New Jack Librarian

"My god, it's filled with lists!"

2012-05-27T18:06:00.005-04:00

I gave a couple talks at last week's code4lib north festivities. These are my slides with some post-delivery notes from my "five minute" contribution.

Last year at code4lib north, I presented Art Rhyno's work on Jamun: the $100 Discovery Layer. This year, I gave a sneak peak of the Leddy Library's new website (which is frantically being built in Drupal 7 for a looming summer deadline) that will hopefully integrate his work eventually. But my talk wasn't a tour of the site; it was the examination of one particular design problem that our site was trying to solve.

At this point I mentioned that I wasn't picking on the University of Michigan because I think they do bad work - I was using them as an example because I think they do great library web work.

I then introduced this slide: a screen capture of what appears if the user types in "psychology" from the search box on the library's front page:

Then I asked the audience to compare this with the "Recommended Resources" page for Psychology:

And then I asked my audience to look and compare that page with the "Psychology Subject Guide" which is a LibGuide put together by a liaison librarian:

I asked the question again, "Which one of these is the University of Michigan's Libraries Psychology page?"

Instead of answering the question, I barrelled straight to my recommendation: libraries should merge library subject guides into library subject pages so there are only two primary ways to explore subjects: by searching and by browsing.

Then I put a slide up of one of our existing library subject pages that are hand-coded and maintained manually in Lotus Notes, links and texts and all.

That slide was quickly followed by a sneak peak at a portion of our English subject page which is still in development:

Unlike our existing site, our new subject pages will have shorter lists (that can be integrated into a Jamun interface if need be) with links to get to everything associated with that discipline if, indeed, the user wants to browse everything in that subject or for a particular facet:

[From this slide on, I'm going to do some revisionist history and present the what I should have said at this point because I know that I skipped over some important ideas that I intended to get across. This really should have been a ten minute talk. Or at least a seven minute one.]

[Also some Drupalspeak: the slide above has a title of "46" because I haven't figured out how to turn a taxonomy ID to a taxonomy term in the title field of a contextual filter view without bringing in the context of taxonomy terms because when I do so, it that causes the view to bring in duplicate items: ones that match the taxonomy ID of 46 and the same items again because they matches the taxonomy term of "English". If you know how to get around this, I'd very much appreciate if you could please let me know!]

Our web design seeks to merge 'LibGuide-like' customization with one centrally maintained e-resource database. Our set-up allows us to create many smaller lists of e-resources from our existing master list of over 300 e-resources.

We can do this because of nodesqueue module which allows, for example, the English liaison librarian to make a top five list of Victorian literature resources while also the History liaison librarian to make a similar but differently sorted list of Victorian historical sources, using similar list elements (this five minute screencast I created some months ago illustrates exactly how).

It took a long time to do. In fact, I have invested at least three weeks creating over one hundred nodequeue lists and the necessary Drupal views that go with them. Only time will tell whether this investment was worth the time. (I hope so!)

Regardless of how your library website is structured, I think we can all agree that our librarians can provide much better research resources than re-creating existing lists of e-resources and merely adding one-line annotations.

One of the benefits of the how the University of Michigan, NCSU Libraries, and Jamun structure their search results is that librarian's work can appear front and centre as long as care is given to what words are used to describe the work. (If you were a student, would you be more likely to click on "Economics Research Guide or "Where can I find economic indicators and forecasts?")

The title of my talk is an allusion to the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, specifically at the end of the movie in which we learn that the monolith is filled with stars and a gateway to elsewhere.

If we want our library websites to transcend being a dark, foreboding mass, we need to fill them stars. Barring that, we should fill them with lists.

Love of the Creative Commons People

2012-05-26T22:35:00.003-04:00

Some weeks ago, I was part of a panel dedicated to "Scholarly Communications and Digital Technologies" at my university's annual Campus Technology Day. My colleague Dave Johnson gave an introduction to the ideas behind Open Access while my other colleague (and Associate Dean of the Library) Joan Dalton described some of the local efforts that our library is engaged in that support Open Access work. My contribution to the panel was to introduce the audience to The Creative Commons.

When I first started crafting my slides for the event, I had this idea that I was going to create a presentation made exclusively from the unaltered slides from other people's presentations dedicated to the Creative Commons (and in the Creative Commons, of course) but I was fast approaching my deadline and wasn't able to craft a tight and cohesive enough presentation from the slides that I had found. So I made re-use of some of Karin Dalziel's slides (thank you Karin) and added my own screenshots and text to illustrate the rest of the presentation.

I started my talk by introducing The Creative Commons as something that could be useful to anyone in the audience, regardless of whether they were an educator, a student, a technologist, or writer, musician or artist. I gave the briefest of histories of the Creative Commons and that history lesson led to a short field guide to the various types of Creative Commons licences that exist. That was followed by a two-stop tour of where one can find Creative Commons work. I then added a caveat that while Creative Commons is great for most works, it might not be so good for things like data which some folk think need a altogether different kind of license. I also demonstrated that I wasn't a completely uncritical person as I presented a gentle rebuke of the Creative Commons license framework for being a little too complicated. I then ended my talk with the claim that Creative Commons is still pretty great when obscurity is a bigger threat than piracy - which is the case for most of us.

After my talk was done, I thought I had given a good presentation. That is, until moments later when two comments from the audience made me realize that perhaps I had emphasized the wrong ideas in my talk.

The first comment was from a professor who said that that she found the Creative Commons very interesting but very different from what she normally tells her students, which is "don't copy". At that moment, I realized that I should have spent more time talking about attribution because clearly this idea had gotten lost. Luckily Joan rescued me by giving a very good answer that made it very clear that copying in this context did not mean plagiarism because Creative Commons work requires attribution and of course, we at the library encourage the attribution of sources.

[As an aside, I think this exchange suggests that there is an important relationship between attribution and open licensing. Imagine if every Open Access paper had a clear designation of it's open license status that could be machine readable, just like Creative Commons licenses tend to be. Now imagine if these designations also contained citation information. Hmmm...]

The second comment from the audience may have been intentionally flippant; the comment came from a man who said that my presentation reminded him of a book that he, himself, had stolen from a library years ago... a book called Steal This Book. My response to this comment was not exactly measured. I told him, "No. They are not the same at all. Copying is not stealing." In fact, I added that Nina Paley has made a very nice video that puts this very point into song: if have a book and I copy that book, then we both have books, and how is that theft?

Yikes. What a way to end my talk.

Of course I meant to say, "if I have a book that was placed in the Creative Commons or was in Public Domain and I copy that book..." but I didn't. And I didn't get a chance to correct myself because everyone's time was up the audience had to leave to move on to their next session.

Which is one reason why I am writing this post.

I am also writing this all down for all for those of you who might be making your own upcoming presentation on the Creative Commons (and thus have stumbled upon this post). I want to remind you to spend time some time talking about attribution and watch out 'cause there are many people who have associated the word copying with something bad.

All the more reason why I think Nina Paley is on to something when she says that we need to emphasize not licenses and permissions when we talk about copying...

We need to talk about love:

Copying is an act of love. Please copy and share.

This is my new spam

2012-05-03T14:01:00.002-04:00

This morning I asked aloud, is there a equivalent of This is my jam for short written works. I followed this thought with another:

I'd like a way to carefully share works that change or move us. They are different from "must reads" as they are actual and not aspirational
— Mita Williams (@copystar) May 3, 2012

I've had a couple requests for clarification. So I've given myself 40 minutes to do that here. (We're at 37:46 at this point)

I'm fond of This is my jam because it's simple and it works. Once a week you pick an ear-worm that's been consuming you and if your friends join, once a week you have a cool playlist of songs. It's an instant mix-tape.

It works well, I think, because it asks only a small commitment of time. One song per week and it's a song that you can control.

Contrast this experience with rdio - an online music subscription service that offers no ability to keep one's listening habits private. Only those who are confident in their musical tastes (or like me, and are mostly indifferent to what others think about the music I enjoy) will sign up to rdio.

Choosing one's song is a fun exercise for this is my jam. Sure, one could get caught up on what impression one will make by broadcasting their choice, but that's makes the exercise an interesting one.

Which is why I was thinking about the differences between picking out one's weekly jam, and now ubiquitous MUST READs from our friends and contacts. I no longer follow posts and messages that demand that they are to be read this way. And I started to wonder, why was this.

So I started to inventory my own feelings just before I hit the submit / share button...

There's a temptation to prescribe reading as a means to convince others of a particular belief one holds. If I can only get you to read about the melting icecaps, maybe you will finally be convinced to act against global climate change.

There are the posts that you can sometimes feel obliged to pass on because you must a bad person if you let crimes against humanity go unrecognized (e.g. you MUST READ this about child soldiers in the Congo!!!).

[... this is a fun exercise and I want to finish this list sometime....]

Anyways, my point is that we want to control what we share because it's so closely linked to how we want other people to see who we are. Maybe you had friends, like mine, who didn't realize that their Washington Post Facebook app was telling the world they were reading about a particular celebrity's diet and other more tawdry pieces. No one wants the automatic sharing of our online reading (I guess, other than this guy).

Reading has always had an aspirational aspect to it. People buy books that they mean to read and never do. In the meantime, the books look very impressive on their bookshelves. My own to-read list is very impressive.. but I'm actually reading Bringing Up Bebe at the moment (and hating myself for it, thank you very much).

This is all related to the time between choice and delivery. Netflix acquired much press for its movie suggestion algorithm, but in the end, never ended up using it. Why? Because picking DVDs to watch in the future doesn't apply at all when we decide what we are going to watch immediately through streaming.

This is all related to the larger issues of how news agencies are to bring us "broccoli news' - news that we probably should read (like the details of a bank bailout from 5 years ago) but we won't because they know from click-through stats that we are reading what gifted toddlers eat for breakfast instead.

(1:00 left! crap!)

This is all related to the 'read later' aspects of Readability and Instapaaper.

This is all related to the floating "buy now" button that is encased with every Kindle.

This is all related to why Amazon sells "single-serving" books.

(I'm in overtime)

So how do we share the things that really matter? What's a This is my Jams for articles? Or videos? Or books?

I think the answer is a performance, not a technology.

I'm going to do an exercise. I'm going to pick one item each workday. I'll give myself some time. I'm going to give myself a constraint.

If I follow through with this, I'll make it public.

Until then, this 40 minute performance piece is my spam.

Anatomy of a tag-line

2012-04-15T11:13:00.002-04:00

[So after Friday's teal deer of a post that I worked on and off for weeks, I feel like writing down something quickly. In my mind, I have some ideas that are folding together nicely, but until I get them down, I'm not sure whether I am going to end up with origami or a paper boulder.]

As I was editing my Friday talk on Wednesday (tl;dr version: I try and fail to summarise the last five years of work in a tagline in preparation for a sabbatical application), I checked in on my twitter stream to find this recommendation

Still the best thing on libraries I've read all year: Libraries as Software : instapaper.com/z6zz01t4x
— Matthew Reidsma (@mreidsma) April 11, 2012

Intrigued, I followed a link and found someone writing about libraries, cities as software and a connection to the open government movement... which was something I was just doing in my own talk/post!

[the so-called joy of serendipity that comes from browsing adjacent books on a library's bookshelf can't hold a candle to the blow torch that spot-welds us together on the Internet]

It felt good, as it always does, to find a fellow traveller. Even better, I found that another post from Hugh Rundle's ("Return to the Coffeehouse") connected nicely to something I was trying to get across and so I added a screenshot and linked to it to make evident the connection. In that post, Hugh applies possible lessons from Steven Johnson’s Where good ideas come from: the natural history of innovation that libraries could do well to learn from.

I had also read and enjoyed Where good ideas come from and have been meaning to put some of Johnson's recommendations into personal practice. While I keep my own Commonplace book, as Johnson recommends, I had not yet made a habit of returning to my older notes to pick up the threads of thought that I had put down which Johnson believes is almost necessary for long hunches to be developed.

Or so I thought. But on Saturday, I received this email from myself - or more accurately, my one-year-ago-self:

I had completely forgotten that I had come up with that title for myself and I realized that this title was closer to a personal mission statement than my the current tag-line on my portfolio site, public spaces need public events - the one that I just spent on thinking about improving over the last few weeks.

But "changing the rules so more can play" wasn't quite right because I thought too many people would think I was just talking about games. So, yesterday, Saturday morning, I kept trying to swap out words to something better but couldn't come up with anything. So I asked Twitter:

Still thinking of new tag-lines. Working on variations of "Changing the rules so that more can..." participate? join in? play?
— Mita Williams (@copystar) April 14, 2012

And shortly, I got this response which - as soon as I read it - I knew it was the answer:

@copystar win.
— Vinay Gupta (@leashless) April 14, 2012

I had been introduced to Vinay through the game of Evoke which had set me on the path of developing a tag-line in the first place.

[aside: Vinay Gupta's work both inspires me and terrifies me]

So. "Changing the rules so more can win" is my new mantra, my new mission, and shortly, my new tagline. It captures the work that I want to pursue in the contexts of social justice, environmental justice, local governance, gaming, and even librarianship.

Which isn't really the point of this (another!) self-indulgent post.

My point is this (from Steven Johnson's "Anatomy of an idea"):

1. The discovery process is remarkably social, and the social interactions come in amazingly diverse forms. Sometimes it's overhearing a conversation on Twitter between two complete strangers; sometimes it's the virtual book club of something like Findings; sometimes it's going out to lunch with a friend and bouncing new ideas off them. It's the social life of information, in John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's wonderful phrase -- we just have so many more ways of being social now.

2. I find it interesting that there are certain kinds of questions that I now send out by default to Twitter, not Google. The more subtle and complex the question, the more likely it'll go to Twitter. But if it's simply trying to find a citation or source, I'll use Google...

3. Priming is everything. All these new tools are incredible for making rapid-fire discoveries and associations, but you need a broad background of knowledge to prime you for those discoveries...

4. Very few of the key links came from the traditional approach of reading a work and then following the citations included in the endnotes. The reading was still critical, of course, but the connective branches turned out to lie in the social layer of commentary outside of the work.

5. It’s been said it a thousand times before, by me and many others, but it's worth repeating again: people who think the Web is killing off serendipity are not using it correctly.

6. Finally, this simple, but amazing fact: almost none of this--Twitter, blogs, PDFs, eBooks, Google, Findings--would have been intelligible to a writer fifteen years ago.

If it isn't already clear, here's some evidence: By linking to his work into my post, I *may* have introduced Hugh to R. David Lankes. From this comment from Amy Buckland, I found another fellow traveller in Char Booth. All of the above have one degree of separation to Nate Hill whose LibraryLab is the setting the groundwork for the physical manifestation of Dan Chudnov's own personal mission "help people build their own libraries" and it was his post - from 2006 - that set me on my own journey to find my own personal mission/tagline.

Which leads us to today.

Thank you all.

The library as interface to public space and public self

2012-04-13T11:10:00.000-04:00

The following are the words and pictures that I presented yesterday as part of the University of Windsor's Librarian Research Series for a talk entitled, The library as interface to public space and public self.

This is the first time - ever - that I’m reading a presentation. There are several reasons why I’m reading this one today and, according to what I've written down already, I’ll be sharing one of those reasons.

This speaking series was designed to provide those at the Leddy Library with an opportunity to share our research work -- work that we’ve done and work that we hope to do in the future. My presentation today is more about the former than the latter. But it’s worse than that.

You see, my intention is to apply for my first sabbatical -- filling in the paperwork this summer -- with the intention of starting it January 2014. At this point, I know what ground I’m interested in exploring but not necessary the particular path that I want to take. In other words, using a more appropriate metaphor, I feel like I’m at the stage in which I feel I have found a piece of glass that fits nicely in my hand, but I still need to grind it down into a lens. This presentation is my first grindstone.

Even without the external motivation of a deadline, I find that forcing yourself to articulate specifically what you really care about and what you want to learn more about is a very helpful exercise in the pursuit of meaningful work. I know this because in some ways I’ve gone through this process before. It happened almost two years ago now.

In 2010, I was paid to play a game. I was a game runner for a game called Evoke that was designed by Jane McGonigal and sponsored by the World Bank. Evoke was an alternative reality game designed to act as a curriculum for social entrepreneurism and during its 10 week run the game attracted almost 20,000 registered players from around the world and raised $30,000 for 25 projects developed by its players.

After the game was over, I was invited to go to Washington DC for a couple days to take part in was known as the Evoke Summit for the game’s winners and their mentors. One of the activities that occurred during the summit was dedicated to developing a short tagline to succinctly convey the essence of one’s project. Unlike the rest of participants in the room, I didn’t come to the summit with a particular project, but I did the exercise and eventually I came up with this for myself: public spaces need public events.

It has become the tagline that I use on my personal portfolio site and I think it does a pretty good job of capturing some of the work I have been doing inside the library and outside of it.

But, being just a tagline, “public spaces need public events” doesn’t explain *why* I think events are so important for libraries, library communities, and communities with and without libraries. I will do that now and I will start with libraries.

I believe that events held within libraries animate the space of the library and situates it as a place not just where knowledge is accessed but where it can be created, understood, and shared. Librarians are positioned as perfect hosts of events as we have access to cheap, accessible, and open public space and we are mandated to serve all sectors of our communities. Community events held within libraries embody the notion that libraries are a continual community-building exercise. Libraries, by their very nature, are a gathering of people and ideas mixed together.

These are some of the ideas that I shared last year in May when I was asked to give a talk at TEDxLibrariansTO. My address there was dedicated to libraries and community events and I entitled my talk Organizing is what librarians do. I will not make you - or me - suffer through the video of my talk, but I will re-read one passage from that day. It’s the call to action part (the genre of the TED talk requires such a call).

I am standing here to extend an invitation to all of you. I believe that we - our profession, our community, our country, our planet - need more collaborative events to bring us together. We need more opportunities to host conversations. We need more opportunities to change the conversation. And so my invitation that I am extending is not to a particular event - but a personal invitation to all of you to organize an event for others.

Now, In that one paragraph I tried to allude to several personal convictions. Today, I would like to articulate the specifics of what I was referring to that day: I believe we are obligated to conserve as much natural habitat and wildlife as possible, that we must continually strive to alleviate human suffering around the globe, and to do so, we need to be engaged in politics and we need to change politics.

To these ends, I’ve participated in a number of very different public events. I describe most of these events in detail in my TEDx talk, so I’ll give a quick summary here: in the last five years, I’ve helped form a neighbourhood residents association, hosted a Jane’s Walk, and organized an ChangeCamp unconference. I’ve also given a Talk20 pecca kucha presentation - which requires 20 slides at 20 seconds each. That presentation ended up being good practice for a later Ignite talk I gave last year which demands 20 slides at 15 seconds each. And then there’s the TEDx talk that I’ve already mentioned which strictly forbids a talk to go a second over 18 minutes. My enthusiasm for strange speaking formats is one of the reasons why I think it’s pretty funny that what I’ve never done until today is just read a presentation. (* makes checkmark*)

By the way, the theme of TEDxLibrariansTO was “Librarians as Thought Leaders” and that particular tagline was largely misunderstood. There were those when they first heard the theme, thought that the speakers that day were being put forward as “thought leaders”. And while that would be a personally flattering interpretation, I know through conversations I have had with the organizers of the event, that this was not their intention. The phrase of “librarians as thought leaders” was designed to challenge our all too common practice of sublimating our work as librarians by constantly to referring ourselves and our work -- in our professional literature, to our own institutions, and to outsiders - as “The Library”.

Now, that being said, one could also make the case that we don’t refer to our work -- “librarian and librarian staff work” as “The Library” enough. I like to refer to this particular debate as “The library is the building where the books are” versus “The library is the building where the librarian is”.

This conversation is just one of many that form the current re-negotiating and re-understanding of the relationships between librarians, the space the of the library, the collections that they hold and are connected to, and the communities that are served by these things. It might be too soon to say this, but I believe we are seeing a great change in librarianship and I want to speak briefly about this change because the work that I’ve done and that I want to do makes the most sense in this framework.

The change in question is just a change in perspective, but it’s a powerful one. Instead of the library bringing the world to the community, there are those who are already thinking and working towards how we can bring our communities to the world. The library becomes the community publisher and an incubator for writer and artists. The library recognizes other literacies and embraces the haptic by hosting hackerspaces where technology is taken apart and examined critically before re-purposed. The library recognizes that communities need to spend time together before it can work together. It provides game space where people can spend time instead of money as they play and learn together. Like the Internet, the library is increasingly seen as a means to communicate and engage instead of just being a locked platform for entertainment and product delivery.

I mentioned Jane McGonigal before. She is a proponent of using games to fix reality, because games make us happy while reality is broken. I love this quote of hers from Twitter and I think that it dovetails what something we sometimes forget about libraries. While libraries are associated with content, libraries were and are created with larger goals in mind: self-education and self-improvement, improving community capacity, and embodying and supporting scholarly communication. The content of libraries isn’t the exciting factor for us. We don’t just exist just to provide information. We strive for literacy, or more accurately in these times, literacies, including information literacy and transliteracy.

The Research for Citizenship Project by Lisa Sloniowski and Patti Ryan of York University is a great example of this re-interpretation of the library’s potential. So far, this project has involved hosting library based teach-ins and developing research guides dedicated to the Occupy Movement and another surrounding the issue of violence against women in conjunction with campus-based Montreal Massacre commemorative events. Many of you know Lisa Sloniowski from her time here at Leddy Library as Information Literacy Coordinator, when she drafted our Senate-approved Information Literacy Policy and initiated the curriculum integration with History Department and course integration with the English Department’s Composition class. This collaborative project of hers and Patti’s involves information literacy work *in the library* where it emphasizes the research needs of students beyond the classroom where they are not just students but citizens. In doing so, their work facilitates knowledge sharing between students from different disciplines and different communities while making visible the critical work of academic libraries.

Now, this all being said - I’m no longer completely satisfied with my tagline of “public spaces need public events”. I think it served its purpose by providing a conceptual space for what I’ve done but I now I find it too vague and that it doesn’t really capture the stand that I want to take. I want to articulate goals.

I spoke of lenses before. My husband Greg has recently got new glasses with “progressive lenses” - which is a more marketable and more forgiving term for bifocals. When he first got them, he found the two focal strengths terribly disorienting. And I have to admit, that at this particular moment, I’m feeling very disorientated myself, especially with my work. I’ve started to think it’s because I have gotten older, I have started to develop another focus. I’m interested in the same subjects, but I find that I’m interested in them at a different scale.

I’m still interested in the work of citizens who come together to improve their communities and their government, but I have found that I’ve been increasingly interested in those ways in which they are using the Internet to facilitate that work. While I have been thinking towards using the library a place for civic engagement and as a support system for democracy, I have been extending that line of thought to consider the library moving from a place where citizens can get information about and from their government, to a place where they can understand, engage and challenge that information.

I’ve realized - by preparing for this presentation - that in many ways, what I’m interested in is this interface between the digital and the analog; the bridge between the digital commons and the public common space. As a User-Experience Librarian, I am acutely aware of how important the interface is to an application and how it both demonstrates, embeds, and constrains a value-system.

Just the act of presenting the same content with a new interface can be a political act. For example in 2008, Peter Rukavina spidered the PEI’s Corporate Register and indexed it so that anyone could search the database by company shareholder. He did because he was concerned about a developer’s plan to build a tunnel in his neighbourhood and he wanted to learn more about other corporations that might be involved and there was no way to search the database this way, even though the information was available. The provincial government did not look kindly to this enhancement and quickly took steps to prevent Peter’s database to make regular updates, effectively ending the service.

Peter Rukavina’s work can be considered part of a larger movement usually called “Open Government”. This movement captures the emergence of non-partisan citizens coming together both online and in person, to find ways to make government more effective and responsive to all of us. It also can describe the emergence of a whole new category of non-profit organizations - organizations that I think have very interesting taglines. Some examples:

Code for America’s tagline is “a new kind of public service”. The longer version is “helping governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the web”

CrisisCommons’ is “we connect people to help those in need”. Longer version: "connecting people, tools & resources to support crisis response"

Ushahidi: “we are a non-profit tech company that changes the way information flows in the world”. Part of the longer version: “We build tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories."

Open government groups and organizations are dedicated to improving the wellbeing of all citizens, increasing community capacity, and reducing digital divides. Just like libraries.

And just as I’ve always been more inclined to host and participate in events rather than writing about how other people are hosting and participating in events, I find that I want to build up my computing skills so I can help code and connect the work of these organizations with that of libraries. In fact, I am beginning to think that I would love to spend a year learning and doing just that.

Speaking of events, I very much appreciate this opportunity to speak to you today and want to thank Selinda Berg for taking the initiative and making this possible. And I thank you for attention. I hope not too much of what work I have described was new to you as I try to capture my ideas and my work in my blog New Jack Librarian as I go along. If you have been reading my blog, you might be more aware of connections in my work and my interests that I’m not aware of. If so, I’d love to hear it because while this presentation has done much towards my goal of creating a new lens to see farther than I can today, the future is still a little blurry to me.

Gender. Coding. Libraries. Digital Humanities. And Timelines

2012-03-04T22:13:00.001-05:00

Gender. Coding. Libraries. Digital Humanities. Where to begin?

Let's start with a Timeline.

Yesterday, out of nowhere really, I came to a particular insight to why Facebook was transitioning its users to the Timeline profile format. It suddenly became clear to me that users will eventually find it very difficult to leave Facebook once they realize that a significant portion of their lives and the lives of their friends and family have been so well captured and expressed and - I suspect - made unexportable -- by Facebook.

I think of leaving Facebook myself from time to time. So I thought I should make my own Timeline outside of Facebook now in the present, so I could kill my Facebook self off in the future without losing the digital artifacts of my past. I remembered that Peter Rukavina had written about Timelines some months ago and went off to investigate whether the software that he recommended was out of closed beta...

This morning I received an unexpected email from memolane of a picture that I took five years ago. A surprise from my past from my personal timeline of pictures and words. It felt good.

At this point I'd like to point out something obvious: digital photography has completely transformed the nature of photography. In doing so, it has transformed how we represent ourselves and others, and you could arguably make the case that it has transformed who we are.

I like to say, "we are all librarians now" but maybe it's a more powerful statement to say, "we are all archivists now."

Meanwhile, both Katherine Harris and Lauren Klein show how archives are often silent when it comes to the representation of minorities, and Lauren (in one of the most powerful instances of topic modeling I’ve found in recent criticism) shows how digital technology can think through those silences.

The quote above is a quotation from a post titled, DH, Archival Silence, and Linked Open Data., a post that is begins with this:

I’m thinking through many of the interesting conversations occurring around Twitter and the DH blogosphere recently. First, Miriam Posner had a really powerful post about learning code and gender, where she argues that the broad exhortation to code covers up gender and diversity inequity.

This post you are reading is, in essence, another response to Miriam's post but it didn't start with it. I've been thinking about re-visiting gender and technology ever since last week when a couple tweets and posts from libraryland struck a discordant chord within:

One of the most important blog posts for librarians to read this year: nicolasmorin.com/?p=1135
— Roy Tennant (@rtennant) February 27, 2012

The "important blog post" referred to above exhorts librarians to be more like engineers in a start-up. While others evidently have critiqued this post using the lens of gender, my more immediate concern is that it guilelessly reduced the profession to "identify problem, test minimal viable product, find product-market fit, validate business model, grow."

So.... illiteracy === opportunity!!!

The best response I have heard to this line of thinking comes from Bret Victor and he addresses the paucity of problem solving in engineering/computers/design in this recent keynote:

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

If you are unable or unwilling to spend an hour on this remarkable video, here's the short version from Bret Victor's bio:

"There is no 'Technology'. There is no 'Design'. There is only a vision of how mankind should be and the relentless resolve to make it so. The rest is details."

(Mankind? Who uses that word anymore? Ah, yes, let's get back to the matter of gender, technologies, libraries, and digital humanities.)

Bethany Nowviskie wrote a wonderfully humane post called "don't circle the wagons" partly in response to the outpouring of response to Posner's "Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code".

I bring attention to that humanity, because these days when the conversation turns to technology and libraries, it's not always there :

Librarians who say they "aren't techy types" might want consider changing that rather than using it as an excuse for not doing things.
— Emily Clasper (@eclasper) February 28, 2012

At this point I'd like to point out something obvious: digital text has completely transformed the nature of libraries. In doing so, it has transformed how librarians represent ourselves and others, and you could arguably make the case that it has transformed who we are.

While the tensions within/betwixt /between the humanities and the digital humanities are real and worth concern, I would make the case that they are, dare I say it?, are academic compared to what is currently being played out within libraries and librarianship. Simply put, we may not survive.

Or, on the other hand, we might be at the beginning of a golden age of librarians. Even so,.

But what I fear it represents is a sense that we cannot stop doing all of the things that our librarians are currently doing in order to address the challenges of dealing with digital materials, so we are going to create one position and get some smart and energetic librarian who can handle everything associated with digital. And then the rest of us can continue doing the essential jobs that we are doing and not have to worry about all that weird stuff.

But if we are not all thinking of ourselves as digital services librarians, we are in trouble.

We are in trouble. Too many of my colleagues think that you can just hire and boss around a programmer to do all the necessary grunt work to support and visualize their theoretical aspirations. But, as Bethany Nowviskie has repeatedly had to point out: digital work is theory in manifest. Also,

DH is slightly uncomfortable territory for programmers, as I've written in the past, at least it is for people like me who mostly program rather than academics who write code to accomplish their ends. I speak in generalities, and there are good local exceptions, but we don't get adequate (or often any) professional development funding, we don't get research time, we don't get credit for academic stuff we may do (like writing papers, presenting at conferences, etc.), we don't get to lead projects, and our jobs are very often contingent on funding. All this in exchange for about a 30% pay cut over what we could be earning in industry [Scripto Continua: A spot of mansplaining].

On a local listserv, a colleague from another university asked a question that has been sitting with me like a splinter beneath the skin, "Are those with web skills obliged by management to do the digital work of colleagues with no skills?" (my paraphrasing).

My friends, this is the crux of what I am trying to reconcile.

Do I exhort my colleagues to learn how to code? Do I tell them, it's a program or be programmed world? Do I tell them that it's our responsibility to create online services and spaces that embody and extend the highest values of our profession and of citizenship? Do I try to make the case that we need to pass on a proficiency with tools that handle data deluge rather than paper-bound scarcity? Do I warn them that general purpose computing is at stake? That those without their own server space will be forever be second class citizens of the web?

No, I do not.

Sometimes I find - especially when the conversation turns to gender, or class, or race and culture, that speaking in generalizations just isn't useful. Sometimes I find times when conservations need to leave the level of abstraction and to come honestly from the individual and the personal.

Let me tell you why I am learning how to code.

I want to learn to program because of people like Peter Rukavina. I'm inspired by his civic data projects, by his PEI Wind Energy Dashboard, and for his experiments in curiosity such as "How much do I cost the health system"? There are so many other people I know and respect who also have a relentless resolve to understand, to celebrate, and to make the world better. They share a generosity of time and spirit and I want to live up to their examples.

I want to make it clear that gender issues in relation to computing and relating to power is very important and it's still very important to me.

It's still on my Timeline.

An editorial board is not a scholarly community

2012-02-24T10:15:00.006-05:00

A couple nights ago I spent the better part of an hour talking with a family friend who is a lawyer that works in the trenches of intellectual property and copyright. He was interested in the Research Works Act and was trying to find out exactly why this one sentence act is so troubling to scholars and librarians.

I probably got more out the exchange than he did because there's nothing like being grilled by a lawyer to force you to articulate how and where you stand on a issue. In the end, we were able to pinpoint what is egregious in this act: it gives all rights to "network dissemination" to the publisher instead of the copyright holder.

But before we reached that point, I had to answer a lot of difficult questions about scholarly publishing, and I found that, to my lawyer friend, all the stories that I was telling about The Big Deal, the intractable pricing levels based on the historic spend and the entrenchment of citation impact factors as a measure of merit in the advancement and tenure processes ... well, they were all very interesting but off-topic. Again and again, he pressed me with this: "If scholars continue to submit their work to journals provided by commercial publishers, then clearly the publisher provides additional value, no?"

It may not have been the best answer, or even my best answer, but this was my answer I gave to him:

Yes, I concede that there are commercial publishers, like Nature, who have, over the years, invested in their publication to justify their standing as an important journal. But most commercial publishers have not made this type of investment. You see, journals historically were produced by scholarly societies for themselves with prices largely set as cost-recovery. But after World War II, it was recognised that scholarly communication was a viable commercial product and commercial publishers made attractive offers to scholarly societies to sell their journals so they wouldn't have to worry about the costs of the distribution, editorial communication and co-ordination any more. But now with the Internet, the costs of distribution and co-ordination have come down to almost zero, which is why this act is in place: to prevent scholars from building new systems of "network dissemination."

And so here we are. I've signed the petition not to publish in, not to referee, or not to do editorial work for Elsevier. Now what?

Well, I think we are not as far from a post-Elsevier world than some may think. We are already developing new forms of practice to recognize "non-traditional" evaluation of scholarly work. It was at last year's Great Lakes THATCamp when I heard about a great way to evaluate the scholarly merit of a scholar's blog: you ask other scholar bloggers to evaluate the work. It's called peer review! How novel!

By the way, the opportunity to share and learn from these kind of stories and strategies is just one of many good reasons to join us at this year's Great Lakes THATCamp.

And while I'm shilling unconferences, I'd like to mention that I will be helping host the next code4lib North that is tentatively scheduled for May 24/25.

Actually, I think that this announcement just might relate to this post in a more more ways than one...

That exchange led to this...

working on an post idea: "one journal = one community" not "one journal = editorial board"
— Mita Williams (@copystar) January 7, 2012

Too long ; Don`t read

2012-02-19T15:47:00.008-05:00

Librarians, has this ever happened to you?

Have you ever introduced a student to a particular search interface, pointed out the various ways to how one can narrow one's search results by type of publication, subject matter, peer-review, author, language and various other facets, only to be stumped by the request, "So, how can I find a five page paper? All the articles I have already found are, like, twenty pages long."

What we have on our hands here is particular form of teal deer, otherwise known as "too long; didn't read" - a phrase in itself is considered too long to bother with so it's frequently shortened to tl;dr.

I thought of all the times this particular scenario had unfolded before me as I was reading Aimée Morrison's post "They still hate the textbook" which I personally read less as an indictment against textbooks and more of a confirmation of my own hunch that even our best students find long-form and/or scholarly reading difficult to do.

I'm beginning to think that this might be an issue that libraryland should be concerned about. If our students can't read articles that are twenty pages long, then our buildings filled with books may as well be filled with teal deer.

And while I don't think I should have to say to this, I will: I (still) think the kids are alright. This post is not a diatribe about how kids today lack moral fibre. I just think they just have poor reading habits.

And I distinctly remember having the same.

I'm not sure what this says about my own higher education experience but immediately after I had graduated from library school, I know my ability to concentrate on long form reading was dismal. I distinctly remember one of these first nights without schoolwork or sports practise and without room-mates or TV. I found myself staring at the ceiling because I was too tired to read any further but not tired enough to go to sleep. I finally had time to read only to find that couldn't even get through a single Harper's Magazine folio article.

But, in time, I did become a person able to read an entire issue of Harper's Magazine in one sitting. And then some. And then a lot more. I became a voracious reader.

So I believe that it's not right to say that the Internet, video games and texting have destroyed the brains of our students but I think it's quite apparent that these particular technologies do, on an almost hourly basis, set and reinforce the particular habit to pursue and experience instant gratification. But the good news is that reading is a just a habit of mind and habits can be changed if the will and the work is there.

I've been thinking about how librarians could take on the cause of long, slow and deliberate reading and how to make its case to our students. I know one way not to go about it. I remember being in my second year of my undergraduate program and being assigned a particular dense scholarly article called something along the lines of "How to read (a dense scholarly article)." I remember this episode clearly because I felt insulted that our professor didn't think we knew how to read. So, yeah, I missed the point. But years later I did learn this: assigning a long dense article on the merits of reading long dense articles is setting yourself up for fail.

Do I have any better ideas? Not at this point. But if I was to look into the matter seriously, I'd start with a couple avenues of thought to explore as leads.

The first would be encouraging the development of deep reading through peer-sharing of reading improvement strategies. I doubt YoungMe would listen to NowMe lecture on good reading habits, but maybe, just maybe she would listen to what sage advice reddit, LifeHacker, AskMefilter, or even Wikipedia would have to say about improving one's reading skills. Maybe students would make use of a self-tracking applications like Level Me Up as they try to improve their reading stamina. Introducing them to tools like Instapaper might be fruitful as well, if just to demonstrate that most of us require being in 'another state of mind' before doing long form reading and these 'read later' apps are generally used to separate out this reading for us while we are caught in the undertow of status updates and tweets.

The other tact I'd pursue would be through the use of tools - like highlighters, post-it notes and whatever their digital equivalent are - to mark-up and take apart, destroy and reassemble a text as a means to force an engagement with words.

Before I finish this post - which I admit is beginning to feel like a forced engagement, I want to address something that seems tangential, but I believe relates somehow.

Recently I attended a library conference where I listened to a colleague speak editorially on the very delicate matter of labour issues within librarianship and, as such, had decided to read her statement. A twitter response that floated up during her talk was that it was 'too dense to follow.' This, I guess, shouldn't have been too surprising because at library conferences it is generally frowned upon to read one's presentation to an audience. And I understand the reasons why: the lecture is now generally understood to ill-suited to the retention of facts - if that is, indeed, the purpose of the talk.

But recently, I've come to understand that at many scholarly conferences, it is accepted practice that papers are read out loud because conference papers are presented as a means to workshop one's argument before peers before an the piece has been strengthened and refined enough for publication. And while the attentive listening of conference papers is challenging, this activity is understood to be the difficult and necessary work of scholars. What does it mean when this sort of presentation is actively discouraged at library conferences?

Long form reading takes concentration and scholarly reading is difficult work but the challenging work through challenging works can and does make it all worthwhile.

So says the woman who writes blog posts? Ummm.... Look! A teal deer!

my top tech lens

2012-01-16T10:24:00.001-05:00

you don't need a weatherman
to know which way the wind blows

The chosen few are set to announce their lists of the top tech trends that we should all be embracing or bracing for. The following isn't such a list. Mine is more of a list of things that I hope more people will pay more attention to. Which is why I wrote this list.

MY TOP TECH BENDS

1. Free as in library

Found a beautiful digitally-scanned collection of pre-1923 books; the library who scanned them claims copyright on them. WANT. TO. PUNCH.
— Jason Scott (@textfiles) January 14, 2012

If you are part of a library or other not-for-profit that takes historical material and then places that material behind a paywall or makes the works available but with copyright restrictions, be prepared to feel a little less gratitude and a little more wrath for your labour. Better have an answer ready to this question: why didn't you add the material to the Internet Archive or to Wikimedia instead?

2. More is different

Regular folk have been reading books on their e-readers for a handful of years now. How much longer will it be before these e-readers start adding new features that take fuller advantages of what digital text is capable of? I'm thinking of strange new features like Amazon's Daily Review.

I was talking with a friend last week about music and he told me a story about how he uses his iPad for his collection of music scores. Not only does it store and makes available all this music collection, the software act as a metronome, can transcribe a score into a different key, offer hands-free page turning, and even play the score so you can know what the piece is supposed to sound like. Paper scores no longer sound so wonderful to me.

3. Make Everything Digital

If you are reading this blog post then you are probably old and if you are old then you probably have much of your own work and past reading material written in ink, embedded in paper, and sitting on shelves. The amount of effort required for the digitizing of your artifacts is probably too daunting to consider seriously. But if you were starting your scholarly career all over again, would you take the time to make just one corpus of material and make everything digital? When scanning a document more often than not requires a camera or even just a camera phone, why wouldn't you?

Academic library systems are able to acquire and make available access to a large number of ebooks - largely because they have accepted many of the publishers' conditional terms for access: DRM, pdf format, and very strict downloading and printing limits. With these restrictions in place, scholars can read works but are not able to copy significant amounts of text for analysis or to manipulate the texts digitally. This raises the question: how soon will it be before we will regularly see scholars scanning their screens with their iPhones in order to make a copy of text?

4. Adding a layer over the web

Discovery layers are a cargo cult for library administrators: build something that looks like Google (but is not Google) and the good times will return as our communities will leave the internet for the promised land of the library website. At my place of work, the use of Web of Science is an order of magnitude over most other databases. Why? Web of Science presents a small, understandable set of the most important journals that cover a long period of time, along with strong linking to full-text, meaningful connections between items, and adds the ability to download, sort and parse results sets. Discovery Layers do the opposite in every way.

NCSU recently presented the results of a study of How Users Search the Library from a Single Search Box and the most frequent query of their library system- encompassing more than one percent of the total number of searches - was web+of+science. Discovery Layers: qui bono?

5. The network divide

map-of-a-tweet

The image above is a map of all the metadata associated of just one tweet. The image below is a map of the connections among the Twitter users who tweeted the word THATCamp, queried on April 30, 2011:

Network analysis and visualizations are of great interest and importance because what they can reveal goes far beyond what we can intuit without machines. Network analysis and visualizations requires a whole set of new competencies that I have not seen much of in libraryland, with the exception of those on Team LODLAM, who enjoyed a breakthrough season last year.

My message here is that we need to be creating data, not records, and that we need to create the data first, then build records with it for those applications where records are needed. Those records will operate internally to library systems, while the data has the potential to make connections in linked data space.

Meanwhile, librarians are still teaching Boolean logic. That's a disconnect that I'm finding difficult to ignore.

Speaking of disconnecting, I need to that now. There is much work to be done. This is what we can all agree on.

A glut. A library. A flood. A review.

2012-01-11T14:01:00.001-05:00

I've started reading again.

I try to put in a chapter before bed and it's done wonders, not only for all the good things associated with what learning news things bring, but doing so settles my monkey-mind down so that I've been sleeping better.

I read three related books in succession: one about the history of categorization, one about the history of libraries and the last about the history of information.

While reading these particular books in quick succession will no doubt mess up my ability to recall which particular book contained which particular antidote, the upside is that I've had the opportunity to notice where they contradict each other and where they tell the same story but from different perspectives.

The first categories may have emerged as outward expressions of existing social relationships: an attempt to make visible otherwise invisible relationships like “parent,” “sibling,” or higher-level abstractions like “family.” As Hobart and Schiffman write, “Genealogy provides the ideal classificatory tool, for it narrates a sequence of actions. It thus sustains the tradition while, at the same time, subjecting it to a hierarchical ordering that clarifies the nature of various figures. When gods are considered, genealogy becomes a means of understanding the cosmos … when mortals are considered, it becomes an encyclopedic framework for historical and geographical as well as social information.”9
Highlighted by Mita in Glut

Or as a more eloquent writer like James Gleick puts it:

For the Yaunde, the elephant is always “the great awkward one.”♦ The resemblance to Homeric formulas—not merely Zeus, but Zeus the cloud-gatherer; not just the sea, but the wine-dark sea—is no accident. In an oral culture, inspiration has to serve clarity and memory first. The Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne.
Highlighted by Mita in The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Glut (a horribly named book; a book about food is not called Stomach Pangs) - is the weakest in terms of scholarship, but just like the work of Howard Bloom which he cites frequently in the early chapters, it is still very interesting...

We do not have to accept Bloom’s theory as hard science, however, to appreciate it as a metaphor. As Alfred North Whitehead put it, “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. But of course a true theory is more apt to be interesting than a false one.”
Highlighted by Mita in Glut

Information: A History, A Theory, a Flood is a drier read, largely because it is a history of information that has nothing to do with meaning. As such, there is scarce mention of libraries in Gleick's book. For that, you will have to read Mathew Battle's work. Be warned: Library: An unquiet history mostly reads as a history of the destruction of libraries over the course of civilization. It's hard not to conclude the cost of centralizing texts in one space is that you've created a single point of failure. It is just a matter of time before that price is paid; libraries fall with the empires that built them.

But I recommend the book just for it's fifth chapter "Books for all" alone. It is the best encapsulation I've read of the inherent conflicts within the profession of librarianship. I would re-type it in it's entirety if I could. This excerpt will have to do instead:

These images of the librarian bring to mind Prometheus, the Titan who presented mankind with the gift of fire. Two things are worth remembering about Prometheus: first, that he is moved by one emotion, pity, and his gift ultimately inspires another emotion, hubris, in the hearts of human beings. The tragic flaws of the Promethean impulse, pity and hubris, are the emotional poles of the librarian in the nineteenth century as well: pity for the low station of the reader, and hubris for the possibilities the library offers for the reformation of culture and society. The second thing to remember about the myth is the punishment of Prometheus. For his transgression against the power of the gods, Zeus chains the Titan to a wave-battered rock by the sea and sends down vultures to eat his immortal liver forever.
Highlighted by Mita in Library: An Unquiet History

Actually there's another passage I think I'd like to mention. Chapter five also contains a reading of the history of the first public libraries that I haven't read elsewhere: while the radical Chartists did much to start the public library movement through the creation of reading rooms that were accessible to the working classes, it was actually the efforts of capitalist utilitarians who brought about the first public libraries paid by the state.

When the Manchester Public Library opened in 1852, it occupied a former Chartist hall, and speakers at the opening ceremony couched their comments in the language of class war and reconciliation. The library promoter Joseph Brotherton hoped that all classes “would learn how necessary they were to each other—how labour and capital were bound together by a link, and how the interests of all classes, rich and poor, were intertwined, like the ivy and the oak.” No less a light than Charles Dickens, who spoke as well, was confident that libraries would teach “that capital and labour are not opposed, but mutually dependant and mutually supporting.”
Highlighted by Mita in Library: An Unquiet History

While this particular history is fascinating in it's own right, I find it especially useful in understanding the current position of the public library in our society. For example, I think it helps me understand why hackerspaces in libraries are being so well received.

Like Chartist reading rooms, the original hackerspaces began in Europe and were established by anti-capitalist "radicals" (I'm still waiting for Fiacre to write the article that I need to cite here). In North America, the hackerspace or Maker Culture movement is much less grounded in politics, although it does have it's own manifesto. One of the reasons why I think the partnership of Public Libraries and Hackerspaces have been so well-received is that hackerspaces are now being re-cast as technology/business incubators. It's not exactly history repeating itself, but it does sound like a rhyme to me.

Actually, I'm not too worried about getting all the stories from these three books mixed up. I've got them all, indexed and searchable on my Kindle DX. I've got them backed up in my Calibre library, and I've got my favourite quotes on Amazon and in Readmill.

And I have these words here. Stories get stronger with their re-telling.

Academic publishers acting badly

2012-01-06T14:10:00.000-05:00

Over the last two weeks, I've been following many worried online conversations about SOPA and the newly hatched Research Works Act. One place where I hadn't read much about it was from my place of work so just now, I uncharacteristically spammed all my colleagues about it.

If you would like to spam your own colleagues about these diabolical plans, feel free to use the text below as a starting or ending point.

I don't mean to spam you all, but there are two pieces of pending legislature in the US that I think should be of interest to all of us.

The first is SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is being described as having the power to "break the internet"
The Stop Online Piracy Act and You: A Primer
Foreign Libraries Will Be Infringing Sites Under SOPA
A number of academic publishers are on record supporting SOPA including: Macmillan (parent company of Nature Publishing), Pearson Educational, and Elsevier.

The second piece of legislation is "The Research Works Act" and it's backed by the American Association of Publishers. This act seeks to circumvent open access publishing guidelines from organizations such as the NIH. The AAP/PSP membership includes many scholarly societies: American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Geophysical Union... as well as The Library of Congress, Ithaka (JSTOR), and the MLA.

The legislators supporting this act receive considerable campaign funding from Elsevier.

There are librarians working on trying to craft some sort of formal response to these acts. One activity in particular that I happen to support, is actively encouraging librarians to stop contributing their research and the labour to Elsevier titles such as the Journal of Academic Librarianship.

A future, fast, cheap and out of control

2011-12-24T09:25:00.000-05:00

The end of the year is upon us, and so, like Janus, it's time to take a look backward and take a look forward and see what we can see.

And as if on cue, this week I received two things in the mail that I would say are from our future.

The first package contained a bumper sticker and postcards that I had received because I was a Kickstarter backer of The Uni: a portable, open-air reading room for public space.

One of the reasons why I happily supported Uni, was because those responsible for its being were the folks behind the Store Front Library experiment. Like Eric Hellman, also I think the future of public libraries are going to be found within smaller spaces. In fact, I already use my library as a point, instead of a space.

I frequently thought about the Uni this year as I followed the rise and fall (and rise and fall) of the Occupy Wall Street Library. I don't think it was coincidence that the first book to be catalogued in The People's Library was Hakim Bey's T.A.Z : The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism.

The book on The People's Library is still unwritten (but you can help publish it if you donate by the end of 2011) and while much can be said about libraries and the occupy movement, I just want to briefly touch on one particular aspect at the moment: the politics of self-archiving.

My personal interest in this topic is largely about the technology of self-archiving but since a good friend of mine is involved in a really interesting archive project, I'm becoming more aware of the politics of self-archiving and what it might mean in a larger context.

By 2006, there were already several substantial collections of girl zines that had been donated to university libraries, including the collections housed at Duke University and Barnard College . I decided to visit these collections. It was quite amazing to me that a zine produced by fifteen-year-old queer girl in 1994 in a print run of 30 or so copies could find its way, only a decade later, to a rare book library half way across the continent. There’s no history of such girls’ voices being remembered or valued, so how were their zines suddenly showing up in rare book libraries and archives? That’s where this project begins—I was interested in exploring why women of my generation, women who grew up during the second wave feminist movement—had not only carefully collected the documentary traces of their activism and cultural production but were, only a decade later, donating their collections to established archives (The Scholarly Feminist: Archiving with Kate Eichhorn).

After the OWS Library was destroyed by the NYPD, the question of how the library should re-build was raised. This concern was most pointedly raised by this stream of tweets from Jason Scott of Textfiles, so I decided to capture it in a Storify stream:

I felt obligated to capture that conversation in the moment because I knew that if I didn't I'd never find those lines again due to Twitter's poor capacity to find particular tweets even in the very recent past.

My inability to find my own words prompted me to install a version of ThinkUp months back and I highly recommend it to all. Without it, I wouldn't be able to find the tweet that will lead us to the end of this post.

In July, I shared the fact that I have an affection for the game, Nine-Men's-Morris, otherwise known as Mill. That post was read by Josh Judkins, someone who I've never met, but I have worked with as we were both game-runners for Jane McGongial's Evoke. Mr. Judkins is a Community Manager at Ponoko, a site that hosts "host tens of thousands of user generated product designs, ready to be customized and made into real things with the click of a mouse." This is the necessary context that explains Josh's response to my post:

(I was able to display this conversation using Aaron's Twitter Viewer. Thanks Aaron!)

Six months later, just in time for Yuletide, I received this in the mail:

The postal service is transportation; 3-D printing is teleportation.

The future is here and it's in distribution.

My Little Pony: Libraries are Magic

2011-12-18T15:54:00.002-05:00

Here's my biggest #firstworldproblem I've experienced today: I accidentally deleted my daughter's favourite My Little Pony episode from our DVR which just happens to lack an undelete, recover from trash or undo option. The emotional fallout from this simple slip of the finger is going to be epic.

So this morning I had a little rant over coffee about how the User Design of this cable-company supplied DVR machine had deliberately made deleting shows easy to do because they really didn't want these machines to save shows forever.

My husband very gently challenged my conspiracy theory: "Then why does the DVR have so much memory and can store so many programs?"

And my reply was that while our DVR could sort of act like a family's library of favourite TV episodes and movies, we should remember that our DVR was really just a walled-garden of cable-company provided content. If it was something like a library (like Boxee) it would have the option to add shows from other sources, like from DVDs purchased elsewhere. And because it would put viewers needs first, it would have an undelete function.

Then, for a brief moment this morning, I curled up on the sofa with my Kindle DX and resumed my reading of The Information: A History, A Theory of Flood, happily highlighting passages that I would, late that day, synch up with my Readmill bookmarklet.

Can you see where I'm going with this?

The ebook services academic libraries offer up at the moment - MyiLibrary, SpringerLink, EBCSO eBrary - are just like my DVR - they possess some of the functionalities of a library, but they are really just a glorified subset of ebooks that never leave the confines of the parent company and are never joined by other books from other sources.

I'm convinced that libraries have to start making, or sponsoring, or commissioning library software for readers.

Because if don't, others will.

I'll tell you this, if I had to read and know fifty books, as Ph.D students are asked to do, I would seriously consider buying them all from Amazon just to make use of their Daily Review feature:

This a feature that puts the readers needs and personal goals first.

Not that such work is in my future. What's more likely is that I'm probably going to be getting My Little Pony on DVD from Amazon.

The Internet is like Detroit

2011-12-11T11:36:00.004-05:00

If you only know me from my blog, then I suspect it's not particular obvious to you that I am actually a person of the book.

Books have shaped me such a way that I'm unable to even imagine who I would be without them. On class trips to Toronto (during the eighties), when my classmates would disperse to record or clothing shops during our too-brief "free time", I would make my pilgrimage to Pages where I would stock up on books that our local bookstore, while admirable in its own way, would never carry. I bought graphic novels, Whole Earth Catalogs, zines, and books from RE/search.

Kids these days don't have to go to the Big City in order to experience thrilling and potentially dangerous ideas. They have the Internet. As David Bowie told Avi Lewis (in the nineties) during an interview: "The Internet is New York City."

Or, as Roger McNamee puts it: "The Internet is like Detroit. If you look hard there are really compelling things in there but if you're not careful, you'll get mugged."

The above quote is from his TED Talk, "Six Ways to Save the Internet" and I think it's worth watching if just for the point that he was making with that not nice thing he said about Detroit: the overwhelming popularity of the gated Apple app-iTunes experience exists because most people prefer safe licensed content from corporations than from the Weird Wild West of the Internet.

And I mention all this because I've been thinking a particular future of the library in which the Big Six media companies decide that they would rather not deal with libraries at all. Combine that future with our present when austerity budgets prompt politicians to challenge libraries on the matter of lending popular materials like magazines, video games, and first run movies and it looks like libraries of the future might have to operate at the edges of media, instead of from its centre.

I mention this all because I have realized that - for much of my reading life - I have felt most comfortable about the edges of our culture. I like the left-of-center and the fringes. I love the first-person weirdness of the Internet. And I don't want to be all hipster about it, but it's the local and "authentic" of the Web that moves me - as I know it moves many of us.

So, I just might be okay with this particular future of libraries.

To beat my metaphor to death: Maybe the library can become the New York City of the small town. Maybe it can be the place that brings forward the most interesting aspects of Detroit to all of us.

That is, if we don't get mugged first.

Who decides what a library should be? Those who use it or those who pay for it?

2011-12-01T15:27:00.002-05:00

Within a week I've read that two our finest public library systems are confronting challenges to their very being by the very bodies that fund them.

On Tuesday it was reported that Toronto's Budget Chief questioned whether the the Toronto Public Library should be lending out movies or non-English materials and suggested that by cutting these collections, the TPL could maintain it's hours of service. Presumedly, the mission of the library is just to serve up books in English, because according to the budget chief, it's a bad thing if a library is a community centre.

This is how the City of Toronto rewards the TPL for being the second-most used library system in the world.

Meanwhile, the focus of the New York Public System is currently in flux as it appears that the board of trustees is investing in future that serves less books to scholars and provides more space to the public.

Here's the sad tale from my own backyard: the building that houses the central branch of the public library is deemed no longer "modern enough" for a library, but strangely, modern enough to host a call-center that was threatening to leave the City of Windsor if it's needs were not subsidized by the city.

Of course, it's all more complicated than that and I do recognize this. A building filled with books never read is a crypt, not a library. And on the other end of the spectrum, if you are spending all your time looking for sponsors for events and content that will attract the widest number of people, then you are probably in the entertainment business.

Still, there's a commonality to these three stores. Those who are paying for the library are trying to call the tune; what's inside the library is no longer the domain of the librarian.

I think I would prefer the library to be shaped by those who use it... if just for the reason that they are more likely to see us as a community centre than a cost centre... or call centre.

The future in one word: platforms

2011-11-23T10:34:00.002-05:00

In this post, I'm going to expand a small piece that I had written in March entitled, What will be the iTunes of ebooks? (it's about what should be the platform for ebooks and why this decision is so very important).

One of the reasons why librarians don't talk very much about ebook platform choice is because, by and large, we've already decided the matter. Libraries have made their choice, voted with their dollars and their energies, and have overwhelmingly selected Overdrive as our platform.

Yes, we have outsourced ourselves with an ebook platform that betrays many of the values that the public admires us for in exchange for a user-experience that be described in any variation of the word horrific.

I don't think it's too late to change our minds. In fact, I think there will come a day when we will have to change our minds.

And that's because no platform can out-perform the Internet in terms of speed, participation, and innovation. And while is Amazon.com is very, very large, it will never contain all the reading material that you would like to read.

Like many, many people, I do a tremendous amount of reading all day (emails, activity feeds, blog posts, news articles, and - uh - journal articles) and most of my reading is material is done online. Only a fraction of my reading is deep, slow reading - and only if I have enough strength to read in the 20 minutes immediately before bed. As I have said before, the web is my reading platform and Zotero is my library.

But imagine this: instead of investing in Overdrive, what if libraries invested in Readbility instead?

I use Readability myself. Most of the time I use it as just as a means to read long text on the screen in a less cluttered, more beautiful, more readable way. Sometimes I use Readability as a means to get long text pieces from the web into my Kindle DX. And sometimes I use it as a way to easily clean up and import documents into my Zotero library.

Now, I understand that it's difficult to see where a library would interject itself between the reader, Readability, and the author and publisher. To be honest, I'm not sure about it myself but I think it's worth thinking about because we need to start thinking about the entire health of the publishing / reading ecosystem before the entire thing crashes and Amazon re-builds on its disrupted remains.

I should say that I'm not entirely invested in Readability as our only hope. There are other options for corporation-agnostic personal libraries, like Calibre. The reader centric services of LibraryThing and Goodreads could develop into something more 'platform like' but it's more likely that a service like Readmill - with its open bookmarking and annotation services - is closer to what I hope could be the reading platform that a library could be proud to invest in.

How could we build a digital Peoples Library?

2011-11-16T22:45:00.002-05:00

I had been planning to write this post earlier this week after I had provided some other posts for necessary context but I got the flu.

The flu is the enemy of the perfect and ... oh who am I kidding the flu is going to be the enemy of the good here too... but... I just want to show this now - the day after the NYPD destroyed the People's Library of the Occupy Wall Street movement because today is the the day that they start thinking about how they want to rebuild. That is, if they can rebuild.

That being said, I want to make it clear what follows isn't advice to the folks running The People's Library. Also, my forthcoming suggestion for the People's Platform for ebooks is suggested as only an augmentation of the library and not as a substitute for the whole.

Really, I'm just using the example of the OWS Library as a thought experiment, which is:

How can people build a digital Peoples' Library?

The catalogue of the OWSLibrary is online but, of course, not the actual books themselves. That's entirely reasonable since only corporations and institutions (who generally act as weak brokers to corporations) are allowed to "share" ebooks.

But I have an idea. It would be simple to set up and maintain. It would be legal. And, if extended, it could still dependent on a particular public space.

My suggestion is to load the available EPUB versions of the books in the people's library into Calibre (and back up that laptop regularly off-site in case of violent attack).

Now, if you use ebooks and you haven't heard of Calibre, you really should read this great introduction to software from Professor Hacker. Otherwise, here's the tl;dr summary: Calibre is an open-source corporation-agnostic platform of ebooks which allows the reader to add and correct metadata, tag and organise material, and allow the reader to convert ebooks from one format to another so they can enjoy ebooks that are exclusively sold to an e-reader that they don't own.

Oh yeah, it also has it's own webserver, so it can act as a book-server that deliver texts through the web, through a network, and through email.

Let me show you how could look like. For this thought experiment, instead of a 5,000 item library, I have used as an example of, um, , a short "Occupy" reading list of 8 books. Actually, of only two books because of the eight, only two are available as public domain EPUBs (the rest are candidates to be unglued). Regardless! I have put them into the Calibre on my laptop in a library called Occupy Time!

Now, I turn on the web server function of Calibre that now serves up ebooks in this library to all those in my wifi network. On my mobile device (in this case, an iTouch), I am running Stanza that is able to look for available OPDS servers on my home wifi network, and using it, I can find said books from the Occupy Time library, download them into my own personal library.

The bookserver standard that makes this all possible is The Open Publishing Distribution Standard and the folks largely responsible for it are from the Internet Archive. It's one of the key components of the their ebook lending work they do with a small group of public and academic libraries through the Open Library. There are e-readers other than Stanza that support OPDS and they include Aldiko, QuickReader, FBReader, and Ibis Reader.

Now, I was hoping to get more into this but I'm still weak and only sleep can cure me. So let me end with this: Calibre is open source and the OPDS is an open standard. We just need to Occupy our Time so people can share a library --- that has a backup.

The Escape Velocity of Ebooks

2011-11-13T19:25:00.001-05:00

I tend to share my viewing and reading recommendations passively through my delicious feed or actively through my Twitter feed, but today I’m going to make an exception.

I think this talk by James Bridle of BookTwo does a very good job of revealing some important insights about the nature of book or specifically, on the natures of texts. It’s called Everything is the same only different and the link will take you to the video and a brief outline summary for those who don't want to commit the 20 minutes it takes to watch it. I won’t spoil it for you, but James gives the best response I’ve seen to the surprisingly common complaint that ebooks just don’t smell like regular books.

One the reasons why I am fond of Bridle’s work is that his thinking isn’t outlandish and speculative; it’s grounded in the present and the past. When he starts speaking about the velocity of books (at the 5:25 mark), he begins by introducing the viewer to Penguin Specials - a series of shorter books grounded in the issues of the day.

There has always been interest in having books available to help the reader make sense of the latest chaos that has descended on her world. And I heartily endorse Bridle’s assertion that it not that ebooks has reduced our capacity to read long texts - we have always have had difficulty finishing long books. It’s just that now, companies such as Amazon have the data gleaned from Kindles that backs up and betrays this once secret shame.

As a personal interjection, I would like to point out that these days, this rapid-response market isn’t being served by print books publishers but through print magazines publishers instead. Go to the magazine section in your local grocery store and you’ll see lots of special commemorative issues, mini-cookbooks, and fairly up to date guides for buying technology or to help you buy Apps. It’s not surprising that the first book that I know of about the Occupy Movement is being published by YES! Magazine

While I can buy “This Changes Everything” for my library, I cannot buy Summer of Unrest: Kettled Youth for those trying to make sense of the UK students riots of 2010 and that is recommended by Bridle in his talk.

At least I don’t think I can. But even if I’m able to buy a DRM-free copy that the publisher will let me lend of an unlimited number of times, where would I put my library’s copy of Summer of Unrest?

Which brings me to a topic that I think has not been explored enough in libraryland: What will be the library’s platform for ebooks?

The time to address this thorny question is fast approaching. The velocity of books requires it.

Practice makes the profession

2011-11-09T10:59:00.002-05:00

The word is out: the kids can't search. This is something we librarians knew for a long time now. And we should know: librarians are experts at searching. That's what we tell ourselves. We're experts!

As those who have read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers know, expertise is understood to come from 10,000 hours of dedicated practice.

And this is why I'm worried.

You see, I remember what it was like to work in a library *just* before the explosion of use of the World Wide Web. I had the privilege of working at the Periodicals Desk at the Toronto Reference Library in 1997. In those days, we would have two or three librarians working the desk and that desk would regularly have line-ups sometimes up to twenty people deep.

Now this is going to sound quaint and old-fashioned, but this was a time when you could develop a sense of a library's collection from working at a reference desk. A good reference librarian knew a library's treasures and the secrets it could bring up. Reference librarians were good and there were some among us who were maestros of reference work.

And for most libraries, that time has passed.

Over the last ten years, the traffic at our library's reference desk has dropped. Significantly. In the past academic year, the library staff of my place of work answered half the questions at our desks compared to the levels of 2003/2004. In spite of being surrounded by students working away on library computers, I have spent a four hour desk shift at my library and in that time only answered three questions.

And this is why I am worried.

I would like to make the case that not only our search expertise came from the practice of the reference desk, I believe that the resulting tenets of information literacy also came from this labour. Because librarians were exposed to the common problems across the disciplines, they were able to see patterns that could not be seen by individual teachers. It has always been clear to librarians that students don't have an innate ability to understand genre, that they lack knowledge of the scholarly publishing cycle, and that they don't understand the importance of language choice in search.

Without the practice of regular searching, how will our expertise of search evolve?

This lack of practice is one of the reasons why I think many librarians have outdated concepts of regarding searching. Boolean searching makes sense when it can used to create a result set that is manageable and comprehensible by a reader. But nowadays, when even the complicated nested boolean field searches using defined vocabulary still results in sets of the hundreds of thousands of records, then our strategies (and perhaps our tools) need to change. It's time we take the time to understand how relevancy is generated.

When I started this post, I intended to end this piece with an argument that user-experience work could be seen as a possible extension of our practice to ground our work. The connection came early this morning as I read this post and recognized some of my own motivations in my current UX web work.

Watching statistics behind the scenes of a website can be addictive. You don’t control them, directly, but you can endlessly tweak and investigate your data, experimenting with better and brighter strategies for luring visitors.

Playing with a website like this is a kind of game, made all the more compelling by how much you care about the outcome. You want your site to thrive. You want its numbers to go on increasing, for ever—one of the most universal and powerful of all the dynamics involved in digital play.

But, I'm personally dissatified with this line of thought. First, as important as it is to make accessible, understandable and useful library websites, reducing our communities to just clicks and pings in aggregate cannot be an end unto itself. It's just too dehumanising a practice -- which is one of the reasons why SEOs always seem so scummy.

And I don't mean to be even more of a downer, but I'm afraid that even good user-experience work grounded in the values of librarianship is also under threat.

Why? I am of the opinion that libraries' continuing enthusiam for propietiary library systems and discovery layers, mean that we are removing our ability to change, test, develop, and improve how relevancy is defined in our search tools.

Why is this ability so important? Well, these propietary systems challenge some of our very values of our profession. Why is it even acceptable that EBSCO Discovery Service returns results from their databases first before the results sets of their commercial competitors? We would never allow this sort of promotional weighting in the print manifestation of these works - it would be unethical. So why do libraries invest in such services when alternatives that allow transparency and even the ability to change the relevancy of search results exist? Sadly, I think it's because the mechanics of how searching works has already fallen out of most of the librarian's practice and their understanding.

The seed of this this post was planted sometime over the course of hours sometime this past this weekend as I was doing the physical labour of list making. I had given myself a challenge of creating a list of Massey Lectures in a format that could be reused by other librarians. By doing so, I created a list of almost fifty books using Evergreen, Bibliocommons, Amazon, RefWorks, Zotero, the Open Library, and a text editor. I probably spent too time on this particular project but when I finally finished this work, I found that had a much stronger understanding of about these services and could feel their relative strengths and weaknesses. The work itself taught me.

I finished that project this Monday. On Tuesday, yesterday, I met up with a faculty member in the History Department who asked me questions about how best to present the work of over 1500 citations on a web site. I am getting more of these types of questions. Other librarian colleagues are now meeting and working with faculty who are suddenly recognising that preparing, preserving, organizing, and presenting collections and other digital work requires a professional understanding that they lack.

Sometimes when you tell a person that you are a librarian, they respond in a very odd way. They say, "wow, I'd love to read books all day". I used to think (but never say) "what a stupid comment" but now I don't think that comment is quite so dumb anymore. I think that the people who say such things just think that the way to understand a library is through the reading of books. Of course, that's not how a librarian makes sense of a library. But there is a truth in what's being said: the librarian makes sense of the collection by interacting with it.

With fewer and fewer questions being asked at desks, how are librarians going to make sense of our collections now? The future of our profession very well might depend on the answer.

Designing for sharing and then for re-sharing

2011-11-07T13:55:00.008-05:00

About a month ago, we did a soft launch of our new A to Z list of indexes that we put together using Drupal 7. When we re-built this page, we had two specific design goals: the first was improve statistics collection and the second was to make our licensed resources easier to share among faculty, staff and students. And it ended up that our our two design criteria were both addressed by the same solution: to use URL shortening software that would embed cumbersome ez-proxy information while also tracking clicks on these new easy to share links.

Now that we have a month's worth of data, I thought I'd take a look to see how the new re-design was doing. What I was really hoping for was some evidence that folks were emailing links to each other. And on that count, my hopes were dashed. From our most popular link has received about 900 clicks, it appears that only one came from within an email (under "various")

But what was surprising to me was how many hits were 'direct' hits. If fact, almost 1 in 10 click were done without coming from the A to Z list at all. It's particularly odd because you can't easily bookmark the link in question led.uwindsor.ca/web-of-science (although you can bookmark http://leddy.uwindsor.ca/web-of-knowledge ... but no one has seems to have done so yet). I've been trying to figure out what's happening here and I *think* that some folks are now accessing databases by typing its name into the URL field aka The Awesome Bar. If that's right, that was completely unexpected and totally cool.

Right now, these short urls are only available on our A to Z page and in some of 'library news' items that come from our blog which are re-transmitted to the library's Twitter and Facebook accounts. While no where obsessed as much as a SEO, I have been keeping an eye about how our little promos have been received by our campus community.

I don't have enough information to do any sort of generalization at the this point, but I can tell you that last week's campaign to promote our Cochrane Collections were pretty much a bust while our Reading List for Future Journalists was much better received, being retweeted a couple of times to over 700 potential readers in addition to our own existing 280 Twitter followers and 900 or so folks who "like" us on Facebook. "Likes", however, don't mean that they've opted to read the updates. According to Facebook, the reading list gained over 300 "impressions" while our "Evidence based reviews: trials, error and the God-complex" received about half those views.

Now, making up book lists is much more time consuming than it seems it should be. I should know. This week, in honour of the 50th Anniversary of the Massey Lectures, I thought I would create a blog post promoting our library's available Massey Lectures in a way that could be re-used by other librarians and other readers for their own use.

I've have been a fan of the Massey Lectures for some years now and some of its books in its series have been influential to my own thinking. This is why my first list of Massey Lectures was started on Amazon.ca in 2007. And so I thought I would take this opportunity to create not just a shopping list - but reading lists promoting the Massey Lectures. To start off, this weekend I made a list for my local library using Bibliocommons.

My own library makes use of the Evergreen OPAC and it allows users to easily add items into 'book-bags' that can be made for public viewing, generate an RSS feed, and can be exported into RefWorks. And just for kicks, after creating my collection of Massey Lectures, I exported my RefWorks collection to create this public Zotero library.

But I wanted to do more. I wanted to create a list that could not be used, but could be re-used in ways that I couldn't forsee. This recent post on Drupal4Lib was foremost on my mind:

I mean, just think of how many libraries are out there and how many hours are spent having to cull together the same raw materials for lists like the Massey Lectures or annual award winners. Or more sobering, how many lists are not created and shared with our communities because they take too long to make. We could do better!

So I have been slowly working through this particular list of Massey Lectures on the Open Library. Unfortunately, Open Library's ability to export lists as HTML, JSON, and BibTex isn't functioning properly at the moment. So I've created this text file of Massey Lectures names, with links to cover images to the corresponding sections on the CBC Massey Lectures website. Trust me, it will save you a lot time if you are so inclined to make a blog post similar to like the one that I just published on the Leddy Library New Blog.

And even though the list export function isn't likely to be fixed by the time that Adam Gopnik reads his first Massey Lecture tonight at 9pm on Radio One, I'm still going to work on my Open Library Massey Lectures list. I have come to really enjoy working on it during the moments when I'm too tired to move and too tired to read. I add descriptions to these books, add tags, clean up author entries and add cover images. And it's very gratifying work. The cover of Inscape and Landscape that I scanned and added last week already appears in our own library catalogue and presumably in every Evergreen library catalogue that opts to use Open Library as a source for cover images. And all the detailed records I'm creating in Open Library may one day also be found in many Evergreen library catalogues -- and maybe even in Koha ones too.

I would be very happy if someone ends re-using any one of the lists mentioned above. I'd be delighted if someone is inspired to make a similar list on a completely different topic. Sometimes I think that the possibility of surprise and delight is a great measure of what work is worth doing.

Finding Ada is is Losing Loneliness

2011-10-07T21:18:00.001-04:00

And in answer to the question "How does it feel to be be the only woman on the court?" she answers simply, "Lonely."

With the exception of spending two hours at the reference desk, I spent my working day trying to figure out how to add missing user information to a staff directory I was building in Drupal. By the time I had to leave work so I could pick my daughter up from daycare, I still hadn't figured it out. Once home and the kids were settled, I flipped open my laptop and kept searching for answers. About a half-hour later, I happen to stumble upon a workaround that just might work...

I don't have a computer science degree - I'm just learning as I go. It's hard work that is mostly insanely frustrating punctured with brief feelings of feeling supremely gratified. I'm lucky because I know that I have friends and an community that I can go to if I really get stuck. And I'm very grateful for this.

Still, the work is... well, it's lonely.

I'm not really up to unpacking that statement so I'm going leave it as it is.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day and I want to introduce you to two women that I recently heard speak at DrupalCamp Montreal.

Jen Simmons starting designing websites in 1996 and is best known for designing the default theme of Drupal 7. Her presentation -- "It's Not Your Father's Web Anymore" -- about HTML5 melted my brain. She is 42. I am 40. I mention this because it's hard for me to explain how profoundly re-assuring it was for me to hear her to give a brief history of the web that was filled with personal and historical touchstones that resonated with my own past.

The other woman I'd like to introduce you to is webchick aka Angie Byron. Her presentation "Getting Started in the Drupal Community" was the kick in the ass I needed to actually get involved in the do-ocracy of the open-source community. To hear that from the person who now is the co-maintainer of Drupal 7 admit that it took her ten years to go from 'open source cheerleader' to 'open source contributor' and that she herself couldn't explain why it took her so long... well, it made my own ten year journey to getting to the same point -- feel much less lonely.

A commitment to librarians is a commitment to scholarship

2011-09-14T13:00:00.002-04:00

I have seen the Enemy of the Library. I have seen it up close. And I have just seen it claim a victim.

The Enemy of the Library goes by different names. It takes on several forms. But you can recognize The Enemy by what it says, as each manifestation always says the same thing: ideas are a form of property that can be brought and sold by private corporations. The Enemy opposes all those - even America's Founding Fathers - who suggest otherwise: that the field of knowledge is the common property of mankind.

There is a particular manifestation of this enemy who's movements I have been following with particular interest as of late. It goes by the name of Access Copyright.

Access Copyright exists in Canada as a legal body that collects payments from institutions that offer photocopying. These collected payments are then redistributed to publishers and to a pool of authors. Digital titles only represent only slightly more than 1% of the body of works that Access Copyright represents - but that hasn't stopped this organization for demanding a non-negotiable tariff be set upon universities at $45 per student.

This tariff is especially egregious because academic libraries have already negotiated and paid for many of the rights for digital works to be used in secured course management systems, library course reserve systems, and online course packs in support teaching and research. No matter, says The Enemy - only we can negotiate with publishers about how digital works can be used - not libraries.

I am very proud of the libraries and the administrations of the universities of Canada who have stood up against the heavy-handedness of Access Copyright.

I am especially proud of these institutions because opting out of Access Copyright does admittedly require more labour in the securing and communicating of the permitted licensed rights of the digital texts being used on campus. But this is work that can be done and it is work that is being done (I'm getting back to it as soon as this post is done).

I am particularly disappointed in the University of Western Ontario for signing on to Access Copyright's terms. At 29,000 FTE (2010), it appears that by doing so, the university has committed to pay $1,305,000 annually for many of the digital publishing rights that had already been negotiated by its librarians and material already designated as Open Access. It is particularly disappointing because the librarians and archivists at UWO are currently on strike for equitable wages.

To commit to librarians is to commit to making available knowledge for all. It is a commitment to scholarly communication. It is a commitment to scholarship itself.

The Board of Governors of UWO has decided that it would rather spend $1.3 million dollars rather than pay their librarians and archivists a fair wage. This gives the impression that this was a decision that was made for ideological reasons rather than for being fiscally sound.

I call on the The President and the Board of Governors of UWO to make a sound investment in its commitment to research excellence and to negotiate a fair wage with their librarians and archivists so their work of collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge can continue.

The library as a point instead of a space

2011-08-10T13:37:00.005-04:00

In one day, two things happened that fundamentally changed the way how I use my public library. It surprised me - maybe it will surprise you too.

It was a Saturday afternoon in July when I took my five year old son and my three year old daughter to the main branch of my public library. We do this on a fairly regular basis. But what changed that day was this: my five year old son decided that he was no longer interested in the toys kept in the children's section. He walked in, surveyed the available toys, thought a moment, and then he demanded that we go home immediately.

I can't say I blame him. He's an active five year old and the only book that he will curl up and pour over on his on accord is his Lego Star Wars Dictionary. It doesn't occur to him to go to a library to *read* as reading is for bedtime and sunlight should be spent playing. We have been going to the library for years and I have never seen him do anything but ignore the bookshelves.

So maybe it's my fault that I did not force him to find his own books from the shelves and that my ability to find awesome books for him has led to learned helplessness on his part. But I don't think so. Bookshelves that are crammed with thin picture books are really difficult to browse through - even for an adult, much less a four year old. And as someone has flipped through a lot of kids books, I can say that many of them are very uninspiring. Of course there are gems in there but they take some work to suss them out.

And the only reason I have been able to spend the time flipping through the picture books at all is because there there are toys in the library. The kids can play and mostly stay still while I can find books - at least books in the immediate area. At the central branch of my public library, the chapter books are in the next bay and the children's non-fiction books are in the next bay after that. And the adults books require an escalator ride upstairs.

Which leads me to my second epiphany. That same trip to the library was the first one in which I actively used the WPL mobile app while at the library. And it fundamentally changed my library experience. As my daughter was playing, she looked up at me and asked if we could borrow some 'Dora' books. So, I pulled out my iTouch, logged in and searched to see if there was any available. There wasn't, but I could hold the screen up to my daughter to ask her which one's she would like me to place a hold on. It is ridiculously easy to do this with the Bibliocommons app.

Forgive me for saying this, but since that moment, I can't help but feel that it is too much bother for me to drag a bag full of books and two kids (one protesting madly that she still wants to play in the library and other demanding we go home now) all around the first floor and upstairs to get books. Luckily, I don't have to. My public library allows me to place holds on books (including those that are even on the shelf at any branch) and doing so means that they can collect my books for me to pick up at the checkout desk in one fell swoop.

And do I miss the serendipity of browsing the shelves? No. Nope. No way. If you are an active public library user, then you already know the truth about browsing the shelves: books you really want to read are never in the library - they are being read.

Since that day in July, I've use the library more than ever. I use Bibliocommon's many lists dedicated to children's literature to find great books to read to our five year old (right now we are reading The Phantom Tollbooth). Every two weeks, I place a bunch of books on hold, and three or so days later I run into the library, pick them up, run out and then go pick up my daughter at her daycare just down the street. We don't go to the library anymore.

It is only now that I completely understand why public library gaming events are so important. How else are we going to draw young people into these spaces (or to rephrase this: into their spaces)? With the promise of shelf-browsing? Of reading in public? Really?

I mean, I'm an academic librarian and I'm now actively avoiding browsing the shelves.

And now I have to figure out how to deal with the disconnect with the services that our public library delivers and the unsaid understanding in academic librarianship that learning how to shelf-browse is some sort of essential skill for later life.

The best time to learn to compute

2011-08-05T16:18:00.002-04:00

They say that the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

I didn't learn how to code twenty years ago, but I am doing the next best thing.

I thought I would share with you my progress so far in case you wanted to get a jump on your own twenty year deadline. I think it's especially important to share this sort of personal experience because while there are many, many resources and many helpful folks out there to help you grok, the sheer enormity of what's available out there can make it difficult to get started. Maybe my coping strategies might work for you.

About a year ago, I made one of the best investments in learning more about computing and the web: I signed up for web hosting at Dreamhost. Now compared to the cost of an iPad or fancy laptop, Dreamhost's price of $9 a month is cheap as chips. But as hosting plans go, $9 a month is actually deemed expensive as some other companies offer hosting services that are closer to $9 a year.

(Be warned that these cheaper services can bring on additional costs as these companies will constantly try to ding you for for services that you need to be constantly vigilant about opting out of. As well, these companies set very low limits for traffic so if you can be dinged for bandwidth once you've signed up. Personally, it was these annoyances that made me switch - but you can go with whomever you'd like. Just make sure you get access to SSH...)

I am flogging web hosting as your computer learning platform for a number of reasons. First, I am one of many who believe that WordPress is the gateway drug to programming. It doesn't matter if you don't want to be another under-appreciated blogger in the world. You can create a WordPress site just to document your learning process... because if it's one thing I learned about computer culture, they appreciate the recursive.

Now, you don't actually *need* to look at the raw code that runs a WordPress site, but one of the very nice things about Wordpress is that its lid, so to speak, can be popped off easily enough for one to look in and poke around. You should try it. Before you know it, you might be hacking PHP just so you can use a fancier theme, for say, your personal or professional portfolio.

Web hosting that allows for SSH - otherwise known as secure shell access - means that you don't need to buy a new computer or partition your existing to start learning how to do command line computing and scripting. I've been trying to improve my own bash skills and I've found this series of free videos from Lullabot a great help.

The reward of getting comfortable at the command line is that you find yourself being to install some really cool web services for your own devices. I've installed ThinkUp to archive my tweets and FB updates and will hopefully installing Yourls so I run my own URL shortener. Later, I hope to have my own copy of Ushahidi installed for mapping fun.

It's funny - when I started writing this post, I was feeling really good about myself because I thought I had figured something tricky out. I have since realised that my celebration was premature and the nut before me remains uncracked. Sigh. More disorientation and frustration and screaming WHY U NO WORK at my computer.

But there's no point wishing I had done this twenty years earlier.

Librarians versus city councillors

2011-07-25T15:50:00.002-04:00

In the most July 2011 issue of WIRED there is a small article about the promise of open government data called "Why Open Data Alone is Not Enough". I've been following the Open Data movement from afar so most of the ideas in the article weren't new to me, but I will say that the stories of tragic, unintended consequences were.

Those involved in libraries might be interested in particular to its last paragraph:

The concern that open data may simply empower the empowered is not an argument against open data; it’s an argument against looking at open data as an end in itself. Massive data dumps and even friendly online government portals are insufficient. Ordinary people need to know what information is available, and they need the training to be conversant in it. And if people are to have anything more than theoretical access to the information, it needs to be easy and cheap to use. That means investing in the kinds of organizations doing outreach, advocacy, and education in the communities least familiar with the benefits of data transparency. If we want truly open government, we still have to do the hard work of addressing basic and stubborn inequalities. However freely it flows, the data alone isn’t enough.

Investing in the kinds of organizations doing outreach, advocacy, and education in the communities least familiar with the benefits of data transparency? Like, oh shall we say, libraries?

But we know that's not happening now. Not in our schools. Not in Toronto. Not where I live.

I'm still flummoxed whenever I sit and try to figure out why institutions dedicated to learning and our civic life are closing libraries in schools and neighbourhoods. I only have partial answers: our brand is books while the world watches video; the library is now associated with the lower rather than middle class, unionized workforces are vulnerable targets in our current political climate...

In light of these threats to our library systems, I'm working through this possible response: public libraries should actively develop and promote services to specifically assist citizens in working with and against governments.

I say this because I think it goes almost without saying there is a definite need. Beyond Open Data, there are so many other instances when governments seem to exist only to further empower the already empowered. Indeed, it appears that our governments are purposefully designed to discourage mass participation - as illustrated in this short and recommended TEDx talk by Dave Meslin called The Antidote to Apathy.

While there is a need, this course of action would be with some risk. We could alienate some of our users who shy away from the conflict of politics. And if we were successful, we could end up competing for the same job as our elected city councillors: From Catherine Porter's essay "The boxer: A guide to getting in the ring with City bureaucracy" from the anthology, "Local motion: The Art of Civic Engagement in Toronto" :

Imagine a community activist resource centre on the ground floor of City hall. It would be a place where you could drop in, tell a librarian your idea and be directed towards resources, experts, case studies, maybe even professors at universities who are into just that stuff. Wouldn't that be great?

...'That's what a councillor is supposed to do,' Councillor Adam Vaughan said when I described my dream community activist resource centre to him. Why bureaucratize a system meant to help navigate bureaucracy? he asked. Good point. But not all councillors are like Vaughan, who prides himself on helping community builders make changes in his ward, and even community-minded councillors don't always like their communities ideas. What if you great scheme is a bike lane and your city councillor is on the record for saying anyone who rides a bike on a major street deserves to be hit by a car (i.e., Rob Ford)?

So, should libraries get into the government activist business? Should we be serving up classes on The Freedom of Information Act along with our government documents?

Well, I think the answer depends on what you think the answer to this next questions is: Who is going to protect our public libraries from cuts and closures? Your city councillors or your community?