The Earthbound Librarian

This morning I was poking around the Apple website, pretending like I was going to buy an iPod touch (so very tempting, so many reasons not to right now…). Anyhow, I was struck by a few things.

First, I was interested in whether the 8 GB Touch was in stock in my local Apple Store. But from the main (online) Apple store page, I couldn’t find any sort of reference or link to Apple retail stores–this is in pretty sharp contrast to other online stores, where “Store locator” or “Find in a store” links are often prominent.

I found the page for my local (Holyoke, MA) Apple store by Googling apple store holyoke (they don’t teach you this shit in library school). When I opened the page, the display was all wonky (on my Macbook Pro running Firefox 3). Based on what I could see, there didn’t appear to be a way to search inventory.

There was plenty of other good stuff, though.

Featured on the homepage is a schedule of workshops and events, which appear to be free. Workshops range from getting started with a Mac to more in-depth sessions on particular software packages. You can reserve a spot or just drop in. There’s an RSS button right at the bottom of the list so that you can keep up with new workshops as they’re scheduled.

There are also links to other types of personalized services, two of which caught my eye: Genius Bar (bring in your hardware & have it looked over by an expert, who can explain your options for getting it fixed);  and Personal Shopping (with an emphasis on no obligation to buy). These both appeared to be free.

If you’re like me (God help you), you’re already making analogies to drop-in library workshops and research consultations. I wonder if the people who work at the Apple Stores had to sit through tons of hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing meetings and overcome arguments like “We tried that before and nobody came” before they were able to institute their workshops? I bet they have nobody show up a lot of the time, and don’t bat an eye.

I’ve run a couple of evening drop-in help sessions for undergrads at my library. With no idea what to expect, I set up in a computer lab that’s open for use in the evening, armed with a pile o’ work to do in case no one showed up. I announced to the mostly-full lab that the room was open for drop-in library help now and that if a lot of people came, they might be bumped, but they were welcome to keep working unless/until that happened. I started doing some work, keeping an eye on the door for people who looked like they might be coming for library help. A few came. We sat down together at open workstations and I was able to help them work through a few problems they were having (mostly with our catalog and locating physical items in the building). A doctoral student showed up with some questions about his dissertation, which I was able to provide tentative answers to while referring him to follow up with his subject specialist. All in all, pretty successful; pretty low-threshold. The people working in the lab were minimally disrupted; the people who came for the workshop seemed grateful for the help.

Getting back to “Genius Bar”: While not the most obvious term for what it denotes, it sure has a flair that “consultation with subject specialist” just doesn’t. I’d love to come up with a better way of marketing that particular service that we offer.

And Personal Shopper: what if there were an easy way for someone to click a few times and set up a short, individual tour of the library and overview of its services?

The distinction between the online Apple store (store.apple.com) and the page for Apple’s retail stores (www.apple.com/retail) strike me as we move forward in my library trying to define the library as timeless, placeless research outlet (services, access to collections, transactions, all happening online) while figuring out what the role of place becomes (computers, group study rooms, quiet study space, copiers, printers, scanners–but also programming and face-to-face services). The retail store page’s tagline is “Come to shop. Return to learn,” and content on the retail store pages seems to emphasize the value-added services that you get by coming to the bricks & mortar store, while the online store is really focused on selling products (with some DIY-type support info).

Do we need to build this type of dichotomy into our academic library web presences?

A coelacanth is a hollow-spined fish.

So how come when you do a keyword search for coelacanth in our library catalog, the first result is:

The Best women’s stage monologues of 2003 / edited by D.L. Lepidus.

(NB: we do own books on coelacanths.)

Also, that link will stop working real soon. That’s reason #232 to hate our OPAC.

Came across a nice pithy illustration of how major search engines tend to privilege commercial results this morning.

Try Googling “philosophy.”

Maybe a nice example for an info lit session…

Hello, faithful readers–and if you’re still there, you are indeed faithful. I’m back from a leave of several weeks from the University during which I’ve been working on a non-library related project, code name Effie. That project will continue for the foreseeable future, but we are now at a point when I can devote half of my time to my library job. Come October, I’ll be back in the bibliotheque full-time.

Astute readers will notice that the name of this blog has changed. Formerly known as “Live from the LC,” reflecting my position as Learning Commons Coordinator, the blog is now called the Earthbound Librarian, reflecting my morbid fear of flying. I chose to do this because looking back over previous posts, much of what I write has little or nothing to do with the LC. Wouldn’t want to lure anyone in under false pretenses (although I do still plan to write about our Learning Commons from time to time).

I’ve walked back in to a maelstrom of organizational change and uncertainty at work, both in the library and across the university.  More on that in days to come.

Interrupting radio silence to kvetch a little…

Just got an email via a listserv which contains what promises to be an interesting recap of a session that I didn’t get to attend at ALA Midwinter.  But…the recap is attached to the email as a Word document. Grr. Why would this rankle me? Well, there’s the fact that it’s taking up precious space in my inbox (our institution doesn’t provide anywhere near as much storage space as, say, GMail, so staying under quota requires weeding). In fact, it’s probably taking up space in hundreds of people’s inboxes. There’s the fact that I’m a Microsoft hater and don’t have Office on my home machine. Yeah, I could open it with OpenOffice, but something always gets lost in translation. There’s the fact that opening and scrolling through a Word doc is clunkier than doing the same with a web page or PDF. I could go on…

Lots and lots of documents that circulate in my library never make it out of the .doc format that they’re born in. I’m probably a distinct minority in being bothered by this, and I do still read the stuff, but it constitutes enough of a barrier to me to make me grind my teeth, or spend several minutes composing a blog post like this. I look forward to the day when these things end up in HTML (or its successor) and can be accessed quickly and cleanly from anywhere, no storage issues, no format clashes…

On a related note, I’ve just finished up writing a report that will be distributed to our Senior Management Group next week. To compose it, I used–you guessed it–Word. As I cut and pasted information from website after website to fill out the environmental scan portion of the report, which will be printed out by about 25 different people, again, it just felt…anachronistic. This would have made much more sense as a living document, with live links to dynamic information (plenty of things we found on our site visits to different institutions in the fall are no longer true, based on their websites, and I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some of the information I cut and pasted is defunct by the time people print out the report on Monday or Tuesday). I didn’t have the time or gumption to be the first to challenge the .doc paradigm this time around (although I will be including the URL to a supplementary wiki with the document). But one of these days…

Speaking of Senior Management Group…meetings are quickly becoming a legacy format of their own. A lot of information dissemination in our library happens via an oral tradition worthy of Homer. Senior managers gather weekly and hear reports read from the notes of various people in the library; they then go back, assemble their own departments, and faithfully recount via spoken word the information that they listened to at SMG, etc., etc.  (All this, despite the fact that minutes from the meeting are typed up and posted on the intranet [yeah, in Word format] shortly after the meeting.)

What if each person who reports at SMG instead posted their report to a blog once a week? All interested parties could subscribe; information would be disintermediated (having worked for different departments, I know that different managers report back to their teams with different levels of detail); and, since most of us read much more quickly than we process the spoken word, plenty of precious senior management time and departmental meeting time could be saved. Instead of a two hour meeting, we could cut down to maybe one hour, dealing only with those items that require in-person discussion and action. As a Classics major, I appreciate a good oral tradition as much as anyone. But as a 21st century librarian with two job descriptions’ worth of work to do, all this meeting time devoted to recitation just doesn’t work for me.
Maybe I’ll propose that everyone on Senior Management Group take this Pew Internet & American Life quiz that tells you what your technology type is. It would be interesting and illuminating to compare the results for library managers with non-managerial staff and users…

The color white can be interpreted as the absence of color (pigment) or the simultaneous presence of all colors in the prism (light). So can it be with silence. I’ve written little here in recent months, more because too much has been going on than because I have nothing to say.

A few factors have inhibited me from writing. Some are professional. Since becoming part of the senior management team at my library, the line between speaking for myself and speaking for my workplace has blurred. I’m sometimes confused about whether or how to tackle certain topics in a forum like this.

Along those lines, now that much (too much?) of what I do relates to management and supervision, the bloggability of my day-to-day work life has decreased. Personnel issues are by their very nature confidential; many managerial tasks are too drop-dead boring to waste bits on; and as I try to reconcile my manager role with the functions of my job that allow more creativity and vision, time constraints often force the choice: write about it, or do it? Not doing things is not an option.

Home life has changed, as well. I remain professionally engaged outside of work much of the time–keeping up with the goings-on at our Learning Commons 24 hours a day; monitoring the hundreds of library and technology feeds that I subscribe to; reading journals; offering occasional presentations or attending library-related events. Recently, however, significant non-work aspects of life have cropped up. These now demand some of the energies I used to devote to blogging and creating professional content outside of work.

Plus, my approach to privacy in many aspects of my life has changed over the past year or so. Many of my personal Web 2.0-type activities have ceased or moved into protected areas, either under a cloak of pseudonymity or in spaces where I can opt to share with only those people I want to allow into my life.

I feel neither melancholy nor whiny, and hope not to be coming off as either. In many ways, things have never been better for me either professionally or personally. Yet I do find myself facing an identity crisis of sorts: pulled in a couple of different directions by virtue of my somewhat schizoid job description, and on the verge of some monumental changes in my personal life.

The upshot: This blog will probably remain pretty quiet for the next few months, as it has for the past few. I’m not giving up; just pupating. Look for a big, brightly-colored butterfly to emerge sometime this spring or summer.

Two reports in the past few days of institutions restricting access to social networking sites…

Middle Georgia College blocks Facebook, MySpace (via the Kept-Up Academic Librarian)

Facebook Banned in Library (via Library Stuff)

Both the library and IT department on my campus are dead-set against policing the type of content that can be viewed on the network or via the machines in our Learning Commons. However, we’ve gotten several comments from students who are irritated at having to wait to perform academic work on library/LC computers while others use them for what they describe as non-academic purposes (Facebook, etc.).

I recently had my first peer-reviewed journal article published. The publication cycle was extremely slooooow…my co-author and I reported on work that was done in 2003, submitted the article to a special journal issue that was announced in 2005, and only now (late 2007) has it appeared.

Since the pace of technological evolution is quite a bit quicker than that of traditional academic journal publishing, parts of our article are completely defunct at this point. (We wrote up a usability study of a federated search tool. The product that we evaluated no longer exists, and metasearch has come a long way since we wrote the article. As have techniques for performing usability studies.) Still, the article provided a great opportunity to evangelize on behalf of library interface usability, one of my favorite causes (and a timeless one).

One nice thing to come out of this process is that our publisher has reasonably enlightened policies regarding author rights. Namely, authors are permitted to post the final, refereed pre-publication version of articles to personal web sites, institutional repositories, etc.

UMass has had an institutional repository–ScholarWorks @ UMass Amherst–up and running for a couple of years now, and while I created a personal researcher page on it some time ago, I never really felt right putting any of my work up on it. Most of what I do is published on the web in mutable formats (blogs, wikis) that don’t lend themselves well to archiving in an IR, or else consists of conference PowerPoint presentations that don’t make a whole lot of sense out of context (like a big standalone photo of a septic cleaning service-cum-party supply store that I used to illustrate a point about Boolean logic). I think of IRs more as repositories for static stuff (discuss?), and I guess my stuff is more manic.

Ain’t nothing manic about a good old fashioned Haworth journal article, though, so I uploaded it.  Have a gander if you feel like taking a trip down memory lane to the federated search interfaces of yore…

And huge thanks to my co-author, Rachael Naismith, who was a great mentor throughout this process.

This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education features a chat with several “young” (= under 40) library science practitioners on the state of the art (or science, as it were) of librarianship. I was extremely impressed at the group of people they chose to interview–many of them are people from whose work (blogs, projects, presentations, publications) I draw inspiration on a regular basis. (Jessamyn, Brian, and Casey are all mainstays in my aggregator…)

My one tiny quibble with the piece is that in my experience, biological age is a fairly poor predictor of innovativeness, technology skills, or openness to change. I think immediately of one of our Learning Commons staff who, although technically a “boomer,” is a total “millennial” (god, how i hate those labels) when it comes to her integration of technology into her work and lifestyle. And, of course, I think of certain other librarians I’ve encountered who fall into the under-40 age group but embody the very antithesis of the values espoused in this article.

But hey, every story needs an angle, right?

In any event, go read the interviews. You can listen to audio clips from the interviewees as well, which I haven’t because even though I’m under 40, I still usually eschew audio in favor of text…

(note: i can’t tell from within our IP range if this article is freely available or not. here’s a link to the blog post from Wired Campus that provides a blurb…)

Student computer labs still in demand — Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus Blog, 10/8/2007.

According to this blurb in the Wired Campus blog, around 80% of college students own laptops, yet 8 out of 11 institutions surveyed report that campus computer lab use has remained steady or increased.

This certainly seems to be the situation at UMass Amherst, where around 71% of the student body owns laptops (OIT Pulse Survey, December 2006), yet the computers in the Learning Commons are in higher demand than ever. Interestingly, observational surveys show that only about 15% of those in the LC are using a laptop at any given time.

Why do students head to computer labs instead of using their own machines? Some reasons mentioned in the Wired Campus post include worries that personal laptops might fall prey to theft; the availability of specialized software on campus machines; a disinclination to lug laptops around campus; and a need for access to networked printers.

The UMass Amherst Office of Information Technologies has addressed the latter need by bringing up a remote printing service that allows users to download a small plugin and print to Learning Commons printers from anyplace on the campus network, including dorm rooms and wireless.

Our Learning Commons was designed to provide a few additional incentives to get students to come in and use our computing resources. We’ve created different types of spaces and workstations that are conducive for group and individual study, and we also provide an environment rich in services, where students have ready access to experts in research, technology, writing, advising, career advice, and course content.

Determining just why students come to the LC remains a work in progress (see forthcoming blog post which has been in draft status forever) and remains an important challenge for those of us looking to justify these spaces and services to campus administrators.

More discussion of this issue can be read in this EDUCAUSE Review Article from September/October 2007.