty generous definition of “research”–a “how we done it good” that has a retrospective or evaluation of the results is good enough for me) or giving them a new way of thinking about your topic. I’ve attended (and given) too many talks that are just a run-down of online tools or the like, and I think the time for those is pretty much over.
Library Camp of the West 2008 (LCOW08) was Friday at the University of Denver. I helped organize it along with Laura Crossett of the Park County Library System in Wyoming, and Joe Kraus of DU. It wouldn’t have happened without both of them, and I agree with Laura that Joe deserves special thanks for just making everything happen from start to finish at DU.
Here are some impressions:
As I noted in a comment on Library Stuff, this was a conference where I personally chatted with library school students, the director of a large suburban public library, people from small rural public libraries, library staff for whom this was their first conference, and long-time professionals. I suppose all those categories are represented at traditional conferences too, but I don’t know they get a chance to talk to each other directly as we did on Friday.
I don’t know that everyone had as good a time as I did, but I think the fact that people keep updating the discussion session section of the wiki on a Saturday is a pretty good sign.
Repeatedly throughout the day I heard people say things like “you are interested in such-and-such? Then you really need to talk to this guy…” or “when you are ready to do that, please give me a call and we can help you with that.”
My friend, roommate, and fellow carping nerdboy, Josh Neff mentioned that in a traditional presenter/audience conference session, he often ends up twittering or IM chatting on his computer while keeping one ear on the presenter. With the library camp discussion format, it didn’t occur to him to do that once.
Kieran Hixon, of the John C. Fremont Library in Florence, CO told great stories about setting up their Koha catalog. They hired a 14 year-old kid to help set up the catalog, so he could only work 9 hours a week because he had to go to school. (Now the kid apparently works for LibLime and works with Koha full time). They tested it on a laptop, then ran it on a Pentium II as a production server. When asked about the migration from their commercial system to Koha, Kieran said “It was Saturday afternoon, and we’d told the library we’d roll it out on Monday and I totally forgot about it until I got a phone call, ‘aren’t we going to do that migration today?’. Got there around 11, we ordered pizza, and had the data migrated by about 3.”
In the session on IM reference, I mentioned David Lee King’s post about putting a Meebo chat widget on the “no results” screen in the library catalog. I got a Twitter reply from Jill at Pikes Peak Public Library today saying “PPLD added it on our pages by 2:30pm Friday :)” (The fact that they may have had a temporary setback doesn’t make that any less cool.)
From Microball, a CC-licensed image by Flickr user SerenityRose.
Mark Bauerlein–the man who recently published The Dumbest Generation (wouldn’t you love to be one of his students?)–has an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind: Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming. The good folks at the Chronicle moved the article from beyond the pay wall, no doubt knowing they’d get lots of links from us blog-addled skimmers. (I saw it via a link from Stephen Downes.) It’s always fun to read these anti-web articles in the Chron web edition, isn’t it?
I’m sympathetic to some of what Bauerlein has to say. I think it’s true that reading the average web page on a screen isn’t necessarily good preparation for reading longer, more complicated works. And I worry sometimes as I feel my impatience with reading longer works on- or offline that my attention span has been negatively affected by all my time online.
But there is also much foolishness and Gormanism in this article as well. Here is a plum library-specific example:
Last year when I required students in a literature survey course to obtain obituaries of famous writers without using the Internet, they stared in confusion. Checking a reference book, asking a librarian, and finding a microfiche didn’t occur to them. So many free deliveries through the screen had sapped that initiative.
Their initiative wasn’t sapped. They just couldn’t understand why an obituary that took them half an hour to retrieve from a microfilm of the New York Times was in any way more valid than the exact same obituary retrieved from the archive of the New York Times online.
I think it’s great to encourage students to talk to librarians, and I even think it’s great to encourage them to use printed journals and microfilm. The fact is there’s still a lot of stuff that’s not online. But newspaper obituaries?
At least at the (admittedly atypical) small, private, expensive liberal arts college where I work, the students seem to crave offline reading of important books. I’m not saying that many of them won’t cut corners when given a chance, and I’m not saying that their first thought when it’s time to do research is to check a reference book and hit the microforms.
But if we want to want to show them the richness of the complicated, multifaceted, multi-format environment that is the modern day academic library, I can’t think of a worse way to teach that than with newspaper obituaries.
Tumblr is a pretty slick platform, but I stopped using it for my own linkblog, Bevedog, because it all felt so locked up. I still haven’t been able to export all my stuff from the Tumblr blog.
But I still check in on the blogs I’m following on Tumblr every now and then, and I enjoyed this moment of JSTOR love that I found today. One of the features of Tumblr is “reblogging” where you can easily do a “me too” and blog the same quote or photo or video that you friends have blogged, choosing to add a comment of your own or not, and you get a unique view of all the reblogs if you see it through your Tumblr feed. It’s fun to see people geek out over JSTOR on a non-academic site.
I’m at least one memetag behind, but I just saw this and thought it would be fun to mark up the list.
Looks like this one has been making the rounds for a while, but I hadn’t really noticed it until I got tagged by The Sheck (aka Sarah Cohen).
This is a list of the top 106 books most often marked “unread” by LibraryThing users. The rules: bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre (assigned in high school, never finished)
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno(and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas (best novel of the 21st century)
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield (assigned in high school, read about about a quarter of it, burned the book at the end of the school year)
From cavlec I learned today that October 14 will be Open Access Day, as proclaimed by SPARC, PLoS, and Students for Free Culture. Exactly what that will mean is a bit up in the air, but there will be some online video appearances, and institutions across the country will be observing the day after their own fashion. There is, of course, a press release with more details.
They have blog badges like the one you see here, promises of downloadable posters to come, and even a t-shirt drawing that I shouldn’t tell you about because I’d really like a t-shirt.
There is a blog post contest that you shouldn’t even enter because Dorothea is planning to win.
Once the smoke clears from the start of school, I plan to put something together on my campus, though I haven’t any idea what that will be.
One thing I plan to do before October 14 is to finally write up the Open Access session that a colleague and I did for CC faculty way back in April. Until that time, here’s the page of information and links we used for that talk.
These guys took something that they are serious about–the need for libraries to change and adapt–and made an endearingly silly video around it. When it comes to the specifics of what libraries should do to change and adapt, I’m not always on the same page as David and Michael, but I love the way they aren’t afraid to go out on a limb, and the way they invited us all to go out there with them in the making of the video.
It is fun to see all those familiar faces in the video, but it does bring up something I have been wondering lately. When we try and include images of librarians to make a project seem more human and inclusive, is it counter-productive if many of those images are of the usual suspects? Or do only the usual supects even notice that the images are of the usual suspects? We have been talking about this over on FriendFeed w/r/t Laura‘s suggestion that we prominently feature the LSW dogs photo on thelsw.org and I’m still not sure what I think.
One thing is for sure, though: I crack up every single time I see Cindi’s Miss 2 wipe out at the end of the hi-fi sci-fi video.
This is the third blogversary for See Also…. Looking back over the past few months, I realize that I have failed to write about far too many projects and ideas that are important to me; I hope to rectify that soon.
I’m still excited by the possibility of this blog and blogs in general. I’m amazed at how blogging and participating in online networks has resulted in a wonderful network of friends and colleagues.
Instead of writing much more, I’ll share this Wordle cloud created from all the words in my posts from the past three years. I love that “Michael” is one of the most used words on my blog. Between Stephens, Sauers, Casey, Porter, and G-rm-n (am I missing anyone?), I suppose it is no surprise.
Presumably Dorothea will blog about it herself, and eventually put it in MINDS, but I’m pleased to read the coverage on the day of the show.
I was interested to read this from Macdonald’s notes on Salo:
She highlighted the fact that self archiving doesn’t have a management component, she’s ‘tired at watching good code fly past’ i.e open utilities that could be utilised within the repository environment but aren’t.
So rather than adhering to an opinion of the IR that ‘everybody knows they all fail!’ lets re-think, re-innovate, re-invent the IR as a suite of services and solutions.
On the same day I read this in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
…Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 enables authors to structure and annotate their documents according to formats that publishers and digital archives require. The articles can then be converted easily to formats that facilitate their digital storage and preservation. The company is offering the new software free to licensed users of Word and other Microsoft products.
…Microsoft has developed other new tools, now in testing, such as one that helps institutions build digital repositories for research output. The company has also set up an “e-journal service” that aids in self-publishing of online-only journals and other documents, such as conference proceedings. And its Research Information Centre, developed with the British Library, helps researchers collaborate throughout a project, from seeking money to collecting information and managing data and research papers.
Dorothea has been saying all along that the tools for open access repositories aren’t functional for authors and aren’t functional for archivists. At first it seems like an article about a Microsoft product that could facilitate Open Access belongs in the Onion rather than the Chronicle. When you think about it, though, most of our faculty are using Microsoft Office products every day to do their research and prepare their work for publication. Having MS tools available to researchers and writers could be very appealing.
I’m less optimistic about a Microsoft repository, and wonder if institutions might find themselves facing a dilemma between, on the one hand buying a Microsoft product that integrates with existing faculty practices but comes with the usual Microsoft baggage, and on the other hand, sticking with open source platforms that are more in the spirit of open access, but fail to present faculty with a viable workflow.
In the one week since we announced the Library Camp of the West (October 10 at the University of Denver, don’t you know) the response has been wonderful. As I write this, we are just shy of 90 people signing up on the attendance page, and many people that I have corresponded with are excited by the possibilities.
I’m certainly excited by the possibilities. I really don’t know what will happen there, but I can’t wait to hear what people across Colorado and beyond are doing in their libraries. I’m excited that a free, unstructured conference that welcomes anyone who wants to spend the day talking about libraries can provide an opportunity that really isn’t there for people who work in an institution that can’t afford to send them out of town for a conference like ALA Annual or one of the other big, national conferences.
Dorothea Salo writes about Tight budgets and conference attendence, and predicts that national conferences will need to dominate their slice of the market and concentrate on getting speakers that will pull in large networks of friends and followers, in the way that Information Today does. (You didn’t think it was a coincidence that so many of their speakers are also popular, well-connected bloggers, did you?) I see no reason to doubt her predictions.
Dorothea mentions briefly how she sees unconferences fitting into all this:
The most interesting opportunity I see is for BarCamp-style participatory conferences both virtual and face-to-face, because these leverage the circle-of-friends model.
And, though she doesn’t spell it out, “BarCamp-style participatory conferences” tend to be free to participants (as Library Camp of the West will be), thus potentially making them more attractive to administrators dealing with shrinking budgets.
I have mixed feelings about this. Of course I have high hopes for the Library Camp of the West and believe it has the potential to be worthwhile for everyone that attends. At the same time, I’d hate to learn that library people were having their requests to go to other conferences denied, with bosses saying “why don’t you just go to that free thing instead?”
This is bringing me back to thoughts about cost and value and some of the other issues Meredith Farkas raised in Value in the online world. Here we are talking about something in real space, not online, and I think the dynamic of “free” is pretty interesting here.
Looking at the attendance page on the wiki again, I see at this moment we have two people from Kansas (*waves to Josh and Royce*) and one from California (*waves to Jezmynne*) signed up with the rest all coming from Colorado and Wyoming. This makes sense to me, as I think most people would be a little leery of asking to go out of state to a free unconference, fearing the boss would say “you want me to buy you a plane ticket and hotel room for a conference run by three people with a free wiki who decided to put on a show?” Free works against you there; free is Not Serious.
But when it’s local the dynamic changes, and the boss can think “all this costs me is a little release time, and with any luck we’ll end up with a few good new ideas, and can publicize a few good ideas of our own. Even if the conference stinks, people will like the fact that I let them go.”
I can’t be sure (because did I mention that I’ve never worked on anything like this before?) but I hope that the free-as-in-beer registration (“Hey, it’s free, let’s give it a try”) will lead to free-as-in-freedom from fear for people who don’t present frequently at conferences (“I guess I wouldn’t mind telling people about that neat thing we are working on”) and some free-as-in-freedom from bureaucracy (“Nobody asked me to join anything, or said I had to come to another meeting in another state in six months.”) I just hope that it doesn’t undercut library people who are trying to get some funding to attend an important non-free conference this year.
This October 10, the University of Denver will host the Library Camp of the West unconference. We are still working out the details–hell, it’s an unconference, so we’ll be working out the details right up to the end of the day on October 10th–but you can check out the wiki at http://librarycampwest.pbwiki.com/. Library Camp of the West registration is free and open to anyone who wants to talk about libraries all day.
Right now, I’m working on setting this up with Laura Crossett and Joe Kraus. If you live in the area, I hope you will come, and I hope you will consider helping us un-organize this un-conference.
theblackmolly: how much interest do think there might be in a Rocky Mountain Library Camp?
tuttlawson: HA!
tuttlawson: I knew you were going to ask that!
theblackmolly: oh, fine
theblackmolly: read my mind
tuttlawson: Because I thought of the same thing and immediately thought of you!
theblackmolly: although I keep wondering if it’s just that I’m all envious of all the other cool kids
tuttlawson: right
theblackmolly: we need a place, first of all
tuttlawson: maybe here, though Denver would be a little more central
tuttlawson: I bet we could get DU or someone to host it.
We didn’t do anything about it, but it was in the back of our minds, and we’d sometimes say to each other “hey, when are we going to do that library camp?”
Then, at the end of this May, I mentioned this idea to Joe Kraus in the Library Society of the World Meebo room. Joe, not coincidentally, is a librarian at the University of Denver (DU) and part-time instructor in the Library and Information Science Program there. After two years of Laura and me dreaming about it, Joe had the date set and the rooms booked at DU in less than six weeks. Sometimes you just need to ask the right person to move things along.
So if you can come, please sign up on the wiki. If you have advice on running or attending an unconference, please share in the comments on this post.
Someone (who?) gave Boing Boing blogger and science fiction author Cory Doctorow a Library Society of the World ribbon for the ALA badge he wore at his book signing.
I should point out that I had nothing to do with either of these things, I’m just enjoying them from afar. I celebrated by creating an LSW Flickr group, so post your LSW-related photos there, please.
Daniel Johnston’s “Hi, how are you” mural, an Austin Landmark. From Flickr user “an agent’s” CC-licensed photo, “fine, thanks.“
Hi, how are you?
I’m OK. Actually, I’m feeling a little ill. And I was sick a few weeks ago, and one of my kids was sick. Nothing serious or anything. Just disruptive. I even missed a conference in Denver where I was supposed to speak, so that was frustrating.
Assuming I manage to recover from this latest thing and assuming that no one else in my family succumbs to some other vile illness, I’ll be heading off for a vacation that will last until the end of the month. So you probably won’t see me around here until July 1st or so.
And that’s OK, because sometimes life trumps blogging, and all that. (Not all the time. I have read some blogs in the last month where people were chronicling some very tough times, and I feel touched that they wanted to share that with the world. It seems that sometimes life could use a good blog.)
But before I took off, I just wanted to check in. I haven’t been posting much lately, but I don’t feel exactly like my beloved nerdboy Josh who says he’s bored with “Libraryland,” if not libraries and librarians themselves.
With me, it’s a little different. I’m still pretty excited by Libraryland, it’s just that the thnigs I’m excited about haven’t lent themselves to blogging. And sometimes the mind is willing but the fingers are weak. I have longish essays and reports I plan to dump on you later this summer, but I haven’t had the impetus to get them done. Perhaps in July. Perhaps before the third blogversary in August.
I might update Twitter while I’m away. Then again I may not. Sorry that I’m not really adding any new Twitter buddies, but I have kind of reached the breaking point there. Of course, that doesn’t matter much when the site is never actually working.
I started a Tumblr blog. It has been fun so far, no promises that I’ll keep it up.
We had to give ourselves an extension–we are an academic library, so we can do that kind of thing–but we uploaded our last images to our 365 Tutt Library Days photoset today. We’ve got 365 photos and two videos.
Did it make us more awesome? Hard to say (we were pretty awesome to begin with). Unlike the projects I mentioned in thet first post, this one was less intense, and I changed the deadline anyway, making it even less intense.
So I’m going to say it was a success, and a reminder to keep taking photos around the library. I suppose the next frontier is to upload some of them to the Tutt Library Facebook page.
Links to video and slides from the Web2.0 Expo. For some reason, all the videos are redirecting me to Matt Mullenweg, but you can access the others in the blip.tv sidebar.
Update, 2008-05-01: I created a Passion Quilt group on Flickr, so please feel free to put your contributions there. Also, I somewhat belatedly showed the image to Luke and he said it was fine.
Cindi Trainor tagged me for the “passion quilt” meme. You have probably already seen it, but here is the deal:
Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
Michael Stephens put a different spin on the original meme with his entry, Meme: Passion Quilt or What I Want for New Librarians* and since then, it has been a little hard for me to tell if participants have been trying to capture what they want kids to learn or librarians to learn. I think most people have been straddling the line, and I suppose my entry does, too.
So here is mine (with the kinda obnoxious by-nc-nd CC license):
And here is the story:
I came home from work Monday, and my six-year-old son, Luke, had a little life lesson for me out of the blue. “Dad, when you have to do something you don’t really want to do, you should do it right away and get it over with.” I’m not sure where that idea came from, or why he chose to share it with me just then, but I immediately thought of this passion quilt thing. That’s him in the photo when he was three, getting down to work.
For me, there are two main branches of this “do it now” idea. The first is what Luke was talking about: if you are putting off the dumb things you gotta do, you are just getting bogged down. There are a lot of things about the article Do it Now by Steve Pavlina that I find obnoxious, but there is real power in reminding myself to “do it now.”
The other, more interesting branch is the idea that you can’t wait until things are perfect before you act. Life is not like that, and so you might as well jump in and do it now. I think of James O’Donnell writing about Cassiodorus in Avatars of the Word. Cassiodorus was a writer and something of a librarian, who, in the middle ages, attempted to preserve Christian texts and scholarship by establishing a monastery of scribes. “In many important respects,” O’Donnell writes, “Cassiodorus was a failure.”
But I have come also to see that this deflated savior of western civilization I learned to mistrust when I was young had nevertheless had the right idea. He did not despise the new; he used it wholeheartedly. He did not reject old social institutions, but found new ways to adapt them. He did not tarry to prophesy a new age of learning and wisdom.
Most of all, he did things…The most effective change is wielded by those who do not expect to create or manipulate a closed system, but instead reocgnize that effective change takes place in open systems, where the accumulation of collaborative actions generates unexpected harmony. (87-88) [Google Books link to this passage]
Lastly, let me say that I choose “do it now” not because I am so great at this, but because it is a lesson for which I need constant reminding. I’m terrible at “do it now.” There is something a little distasteful to me about a bunch of bloggers telling people what they should do. This is a blogger telling you what he needs to do more of himself.
Rikhei Harris asks some good questions about conference attendance in her post Computers in Libraries: some initial reflections. As she points out, she’s picking up a bit on what Ryan Deschamps was getting at in November when he wrote The Ethics of Conference Attendance in a Networked World. Is it ethical to spend your library’s money and time on attending national conferences when the two main purposes of those conferences–learning new things and creating and maintaining a professional network–can be done online all the time at virtually no cost? And what does it mean to “bring something back” from a conference these days?
Let’s get another question out of the way first: Rikhei asks “was it right for me to have so much fun at Computers in Libraries?” Yes. It was right. Information Today did not invent fun. I’m sure Cutter and Dui and all those dudes had fun back in the day when they got together to talk about libraries. Plus, one assumes it is OK for librarians to go out and have fun during our normal work week as long as we make it in to work bright-eyed and bushy-tailed the next day. So, assuming that you aren’t so hung over you can’t make it to the morning sessions the next day, I think fun is nobody’s business but your own. (Note, though, that when I pointed out this photo to my boss, she said it looked like I was having “too much fun.” I’m sure she was joking.)
The fun also gets to the question of “what am I bringing back?” There is one thing you are sure to bring back from every conference: yourself. Did the conference make you more excited, more engaged with the problems of your library, more ready to tackle the next project or challenge? Then I’d say that you brought something valuable back. Like Rikhei or Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, I didn’t come home with a long list of things that were brand new to me, or that I want to immediately try and implement in my library. But I did hear some new details, see some new sites, hear some points of view that I hadn’t heard before. That’s a little hard to quantify, but I think it will pay off in the long run.
I still think there is a value in meeting people face-to-face. Yes, I get most of my professional networking done on Twitter and in the Library Society of the World chatroom these days (which probably sounds kind of like Clay Shirky’s “we get our Thursdays from a banana” to many librarians), and yes, my CIL presentation was about professional networking online. But getting in a room with those people deepens the bonds you form online and expands the network. I met many people at CIL this year who I knew of, but had never communicated with directly before. You can always expand your professional/social graph.
Lastly, what do Rikhei, Jenica, Ryan, and I all have in common? We presented at Computers in Libraries (and Jenica blogged the heck out of it). This is not to say that we have nothing to learn anymore, just to point out that we contributed to what all those other librarians are “bringing home.” I’m thinking also of what Dorothea Salo is getting at in her post Single spray and steady stream: many librarians don’t do this keeping current and networking thing every day. Many librarians go to the conference and get their learn on once or twice a year, and we are doing something important for the profession (if, admittedly, not for our “home” libraries) when we put together good presentations and deliver them in person at these conferences. Someone has to deliver Ronco Spray-On Professional Development, and if we can do it and have fun at the same time, so much the better.
In the past 36 hours, I have met more than a dozen of my imaginary friends in person for the first time. It has been a little overwhelming, but in a good way. I find that most people’s communication styles online are quite close to their affect face-to-face.
I went to talks today by Mary Ellen Bates, Jeff Wisniewski, Tom Ipri, and Roy Tennant. All were excellent speakers with very well-done presentations. I don’t know if I’ll take time later to type up my notes, but if you can find their slides on the CIL site or in the wild, they would be worth your while.
The talk I gave with Josh Neff and Rikhei Harris on the Library Society of the World was total chaos. Which is to say, it went rather well. There were about 150 people in the physical room with us and 20+ people in the LSW Meebo room.
I was worried that the whole thing might seem like an inside joke, or “look at us, aren’t we cool?” And maybe it did a little bit (OK, maybe a lot). But I think people got our main ideas about the creation of online community, the benefit of online spaces that blend the personal and professional, and our joy in making these connections. It must have resonated with a few people, as there are more names on the wiki, and more “guests” and new members in the Meebo room today.
We left the LSW room chat window up on the screen for the whole presentation. I knew that it would be distracting, but that was part of the fun (especially when we got rickrolled, and you could hear “Never Gonna Give You Up” start up on people’s laptops throughout the room).
I couldn’t see much of what scrolled by on the screen, but it drew laughter and confused stares.
We didn’t have slides. If we did, they might look like this, or even these. But probably not.
A few blogs have posted on our session. Here is what I have seen so far:
At the very least, we did something a bit different, a bit anarchic. Greg Schwartz (who is selling T-shirts these days, I hear) said there was an interesting contrast between our half of the session, and the group we shared our timeslot with, the Infododads bloggers. Greg pointed out, that unlike us the Infodoodads folks had “structure and content.”
Do libraries have a blind spot for a certain set of important, interesting books? Tim Spalding thinks so, and in Getting real: Libraries are missing books he brings up the case of Getting Real, a book on building web applications by the web software company 37signals. It was a big seller as a PDF download for 37signals, and again on Lulu.com. But it made not a dent on libraries, judging by holdings in Worldcat.
Spalding asks “how could libraries miss this?” That’s a reasonable question, but it’s pretty easy to answer, and people answer it in the comments: bias against self-published books, difficulty of ordering without a purchase order, lack of reviews, lack of faculty/public demand, the fact that there is now a free HTML version, etc.
But the real question isn’t “how did libraries miss this one book?” The questions (implied if not explicit in Spalding’s post) are “is it OK to miss that kind of book?” and “how big of a problem is this?” and “how are libraries going to deal with this in the future?”
I have another example book: Wil Wheaton’s Happiest Days of our Lives. Wheaton, best known as a kid actor on Stand By Me and Star Trek: The Next Generation (cf. alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die), has reinvented himself as a geek writer in recent years. His earlier memoir, Just a Geek shows 160 owning libraries in Worldcat.org. His new, self-published memoir? Zero libraries.
I don’t want to make too much of that goose egg. The book has only been out since October. I don’t konw what the usual lag on Worldcat reporting is. At least one big library has it on order. Plus Wheaton has had surgery recently, and has been late in filling orders.
But that’s kind of my point. Soon, it may not sound all that unusual to say “the guy who wrote and designed the book and had it printed has been under the weather and hasn’t shipped the book to us from his home yet.”
Kevin Kelly’s essay/post 1,000 True Fans received a lot of attention recently. The idea is pretty simple: a creative person needs to have only 1,000 people spending $100 a year on their stuff to make a nice living. It may not be easy, but it seems doable. But that plan only works as stated if the artist is selling his or her own work, with very little in the way of middlemen to pay. Kelly makes that point, and also emphasizes that “The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly.”
It’s important to note that Kelly isn’t saying that these artists will only appeal to a thousand people total (though I’m sure large academic libraries have books that appeal to even small audiences), just that pleasing this core audience will be the artist’s most important task.
Put it this way: a writer trying to go the True Fan route will be so busy cultivating a relationship with the audience, he or she will have little time for sending out review copies, creating a workflow that deals with P.O.s, etc. They really don’t care if they sell to libraries, as long as they are keeping that fan base happy. If they pick up other fans, or sell a few books to some libraries, that’s great, but it isn’t what their main focus will have to be.
Probably predictably, I don’t really have answers to the questions I posed earlier. I don’t think it’s worth getting worked up over particular books and how popular they might or might not be or how important they might or might not be. I don’t know how much of an impact self-published books will have in the long run. But I don’t think libraries can afford to neglect this kind of book for long.
I have long known that I have more than a few Googlegangers. The most interesting to me is Steve Lawson (duh!), an British bass player just a few years younger than I. He is one of those shameless self-promoters that I admire so much. It looks like he’s taking every opportunity to reach out to listeners and expand his audience on the web. As such, you can hear his music on just about any social software site. I have been tuning in on Last.fm and Facebook.
I didn’t know he was on Twitter until I got a reply from someone I didn’t know, talking about music. On a hunch, I searched his/my name and found http://twitter.com/solobasssteve. I friended him, and have since been rewarded with fun messages like this one. I left a comment on his blog under the name “Steve Lawson (no, not that one, another one)” and so on.
What’s my point? Just that Twitter and the Internets are fun. I like the flames and the drama and all that, but isn’t it cool that we can spend time just goofing around together with people we otherwise wouldn’t know?
Computers in Libraries 2008 will be the first big conference I have attended since I stated using Twitter and I’m interested to see how it will work as a backchannel, liveblog outlet, etc. I’d like to see how the following things work in terms of Twitter and conferences
Hashtags
A hashtag is a keyword preceded by a hash or “#” sign. It’s a way of marking a tweet with a tag in a similar way that you might tag a Flickr photo or del.icio.us bookmark. Theoretically, a person could use hashtags for all kinds of tagging in Twitter. Most of the time, there’s no real point in tagging a 140-character message.
Tagging for a conference makes sense to me, though, because you might want to see what’s going on in that place and time without having to follow a whole bunch of new people. You might not even know what people to add even if you wanted to. The hashtag adds a hook for an aggregator–like the CIL Netvibes page I made–to latch on to.
There is a catch, though. If you want http://hashtags.org/ to find those tweets you tag and display them on the http://hashtags.org/tag/cil2008/ page, you have to follow http://twitter.com/hashtags on Twitter (they’ll follow you back almost immediately; once they do that, you are ready). So that setup step makes it just a little more cumbersome.
There is the added baggage that some people just hate the hashtags. I guess I’d feel similarly if people habitually sprinkled them in all kinds of tweets, but for the purpose of collecting tweets around a specific event, I think they are fine. Any hashtag haters out there?
The problem there is that I’m sure even during the conference the friends of CIL20008 will be tweeting about things other than the conference itself. It gets even more complicated if CIL2008 has friends who aren’t actually present at the conference.
Privacy
Another possible monkey wrench here is that many librarians keep their Twitter account “protected” or private so that only followers they approve can see their tweets. I’m not going to argue that that is a bad thing, just that it will make them invisible when it comes to this kind of keeping up with an event via Twitter thang.
One way around that, of course, is to create a separate public account to use for events, like Iris Jastram has done with her pegasuslibrn account.
Or you could just relax and not worry about it. It’s only Twitter, after all.
With Computers in Libraries coming up in just a few weeks, I have started to think about keeping track of all the online activity relating to the conference: blog posts, Flickr photos, slides, Twitter comments, and so on. There is the official wiki which has a lot of information by and for conference attendees, but I’m thinking of how to keep up with the conference as it happens, regardless of where you are.
In the past, I posted a bunch of links and an OPML file for conference-related feeds. This year, I thought I’d do something a bit different. I created a public Netvibes page page with the feeds that seemed relevant. Most of them don’t have very much yet, but should become pretty active during the conference. If it looks useful, it’ll be there for you. If I missed a feed that you think should be there, let me know.
At ACRLog (with their new sense-making URL http://acrlog.org/), Steven Bell wants to know Are You Reading These Journals? He’s wondering if it is worth getting excited when a review of his book is published in a traditional (or, in the case of portal, semi-traditional) academic librarianship journal, or if journal readership has gone the way of the rubber-stamped due date.
So he came up with a little survey. If many people answer like I did (i.e., all over the map) I’m not sure that Bell will be able to draw any useful conclusions. But he’s not billing it as a big research project, but just a little questionnaire.
His overall question, though–does anyone actually read this stuff?–chimed with another blog post I had just read, Heather Morrison’s Aiming for Obscurity (definitional post) which I came to via Peter Suber’s Open Access News. Here is the nut:
[A]uthors who continue to publish in toll-access journals and do not self-archive can be said to be aiming for obscurity. In other words, an author in this position is pursuing a course of action which is very likely to decrease the probably of the author’s work being read and cited.
This is such common-sense that you’d think it needn’t be said at all, but this phrase “aiming for obscurity” wraps it up nicely. There are valid reasons for wanting to publish in a more traditional journal rather than just going straight to a blog or other unmediated publication. But if you want people to actually read it once it is published, it seems to be more and more imperative that it be freely linkable on the web somewhere. Especially in a field like librarianship, where so many practitioners are outside the academy and can’t count on their institution footing the bill for the subscriptions, we owe it to ourselves to self-archive.
Having said that, I now realize that I haven’t done so myself. I have published a few things in journals over the last couple of years, and I have mostly made sure that I’d be allowed to self-archive. Then I didn’t do it. By this time next week, there will be links available.
From Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog comes the announcement of the public beta of Omeka, software designed to host digital collections and to show them to their advantage as online exhibitions. In a nutshell, Cohen describes it as “WordPress for your exhibits and collections.”
This comes to us from the ass-kickers (sorry, I can’t think of a better term for them) over at the Center for History and New Media. I think Zotero shows that these folks know how to put together a project, roll it out, establish a user base, and keep improving it.
I downloaded Omeka and installed it on my MacBook under the MAMP environment. It was no more difficult to install than WordPress, though things aren’t working exactly right quite yet because I can’t get it to find my install of ImageMagick. (Help?)
I’m obviously in no position to review or recommend Omeka yet, but I find the project very exciting and full of possibilities. I have been working on and off with OCLC’s ContentDM (or however they want me to capitalize it) and have found it a frustrating and expensive experience. I have long wanted an easy-to-set-up, free open source digital collection management tool, and it looks like Omeka fits that bill. It also takes into account the importance of user-contributed objects and metadata, and comes with what should be no-brainers like RSS feeds and easily switched and customized themes.
The Omeka developers realize that libraries and museums who put up digital collections don’t just want to throw their visitors to a search box or a “browse everything in accession number order” screen. We want to create exhibitions that guide people through carefully curated selections of the objects in the database. Omeka builds this in as a standard feature.
Whether it will be the right combination of powerful and elegant and easy to use, I don’t know, but looking at the featured sites in the Omeka showcase makes me hopeful. I can’t wait to see what people do with it, and hope to get my own glitches out soon so I can play with it more myself.
Cell phones: Mine is cheap as can be and kept alive via periodic infusions of minutes rather than a monthly plan.
Computer hardware: Like Laura, I am a lifelong Mac user, and never learned to care about things like video cards, processor speeds, etc., and in fact feel slightly superior to those people who do seem to obsess over such matters. (That completely unwarranted sense of superiority is included with the purchase price of every Macintosh, btw.)
Programming and scripting: I can cut and paste just like everyone else, but I still have yet to sit down and really understand PHP or JavaScript or the like.
Databases: I can’t tell if I have trouble with relational databases because it is really pretty simple and self-evident and I’m overthinking it, or if something fundamental continues to escape me.
So why are we interested in compiling such lists? It’s fun to “come clean,” to demonstrate to others and ourselves that everyone has blind spots and tin ears for some technology. But what does it matter if we can’t program a VCR or play a videogame? I think this memelet says something interesting about library bloggers.
We are prone to conflate various interests, tendencies, and proficiencies into one big “techie” category. But we are really talking about at least two different things.
Are we talking about being able to create and maintain interesting and useful technology for digital libraries? Or are we talking about being down with what we think our user population is doing? In other words, would anyone care if it were to come out that John Blyberg didn’t own a cell phone or planet code4lib doesn’t have a World of Warcraft guild? They are too busy actually trying to build useful stuff, right?
Or, on the flip side, would it really matter if Jenny Levine couldn’t use regular expressions or if Stephen Abram was perplexed by phpMyAdmin? These folks don’t set themselves up as hands-on creators of technology, but as popularizers and surveyors of what users are doing and expecting.
I guess part of the anxiety around this subject is that many of us feel caught in between, falling behind on one end of this discussion or the other. For my part, I couldn’t care less about my first two tech-nos on my list. The second two are things I’d like very much to change, if I can find the time and the right project.
If you run a WordPress blog, you are surely familiar with the Hello Dolly plugin by Matt Mullenweg. It is a simple little plugin that displays a line from the song “Hello Dolly” in the upper-right corner of the admin screens.
I took the code for that plugin and changed it so that it now randomly displays one of Ranganathan’s five laws of library science. So instead of seeing, e.g., “You’re lookin’ swell, Dolly” on your WordPress admin screen, you’ll see instead something like “The library is a growing organism.”
I call it, of course, “Hello Ranganathan.” You can download the file here: Hello Ranganathan
Follow the usual steps to install the plugin: unzip it (it’s just one php file) and upload it to your wp-content/plugins directory. Then activate it on the Plugins screen. And get those laws drilled into your head every time you post.
I think Iris is right to divide it up into “why I became a librarian” and “why I am still happily a librarian.” I thought there might be an earlier bit, too: “why it even occured to me that working in a library would be cool.”
I have been fond of libraries for about as long as I can remember. I have always had very positive associations with libraries as fun places to explore. It is very easy for me to remember going to the library with my parents as a child, and it’s a habit I have kept up and now share with my own children. I have written a little about this, recently in the post Staying of of the way and about about two years ago in Four more for the road. So working in a librry seemed like a reasonable thing to do in a way that, say, being a fireman or a forest ranger never did.
The first job I ever went out and found for myself was at the Evanston Public Library, shelving books in the children’s section when I was a college student. After working in bookstores, I ended up working in the ILL department of the University of Delaware Library. I wasn’t really interested in being a librarian when I took the job; it just seemed like a reasonable place to work.
After I’d been there for a few years, I started to think that making a career of working in the library would be a good idea. I’d started to get interested in preservation and rare books librarianship, so I went to the University of Texas at Austin with the idea of becoming a Special Collections librarian. It was also a good excuse to move back to the west.
So that’s why even considered working in libraries, and that’s why I decided to get the master’s degree. Why is this career a good fit for me? I like helping people–college students, mostly–succeed with their resesarch. I like building tools that help them, too. I like the fact that it is a job that provides valuable servivce to people while keeping me outside the rat race. I like librarians. I like the feel of instant access to lots of interesting articles and data. And I like the books. I like reading them, I like seeing them every day and being surrounded by them.
Looks like I should tag some people. I’d lke to see what Walt and Tim have to say about why they are library-types, and I’d like to read what Julian would say about why he wants to be a librarian (after he finishes the degree). Julian has the added handicap of needing to give his answer in 140 characters or less.
Except that this time the magic was disappearing ink. After the update, the whole blog was nowhere to be seen from the browser, though I could see the files just fine on the server.
At another time, in another mood, I would have taken that as a perfect opportunity to end the blog. But right now, I have notes for a few more posts, so you’ll be stuck with me for a while longer.
So instead, I renamed the blog directory fubarseealso, downloaded a fresh install of WordPress with svn, and copied files from fubar until things looked OK. But if you find anything weird (by which I mean weirder than usual), please do let me know.
It might just be that I have been paying more attention lately, but I seem to be hearing more and more about interesting projects in digital humanities. Here is a little linkdump:
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities is a fairly new blog by Lisa Spiro. She kicked off the year with a three-part roundup on the subject of Digital Humanities in 2007 (part 1, part 2, part 3). Many of the links below are in those three posts, though I heard about some of them from other sources.
Dan Cohen and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason seem to have interesting new announcements every week. These are the folks behind the citation tool Zotero and a platform for online media collections called Omeka that I’m eager to get my hands on. Plus there is their latest project…
THAT Podcast, or The Humanities and Technology Podcast. The first episode featured an interview with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress.
Dorothea Salo points us to the Bamboo project, a proposal to the Mellon Foundation to fund the development of a shared technology platform to support arts and humanities research. At least I think that’s what it is; the report is in my “printed but not actually read” pile for now. (They might think of getting the History and New Media guys to come up with a new name for the project, as “Bamboo” is gonna be a royal pain to google.)
The relatively new DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, which bills itself as “an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities.”
Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives by Ed Folsom appeared in PMLA 122 (5), Oct. 2007. The link, I’m sorry to say will only help you if your institution subscribes to PMLA. The article is a very interesting look at how the database can be seen as a literary genre unto itself, based on the author’s work as co-editor of the Walt Whitman Archive. I plan to write more about this article, once I have read the responses that were published in the same issue.
I’m surprised that there wasn’t more comment on library blogs about the possible takeover of Yahoo! by Microsoft. Perhaps people are waiting to see how it will shake out. No one has ever mistaken me for an industry analyst, but I’m curious about the effect this might have on libraries in two areas.
First, would this takeover mean less choice and competition in search? Or would it mean that Microhoo! would make a real breakthrough in search and become a real rival to Google? Or does Google just have search completely wrapped up?
I have used both of those sites since before they were bought by Yahoo!, and in neither case did I worry too much about their acquisition. But Microsoft seems different. I’d be afraid that MS couldn’t help itself from trying to “improve” the sites. John Gruber thinks it likely that MS would just sell them off, anyway, which may or may not be comforting, depending on who bought them.
This is something I think about when it comes to using all these sites for library purposes. Sure it is easy, cheap, fun, and sometimes even effective to use these sites for various library-related purposes. But I’m not sure I have a good enough backup plan in place if one of these sites were to shut down, or suddenly change its services or terms of service such that I thought it was no longer appropriate for the library.
Updated 2008-02-04: Check out the Flickr group, MICROSOFT: KEEP YOUR EVIL GRUBBY HANDS OFF OF OUR FLICKR , which is where I found the illustration seen here. Then there is Richard Akerman at Science Library Pad who notes in his post JotSpot wikis disappear from the net that Google’s seeming disinterest in its property, JotSpot, might be an indicator of how MS would treat Yahoo! properties. I especially liked this line: “This is a good reminder about the risks of living ‘in the cloud’ (I have quite a lot of work put into pages in my JotSpot wiki, they had better be coming back online).”
So, yeah, life trumps blogging. Over the Christmas/New Years holiday I made a purposeful decision to stay offline a bit more than usual, a decision that was pretty helpful, I think, in having a good holiday.
After the new year, I was in a class that met three hours every weekday for two weeks, so that trumped blogging and work to a large degree.
Then, in the middle of that class, I caught strep throat, which trumped the class, work, and damn near everything else.
So then I got healthy and my wife got sick, so the family stuff trumped the other stuff, except for class, and when the class stopped trumping everything, I had to catch up on work and that trumped the blogging.
Then I had a strep relapse, which trumped not only work and blogging, but my son’s sixth birthday party (only for me; everyone else had a great time, I hear).
Now I have recovered from that. Work seems under control. Family is mostly healthy (did I mention the other son’s ear infections (plural)?).
I’ve noticed that several of my favorite writers have resolved to post more frequently in 2008. Dear favorite writers: at the risk of sounding ungrateful, would you be terribly offended if I begged you not to follow through on this resolution?
It’s not that he’s worried about having too much to read. Instead, he is concerned that his favorite blogs will lose focus, and be less worthwhile than they are now because of it.
I left a comment on that post at the time, but I have been thinking about it some more since.
I agree that posting more just for the sake of posting more can easily lead to a noisy blog. If those “additional” posts are just the proverbial cat photos, or brief comments on things I have already seen linked elsewhere, it’s going to get very noisy very fast. If it is all your del.icio.us links or your twitter feed, chances are I have already unsubscribed.
But as I read Bonfield’s post, I was interested to see that his reasons for reading a blog don’t quite jibe with mine. In particular, he says of bloggers that he likes:
You publish almost nothing that’s off-topic, in particular almost nothing that’s both off-topic and solely about you. Once or twice a year, at most, going off-topic or writing about yourself is actually endearing. And it can be useful in our post-postmodern world if you acknowledge personal reasons for your opinions. But I’m reading your writing in order to learn about the topic of your blog. Abandon that topic too often and I’ll mostly likely unsubscribe from your feed.
In my case, I’m not necessarily interested in blogs that are tightly focused and always on topic. I’m more interested in following the blogger where he or she may go. I was going to call this “voice,” as I like writers with an identifiable style. In my comment on the ACRLog post, I used Walt Crawford and Dorothea Salo (who, as I write, has a cat photo as her current post) as examples; in those two cases (along with several others I could mention) I came to identify with the writer’s voice, which then led me to care about the person behind the voice.
But this quality that makes me want to follow a blog comes across strongly even in what just amounts to a linkstream. Andy Baio’s Waxy.org links is one of my don’t-miss blogs, and it’s just a list of links with minimal commentary. keyvowel’s del.icio.us linkstream is similar. The key to both of those “blogs” isn’t writing, it is the fact that those two people have interests that are similar enough to mine, but they also read more widely and hang out in different parts of the web than I do, so their links tend to be new to me.
So it’s not just voice that makes me stick with a blog. It has something to do with signal-to-noise ratio, and something to do with the flâneur’s ability to make the act of just wandering around noticing things into a work of art. (Has anyone written about “blogger as flâneur” yet? If not, it’s my ticket to getting published in some cultural studies journal.)
This quality that keeps me reading a blog–I’m going to call it “sensibility” instead of “voice.” If you have a better word for it, let me know.
If someone has a sensibility that I find fascinating or sympathetic or usefully irritating, I’d love for them to blog more, assuming that they can keep that sensibility honed. The occasional cat photo or link to something on BoingBoing is fine, but if I’m subscribed to your blog, I’m mostly interested in you and the kind of thing that only you would write, or that no one else I follow would point out on the web. As long as you stay attuned to that sensibility, you can’t go off topic.
Attentive readers of this blog will be familiar with the name Jessy Randall. Jessy is my friend and colleague, and the curator of Special Collections at Tutt Library.
As I may or may not have mentioned up to now, Jessy is also a poet. Her first book, A Day in Boyland, was published earlier this year by Ghost Road Press. It’s a wonderful book. She writes about love and heartbreak and all that great stuff in a way that is personal and contemporary, honest but not sappy. You don’t have to take my word for it, as several of the poems from the book are online: A Day in Boyland, Boys on Bikes, and The Revenge.
She read from the book last week as part of the Colorado College Visiting Writers Series. On the poster for that series (which also included Salman Rushdie this year), Jessy was described as “delightful” and “edgy.” I told her that I thought it was a neat trick to be both delightful and edgy, and she replied that “delightful” = “female” and “edgy” = “funny.”
There were more adjectives flying around at the reading when CC poet and faculty member David Mason finished introducing Jessy by saying “After the reading, we’ll leave time for question so you will have a chance to ask Jessy what it is like to be a wacky, sexy, librarian poet.”
I, of course, didn’t ask that question as I already know what it is like (except for the poet part).
Anyway, the point is, you may not get the chance to hear her read, but you need to buy the book, for yourself or for your library. You can buy it from the publisher or the usual online mega-store
I kept turning this question over in my mind and came up with my own three ideas. I think I got away from “things on which to work” and moved over to “rules of thumb,” or something. I’m sure if I kept thinking, I’d change my three, but here they are as they exist in my mind right now:
Exploit diverse networks of libraries and librarians rather than seeking to create monolithic groups. Pursue openness whenever possible. Keep asking yourself and your users “how can we help our users kick ass?”
Since this is my own blog, I’ll grant myself a little more room to explain.
Exploit diverse networks of libraries and librarians rather than seeking to create monolithic groups.Stephen Downes writes about this kind of thing a lot (take a look at this whiteboard for starters), and while I don’t know that I’d agree with everything he’s written on the subject, I do think that we will have more success in coming up with ways for lots of people or libraries to cooperate in their own way (as with interlibrary loan) than in trying to get many people or institutions to move in lockstep (as with collaborative collection development)
Pursue openness whenever possible. Yes, I’m still thinking about yesterday’s post. Open source, open content, etc. aren’t always possible. Users are going to demand content that isn’t free to rip, mix, and burn, and sometimes vendors’ proprietary systems will be superior to what we can offer with free open source software. But the less locked in we are to proprietary software, data, and the like, the better off we will be, and the better we will be able to serve users.
Keep asking yourself and your users “how can we help our users kick ass?” That comes, of course, from the great blog Creating Passionate Users, specifically the post Subvert from Within: a user-focused employee guide. I confess, I need to do this much more myself: ask all the time “how is what I’m doing right now helping users succeed?” “How would this new thing help users kick ass at whatever it is they are doing?” “Just what exactly does kicking ass entail for my students/faculty/public/employees?”
I could come up with others, probably having to do with making less-crummy interfaces or hiding complexity by making more intelligent systems. But this is what I came up with in the shower, and I’m sticking with it!
Cohen and D’Arcus wonder why Zotero–a free, open source reference management tool that runs as a Firefox plugin–doesn’t get more love and support from the academic community, particularly from librarians.
As I read it, I thought “I resemble that remark!” I could see where Cohen and D’Arcus were coming from, even though I started feeling defensive at the same time. So I thought I’d unpack this a little bit here.
The whole thing kind of starts with a review of Zotero called Mark of Zotero in Inside Higher Ed, specifically a comment from Steven Bell where he points out that many academics may already have access to a similar bibliographic utility, RefWorks, due to campus-wide subscriptions. In fact, the library where I work subscribes to RefWorks on behalf of the campus.
D’Arcus wonders why librarians in particular are wedded to their proprietary solutions like RefWorks to the point of feeling like a “traitor” if they were to promote Zotero instead.
I don’t know that I would feel like a “traitor” to promote Zotero over our campus subscription to Refworks. In fact, I feel a little bit like a traitor to Zotero: I signed on early as someone interested in Zotero and they sent me a t-shirt. All RefWorks ever sent were some crummy mousepads!
But I don’t really promote Zotero, and I wondered why. It’s a very nice product, it is free, open source, easy to use, etc. Am I a RefWorks corporate tool? Here is what I came up with:
My library has invested more than just money in RefWorks. We have invested staff time in learning how it works, developing handouts, coming up with classes to teach people how to use it, and so on. Now that we have had it for a few years, I feel pretty good that students can talk to just about anyone on the reference desk and get competent help with RefWorks. If we were to throw Zotero into the mix, we’d have a big staff education project on our hands. Zotero is nice and easy to use, but I don’t think it is immediately apparent how to use all its functions, so I’d anticipate people would be asking for help if we promoted Zotero. (Personally, I always need to click around a bit before I can remember how to actually create a bibliography from my saved citations.)
D’Arcus seems to treat the fact that RefWorks can be acccessed via the web without installing anything from pretty much any computer is just another feature. To my mind, this is the feature that separates RefWorks from Zotero at a school like mine where students move from computer to computer all the time. Wherever they sit down at an internet-enabled computer, on- or off-campus, their data is accessible. No monkeying around with special configurations or putting Firefox and a Zotero library on a USB drive. (I should note that as I write this, I’m having trouble connecting to the RefWorks site. Curse you, gods of irony!)
Similarly, as much as I love Firefox, it is important to point out that for many people, using Zotero isn’t as simple as “using Zotero.” It means using an unfamiliar browser and installing a plugin. Easy for me, not so easy for under-motivated students and faculty.
I understand, I think, what D’Arcus is saying about “free as in freedom” as it relates to Zotero. It’s certainly one of many things I consider when choosing software. But I wonder if he’s not overstating his case to the point of spreading FUD when he says things like “I don’t think many people realize how crucial bibliographic data is to a scholar. A rather intense frustration can result from feeling that such crucial data is locked-in to closed products that have a history of glacial innovation.” All the reference management tools I have used feature multiple ways to export the data. I just did a quick, unscientific test export from RefWorks to Zotero which appeared to go smoothly, bringing along the bibliographic data and my notes. But maybe D’Arcus means something else, and I’m misreading him.
In the comments on the post by Cohen, D’Arcus says “I almost have to wonder rather cynically if this [promotion of RefWorks over Zotero] doesn’t have to do with some kind of organizational turf-guarding; the belief that librarians alone ‘own’ the bibliographic space?” I’m probably the wrong person to respond to that, but I think the real answer is probably less sinister. For my part, I think that RefWorks is easier to manage and support than Zotero would be, and that the web-accessibility of the program outweighs a lot of other considerations. I am resolving to use Zotero a bit more, so I’ll be better able to recommend it to students or faculty when it would be more appropriate. And if they come up with a zero-install web-based version, you can bet I will look at it very carefully indeed.
So I’m not at Internet Librarian. And I’m not bitter.
I have been refreshing the Flickr photos tagged il2007 every now and then. So far, my favorite photo is the one here from John Blyberg, apparently illustrating a level of “BS,” folllowed by a layer of “Crap,” topped off with the radical “User-generated BS.” I have no idea what that means, but I love it.
Seems like most bloggers are too busy running up big bar tabs to blog the event in much detail. Or maybe they are just stymied by the need to keep the battery charged while simultaneously picking up a wireless signal. Anyway, The Corporate Librarian has the most detailed session reports I have seen.
Now, if you will excuse me, I need to get back to important not-being-at-Internet-Librarian activities.
I have been thinking about a couple of recent posts by Dorothea Salo. One of them, Training-wheels culture, has received a lot of attention (some of it even positive!). Another, The darn things grow on you, hasn’t. But I think that the second post–which has to do with the place of computers and technology in one’s life–has something to say about the first.
In my case, my dad bought an Apple ][+ for the family in 1982 when I was eleven years old. And when I say “the family,” I mean for him and me, because my mom didn’t really take to computers until email and eBay made them compelling to her.
Around the same time, I occasionally used a TRS-80 at school and at a friend’s house. As I remember, using the computer at school was a bit of a let-down, as it involved mathematics drills.
The situation with the Apple was better, as it came with some games like Olympic Decathlon and Adventure. But you couldn’t play those forever. And after a while, it was obvious that the computer itself was something worth playing with. What can you make the computer do?
I remember spending a long weekend afternoon with a friend, typing in the BASIC code for Hunt the Wumpus–perhaps from this very book (that mecha-wumpus looks awfully familiar)–on his borrowed TRS-80. Then we couldn’t get it to work. Then we couldn’t manage to save what we’d typed on the cassette tape drive.
I had more success with the Apple (and its floppy drive). I learned some Applesoft Basic programming and wrote lots of weird little half-finished programs–quiz games, graphics displays, that kind of thing.
Years later, one of my high school friends who went on to get a degree in engineering and work in computer hardware and computer security pointed out how great that situation was for those of us who were kids when the first wave of home computers hit. There was no Photoshop or iMovie to mess around with, no World Wide Web to hang out on. We had to make stuff up.
It meant that we didn’t really fear the computer. We’d crashed it before and we’d crash it again. I wasn’t a programming genius, but I knew the satisfaction of finding and fixing a small bug. The computer wasn’t going to do anything on its own; it was up to me to make it do something interesting.
I think about that sometimes when it seems like “computer literacy” has been shoved into a little tiny box that really means “knows how to use Microsoft Office products.” I think of computer literacy more as being able to screw something up and then figure it out and fix it. (This might be a good time to point out that the home page for this very blog was the GNU General Public License for a brief time yesterday; something always goes wrong when I upgrade WordPress.)
I also realize I was lucky to encounter computers when I had whole afternoons to waste trying to get them to do something weird, not as an office worker getting one dumped on me, and being told to learn how to be productive with it or risk losing my job.
Ideally, this would be the place where I divulged a sure-fire method to help turn people from thinking “let me write down exactly which menu option I need to memorize” to “I seem to have broken this in a particularly interesting way.” But I don’t have a good answer. Perhaps a little patience on both sides for those currently in the profession and a lot of impatience when it comes to new librarians and new hires. In other words, I’m willing to believe that those librarians Dorothea needed to help with the web forms have something else worthwhile to offer the library that outweighs some willful cluelessness, but I would do my damnedest not to hire any more people like that.
If I got nothing else accomplished today, I made this little Facebook flyer, inspired by an idea suggested by my colleague, Robin.
I used a Creative Commons licensed work–a photo entitled Evil monkey from the movie about the evil monkey that plays funk on his cymbals–and didn’t have space to credit the photographer: the monkey image is from Flickr user scragz. I hope this attribution makes up for the lack on the flyer.
Thanks also to Dave Pattern who found the image during a discussion in the LSW room. Whew! That was one collaborative little effort.
Chapter ten of the book is called “The Industrial Library,” and goes over some of the contributions of Cutter, Dewey, and Ranganathan to classification and library science. At the end of the chapter, Wright mentions an 1883 essay by Cutter entitled “The Buffalo Public Library in 1983.”
This sounded intriguing to me, and I was able to find the full text on Google Books rather quickly. It appeared in the Papers and Proceedings of the American Library Association for 1883. Here are some links depending on what you want:
Wright is interested in how Cutter foresaw electronic book requests for readers and a telegraph-style network that allowed libraries to share information. That is interesting. But I found some of Cutter’s blind spots and apparent enthusiasms that haven’t aged as well to be more interesting.
For example:
Cutter seems obsessed with circulation, not of books, but of air. “Ventilation was their hobby,” Cutter writes of his notional 20th-century librarians. “Nothing made the librarian come nearer scolding than any impurity in the air.”
I believe all librarians are referred to as “he” or “him.” But, then, this is Cutter writing, and not Dewey.
Reading fiction in “1983” is still looked down upon. The librarian of the future says “We have not yet escaped the preponderant use of fiction though we have diminished it since your day. It used to be 75 per cent. Thanks to our training the school children in good ways it has fallen to forty. I doubt if it gets much lower.”
I found his description of the photographic catalog system (pages 52-3 in the original pagination) completely incomprehensible.
In “1983” open stacks haven’t been invented yet. Readers enter the call number they want on a litle device in their desk and a boy runs and gets the book for them.
The library of “1983” is open every day, and kept open as late as anyone wants to stay.
Gender segregation still goes strong in “1983” with separate service desks for men, women, and children.
Cutter’s librarian of the future uses the term “great unwashed” unironically: “Every one must be admitted into the delivery-room, but from the reading-rooms the great unwashed are shut out altogether or put in rooms by themselves. Luckily public opinion sustains us thoroughly in their exclusion or seclusion.”
In short, the library of “1983” is suspiciously like a librarian’s ideal of a library in 1883, plus some electric lights and a telegraph.
If I have time, I plan to delve into these Papers and Proceedings a bit more. The other essays will lack the prognosticating of the Cutter essay, but they seem like they’ll furnish a fascinating look at the concerns of librarians from 125 years ago. The report on library architecture and the report on fiction in libraries look particularly interesting. From the latter: “The time was–perhaps to some still is–when the announcement that fiction reading was spreading through the community would excite alarm like the cry of cholera.” There is also an article entitled “The Work of the Nineteenth-Century Librarian for the Librarian of the Twentieth” by a certain R. R. Bowker that looks promising.
I’d love to read my own blog and others like it with 125 years of hindsight. On second thought, I think I may be lucky to be spared that particular fate. I can hear them now: “Social software? I guess that is what people talked about before the singularity.”
“Don’t tase me, bro!”: Using a taser on obnoxious-but-not-violent people is still a bad idea.
“I work on the web”: Hey, good for you. I seem to mostly waste time on the web.
Anonymous cowards: Using anonymity or pseudonymity to allow one to write about sensitive topics without fear of reprisal seems reasonable. Using anonymity or pseudonymity as a screen for zero-consequence nastiness seems lame. Cf. this funny and profane comic from Penny Arcade.
Googling the Victorians (link to 356KB PDF), an article by Patrick Leary published in Journal of Victorian Culture (10:1 (Spring 2005) 72-86) has picked up a few links in the blogosphere in the past week or so, almost certainly due to a link in The Google Exchange which I linked to last time around.
It is an interesting article (and not just because it makes reference to “Michael Gorman” in the first line; a little Googling (I know, right?) shows that it’s not that MG) in the way Leary looks at the vast amount of material now easily searchable on the web for scholars of the 19th century.
One thing became more clear to me about where Leary and Duguid are coming from in that “Google Exchange.” Duguid’s article was explicitly looking at how “authority” is transferred from a printed edition in a university library collection to a scanned “edition” (are we calling it that? “Manifestation?”) in Google books, and seems to be trying to evaluate Google Book Search results as “books.” Leary’s article is more about text-mining and searching large datasets of uncorrected texts.
I suppose I agree with both of them: On the one hand, I’m skeptical of GBS scans as “books” of any sort due to the problems they seem to be having with quality control with this particular project, and the lack of affordances when it comes to e-books in general at this particular time in history. On the other hand, I’m happy to have this strange GBS collection to search through, and the rewards when searching 19th century topics in particular are easy to see.
Perhaps I am simply easily persuaded by whichever article I have read most recently.
I’ll end with two substantial quotes from “Googling the Victorians.”
From page 5 of the PDF linked above (looks like pagination was different in the published version):
It has been often and rather piously proclaimed (by myself, among others) that googling around the internet cannot possibly substitute for good old-fashioned library research, and this is certainly true. But we are perhaps reaching a point in our relationship to the online world at which it is important to recognize that the reverse is equally true. No amount of time spent in the library stacks would have suggested to me that any of those sources would be an especially good place to look for instances of that particular phrase [a puzzling caption to a cartoon from Punch. -SL], and if it had, the likelihood of actually discovering the phrase in a printed edition of any of them would have been virtually nil.
And then there’s his take on “if you can’t Google it, it doesn’t exist” (my words, not his). On page 13, Leary writes of an “offline penumbra”:
The offline penumbra is that increasingly remote and unvisited shadowland into which even quite important texts fall if they cannot yet be explored, or perhaps even identified, by any electronic means. …Inevitably, more and more scholarly work will be done on texts that can be found online, whilst more inconvenient, costly, and laborious kinds of research, particularly with unpublished manuscripts, is likely to be correspondingly avoided. At a time when even accomplished researchers rely heavily upon online searching, and when many students and interested members of the public rely on little or nothing else, the offline penumbra represents one side of a ‘digital divide’ that I suspect will subtly affect the ways in which we think, teach, and write about the nineteenth century for years to come.
While I’m sure Leary isn’t the first or only person to put it this way, I think this emphasis on the new possibilities of online searching combined with how tedious some forms of offline research already seem to be rings truer to me than huffing about how kids these days just want to search the web.
My “friend wheel” from Facebook, showing how my friends are connected to one another. From 4 o’clock to 10 o’clock–the highly-connected yellow/green part–are my friends from the library blogosphere. Edited 2007-08-2016:00MDT
If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it’d be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing “Social Applications” is too much work.
He states his goal like this:
Ultimately make the social graph a community asset, utilizing the data from all the different sites, but not depending on any company or organization as “the” central graph owner.
So the idea is to have “friend” information from social networking sites–the “social graph”–as a “community asset” that all applications could draw upon, letting social networks proliferate without everyone lining up behind Facebook apps.
Some of his explanation is a little too technical for me, but the examples he gives for the end-user experience is easy enough to follow for those who use social networking software:
A user should then be able to log into a social application (e.g. dopplr.com) for the first time, ideally but not necessarily with OpenID, and be presented with a dialog like,
“Hey, we see from public information elsewhere that you already have 28 friends already using dopplr, shown below with rationale about why we’re recommending them (what usernames they are on other sites). Which do you want to be friends with here? Or click ‘select-all’.”
Also every so often while you’re using the site dopplr lets you know if friends that you’re friends with elsewhere start using the site and prompts you to be friends with them. All without either of you re-inviting/re-adding each other on dopplr… just because you two already declared your relationship publicly somewhere else.
Sounds good to me. I don’t know if the big sites will want to play along, as keeping their information in a silo seems like part of the business model. This social-graph-as-community-asset doesn’t exist yet, of course; you can check the development status near the end of that essay.
The biggest event for the blog in the past year was moving from being hosted on the servers at Colorado College to the nice new digs here at stevelawson.name. Thank you to all of you who followed the blog here, and thanks as well to those who have just started reading recently. It boggles my mind that people want to read what I write; it is simultaneously humbling and gratifying, and making me more of an insufferable egomaniac than ever before.
For the first year of See Also.., the blog was an all-consuming passion. My relationship with the blog this year has been more varied. Sometimes I have been phoning it in. Sometimes neglecting it for weeks at a time. And at least once, I even deleted the entire thing, before restoring from a backup a few hours later. I wonder if I should write more, write less, stop sending linkblog items to the main page, be funnier, be more serious. Lately I think I have learned to relax a bit, finding new ways of thinking about the value of the blog. If that sounds disturbingly like a love affair, so be it.
Looking back to what I wrote a year ago on the first blogversary, I see that I ended with thanks and appreciation for my “imaginary friends,” which is where I intend to end today. I had hoped from the start that the blog would let me engage in conversations and arguments with other library bloggers. I hadn’t anticipated the depths of the friendships I would feel with people I have never met face-to-face.
I have been thinking a bit this past week or so about books–books as objects, things made of paper; and books as concepts, as long-form written works that might be on paper or a computer screen, or a yet-to-be-invented beautiful electronic reading machine.
I don’t denigrate books. I denigrate the container, not the content – two very different things. Books as a format I think will stick around for a very long time. The paper they are printed on? Well… I have a Sony E-Reader in my office right now for staff to play with.
If prodded, I’ll bet David would admit that most paper books on our shelves today will outlast the Sony E-Reader on the order of a few hundred years at least. But that’s being overly specific, and not the real problem. The problem, I believe, is that a book isn’t really a “container.” A book is a book.
That doesn’t mean that electronic books aren’t a worthwhile endeavor, or that it is impossible to make e-books that are worth using. I have read books on my Palm Pilot, and expect to read many more e-books on more usable devices in my lifetime. But if we fail to take into account the “bookishness” of books, we run the risk of making some terrible errors.
I had already been trying to get my thoughts together along these lines when I found Paul Duguid’s recent article for First Monday, “Inheritence and loss? A brief survey of Google Books.” In the article, Duguid uses the Google Books results for Tristram Shandy to see how the project handles a problematic text like Laurence Sterne’s novel.
One would think that scanning the pages would be enough to create a usable e-book, but in the cases that Duguid examines, it just isn’t. Some of the reasons Duguid covers:
some scans are simply bad, missing parts of the page or illegible for significant parts of the page, or completely blank;
there are mistakes or omissions in the metadata, such as mistaking the list of illustrations for the book’s table of contents, or not clearly identifying the parts of a multi-volume set;
Google’s ranking algorithm seems to prefer odd, substandard versions of the work due to copyright or other restrictions.
Some of these things would be less problematic for a less complicated work than Tristram Shandy, but I expect the problems with Shandy are by no means unique.
From Duguid’s conclusion:
Google Books takes books as a storehouse of wisdom to be opened up with new tools. They fail to see what librarians know: books can be obtuse, obdurate, even obnoxious things. As a group, they don’t submit equally to a standard shelf, a standard scanner, or a standard ontology….Even with some of the best search and scanning technology in the world behind you, it is unwise to ignore the bookish character of books. More generally, transferring any complex communicative artifacts between generations of technology is always likely to be more problematic than automatic.
Not incidentally, I believe I first came across a link to Duguid’s article in Dorothea Salo’s del.icio.us stream. Dorothea, as ever, is way ahead of me on this, having been “ranting” about similar topics since 2003 (and possibly before). In her post from that year, No, it really is that hard–a response to a person who thinks that encoding books digitally is a simple, straightforward process–she writes,
Nine times out of ten, these yahoos have utterly forgotten that there’s any book in the world more complicated than, say, a Robert Ludlum novel. (I don’t think these yahoos actually set foot in libraries, though I suppose I could be wrong—they could merely suffer from acute tunnel vision.) The rest of us don’t have that luxury…. We have to sweat over math, art, indexes, tables, links, complex layouts, production workflows, metadata, non-Roman alphabets, digital preservation issues, and all that fun stuff.
(Several of those e-books I mentioned reading on my Palm Pilot were Cory Doctorow’s novels. Dorothea did the HTML markup on them. Which is random, and cool, and sorta beside the point, but I thought I’d mention it here anyway.)
If you find the Duguid article interesting, you might also try these links:
* If it seems like David Lee King is my new bête noir, I don’t really think that’s the case. I believe he and I have a lot of views in common, so the areas where differ stand out to me, and I find them worth investigating. It’s also evident that he welcomes the discussion.
The Ithaka Report “University Publishing in a Digital Age” was released at the end of July. The report is the result of dozens of interviews with university provosts and presidents, directors of university presses, and university librarians. It deals mostly with monographic publication, conceding that the market for journals and the online environment for journals is more mature.
Some of the recommendations are pedestrian, e.g., “take inventory of the landscape of publishing activities currently taking place within your university.” But the big recommendation is indeed a big one: “develop a shared electronic publishing infrastructure across universities to save costs, create scale, leverage expertise, innovate, extend the brand of U.S. higher education, create an interlinked environment of information, and provide a robust alternative to commercial competitors” (32). Yeah, and do that soon, m’kay?
Dorothea Salo and K. G. Schneider have already blogged their comments on the report, and I can guarantee that each of them have spent more time thinking about these issues than I have. But here are my notes anyway (if I read something like this and don’t blog it, it kinda doesn’t count, right?):
As the library blogosphere frets and fights about how conservative some librarians can be when it comes to technology and change, it was refreshing and encouraging to read such sentences as “the librarians consulted for this study were more enthusiastic about the potential of multimedia than other constituents,” (14) and “among the librarians consulted for this study, we perceived a high level of energy and excitement about the ‘reinvention’ of librarians’ mission, making them more relevant and reinvigorated with a better understanding of their purpose and potential” (15). To which I have three responses:
Hell yeah!
If the folks they surveyed—the heads of such libraries as the University of California, Yale, the University of Virginia, etc.–weren’t enthusiastic and energized, we would be in huge trouble; and
Perhaps in interviewing university provosts and press directors, they found the only two groups that are even more conservative, slow-moving, and risk-averse than librarians.
I think they did a fair job of evaluating library strengths and weaknesses in this arena (in the narrative on pp. 14-16 and in Appendix B, pp. 36-37). Yep, we have the service and collaboration pieces down to a large extent, and we have deep connections with academic departments and other units. And nope, we aren’t so hot at evaluating or creating demand for products, or working under commercial constraints (thank heavens for that last one, eh?).
In the list of “weaknesses” for the library is this: “do not really understand faculty as authors (copyright protection and prioritization of revenue generation for royalties versus maximization of exposure from open access…)” (36). I’m certainly one of those that doesn’t understand “revenue generation for royalties” when it comes to non-textbook academic university press publications, as I was under the impression that the royalties for such works rounded down to zero.
As the authors of the report laid out the strengths and weaknesses of university libraries and university presses, I wondered if were were in danger of ending up with the worst of both worlds: a hybrid press/library organization that is compelled to act as a commercial entity, with library-style service and collaboration, resulting in costly experiments that alienate faculty and administration when they utterly fail to perform in the market.
Even with the recommendation that presses produce a “shared electronic publishing infrastructure,” I’m depressed at the thought of another balkanized electronic environment, with some presses contributing to one online archive, some to another, and all the commercial presses setting up their own systems. Imagine a card catalog organized by publisher, and you’ll get a sense of the frustrations that users currently face with online journals and can expect to face with online books.
MIT press rocks.
“The fear is that when scholarly books are ‘chunked’ into smaller segments, the long argument form will disappear. We would argue that authors should continue to produce book-length arguments, but must accept that readers will not always read them end-to-end” (24). Reminds me of Radiohead’s objection to iTunes. I think those authors need to accept that readers already have a more random-access (or, perhaps, search-and-destroy) approach to academic texts than authors might wish for in a perfect world.
This report had me thinking of how I would like a university press to treat a hypothetical publication of mine. I think I’ll have to save that for a future post.
So you probably don’t need me to tell you this, but David Lee King wrote a post Wednesday called Am I a 2.0 Librarian and the Library 2.0 Spectrum. It featured an image that he titled Library 2.0 Spectrum. Some people really liked what David had to say and how he illustrated it with the image. Some didn’t like it.
I didn’t like it.
The post drew a lot of comments, including a few from me.
I called in to Uncontrolled Vocabulary last night specifically to talk about this. Uncontrolled Vocabulary, besides having about the best title ever, is fun to listen to and even more fun when calling in. If you want to hear the segment where we discuss David’s post, it starts around 41 minutes in.
I haven’t taken a comprehensive survey of other blogs’ responses to David’s posts, but a notable one comes from Cindi at Chronicles of Bean. Her post, David’s Librarian 2.0 Spectrum Thingie is in the form of a video. She uses David’s posts as a prompt for her own thoughts on “librarian 2.0.” I find her take on the subject more appealing, as she seems to look at all this “2.0″ stuff as a way of thinking or working, and less as an ultimate destination or doctrine.
You might think I have said enough about this already, but I just wanted to add a few more thoughts to explain where I’m coming from:
I think it’s fine when people emphasize technology when they talk “2.0.”
I object when people treat “2.0” as if it were something that exists in some platonic sense. If you want to talk about 2.0 as a group of tools or techniques or ideas, I’m ready to talk. If you want to talk about it as if it were a state of nirvana that we are all striving toward–as something that one either “gets” or doesn’t “get”–I’m out. I don’t “get it.”
It bugs me when librarians seem to be denigrating books.
I think my “traditional library skills” are where I need the most work. For example, I bet I could help more people, faster, if I knew our reference collection better.
Similarly, if we stopped doing all the “2.0” stuff we do at my library–Flickr, IM reference, blogs, wikis, all of it–we’d have a few minor inconveniences. If we stopped doing all the “traditional” stuff we do, we’d all be fired.
If you can read this, thank your sysadmin….A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work — to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.
So let me take a moment to thank Blake Carver and the folks at LISHost. Ever since I moved over from my work-hosted blog in January, I have had great service and quick help from Blake & crew. So, thanks! I appreciate you!
[Note: this post contains no spoilers, as I know nothing. I make no promises for the Potter-related links; some of them certainly contain spoilers or link to pages that contain spoilers. -SL]
I am what you’d call a casual Harry Potter fan. I have read all of the books– with the exception of Deathly Hallows–some more than once. I enjoyed them all, and I’ll read the new one some time in the next few months. I have seen bits and pieces of the movies on TV. I own no Potter paraphernalia or costume pieces.
But I do find the culture around these books interesting, especially the mania for spoilers and pirated copies that has surrounded the publication of the last few volumes in the series
Some blog posts this week–Jessamyn West’s Previews and spoilers in a 2.0 age and its subsequent update, where she noted that she had linked to apparently bogus Potter spoilers, and that there are multiple pirated electronic editions which themselves my be compromised with bogus information inserted via image manipulation techniques; plus Boing Boing’s take and the obligatory MetaFilter thread–had me thinking about book piracy, 18th-century-style.
Right at the outset of his address, Darnton makes it clear how much piracy was going on in 18th century France (pp 2-3):
I would go so far as to argue that by 1770 most of the current literature available in France–aside from chapbooks, devotional tracts, and professional manuals–came from the pirate publishers outside the kingdom as well as from some who operated clandestinely within it.
So far that sounds more like the present-day music industry than the book publishing industry. Today, I don’t think I’d be going too far out on a limb in guessing that most of the music files on people’s computers are unauthorized copies.
On page 9, Darton talks about those pirates who, like Potter’s pirates, could beat the official publication date:
More important, the pirates were so quick off the mark, thanks to secret informers and proofs filched by workers in their pay, that they sometimes beat the original publisher to the market, and they were likely to damage his profits long before he could sell off his first edition. They easily undercut him, because they paid nothing for the manuscript and used relatively cheap paper. Sometimes they followed the original closely, producing true contrefaçons or counterfeit copies. More often they aimed their product at a broader public by eliminating illustrations, abridging the text, and purging the edition of everything that smacked of “typographical luxury.” If they went far enough down market, they might not harm the original edition at all.
Is photographing each opening of the book with a Canon Rebel 350 sufficiently “down market?” Certainly these pirate editions will have zero effect on sales in the US and UK.
But Darnton is clear that the pirates’ main motivation was sales and profit, exchanging many letters in their “market research” to determine exactly which books should be pirated and sold in which locations: “With adequate information and good enough timing, the pirates could make a killing”(9).
What is the motivation for piracy now? Surely no one is making a dime on all those torrents on Pirate Bay. I suppose it is natural human curiosity combined with natural human competitiveness to be first, and natural human cussedness to not let anyone tell them that they can’t do such a thing.
It seems that Rowling and her publishers are generally unamused by the piracy, or at least that is the line they have to take publicly. Darnton tells us that Voltaire had to talk a bit of a good game to his publisher, too, even as he passed along his proofs to the pirates himself. From page 11:
Voltaire was happy to oblige, because by then he no longer cared about making money from his pen. After more than fifty years of experience with publishers, he knew every trick in their trade; and he also had learned to put the tricks to use for a higher cause: the diffusion of Enlightenment, the campaign to écraser l’infâme. He therefore agreed to supply Ostervald with a copy of Cramer’s proofs, corrected and expanded, provided that everything took place behind Cramer’s back. Voltaire was happy, that is, to pirate himself. It was a way to multiply copies. Besides, he knew that the Questions would be pirated anyway–strange as it sounds to apply such a term to an illegal book. By cooperating with the STN, he could control that process, while touching up the text with additional audacities that he also could disavow.
So Voltaire could be even more outrageous in the pirated version of his already illegal book. That’s not analogous with Rowling’s situation of course. But commenters in the MetaFilter wonder if some of the apparently bogus torrents were actually seeded by the publisher to sow confusion about the actual text.
I wonder how easy it will be to find these pirated Potters a few years from now. Darnton can do his work on Enlightenment publishing practices because he was able to read a huge archive of correspondence of the Societe typographique de Neuchatel, along with the end products–the pirated and official books themselves–in libraries. Who will have all this Potter stuff for another Darnton in 250 years? Will it be a library like the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, or more like the Internet Archive, or an individual enthusiast / private historian’s site like Jason Scott’s textfiles.com? Does it matter?
The O'Reilly Radar blog takes a look at the downward trend in circulation and reference questions at ARL libraries. Interesting comments from all angles, including a hectoring librarian. (via corplibrarian/LSW)
Thanks to Michael Sauers‘ suggestion in his comment on my post about the documentary Good Copy Bad Copy, we have done a brown bag lunch and video screening the past two weeks at my library. Both times we have had a nice mix of attendees from the library, academic technology, and the writing center.
Last week we watched Good Copy Bad Copy, and this week we watched a few videos from the TED conferences. Namely:
Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity: Is the point of educating people to create college professors? Can’t we do better in helping people unlock their creativity (or at least not crushing it out of them)?
I’m sure if I had more time, I could put together an entirely different, but equally compelling hour of TED talks. They are great to watch, not just for the content, but also for seeing some interesting presentation techniques and styles.
I’m not sure what we’ll screen next week; maybe something a little lighter, more fun (though I thought the documentary and these talks were loads of fun, too). Thanks for the idea, Michael!
In writing that previous post about Facebook, I had a few other thoughts that didn’t really fit. I have collected them here.
Privacy and the Facebook feed
Facebook users are familiar with the news feed of what is going on with their friends. In general, when your Facebook friends make updates to their profile, you will read about it in your feed. E.g., “Joshua M. Neff added ‘They Might Be Giants’ to his favorite music” or “5 of your friends joined the group Internet Librarian 2007.”
Facebook give users a lot of control over what information about themselves will appear in their friends’ feeds. So if you don’t want people to see the comments you make on photos, or when you leave a group, or write a wall post, you can un-check those boxes.
But people don’t always think to change those privacy options, and can’t always anticipate how their actions on Facebook might look from the vantage point of that feed.
A recent post on BoingBoing led me to Thomas Crampton’s How Facebook ended my marriage about how an engaged couple’s friends freaked out when they removed their relationship status information from their Facebook profiles. Nothing about their relationship changed, they just changed their profile info. And their friends lost their minds on Twitter.
I think a similar thing happened to Jessamyn West recently when she updated her profile to say that she was married to the moon. Her feed just showed that her relationship status had changed to “married,” with no mention of to whom. I, myself, found this odd enough to mention to someone–I forget now if it was by private IM or in the LSW Meebo room–though I was pretty sure it was a joke.
Anyway, when we talk about online library applications that may have privacy implications, there is often the feeling that as long as we give people enough privacy controls, we needn’t worry too much. I think that incidents like these show that it can be hard, even for savvy users, to imagine ahead of time how our actions in social software environments might look when stripped of context and published in a feed of some kind. Crampton and his fiance thought they were increasing their privacy. Jessamyn thought everyone would see that her new life partner was the moon. Who is to say what that feed of recently-checked-out books will look like on a widget somewhere?
Terms of Use
I have been looking at the Terms of Use for Facebook users, and, not being a lawyer, it’s a little hard for me to suss out exactly what rights one gives up by posting stuff to the site. They seem relatively innocuous, in that I can understand their need to assert some rights over “User Content” to allow them to re-publish uploaded stuff in different contexts. And the “non-exclusive” seems to mean that they aren’t trying to claim outright ownership of anything their users create.
CC’s group currently has 356 members (the incoming class totals about 530 people) with over 2,300 wall posts and 130 discussion topics on the discussion board. I haven’t dug into the boards yet, but from reading the wall, I have a pretty good idea of what some of their top concerns are (my impressions, not statistically tabulated): meal plan (is the “gold” plan enough food? A ripoff?), what First Year Experience class people are taking, CC Tiger Hockey, the “all-class reads” book assignment, when exactly those forms need to be in the admissions office, special sheets for dorm beds, how do I get my CC email address, etc. A few people claim to be posting drunk, at least one guy is TROLLING IN ALL CAPS (he is completely ignored), the usual stuff.
I haven’t jumped in to the conversation as Brian has for the Georgia Tech group, but I’m going to keep my eye on it. If it seems appropriate, then I’ll weigh in.
Update, 2007-07-05: Ken Varnum’s comment on this post indicates that Facebook can change its decision on these kinds of apps with some patient explanation on the library’s part. It’s not clear to me if we can interpret this as a green light, or just a single happy outcome.
[Note: some of the links in this post go to pages that are only available to Facebook members. I identified these links with an "(FB)" immediately following the link. The fact that I have to do this is pertinent to the post itself. -SL]
I did a little messing around with Facebook apps last week. Basically, I downloaded code for the UIUC Facebook library application (FB), used it as the basis for a hasty cut-and-paste job, and managed to get a test version of a working application for my library after a fairly short time. It was very simple, embedding a search for my library’s catalog on the user’s profile page.
I had planned to post some details for those who might want to do the same, and perhaps I will eventually. But recent events make me wonder if that simple application will ever work out.
My colleague, Carol, was going to take my rudimentary application and see if she could add some more features. But she came to me today and said that she had read on on the Facebook group FacebookAppsForLibraries (FB) that libraries were having their apps rejected by Facebook staff.
received a note from FB staff saying the app violated the FB “Platform Application Guidelines” which states “Applications that may be displayed on “user profile” pages or other pages of the Facebook Site…may not include…any web search functionality of any kind.”
He challenges their assertion, as searching a library catalog is different than searching the “web.” Of course, if Facebook’s point is to keep people from driving traffic away from Facebook, they are unlikely to care.
Other libraries have also had their applications turned down upon submitting them to the Facebook application directory, but for different reasons than the ones given to Peterson. Wayne Graham from William & Mary says that the Facebook people said his app “didn’t use the Facebook platform” and David Ward of University of Illinois was told that his app “stores user data beyond the context user session or specified timeout.”
So this is all a bit discouraging. But perhaps not too surprising.
Jason Kottke is the latest person to express some skepticism and reservations about Facebook in his posts Facebook is the new AOL and Facebook vs. AOL, redux. His main point is that Facebook might be fun or useful or whatever, but it is still a walled garden set apart from the rest of the web. Search engines don’t index the site, you need an account to view pretty much anything on the site, etc., etc. And if they don’t like what you are doing, they can take their toys back and send you home.
I see how much time some of our students spend on Facebook, and wish that I could encourage them to spend that time making their own web pages. Rather than adding another jokey Facebook group, they could be learning a little HTML and CSS, maybe learning how to install WordPress or something, and making the whole web a more interesting place.
In saying that, I feel like a parallel-universe version of Pope Gorman:
<fakegorman>I fear that today’s student is in thrall to a cyber-Calypso, enjoying the sweet embrace of Facebook, but ultimately leading an empty existence, unaware of his own longing for the intellectual wine-dark sea of the open Internet. One suspects that years of scrawling hip-hop haiku on the aptly-named Facebook ‘Wall’ will leave this generation of students incapable of writing a lengthy, sustained blog post of 300 words or more.</fakegorman>
I’m not ready to give up on Facebook yet. For one thing, it’s fun. (Excuse me while I go poke a half dozen Facebook friends. … Ah, that was fun!) For another, it really is where our users are: the Colorado College network has close to 3,500 people (for a campus with ~ 2,000 current students). The group for the class of incoming students already has 354 members two months before school starts. Now whether these folks really want a Colorado College library application–when that valuable profile space could be taken up with SuperPoke!, Food Fight!, or Booze Mail–who’s to say?
The best part of this whole stupid Gorman thing yet: in a blog post on shoddy research, he misquotes Jimmy Wales based on a printed source. And has to apologize. The irony! The laughs! The sheer idiocy of this whole exercise!
Thanks to Jason Scott’s write up on his blog ASCII, last night I downloaded a torrent of the documentary Good Copy Bad Copy and watched the video. You can get the torrent for Good Copy Bad Copy from Pirate Bay. (If you are new to BitTorrent, you might want to try this FAQ (er, this FAQ. Thanks, Josh!). You’ll also need a client; I use Transmission, but there are plenty of others.) It’s free to download; I can’t seem to find any copyright or Creative Commons information, which is kind of funny, considering the topic. So it’s free as in beer, and may be free as in freedom as well.
“Good Copy Bad Copy” looks at the current copyright environment and what it means to artists, media companies, and consumers. That might sound a little dry, but they build up the story they want to tell with long, interesting segments with a fascinating variety of people. Yes, they get people you have probably heard of like Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Dan Glickman (CEO of the MPAA), and DJ Danger Mouse, but the most interesting interviews come from people you have almost certainly never heard of like Charles Igwe, a Nigerian film producer; Rick Falkvinge, of the Pirate Party, Sweden; and DJ Dinho, a “Techno Brega” DJ in Brazil. I agree with Jason Scott that this global reach, with interviews and street footage from all over the world, is what makes this documentary special.
By structuring the film this way, with all these interesting people in all areas of music and motion picture production, performance, and sales, “Good Copy Bad Copy” stays away from the kind of black and white view the title might imply. Instead, it looks at different approaches toward making art and making money, destabilizing what we think of as the “natural” system of artists, labels/studios, and consumers.
One of my favorite segments was on the massive Nigerian film industry. Near the end of the documentary, Charles Igwe, the Nigerian film producer, sums things up this way: “You need to take a look at your environment–the limitations of your environment, the advantages of your environment–and then do things which are peculiar to you. And be proud of them.” Which sounds like great advice to me.
Here is the preview, which doesn’t give enough of a taste of the scope I’m talking about, but might give you enough of the flavor:
I have a hard time sitting through any movies these days, and I found this fascinating. It clocks in at just under an hour, so it won’t be a huge investment of your time, but I think it will be a rewarding investment.
This is news to me because diglet is the first blog I ever started. As I mentioned previously, diglet was a blog I started with the encouragement of my then-boss, Anna Gold, to keep tabs on the digital library happenings at UCSD (“diglet” being short for “digital letters”).
Even though the “authorship” of the entries changed with a blog move or upgrade, I wrote all the entries from April to October of 2002, after which time James R. Jacobs was the main force behind the blog.
It’s just interesting to see something that I started a while back have a life cycle beyond me. See ya, diglet.
It gets even weirder, as he is blogging for Encyclopedia Britannica. Which, as I noted at LSW, is rather like driving a Ford truck for a buggy whip manufacturer.
I have a hard time writing about Gorman without cursing, but I’ll try and keep it clean here. I just don’t understand why he feels the need to write about the web at all. He has the beginnings of interesting, useful critiques, but he so obviously dislikes darn near everything about the web and the people who like the web. It seems like he can’t bring himself to actually try and understand anything about the web, leaving him to fall back on platitudes and his own blowhardiness, usually insulting people in the process. As Jessamyn says, “I don’t understand why he has to be that way.”
I don’t want to be that way. Gorman brings out some of the worst in me–my own self-righteousness and crummy Photoshop skills to name two things–so I’ll stop here (throwing away a perfectly awful Gorman-Cartman mashup in the process; we are all better off for it). Besides, I think the trackbacks might just encourage him.
In fact, not knowing exactly what they’ll be presenting is part of the point of this, as the BIGWIG folks were frustrated at the idea of planning an “emerging technology” program a year in advance. Looks like presenter K. G. Schneider isn’t even sure what she’s going to present, and in this instance, that’s probably a good thing.
The organizers mention HigherEd BlogCon and Five Weeks to a Social Library as inspirations/precursors to this event. I was a presenter for both of those online events, and I think they went well; I’m not involved in this new one (though I’m sure I’ll check in on most if not all of the presentations) and I wish them success.
All three of these events (HEBC, 5 Weeks, and now BIGWIG) have social software not only as the mode of instruction, but also as the subject matter. I think it will be an exciting day when people start to use these online environments for sessions that have little or nothing to do with technology.
In a conversation at the clubhouseLibrary Society of the World chatroom some time last week, talk turned to David Weinberger’s book Everything is Miscellaneous and Walt Crawford said that he’d look up some topic in the index. Then Walt joked that perhaps such a book wouldn’t even have an index, being all miscellaneous and everything.
Of course, the book does have an index. As all of us who read walking paper remember, the index features Sarah Houghton-Jan (you can call her the Librarian in Black as well as K. G. “Free Range Librarian” Schneider.
But it is also an index with a sense of humor. In addition to amusing-but-legit entries such as “intertwingularity, 125-28″ and “Gdansk vs.Danzig edit war, 138″ and “sort-of, kind-of relationships, 196-98″ there are a few entries planted just for yucks.
Pictured here is the first one that I noticed, when I went to look up “index” or “indexing” in the index itself, and found “index, entries that should not have been included”:
One of those is “everything.” Look up “everything” in the index, and find, among other sub-headings, “in book, 1-277″ for the 277-page book.
There is also fun with names, starting witih “companies, names of which are made-up words”:
and continuing with “names of people” (where the subheadings include “that are also animals” and “wonderful”) and “people” (subheadings include “anonymous,” “knighted,” and “you want to be”).
If that’s all too silly for you, you might want to check out the entry for “parody, good pages of this book to, 24-26, 126, 211.”
Eventually I’ll have more to say about the book. For right now, I’ll say it is a pretty good read. It’s more journalism, more pop-non-fiction than I realized it would be. I think he gives a good tour of issues surrounding metadata and organization in the Internet age that librarians have been kicking around for a while now (without really coming to terms with most of those issues, I’d say). He does tend to be a bit breathless over some of the possibilities of what he calls the “third order” of organization without taking adequate notice of what Cory Doctorow calls metacrap (in a nutshell, people are lazy stupid liars). But I’ll try and take it up at some length later. (I am fully aware that when I say on this blog that I’m going to write something up “later” that tends to mean “never.” Time will tell in this case.)
Fellow Library Society of the World denizens know that I spent much of last week fussing over a presentation to the Colorado Academic Library Summit. I enlisted their/your help a few times, and am grateful for the help. I hope that I was the first person to thank the LSW in a conference handout!
The talk, Web 2.0 and the Digital Library -or- Learning from Flickr (follow that link for slides, abstract, and further reading) seemed to go well. I had a very large room–it must have been able to seat about 200 people–with a respectable turnout of 30 to 40 people. The room wasn’t optimal, and having to use the mic was a bit of a chore, but it worked out OK. I need to remember to bring a little clock for the podium, as I finished way early. That’s not a big problem, as it left time for some very good questions and comments from the audience, but I hate not knowing how I’m doing on time.
Joan Lippincott‘s keynote on Millennials was interesting and avoided making too many sweeping generalizations about generations. I particularly appreciated that she quoted Lorcan Dempsey’s The user interface that isn’t, a blog post that was on my own list of further reading for my talk: “[Libraries] do not participate fully in the network experience of their users.” Lippincott asked how many of us even think of users as having “network experiences.” Which was one of the things I was trying to get at in my talk which immediately followed hers. Nice when that kind of thing happens.
For the other sessions, I saw Jack Maness from the University of Colorado present on “librarian 2.0.” You may have read Maness’ article Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and Its Implications for Libraries, as it was heavily blogged when it came out last year. He gave a very engaging talk, with a vision of the socially-present web-based library that I hope was resonant for others in the audience as it was for me.
I also attended a talk by Chris Brown of the University of Denver on using Google Scholar and Google Book Search. He had some interesting techniques and haxies for using Google Scholar with RefWorks and licensed databases. He also showed how he’s putting links to Google Book Search documents in library catalog records, which seems like a great idea. Let’s hope Google keeps those URLs stable. It was fun to listen to Chris talk about getting lists of titles, comparing lists, and generally geeking out.
I had to take off before the final session of the day got underway, but it was overall a very good experience as a speaker and as a conference-goer.
Not “personal stuff” like “bad news” or “terrible confessions”; just some stuff that I wanted to mention that isn’t really about libraries and is more about me and my family.
My younger son, Nicholas, turned two years old on Friday. Happy birthday, Nick!
I have gone a little nuts for model rockets lately (photographic evidence). I have been looking at cardstock model rockets, too, and might try this V-2 some time soon. If I am especially motivated, I might even try to modify it into something I could actually launch, like this guy did.
Not coincidentally, my newest favorite blog is GeekDad
Luke and I went to Casa Bonita the semi-legendary Denver restaurant/tourist trap on Thursday. It was a blast. (photographic evidence). If Casa Bonita sounds familiar to you and you aren’t sure why, perhaps you saw the South Park episode? The photo above is of us looking into the haunted well. Luke inherited my nostrils.
I’m scaling back on my feeds, having dumped about half of them into a folder called “Deleted” that is set to never update. I expect I’ll re-subscribe to many of those feeds some day, but for now, I have about fifty feeds still subscribed. Which is probably enough.
Similarly, I deleted my Twitter account a week or so ago. I suspect I’ll return someday, but it was too easily distracting, and led to me thinking far too much about what I should post to Twitter and how.
I’m thinking of considering this week a “be kind to the blog” week, wherein I do a lot of the cleanup I have been meaning to do for months now. We’ll see how I do on that one.
Walt asks “Ever thought you or one of the groups you work for or with could use a Walt Crawford?”
It seems that due to the OCLC/RLG merger, Walt won’t have a job anymore come October. He runs down the details in his blog post, What’s next?
I’m not sure what more to say, except to wish Walt well in finding a good fit for the next stage of his career, and to exhort you all to keep Walt in mind.
I have put myself in an interesting position (which is a euphemism for “I’m trying not to freak out too much”). I’m giving a presentation in a few weeks, and I’m not sure how much I believe one of the main points of my presentation anymore.
This presentation will look at the digital library through the lens of the popular web 2.0 site, Flickr , to see how better use of user-created content and metadata (such as tags, comments, and notes) and a more predictable, programmable interface (through feeds, application programming interfaces (APIs), and better URLs) can help us create a more useful and usable digital library. The discussion will be on the conceptual level (i.e., no screens full of code).
The October talk was aimed at people at liberal arts colleges in the early stages of putting together digital image collections. I looked at some aspects of Flickr–specifically tags, human-readable URLs, comments & notes, feeds, and the API–and described how I thought they could be applied in this context, often in contrast to the way things work in the digital image project I’m affiliated with, the Image Database to Enhance Asian Studies (IDEAS).
In many ways that talk was pie-in-the-sky, as it would not be trivial to implement any of those Flickr features, but I thought it was important to look at what Flickr is doing now to get a clue as to what we might be able to do some time from now.
In that presentation, I put a lot of emphasis on the value that users provide through tagging and comments. But I’m starting to lose faith that this kind of user-contributed metadata will ever be that useful in the library context, at least in the way that I had been thinking about it.
The problem with tagging is that people don’t have enough motivation to tag something that isn’t “theirs.” I have often returned over the past year to The Del.icio.us Lesson; here’s the main argument:
The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost. All other usage is secondary.
Tim Spalding takes up this same argument in When tags work and when they don’t: Amazon and LibraryThing. I’m afraid that library applications–be they the catalog, a digital image collection, or something else–will feel more like the “Amazon” experience to users than the “LibraryThing” experience.
It is way too early to judge the success of the tagging features of the Ann Arbor District Library Catalog and PennTags, but when I see that most of the “top tags” in those applications have been used fewer than 100 times, I start to wonder if library and academic users have the motivation to tag.
And I wonder how many users a project would need in order to useful. I keep thinking about our new systems librarian, Carol Ou, commenting that she didn’t think Penn’s user community was large enough to create a viable folksonomy. If that’s true, how about a smaller digital library project where the user community might number in the hundreds? (Carol has since said that she thinks smaller groups of taggers can have a greater effect in areas like “clustering” of search results; you can bet I’ll be talking to her some more before this presentation.)
The academic caste system is likely to complicate matters further. One of the examples I used in this talk in October is a Flickr photoset of Soviet-era posters. The comments on that set and on the individual photos go way beyond the typical “wow cool” as Flickr users provide additional information about the posters, including translations and corrections of errors made by the person who originally uploaded the images.
But I wonder if that would happen in an academic context. Would faculty contribute photographs to an image collection if they knew that they could be “corrected” by students? Would students feel comfortable offering up their comments in the first place?
In any case, I’m sure there is still a lot we can learn from Flickr and similar applications–the sections of my talk on URLs, feeds, and the API still hold up basically unchanged, and I’m sure I can find other aspects, too.
So help me out: what can we learn from Flickr? Is user-tagging of the digital library too much to hope for?
KGS on Steven Bell’s recent bit about academic librarian blogs. She does a nice job of dissecting why this essay was so dissatisfying. My most cogent critique so far had been "bullshit"; Schneider takes a more reasoned approach.
I’m not normally big on "icebreakers" but some of these ideas–from the recent Information Architecture Summit in Vegas–sound great for a conference. Nice photos, too.
Updated 2007-05-08: It amuses me greatly that I got three comments on this little stub of a post. Thanks Josh, Dorothea, and Heidi.
The presentations went well enough. Emilie Satterwhite and I reprised our Keeping Current talk from November. Emilie is a fun person to present with, and our smallish room (for this smallish event) was rather full. People seemed most excited about blogging, though they had good questions about wikis, feeds and podcasts, too. I don’t know how much the message “took,” though. We offered free premium wikis from pbWiki (through their educator presenter pack offer) to the first two people to email us with the URL of their wiki to upgrade: no one took us up on the offer.
My solo presentation, Social Software: Making Connections on the Web, was perhaps less successful. I was trying to show off Flickr, del.icio.us, and LibraryThing and their applications for libraries. I was a little too unfocused, and severely hampered by the fact that I had to kneel behind the projector if I wanted to do a live demo–small room, short projector-to-laptop cord. I think I didn’t have a good enough “narrative” for the presentation, either, so it was more like a few disconnected demos.
One of the neatest things about my day in Pueblo was meeting Karen Pardue, a librarian at Colorado State University, Pueblo. I got to know Karen a little through our participation in Five Weeks to a Social Library, and was looking forward to meeting her in person. It was fun to meet up: I was really happy to see her, and it seemed like she was happy to meet me too. I’m looking forward to meeting more of my imaginary friends in the future.
Another year, missing another Computers in Libraries conference. As with other recent years, though, there is no real reason to feel too left out.
As in years past, Nicole Engard has wrapped up a CiL OPML file that you can download and import to your feed aggregator. If you do, you’ll get the feeds for the official conference blog and wiki, and feeds for del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr with the “cil07″ or “cil2007″ tags.
There’s a new wrinkle this year with Twitter. Many of my twitterati are at the conference, and they are twittering away: this is real live liveblogging. Short on details, sure, but you can practically smell the librarians. (Ew. Forget I said that.)
You could do worse that to just follow madinkbeard’s photo stream for the sketches. (Such as the one I yoinked to illustrate this blog post. It ain’t CC-licensed, but since he left up the “blog this” button, I assume it’s OK.)
Lastly, if you see my co-worker, Robin, buy her a drink or something. She’s funnier than I am. You won’t even miss me.
The deal is that your library joins the group and then contributes the equivalent of one photo every day for a year. I gather that the Platonic Ideal of a 365 is to upload one photo per day, every day, that was taken on that day. Michael knows that kind of every day commitment is too much for most of us, so he’s suggested that you still aim for a total of 365 photos in 365 days, but that you relax the upload schedule. Maybe you aim to upload seven photos a week, but don’t worry if you shot all seven on the same day. The main thing is to make it a habit, do it regularly, and post current photos of what is currently going on in your library.
Well, I asked a few of my colleagues and they agreed with me that it sounds like fun, so count Tutt Library in. We haven’t started yet, but by the end of the week, we’ll get rolling. I expect it will be fun, I expect I will regret this decision a few times over the year, and I expect that next April I’ll be looking back over a great photographic survey of what we were up to over the preceding year.
(Aside: I notice that right now we have 367 photos in our photostream, taken over the last two years. So even if we post no other photos this year, it will double the size of our collection.)
(Another aside: I see that the 365 Library Days group now has 245 photos after just two days. Soon, I suppose the group will be getting 365+ photos per day.)
The League of Awesomeness Internship
This new project dovetails nicely with something else I have been planning to write about: the League of Awesomeness Internship.
If you watched Ze Frank’s The Show for the year it was going, you know what I’m talking about. Ze Frank produced a short video program five times a week for a year. (If you never saw it, you might want to find some decent bandwidth and the popular shows page. If you get hooked, I’ll see you in a year.)
There was a running thing on The Show that Ze was doing the videos as part of an internship for The League of Awesomeness. So I have begun to think about these commitments to do some creative act in public as League of Awesomeness internships.
Internet troubadour Jonathan Coulton’s Thing a Week, where he recorded a song for a podcast every week for a year, was certainly a League of Awesomeness internship (hell, just the Flickr song (or try this YouTube link) alone makes him Awesome in my book). This Library 365 thing may be less intense than recording a song a week or five videos a week, but it’s the same kind of idea. I’d say that 5 Weeks to a Social Library was a mini-LOA-internship for the participants (and a maxi-LOA-internship for the organizers!).
This is a powerful idea: instead of saying “I really should record some more songs” or “take more photos” or “figure out what this social software stuff is all about,” League of Awesomeness interns commit to doing more than they think they might be able to do and they do it in public. Over time, they run out of ideas, learn to make decisions quickly, and are forced to tap hidden stores of creativity.
Which might sound like a funny thing to say about an online learning course for librarians. But he’s right: Five Weeks had the DIY spirit and work ethic, the “here’s three chords, now form a band” approach to education, and a very blurry line between “performer” and “audience” or between “expert” and “student.”
So when I kind of gave a nudge to Walt Crawford’s notional post on “personal heroes among libloggers,” I immediately started to regret it. “Heroes” or “heroines” aren’t very punk rock (we’ll leave “heroin” aside for the purposes of this discussion; this is a straight edge blog post). One of the great things about blogging–at least in libraryland–is that you can engage with bloggers as equals; it’s expected.
But I have been listening to the great punk band the Minutemen a bit lately, and watched the Minutemen documentary We Jam Econo (if you care even a bit about the Minutemen, you should watch that movie). There was a great, low-key Minutemen song called History Lesson (Part II) about the band itself. “Our band could be your life (real names’ll be proof)” sings D. Boon (or “truth” depending on the performance). “Punk rock changed our lives.” A little while later come some namechecks: Bob Dylan, E. Bloom, Richard Hell, Joe Strummer, John Doe.
So if D. Boon could do it, I can do it. Blogging changed my life. Here is who I pretend I am when I sit behind the keyboard:
Jessamyn West: Sure, she got here first, but no one would care if she wasn’t awesome. Jessamyn has a generosity of spirit I want to emulate (which doesn’t mean she isn’t tough, as anyone who reads MetaTalk can attest (here is a recent (hilarious) example)).
Dorothea Salo: For being the best kind of crank and for sheer brainpower. And for “Elseviley Verlag” and “M-ch–l G-rm-n” and “beat things with rocks” and other Saloisms that lodge in my brain and make me wish I could come up with something as good.
Sarah Houghton-Jan: The first blogger I ever met in person, at Internet Librarian 20072005 (thanks, Jessamyn). She had no reason to know who I was, and every reason to think a guy following her up the escalator would be a creep. I thought she was a rock star, but she treated me like a person instead of a groupie, which helped set the tone for my entire experience of blogging.
Meredith Farkas: For indefatigablity and over-prolific alpha librarianship. For a while there, I would work on a blog post, then check my feeds to see that Meredith had already written something very close to what I was writing, only she’d said it better, and already had a lively discussion going in the comments.
Iris Jastram: In Walt’s post that got this ball rolling he mentions the idea of “unsung liblogging heroes.” I know Iris much better than the other women on this list, so it seems a little funny to call her a “heroine.” But she is constanly interesting, always thoughtful, humane, and memorable. And as for unsung, I’m appalled when I compare my FeedBurner subscriber count with hers; she’s been writing great stuff while I have been phoning it in lately. So if you are reading this blog and have some kind of weird one-blog-quota for humanities-types at small, private, liberal arts colleges, please go ahead and unsubscribe from See Also… and pick up the feed for Pegasus Librarian
So those are the libloggers whose names I’m painting on the back of my leather jacket. This is a meme, people, and Dorothea has already tagged you. Don’t make me tag you again.
Once again, I am reminded by Dorothea Salo’s post that April 5 is Annual CSS Naked Day. The idea is to show your site with no CSS to celebrate the separation of HTML structure and CSS style. So visit See Also… today and see it in the buff.
Via Veerle’s blog, this link to letterpress porn.Well-shot short video about Firefly Press, in Somerville, MA. The voice-over is a little annoying, but worth it for the beautiful shots of type, typography, and the presses in motion.
Contrary to what you may have read, the official blog of the current ACRL conference is world-readable. (Note this is the event-specific "ACRL Blog," not the long-running "ACRLog"
O’Reilly points to a blog post by a Berkeley grad student on what Google Book Search means to her research. I was just thinking of GBS as the "poor library’s ECCO" when I helped someone find an 18thC publication there this week.
O’Reilly points to a blog post by a Berkeley grad student on what Google Book Search means to her research. I was just thinking of GBS as the "poor library’s ECCO" when I helped someone find an 18thC publication there this week.
O’Reilly points to a blog post by a Berkeley grad student on what Google Book Search means to her research. I was just thinking of GBS as the "poor library’s ECCO" when I helped someone find an 18thC publication there this week.
Dempsey embeds a funny/depressing video from Ellysa Cahoy about finding Time Magazine on the Penn State website. I counted 18 clicks. I often tell students "believe it or not, the link resolver is supposed to make things easier."
ASCII by Jason Scott. Scott is the guy behind Textfiles.com and the BBS Documentary, and is hell-bent on preserving early personal computing culture. He can be cranky, irascible, opinionated, and profane, but he also strikes me as something of a romantic idealist. Suggested posts: A Sysop, Forever and You’ve Ruined Everything
Ironic Sans by David Friedman. Posts about art and design and web stuff, often in the form of “Ideas,” or brief sketches of things that would be cool if he had the time to do them. Some ideas do get played out in full, like Every ad in Times Square. Suggested post: The Astoria Notes about his former downstairs neighbor with scans of the strange notes she would leave for him.
Metafilter, AskMeFi, and MetaTalk. Sprawling, maddening, wonderful. Not really a blog, but whatever. No suggested posts, just dive in. Pay the five bucks and join up.
Subtraction, by designer Khoi Vinh. A blog that I almost always click through from the feed because I love the site design. Suggested post: Oh Yeeaahh!, about his presentation at SXSWi this year on grid-based design. Download the slides while you are there.
Benjamin’s blog. I’m not going to link to it right now, because I’m not sure he wants the traffic, but a guy who was a student at Colorado College and is now doing a one-year paraprofessional job in the Math and Computer Science department here has a blog that is more of an online social site with user profiles, internal email messages, and the like. He wrote the code for the site himself. Most of the participants are real-life friends; I’m just an interloper there.
It seems that Twitter is one of those particularly potent cultural signifiers, like veal, or David Foster Wallace novels, or Hummers. You don’t just like or dislike those things: you are for them or against them. While some people are content to say they simply don’t get Twitter’s appeal, or that it isn’t the kind of thing they like, many people feel the need to go farther and imply that Twitter is wrong and people who like it are in some way also wrong in an objective way.
John Blyberg recently wrote of Twitter that it is “the Paris Hilton of the social web. Slutty and unfortunate. The basest manifestation of the culture and systems it represents.”
Which sort of implies that if you think Twitter is kind of fun and harmless, you are guilty of perpetuating the debasement of the social web. Jeez, this thing is worse than MySpace?
Blyberg also says “I’ve received no less than 14 Twitter invitations from people whom I respect deeply and I have to wonder, why the **** are they using this?” (After reading that, I, of course, immediately sent him an invitation.)
I should hasten to say that Blyberg (or someone with the handle “jblyberg” anyway; identity is so fugitive on the web, isn’t it?) actually does have a Twitter account, and logged in today for long enough to tweet “I’m so slutty.” Which I love, because it shows that he isn’t taking this all that seriously. He also calls Twitter “candy 2.0″ which I’d say is on the money. But, then, I like candy.
Blyberg also links to Kathy Sierra’s post Is Twitter TOO good? which includes a graph of the asymtopic Twitter curve (reproduced here) which claims that “Twitter is the best/worst cause of continuous partial attention.”
Well, first, let’s look at that curve: if you think Sierra is on to something, you just might to have to write off all of the web including IM, blogs, RSS, and MySpace–hey, Twitter is worse than MySpace!–all of which are beyond Sierra’s “Brain Thrashing Threshold.”
That also assumes that the average Twitter user is a drooling idiot, continually waiting for another hit from the Twitter pipe, neglecting work and family while typing up his every fleeting thought, action, or impulse, and tweeting it out to other similarly pathetic wretches. To which I say, do you have cameras in my home?
Seriously, I think that this assumes too much about how people use Twitter (and IM and RSS and all those other attention-sinks). Yes, I have lost evenings to refreshing my feed reader, but most days I’m capable of bringing up a Twitter window when I’m on autopilot or just returning from lunch or something, and closing it (along with the feed reader, IM, and email) when I need to concentrate. If people are lacking these skills now, it’s time to learn them.
There is another Kathy Sierra graph that might also apply to Twitter, this from a post called Don’t give in to feature demands, and again reproduced here for your convenience. In short, if people tend to love or hate your product, you are probably on to something interesting.
Also some of the common criticisms of Twitter (“It’s banal! Who cares what you had for breakfast?”) can be solved by befriending more interesting Twitterati (thanks to Andrea Mercado for the vocab word). If your friends are boring you, get better friends. And for heaven’s sake ignore the public timeline. Judging Twitter based on what random strangers are posting is like judging Blogger by the random crap you get when you hit the “next blog” button.
The connection between “Twitter” and “twit” is obvious, but you also can’t spell Twitter without “wit,” and I wonder if certain people will come to be valued as Twitter friends due to how funny and interesting they can be in 140 characters or less. I’m sure I’m not the first one to think of tweeting in haiku:
March Madness playing,
warm TV, cold beverage;
toilet so distant.
Early spring morning,
my four-hour reference shift
has shot this whole day.
I’m at Blockbuster.
“Borat” or “Children of Men?”
Tweet me ur vote, d00dz!
ZOMFG!
Paris Hilton in my libe!
ROTFL!
Speaking of brevity, I think I’ll stop before this post gets any longer. mathowie probably covered this better in 140 characters or less, but that’s life. (mathowie ftw on the Twitter background images, too.)
In all this, please remember that I have only used Twitter via the web and IM, not via cell phone. Because Twittering this via text message would be crazy! I mean, can you imagine all the interruptions? I’d never get anything done. Twittering via text messages is dangerous, wrong, and scary, and people who do it are mouth-breathing, baby-eating kitten-stompers with the attention span of seventh-graders on crack. You know who probably uses Twitter via cell phone? That’s right: Paris Hilton.
I’m making changes to the blog tonight so that my del.icio.us links will no longer be a separate sidebar/footer item, but will be individual posts of their own. This probably resulted in an onslaught of “new” posts from me in your feed reader tonight.
Now I’m going to work trying to style those entries differently than the “regular” blog entries. I don’t think I’ll hit you with another big linkdump, though.
Via boingboing I found this blog post Before the blog – zines from the 80s…. The blogger has scans of zine covers from the late 1980s from his collection–a collection which apparently has spent the last 20 years or so in Jugoslovenski Aerotransport carry-on. (Are those archival? Because it’s way cooler than a Hollinger box.)
He has also created a flickr group called The Piran Café zine repository for cover scans of zines that are no longer published (i.e., just about all of them). Perhaps when I have a spare moment, I’ll pull some of my mid-1990s zines out of the boxes under my desk and shoot a few covers for the pool.
In other zine-related news, I expect to attend the Denver Zine Festival, a week from Saturday, where I hope to buy some zines for the Colorado College Zine Collection and meet up with one of my heroes, John Porcellino, author of the self-published comic King-Cat Comics and Stories. While we go around celebrating our blogs’ first or second birthdays, Porcellino has been self-publishing King-Cat since 1989.
My own zine from the mid-1990s, Fiasco, lasted two issues (which I think is the median for zine longevity), though I’m thinking of dusting off the imprint for a special issue this summer. We’ll see.
Updated 2006-03-13 21:40 MDT: *sigh* Whatever Twitter is, one thing it isn’t at the moment is fast. I’m taking out the JavaScript badge so that the page will actually load.
Updated 2006-03-09 8:56 MST: I have edited this post a billion times over the past half hour trying to get the JavaScript badge to work; turns out that WordPress is very fussy about JS within posts.
Iris asks for someone to throw her a clue on Twitter, the microblogging, what-I’m-doing-this-second, IM/SMS/Web dealybop that is the flavor of the moment.
The setup is that you enter a brief message (140 characters or less) that answers the question “What are you doing?” You can subscribe to friends’ messages and keep up with what they are doing. You can see it all on the web, or you can get IM or SMS updates (though I can’t get the IM updates to work for me on Adium for the Mac). Required background reading from Liz Lawley and Anil Dash.
It’s like a new online toy. I think that the hour-by-hour update is a big waste of time (note to self: stop doing that), but I could see using it once or twice a day as a little update on what’s going on with me.
I don’t know if I’ll continue to use it much, and I doubt I’ll continue to keep a Twitter window open all day, but I could see using it as Evan Williams does as a brief status line across the top of the blog.
David Rothman wants to know why should libraryfolk care about Twitter?. It has–as far as I can tell–nothing to do with libraries, but it does have something to do with groups of people who know each other to some degree, but don’t see each other much, who want to keep in touch in a relatively non-obtrusive way. People like library bloggers–my imaginary friends.
Twitter is also making a big push at South by Southwest Interactive this year. They encourage people at that conference to add sxsw as a friend, and then they can track everyone at the conference. I can see this at a conference like Internet Librarian, where attendees could just Twitter where they are going for dinner or their present location if they want company, or are looking to meet up with friends. Or random stalkers. Whatever.
My crystal ball is broken, so I don’t know if anyone will still care about Twitter in four weeks. Or Monday, for that matter: Twitter has been a bit erratic lately as so many people seem to be trying it out and hammering their servers.
I have been following the course blogs all along, and it is obvious to me that course participants are taking advantage of the class to learn about social software and think it through “out loud” on the blogs.
But another, perhaps overlooked, benefit of the course is to the presenters. I hadn’t presented online before tonight, nor had I ever presented with Michael. It was a great benefit for me to do both of those things, though I hope that paticipants didn’t pay any price for my inexperience.
As we were preparing, I told Michael that I wished we were just doing the presentation in person, as I knew that we could both talk about Flickr and show our slides and it would all be OK. I wasn’t so sure that the technology would work, and that was the main thing that had me nervous going in.
I did need to trade my Mac for a Windows box (which we figured out in our practice session a few hours before the talk–be sure and do that if you are presenting online) and had a bit of a scare when my headset wasn’t working properly with the OPAL software right before the talk. Tom Peters of OPAL advised a quick log out and back in, which was enough to fix that problem. A bit of handholding from Tom today made me feel much more confident that everything would work.
And presenting with Michael was a breeze. Check him out if you ever get the chance.
This isn’t meant to be a big pat on the back for myself: I’m sure that my part of the talk was too basic for some people and too fast for others. And I probably skated over some really interesting issues around Flickr. I’ll be watching the class blogs for questions that come up.
Mostly I just think that Five Weeks to a Social Library is a cool thing, and I’m pleased to have been part of it. I have even more respect now for the organizers, many of whom were already my blogging heroines going into all this. My thanks to them, and to Tom, too.
I haven’t been blogging much because I have been busy doing worky stuff, as well as taking care of a sick kid, and–shockingly enough–getting sick myself.
But even the busiest life can’t trump this weird little icon blog thing called bouquet. Here is my bouquet (mouse over an icon to see what it is supposed to mean):
I found this via Jon’s blog on Vox. I don’t really know who Jon is, but I found some interesting stuff he wrote on that blog and added him to my Vox “neighborhood.”
Coincidentally, I read today about Twitter, which I don’t really understand yet, but it looks like another microblogging application (among other things).
Tim Spalding used the phrase “smallest bloggable unit” recently, which I do quite love. These apps seem to lower the bar.
Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.
So do it now. (Unless the cracker got the blog and 2.1.2 instead, and this is some kind of complex phishing thing…nah. Upgrade.)
Edited 25 Feb 2007: I seem to have done the upgrade properly tonight.
So I went to upgrade to WordPress 2.1.1 this evening. And ended up somehow nuking the whole site.
Luckily, plan B — “replace the gaping, smoking hole that used to be the weblog with the backup you just made” — seems to have worked out. That’s why step one in an upgrade is always “make a backup of the site while you still can.”
If you notice anything weird, please drop me a line at steve [at] stevelawson.name
I think I’ll go read a book. On paper.
Note: This post starts out sounding like shameless self-promotion, but is meant to end up as a motivational pep rally. Others do this trick better than I do, but I’ll give it a shot.
From what I can tell, this isn’t part of a scientific study or anything; it just means that someone on the dig_ref listserv thought we were doing interesting stuff with online tools. They cite our “Flickr account, blogs for library news and book reviews, instant messaging as well as a wiki providing links and access to government information.”
It’s fun to see that, and it is fun to be a part of that, and it is fun to think over all the stuff my colleagues and I have done over the past four years. (It’s also kind of funny, because they just link to our main library website, which is looking pretty late-20th-century these days.)
I’m the one here writing about this stuff, so it might seem like I’m the one responsible for all these webby things, but that’s not the whole story. Our head of reference started the IM reference service after getting inspired at Internet Librarian a few years ago; the main person keeping Bookends going is the head of technical services; and the gov docs librarian set up the wiki all on her own.
I think I work at a very good library. But I don’t think it is a good library because we do all this stuff. I think we do all this stuff because we are a good library. These webby things are just an outward sign of a library that is willing to try new things, to expand the idea of what the library can do.
Flickr had its own problem this weekend. On Saturday morning, I was looking at my contacts’ photos on Flickr, and I noticed that Laura Crossett had what looked like some interesting architectural photos up. So I clicked on a thumbnail of a lighting fixture, but got back what looked like a lo-res film still of a guy in a parking lot. Back in my photostream, a thumbnail photo of my kids was replaced with a busty anime character, though when I clicked on that, I got the correct image on the photo page. “WTF?” I thought.
Apparently a lot of people were also thinking “wtf?” and saying so in the Flickr forums. I like this quote from a forum post by Flickr user Dr. Keats: “55 out of my 860 [photos in his photostream] have got the dodgy photostream image – some pixilated, most not. Two are porn, the rest aren’t. Some are, in fact, very good…”
While many people thought the site had been hacked, it turns out the the official explanation is a bad caching server.
[Side note: the fact that so many people found porn/adult images in their photostream is an interesting indicator of how much of Flickr must be "adult" images (since we have to assume the images were being re-assigned randomly, yet many people complained of porn). There must be a whole 'nother world of private/NIPSA photos beneath the surface of Flickr.]
This got me thinking a bit about the Five Weeks to a Social Library class, where many of the participants are just starting to explore sites like Bloglines and Flickr, and some have expressed some understandable anxieties about it all.
The Five Weeks organizers have already had to tell participants that Bloglines may be buggy, which, I suppose, isn’t really all that big a deal; your choice of aggregator normally just affects you, though you might find your blog’s readership suffering if too many of your readers use Bloglines. But when Michael Porter and I talk about Flickr in week four of the class, I’m not really looking forward to saying “Flickr is a great place to store the photos for your blog; unfortunately, there is a small possibility that one day you will wake up to see photos of naked dudes on your ‘Kids Club’ blog. Welcome to perpetual beta.” (Or gamma. Whatever.) I don’t think that “Flickr is having a massage” (or “your library is having a massage“) is gonna cut it.
And the fact is, it’s Flickr and Bloglines this week, but next week it could be Blogger and Typepad (both of which have had their rough spots over the years) or FeedBurner and PBWiki (neither of which have ever given me trouble, but if they did, I would feel hung out to dry).
I’m not sure what the lesson is here. It would be nice to think that we could do all this ourselves, or minimize dependencies as much as possible, but most of us can’t write this software or even host it ourselves, and there may be features that we want to take advantage of (such as the subscriber count in Bloglines or the social features of Flickr) that simply couldn’t be duplicated.
I guess the questions to ask are “what could go wrong?” (though I don’t think I would have thought of the Flickr-photo-roulette thing until it actually happened yesterday); “how risk-averse am I?” (or “… is my institution?”); and “what is my exit strategy?” (e.g., do you keep your own blog/wiki/photo backups in a format suitable for importing to another application if your current application becomes unusable?).
We already know from our experience with library catalogs that putting too much faith in vendors can be a mistake. Are we making the same mistake with social software?
I’m sure I have seen this linked before, so excuse me if I am late to the party. But Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us is a very slick video about the value of standards, XML, machine-readable information, and other stuff put into the context of Web 2.0.
I suppose if I watched it a few more times I’d find something to criticise, but for now, I’m just so impressed with how well this conveys what is going on and why people are excited about what is happening on the web these days. And the thing is just cool. I think it is a great four-minute primer for people who aren’t as immersed in all this stuff as a lot of us are. (I got the link emailed to me by my director, which is a good indication of how well the video speaks to people who don’t spend every waking minute on the internets.)
The fact that it was made by an academic really blows my mind (though the wacky pun/ctuation is a dead giveaway). The video is by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. Wesch is apparently part of a group that blogs at Digital Ethnography, which looks like a site to watch (they have a feed) if you are interested in digital projects in academe.
Update: If you like this video, you are a vain, cultish rube in a tizzy. Just thought you’d like to know. Deleted (and de-linked) on account of being petty, peevish, and poorly-considered. Apologies all around.
The participants on Five Weeks to a Social Library have started blogging. The introductions have been fun to read, and many people have made posts beyond their initial “hi, how are you?” test post.
I was particularly interested in what Alisia Wygant had to say today in her post Work Social Life. She agrees with some bloggers that social sites like Facebook could be fertile places for connecting with users. The problem is that she was already a Facebook user, “but it seems to me that my network of friends from college and my network of friends from work are very distinct and should be.”
Social software is designed to increase its value to you as you create a network of contacts and friends, and establish a reputation for yourself. So if you have already invested time and effort in establishing yourself on, say, Facebook, you might not be so thrilled about expanding your professional persona into what had been a purely personal space. Your Facebook friends might think it odd if you take down all your funny pictures and quotes and their profanity-laced comments on your wall.
With blogs, it is easy enough to have more than one, and keep the siliness on LiveJournal or Vox or whatever, but a site like Facebook seems like it might be more problematic to maintain multiple personalities (though danah boyd sez that the kids seem to almost prefer to start over from time to time).
Wygant says the point became moot when she canceled her Facebook account because of the “lack of conversation that they caused in my social group.” (Anti-social software? There’s a whole ‘nother post right there!) And she ends with a great line: “would I be forced to live an online double identity–ducking into virtual telephone booths and putting on my uniform?”
Well, yeah, you might. But on the web, it seems a lot easier to tell that you are the same person when you put on those glasses, Clark, so don’t expect that alter ego to shield you too much. You can try and be Ernest in town and Jack in the country, but we all know that, in the long run, such things often cause more problems than they solve.
I don’t know how many Colorado academic librarians read this blog, but I wanted to take a moment to point out Colorado Academic Library Summit 2007, a conference planned for May 31 and June 1, 2007 at the Sheraton Denver West.
The theme is Changing Cultures: Collaborations, Social Networking and New Technologies. Here is what they are looking for:
The planning committee is seeking presentations that highlight the changing culture and values of library staff; the implementation and potential of social computing tools and emerging technologies; and reaching out to the new generation of patrons.
They are also looking for “digital poster sessions” (don’t quite know what that means) and discussion leaders for “table topics.”
I sent in my proposals today; we’ll see what happens. Proposals are due by February 5 (that’s next Monday, so get crackin’).
“Don’t worry about what babbling bibliopundits might have to say about the tools you choose, the speed of your implementation, or choice of software. You are not here to impress them–you’re here to serve your patrons.”
"Don’t worry about what babbling bibliopundits might have to say about the tools you choose, the speed of your implementation, or choice of software. You are not here to impress them–you’re here to serve your patrons."
"Moreover, you’ll also be subject to some fairly onerous terms of usage on Footnote.com, especially considering that this is our collective history and that all of these documents are out of copyright."
Ich shalle vse thys meme to telle sum detayles of my personal lyf and newes of my blogge, and thogh my face ys sum deel reed wyth embarassment at certayn detailes, yet ich shall share yn the maner confessionale wel suyted to blogges.
I love it. Did you know that Chaucer was an NWA fan? Blogs are educational, I tell ya.
Here’s what I’m taking away from this week’s drama:
When you invite people to “be themselves,” don’t be surprised when some of them behave obnoxiously.
A person who habitually harangues at length those she disagrees with is unlikely to be convinced by equally lengthy rebuttals, however reasonable. Probably better to take a cue from Kathy Sierra and reply “Hmmm….How interesting,” or from H.L. Mencken and reply “you may be right.” And leave it at that. Easier said than done.
I am a pathetic blog drama junkie. I largely stayed out of it, but that didn’t stop me from hitting cmd-R and refreshing the comments over and over and over. It’s like eating cheezy poofs or something; I know it’s bad for me, but that doesn’t stop me.
I am such a Jessamyn West fanboy that she can call me anything and I’ll take it as a compliment.
I’m going to spend my spare time over the next few days trying to finish off my new WordPress theme so this blog won’t look so “default” anymore. Then maybe I’ll have time to actually write something about libraries. Wouldn’t that be a nice change?
Rochelle Hartman’s latest post, “Politeness? Overrated.” struck a chord with me in an odd way. I left a smartass comment on the post itself, but it’s really a juicy post, and deserves more than a one-liner.
She starts by saying that we needn’t be so polite with vendors and other business partners:
But when preparing to hand over loads of taxpayer money to vendors, jobbers and consultants, politeness should be one of the the last considerations in your interactions.
But Hartman takes it further to question an overly polite library 2.0 demimonde (as I believe Tim Spalding once called it/us):
There are a lot of cheerleaders among us. It’s awesome that we acknowledge and celebrate each other’s work and successes. I really do value being part of such a caring, communicative community, but some days, it feels like more of a beige suburb where everything looks good, even though you know there’s more going on than meets the eye.
(Cue Blue Velvet clip of picket fence, lawn, insects.)
I thought this was very interesting because as I read it, I rehearsed in my head some of my recent thoughts about politeness, blog “drama” and the like.
When I’m feeling particularly argumentative, I usually indulge those feelings not here at See Also…, but in the comments of other people’s blogs. I have come to believe that this is (a) cowardly and (b) pointless.
Cowardly because, even though I sign all my comments, I know that they aren’t as easily linked to me as this blog is.
Pointless because I don’t know that I have ever convinced anyone of anything in those kinds of comments, and because simply objecting to someone else’s ideas doesn’t usually move the conversation forward.
I have been reading Joseph Harris’s book Rewriting on effective academic writing. In his chapter on “Countering,” he writes about using sources in your writing that you disagree with:
What do I hope will result from pursuing this disagreement? If the answer is simply that I think I can prove that the text I am reading has certain shortcomings or limits, then I try to set aside the temptation to argue…. But if I can use certain problems in a text as a springboard to get at something I couldn’t otherwise say, to develop a line of thinking of my own, then I try to note those problems in a way that allows me to quickly move on to my own counterproposals or ideas.
So, for me, I think that if I’m really rubbed the wrong way by a post somewhere, I’ll resist the urge to comment. If I believe my disagreement is really interesting and important, and I believe I can provide an alternative viewpoint, I’ll write it up for this blog and leave a trackback on the post that sparked it.
I suppose it is a bit silly to say “me too!” to a post that calls for more argument and less echo-chamber in liblogs, but it looks like that’s what I’m doing. My new year’s resolution: less flaming snark in the comments, more substantive disagreement here.
OK, I’m flipping the switch on the FeedBurner RSS feed today, and kicking off the blog at http://stevelawson.name/seealso/. If you are getting this post in your aggregator, you are all set. I’ll start sending reminders to the old feed addresses, and keep them up for the month of January.
I’ll try to keep these throat-clearing posts to a minimum. Happy New Year!
disabled the “visual rich editor” or whatever it is called (a checkbox at the bottom of the user screen under “Users”). It was playing absolute hell with tags on posts with complex HTML. See Which is the best WYSIWYG editor? on the WordPress support forums.
added the plugin WpLicense and chose a by-nc license (looser than the by-nc-sa license on the old See Also…)
Edited 2007-01-01: This was the last post on the old site. The title should now read “this blog has moved.”
So here is the important announcement I mentioned in the previous post: this is probably the last post I will do on See Also… this year, and it is probably the last post to this blog at this URL.
I have my own domain name now, stevelawson.name, hosted by LISHost (who have been earning their $10 this month answering my questions and fixing my permissions problems). The new blog address will be http://stevelawson.name/seealso/, and I welcome you to check it out now.
In addition to changing hosts, I’m changing platform as well. Goodbye Movable Type, hello WordPress! I’m planning to leave the site in an only-slightly-modified default WordPress theme (i.e., look & feel) while I work up my own theme. So things will look pretty generic until I get up to speed on creating themes.
Perhaps I should hasten to say that this move is entirely at my own whim; no one at Colorado College has suggested that I move off the College servers, nor has anyone tried to interfere with my writing here. Nor do I have any intention of leaving the College any time soon. It just seemed like a good idea to have my own place, if you will.
You may be wondering what this all means to you. I hope it means very little. You might want to check your feed subscription URL. If it is http://feeds.feedburner.com/seealso, you shouldn’t need to change anything, as the feed will get updated with the new address. If, however, your feed subscription URL starts with library.coloradocollege.edu/steve, you’ll need to change it; use the Feedburner URL above. I’ll send reminders to the non-Feedburner feeds throughout January to pester people to change their subscription (or just drop me!).
If you have previous posts bookmarked or linked in your own posts, don’t worry about that, either. I expect I can keep the old blog up at the library.coloradocollege.edu server indefinitely, but I have also made plans for redirecting requests for old pages to the new site. We’ll see how well that works in a few weeks, when I can talk to the College webmaster types.
No doubt there will be growing pains: existing internal links, for one thing (where I link back to previous posts within See Also…, like I did near the top of this post) may be awkward; the same is true for images on the site; WordPress stripped out <span>s, classes, and inline CSS in the import process (which is odd, and very annoying, and messed up (at least) all posts that use an image from Flickr); and I’m sure I’m in for some more surprises.
But I think it will mostly be fun and exciting for me. I hope you will join me on my new site.
Iris tagged me for the “5 things you don’t know about me” meme.
While it is an honor to be tagged, my feelings about this particular meme are summed up in the accompanying Venn diagram. There’s just no overlap right now between the things that I haven’t hitherto shared but am willing to share now and things that aren’t 100% banal.
I do have an important announcement that I suppose falls into the “things you don’t know about me” category, but I think I’ll tackle that in a separate post tonight or tomorrow.
I know I’m not really doing this meme, but I can still tag people, right? OK, Steve, Geoffrey, Samuel, and Mel: have fun!
Going back to before we were married, my wife, Shanon, and I have several times given each other the same gift (wind chimes, juggling balls, etc.). It’s kind of like “The Gift of the Magi,” but without the irony; all sweet, no bitter. We did it again this year, by each giving the other a lifetime membership to LibraryThing. (I am hatchibombotar, she is bibliowench if you want to find us on the site.) She went the extra mile (and proved that she didn’t just think of it two days before Christmas like I did) by also getting me the CueCat, a cute little barcode reader that makes it very easy to enter items from you library to LibraryThing.
I have written about LibraryThing before and commented on their blogs, LibraryThing Blog and Thingology. I think it is a very cool site, and I believe I have said before that someone needs to get Tim Spalding (Mr. Thing) an honorary MLIS for all the provocative, interesting stuff he has been doing and saying. But I haven’t actually spent tons of time on the site, or cataloged a large collection of books. That’s about to change!
I still don’t know how interested I am in putting in every book in my house. Up till now, I have been using LT mostly to keep track of the books I had recently read. I realized that by entering all the books I get out of the library, I can easily remember what books I have recently consulted, or–more importantly–read to my sons.
For instance, I can’t remember what version of the Bremen Town Musicians I read with my son, Luke, last year. He wants me to check it out again, but I forget the author/illustrator (besides the Brothers Grimm, of course). So we checked out a different edition, which he also likes. This time, I put that edition in my LT catalog, tagged it with “ppld” for the Pikes Peak Library District, where we found the book, and next time he wants it, I’ll be able to locate it easily enough.
In the photo are other library-related gifts from Shanon: the chap in the spectacles is Lucien, the librarian of The Dreaming; the fellow whose body appears to be made of books is the librarian of Mirrormask. They’ll go quite nicely with the Giles action figure I got from Shanon when she left her last librarian job.
“So the upshot is that printing is a definite problem, but the answer isn’t as simple as, ‘Well, with the advent of eReserves printing went through the roof….’”
Subsequent to that announcement, I have now seen at least three blog posts (librarian.net, the goblin in the library, and Thing-ology) talking about Bisson’s plan to buy LC catalog records and release them under a Creative Commons or GPL license or something similar. Here is the relevant paragraph from Open Libraries:
The revolutionary part of the announcement, however, was that Plymouth State University would use the $50,000 to purchase Library of Congress catalog records and redistribute them free under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license or GNU. OCLC has been the source for catalog records for libraries, and its license restrictions do not permit reuse or distribution. However, catalog records have been shared via Z39.50 for several years without incident.
So here is where my ignorance crops up. I simply don’t understand what is happening here. My tech services knowledge is limited, and I have never cut a check for catalog records. A few questions:
How can he do this? If the records don’t already have a permissive license, how can someone else decide to give them away more freely? If they are already licensed under some other scheme, isn’t this like buying a bunch of songs from iTunes and then “releasing” them under a Creative Commons license? Or, if these records aren’t covered by copyright or a restrictive license, why is this a big deal?
How many catalog records does $50K buy?
Who is likely to use the records and how? Is the idea that public libraries will grab them? Won’t they already have purchased the records they need? Or is it mainly to give innovators like Bisson some raw materials?
Please understand that I’m not trying to be cynical or even skeptical. I really just don’t understand what is going on here! So drop me an explanation or explanatory link in the comments if you can.
Chances are, once someone explains it to me, I’ll be excited, too. If Jessamyn West, Joshua Neff, and Tim Spalding think this is a good idea–not to mention Casey Bisson–I’m pretty sure I will think so too.
See Also… and the other Tutt Library blogs are on Movable Type. This is mostly by default; when I first started Bookends and my old personal blog on the College’s academic technology server, that is what was already installed. When we decided to upgrade, they didn’t have PHP running on college servers yet, so WordPress wasn’t an option.
While I have nothing specific against Movable Type, it seems like WordPress has continually moved forward while Movable Type has stagnated (see K.G. Schneider’s interesting post, Movable Type: Declaring Victory, and Moving On, with Anil Dash’s interesting comment).
I haven’t really had the chance to play around with WordPress, so I followed these WordPress OS X Install Tips and installed it on my PowerBook and imported See Also. Very easy!
I suppose if I do decide to switch, preserving the URLs would be the main stumbling block. I have seen several pages that talk about this, but it looks like it could be a mess.
While most participants surf the site through the networks themselves, most newcomers and non-participants use the search feature and are absolutely horrified by what they may see.
And I felt a certain resonance with something else I had heard recently, but it took me a little while to figure out what it was.
And then I remembered. A month or more ago, I was talking to a CC philosophy professor about an upcoming instruction session I was going to do for his class. We were discussing the various catalogs and databases I could show them, and then I asked where he himself would usually search for articles on these topics.
He said that he very seldom searches article databases. Instead, he subscribes to the major journals in his field, he follows up interesting references, he communicates with other scholars, etc.
In other words, he is surfing the literature through his professional network itself, while the newcomers and non-participants–i.e., students–are using the search features of the article databases and are absolutely horrified by what they may see. Horrified not by posturing, porn, and some of the most ugly webpages ever created (as they would on MySpace), but either long lists of articles with uncertain relevance to their topic or zero hits on what they thought was a sure winner.
I get a similar reaction sometimes from people about the stuff that I find on the web. People who don’t read a bunch of blogs and similar sites through RSS, who don’t have any kind of online social/professional network must have a completely different experience of surfing the web from those of us who do. That’s why they ask us questions like “how do you even know about all this cool stuff?” It ain’t by Googling random keywords, that’s for sure.
As usual, I have no real answers here. I think that the edublogger types are hashing this out as part of a conversation about “personal learning environments,” which, as far as I can tell, mostly means getting the stuff you are interested in via feeds and producing and publishing your own interesting stuff in a blog. And with a sexy name like “personal learning environment,” students and faculty are bound to flock to it, right?
There are other barriers for students. Not everyone taking a class to fill a requirement is going to want to become immersed in some kind of learning network about that subject in a single semester. Even among majors, the motivation to become tuned-in to the literature of the discipline will vary widely (i.e., not every English major wants to be an English professor).
In any case, it is good to be reminded that experts and novices are worlds apart, not just in what they know, but in how they go about learning more.
It’s a good article, stating some things that are pretty obvious to anyone who uses social network sites (e.g., “The types of relations people included [as "friends"] varied immensely as did the motivations for including certain people but not others”). But her analysis of Friends (as boyd chooses to capitalize the social network “Friend” versus the commonly-understood idea of “friend”) goes deeper.
I was interested in some of her analysis of how non-users of social network sites misunderstand the nature of Friendship, as well as how the sites’ users experience the site in very different ways than non-users. For example, as boyd writes in the section sub-titled “To Friend or Not To Friend,” on MySpace, when someone sends you a Friend request, your only options are to accept or reject them. For that simple reason (along with a few other ways that the site forces or foregrounds the issue), boyd writes that “it’s much easier to just say yes than to face questions about why the sender was ignored or declined,” and thus end up with a long list of Friends who aren’t really friends.
Perhaps most interesting to me is boyd’s last section, “Egocentric Networks Replace Groups.” There has been a lot of talk about how appropriate it is for college faculty and administrators to have profiles on Facebook, most recently on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog: “On Facebook, Professorial Profiles Proliferate.”
Here is a relevant passage from boyd on how social network site members try to signal what users they are actually interested in interacting with:
Participants in social network sites want to be public where public means interacting with all people who might have similar tastes or be entertaining or provide useful information. They do not wish to exist in a public where they are harassed or where they have to deal with people who have power over them. This is not unlike everyday public spaces where people invite the opportunity to meet with like minds that recognize their fashion signals or otherwise find them intriguing. In both spaces, people assume that everyone else will just walk on by and rebuffed invitations to engage will be respected and not pursued. For many, social network sites are not a friends-only space, but they are a public space with some assumptions about the scope of that public. While technical barriers do not provide scope, Friends are a critical signal in conveying the expected social boundaries.
In fact, Friends tend to define the site for most users. No one is out there actually interacting with all the millions of MySpace and Facebook users; instead they interact with their Friends. This, boyd says, is one of the main causes for outsiders misunderstanding the entire experience of social network sites:
While most participants surf the site through the networks themselves, most newcomers and non-participants use the search feature and are absolutely horrified by what they may see.
Lastly, this sentence is just too good to pass up:
The massive press helped it [MySpace] grow larger, penetrating those three demographics [young urbanites, musicians, and teenagers] more deeply but also attracting new populations, namely adults who are interested in teenagers (parents, teachers, pedophiles, marketers).
I have more thoughts about boyd and her position vis-a-vis academe and the web, but I’ll save those for another post.
In other OPAC news, Library Thing impresario Tim Spalding has a nice post on Thing-ology entitled Is your OPAC fun? (a manifesto of sorts). (Don’t worry, manifesto-haters; it’s more of a party invitation than a call to the barricades).
And Tim really means fun! Not “fun” like “gee, it sure is fun to try and remember if this catalog defaults to an implied AND search or phrase searching on the keyword screen,” nor fun like “hey, look, an animated gif!” But real fun, like finding more cool stuff in the library because people recommend it, or reading reviews of stuff you didn’t know you were interested in, or taking an API and hacking some weird interface for the catalog; fun like that.
And both of those things just got me thinking about how fun it could be to design a whole library web site like that. Not just an OPAC, but a site that started from the premise that research, learning, finding interesting stuff to read and sharing what you found with others, is fun. A site where I don’t have to apologize to people for how weird it all is, and how many little places you have to look to find what you want.
It also got me thinking about what kind of user community you would need to support a library website that was more–as one commenter said on Thing-ology–more MySpace than Google. How many people would have to participate to make it a success? How could we put the “del.icio.us lesson”–that personal value precedes network value (i.e., people do stuff because it is useful to them first, and not out of some abstract idea of creating a network effect)–into practice on a library site?
Ideally, I’d have some sort of punch line here, where I had some more ideas on how to move forward. I don’t! So I’ll just say “go Casey! Go Tim!”
Update 2006-12-03: OK, got all the gunk scraped off the blog. Turns out that deleting 400 comments at a time was about as much as my system could handle; much more than that, and it would return an error.
For Movable Type 3.2 users, be aware that there is a “known issue” regarding the auto-deletion of junk email –it only happens when you visit the main admin page for that blog. I hadn’t been doing that lately, because that page hadn’t been loading properly, presumably because of all the spam gunking up the system! Vicious circle, anyone? Anyway, should be back to normal. Feel free to celebrate by leaving a comment.
So I hadn’t been paying too much attention to how much spam we were getting on these blogs on the Colorado College server, other than noticing that I had been getting more emails than usual about IPs being banned for too many comments (i.e., for big fat spam attacks).
Then when I went to list all the junk comments to delete them, the system choked. When I checked earlier today, I saw that I had about eighteen thousand undeleted junk comments. Checking again just now, I see that I have twenty seven thousand.
So, even thought it may not look like it, I have comments turned off on this blog and all the other ones on this Movable Type installation while I figure out a better strategy for deleting them than doing it one screen of 125 at a time. Wish me luck. I hope to be back to normal soon.
Several of the library bloggers I read (LiB, Caveat Lector, Walt at Random) have weighed in on the “Sci-Fi [and fantasy] book meme,” marking their reading history against a list of classic science fiction and fantasy titles. I’m not going to do that one here; I have read a fair amount of science fiction–and many of my favorite authors (Murakami, Auster, Gaiman, Rushdie, David Mitchell) have a strong streak of the fantastic in their fiction–but I have only read about a dozen of those on the list.
But the sci-fi meme has reminded me to talk about my current reading project: to read the works of Shakespeare.
Some thoughts on the Colorado Association of Libraries conference.
I think that Emilie’s and my presentation, Keeping Current, went quite well. We were in a large, theatre-style room, and it was pretty much filled (I think that means around 150 people). Michael Sauers blogged it and took some photos. We got a few nice comments on the CAL2006 wiki, and I think that most attendees found it worth their time. After the session, we had a few requests to reprise the talk elsewhere in Colorado in the coming months, so that should be fun.
It’s good to remember when doing a session like this–one that seeks to introduce people to technology that they may know very little about–that many people who want to attend it will lack a lot of context. So it’s important to come up with a quick, easily-understandable way to make sure everyone is on the same page. I think we did a pretty good job of this, but it’s an area I could continue to work on in the future.
If you are on a conference planning committee, and someone suggests that you can put the smaller sessions in cubicles in a big room, shoot that idea down as quickly as you can. It wasn’t a total disaster, but it was noisy. (Our presentation was in a separate room, so it didn’t affect our particular session.)
I had the chance to spend a little bit of time with Michael Sauers, which was enjoyable. The little bit I did for his presentation was a “staged reading” of my blog post, A biblioblogger visits the local branch library, which means that I had the pleasure of shrieking out “Ajax del.icio.us OPML Creative Commons radical trust mashup widget!” in a crowded room.
Today, I’m presenting with Emilie Satterwhite, young adult services librarian at Mesa County Libraries in Grand Junction, and sometime commenter on this very blog. Our presentation is entitled “Keeping Current with Technology: How popular trends in technology can (and should) be put to use in your library,” and we’ll be talking about blogs, wikis, feeds, and podcasts.
Tomorrow, I’ll be performing a little curtain-raiser for Michael Sauers’ “Tech Terms” session, along with Heather Clark. It looks like Michael might want to keep it something of surprise; I’ll just say that the text of the performance comes from the most popular post on this here blog. I’m pleased as punch that Michael asked me to do it.
There is a wiki, apparently being updated by conference staff. Full reports from me on these sessions after the fact. If I get around to taking any photos, I’ll post ‘em on Flickr, tagged cal2006
In a post on ACRLog, Marilyn R. Pukkila, Head of Instructional Services at Colby College Libraries, asks Just How Connected Are They?, “they” being her undergraduates.
She says that she asked a few students in student government about podcasts and Second Life. Their resonse was a resounding “hunh?”
So she asks:
If they don’t know anything about these technologies, and if they feel that librarians in MySpace or Facebook are peering through the open curtains of their (perceived) student-only spaces, then why would I want to spend all the time it would take for me to become fluent in them? Is it to get ready for their younger siblings (according to the Pew study)? Or would I be better off spending the time asking students how THEY want to receive information from me?
The first two comments on the post back up her observation with anecdotes of students not knowing what del.icio.us is or even asking “what is MySpace?”
Then Stephen Downes comes in and says that making judgments based on these sample sizes is not worthwhile.
I agree with Stephen. Because if you asked one of those student-government and student-publications movers and shakers at my college, you would find that, in addition to the seeming mandatory Facebook account, he has a del.icio.us account, a Flickr account, and that he has just set up a wiki for the campus publications group. Which might lead you to believe that Colorado College kids have just skipped merrily on to web 3.0 or something.
Which would be a false impression. Another small sample of CC kids would lead you to believe they are all barefoot, dreadlocked, white kids, drinking water out of Mason jars and saying that they think technology is somehow opposed to their idea of the liberal arts.
Sample size aside, I think that it is a huge mistake to conflate all these social software sites and expect that they will somehow help us better relate to our students.
For some sites and some students, that may be the case; in a very small way, my Facebook account has helped me keep up with a few students and meet one or two that I wouldn’t know otherwise. When I find out about student blogs, I take a look, and learn more about what it means to be a student at CC today.
But in other ways, can’t we use these tools to teach students? Isn’t it our job to be out in front of them, and not always be catching up? I don’t expect my students to already know about del.icio.us; I expect that when I show it to them, a few will say “holy crap, that’s cool!” Like the student who used PBwiki for his notes for his thesis last year after he and I spent a little time talking about online productivity tools.
As for Second Life, one of Pukkila’s students says “Why would anyone want to spend time with that?” That sounds like a research question to me. Why indeed? Next time that student is in a sociology class he should get an avatar on there, talk to people, and find out!
If your approach to social software is to get an account and then cry into the ether “anyone wanna talk about libraries here?”, you shouldn’t be surprised if no one takes you up on it. Instead, get in there and make something that you yourself (as William Morris might say) know to be useful or belive to be beautiful. And let those experiences change and shape you as a person and as a professional, and affect how you think of the potential of the web, not just for “outreach” but for teaching and learning and collection development and providing services of all kinds.
And have fun, damn it! If your attitude is “why should I spend all this time learning how to do this stuff,” you have lost before you’ve begun.
I have mentioned before my weakness for over-prolific alpha geeks and librarians. There is at least one over-prolific alpha academic who inspires me, and that is Michael Bérubé. Bérubé was on the Colorado College campus today, and I was able to hear him speak to a faculty luncheon today on “Cultural studies in the Bush era” (though I missed his talk tonight, entitled “Academic Freedom: Fragile as Ever”).
I believe it was in the mid-1990s when I first started reading his essays in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Bérubé often writes about the academy and the practice of academics and scholars in a style that is readable and witty, but still substantive.
If that long list of essays isn’t enough to qualify him as an over-prolific alpha academic, how about the fact that he has not one but two new books out: What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? and Rhetorical Occassions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities?
And then there is his blog, to which he posts almost every day (when CC English professor, Barry Sarchett, introduced Bérubé at lunch today, he mentioned the blog and I blurted out “and he updated it about an hour ago!”), where his posts are frequently over a thousand words, and where getting over one hundred comments on a post is routine. He writes about the academy, politics, culture, and his family in a way that seems effortless and is often moving and thought-provoking.
His talk today was taken from his work in progress, The Left at War. Being aimed at faculty, many of his references sailed straight over my head, but some of his main points–that the Left has largely passed on the question of what should be done in the wake of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the spread of Islamism except to say “no, that’s not the right response”; that Noam Chomsky’s elaborate claims do nothing to help sway the United States further to the left; and that no one thinks that Cultural Studies has anything to say about the Bush era since Cult Studs are largely associated with the TV-watching wing of the academy–were plain enough.
I’m sad that I’m missing Bérubé’s talk tonight. I’d like to hear him speak on academic freedom, and I’d like to hear his talk pitched to a more general audience.
But it was exciting to meet in person a man I’ve long admired. I didn’t quite squee (I don’t think), but it may have been obvious that I was a shameless fanboy in the way that I shook his hand several times (plus the aforementioned blurt about his blog). At least I kept my camera in my pocket.
I probably shouldn’t comment any more on this because (a) this is a public library issue and I have never held a real position at a public library (shelving books in the children’s section for 8 hrs/week doesn’t count); (b) after commenting in two separate locations earlier today I shouldn’t beat a dead horse; and (c) I’m straying into “if you don’t agree with me, you are wrong” territory. But here I go. You have been warned.
Jessamyn West linked to This is Broken – Denver Library notice, a blog post about how the Denver Public Library sent the poster an email overdue notice after the book was already 10 days overdue. The poster noted that the Colorado Springs Pikes Peak Library District sends the email the day before the item is due. (PPLD is my hometown public library. It is a really excellent public library, from this patron’s perspective.)
I wasn’t familiar with This is Broken, but the tagline is “A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it.”
So here we have a guy saying not “I don’t think libraries should have fines” or “I don’t want to pay fines,” (though he does draw the surely erroneous conclusion that the library does this to increase revenue from fines), but that it would be better for him and for the library and for anyone else who wants the books he has checked out if the library could email him before the books are due.
In the comments, though, a circulation manager and a person who says that he or she has been “running public libraries for over 20 years” take the opportunity to lecture the poster on personal responsibility. The comments on librarian.net similarly feature two commenters claiming the poster is ducking his responsibility.
Here is a person saying that his experience using the library would be better if the library changed their email notifications, and the representatives of the library community tell him he is an irresponsible twit. (I should note that the commenters aren’t from the Denver Public Library, whom, I’m sure, would handle the complaint/suggestion with more tact.)
The point is that our beloved Integrated Library Systems should know better than anyone who has what checked out and when it is due. Why expect patrons to hang on to those irritating little receipt print-outs from the circulation computers when the system could just send them a courtesy email? Sure, before the age of computers and email, I probably would have had to carefully keep the dozen almost-identical books on rockets that my son currently has checked out in little piles depending on what day they are due, but why make the patron do that when the computer can do it better?
A more serious problem is mentioned by commenters at both This is Broken and librarian.net: some ILSes don’t do this properly. In some cases, patrons can choose email, phone, or mailed notices. Obviously, libraries don’t want to snail mail thousands of courtesy notices at cost to the library, when most of those books will come back on time anyway. But their ILS can’t differentiate between print and email notices. I.e., they can’t set up a system where “email patrons” get courtesy notices, but “snail mail patrons” only get the overdue notices.
This is worse than nuts. This is pathetic.
Doing a little logical exercise such as “IF the patron gets email notices THEN send a courtesy notice; IF the patron gets snail mail notices, THEN wait to send overdue notice” is the kind of thing a computer should be great at. That a library would have to wait for a future release or custom programming strikes me as ridiculous.
Anyway, I’m right, they are wrong, and get off my lawn. (Right? I mean, it’s not me, it’s them. Right?)
Iris Jastram at Pegasus Librarian and her colleagues at Carleton College are running a survey on library instruction. The survey is entitled “Trends in Information Literacy at Liberal Arts Colleges,” but it looks like they are interested in responses from anyone who does a lot of instruction.
I am even more pleased to say that I will be presenting with Michael “Libraryman” Porter. Michael and I didn’t plan a joint presentation, but we both submitted proposals on Flickr, and since they were both half-baked so fabulous, they asked us to present together. Besides, they needed some token men. (That’s a joke; it never once occurred to me that my proposal wouldn’t be welcome, or given fair consideration.)
Michael and I met at last year’s Internet Librarian conference (where I was once mistaken for Libraryman) and had just been lamenting (via Facebook messages, no less! We walk the social software talk!) that we wouldn’t have the chance to hang out this year, since I’m not going to IL06.
So we still don’t get to hang out, but we do get to work together on this presentation. Michael says it will make us famous. And I believe him.
“Five Weeks to a Social Library” and you
So what is a course without participants? Forty people will be able to take the course, participating in the live webcasts, chats, and the other live, social aspects of the course. And everyone on the Internets will be able to view the course content, and archives of the live events.
If you want to be one of those forty people fully enrolled in the course, get on over to the participant application. I’m not privy to the selection process, but it is my understanding that special consideration will be given to people who have little or no monetary support for professional development from their workplace.
I think this whole thing is very exciting. It has the potential to be a great experience for everyone. It could very well crash and burn. But Meredith, Amanda Etches-Johnson, Dorothea Salo, Ellyssa Kroski, Karen Coombs, and Michelle Boule have my thanks and admiration for dreaming this up and getting it going.
(Just an aside: do we have a tag for this yet? Or at least a shorthand way to refer to the course? ‘Cuz I’m not feeling “fiveweekstoasociallibrary” as a tag. For now, I’m going to go with “sociallibraries” since that is the domain name of the course site.)
I haven’t had the time to do many of the longer posts here that I prefer to do, though the Long Queue of post stubs is growing.
Instead, I have been using my del.icio.us linkblog a bit more often just to point out interesting stuff I have seen lately. del.icio.us only allows for a 256-character description, so I usually just put in a quote from the site itself, or a brief comment.
If you subscribe to the FeedBurner feed for See Also,, you are already getting the linkblog stuff as a single daily posting in the feed. If you aren’t getting the FeedBurner feed, but are subscribed to something with a URL starting “http://library.coloradocollege.edu/steve/”, you might want to think about switching, as you aren’t getting the linkblog “spliced” in from FeedBurner.
Of course, if you aren’t a feed-reading kind of person, you can just check out the right sidebar on the actual See Also site, or hit http://del.icio.us/bevedog/see_also and see my out-of-control tag cloud (and understand why I’m not a cataloger).
Did I mention that I love del.icio.us? See my recent comment over at Iris’s place for more of my del.icio.us boosterism.
I thought y’all would enjoy this from Dan’s latest post, where he runs down a list of things he has been able to do for himself since settling in to Ankara:
11. Procured a library card (and oh, was THAT an ordeal—seven different forms stamped by seven different offices, and I can still only check out books–“DVDs yok”– no DVDs. I recall it is this region that gives us the English word “Byzantine”).
So whenever someone accuses your library of not being customer-centered enough, you can say “hey, you should try to get a library card in Ankara sometime! This is Nordstrom’s compared to that!”
Last year’s Internet Librarian conference was a great combination of a kick-in-the-pants good time and a valuable professional development experience (see my posts tagged il2005 for details), so I had assumed that I would head for Monterey again this fall.
But a few months back, just as I was starting to feel bad about not even submitting a proposal for IL2006, and wondering if I should save my traveling for a conference where I would actually present something, I got a call from Eric Jansson of NITLE, the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (the acronym is pronounced “nightly”).
NITLE’s slogan on their home page is “advancing liberal education in the digital age,” and I know them mostly as the people who put on workshops for liberal arts colleges to discuss and develop sound programs for using technology in teaching and research. They also host and provide technical and logistical support for multi-campus collaborative projects like IDEAS, the Image Database to Enhance Asian Studies.
Eric knows me because I am one of the people responsible for IDEAS. It would seem that Eric also reads this blog (hi, Eric!), as he asked if I would like to present a talk on possible future directions for digital image collections, with an emphasis on flickr and social software.
The catch is that the NITLE conference, Managing Digital Image Collections, is on October 23 and 24, the same days as Internet Librarian. And it is at Milsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, so I can’t just pop over from IL to do my bit at the image conference.
After some moments of doubt–including an IM with Meredith Farkas where she said (and I’m paraphrasing here) “don’t be an idiot; go to Internet Librarian!”–I decided to skip attending Internet Librarian in favor of presenting at Managing Digital Image Collections. I’m disappointed that I can’t do both, but I’m excited to have the chance to talk to librarians, faculty, and instructional technologists for a few days about digital image collections.
I’m also excited about doing the presentation itself. I usually avoid PowerPoint like the plague, but I’m thinking that it is probably the right tool for this job. I figure if I’m talking about images, I’m going to need to have a lot of nice big, bright, full-screen images in my talk, and PowerPoint’s scaling seems the only reliable way to do that. So I’m looking forward to the challenge of making a highly visual PowerPoint presentation that I can be proud of (I have been catching up with Presentation Zen for inspiration). Wish me luck, and I’ll share here when it’s done.
Just this week, I learned that I will be missing something else: Lorcan Dempsey will be speaking at the Library Renaissance Conference at Colorado State University on Tuesday October 24, the same day that I’ll be telling people in Jackson about how current digital image collections do a poor job of insinuating themselves into users’ intrastructure.
As for Internet Librarian 2006, tag your photos on flickr, and maybe I’ll use them as an example in my talk. I expect lots of cheesywild photos of this year’s giant calculators.
If you are reading this blog, you are–statistically speaking, anyway–also white and nerdy. So watch Weird Al’s latest and think “mon semblabe, mon frère!”
Here’s how I know I fit the bill: I understood all the D&D and Star Trek/Wars references, but I have no idea what the original song is that Al is parodying. (Though I need a phrasebook for JavaScript, and Klingon might as well be Elvish to me.)
Via Waxy links, a site that helps me stay white & nerdy.
I don’t know that I have written about it here, or if I have just commented on otherpeople’sblogs, but I’m not very fond of the practice of posting signs from libraries in order to criticize them. I just think that if someone personally pointed out to me a sign in my library that they found objectionable, I’d be willing to listen and maybe explain, and maybe change the sign. But if someone came into my library, took photos of our signs, and posted them to Flickr with the intent of saying how bad they are, I’d want to punch him or her in the nose.
And yet, the discussion around signs has certainly got me thinking. We want to discourage cell phone use in our library because our students (the ones who aren’t talking on the phone, anyway) have told us how distracting and rude they find it when cell phones are ringing and people are talking on their phones in study areas. But there is no need to be snarky or abrupt about it in our signs.
So, as I posted before, we are taking a cue from Regis University Library and trying some one-on-one signage for cell phone users. We ripped them off wholesale, though we did change one of their slogans to “‘I’m sorry, I can’t talk right now; a librarian just handed me this card…’”
I was also fond of the phrase “promoting a research-friendly atmosphere.” After all, that’s the point, right? Nobody expects this library to be monastery quiet. So I made up a new wall sign, too, incorporating that wording and using a Creative Commons-licensed image from Flickr.
For other sign-like objects, some of my colleagues have designed the “Tutt Library keeps you afloat” image for magnets that we’ll be handing out with our contact info.
They have also come up with a nifty door hanger for new students with “Do not disturb / I’m connected to the Library!” on one side and “If my parents call, I’m at the Library!” on the other (along with our contact info, of course). Illustrations are photos of CC students from the 50s or 60s from the archives. I seem to remember the main reason to hang something on the dorm room doorknob was to send the signal to one’s roommate that he or she should get lost for a little while. So maybe “I’m connected to the Library!” will become CC slang for “I’m getting some action.”
As I mentioned earlier this week, yesterday was the first blogversary for See Also…. I guess this is a low-key celebration, not a multimedia extravaganza like some people put on for their blog’s anniversary.
I had originally hoped to celebrate with a big redesign of the site, or at least with a re-working of the archives index. But no. No time.
I was going to do a little look back over the past year, but I don’t know how interesting it would be for anyone who isn’t me.
I did create a new blog page that contains every single post to See Also… on one web page, complete with comments. I left it mostly unstyled for printing, and even created a pdf of See Also…, year one (6.6 MB, 121 pages long. Think twice before printing!). I also backed the thing up; true believers can download a text file of the year’s work, suitable for importing to Movable Type (and with the Creative Commons license on this blog, you can do that if for some strange reason you really want to). I know most people won’t want to download those files, but I thank you if you do: lots of copies keep stuff safe, as they say.
I’ll spare you all the stats but one: word count (excluding titles and comments and categories and the like): 60,717. Yikes.
Here are a few of my favorite posts from the last year:
Writing this blog has exceeded all my expectations, both in the intrinsic value of writing and sharing and in the way the blog has opened up new connections and opportunities for me.
Writing this blog has led to what I now think of as my “imaginary friends” (I suppose the more dignified term would be “invisible college”): those people with whom my interactions have been either mostly or entirely electronic in nature (email, IM, blog comments, etc.) and whom I have “met” because I choose to participate in the world of library blogging. With these imaginary friends, I have traded drafts of articles and book chapters, troubleshot CSS or HTML problems, commiserated, conferred, and conspired.
So the next time Crawford does his investigation, I hope that See Also will be right up there, and that I can thank my many (I’ll settle for several) loyal readers for making See Also such a success.
Well, Walt did it again, and this time See Also is indeed right up there. Of course, Walt did change his methodology and decided to look at the “Great Middle” this time rather than the liblogs with the greatest “reach” as he computed it. So that helps.
And there is a nice little fluke in that the data-collection period that Walt chose (March to May, 2006) includes the post Name that book: a fiction subject headings quiz. That post got 35 comments and ended up as the most-commented post in Walt’s survey. (Of course, eleven of those comments are from me….)
Walt asks:
I cited the title of the post with the most comments for each blog that has any comments. What conclusions can be drawn from those titles? Other than the obvious—new jobs, marriage, graduation from library school, homebuying and other major life events draw lots of comments—I’ll leave that exercise to others.
The conclusion I draw is: come up with a sorta funny audience-participation quiz, and watch the comments pour in.
Walt mentions the impact of feeds on blogs. With more people reading blogs via feed readers, it is less important (he believes) to post frequently and regularly, and that the size of the audience doesn’t matter as much as it used to.
I agree about the frequency of posting (I sure hope it’s true, given the summer doldrums around this here blog), with a minor caveat. For blogs just starting, I think it is important to post regularly–not every day, but at least once or twice a week. I think it is important for two reasons.
One, if you have just started a blog and can’t manage a few posts a week while it is all fresh and new and exciting and you have a lifetime’s worth of “backlog” to get out there, how on earth will you be able to keep it going in the long run?
And, two, I personally am reluctant to add new blogs to my aggregator. I have too much in there already to keep up with comfortably. So for me to pick up a new blog, I usually have to see it linked several times within a short period. I think that regular posting is more likely to lead to regular in-bound links. But that might just be me.
As for the second part (size doesn’t matter), I’m not sure I follow the reasoning. Walt says that “the hope now is to find the right audience, which might be anywhere from half a dozen friends to a few thousand strangers.” I would have thought that was always the hope; perhaps in the hype surrounding blogs a few years ago there were more people who thought they’d become rich and famous blogging? Now we all know that in the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people. But I’m not sure what feeds have to do with that.
At the end of the issue, Walt notes that the project took a very long time and asks “was it worth it?“
That’s a tough one. I think a yearly round-up of the biblioblogosphere liblogs is a great idea, and I think Walt Crawford is a great person to do it: I don’t always agree with him, but I always respect what he has to say. It might also help that he is in the blogosphere but not of it, exactly.
But I’m afraid that this list left me a little cold. I value blogs and bloggers for their voice and their sensibility; I’d rather read Dorothea Salo (for example) blog about her cats than read most other people reveal the secret of life. And this kind of study doesn’t really capture much of that. I think I’d rather read a more qualitative write-up from Walt each year–one where he could exercise his own voice a bit more, and write about those voices that mean the most to him. But I realize that would be a very different project from the one he has undertaken these past two years. And others, who are more actively looking for new blogs to read may find it more useful than I do. Finally, the real worth of this surve may be as part of the historical record, when people wonder just what all these wacky “bloggers” were up to in the early 21st century.
[Embedded YouTube video of David Lee King's "Are You Blogging This," wherein David sings an uptempo little number about web 2.0-ish stuff. Funny, geeky, catchy.]
No doubt you have already seen the Library 2.0 Idea Generator over at Dave Pattern’s weblog. I don’t see what the big deal is: I just keep reloading the darn thing trying to find an idea I haven’t already done:
disenfranchise Stephen Abram and attain Library 2.0 Nirvana overnight (check!)
introduce your Baby Boomer colleagues and then rant about them on your blog (check!)
interrogate Library Elf (think I violated the Geneva convention doing that one. Check!)
leverage Michael Gorman (Woof. Check!)
engage your monolithic ILS and apply a liberal amount of lipstick to it (check! seriously, this time)
Bess is my wife’s cousin, and while I can’t claim to know her very well, I can say that I’m excited at the prospect of her blogging. She’s a real techie librarian–the kind who posts Java code to her blog–not a poser like me, and she has what sounds like a very cool job: metadata and systems librarian at UVA. Lunch with Bess followed by seeing Lawrence Lessig speak as part of the “Open Accces, Open Minds” panel was the highlight of my 2004 ALA Annual in Orlando.
Let’s hope she keeps up the blog, and continues to weave in human-readable posts (lke Friday’s two excellent posts on women in the open source/systems librarian communities that Dorothea linked to) with the code snippets.
* Caveat Lector (“reader beware”), Solvitur Ambulando (“it is solved by walking”): makes me want to give this blog a nifty Latin title. cf. would be somewhat close to the meaning of the current title. Other possibilities (which are probably ungrammatical): Fiat Libris or Scripta Non Grata
Edited 2006-07-24: I have no more invites. The ones I had are all gone. Any “refills” I get in the future I plan to send out to people I already know, either in real life, or from online.
Edited 2006-07-19: Sorry, I wasn’t very clear about something. Anyone can look at my Vox blog (or anyone else’s Vox blog) and see the posts that I have set to “viewable by the world,” which is most of them at this point. You need an account if you want to be “friends” or “family” with someone else on Vox (at the other person’s discretion) and/or if you want to try using Vox for your own blog. My Vox blog is at http://hatchibombotar.vox.com/. Right now, the lead post is a YouTube video of an unmanned rocket blowing up. And I use bad words sometimes! It’s highbrow stuff over there.
Dear readers, I have been away from See Also for a time because I have been cheating on it with another blog on Vox.
Vox is a new blogging platform from Six Apart, the company that does Movable Type, Type Pad and LiveJournal. It is supposed to be something like LiveJournal for “grown-ups,” in that it enables you to create a blog “neighborhood” of the people whose Vox sites you wish to follow. You can also designate some of your neighbors as “friends” or “family” (as you can with Flickr).
You can also control who gets to see what. So for each blog post, you can choose whether everyone can see it, or only friends, family, or both.
Vox makes it easy to upload multimedia, or embed media from other sites like Flickr or YouTube. There is also a way to display books–i.e., images of book covers from Amazon–but there is little else you can do with them. I mentioned to Tim Spalding at Library Thing that I could envision an interesting tie-in from Library Thing to Vox; we’ll see if anything happens there.
As with your posts, you can designate your photos, videos, audio, etc. as viewable only by friends or family, if you so desire.
Exploring Vox can be a little odd. You’ll find many well-known web personalities like Merlin Mann, Anil Dash, Matt Haughey, and others. But (a) it doesn’t seem likely that any of them will do something as interesting on Vox as they have been doing on the projects that made them so well-known, and (b) if you aren’t friends with these folks, your are likely locked out of many of their Vox posts.
For me, Vox is fun. It is a little liberating to have a “personal” blog for posting cat pictures, photos of my family, my thoughts on random non-library stuff, and the like. It is nice to connect a bit more with my online imaginary friends. It is generally easy to use, though I sometimes have a hard time remembering where I saw certain links or features. And there seems to be no way to write regular HTML in the posts, which can be annoying when there is a hard-to-figure display quirk. My most serious reservation is the amount of “lock-in” that Vox entails. The terms of service make it clear that you own your content, not Vox. But at the moment, as far as I can tell, there is no way to export your posts, photos, etc. I know that leaving Vox would mean leaving behind the social features, but I’d still like the ability to export my posts into a text file.
At this point, Vox is by invitation only. I have two invites now, so if you want to check it out, email me.
Recent publication number one: With my friend, colleague, and occasional commenter on this very blog, Jessy Randall, I recently published a “humorous” “survey” in the “journal” American Drivel Review. It’s worth publishing something there just to have “American Drivel Review” on my list of publications.
As your average white guy, I don’t have a good answer, and some of the answers that I have come up with sound like excuses, so I won’t offer them here. I’ll just say that yes, I’d like to hear more from women in technology too.
The one thought or question I’d like to add is, how will blogs and blogging affect this issue in the future? Let’s look at the lineup for the LITA Top Tech Trends session at the recent ALA conference:
Marshall Breeding
Clifford Lynch
Eric Lease Morgan
Andrew Pace
Karen Schneider
Roy Tennant
Tom Wilson
Walt Crawford, moderator
along with Sarah Houghton in absentia, I belive.
None of those men are known for blogging. Walt has a real blog which he established after he was already a well-known presence in the library technology world, and Roy Tennant is the player/manager for TechEssence.Info but I don’t think of him as a “blogger.”
Meanwhile, the two women in the group I know because of their blogs, Free Range Librarian and The Librarian in Black; that’s not to say that their blogs are the only things notable about them, just that I personally might not know who those two women are were it not for their excellent blogs.
So what? So I don’t know! Perhaps in the near future, having a great blog that addresses technology and libraries will “count” for more when it comes to an invitation to a group like this (though I expect it to be a coldday in hell before I see Dorothea on an ALA panel). Perhaps these blogging women will inspire more women as they enter the profession to take up technology–I know they have inspired me. Perhaps by the time those new librarians are as old as the men on that panel LITA won’t be able to ignore them anymore.
This year I continued my fairly recent tradition of skipping ALA. I don’t regret missing the conference, but I do regret having to pass up several invitations to get together over a beer (or a hurricane; do they still serve those in New Orleans? I’d expect the name seems less cute since Katrina) with old or new friends during the conference. I think next year I’ll go to D.C., skip the conference, and just drink with librarians.
But the great thing about the web is that I don’t have to feel left out–I feel like I attended the conference just by reading blog posts. No, not the conference reports, silly! The conference-related snark from A Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette. Check ‘em out:
Conferences, Returning from: “Cull out the good vendor give-aways for yourself and then dump the rest off on your coworkers or the homeless (15 minutes)”
Freebies, collecting conference: “In order to make the most efficient use of your time, don’t look vendors in the eye. Just grab the freebies by the handful and go!”
Totebags, On hating: from an anonymous comment on this post: “Since librarians often fly to conferences, wouldn’t it be better to have barf bags emblazoned with library related logos?”
I see fellow conference-skippers Steven and my new imaginary friend Iris are also giggling at this.
A few months back, there were a fair number of biblioblogospherical posts about signage in libraries, most of it showing negative examples, and much of it around signs regarding cell phone use in the library.
At my library, we have a “no cell phones” policy, but it isn’t all that effective (you are shocked, I can tell). On the one hand, cell phones are so pervasive, and our library (especially on the first floor near the circulation and reference desks) isn’t exactly a silent sanctuary, so we often don’t bother to enforce the policy. And the signs, they do nothing!
On the other hand, students do complain to us about fellow students talking loudly on the phone. So I think we do owe them a reasonable enforcement of the policy.
One of my colleagues brought back a souvenir from her most recent visit to the Regis University library in Denver. It’s a card, which reads on one side “getting this card handed to you is better than being chased from the library by an angry mob…” and on the other “Please use your cell phone in the library’s lobby or a closed study room. Thank you for your assistance in promoting a research-friendly atmosphere.”
The idea, of course, is that library staff can hand people a card rather than tugging on their sleeve and saying “excuse me, but you’ll have to take your phone outside.” Some of my colleagues and I think it is an intriguing idea. It seems less confrontational than interrupting the person on the phone, though I suppose it’s all in the execution–we probably would not want to take our cue from the red-card-happy World Cup referees, holding them high over the offenders’ heads. I also like the fact that the more “serious” side of the card gives people options, instead of just saying “please turn it off,” which just doesn’t seem realistic anymore.
To find out more about these cards, I emailed Regis reference librarian, Martin Garnar. I wondered how people reacted when they were “carded.” Martin wrote back, “Most recipients are good sports — we get an occasional chuckle, but most are apologetic and don’t take time to read both sides. In addition, we have a ‘No Cell Phone’ sign in the front lobby and also mention our policy at new student orientations.”
Martin also sent me the text of the other two card designs: “call me crazy, call me a dreamer, just don’t call me from the library!” and “peace on earth / goodwill to all / now it’s time / to end your call.” I also like the fine print at the bottom of the card: “#1 – collect all 3.”
“For the sake of historical accuracy,” Martin says, “we borrowed the idea of cards from Douglas County Libraries, but I’m pretty sure theirs were straightforward. I think we came up with the humor concept. In fact, I don’t think humor existed at all before we created these cards, so please be sure to credit us with the origins of humor. I can’t give any more details at this time, as we have a patent application in process regarding this matter.” Wow! Now that is innovation! Though I think I have some prior art around here somewhere…
But seriously folks, I’m about 80% convinced that this is a good idea for my library. Is anyone else trying something like this?
Edited to fix the paragraph beginning “My point is, the vendors..,” as I had left some words out, making the meaning the opposite of what I intended. Oops.
Buy a system. Negotiate the best terms you can. Enforce contracts.
Buy a system. Live with it, happy or no.
Hire people to build you a system. Negotiate the best terms you can. Enforce contracts.
Hire people to build you a system. Live with it, happy or no.
Install something Free-as-in-Speech. Negotiate support as best you can and enforce contracts.
Install something Free-as-in-Speech. Live with it, happy or no.
That’s it. Those are the options.
“A-List”-In-Our-Dinky-Subculture-BiblioBloggers May Kvetch Daily but an entire marketful of suppliers used to clients who accept subpar products and who don’t play hardball and who don’t sue over breaches of contract is not going to suddenly implement your favorite APIs overnight
I think I understand where he is coming from. But I think the disconnect for me comes a bit earlier in his post when Chudnov writes “you can choose NOT TO BUY THE FREAKIN’ PRODUCT.”
Well, no we can’t. I sure can’t. I can’t go in and cancel my library’s contract with our vendor. I didn’t sign the original contract, and neither did my director. That decision was made at least one director ago.
And even if I could move my library over to Evergreen tomorrow I wouldn’t because I am fairly certain that such a move would torpedo my library’s participation in our state-wide lending network, which is absolutely vital to our college’s population. Which isn’t to say that Evergreen couldn’t handle such a network, as it is being developed for Georgia’s statewide library network, PINES; it just means that I’d have a whole heck of a lot of people to convince that this was a good idea.
My point is, the vendors have many of us effectively locked in. And I would hope that the options would be more than simply (a) go open source or (b) take whatever the ILS vendor dishes out.
For my part, I’d like to see librarians come together on what we really want from vendors–not feature after feature, but what environment do we want to work with. For example, I’d like to see us not ask for things like “please let us rearrange the order of the buttons on the screen,” but instead ask for valid (X)HTML/CSS templates for every screen of the OPAC with semantic markup and no presentational cruft in the HTML (no <br/> tags, no inline styles, use a <ul> when marking up a list, etc.). No doubt there are more important things to ask for on the database end, but my experience is with the web design part.
In the meantime, what? For my part, I plan to keep up with ideas and discussions about the future of the catalog on NGC4lib; keep working on the catalog I have to try and make it work better for our college; try to remember to watch my language and remember my audience, because saying that things “suck” isn’t always the best way to get taken seriously; keep up with open source developments like Evergreen and talk them up whenever possible; and try and keep the pressure on my ILS vendor for meaningful change along the lines of, yes, the ILS Bill of Rights.
Note: I had the stub of a post in my long queue entitled “DChud is the man”; seems like a good time to dust it off and post it. So here is a bonus post:
DChud is the man
I admit that most of the time I have no idea what Dan Chudnov is talking about at One Big Library. I don’t really understand the significance of his projects unalog or unapi (though I plan to spend a little more time trying to understand soon).
But when Chudnov (or “dchud” as he calls himself) writes about the big picture, I tend to read and re-read his posts. If you haven’t read his blog, take a look at these posts:
But I’m using that little semi-relevant link as an intro to how much I lurve Wikipedia.
Today, I looked up ad nauseam in Wikipedia. I was hoping it would lead me to some related Latin phrases, which it did. But the “See Also” section (hey, I should sue! “See Also” is totally my service mark!) led me somewhere unexpected: the entry for Chewbacca Defense.
Now, you really should go read the whole thing yourself. But to entice you, I’ll say that the “Chewbacca Defense” originated on a South Park episode where Johnnie Cochran represents a record company that brings suit against Chef. Cochran bewilders the jury with a nonsense argument involving Star Wars wookie Chewbacca.
The Wikipedia summary of the South Park episode is funny enough, but what really had me laughing out loud is the analysis section:
Chewbacca does not in fact actually live on Endor — though early drafts of Return of the Jedi did have the forest moon of Endor populated by Wookiees rather than Ewoks.
…
Also, Cochran calls for an acquittal, when such a result is impossible in a civil case (where there can only be a finding of liability or no liability).
…
Finally, the Emancipation Proclamation is not a verb, and cannot be conjugated.
I love that about Wikipedia: the neutral point of view combined with a fanboy‘s fisking of a fictional court case argument on a cartoon show. Hilarious. If that isn’t enough for you, see the talk page for Chewbacca Defense, where you will learn that the entry was at one time considered for deletion! Think of the loss to humanity.
I know that people say they do this with printed encyclopedias: follow up the cross-references just for the heck of it and have wonderful serendipitous finds. I like that idea, but practically, I never did it. With Wikipedia, I do it all the time.
I do love browsing the stacks, and I am one of those people who will pull down a book because I was attracted to its binding. But I’m with Steven Berlin Johnson when he says “I find vastly more weird, unplanned stuff online than I ever did browsing the stacks as a grad student.” Useful, helpful stuff, maybe not. But weird and unplanned, certainly.
Wow, what a cool blog! Bibliodyssey, which just came to my attention thanks to boingboing, is so visually rich, I don’t know that I have read a word of it, so busy have I been looking at the images. Each entry features one or more scans of illustrations or book pages. This one comes from Louisa Ann Meredith’s Bush Friends in Tasmania, 1891. A visual feast.
If you know who shameless self-promoter and alpha geek Cory Doctorow is, and/or you read boingboing, you may find the little skit Cory Doctorow visits a Radio Shack funny. I know that I did. (If you don’t know who he is, skip it. It’s one big inside joke.)
As soon as I read it, I thought, “I need to rip off pay homage to this funny scene by re-writing it as ‘A biblioblogger visits the local branch library.’”
It’s meant in fun, and I’m not trying to parody any one of us in particular: l’biblioblogger c’est moi, as Flaubert never said.
(SCENE: a small suburban branch of a public library. BRANCH LIBRARIAN is at the reference desk. BIBLIOBLOGGER enters with laptop.)
BIBLIOBLOGGER: Hey, I’m a new librarian in town and thought I’d stop by and introduce myself. Perhaps you know my blog, Library 3.0 Has a Posse? Where can I get the feed for your library blog?
BRANCH LIBRARIAN: I’m afraid we don’t have a blog.
BIBLIOBLOGGER: Oh, you have already moved on to podcasting, then?
BRANCH LIBRARIAN: No, I do our webpages in Microsoft FrontPage.
BIBLIOBLOGGER: (chokes) Whoa! Maybe someday that will be old skool, but right now that is just perverse. We’ll hop on #code4lib and get you hooked up with a Drupal-based open-source CMS portal authoring environment that validates to XHTML 1.1 but is fully backwards-compatible and future-proof.
BRANCH LIBRARIAN: Thanks?
BIBLIOBLOGGER: (opening laptop) Don’t mention it. Hey the wi-fi signal in here is weak.
BRANCH LIBRARIAN: I’m sorry, we don’t have wireless.
BIBLIOBLOGGER: OK, well, let me run my Portable Firefox from my USB drive on one of your public-access computers…
BRANCH LIBRARIAN: We don’t allow patrons to use USB drives. The IT guys won’t let us. MySpace and IM are blocked, too.
BIBLIOBLOGGER: Say no more. I understand. Just give me a Google Map to the IT guy’s home and I’ll get Sauers to rub him out. When are people going to realize that if they don’t “get it,” they are going to “GET IT,” know what I mean? I’m sure you are on Flickr though?
BRANCH LIBRARIAN: Yes, I have to apologize for that, we were supposed to have someone come in to look at the lights last week.
BIBLIOBLOGGER: No, not “flicker”–Flickr! It’s where you can share photos of all the great activities you are doing here. I’ll show you the photos of my Livin’ Large Print hip-hop night for seniors program at my last library. Have you thought of having a Marshall Stacks in the Fiction Stacks heavy metal night here?
BRANCH LIBRARIAN: I don’t think we are zoned for that…
BIBLIOBLOGGER: I didn’t say anything. So just how much does your OPAC suck?
BRANCH LIBRARIAN: Excuse me?
BIBLIOBLOGGER: Oh, don’t be self-conscious about it. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, OPACs gotta suck. Man, the last library I was at, we had the suckiest OPAC to ever suck! I was gonna replace it with a wiki and just let the users catalog the collection.
BRANCH LIBRARIAN: We do have some online innovations here. We allow patrons to pay fines online via PayPal.
BIBLIOBLOGGER: You still have fines? I’m sorry, my friend, but the Cluetrain is about to pull into the station, and you are looking like Anna Karenina, if you get my drift.
BRANCH LIBRARIAN: Ah! A literary allusion! Yes, I understand perfectly, though I’m not flattered.
BIBLIOBLOGGER: Hey, don’t take offense. Tell you what, I’m doing a thing in Second Life tomorrow called Exhuming the Paleolibrary that is designed for people just like you. Have your avatar ping my avatar and we can have Second Lunch.
There is no code, no ethic, that will teach us how to be good bloggers, good teachers, good citizens
What matters is that we are honest with ourselves, and that we share without reservation
Culture – like literacy – is negotiated, a conversation between ourselves
“Share without reservation…” I guess I have some reservations about that. And I guess Downes must, too, since he wasn’t entirely forthcoming about why he took that hiatus a while back–which is fine: it’s his life and he doesn’t have to share what he doesn’t want to.
But I like that challenge: be honest, share more than you thought you ever could, and create a culture through conversation.
Walt Crawford recently offered an “apology” of sorts on his blog Walt at Random for being the only person that the Library 2.0 proponents tend to cite as a Library 2.0 critic or skeptic. His January 2006 survey of the state of “Library 2.0 and ‘Library 2.0′” (link to pdf or html; it’s long, so get the pdf) is the only overtly critical reading on the ALA Library 2.0 Boot CampSquidoo reading list (though it is hard to tell if that is the list Walt was looking at; that boot camp has a boatload of reading lists!).
In a fit of enthusiasm, I suggested that I would take this particular bull by the horns and come up with a Library 2.0 skeptic’s reading list. I’m not anti-Library 2.0. I like and respect Michael Stephens and Jenny Levine and what they seem to want to do with Library 2.0 Boot Camp. I like to think of Library 2.0 as a continuing conversation about the future of libraries, and it makes sense to me to try to round up some voices that challenge Library 2.0 conventional wisdom.
Working on this little blogliography, I can understand why people are tempted to just cite Walt’s survey and leave it at that: he did a great job of pulling in a lot of different voices on Library 2.0. While his own critical perspective shines through, it’s easy to also trace other dissenting and supporting voices. And I believe some people who are skeptical, critical, or dismissive of Library 2.0 only wrote about it because Walt put out a call for comments on Library 2.0. From what I can tell, people haven’t spilled a whole lot of electrons on anti-manifestoes (with one possible exception). That is perhaps another reason why Walt is the Library 2.0 critic poster-boy: he continues to call people out and take the bait long after other Library 2.0 skeptics have stopped.
In my list, I have tried to confine myself to posts written after (or not included in) Walt’s “Library 2.0 and ‘Library 2.0′” survey, though one or two might have snuck in. I grouped the posts loosely by topic. Within each topic, links aren’t in any particular order (I know, I know: “No particular order? And he calls himself a librarian?!”). I have tried to be neutral: I don’t necessarily agree with all of these criticisms, though I think they are all thought-provoking.
Much of that conversation has had to do with trust between libraries and patrons, mostly “us” trusting “them” not to vandalize the catalog when it gets all folksonomic one of these days.
There is another kind of radical trust that I started thinking about when I was reading Greg Linden’s series of posts on early Amazon. This series (which I found via a post on O’Reilly Radar) is a fun and interesting look back at Amazon.com in the late 1990s from the point of view of a programmer whose first “office” was a card table in the kitchen.
Linden writes about working on some projects that weren’t officially endorsed by his bosses, and one that he was “explicitly forbidden to do and did anyway.” Once it was seen how effective (and profitable) his innovation was, it was rushed into production.
As Linden concludes,
Creativity must flow from everywhere. Whether you are a summer intern or the CTO, any good idea must be able to seek an objective test, preferably a test that exposes the idea to real customers.
Everyone must be able to experiment, learn, and iterate. Position, obedience, and tradition should hold no power. For innovation to flourish, measurement must rule.
Now that sounds like radical trust!
In my other favorite piece from Linden’s Early Amazon stories, he writes about how he solved the “Harry Potter” problem. (Remember in Amazon’s early days, no matter what you were shopping for on Amazon–electrical engineering textbooks, erotica, assisted suicide manuals–the site would tell you that people who shared your interests also liked Harry Potter?). Here is how the billionaire owner of the company reacted:
When this new version of similarities ["if you like this, you will like that"] hit the website, Jeff Bezos walked into my office and literally bowed before me. On his knees, he chanted, “I am not worthy, I am not worthy.”
Now let’s compare and contrast those two stories with the post Radical Trust? by Ria Newhouse. Sigh. I have been fortunate in my career so far to work for organizations and bosses that give me and my colleagues a lot of latitude. The more librarians I talk to, though, the more I realize how lucky I have been.
We need radical trust within libraries as well if we want to innovate. We also need much better data if measurement is to rule; sure, some things are hard to measure, but many of our online tools seem to lack sophisticated statistical reporting (or we lack the skills or motivation to use them fully).
I had the pleasure of hearing Casey Bisson present on his Web 2.0 OPAC, the WordPress-powered front end he put on his III catalog. His talk rehearsed a lot of what are coming to be articles of faith in the biblioblogosphere (the need to dis-integrate the catalog, the relative failure of the catalog to fit into the internet at large, and, by extension, to users’ expectations of how a web application should work), but he did it in a way that was engaging and interesting, and in front of about 200 people. He also kept right on answering questions for another half hour after his presentation was over. Very cool.
Bisson’s slides are posted on his blog. My full notes on his talk are after the jump.
I also want to try and learn a bit more about the enhancement request procedure. The preliminary ballot for enhancement requests is out. It is marked “confidential information for customers of Innovative only,” so I can’t quote it here without checking that everyone knows the secret handshake. I don’t think I’m divulging any trade secrets if I say that it seems to be missing the forest for the trees: why request the ability to make this or that minor change on the search results screens, when what we should be asking for (IMHO) is for fully-editable templates for those pages? How about asking for valid XHTML pages? But I’m a newbie in this group, so I’ll try to avoid acting like a know-it-all jackass. There may be a perfectly good reason for this approach.
Our catalog redesign
A few months ago, I led a group here at my library to redesign our catalog, TIGER. I planned to blog about it at the time, but was a little discouraged when I realized that I had broken a few of the forms, causing us to have to revert those few pages to our old version. It wasn’t a big disaster, and I generally behaved in accordance with Dorothea Salo’s recent advice on TechEssence.info on how to fail gracefully (my favorite quote from that post: “It’s okay to say ‘wow, I completely didn’t expect it to die like that!’”), but I wan’t up for celebrating.
Plus this is very much a lipstick-on-a-pig redesign. It’s still the same old OPAC underneath, even though it has CSS formatting and most of the search pages validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
I did try an add a few grace notes to the catalog, including Web 2.0-style big fonts on the search boxes and highlighting the location, call number and status on item screens, as the usability testing I did on our catalog last summer showed me that students would find the correct item in the catalog, but not notice where it was located or if it was already checked out (I haven’t done another round of testing yet to see if my highlighting helped at all).
But anyway, I’ll be at the IUG thing on Sunday, so if you will be, too, let me know in the comments and we can try and meet up if you want.
The essay is a consideration of the place of the library and the librarian as we look toward the future. I won’t summarize the whole thing; you should read it yourself in full. But let’s just say that he is skeptical of the librarian’s role as a technician, and believes that the librarian needs to return to her role as someone who understands literature (broadly defined) and can put that literature in context with the rest of the culture.
Two excerpts:
The library has one thing, one long thread of continuity running through its millennia of existence, a single strand making up its historical warp and soul: that long yarn is composed of a billion others which come together to form the highest achievement of collective humanity, the apex of our efforts, the showpiece of the human intellect: literature.
and:
In order to make a profession of this calling, we’ve said that a degree makes a librarian, rather than that the degree is the thin veneer, an veritable egg’s skin over a great mass of learning and understanding. We’re turning out generations of mechanics when what we need are artisans. If you do not think this is true, take a look at your colleagues and ask yourself what proportion possess true understanding of the literatures which compose the real stuff of the library.
I offer this more or less without comment. I think he is correct in many important ways; I think he may be wrong in other ways. I need to read it a few more times before I can say something intelligent in response.
The point is, I believe that this is how to start this kind of conversation about the role of the librarian and the library school vis-a-vis technology and information science. Thanks, Michael.
No doubt you have seen Pope Michael Gorman’s latest pronouncement. The one about yipping and yawping “millenniarist librarians” (whatever that means) and “pseudo-librarians” who offend the Great Leader so much with our blogs and computing devices and rock and roll music (or something). You can read the entire column on Gorman’s (ahem) website–I guess it is OK to use the Internets as long as you don’t actually enjoy it.
For my part, I just find the whole situation sad. I think there is a place in our profession for conservative traditionalists. Heck, when I was in library school, I thought I was a conservative traditionalist in many ways (not politically, mind you, but in terms of library issues). Reading the rest of Gorman’s column, I can see many things that I would have said when I was a student regarding the uncertain relationship of information science to library practice and the like. I have revised much of my thinking, but I still believe there are rational arguments to be made there.
But why a man in Gorman’s position–head of the ALA, a man who has had a long and distinguished career–feels the need to couch so many of his remarks in this sneering, bombastic language, I can’t really understand. It is sad.
Two weeks ago, Michael Sauers said I was a “Second Life n00b” (or newbie, or clueless new guy) and oh, was he ever on target. Here’s a shot from my misadventures last night at the Second Life Library 2.0. Yes, that is my avatar, Hatchibombotar Stein, with a Bible on his head.
Planetneutral (aka Greg) had showed me how to pull a virtual Bible from the stacks, which I did. In trying to read it, I accidentaly wore it like a hat. Luckily Planetneutral had gone downstairs at that point, and didn’t witness my humiliation live (though he did later call “Hatch, what are you doing up there?”).
I thought that HEBC was a great idea and a very good experience with some room for improvement. There is a lot that I don’t understand about the ACRL model–I haven’t attended any of their online conferences–but I have some thoughts based on what Steven wrote.
In case it isn’t obvious, the thoughts that follow are of the “what if?” or “why not?” variety, not the “this must happen now!” or “online conferences are broken!” variety. I have done my share of conference planning, but not for online conferences; which is to say I may not really know what I’m talking about. But when has that ever stopped me before?
Why go to a conference?
Presentations and poster sessions and the like are important for conferences, of course. If you don’t have interesting people presenting on interesting topics, it will be tough to get people to attend.
But once the attendees are there, I’d say that the part of the conference that appears in the program is less than half the story. What I remember best about the conferences that I have attended are the people I have met or re-connected with; the wider circle of colleagues and friends that conferences allow us to develop. The attendees are the conference.
I remember the time I spent “hanging out” at Internet Librarian or the RBMS preconferences I used to attend at least as well as I remember any of the sessions. And even the conference sessions I remember best are the ones that are less scripted and more participatory like the Google-brary free-for-all at Internet Librarian or the Googleization discussion at CAL (I guess it helps to have a hot-button topic like Google to motivate the discussion, too).
It can be tough for an online conference to replicate that sensation of haning out and getting to know people: there is no hotel bar to hang out in, no mealtimes to bring people together in groups. So I think that any online conference will need to plan for some of these informal interactions, perhaps by establishing a semi-official “backchannel” where people can comment on the conference or go wildly off-topic without distracting from the main event. Online conference attendees need something to do besides listen or read or type questions to the presenter into a little box.
Free vs. paid registration and the economy of attention
I agree with Steven Bell when he writes “When any program or event is free those who registered have less of a commitment to attend…” True enough. I was very enthusiastic about HEBC, but failed to clear any time on my calendar to participate. I knew that the conference was not only free, but would be available on the web indefinitely, so there are many presentations that I am interested in but still haven’t seen a month later.
On the other hand, as a presenter I worked long and hard on my presentation, and one of the reasons I did so was because I knew that its life wouldn’t be limited to a one-hour slot on a single day. The presentation is still up on the HEBC site. The organizers insisted on Creative Commons licenses for the presentations so I have a local copy of the presentation on this server, and you could host one yourself if (for some strange reason) you wanted to.
And a registration fee isn’t the only way to make people pay more attention. If HEBC had had live chats or even a threaded discussion board, I would have been more motivated to keep up with the conference so I could participate in what was happening at the time. HEBC did have blog-style comments for each presentation, but they never really took off.
Lastly, there is the fee itself. The ACRL/CNI/EDUCAUSE Joint Virtual Conference was $195-275 depending on whether you are a member or not. I wonder how they arrived at that figure. I know that attendees don’t have to pay for travel, meals, etc. when attending a virtual conference, making it a “bargain,” but paying the same price for an online conference as one would pay for a traditional conference where the organization has to pay for space and amenities seems very odd. Maybe there are good reasons for that fee, but it seems unreasonably high to me.
What problem is ACRL trying to solve?
In his original post, Steven suggested that “perhaps ACRL could make some of the poster sessions and a selected presentation archive or two available for free after the conference,” and in my comment I let on that I thought that was perhaps a little stingy.
But part of the problem with this conversation is that I don’t really understand what is going on with the ACRL conferences. Are they selling out quickly or are they barely filling up?
If they are selling out quickly, what is the point in keeping the content behind a paywall for very long? Wouldn’t they still sell out quickly if the “embargo” period was cut in half? People would still pay for the opportunity to be an active participant in the conference, and not to just see what happened a month later. Would registration be affected if several conference sections or sessions–ones that wouldn’t be compromised by radically increasing attendance–were open to the public?
If they aren’t selling out quickly, maybe they need to expose more content at the start of a conference. Have day one be a free day so people can see just how great the online conference experience is and sign up on the spot for the rest of the week’s activities. Like the model of many online services (Flickr, LibraryThing, pbWiki): the free product is very good and not significantly crippled, but if you really like it, you are going to want to pay up for the full version.
For HEBC, the problem seems clearer to me. The conference apparently had thousands of visitors, but little interaction. I don’t know that a registration fee would change that, but additional opportunities and incentives to participate might.
More…
I have more to say on this, particularly about why I favor asynchronous threaded conversations to synchronous chat when it comes to conferences, but I will leave that for another day. This is already getting too long for a blog post (not to mention way past my supposed computer curfew).
I’d love to hear any reactions or arguments in the comments.
While taking my little breather from the web, I suddenly developed a vital interest in email lists.
I hate dealing with email lists, especially high-volume lists. And yet, if I tell myself that I shouldn’t subscribe to them but just check the archives from time to time, I never remember. If they come into my main inbox they are just annoying (I don’t need to see each new web4lib message as it is posted; even less do I need to see each new Innovative Users Group message). Even using “rules” in Entourage to shunt them off to their own folder isn’t optimal, as they are taking up valuable kilobytes in my all-too-small college mail storage allotment.
My current solution is to subscribe to all lists with one Gmail account. I know that Gmail is no longer news, but this method seems to work really well, so I thought I’d share it.
I had already experimented with Gmail for mailing lists, and found that its threaded “conversation” approach to mail is great at pulling together the original message and all the replies. The large screenshot illustrates how read items in a conversation “stack up” behind the most-recent unread messages, which is very handy).
In that Gmail account, I filter messages based on the “to” address of the list, and apply a label based on the name of the list (I start the name of the label with an asterisk to force them to the top of the list of labels–see the smallscreenshot). Now, when I want to read web4lib, I just click on the “*web4lib” label and see only that mailing list. This makes it easy to catch up on those lists once or twice a week, skim for interesting threads, star (or even read!) the good ones, and then mark everything as read. If you don’t delete anything, you also get your own, private, easily searchable and taggable archive of the mailing list.
After thinking myself so clever for coming up with this, I found the post Gmail and high volume mailing lists on the delightfully floral joshuaink.com, dated almost a year ago (and he probably isn’t the only one). John takes the method one step further and uses the “skip the inbox” option when creating a filter to send all the messages to the archive immediately. That might be a good move, especially if you are using the GMail account for other kinds of email as well.
Lastly, it looks like anyone who is willing to divulge their mobile phone number can get a Gmail account now. If you don’t want to do that (or *gasp* somehow manage to exist without a mobile phone), email me or let me know in the comments (put your real, current email address on the comment form; it won’t get published) and I’ll send you an invitation.
So how did it go? Pretty good, I guess. Bad RSS-withdrawal pains on Saturday and Monday, lessening as the week went on. A lingering sense that I was “out of the loop.” Some agonizing slow hours on the reference desk. But nothing worse.
I read a whole entire book (the quite good Black Swan Green, which I reviewed for our book review site, Bookends); I didn’t try and read feeds at the same time I fed my baby; I didn’t stay up late messing around on Second Life, etc.
Did I cheat? Yeah, a little. I checked my blog stats from time to time to see if anyone was still visiting. (Between traffic for the guess the book by its LCSH game and Steven Cohen’s nice shout out, the day after I “signed off” was See Also’s biggest day ever in terms of page loads. I should go away more often.) I looked at web pages that people forwarded to me via email and stuff like that.
But I held fast to my main principles: no feeds and no time-killing on the web. My whole point wasn’t to see if I could go for a week without the web, but to try and help establish healthier patterns for using the web. Now that I’m back, my plan is to read feeds three times a day at most (morning, afternoon, evening), and no web surfing after 10PM.
Now I’m itching to get back to work here. I have a small backlog of things I want to write about, so I expect to post more often than usual while catching up. Also, if you haven’t looked at the LCSH game recently, take another look, as the commenters have come up with some great additions.
We’ll see how it goes. Now, if you will excuse me, I have 729 links awaiting me in my feed reader.
I love the web. And I love the “biblioblogosphere.”
But I am getting repetitive strain injury from hitting command-R in NetNewsWire to refresh my RSS subscriptions. And I stay up late reading Metafilter or trying to get my Second Life avatar just the right shade of blue instead of doing the dishes. I read ten times as many words on a screen each day as I do on paper (at least! I wonder what the real figure is?). And the returns are diminishing.
So I’m swearing off the web for a week. I’m thinking of exporting my RSS feeds to OPML and deleting NetNewsWire to ensure I don’t backslide.
This week is/was TV-Turnoff Week, which isn’t really much of an issue for me. If you don’t count the kids’ videos I “watch” in the morning, I probably only watch three or four hours of TV a week. The web is another story.
So, starting tomorrow, I won’t be using the web for anything other than work. I’ll still write and answer email and will still be on IM as much as I usually am. But I won’t read blogs and I won’t post to this blog. I will check in on the comments every day to make sure the spam thing stays under control, and I might even write a reply in the comments. I won’t be bringing my laptop home from work unless I really need to do some work at home.
I will read a book or two and I will get more stuff done around the house and I will make more eye contact with my family. I might do some writing for the blog while I’m away; it has been a while since I wrote anything like an essay.
I fell a bit conflicted about doing it right now; it was great to have so many comments this week on the LCSH for fiction post, many of them from people who had never commented here before. In terms of page loads, See Also had its fourth busiest day ever yesterday. I hate to lose the momentum, but I’m sure it will pick up again quickly after a week. If I wasn’t making a conscious decision about this, a week’s absence would be nothing.
I’ll let you know how it went next week. Don’t do anything too interesting while I’m away.
Right now, though, I have to go–I have eight hours and thirty minutes of unapologetic web surfing ahead of me!
I just installed the Email Whitelister plugin for Movable Type and populated it with the email addresses of all the folks who have already commented on this blog. So if you have ever left a message here before (and you use the same email address as you have in the past), your comment should be automatically approved. If you are new, you’ll have to wait for me to pick your comment out of the increasingly inscrutable spam filters I have set up. (Which I will be happy to do, and will add you to the whitelist for future reference).
Please note that I don’t publish commenter’s email addresses, but I do require an address to comment.
Akismet, which I installed earlier this month is a strange one. It marks damn near everything as spam, which, I suppose, is better than the alternative. But every now and then it has a hiccup and lets through something bizarre–there was a completely obvious donkey porn spam with 200 offensive keywords that got through this morning. So I’m not sure if I should leave it running or go back to trying to tweak the settings on Spamlookup.
As for trackbacks, forget about ‘em. I almost never get legit trackbacks, so I’m turning them off.
The screencasts I made with Camtasia turned out to be much larger (i.e., more megabytes) than I thought they would be. I hope people are able to stream them OK.
The name of the presentation is misleading. It’s almost entirely about CSS.
It was a challenge to write to the proper audience. The idea was to help people who want to customize their blog templates, but don’t know much about CSS. I didn’t want to write an intro to CSS textbook, so if you have never used CSS before at all, this might not be enough of an introduction for you. If you are already building pages with CSS, there might not be much new. Either way, I hope you take a look at it and let me know what you think. I’m keeping a copy of the presentation on this site, so if I get good suggestions to change it, I would likely make changes on that copy.
If nothing else, I hope my presentation encourages everyone to use Firefox, and everyone who creates web pages to try Chris Pederick’s Web Developer extension for Firefox. It is an extremely useful and elegant Swiss Army Knife of a tool.
Otherwise, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I have some thoughts as to how future HEBCs might improve the experience for presenters and participants, but I’ll keep them to myself for the moment, as I don’t want to look like I’m complaining. Overall, it has been a positive experience for me, and I’m happy to have had the opportunity to present.
I hung out on Second Life a little more on Tuesday night. I’m getting a little better with the navigation, though I did jump off the roof of the library at one point.
I met a few more people and am now officially Second Life “friends” with Planetneutral Fackler and Max Batra (or my avatar, Hatchibombotar Stein, is
friends with them, anyway). I still don’t think I can devote much time to Second Life, but nobody told my brain that: my sleep was broken Tuesday night, and it seemed that every time I woke up, my brain was churning through something or other on Second Life.
So here is a little brain dump to try to avoid that fate again (not playing right before bed will probably help, too):
The main ice-breaker conversation seems to be a chat about your avatar: “Hey, nice wings,” or “where did you get the texture for that kitten-fur coat?”
I’m reasonably comfortable communicating with strangers via IM, but the chat on SL is pretty slow for me. So I’m afraid I come off as slow myself.
I think it is nice that when people see my avatar they say “Hi, Hatch.”
It ain’t the Metaverse, to be sure, but it is pretty interesting to walk around SL and see all the various creative and commercial efforts. The atmosphere–people in crazy costumes very busy doing strange things–feels like walking through Lollapalooza or something.
I had posited “2L-L2″ for Second Life Library 2.0. But people don’t say 2L, they say SL. So SLL2?
I gather there are questions about what the SLL2 collection will consist of. I hope they concentrate at first on information and literature created in SL. I know so little about this, but is there already a place in the game to go for information on how to make a great avatar or build cool stuff? Is there a collection of SL folklore yet?
This might have a “you-had-to-be-virtually-there” quality to it, but my favorite chat exchange of last night went something like this (the game doesn’t seem to keep the chat history from session to session, so I can’t quote exactly.):
Green-haired female avatar in cyberpunk getup: “What kind of books are here? Just the ones near the front door?”
Four male avatars w/relatively “straight” appearance: [dead silence for a full minute. Avatars shuffle their feet, look at the sky.]
Green-haired female avatar: Um, did I come at a bad time?
Finally, Planetneutral Fackler (or PF) spoke up and said that the silence was mainly due to the fact that the library was so new that we didn’t really know what to say yet. Whew! Felt like junior high there for a minute!
Even if you aren’t likely to be a real “regular” there, you can think of the Second Life Library 2.0 as a librarian hangout. In short, if you are interested in libraries and have been curious about Second Life, this is a great time to jump in and see what the heck this is all about.
So that’s my Second Life avatar, Hatchibombotar Stein, standing in front of the horse statue that is outside the Second Life Library 2.0. I may end up making him blue like Krishna or Dr. Manhattan or a Smurf, but he’s OK for the time being. If I ever have some time to burn, I might make him look more like Lucien, the librarian in The Dreaming.
I doubt I’ll spend much time in Second Life (my hands are pretty full in the First Life, thanks), but after reading Michael Sauers’ posts at TravelinLibrarian (Second Life and Virtual Attendance) and looking around at the Second Life Library 2.0 blog (if “Library 2.0″ = “L2,” does “Second Life Library 2.0″ = “2L-L2?”) I wanted to check it out. Business Week is also doing a cover story on Second Life this week.
After a short time in-game, I guess I’d say that the possibilities for Second Life are very intriguing, and were I ten or twenty years younger with more time to burn, I’d be all over it. Then there is the technical element; the game tests the limits of my sluggish DSL connection, and threatens to cook the processor on my PowerBook.
Basic accounts are free, so if you are curious you can take a look without any risk. The 2L-L2 folks are going great guns with their reference desk, hosting instruction sessions, and having an organizational meeting tonight at 6:00 Pacific time, following the book discussion of the book “Norwood” at 5:00 Pacific (I love how they give all the time zones except Mountain Time! What are we, chopped liver? Or the only folks who can be trusted to add and subtract?).
So I thought that other Movable Type types might want to copy that file, too. Here it is: comments.xml Looks like that file is kaput. Try this one: Movable Type comments RSS 2.0 feed. (Right-click (Macintosh users ctrl-click) to download this file to your computer.)
One of the things I like about this particular comments feed is that it provides a bit more context than comment feeds often do. The headline in the aggregator will say “Comment by [name] on [blog post title]“. The main body of the feed contains the entire comment, followed by an excerpt of the original post. There are links to the comment, the commenter’s URL (if provided), and to the original post.
This template should work for Movable Type 3.2 with a minimum of customization on your part. To use, create a new index template on the Templates screen in Movable Type. I gave mine the name “RSS 2.0 Comments” and the filename “comments.xml”, but I expect you could call it anything that ends in “.xml”.
Movable Type will automatically replace the MT template tags in the document with the name, description, URL, etc. of your blog (as well as the appropriate comments, of course). You do need to specify a URL for an image (if you would like your blog logo to show in certain feed readers) and text for a copyright statement. See the comments in the template file itself for guidance as to where to put that information..
Once you have it set up, the URL will be http://[your blog url]/comments.xml (or whatever filename you gave it). Load that URL in your browser. It will look like
unformatted XML (like my raw comments feed), but you should be able to read it well enough to be sure it is pulling the appropriate comments from your blog.
If you have experience using the template tags for your blogging software, this kind of feed is pretty easy to write. I just looked at the stock MT feeds for the entries, referred to the RSS 2.0 specification and did a little troubleshooting when I made this feed.
One last caveat: it looks like almost no one subscribes to my comments feed! That’s OK, because it is useful to me. And if I can get some more good discussions going here in the future, perhaps more people will want to pick it up.
My friend, colleague, and occasional commenter on this very blog, Jessy Randall, has a new little project: Library Shenanigans, a list of library pranks and other silliness. My new favorite is “Reading On a Dream,” the musical-theatre duet sung in the middle of the library to an audience of unsuspecting students (apologies for all the porn links on the host page).
If you know of (or have perpetrated) other library shenanigans, please let Jessy know, or leave a comment on this post.
If you have been reading library blogs this week, you have seen the discussion on “shameless self-promotion” and the like. Meredith Farkas’ Shameless self-promoter at Information Wants to Be Free is the latest one I have seen, and she recaps the previous posts, so you can start there and work backward if you have missed out.
I don’t want to beat a dead horse, and I certainly don’t want to take anyone to task for previous posts or comments. But I did want to say something about self-promotion.
I love the over-prolific alpha geeks on the web. Take Cory Doctorow. His profile seems a little lower than it was a few years ago, but in the early aughts, Doctorow’s blogging at boingboing is what got me excited about the web again, after it seemed like all the interesting weird stuff on the web was getting overtaken by corporate web gunk.
For a while there, he seemed like the mayor of the Web. He blogged incessantly, he promoted his science fiction writing (releasing the full text of his novels online with Creative Commons licenses) and generally was omnipresent. He also was (and is) a shameless self-promoter. He promoted his books, his talks, his ideas, everything he was into.
And I ate it up. Doctorow’s posts on boingboing about copyright, the Creative Commons, digital rights management, and on and on were often my first exposure to the subjects (not to mention Internet trivia and culture like “all your base”, 1337speak and the like).
These days, I’m also a big Merlin Mann fan. His flagship site, 43 Folders, covers lifehacks and the like. That site has mutated into a one-man self-publishing, community-building empire with 43F Podcasts, 43F Wiki, the 43F Board, and the 43F Google Group (there is probably a 43F pirate radio station and a 43F credit union that I just haven’t heard of yet).
Cory Doctorow and Merlin Mann aren’t necessarily the smartest guys or best writers out there (though I think they are both plenty smart and quite good writers (just about every Merlin Mann post has an LOL moment for me, anyway)), but they know how to hustle, promote, and sell themselves.
I’m very happy that we have a group of over-prolific alpha librarians on the web. They may not always be the best librarians–there is always someone somewhere that knows more–but the mere fact that they are moving and shaking and getting people excited about blogs or wikis or institutional repositories or library marketing or whatever is great. And I think that blogs make these folks so much more accessible than research articles or even magazine columns did in the past: I have had at least one email or blog-comment contact with just about every big-deal library blogger, and the same with Cory Doctorow and Merlin Mann. I don’t say that to claim that I am a big deal because people return my email; it’s just that the kind of people who blog are the kind of people who want to engage with their audience.
Of course, the flip side to all this moving and shaking is burnout. Steven Cohen has blogged about it recently at Library Stuff, and who can blame him for wanting to spend more time with his family. I have had my own minor burnout in recent weeks.
But, in general, I have a high tolerance for self-promotion. Maybe it is because I once wanted to be an actor, a profession where self-promotion is a basic requirement. If a person is consistently interesting, thought-provoking, and generous, I don’t much care if they come off as an egotist or a climber. I’m happy to latch on and see where they take me.
Edited 2006-04-28, 06:45: So far so good. If you try this on Movable Type, don’t forget that you still need to get a free WordPress API key via WordPress.com and fill it in under the settings for the Akismet plugin. If you forget that step, and you disable your other spam blockers as Akismet suggests, you will be entirely without spam protection (as I was for a few minutes before I realized my mistake).
I went ahead and disabled the native SpamLookup anti-spam plugin, and am now relying on Akismet. I’ll keep a close eye today and tomorrow–let’s hope I don’t get buried in donkey pr0n.
Comment spam. Like Walt Crawford, I’m getting hammered with stupid comment spam. It isn’t the amount as much as it is the seemingly innocuous nature of the spam is making it past my filter. I want to make it so that if you have commented here before, your comments are published right away, but if you haven’t, they get moderated. It looks like I can’t do that without enabling icky TypeKey, which I won’t do. But I have tweaked the SpamLookup settings to try to put into effect a “guilty until proven innocent” setup where all spam is presumed junk unless it gets credit for email and URLs matching previously-published comments. Let’s hope that does it.
HigherEd BlogCon. I should have known that putting together a few two- to five-minute screencasts with audio would be a lot harder than it seemed. My problems are compounded by the fact that I use a PowerBook, and there doesn’t seem to be an acceptable screencasting program for Macintosh. So I’m doing the video in Camtasia on random PCs around work, and recording the audio in Audacity on the Mac. Tune in last week of April to see if it is a total train wreck. After HEBC, I have two reviews that I have signed on to do, then no more extra-work commitments for me for a while.
The sniffles (and worse). I can’t remember the last week when one of my children wasn’t sick with something, necessitating my wife and I to miss some work to take care of them. And now the allergy season is coming on strong.
Sigh. When I started this blog, I told myself I wouldn’t do “sorry I haven’t been posting much lately” posts. But that’s what’s going on with me. See you in a week or two.
On Monday, I got an email from Jessica E. Vascellaro of the Wall Street Journal. She was writing an article about how people use online mapping services, and had come across my See Also post on Google Maps and directions for Tutt Library (which was, incidentally, only my third post to the blog). She wanted to interview me.
I called her back and we talked a little bit. I thought she’d want to talk about how easy it was to use the Google Maps API so that people can create their own custom maps and mashups, but I guess that wasn’t her angle. I talked about how I use them all the time, printing out a map whenever I am going somewhere I haven’t been before, giving them to people at the ref desk when I refer them somewhere across town, trying out newer services like Ask.com Maps, etc.
I also remembered something a little unusual that I use Google Maps for. In meetings of the Colorado College Design Review Board, I often pull up the aerial view of the campus to help me visualize where a proposed building or improvement is going to go. The photos are getting a little old (our newest buildings aren’t on there), but they are still helpful for me.
As you can see from the clipping, that is the part she picked up on. The story is on page D1 of today’s issue. Neat! I didn’t really say I was an online map “junkie,” but whatever.
Things got even funnier when I got a call from the Today Show this morning, wanting to talk to me about the same topic (it isn’t going to happen–Colorado Springs is too far from their Denver bureau for them to come down and talk to me). That is getting a little bizarre. I am no kind of expert on online maps. They could probably ask anyone my age or younger and get as good an interview.
Anyway, the caller from the Today Show asked I knew anyone in the DC area (um, Dorothea? Want to be on TV?) and I reminded him that there are some big libraries there that might be able to help him. I also wished him well in the post-Katie-Couric era (“yeah, we knew it was coming,” he said).
So this is all no big deal, but it is fun to see my name (and my institution’s name) in print in a national paper. And it just goes to show that if you “put yourself out there,” people will find you. They may find you for tangential, slightly random reasons, but find you they will.
Some of the photos may just be interesting to Colorado College folks, but who wouldn’t love Coburn Library, shown here, with its (now missing) Winged Victory statue? Coburn was razed in 1963.
I also like the photos of the book move from Coburn to Tutt in 1962. Check out the professorial type in the sweater vest, jacket, and bow tie on May 16th! And for those who think our current concrete Tutt Library is a monstrosity, at least this photo gives you an idea of what Skidmore, Owings & Merrill had in mind.
I am excited about this; the tagline for the conference is “transforming academic communities with new tools of the social web,” which I think is a very interesting and worthwhile goal.
I was going to complain about the lack of April Fools jokes in the “biblioblogoswhatevertheheckwearesupposedtocallit.” About the only one I’d found on April 1 was the Library Journal Booze, Beads, and Beignets story (librarians + jello shots + pastries = a new disaster for New Orleans), which was pretty good.
I had planned an April Fools post, but one of the punchlines involved Steven Cohen undergoing a Christmas Carol-style conversion to Library 2.0 believer. But after his heartfelt (i.e., very much not an April Fools joke) Steven 2.0 post, I didn’t want to look like I was making fun.
[Note: the post below started out as a comment on Library Juice, but I decided to move it over here as it got a bit too long and wide-ranging for a comment. Besides, I have been doing a lot more commenting than blogging lately (to the point of being a virtual squatter in one thread at Walt at Random) and wanted to get back in the swing.]
Rory Litwin posted a thought-provoking entry to Library Juice earlier this week entitled Questioning the Techie Mission. I’ll trust that you can read his post yourself, and won’t run it down point-by-point, but his main argument is that there is an over-emphasis on technology in library blogs, and–due to a host of often unstated assumptions behind most library blogs involving technology–many library bloggers tend not to be very objective when it comes to technology.
I agree that there is sometimes too much emphasis on technology in library blogging, but also agree with Nicole Engard’s comment that blogging librarians tend to be more tech-y or we wouldn’t be blogging. Blogging is getting more and more mainstream, but it seems to still be true that the people who are going to see the value in setting up and maintaining a blog are people who are, if not hardcore techies, then serious “netizens” who already read lots of blogs and see a value in online communities and the tools that make them possible.
I do value those blogs that don’t take technology as a primary focus, and I think there is a real opportunity for people who want to take a non-techie subject and run with it, the way that Jill Stover has done with Library Marketing-Thinking Outside the Book or John Overholt has with his Hyde Collection Catablog. If someone has a great blog about instruction or signage or something, I’d love to hear about it (actually, a signage wiki or Flickr group could be fantastic…)
Many library bloggers, myself included, aren’t full-time systems librarians, but “blended librarians” or “tech-librarians-by-default.” For my part, as a younger librarian (at 35 I’m not that young, but I have been the youngest librarian at both of the schools where I have worked), I didn’t come into the profession wanting to be a techie (and to real techies, I’m a techie wannbe), but it seems like that is where the opportunities are for newer librarians to lead and distinguish ourselves. It doesn’t mean that reference or instruction or other roles aren’t important to me; it means that when I arrived at a new job and looked around at how I could make an impact, technology was an obvious answer.
I haven’t really felt that “they [meaning my colleagues] just don’t get it”; instead that “they” welcomed someone who wanted to do some trend-spotting or to keep abreast on developments in web design and technology.
I think one of the problems of filling that role is not only that it can be easy to slip into technophilia, but that it can be easy to “oversell” new technology or technology trends. Are blogs and wikis and Flickr and MySpace and del.icio.us interesting trends? I’d say yes. Should libraries have someone on staff willing to explore those kinds of services and sites and report back to the rest of the library on their potential? Again, I’d say yes, though I recognize that smaller libraries may not have the luxury of staff time to devote to that kind of exploration.
But do I think that blogs and wikis and social software in and of themselves are the most important thing about libraries? No way. I’m with Steven Cohen that it is more important to be a good searcher than it is to post photos to Flickr, and I am sympathetic to Rory’s observation that:
The focus on the promotion of technology as an end in itself can distract techie librarians’ attention away from the educational mission of libraries, so that as they learn more about technical tools, they learn less about the subtleties of interpreting and responding to user needs, and less about the bibliographic (electronic resources included) knowledge of subjects that’s needed to be a good reference librarian.
Perhaps that is right. Yet I have two observations: (1) this need not be an either/or proposition; promoting technology “can distract techie librarians’ attention away from the educational mission of libraries” but it need not. And (2) most libraries have more than one person on staff. As long as those of us who are interested in all this techie stuff can avoid the “Us vs. Them” attitude Rory mentions, we can be an important part of a library staff. We can learn about those subtleties of reference and instruction and collection development from librarians who have been doing it successfully for years, and they can learn from us about new ways of reaching out to users or making collections more accessible through technology.
Two posts on presentations at Cil2006 reminded me of one my pet peeves when watching conference presentations: presenters who don’t “get to the good stuff” right up front.
The thing that annoys me the most at conferences is not PowerPoint slides, or people reading directly from their notes, or people’s cell phones going off…it’s presenters who stand up and talk to you for an hour about the minutiae of what happened at their library during a certain project, talking in great excruciating detail about how their library “did it” including each administrative step, what specific challenges they faced from their administrators/boards/patrons/staff, and really giving you nothing to take away that is useful.
I’m afraid that most times, though, these offenders aren’t really “egocentric,” but simply clueless (I have no problem with egocentric people who actually deliver). My pet peeve is a subset of what Sarah is talking about.
Amanda Etches-Johnson at blogwithoutalibrary.net comes closer to what bugs me. Writing about Paul Miller of Talis (who apparently is the counterexample for my pet peeve) she says:
Minor aside: the session overview is so crucial. It has the potential to hook your audience or lose them from the get-go. I’m often amazed at the lack of attention paid to the overview. But anyway. Paul’s overview was great — succinct, interesting, and had me looking forward to the rest of the session.
Exactly. I often feel like presenting librarians have made a genre error when preparing their presentations. Their talk feels more like a parable or children’s story (“Once upon a time, there was a little library who didn’t have a budget for a big, bad virtual reference program…”) where they don’t want to give away the ending too quickly. As Sarah points out, they include too many dead-end, deadly dull details about their own situation (“And then the consortium decided not to fund that project after all…”) and tell you what the actual solution was in the last five minutes (by which time I have usually bailed out for another session).
Instead, we need to present as if we are writing a news story with an attention-grabbing headline and a lede sentence and paragraph that tells the audience why they should stay put and not go down the hall to hear Cliff Lynch or something: “Virtual reference systems stink. At Groovy college, we use free instant messaging for online reference and, if you listen to me for the next half hour, you can do it too.”
And, as Sarah also points out, you need to deliver on that promise. If your solution is too specific to your institution or if you aren’t willing to put the relevant details on a handout or web page, you are again wasting my time. I understand we all need to present at a conference to have something to put on our annual performance reviews, but let’s try and make it worth everyone’s time.
Walt Crawford said it: it feels like all the cool kids are at Computers in Libraries (well, some of the coolkids are at PLA, but that’s not my scene, man). Even Flickr knows that “cil2006″ is hot–no kidding, check out the pics.
A few of the sessions I’m sad I missed, but glad I can read about online: David Lee King‘s Basics of Web-based Experience Planning and the Cool Tools Update for Webmasters from Frank Cervone and Darlene Fichter. All the conference bloggers are doing great work, but special thanks to Karen Coombs at Library Web Chic for the nice posts with hyperlinks included. I remember well from blogging Internet Librarian that putting in all the links is a minor headache, so I really appreciate her doing it.
Of course, all the blogs in the world can’t capture the joy of eating, drinking, and b.s.ing with my fellow library geeks.
Back in 2002, I was the Digital Projects Librarian at the Science and Engineering Library at the University of California, San Diego. My boss at the time, Anna Gold, suggested that I could make myself useful by trying to keep the rest of the staff up-to-date on what was happening with the Digital Library Program Working Group (or DLPWG or Dill-Pwig–one of my favorite things about working at a small college now is the relative lack of silly initialisms and acronymns).
To that end, I started a printed newsletter, Digital Letters, and a blog, diglet. I left UCSD after only a few months of the blog (yes, the entries from April to October 2002 may say they are by “jrjacobs,” but they are really by me–I was the one who broke the news to UCSD that Fair Use Has a Posse, damnit!). diglet has thrived since I left in the hands of two guys named James Jacobs (I am not making that up), Trish Rose, Marlo Young, and perhaps others.
I hadn’t known what had happened with Digital Letters, and was actually just thinking about it a few days ago. Then I see in my feed reader today links to ten issues of Digital Letters. I am responsible for number one and number two (PDF links), and am quite happy to see that they have kept up with this project over the last few years. The latest issue, number ten, has articles on GIS and social software. The audience is still internal, I’d say, so I don’t know how interesting this will be to those of you outside of UCSD. But it gave me a charge today.
OK! Step right up for the Carnival of the Infosciences number twenty-nine! Keep you hands, feet, and laptops inside the ride at all times, and don’t get cotton candy on the keyboard. And absolutely no refunds!
I’m very happy to be hosting the Carnival for the first time. I had a bit of a week last week, with responsibilities both professional and familial keeping my head out of the “biblioblogosphere.” So this has been a nice opportunity for me to catch up a bit. First the submissions from you, the public, without which none of this would be possible:
Teresa Koltzenburg, editor of the ALA TechSource blog, submits K. G. Schneider’s post, How OPACs Suck, Part 1: Relevance Rank (Or the Lack of It). (Note the “part 1″: I wonder how many posts it takes to completely describe how OPACs suck? I’m guessing rather more than the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.)
Teresa writes, “Karen’s most recent contribution provides a straightforward explanation as to why ‘OPACs suck,’ breaks down how relevance ranking works, and highlights the importance of creating search mechanisms (for the library’s collection) that users find familiar and will help get them the materials (that they’re searching for) FASTER.” Lots of actions in the comments, including a kinda lame one from yours truly. Remember, folks, this is part one. I don’t think she is saying relevance ranking is the be-all and end-all, just that OPACs suck at it.
Charlton Braganza submits a post from Reference Work on providing services to immigrants. The main idea of that post is that “immigrants” are not a homogeneous group and that libraries need to consider a wide variety of factors to reach out to those sub-groups.
Laura Crossett of lis.dom says “now that I’ve settled (and have internet again!) I’ve resolved to start submitting to the Carnival of the Infosciences again…. Hope you get lots of submissions–hosting is fun!. She submits her post, Wyoming Librarianship: A Sample, which she calls “a day in the life of a small town librarian in the West.” This, also, would have been an editor’s choice, had Laura not submitted it herself. It sounds like Laura is settling in to Meeteetse, WY, pop. 351 (is that including Laura? Did they change the town signs when she rolled in?), and I hope she continues to give us these reports on small town librarianship. Welcome to the big square states, Laura!
Brian at The Laughing Librarian submits his post Library 2.0 is evil, which proposes that the “Library 2.0″ label be replaced with “Ideas Worth Stealing” (which may itself be worth stealing), and announces an MP3 song called Library 2.0 (link to MP3) which I haven’t listened to yet, as my home internet connection is lousy this week.
Connie Crosby at Slaw submits Requests for Legal Seminar Publishers, and introduces it this way: “This is one of a series of posts I have written to Canadian legal publishers from their clients’ (librarians’) perspective; however, many of the comments apply widely to the publishing industry. I expect more such posts to come in this series as the need arises. SLAW is a co-operative blog on Canadian legal research and IT, and contributors are librarians, lawyers, law profs, and KM managers from a variety of organizations. My own blog for law librarians is http://conniecrosby.blogspot.com“
The O’Reilly Radar blog has two posts this week about a summit meeting called Reading 2.0 (er, should that be “Ideas Worth Reading,” Brian?). First is Link List: Reading 2.0, in which Tim O’Reilly runs down the main presenters, many of whom–Lorcan Dempsey, Cliff Lynch, Herbert van de Sompel, to name a few–will be very familiar in libraryland. The second post is Top 1000 Books in Library Collections which runs down Dempsey’s talk in more detail. The comments are interesting for the way the non-library crowd is begging for correlation with other information such as circulation stats or demographics.
I also enjoyed Derek Powazek’s SXSW to MPAA: STFU (notice how I didn’t put an <abbr> on STFU?), which describes what happens when a panelist at SXSW says “Hello, my name is Kori Bernards, and I’m from the Motion Picture Association of America,” and proceeds to get reamed by the audience for the next hour. Check out his Powazek’s paragraph:
Until we (users, industry groups, lawyers, and politicians) finally make a clear legal and procedural distinction between copying a work for noncommercial creation of new works (like mashups or backups) and wholesale piracy for profit (like duplicating a work for the purpose of resale), we’re just going to keep shouting at each other in conference rooms and newspapers, and real innovation will never get made.
Do you think we could shoehorn “libraries” in there between “users” and “industry groups” in the list of parties with an interest in fair use and sane copyright policy?
Lastly, we have Congratulations All Around from Meredith Farkas at Information Wants to Be Free. Lots of good things happening to people this week, including a lot of the blogging tribe being selected as Library Journal Movers and Shakers (including Meredith herself). We all know these folks are doing great work; it is satisfying to seem them recognized by the establishment. Good going!
Whew! And with that, the Carnival moves on in a cloud of silicon dust, leaving only memories and regrets. Next week, Carnival number thirty, as it heads home to Open Stacks. Thanks for coming! If you are new to See Also, please look around a bit!
The Carnival of the Infosciences will be here at See Also one week for today (on Monday, March 20)! For those of you who know what that means, don’t let me down. Submit your stuff early and often to slawson@coloradocollege.edu or by leaving a comment on this message. The deadline is late next Sunday evening.
For those of you who don’t know what that means, the Carnival is a weekly traveling roundup of what’s going on in the “biblioblogosphere.” (It’s a carnival because it travels each week, not because the games are rigged and it makes you want to throw up. I think.) You, the reader, are invited to submit links to the best posts of the week (from today through Sunday). Self-nomination is encouraged, so if you have a new blog or an under-recognized blog, this is a great chance to get a little more exposure. Of course, you can also submit a link to someone else’s blog post. I’ll write up the submissions I get, add a few editor’s choices, and publish on the 20th.
The following week (the 27th) the Carnival goes back to its home base at Open Stacks
A while back, I said that someday soon, we won’t be talking about the “read/write web” or “Web 2.0″; instead we will just say “the Web” and mean exactly the same thing. As more and more people take advantage of social software and create their own content online, the less we will settle for top-down management of our online experiences.
That idea is not original to me, of course. I want to pull in a few lengthy quotes from education blogs around this subject: what does all this mean to academe, to learning, and to students (if not our current students, then the ones we will be seeing very soon)? These links are a little old for the blogosphere (some over a month old; shocking, I know!), but I don’t think that they have had much play in library-land, so I hope you will excuse me.
This got a little long, so you can read the full post after the jump.
Updated 2006-03-09: I changed the title from “Online Learning Daily goes offline,” since that isn’t really true. The site is still there, but Downes is taking a break.
I want to read and write a little more about academe and higher education, so in the past few months I have picked up several higher ed. blogs in my aggregator. One of the most consistently useful and interesting was Stephen Downes’ Online Learning Daily, or OLDaily.
I say was because as of Monday, Downes has announced he is taking an indefinite hiatus. The announcement was so sudden and cryptic, that he felt the need to publish a “hiatus FAQ” letting his readers know that, while no, he’s not sick, and no, he hasn’t been fired, things aren’t great:
But, are you ok?
Not particularly (I mean, d’uh) but I will be fine. Please don’t worry about me. Think of this as a preventative measure rather than an emergency.
I have been reading OLDaily for a few months now, and I’m catching on to the idea that Downes (who, I’m sure I’m not the first to note, has kind of a David-Crosby-gets-a-PhD look about him) is something of an intense and controversial figure. He certainly doesn’t hesitate to say what he thinks, and he seems to both think and say quite a lot; he’s puttin’ the “pro” back in “prolific” if you know what I mean. I think it is quite plausible that he is taking a break just to give the rest of us a chance to catch up.
This was all meant to be introductory to a post about the read-write web in academe, but I think I’ll let this stand as-is and take up the wider issues in my next post.
The comments on this blog have really picked up lately, which is exciting for me. Last week I added a “recent comments” section to the right-hand sidebar on all pages, but it wasn’t updating properly on pages that weren’t getting “rebuilt” by Movable Type, so now it’s just on the home page.
Let me know what you think about the comments feed. I don’t know that there is any perfect way to do this. Comments-only feeds often seem divorced from the original blog entries, so I tried to make it very clear in the feed what entry the comment is about. The alternative is to have the comments in the main feed with entries showing as “new when updated,” but I’m not fond of that option myself; even though I should know that is what is happening when I read one of those feeds, I still think “hey, I read this before” every dang time.
I changed the way those links look in the sidebars a bit too; it’s not entirely right yet, but the links work, and I can live with it.
By the way, you might want to check the URL for your main See Also feed; it should be http://feeds.feedburner.com/seealso and not a URL starting with library.coloradocollege.edu. If you have the “wrong” URL, that’s not the end of the world, but in a perfect world everyone would be getting the FeedBurner version, which includes the linkblog posts as a daily summary.
This is post number 100 on See Also, coming about six and a half months since I started this thing. We hit 100 comments a few days ago with this comment from Lorcan Dempsey (Lorcan has won a free lifetime subscription to See Also for being the 100th commenter! Congratulations, Lorcan!). The little red FeedBurner subscriber counter over there in the left-hand column has been flirting with 100 for weeks now, but, for the moment, it can’t seem to get into three digits.
Edited to add: the FeedBurner subscriber number obligingly went to 100 overnight. It will probably fluctuate, so here is proof!
It probably makes sense to wait a year to really try and recap the effect of the blog on my life and career, but I hope you will indulge me briefly.
In short, I’d say that blogging has been everything I’d hoped it would be. I said in that first post that I wanted to get more involved in the discussions I’d been reading in the “biblioblogosphere,” and I think I got all the action I could handle in the Library 2.0 discussion this winter. Bring on the next one–have we fixed ALA yet?
At Internet Librarian 2005, I felt like having a blog was akin to having a press pass or something; it helped me overcome my natural reluctance to go up to people I don’t know and introduce myself. Which is not to say that I think I impressed other people because I had a blog–you couldn’t swing a laptop at IL05 without hitting a blogger–it just gave me an excuse.
While I think the word “biblioblogosphere” is goofy, I think the biblioblogosphere is actually a very cool place. People talk about the “A List” and all that, but I have found the A-listers to be very welcoming and willing to engage in conversation or debate.
I had hoped that writing a blog would help me focus my thoughts for more formal presentations and articles, and it certainly influenced my presentation at the Colorado Association of Libraries, Teach an Old Blog New Tricks. I wrote a little thing on Library 2.0 for Colorado Libraries which should appear this spring. So far, so good there.
So what is bad about writing a blog? Sometimes I forget it isn’t my job. It feels like work sometimes; it is certainly entwined with my real job as the humanities librarian at a private liberal arts college, and trying to write something intelligent and intelligible about libraries isn’t always easy. But it’s not what they are paying me for, either (though it’s nice of them to host the thing).
In any case, I’m with Steven Cohen when he says about his blog “If people stopped reading it, would it ruin my day? Honestly, yes. It would.” It’s true. This blog is part journal, yes, and part outboard brain, but my main hope is to connect, to communicate, to start and to maintain conversations and relationships. And it has done that better than I had dared hope when I began. My sincere thanks to all of you who are reading this post, and to all of you who read regularly. What the hell: free lifetime subscriptions for everyone!
Sarah is the first library blogger I met “in real life” as my son Luke would say, back at Internet Librarian 2005. She is a great blogger and a neat person, and this job sounds like it will be a wonderful move for her. Hooray!
“Speak of the devil and he is bound to appear” has been running through my mind lately. Now that everyone who would like to be anyone on the web has ego feeds set up through Technorati, PubSub, IceRocket, etc., it seems that all one needs to do is name that person and link to him or her to conjure them up–if not in the flesh, than at least in the comments.
It makes sense. I had a “false hit” in my ego feed today: a Christian blogger named Doug McHone linked to See Also under my name in a post on his blog Coffee Swirls. The problem is, he thinks I am a Baptist minister (he would be so disappointed to know that I am an atheist librarian). I left him a comment on his web form to let him know he had the wrong guy.
It’s also funny that anyone could comment on this blog with a fake name and email address. If it sounds enough like the person in question to be plausible, I’d never think twice that it could be an impostor.
Anyway, I thought I’d play Doctor Faustus and see if I can summon any more famous (or famous to librarians) people to the comments. I have already named Tennant and Dempsey so let’s call:
That is the thought that leapt to mind, but I felt a little unsure about blogging it, as I’m not an expert in FRBR or in the exact way that LibraryThing is combining different editions into single “works” (as seen in the Invisible Man book covers in the screenshot; dig also the link to “OCLC Find in a Library” (aka Open WorldCat)). What he calls a “work” might not be exactly what FRBR would call a work, and what he calls a “copy” is more what I think FRBR would call a “manifestation,” but still.
But then a quick search shows that William Denton at the FRBR Blog has had a similar thought.
So, I say again: it looks like Tim Spalding at LibraryThing is reverse engineering FRBR!
Like many bloggers, I have a text file full of half-finished (half-assed?) blog posts which are, as Dan Traister says about his in-process papers, “in various stages of drafty undress.”
Recently I read Andrea Mercado, of Library Techtonics fame, calling her backlog “The Long Queue.” I like that, and will henceforth call my backlog The Long Queue as well.
To compensate Andrea for appropriating her phrase, I have made a small donation for her upcoming trip to China. Emphasis on the word “small”; let’s hope there is a favorable exchange rate.
I was in the virtual peanut gallery at this morning’s SirsiDynix Institute Conversation: “The 2.0 Meme – Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Librarian 2.0.” The panel was the Library 2.0 Gang of Four, i.e., Stephen Abram, John Blyberg, Michael Casey, and Michael Stephens.
All four men were in good form, sounding the themes that are familiar if you read their blogs. Stephen Abram as emcee knocked me out once again. Here are two pseudo quotes from my notes, though I don’t think these will be nearly as funny here as they were out of Abram’s mouth:
Something simple like Flickr [for photos of "Rock the Shelves"] can make libraries cool, hot, sick!
I don’t know how we get people to play more in libraries, but we need to do that–it is less stressful than saying “library management has decided that we will all blog!”
Updated 2006-03-07: I changed the image to link to the new version of the flyer. Make sure and read Stevyn’s comment for the time and place.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it, but the Denver Zine Library and others are sponsoring the Denver Zine Fest on Saturday March 11 from 10-6 at More Matters Studios, 2132 Market St., Denver. Exact time and location are still to be announced.
We have a small zine collection at Tutt Library; I hope we’ll be able to buy a lot of Colorado zines at the zine fest to start growing the collection. At the very least we plan to send a flyer letting zinesters know that we are looking to buy their stuff for the collection.
If you aren’t familiar with zines, the Wikipedia entry for zine is as good a place as any to start. If you kids are good, someday I’ll tell you how I was a zinester long before I was a blogger.
Update 2006-02-26: added Information Today blog to list below and to OPML file
I’m not attending Computers in Libraries which is being held March 22-24 in Washington D.C. But I do want to keep up with what is going on there. So I have set up a temporary folder in my RSS reader with the following subscriptions (text hyperlinks lead to HTML pages, while the icons lead to the feeds):
If you want them all in an OPML, I have that too. Right-click or ctrl-click on this to save it: CIL2006 OMPL file. If you haven’t used an OPML file to get multiple RSS subscriptions, here is how it works: Once you have it saved, go to the “import subscriptions” function of your newsreader. If it’s a desktop newsreader like the great NetNewsWire for the Mac, the import function is probably under the “File” menu. In Bloglines, once you are logged in, click the “edit” link in the left-hand tab. Scroll down to find the “Import Subscriptions” link.
A few words about the feeds I chose: I’m guessing people will use both “cil06″ and “cil2006,” but you might want to delete feeds for one or the other if it turns out that only one of those tags is getting used. And the pbwiki feed might not be everyone’s cup of tea, as you’ll get notified every single time someone makes an edit on the wiki. If you grow weary of notifications every time Meredith changes a dinner date, you might want to unsubscribe from that one, too.
This is one of my first experiments in sharing OPML files using OPMLmanager.com. Let me know if it works for you or not, and if there are other feeds I should include.
All of you who are considering getting your library on MySpace or the Facebook need to watch a very informative video from Daily Show’s “Trendspotter” Demetri Martin. (You might have to scroll down to find the link to the Windows Media video.)
Favorite quotes:
Besides candy, online networking is the thing young people like the most, and old people like the second least.
and
So what are social networking sites? First of all, if you don’t know, you’re a loser.
It was also great to see scholar and blogger Siva Vaidhyanathan as the expert “old person” and “professor smallbeard.”
The bottom line is that today, if you want to communicate with the youth, you gotta get into social networking. The only other way that I know is: emo rock.
Posts that contain "library 2.0" per day for the last 90 days.
This may be old news, but I just noticed it. When you do a search on Technorati, part of the results is a graph of “mentions by day” that shows the frequency of occurrence of your search terms over the past 30 days. Click on the link for “more,” and you can adjust the language and “authority” (as Technorati defines it) of the blogs searched, as well as the time period covered by the graph. Lastly, they have a “blog it” link to give you the code for the chart if you want to put an automatically-updating chart on your site. Which looks like the one here for "library 2.0" (I, arguably, improved the look with the background color and border).
Gee, I wonder what happened on January 8, 2006 to make it spike like that?
Jessy has pointed me to a wonderful blog that I hadn’t seen before: Hyde Collection Catablog, “The world’s greatest Samuel Johnson collection, one book at a time.”
This copy of Rasselas has what looks exactly like the signature of a previous owner, except that the name is “Steadfast Bunny”. Our index lists several people with the last name of Bunny, so I guess it’s not impossible, but still I feel strange putting “Bunny, Steadfast, former owner” in my record. That’s not a name, it’s the title of a children’s book!
“..and so, the Steadfast Bunny returned to his warren, having learned a very important lesson about the value of friendship.”
Overholt also gives a great feeling for the thrill of holding and examining 18th century books in all their various states (I think it was Michael Winship I first heard say that every manuscript is pretty much the same, but every copy of a book is different), as in the post Time travel: now in book form!
My only complaint? No pictures! Show us the goods, John!
Michael, that is HOT! ;) My very sincere congratulations.
I “met” Michael on iChat at Internet Librarian 2005, and since that time we have carried on an IM and email conversation. I consider Michael a friend and colleague, and am very excited for him. I expect him to make me want to take back all the snarky things I ever said about library school faculty (and, Michael, be sure they keep the word “library” in the name of the school, OK?).
A brief aside on what a dope I am: for years when I saw anything about the library school at “Dominican,” I thought it was in the Dominican Republic. Sheesh, what a dope.
I’m getting close to the deadline for that Library 2.0 article for Colorado Libraries that I have mentioned before, and I’m finding it a bit of a challenge to break my habit of writing for the web.
I’d like to write a paragraph or two about the current state of the ILS and the online catalog (does everyone else hate the word OPAC as much as I do?), so my natural inclination is to write something like this:
Now, that paragraph might not be brilliant online, but in print, without hyperlinks, it would be downright impenetrable. So back to the drawing board to figure out how much context I need to provide for readers who haven’t been following along online for the past six months, and who I doubt will be keying in long URLs from the bibliography.
I am such a loser. I was doing dishes thinking “No one has tagged me for the ’4 Things’ meme,” and feeling ambivalent–I don’t like chain letters, but I don’t like feeling left out, either.
So I hit NetNewsWire to find out that my man Michael Stephens has tagged me. Gosh, I haven’t really thought about it ;) …
At the risk of suffering seven years bad luck or six more weeks of winter or something, I’m going to resist tagging four more bloggers (I think all the people I actually know have already done this).
A slide from Ardhana Goel’s presentation at the “Designing Library Experiences for Users” webcast.
Tuesday, I attended the Blended Librarian webcast “Designing Library Experiences for Users.” The session was a look at how Maya Design approached a major overhaul of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. [Note: I haven't been able to get through to the Maya site yesterday or today.]
I had seen Maya’s work on this project when they posted their slides for their presentation at User Experience Week 2005; follow that link and get “all the slides,” a 1.4MB PDF.
The work that Maya did in walking a mile in a user’s shoes is fascinating and sobering. They tried to behave as a typical user would, but they took photos along the way, and wrote their comments directly on the photos; things like “What is this? Where is this?” on the catalog’s “location” information, or “Is this what a help desk looks like?” on a photo of the puny, crowded reference desk. The “I’m stupid…I can’t find anything” label on a photo of the library catalog (hey, it’s Innovative!) reminds me of Creating Passionate Users’ exhortation to help people get from “I suck” to “I rule!” when using our tools. I think she referred to the catalog as “broken.”
Other points I jotted down from Ardhana Goel’s presentation of Maya’s work:
People should not be changing their lives in order to use your product or service. [And yet, one of our goals as an academic library is to change our users lives by making them understand research better. Still, I'd like to change your life by inspiring you, not by wearing you down until you finally give in.]
The catalog is “unforgiving” unlike Google (no spell check, no help when you get zero hits, etc.).
We need to identify and address “break points”; when they can’t find the book in the stacks, what happens? When the book isn’t in the catalog, do they have any options? How do they know?
What are the affordances of the different environments or interfaces (online vs. physical space, human vs. automated, etc.)? How do we exploit the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses of these environments?
Shifting to action-oriented language in labels and signs (“ask a librarian” instead of “reference”)
You can see more notes on the talk at dave’s blog.
Ardhana’s presentation was good, and stimulating, and the hosts from The Blended Librarian did a nice job of keeping things on track. All the same, though, I don’t know how effective a medium the webcast is. The depth of information covered was less than what I’d expect in an article or other written treatment of the material. Even a more prepared, pre-recorded talk would have probably been more efficient. And the interactive tools aren’t really effective with a large group like this one. My problem is not with this particular experience–as I say the material and the people involved were great–it’s the medium that I have not yet found to be very effective.
He talks about vocational training in his public school as a kid, the idea of which seemed to be to give all students some work skills to fall back on. He contrasts that training with what he sees himself and his friends actually doing in the workforce:
I think everybody that I know today, almost to a person, has a job that didn’t even exist 25 years ago. And if they have a job that existed 25 years ago, the people who had that job 25 years ago wouldn’t even recognize it today, ’cause of how much these jobs have changed, right? I mean, even the most ordinary desk job has been completely upended by technology and so many of the changes in how we work.
I have thought about this often on the days that I have spent working on web pages, sending email, etc. My job has obviously been around for a lot longer than 25 years, but I wonder how I would have spent most of my working hours in, say, 1980. Typing catalog cards?
Merlin goes on to talk about how he liked Richard Scarry’s fantastically detailed pictures of Busytown, with all the little animals performing their jobs as nurse, fireman, policeman, etc. He wonders,
What will the Richard Scarry book of the future look like? Because based on my experience, and the experience of most of my friends, I think it is going to be about 80 lavishly-illustrated pages of a cartoon mouse sitting at a desk typing with headphones on [which is, of course, exactly what I was doing as I transcribed these quotes from the podcast -SL]. Because that, in a nutshell, is the occupation of almost everyone I know…
All those little mice sitting at all those little desks are exercising a huge skill set that they had to learn completely on their own.
Using colorful language, he expands on the idea that we all need to get better at skills that are seldom taught, such as how to work on team, how to communicate better, and how to be an autodidact (I guess that would be a tough one to teach…).
I’m generally with him on this assessment; to be a librarian today is to be constantly expanding our skill set, dealing with new technologies, and new expectations. The more of us who feel comfortable tweaking and customizing our online environments, the better we will get as a profession at providing useful services in the online world. And, by and large, we need to learn those skill on the fly, teaching ourselves and sharing those skills in semi-formal venues like blogs and presentations.
I don’t mean to suggest that prior to the advent of the World Wide Web librarians never needed to change and grow. I would say that this uncertainty about what even the short-term future will demand of us is new.
Lastly, forget about the Richard Scarry book of the future, and check out the Richard Scarry book of the recent past. See the differences between the occupations and gender roles in the 1963 and 1991 editions of The Best Word Book Ever as seen in this Flickr photoset by kokogiak. (I linked to this a while back in the See Also del.icio.us linkblog.)
So Walt Crawford did a post the other day about how he composes his blog posts, titled The joys of real-time wordsmithing.
I have been meaning to do something along those lines to talk about the tools I use, so here goes. Warning: serious geeking out ahead.
TextWrangler
I write just about everything in a file called notes.txt in TextWrangler, a free text editor from Bare Bones Software. I don’t like writing in the little text entry box from Movable Type, or a blog comment form or the like. Anything longer than name and address gets written up in TextWrangler first, spell checked, and cut & pasted.
I think Cory Doctorow was the first person I read extolling the virtues of doing everything in a text editor rather than Word or another specialized application. Then I read text.editor.addicts.txt by Giles Turnbull on O’Reilly’s mac devcenter site, and got hooked for good. I have tried other text editors for the Mac like Smultron and SubEthaEdit, and have settled on TextWrangler, mainly because TextWrangler made it easy to integrate Markdown (see below). For Windows, I have used Crimson Editor a bit, and it seems fine. Almost any text editor (short of Notepad or TextEdit) will do the trick.
And what trick is that?
Writing without dealing with Word trying to “help” me.
Writing without getting distracted by fiddling with fonts, sizes, margins, etc.
Keeping my words in the simplest possible format, making it easy to cut-and-paste to the web, to turn into HTML or CSS or email or whatever and not worry too much about file compatibility or obsolescence (after World War III, the cockroaches will be eating Twinkies and reading .txt files).
Saving with small file sizes (my notes.txt is close to 4,000 words and weighs in at 24KB; a two word MS Word doc is 20KB).
Displaying in an eye-saving green-on-black (which also makes me feel 1ee7 and kewl).
Syntax coloring so my HTML and CSS is easy to read, too.
TextWrangler uses the same spelling dictionary as the rest of the MacOS.
The BATF
I also tend to use just one file; every blog entry, comment, shopping list, meeting agenda and notes, etc. starts out in notes.txt. That file lives on my .Mac iDisk so I can get to it from work or home. It also gets backed up to the local hard drive every single time I save it on my PowerBook (another reason why small file sizes are good; looks like I saved the file 26 times today, as I have 26 backups from today on my drive).
I got the idea for notes.txt from the 43Folders post Life inside one big text file, which is really just a write up of (and a heck of a lot of comments on) Living in text files, a post by that same Giles Turnbull over at mac devcenter.
Why one BATF (Big-Ass Text File)?
When writing, I don’t have to think about “what do I call this file? Where should I save it?” Just add a divider with a few “-” characters and a few lines of blank space, and start typing (I usually put new stuff at the top of the file–a reverse-chronological blogger to the core).
When searching for something I have written, I don’t have to think “what did I call that file? Where did I save it?” It is all in notes.txt.
To avoid going insane, once something is more-or-less finished, it gets kicked out of the nest into its own file. If it’s just for my own reference, it stays in text. If it is something I have to make presentable, it gets dumped into Word and fitted for a suit and tie, complete with proportionally-spaced type and everything. Theoretically, I clean up the file at least once a week, deleting blog posts and comments that are now making their own way in the blogosphere.
Markdown
I write just about everything in Markdown, a syntax for writing plain text that can easily be converted to HTML. As its creator, John Gruber (of the blog Daring Fireball, writes,
Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
So, for example, the Markdown for this section so far looks like this:
####Markdown
I write just about everything in [Markdown][], a syntax for writing plain text that can easily be converted to HTML. As its creator, John Gruber (of the blog [Daring Fireball][df], writes,
> Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
So, for example, the Markdown for this section so far looks like this:
The “####” means “<h4>,” a level-four heading in HTML; the brackets are a more human-readable way to do links than HTML’s “<a href=“; the “>” at the beginning of a line indicates a blockquote, and so on. When I’m ready, I select the text I want Markdown to convert, and select “Markdown” on the Perl script menu from the menu bar, and I (should) get valid HTML in place of my Markdown, ready to cut and paste into Movable Type (I set my MT composition preferences for “don’t convert line breaks,” because Markdown puts in all the paragraph tags for me). For more, see the Markdown Syntax Documentation.
Movable Type
Once it’s in MT, I can ideally just preview, check the links, and publish. In reality, I usually do at least a little editing and changing at this point. I also seem to inevitably publish with an error or two remaining. If I notice and fix it right away, I don’t worry about marking it as an update or edit. Um, like just now, when I forgot to put in the stupid tags for this entry (now below).
OK, I squeaked my proposal for HigherEd BlogCon in at about the eleventh hour. I had a lousy week last week (though not as lousy as my son Luke, who had pneumonia (he’s fine)), so this got put way on the back burner.
If you care to see it, I ended up submitting it to the Web Sites and Web Development track, as my topic wasn’t very library-specific.
The working title is “Know Enough to be Dangerous: Tools for taking control of HTML and CSS.”. In short, the idea is a session on how to use tools like the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar and a little trial-and-error to take control of your blog. It will be aimed at those who are enthusiastic and tech-savvy enough to set up a blog (or similar site) but don’t have enough confidence in their HTML or CSS skills to mess with the code. This will teach you how to break your site real good! And put it back together again, of course.
This is all assuming they accept the proposal. If they don’t, I will simply cry silently, delete this post, and pretend it never happened.
Thanks to TangognaT’s (whom I have now just linked to twice this evening, and whose palindromic nom de blog I have only just now figured out) link, I read web designer and standards evangelist Jeffrey Zeldman’s article Web 3.0.
The article and ideas don’t map seamlessly to Library 2.0; libraries never had a “bubble” that I was aware of (at least, I never managed to get any stock options), and I don’t think Yahoo! is going to buy AADL any time soon. But Zeldman’s thoughts on hype and spin which can obscure the good work people are doing strikes pretty close to home, as does his effort to actually articulate what those good things are.
For Zeldman, the worthwhile part of “Web 2.0″ has to do with “small teams of sharp people…designing smart web applications” that mostly “foster community and collaboration,” and are usually built with open-source technology on the back end and web standards on the front end.
Somewhat against my better judgement, I thought I’d lift my moratorium on “Library 2.0″ and try once more to separate signal from noise. What is the “good work” that the hype/controversy/hostility surrounding Library 2.0 might obscure? Here’s what I got so far:
recognizing that patrons have an online life outside the library, and trying to make our online presence more consonant with their experience and expectations;
opening up our data to allow others (other libraries, librarians, programmers, patrons) to use that data in novel ways;
building better, simpler, more usable, more accessible interfaces;
all kinds of librarians (not just “systems” librarians) seizing blogs, wikis, RSS, and other simple web tools to communicate with each other and with our patrons;
viewing our patrons as collaborators in creating community-based content;
challenging vendors to help us with all of the above, and working around them when they don’t.
The sharp-eyed reader will note that I stole most of this from the people I quoted admiringly in my Library 2.0 hangover post. I try to only steal from the best.
Lastly, here is Zeldman’s parting advice to those who haven’t jumped on the 2.0 bandwagon:
To you who feel like failures because you spent last year honing your web skills and serving clients, or running a business, or perhaps publishing content [or, says Steve, teaching BI sessions to students, building unique collections of books and manuscripts, helping people learn to read, or answering reference questions patiently, thoroughly, and accurately] you are special and lovely, so hold that pretty head high, and never let them see the tears.
After some confusion months ago, I finally understood that the Carnival was a weekly wrap-up of interesting posts in the “biblioblogosphere” (a word which is glued to its scare quotes in the See Also Manual of Style). Like a carnival, this wrap-up pulls up stakes each week and moves to another host blog (unlike a carnival, the games are not rigged, and it is your own fault if you eat too many corn dogs and throw up). Ideally, if you follow the Carnival, you’ll find out about new blogs each week from the links, and visit host blogs that you might not otherwise visit. Pretty neat.
The problem was, due to its peripatetic nature, I frequently missed the carnival. I had seen the wiki, but there was no way I would remember to check it each Monday to see where the carnival had gone.
“Someone,” I thought, “needs to take the bull by the horns and make an RSS feed for the Carnival of the Infosciences! It might be hard work; it might entail thankless hours slaving over a hot text editor to get it right; but it must be done!”
Of course, I now realize (as probably everyone else already does) that there already exists an RSS feed for the Carnival of the Infosciences, hosted by the Blog Carnival Index who apparently does that sort of thing. Grab the link above, put it in your RSS aggregator, and follow the carnival from blog to blog like a drunken sailor intent on winning a prize for his gal back home.
This looks like a job with a lot of cool, fun responsibilities. One would hope that the institution is ready to implement what this person is likely to recommend. Given what Jeff Trzeciak, Associate Dean at Wayne State University, says in his comment on Dave’s post, I’d guess that they are.
I don’t know about that job title, though. I don’t know that I would want “Next Generation Librarian” on my business card. If you didn’t look like Cory Doctorow or Xeni Jardin, people would be disappointed. I don’t know if I’d want to be a 60 year-old “NextGen Librarian” in the year 2030. Maybe “Technology Innovation Librarian?”
And the person that gets this job? Needs to blog it.
According to the call for presenters, “Higher Ed BlogCon 2006 will focus on the use of blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, vblogs, and other digital tools in a range of areas in academe.” AND there is a track for Libraries and Information Resources AND that track is being chaired by Meredith Farkas of Information Wants To Be Free. Which reminds me: almost all of the conference will be free as in beer (coincidentally, they are waiving all the presenters’ registration fees–isn’t that generous? ;) ) and relatively free as in freedom, as they tell us that”presentations will be offered under the Creative Commons License.” (Though it isn’t clear which license or if the presenter will be able to choose.)
So where’s my proposal, you ask? I’m hoping that it is buried somewhere deep in my subconscious, because I’m having trouble articulating anything interesting at the moment. But watch for me to sneak something in before the deadline–and you can watch as the submission process is mostly public.
I don’t keep a blogroll here for various reasons–lack of space, not wishing to alienate bloggers who don’t make my list (though I can’t imagine anyone would care too much), not wanting to have to maintain the thing as I add and drop blogs. I don’t make my Bloglines subs public because I only use Bloglines as a distant second choice to my usual feed reader, the excellent NetNewsWire Light, a desktop client for the Macintosh. My Bloglines subs don’t get updated very often.
Besides, I figure you can tell which blogs I am really influenced by through my links–if I link to it, you know I find it particularly worthwhile and interesting, which is something you can’t really tell just from a list.
That’s reasonably interesting; I thought I read a lot of library blogs, but I ain’t got nothing on Walt. But more interesting to me was his shorter list of non-library blogs. And, since I started this post over the weekend, Lorcan Dempsey has a post, Self-aggrandRSSment on some of the non-library blogs he’s been reading lately.
So I thought I’d post a brief list of my some favorite non-library blogs; I don’t link to them much, so I doubt I’d get around to mentioning them otherwise.
456 Berea St.: Swedish web designer Roger Johansson’s blog on web design and development. Lots of action in the comments, with good discussion about design, web standards, and the like. If you want to know what professional web designers are discussing, this is a good one.
fade theory: a blog about books, reading, and culture from an anonymous female “theorist.” I have just started reading this one, and particularly enjoyed her post interlibrary woes about marked-up books arriving on ILL.
Many-to-Many: “a group weblog on social software.” This seemed more vital when Clay Shirky was posting more often (anyone know where he went?), but the rest of the group is still very good.
Michael Bérubé Online: I have been a fan of Bérubé’s writing on academe for a long time, and only relatively recently found his blog. He writes about academe, politics, hockey, culture, and his family.
O’Reilly Radar: a good place to keep up on general web and technology stuff.
News from Stephen’s Web by Stephen Downes: a lot of this has to do with teaching and pedagogy–I skim much of it, but Stephen links to a large number of readings almost every day on technology and higher education.
The Valve: another new one (to me, that is), The Valve is a literary site sponsored by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (so that should give you an idea of what kind of “literary” talk we’re talkin’ about here). I have been following their “book event” around Graphs, Maps, Trees, a book of literary history and theory by Franco Moretti. Interesting stuff, and a book I would have never read if it weren’t for this blog and their event.
Waxy links: my favorite place for web zeitgeisty/meme-de-jour stuff.
Wired Campus Blog: no, not that Wired; this is a blog from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. on education-technology news. Unlike the main Chronicle page, this is freely available (though they do link back to the pay site frequently).
I thought I’d start a new category of “tools” on this blog, where I’d share some of the tools and applications that I use in my work. Today, I have two web troubleshooting tools I’d like to mention.
Web Developer Extension
The Web Developer Extension, a Firefox (and Mozilla and Flock) extension written by Chris Pederick, has been around for a while, and is very well-known among people who create web pages, but it is so useful, I thought I’d risk it being old news. Besides, it just reached the milestone of a 1.0 release.
The extension installs a toolbar and a right-click (or ctrl-click) pop-up menu. The pull-down menus on the toolbar will give you an extraordinary amount of information on the page you are viewing: outline images without alt attributes; outline all table cells; show CSS ID and class names right on the page; disable all CSS (good to reveal a page’s structure, or just to nuke a gawdawufl design “choice”); view style information (turns the cursor into a crosshairs; click on the element of your choice and see all the styles applied to it).
But the coolest thing is it lets you edit the CSS (and now the HTML) in a sidebar and view the results in real time. Want to see what your site would look like if you changed the font for your headers? Don’t change the actual stylesheet–just load the page, make the change in the “Edit CSS” sidebar, and see what happens immediately. Too cool.
XHTML Validator to RSS
Karen A. Coombs’ post, Bad Code, on Library Web Chic is about trying to maintain valid XHTML and live up to the little W3C validator button she has on one of her sites. (If you don’t know what “valid” means in this context, try Why Validate? from the W3C.)
I started to think about that, and realized what I really wanted was an RSS feed for the validation results of the See Also home page.
A little Googling found me Ben Hammersley’s XHTML Validator to RSS, which does exactly that. It couldn’t be much simpler: add the URL you want to track to http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/validate.cgi?url= and subscribe. Every time the feed is fetched, the validator runs; if there’s an error, you get a message in your feed.
I tried it today by putting an innocuous little bit of invald code on the home page (a <br> instead of a <br />) and the next time I reloaded the feed I had the error messages right there in NetNewsWire. Neat!
There is no such thing as Library 2.0 and this is a blog post about it. (Apologies for bastardizing the first line of Steven Shapin’s book The Scientific Revolution.)
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? And are pin-dancing angels really Library 2.0?
I have spent the last week or so reading and thinking a lot about “Library 2.0″; what it means, how useful the term is, and so on. I capped off the binge Monday with a reading of Walt Crawford’s 32-page special issue of Cites & Insights titled Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0″
So now I have a Library 2.0 hangover like you wouldn’t believe. Hangover as in “geez, that was fun…I think…” and hangover as in “let’s never do that again.”
Listen: I care a lot about many of the things that people write about under the heading of “Library 2.0.” I am caring less and less about the term itself, and am certainly not interested in (a) splitting hairs about what is and isn’t Library 2.0 or (b) participating in a “with us or against us” campaign. I don’t like it when politicians take that line, and I certainly don’t like it when librarians do.
So today, I’d like to give a few last thoughts on Library 2.0 for the time being, and get back to trying to be a better librarian, and to making my library better.
All but the incurably masochistic will be happy to know that this is a whittled-down version of what I had originally intended to post. I took out some criticism of Walt Crawford’s article (which is, on balance, very good and very useful), some responses to rhetorical questions (as Homer Simpson says, “do I know what rhetorical means?”), and other stuff. And, at the end, there is a little punchline for those who read that far.
Here is why I was originally excited about Library 2.0 (please note that this is not yet another attempt to define the subject): when I read about Library 2.0, I found people who were exploring the same things I was interested in, like the relationship of Web 2.0 technologies and ideas to libraries; using lightweight publishing tools like blogs, and collaborative tools like wikis in the library; and, looking farther down the road, trying to figure out what something like a library catalog or article database might look like if it took full advantage of the web. It also spoke to my fear that libraries were stuck, not in “Library 1.0,” but in “Library 95,” where we have put a lot of our stuff on the web, but haven’t yet adequately integrated ourselves to what people expect from a web experience.
I agree with Walt Crawford that the library can’t be the be-all and end-all for everyone’s information and cultural needs–it sure isn’t for mine. But I also think that libraries need to try to make our tools compatible with users’s expectations of how the web works, so when using the library is appropriate for that person, they can integrate their library research better with their existing behaviors on the web. For example, after a library instruction session I did last semester, a student told me he wanted to use del.icio.us to keep track of his research (he brought up del.icio.us, I didn’t) and I had to tell him that I didn’t think it would work very well, due to the fact that stable URLs in library catalogs and databases are sometimes hard to come by (not to mention problems of authentication, etc.). Now that’s just one student, but I think that question of “how can I put all this useful library stuff you are showing me with all the rest of the stuff I am reading/researching/keeping track of?” will become more and more common.
Old lesson, re-learned: Be careful what you wish for. One of my reasons for starting a blog was to get involved with conversations exactly like this one. But having to defend posts and comments that felt in their composition more like “thinking out loud” than “my last word on the subject” can be sobering.
Frankly, reading Walt Crawford’s piece was a bit of a slog–a necessary and important slog, but the very nature of his project made it a slog nonetheless. Here are the passages that were, for me, like a drink of cool water on long, hot march:
Luke Rosenberger on the “read-write library”: “Library 2.0 should be for us, in part, what StoryCorps has been for radio–we offer our communities the tools, the hosting, the infrastructure, and they bring the stories for us and others to learn from.”
Roy Tennant (and, indirectly, Dan Chudnov): “Moving beyond silo-ized “destination” systems to expose our information and services in a wide variety of methods to a diverse set of consuming applications is a good thing…. If that’s Library 2.0, then so be it. Call it whatever you want, just stop anguishing over it. As Dan Chudnov says, “Now stop boring us, and help build it.
Thomas Dowling: “What really is new and exciting, in my experience, is that the Library 2.0 banner is being picked up by librarians who insist that it move forward with all due speed. If there isn’t a commercial option that meets their needs, they will turn to a growing set of high-quality tools to build–and share–the solutions they want. It is a new sense of ownership over those services and a new set of relationships with both vendors and others in the library community.”
Oh, and the punchline? On Monday morning, I got a somewhat tentative go-ahead on my proposal to write an article on Library 2.0 for an issue of Colorado Libraries about “Managing Change in Libraries.” I’m going to give myself a few days to sleep off this Library 2.0 hangover before starting in on that. Actually, revisiting Library 2.0 in a little while with the goal of writing something more detached and less immediate than a blog post, and aimed somewhere besides the world of library bloggers, should be good for me. Colorado Libraries doesn’t ask the author to sign away copyright, so if that article comes to pass, I’ll post it here.
I have been continuing to think about Library 2.0, whatever it may be (aren’t we up to library 2.0.1 or something?), but still don’t have a nice juicy post put together for See Also yet.
I have, however, been quite busy with the comments on other blogs. I hope this isn’t too cheesy, but I thought I’d link those comments here, and (I hope) tie them all together with a new post soon. (Have I mentioned my lazyweb request for a “reverse trackback” that would help me see all my comments on other people’s blogs in one place?)
But Michael also included some non-tech stuff that I thought might be a stretch for L2, such as Rock the Shelves and the Gaming in Libraries symposium. So I left a comment, saying so. I had hoped to start a discussion, but this was three days before Christmas, and no one seemed to want to take me up on it.
So, at this point, I’m feeling a bit more charitable towards the idea that L2 isn’t just a web design philosophy, and groping toward an idea of a “pattern language” that might help us distinguish a “Library 2.0″ program from a simply “good” program.
Lastly, Michael Casey wrote a very good post (with a very good title), Born in the Biblioblogsphere. He responds to Steven M. Cohen’s criticism of Library 2.0 as nothing new, and amplifies some of what he wrote for Tame the Web. My comment is mostly me thanking Michael for writing what I had wanted to say in response to Steven: Library 2.0 doesn’t have to be entirely new or revolutionary to be worthwhile.
So that’s where I stand now. I’ll try and wrap that up into something more coherent soon.
I don’t follow college football in any serious way, but I have a big soft spot for Penn State coach, Joe Paterno.
Joe and his wife, Sue, were the co-chairs of the expansion campaign for the PSU library in the 1990s, and, in addition to raising $14 million, they gave a quarter of a million dollars of their own money to the library building effort. Those figures from the Joe Paterno bio page at PSU, along with this:
“I’ve said it a hundred times,” Paterno stated at the time the drive began, “a great library is the heart of a great university, and if we want to remain a big league university, we’ve got to have a big league library.”
As if that weren’t enough, Paterno and family gave more money to the University to endow faculty positions, including the “Paterno Family Professor in Literature,” a position currently held by one of my favorite academic author/bloggers, Michael Bérubé.
So that’s why I spent the last five hours of my life watching Penn State finally beat Florida State, 26 – 23 in triple overtime in the Orange Bowl. Whew!
I didn’t really intend to take the time off between Christmas and New Year’s Day, but that’s how it worked out.
Here, one day late, is my personal wrap-up of 2005.
Blogs
I started this blog back in August, and so far the experience has lived up to my expectations. I haven’t posted as often as I’d like in recent weeks, but I have high hopes for 2006. If my statistics are any indication (and they should be–that’s their job!), I’m building a small but growing readership. I’m grateful to you all for reading this, and I welcome your comments and criticism.
I started using del.icio.us in earnest one year ago. Now I have over one thousand bookmarks, and find it hard to imagine life online without it. I bookmark and tag just about anything that catches my attention online, knowing I’ll eventually want to find it again.
Our reference department set up a wiki this year that should eventually replace our reference manual; people were more enthusiastic about the wiki than I thought they would be, and now it looks like the wiki will take over our whole intranet. We are using pbwiki, which is very easy to use. It also sets up a private, password-protected wiki by default, which was what we wanted. (I blogged this before.)
Library Thing
My other favorite social software application of the year is Library Thing, which I have also blogged before. I expect to upgrade to a paid account there soon. (BTW, I finished two more books–On Beauty by Zadie Smith and Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion–before the end of the year, brining my total to 23. Pretty bad (the total, not the books).)
Conferences
Internet Librarian
This was my first year at Internet Librarian, and it lived up to my high expectations. I blogged it like a dead horse, met all the bloggers I’d hoped to meet (and started some lasting friendships and conversations, too). A blast.
Offline, away from work, came the biggest and most important event of my year: the birth of my son, Nicholas in June. My older son, Luke, has done an admirable job of adjusting to no longer being the baby of the family. I’m still trying to adjust to being the father of two.
If you read enough library blogs to be aware of See Also, then you have probably seen the recent flurry of activity around Jenny Levine’s recent posts Why I’m Not Joining ALA Right Now After All and her follow-up Continuing Conference Conversations. The main thrust of her post is that it is absurd that she should have to pay $165 just to speak at a conference that she is not otherwise attending, even when she was invited by the conference organizers to present.
There has been a lot of commentary on these posts and the issues that surround them. If you need to catch up, set a good example for the ALA Council email list members and read Jenny’s original posts, linked above. Then, if you have the time, check out the archives of the ALA Council email list starting here with the thread titled “honked off presenters” (!), though the thread changes name several times. K.G. Schneider gets a gold star for not hauling off and telling her fellow Council members to RTFA. After that, you can see what I have tagged ala+conference on del.icio.us recently, or see what links Technorati has picked up to Jenny’s original post.
The whole thing has got me thinking about (1) what conference organizers should do for presenters, and (2) what good is the ALA anyway?
Conference presenters
I have had a bit of experience with conferences, but just a bit. I have been to at least one conference per year since library school (many of those the big ALA Annual Conference); I was on the Budget and Development Committee of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (itself a division of ALA) for several years (where I learned just how absurdly expensive it is to put on a good conference); I have been on the Program Planning Committee for the Colorado Association of Libraries conference for the past two years; and I have presented at a conference exactly once, at CAL in November of this year.
I think I can offer one single, golden rule about all this: if the conference invites a speaker (as opposed to just accepting a speaker’s proposal) the speaker should not have to pay to register for the conference.
Isn’t that just common sense? By inviting the speaker, the conference organizers are saying that the speaker is important to the success of the conference. That rule should work regardless of how large or small the conference is, whether the speaker is nationally known or just the best speaker in town, and regardless of the membership status of the speaker. Invited speakers don’t pay to register.
I’m a little less certain about this one, but I’ll throw it out there anyway: any speaker (invited or merely “accepted”) should have the option of not registering for the conference if he or she is only presenting and is not attending the rest of the conference. This seems like a fair way to accommodate those who can’t afford to “pay to speak,” or who simply don’t have time to attend the full conference. That was the policy at CAL this year.
I’m less certain about that one because I think it is best if presenters don’t just breeze in and out. At Internet Librarian this year, it was possible to see a person present in the morning, sit next to him or her in the audience of an afternoon session, and see them again at the hotel bar in the evening. That promotes discussion and sharing, and even helps develop the next wave of presenters for future conferences. But I do believe that presenters should have the option to get in and get out for free.
ALA: What is it good for?
The conference in question (where Jenny Levine is scheduled to present) is the 2006 Public Library Association Conference. PLA, as you are probably aware, is a division of ALA. So, for those unhappy with the current situation, a lot of the complaints and criticism have been leveled at the ALA. The way ALA treats its presenters has been compared unfavorably to the way Information Today treats presenters at Internet Librarian. Defenders of ALA (mostly on the Council email list) have wondered why librarians could treat “their” organization in so cavalier a fashion as to expect any monetary consideration, even the waiving of the registration fee.
After the conference is over, it’s not as if the company is
there championing intellectual freedom, organizing Banned Books Week,
lobbying in Washington, etc. It goes back to printing magazines. There’s
nothing wrong with that but to me it speaks volumes that the younger set
can’t distinguish between ALA and a commercial company. I don’t think they
are being obtuse: I think they’re being honest. You may disagree, but they
have to feel and believe that ALA is providing them a good that is worth the
return on investment.
It’s true; when I think of ALA, I don’t think of it as a lobbying organization or as a champion of intellectual freedom. I think of it as the organization who puts together that bloated conference every year. I think of it as the organization whose website is hard to navigate. I think of it as the organization currently headed by a technological reactionary. I think of it as practically irrelevant to my work, my interests, and my career. Is that an accurate view of ALA? I’m willing to entertain the possibility that I’m wrong!
To be fair, I have had great experiences with some of the “grandchildren” of the ALA. As I mentioned above, I was active in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries for several years, which is a fantastic organization. The only thing I didn’t like about RBMS was having to go to ALA each year to attend the section meetings (most of the real action is at the RMBS annual preconference). A common RBMS backchannel conversation is how great RBMS would be if it weren’t for ALA.
I have had more limited experience with the Literatures in English Section of ACRL, but I have a similarly high regard for it.
But ALA-as-ALA just doesn’t resonate with me. And, at 35, I don’t know if I’m still part of that “younger set” Schneider is talking about or not. I will say that at both my academic library jobs, attending the ALA Annual and participating in ALA committees was the exception rather than the rule, regardless of the librarian’s age or years in the profession. At least in academic libraries, the ALA doesn’t seem so vital.
What can the ALA do? Get rid of the Annual Conference, and put the focus back on the sections and divisions? Concentrate solely on the lobbying, literacy, intellectual freedom angle and become more like the ACLU? I don’t know. But as things stand now, I can’t see becoming an ALA member or attending an ALA Annual Conference any time soon.
I love the year-end lists. (If you love year-end lists, you surely know of the exhaustive annual Fimoculous meta-list). I have put together a little year-end non-required reading list of the library-related stuff I have read this year that has really stuck with me; that I have read and re-read, or recommended to others, or has shaped my thinking about libraries, librarianship, and the web.
I think all these first appeared in 2005 (though perhaps the OPAC Manifesto had earlier origins), and it’s all available on the web (though for one article, you need access to a Project Muse subscription). I think the vast majority of the words I read this year were on a screen, rather than on paper.
Of course this list is missing loads of great stuff. If you have your own list of “greatest hits” for 2005, leave a comment or a trackback with a citation; I’d love to read more.
Do librarians need to be programmers? As the Simpsons’ Reverend Lovejoy says, “short answer, no with an if; long answer, yes with a but.”
This memelet – librarians as coders – has been going around for the past few months. I first saw it when librarian.net linked to Dan Chudnov’s post A new era of web (and library) development. The money quote from Chudnov is:
This kind of message needs to be broadcast profession-wide – at the TLA meeting this past April several audience members challenged my assertion that “more of us need to be coders.” My response was, and remains, that in the aggregate, our profession is borderline incompetent w/r/to software development, and the more people we can get who understand this stuff, the more likely our chances of basic survival as an industry.
Of course no one is saying that we all need to write code; most librarians are much better suited for doing reference interviews, or bibliographic instruction, or raising money, or dealing with the board of trustees, or cataloging a unique manuscript, or reading to a bunch of pre-schoolers. And that doesn’t mean that those librarians aren’t technology-savvy in terms of using and understanding their tools, be those databases, smart classrooms, or what have you.
But when push comes to shove, it sure would help to have someone in the library who knew how to do a little coding. And I’m not talking about building an application from scratch. A little script to take some information from one place, alter it, format it, and put it somewhere else could save the day. Making one library application talk to another one could be a small miracle.
Chudnov makes it clear in his response to Dorothea Salo’s comment on his post that he’s not saying we all need to be developers, but that the more we know about how code works, the more we can “shift the mean” toward a more knowledgeable and competent profession.
I’m all for that. I’m even willing to throw markup in with coding; HTML and CSS are pretty easy to learn. And with so many of our services being web-based, we really need people whose knowledge of HTML goes beyond Dreamweaver. All you need to sharpen your skills is a site that you care about enough to work on a lot, but isn’t the main site for your library. That way your boss won’t notice when you make all the fonts 1px high by accident, or float the main content off the screen. (A blog would do nicely.)
The same aforementioned Ms Salo is responsible for one of my favorite blog posts of the year (which you will find in my del.icio.us bookmarks affectionately tagged rant+geek), entitled Just hack it.You should read the whole post, but here is the part that I’m going to have carved in stone someday:
What it takes is recognizing that it’s a solvable problem and being willing to bash the system with a large rock, cursing the whole time, until it does what you’re asking it to. This is what I personally do to systems. I am not a trained programmer; I just beat things with rocks until they work. It’s not expertise, just bloodyminded determination to build something useful and time-saving.
I believe I have mentioned before how disappointed I am in librarians’ general unwillingness to beat things with rocks until they work? “I’m not a programmer!” doesn’t cut it, sorry.
As for me, I’m not a programmer. The last language I learned was Applesoft Basic on the good ol’ Apple ][+. But I do like beating things with rocks until they work, and after a couple of years of making sites like this one, and making some frankly tentative changes on the library site, I’m getting pretty good with the (X)HTML and CSS. Not as good as a real web designer, but good enough for library work.
So I’m going to take my first steps toward coding by learning JavaScript this year. As a real web designer, Cameron Moll, says in his predictions for 2006:
I’ve been able to get by the last few years with my measly JavaScript skills, you know where you just copy and paste existing scripts? Yeah, those skills. That’ll change in 2006.
You and me both, Cameron. Now, I think real coders may turn their noses up at JavaScript, but with AJAX as one of the big buzzwords this year, JavaScript seems to be making a comeback, and demonstrating that it has more uses than just annoying people with rollovers and popups. So with my copy of Beginning JavaScript at hand, I plan to take some steps toward coding.
I’ll keep you all posted on how that is going. On second thought, I won’t have to keep you posted; when you come back to See Also and find a lot of crazy mouseovers and forms and stuff, you’ll know I have been hitting the JavaScript.
I have been pretty busy this year (added a son to the family, started this blog, showed up for work most days), but one thing I haven’t been doing much of – to my shame as a librarian – is reading.
About a year ago, I gave 43 Things, the social software site for goals – a whirl. One of the “things” I put on my to-do list was “read 30 books in 2005.” I have since deleted my 43 Things account (social software for what amounted to New Year’s resolutions wasn’t really my thing, so to speak), but that resolution has stuck in my mind.
At the time I thought 30 was a little embarrassing as a goal, but today, with three weeks left in the year, I’m still nine books short. I have only written two reviews all year for Bookends, the book review blog I set up at work (thank goodness for my colleagues – especially Gwen – for keeping that site alive).
Since late 1996, I have kept a little reading journal in a little black spiral-bound sketchbook (some of those books I read in 1996/97 are still all-time favorites: Robert Graves Good-Bye to All That; David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest; Sebastian Japrisot A Very Long Engagement). Now, mostly as an excuse to try it out, I have put this year’s reading on Library Thing; you can see my catalog there, and the Library Thing “blog widget” is hanging out on the right side of this entry .
If you haven’t played with Library Thing yet, you should. I first read about it on Library Stuff, and, as I often do with social software sites, I immediately set up an account and did nothing with it. But adding my sad little list of books read this year gave me the chance to see what an elegant piece of work Library Thing is. You can search Amazon or a long list of libraries to create records for your personal library. You can tag your books (of course), and add comments, reviews, star ratings, etc. And then you can dive into all the social goodness on the zeitgeist page; my favorite is the “top 10 most contentious books: Highest standard deviation of star ratings.”
Wouldn’t it be cool if a library catalog itself was fun to play with in this way? If library users could keep their own personal catalog of books, and compare lists, reviews, most popular books lists, etc. with other readers? If the first line of search help read “Be sloppy, Do what you want”(as it does on the “add books” screen of Library Thing)?
Cool stuff. Almost cool enough to make me forget how few books I read this year. There’s always next year.
Those of you who subscribe to this blog via RSS probably noticed a change yesterday; the main feed for the site now also includes the “link blog” that appears in the right column on the site, and is consists of items in my del.icio.us bookmarks that I tag with see_also.
I hope none of you object to that change–I think of that linkblog as an important part of See Also.
The feed also has a link to the comments for each main blog post (including a counter for the number of comments actually there).
In the next day or so, I plan to change the code on the page so that people who use RSS autodiscovery will discover the feed I want and not all the default MT feeds that are still linked on each page. If you are a subscriber, you might want to double-check that your are signed up for http://feeds.feedburner.com/seealso/, and not a feed that starts with http://library.coloradocollege.edu/steve/
Lastly, look for an email subscription box in the left-hand column soon.
If you have any problems with or questions about the feed from this site, please leave me a comment below.
It is especially interesting because this post is an example of what the post is about (how’s that for recursion?): the unintended consequences of living online. I had been fretting a bit about the degree to which I want to keep my private and professional personae separate. But when I see links to my personal photos and my work photos in the same post on someone else’s blog, I realize the cat is already out the bag and anyone who is paying attention can figure out that Flickr’s Hatchibombotar is the same dude working on the other Flickr page for his library.
I suppose the point, for those of us who seem to tend toward a “high degree of self-disclosure” (to borrow a phrase from Michael’s post) is that we need to think about those disclosures before making them, as there is little you can do afterward to “un-disclose.” For me, so far, so good; I’d love for the world to check out the Halloween pics of my boys. But I do worry that I’ll end up disclosing things that could embarrass them when they are older (and yes, I realize that they will find every single photograph of them embarrassing when they hit about 12 years of age. Note to my boys in 2015 when they find this on some post-Google search: tough luck, guys!).
I gave a new presentation on RSS/Atom feeds today as part of our Library Lunch & Learn series. I had about ten people there, mostly College staff, with a few library folks and students thrown in. None of them were using feeds coming in–some had first heard about them from my announcement on the campus listservs–but by the end, almost all of them said that they planned to continue to use their Bloglines account that we’d set up.
I find that, for myself, a lot of web applications take a while to click. I didn’t really get into using feeds until I started wanting to read dozens of library weblogs. Before that, I’d just open BoingBoing and Slashdot and the few other blogs that I read regularly in tabs, and that was good enough for me. And with Flickr, I must have had an account set up for a year before I uploaded any photos at all. Now I find new reasons to love Flickr every day: the photo of some librarians on Halloween that popped up at the top of my tag=”colorado” search during the Lunch & Learn, or the slideshow of the most interesting photos of whales that kept my son busy this evening while I cleaned up our dinner dishes.
My point being that many of the folks in the little class today might not have 100 subscriptions in their Bloglines account by tomorrow. But a year from now, I bet that several have made it a daily habit.
Edited to add: This has got me thinking about the feeds for this site. I intend for everyone to use the FeedBurner feed for See Also, but I realize now that I never stripped out the “native” Atom and RSS feeds. I’d like to make some changes to the feed so it includes categories, comments, etc. So if you are a feed subscriber, you might want to check and make sure the URL for the feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/seealso. I won’t make any changes without another announcement (and the fifteen of you who subscribe to this blog on Bloglines? You rock!)
Well, I had just been blabbing about how I’d like to do a “keeping up” session for librarians at next year’s Colorado Association of Libraries conference, and now Libraryman has pre-emptively kicked my ass. You can’t get all the schwag in the photo unless you attend the course, but over the web you can: check out the OCLC Western course Keep Up! Practical Emerging Technologies for Libraries; its associated resource page with links to documentation; the Keep Up! del.icio.us feed; the Keep Up! blog; and the Keep Up! wiki. And he wouldn’t be Libraryman if he wasn’t putting photos on Flickr tagged keepup.
So I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I zipped up the feeds for the blog, the links, the wiki, and the photos using KickRSS into one big honking feed?. And it is pretty cool, but the photos aren’t showing up in the feed itself (though the links do).
Here is the excited audience of Colorado Librarians listening to me!
Edited to add: I feel like the session went quite well; we had somewhere around 50 or 60 people there. None of my fears about internet or projector problems came true. I think I was reasonably coherent, got some great questions from the group, and I spoke to a few people afterwards who seemed enthusiastic and motivated to build blogs, learn about RSS and social software and how they might use them at their libraries, which is fantastic.
There weren’t many RSS or Bloglines users in the group, which makes me think CAL could use a “keeping current” session next year.
Lastly, I think I did a good job of conveying why this stuff is cool and fun and fairly easy, I think I did less well in articulating why this is important for libraries. Which is not to say that the public and school librarians who spoke to me after the session about reaching their young readers can’t connect the dots themselves. But I think I need a better elevator pitch.
Shelley Walchak of CLiC gave a great intro to blogs and blogging to an SRO crowd, and she kept right on going with the offline version of her presentation when the internet connection conked out–blog on, indeed! (You can bet that I immediately started double-checking the offline version of my presentation.)
She concentrated on Blogger, as the easiest free blog to set up. She had a good bit of advice: play around with Blogger to see how you like it, how enthusiastic you remain about continually posting new material, etc. Then if you outgrow Blogger, you will know what features to loook for in pay blogging software.
She shows the blog, Click on CLiC, that she set up for the Colorado Library Consortium. The first one to comment on it wins a book on blogging (cool idea).
Lots of questions on how to set up a multi-user Blogger site for classroom use. Lots of questions about how to enable, disable, control comments. Questions about how to set up file downloads, interest in hosting photos, other files on your blog to download. Questions about searchability of blogs, blogs vs. wikis, etc.
Seeing how many questions Shelley got about the relative basics of blogging, I started to worry about my presentation tomorrow, where I was planning to assume a certain amount of knowledge. Driving home with my colleague, Rebecca, though, she pointed out that one of the appeals of a conference is getting in a bit over your head–learning just enough in a session to get excited, go home and learn more. We’ll see how that goes tomorrow.
George Jaramillo and David Domenico, of Colorado State University, showed a short, speculative film about a future Amazon/Google Goliath called “Googlezon” as a catalyst for audience discussion afterward. The discussion was pretty wide-ranging and interesting, with many in the audience quite concerned about authority and accuracy in the world of networked information.
I met two other bloggers very briefly at this session: Michael Sauers of Travelin’ Librarian and (Ms) Shaun Boyd who blogs on LiveJournal (and to whom I’m not linking, since LiveJournal always seems more like a real journal than a blog, and I don’t feel right linking without permission).
I also had an nice talk after the presentation with a woman who works for a small publisher in Boulder (whose name I didn’t get, and whose employer I have forgotten. Sorry!). We talked about intellectual property and rights and the ethics of a company like Google making money off authors and publishers without sharing. I said that while I want to see authors and publishers continue to make money, that I wasn’t so sure that every time someone makes a nickel off a book that they should get a penny. We talked about whether increased full-text exposure would result in lost or increased sales. I said that I would hate to see publishers end up like the RIAA, suing customers, employing bizarre DRM schemes, etc. Interesting stuff.
Click through for my full write up of this interesting “Googleization” session.
OK, I said I wasn’t going to blog CAL2005 to death, but I did take some notes during today’s first session on online information literacy instruction. See my notes after the jump.
In other news, my camera battery is inexplicably dead, so photos will have to wait until tomorrow.
Our talk is called Teach an Old Blog New Tricks and is designed to encourage librarians to go beyond thinking of blogs as links-plus-commentary or online journals, and think of blogs instead as content management systems. I also highlight cool and useful add-ons for blogs from third parties like Flickr, FeedBurner, and Technorati. I try to be agnostic as to the blog platform or kind of library.
To demonstrate that blogs can be used in many different ways, I used Movable Type to create a hybrid blog/slideshow for the presentation. The idea is that it can function like a blog with individual entries, comments, trackbacks, etc., but when we are presenting, we can use a javascript style-switcher (nicked from A List Apart) to go into “presentation” mode which blows the font-size up good and big, hides the sidebar, comments form, and even some text that I have marked as “notes,” thus giving us a nice clean presentation that should be legible from the back row.
I invite you all to take a look at this presentation, and let me know what you think, either via a comment here, or on the presentation blog.
I also set up the files and template tags on the blog to make it relatively easy for me to download the presentation, do two or three find-and-replaces in TextWrangler to create relative links, and end up with a presentation I can use offline if the promised internet connection at CAL goes bad.
The content of the blog is released under a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – ShareAlike license, and I had intended to do the same for the MT templates. But, although I think the templates and stylesheets will work fine on Saturday, I don’t think I’m ready to .zip them up and unleash them on the world. I also don’t know if I can include the javascript from A List Apart in a CC-licensed MT template. But if this kind of thing interests you, just contact me and I’ll be happy to share what I have done.
This Friday and Saturday, I’ll be at the Colorado Association of Libraries (CAL) 2005 conference in Denver. If you are there too, keep an eye out for me, and please say “hi.” I won’t be blogging this conference to death like I did for Internet Librarian, but I will be lugging the laptop along, and will likely have one or two things to say about the conference on this blog. I present on blogging on Saturday; more about that in a later post.
Just as I was beginning to forget about ALA President Michael Gorman, he shows up in my aggravator, er, aggregator again. First with the quotes in the Wall Street Journal article (see also the commentary on ACRLog and CopyCense [via librarian.net]), and now with his address to the CLA as covered by Librarian in Black (don’t forget to check the comments on that LiB post, either).
I find it interesting, if not surprising, that LiB quotes Gorman as saying that Google is “probably too stupid to have a library,” thus continuing the kind of ad-hominem attacks that he simultaneously deplored and exemplified in his LJ-published rant Revenge of the Blog People!. And then Pope Gorman strode off the stage without taking questions. A class act.
I’m not saying that I’m drinking the Google Kool-Aid; I’d be very happy to see Roy Tennant–who is asking lots of tough questions about Google while trying to lead by example from within the Open Content Alliance–get more quotes in the Wall Street Journal. But Gorman, who prides himself on the critical thinking and sustained arguments that he believes Googlization will destroy, exhibits neither of these skills in his public statements.
It’s so much more fun and inspiring to read the quotes from Darlene Fichter, Jenny Levine, Jessamyn West, and Aaron Schmidt in the article on “Library 2.0″ from Publish. Here are some librarians trying to harness the power of technology to make it work for actual patrons.
I just took the survey; not only was it painless, but the “essay” questions were thought-provoking. Halfway through answering the essays, I thought “this will be a cheap way to get another blog post in today,” er, I mean, “this might be worth saving and sharing on See Also.” So keep on reading if you want to see how I answered Michael’s questions.
In a post titled IL 2005 Redux, Erica Reynolds puts forth a cool idea:
Here’s what I think would be oh so cool for next year: instead of “tracks,” just post each one of the presentations on the IL06 site, and let us all tag them. Then, we’ll self-organize, and the coordinators will know which sessions have the most buzz, and likely the most attendees so they can plan the room size. But, it’s not really about buzz as much as it is letting the attendees self-select, and show (not just tell) the coordinators and presenters what it is about the presentations that they’re interested in. So all I want for IL06: tags, baby, tags.
What a great way to let your attendees tell you what the conference is going to be about. Then we’d want to have some tools to let us visualize relationships between tags (“hmm, it looks like most of the people who are tagging ‘blogs’ are also tagging ‘social_software’; maybe I should look into that, too”) , see which sessions the taggers are in agreement about, and which sessions are seeing a proliferation of tags (which might indicate that the session will be wide-ranging or might indicate that it is time to re-write the session description to make it clearer to the intended audience).
There is other good stuff in this post, including some thoughts about picking a (constructive) fight with vendors, and a glimpse at Erica’s to-do lists. And you need not have attended Internet Librarian to “get” this.
If I had a blogroll (a list of links to blogs that I read), I’d be adding the blogs listed below. None of them are new, just new to me. All were blogging Internet Librarian, and I met all the authors, at least briefly. Links to the feeds are in there too (a mixed bag of RSS 1, 2, and Atom) as well as links to interesting recent posts.
It seems like fewer and fewer blogs have blogrolls. A few years ago, blogrolls seemed like a vital part of the blogging experience, helping readers find other interesting sites. I’m guessing that the widespread use of RSS has made blogrolls unmanageable (since RSS makes it easier to read so many blogs) and less necessary (the first time I hit a blog I like, I add it to my aggregator, so I don’t need someone’s list to point me there). Maybe once I get it cleaned up, I’ll link to my Bloglines subscriptions from the sidebar here.
Home safe and sound to my lovely family. Here are some random thoughts to clear out of my head before going to bed, though I expect I’ll have a little more to say about the conference in days to come.
This was the best conference I have been to in a long time. The well-defined focus and relatively small attendance (I’m comparing to ALA) made most every session feel relevant. The keynotes provided a common frame of reference, and were of uniformly high quality. Reminded me of a library conference with a very different focus, the annual RBMS preconference.
I think I fulfilled my major expectations for the conference. I met almost all the bloggers that I was hoping to meet, and made friends with some cool people with cool noms de blog (Sarah Houghton, aka the Librarian in Black and Michael Porter, aka Libraryman); I learned about new software and trends; I had many of my current assumptions about the value of social software to libraries confirmed, while seeing some great twists on familiar ideas; I dang near blogged my brains out; and I’m ready to go back and do more cool stuff at my library.
Asked of me at the end of a session by Erica Reynolds after we’d introduced ourselves:
Her: “Are you Libraryman?”
Me: “Er, no. But I met Libraryman!”
Free wireless internet is fantastic, and, even though the coverage was spotty, it seemed like Internet Today was doing its best to provide it. Now, if we could only find a way to provide free, wireless power, we’d be all set.
Looks like the photo at right is the only picture of me at the conference that made it up to Flickr. A stunning likeness, don’t you think?
Blogging the conference in the way that I did–writing up just about every session I attended in great detail–is insane. It was a great thing for me to do once; next time I’ll probably aim to post two or three times a day, hitting the high points and the things that stayed with me. Now, I will certainly go back to posting a few times a week rather than a few times a day.
That said, it has been very cool to go from having a blog with zero traffic to getting many page loads per day, with presenters from the conference commenting on the posts (sometimes objecting to my characterization of the session!). It’s nice to know that if you take the time to put commentary out there, people respond.
Hearing the tales of public librarians whose administrations or IT departments won’t let them install software, un-install filters, use IM, etc., etc., ad nauseum, made me very glad to work for a private college. I suggested a program for next year should be “What to do when you boss/IT department balks at your way cool idea.”
The other panel we need next year is “Google: J’accuse!” where Google could send a high-level executive with the green light to answer the tough questions that librarians want to ask about policy, technology, etc. A pipe dream, I know.
My Monterey cabbie used the word “gnarly” in a sentence.
Stephen Abram called this “the Internet Librarian Tuesday night rave,” and we did seem to teeter on the edge a bit, boys and girls (though Steven Cohen had the light show earlier today).
This session had a bit of everything: visions of smaller libraries withering in the white heat of Google Print; librarians hissing at the introduction of the Google representative (?!?); the death of MARC (or was it Mark?); disembodied panel members via cell phone; a dramatic announcement from the floor; and a general gamut-run of future scenarios from info-nirvana to the Googlepocalypse (which, I should add, is still in beta).
Some people said afterwards that they thought Adam Smith of Google looked a bit scared; I think he was perhaps just taken aback at the tone of some of the questioning. My impression (and I have never met him, or heard him speak before) was that he feels that Google and libraries are working hand-in-hand towards similar goals, and that Google’s China policy really doesn’t have that much to do with anything. But that’s just one observer’s opinion.
I thought that Stephen Abram did an excellent job moderating this session. He was funny and loose and kept things moving, while allowing people enough time to develop their thoughts, and never letting us get too far off track.
I was blogging this one old skool–like back in the day when it was called “taking notes”–on my hipster PDA (a.k.a. a stack of 3×5 index cards). I got 11 cards here, back and front. Perhaps this is a good time to reiterate that this is not a transcription of direct quotes, but as accurate a summary of what was said as I can manage (I welcome corrections in comments or via email).
Let’s get down to it, as I am already looking at getting less sleep than the hapless Houston Astros. Warning: 1,200+ words after the jump.
Susan Herzog has already created a fantastically detailed group of blogs her her talk, Blogging @ the University, so I think I’ll just sit back and watch.
Jill Stover of Library Marketing-Thinking Outside the Book presented on how to adopt a marketing mindset, from the moment you start conceiving of a blog until after it goes live. She had a lot of good information and links; I’m sorry that I didn’t get her link at the end for her slides. I’ll post it if I can get it.
Again, K.G. Schneider has already posted to her blog about this talk, and links to her PPT slides there. So I’ll just hit a few points from her very good talk here.
Her talk focused on five major areas:
Be transparent
Cite source
Get it right
Be fair
Admit mistakes
Why do ethics matter? When librarians blog, we represent librarianship.
What we write is “the last stop between the reader and the truth.” Don’t expect your readers to do background research on what you write.
There is nothing more pathetic than a librarian who gets the facts wrong.
Well there is not much point in me taking bullet-point notes on this, since Steven M. Cohen has posted his notes at http://stevenmcohen.pbwiki.com/BlogsWikis. I’ll stick to stuff that is new and exciting to me.
A very good talk by Liz Lawley on social computing opened the second day of Internet Librarian today. I’m going to try and be more selective with my notes today, and hit more highlights than a full play-by-play.
I was very happy to see Jenny Levine and Jessamyn West in person, as I have read their blogs, The Shifted Librarian and librarian.net for a long time. Their presentation was quite fun to watch, though I was already familiar with most of what they discussed.
I turned on iChat and Michael Stevens of Tame the Web was on Rendezvous. He was also moderating the panel, but I guess he’s a multi-tasking kind of guy. He said “hi,” and I pointed out Tutt Library’s Flickr page to him. He blogged it on TTW, along with See Also, so that was nifty.
Click through to read my notes on Ms Levine and Ms West’s talk.
As I noted earlier, there is no way for me to continue to try and almost transcribe each talk. So, in the time-honored tradition of a student who takes pages and pages of notes at the start of the term, and ends up with a few words by finals, expect the posts from now on to be more brief.
Looking for wi-fi in this session, I found only the Portola Plaza Hotel service. Here is the rate sheet;
Per Minute : $1.00
Per Hour: $50.00
One Day: $300.00
I can’t think of anything legal that costs a dollar a minute, especially something so cheap to provide as wireless access. (Since that time, someone has set up the free “schmi-fi” network–good going!)
Click through to read my notes on “Users Driving Web Site Changes”
[OK, in retrospect, it is obvious to me that I won't be able to keep up this level of detail over the next two and a half days. Also, the wireless coverage here is spotty (at best), which makes it difficult to add links, check facts, etc. If it's in square brackets, like this paragraph, it's my commentary. Otherwise, it is my attempt to summarzie (not truly transcribe) Lee Rainie's talk. Click though to read about his talk.]
Sorry; I was flashing back to when phones on airplanes were a novelty and every conversation from them began with “guess where I’m calling from?”
Anyway, off to Internet Librarian 2005 in Monterey by way of San Francisco. Earlier today, I saw that Andrea Mercado of Library Techtonics has put up an Internet Librarian 2005 group page on Blogdigger which is a custom feed of all the blogs that signed up to cover IL05. This is nifty thing, and much more convenient than my earlier idea, which was to bookmark all the blogs in tabs in Firefox. I think I need to give Blogdigger a long look.
Lastly, since the Info Today folks have designated il05 as the Technorati tag for the conference, I thought I’d try tagging posts for a while and see how it goes.
I’ll be there, trying to type and listen at the same time, along with about 15 others; I may not be unique, but I am certainly in good company, even if I am at the bottom of the list (hey!).
According to Nancy Garman of Information Today, we will have a “press room” at our disposal and our badges will be festooned with “Blogger” ribbons so we can be spotted in a crowd. “IL05″ is the official Technorati and Flickr tag, and I’m going to start using it right now on del.icio.us as well.
Edited to remove the “Official Blog of Internet Librarian!” from the title. It was supposed to be a joke, but I’m not sure it read that way. My mom was excited, though. *waves to mom*
It was such a beautiful fall day yesterday that I took the library’s camera out for a stroll and took some shots of the library and campus with the fall foliage. This one is probably my favorite; there are a few more at the library’s Flickr account.
I set up that Flickr account a few months ago. I’m not exactly sure what we should be using it for, but it seems handy to put library photos somewhere where it is easy to share them or re-use them on our blogs and library website. Otherwise, they end up buried in cryptically-named folders on our shared network drive, never to be seen again.
Last week I did a Lunch & Learn session on Getting Things Done, in which I gave a quick course on David Allen’s system for, erm, getting things done.
I was happy with the turnout. I think a lot of people came because no matter how successful we are, we all feel like we could be doing more, and are all too aware of those areas where we feel like we are falling behind.
For that same reason, I think, it was a fun session, because (given the proper context) we can all laugh at ourselves for being miserable procrastinators. I tried to set that tone by leading off with the funny little Flash video Gotta Get My Stuff Done.
I won’t say too much about GTD, as you can see what I have to say on the GTD Lunch & Learn page. (If you are at all interested in this kind of thing, get to know Merlin Mann and his 43Folders site; one of my favorites.)
Our Library Lunch & Learns are hour-long sessions in a library electronic classroom at noon on most Thursdays. The idea is to get people into the library with some pizza and teach them something about the library, or the college, or just “life skills” that people are interested in like buying a computer, or planting a garden, or getting stuff done. I think the original idea was to promote library services, and we still do that, but somehow people seem more insterested in learning about how to scan their family photos than they are in learning how to do an advanced boolean search in JSTOR. Go figure.
At our most recent reference meeting, we were discussing setting up a private blog for the reference staff. That is still something that we are likely to do for news and announcements, but the more people talked about what they would like to do with the blog–post tips on using specific databases, good sources for common assignments–the more it sounded to me like we need a wiki.
Now, I would love to try my hand at setting up a wiki on a local server, but (a) we don’t have ready access to a server and (b) being inexperienced, I’m afraid I’d mess up the security. The idea for now is a wiki that only library staff could read and edit.
So I went looking for a hosted wiki and found PBWiki. The idea is that you can set up a wiki there as quickly and easily as making a peanut butter sandwich. Wikis are private by default; if you want to add users, just hand out the password, and those people can now view and edit the wiki. You can also choose to make the wiki public, meaning that anyone can now view the wiki; you still need the password to make changes.
So far, PBWiki looks like the ideal place to play around with a wiki and see if it suits our purposes. It seems like an obvious replacement for our current “intranet” of static web pages that are hard to search and a minor pain to edit. As for editing the wiki, I think that anyone halfway motivated could pick up all the essentials in 10 minutes (the time it takes to eat a peanut butter sandwich?).
My main concern is that we would spend a lot of time converting old information and adding new information only to have PBWiki go under, or to discover that it isn’t flexible enough or fully-featured enough for our needs. You can export your entire wiki to back it up, but it isn’t clear to me yet that the file could be imported into another wiki (in the same way you can export your Blogger blog and import it to Movable Type). But it is promising, and fun, and I recommend PBWiki for people who have been wanting to play around with a wiki, but don’t have the time or skillz to set up their own.
Just a quick note to say that I (with the help of my colleague, Dave) upgraded Movable Type to version 3.2 a week ago. So far, so good!
We also made some changes to the IIS server (boo!) to allow us to run CGI scripts, which means that I should be able to take advantage of more MT plug-ins, which could be a real boon in the future. Right now I’m not accepting trackbacks on any blog, but I have a feeling I’ll experiment with that soon, as well.
This version is supposed to deal much better with comment and trackback spam. I have set up comments on this blog now to post without needing approval, and will probably move that direction on the library’s other blogs soon.
Later this month I will be headed to Monterey for the Internet Librarian conference. The folks at Information Today are asking blogging attendees to email them to be included in their “Blog Central” page for the conference. If you are going and blogging, you should let them know.
I am very much looking forward to the conference. It will by my first time at Internet Librarian, and I have heard good things about it from colleagues. I have wasted far too much time at big, frustrating ALA conferences; now that I no longer have an RBMS committee assignment that demands my attendance at ALA, I’ll be attending more of these smaller conferences.
P.S. The phrase “get psyched for Internet Librarian” kept running through my mind as I thought about this post. The student paper at my alma mater would run ads from sorority girls to their pledges telling them to “get psyched for formal!” Somehow it seemed appropriate for a library conference too. I know I’m psyched. Or is that psycho?
I wasn’t planning on blogging this, but now that I have seen mention of Serenity on Unshelved, Librarian Avengers, and Caveat Lector, I guess I can establish some librarian geek cred by saying that I saw Serenity over the weekend as part of a wedding anniversary evening out with my wife (thanks mom & dad for watching the kids).
It was cool and fun. We have been catching up on Firefly via Netflix, and I enjoyed seeing the characters given the big-screen treatment. And there is something about the handheld camera effect in the way they shoot the spaceships in flight that I love.
Minor quibbles:
What happened to the Western-in-space costuming and mise en scène? I didn’t really miss the horses and cattle, but Simon looks way cooler in his Firefly costume of white shirt and black vest than he did in his Logan’s Run space-tunic. Mal’s duster? Gone. Villians who look like they stepped out of Deadwood? Gone. Too bad.
Not enough snarky Whedon dialogue. The funniest quips were all in the trailers.
For a little while now, I have been posting “remaindered links” to the sidebar titled (for now) “Current Awareness”. These are just links with a brief comment from me about why I find them interesting. I’m putting them in that link blog rather than in the main See Also blog because I feel like the link is about all I have to offer; many times, I haven’t even read the entire page that I’m linking to yet. If I find that later I’m ready to comment at length, I’ll do another post here in See Also.
The Current Awareness sidebar is powered by del.icio.us the fantastic social bookmarking site. I have long felt that bookmarks in the browser aren’t all that useful; the list scrolls on too long, they aren’t easily searchable, etc. I had used my old blog to keep track of links, so when that server died last year and I was without my blog, I was casting about for a new place to put my links. Thanks to 43Folders, I found del.icio.us.
With del.icio.us bookmarklets, it is easy to post to my del.icio.us account, and thanks to the tags I give everything, it’s usually pretty easy to find what I want later. And the popular page, which shows the pages most posted by del.icio.us users, is now my web-zeitgeist-meter of choice; it skews heavily toward people interested in social software, web design, programming, and life hacks.
A few more reasons to love del.icio.us: the inbox that subscribes to other people’s posts based on the tags they give to the post, or based on who posted the link; meaningful URLS, i.e. if you want to see all links with the tag “library” the URL is http://del.icio.us/tag/library/; the abundance of tools written by del.icio.us users; the nifty linkroll javascript tool that powers my Current Awareness; and the RSS feed for every single page, so you can keep tabs on anything. If you want, you can subscribe to the feed for the See Also Current Awareness sidebar here.
Reasons not to love del.icio.us: my fingers and I always argue over where to put the dots: deli.cio.us? del.ici.ous? delic.io.us?
Last week, Tutt Library had a day-long retreat with other “academic support” groups on campus, including members of the IT department, the Writing Center, and other components of the Teaching and Learning Center, which is physically located in the library.
One of the sessions had us responding to this prompt:
What is your vision, or possibilities that you see for the future, that reflect/support an integrated learning support services model? Where do you see us presently relative to your vision, and how do you feel about it?
I was on a pre-selected panel for that one, so I had time to put together my thoughts beforehand. I seem to have lost my notes, but here is the gist of what I said.
To create the map, I used the Google Maps API. You sign up for a key to the API which then lets you place Google maps on pages your pages. Google Maps doesn’t have a geocoding component, so to find out our location, I started with lat-long.com. Lat-long has locations for colleges and universities, so that got me close, but then I asked around and a colleague had a GPS device so we got the coordinates from right in front of the building.
Google has what looks like pretty complete documentation for the API, but I confess that my JavaScript isn’t all it could be. After several go-rounds of doing the programming-language equivalent of just speaking English louder and slower when in a foreign country, I started to look around for some code to copy. I’m sure that any idiot could read Google’s documentation, and convert their “place 10 random points” examples to “place one very special point right where I want it,” but I’m not just any idiot.
So I found a nice, simple, real-world example at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library, designed not-so-coincidentally by Aaron Schmidt of the library blog Walking Paper.
I made one further refinement to the Tutt map page by putting the map in an <iframe>, something I’d never used before. The Google Map API key is granted only for a particular directory on your site. In itself that isn’t a problem, but the URL is case-sensitive. That means that, according to Google Maps, http://www.coloradocollege.edu/library/about and http://www.coloradocollege.edu/library/About are two different directories, and the key will only work with the one you registered with Google. That is a big problem for me, as our directories typically have capital letters, but we don’t always use them in links. Grrr.
The way around that is to put the map itself in an <iframe> so you can control the exact URL used to reference the map, and the URL used for the surrounding page doesn’t matter so much. I’m not sure where I learned that hack; I think I found reference to using iframes on several pages, then tried the idea on my own.
Last, I added the driving directions section (which doesn’t require an API key) using the technique described here which I found via librarian.net.
I tried to cover all the browser problems (Google Maps wants new browsers, need to have JavaScript enabled, etc.) with a link to the less-sexy MapQuest.
At least that’s what I thought after reading over Walt Crawford’s investigation of the “biblioblogosphere” in the September Cites & Insights (pdf link). I knew there were a lot of library weblogs–I subscribe to close to thirty in my RSS reader–but Crawford analyzed over 230 library-related blogs, and ran down sixty of the blogs with the widest reach (according to his interpretation of his data; if you’d like to interpret it yourself, he’s made it available as an Excel spreadsheet). The likelihood of my adding something entirely new to that mix seems low.
And yet, here we are.
This is the first real post to my new library weblog, See Also. While I am obviously feeling a little self-conscious about adding my blog to those 230+ that are already out there, I’m also very excited about the idea of thinking, writing, and conversing about libraries, librarianship, and more.
I have had other blogs in the past, but most of those were just my outboard brain, a parking place for URLs I didn’t want to lose (now I just use del.icio.us). I made no attempt to build a readership, to communicate, to connect.
But over the last year as I read more and more library weblogs as they hashed out Gormangate and tried to understand the implications of tags and folksonomies, I wanted to become part of the conversation. I left the occasional comment, but it seemed like I needed a home base if I was really going to take part. See Also is intended to be that base.
So the next few posts will probably also be navel-gazers like this one. Then I want to write up a few things I have been working on this summer (or longer). After that, though, I hope to take a wider perspective, and write about academic libraries and librarianship, libraries and technology, and similar topics.
So the next time Crawford does his investigation, I hope that See Also will be right up there, and that I can thank my many (I’ll settle for several) loyal readers for making See Also such a success.
Please look for me and introduce yourself. As long as the supply holds out, I’ll be handing out 
Walt asks “Ever thought you or one of the groups you work for or with could use a Walt Crawford?”
It seems that due to the OCLC/RLG merger, Walt won’t have a job anymore come October. He runs down the details in his blog post, 
Blyberg also links to Kathy Sierra’s post 
There is another Kathy Sierra graph that might also apply to Twitter, this from a post called 
It looks like Tim Spalding at 
icons lead to the feeds):
So Walt Crawford did a post the other day about how he composes his blog posts, titled 
