Pegasus Librarian

Best Bad Marketing EVER

2009-07-16T14:23:00.002-05:00

I thought I could resist jumping into the fray on this one, but this story just keeps getting better and better.

Have you ever heard of the service called Clinical Reader? Apparently it's a new service that acts kind of like a feed reader, only they decide which feeds you read, and it's aimed at the medical community. The salient facts here being: 1) it's new, and 2) nobody had heard of it. Until this week.

This week they used twitter to threaten legal action against a blogger, explain that they'd overstepped and let some unknown junior colleague too close to the keyboard, argue with the blogger and her ever-growing posse, apologize to the blogger, and now send out bogus retweets.* (See the chronology below for the gory details.)

What fascinates me is how quickly (in the space of four days) hundreds of people have gone from knowing nothing about this service to being pretty sure that everyone at Clinical Reader is completely insane. The social web can be an incredibly rich marketing arena, but it has zero patience for companies that get stuff wrong, and it rather delights in calling out this kind of behavior. This is the flip-side of crowd-sourcing, and companies and libraries hoping to harness online social networks would do well to watch this real-life parable unfold.

Chronology:

The story is way more interesting if you see it unfolding, so here are the best places to get it in kind of chronological order. This blog-version of the summary is necessary because Twitter itself is kind of difficult to reconfigure in a way that makes sense after the fact, and because Clinical Reader has started deleting tweets. Oops.

Nikki noticed some less than ethical aspects of Clinical Reader's site (which now includes edits linking to the apology she received)
Steve summarized day one of the saga
Nikki gathered together links to a bunch of stuff that happened after Steve's post.
The RT shenanigans begin, but these need more space, and screenshots, so here we go...

Clinical Reader went wrong in two completely wrong ways with the retweeting. (By the way, read each of the screenshots from the bottom up, because I forgot I should reverse the order and don't feel like fixing it now.)

First, they thanked people for retweets even if the people had never retweeted them.

Then they seem to have completely made up tweets to retweet.

Amazing. Pardon me while I go pop some popcorn and settle in for the amusing ride. You can follow along on FriendFeed if you want.

P.S. The founder of Clinical Reader now says: "I have taken control of this account & parted company with former acquaintances in Canada whose behaviour I can only describe as schoolboy" (cite), and he is now apologizing to people. [The following sentence is apparently no longer true... which is ironic, since I was poking fun at Clinical Reader for misunderstanding how it works: "The problem is, he doesn't realize that if he starts with one person's name, there's no guarantee that everyone else will be able to see what he writes, since Twitter only lets you see messages directed at mutual friends." Further testing reveals that the other people would be able to see this message if they clicked on their @[username] page but not in their main Twitter feed. So, still weird, but not as egregious.]

* For those who don't use Twitter, RT means "retweet" and is a way to redistribute something somebody else said, complete with attribution. It's very much like a cited quote in a paper, only with links. So if I say "Something Clever" on Twitter, somebody else could say "RT @ijastram - Something Clever" which means "retweeting Iris Jastram who said 'Something Clever,'" and the "@ijastram" part automatically turns into a link to my tweets. Quotation and citation in 140 characters or less. Pretty slick.

An Interesting Thing Happened on the Internet

2009-07-07T15:49:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, somebody pointed me to a FriendFeed thread in which an artist and a FriendFeed user were working through issues of intellectual property and Internet etiquette.

The FriendFeed user, Kol, had bookmarked an image that he found on a site that allows artists to share their work with each other. In typical FriendFeed fashion, this bookmark appeared in FriendFeed with a thumbnail of the image he had bookmarked and with places for other FriendFeed users to comment on, "like," or re-share the bookmark and its related thumbnail image with their own sets of FriendFeed friends. The artist objected strenuously (and not at all politely) to the fact that this thumbnail appeared on FriendFeed. Kol and other FriendFeed users tried explaining that Kol had not, in fact, infringed on the artist's rights by bookmarking her image since thumbnails do not violate copyright and since the image was licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License (though the artist has since removed that license). In short, the artist was well within her rights to ask (politely) to have her image removed from FriendFeed as a matter of courtesy, but she was probably not within her rights to accuse the original poster of wrong-doing. That's the sanitized version, at least, which I reproduced here at some length because of difficulties with the original material.*

So, except for the attendant drama, the issues seem to be garden-variety intellectual property confusion. But all the drama involved in this particular exchange was actually kind of illuminating.

First, it reminded me that as an information consumer, I'm used to the feelings of frustration involved in finding out that I can't freely use other people's stuff however I want to even if I cite my sources. I run up against the flip-side of these frustrations only very rarely, however, and they're good to bear in mind. I happily slap Creative Commons licenses on lots of the stuff I produce, but I remember all too well the first time I found my work being reproduced and shared in a way that I didn't particularly appreciate but that fell squarely within the parameters of the license I'd chosen. There's nothing like working up a good head of righteous indignation only to remember that they're doing exactly what I said they could do and no more.

This particular discussion might also be less straight-forward than it at first appeared. Licenses always trump copyright, and the original image** has license-like language attached to it that prohibits "use" of the work outside of a specific community. The artist clearly thought that this applied to bookmarking and sharing via FriendFeed, though that's not at all clear from the term "use." Kol either didn't read those instructions, or read them but didn't think they applied to bookmarking, or read them but didn't think they constituted a license. (To be fair, I'm not completely sure they are a license, either, but I think good etiquette would be to assume that they do.) And where does all of this leave the artist's fans? If they want to share bookmarks with other fans or potential fans, they can't turn off the "suck in a thumbnail" feature of these social networks. The only way that gets turned off is if the originating site has lock-down features like Flickr does for the images its users make private.

Little did Kol know when he bookmarked this image that he'd bring down the wrath of the artist, spark a huge debate on FriendFeed (and a ton of re-shares of Kol's post), and set this librarian to musing about the incredibly intertangled worlds of intellectual property, etiquette, and the Internet.

* I don't like talking about things without linking to them, but this one has me on the fence for two reason: 1) the link may die suddenly since there was a promise to delete the thread as soon as someone from FriendFeed had seen and responded to the original poster, and 2) the language in this thread is decidedly not safe for work, or for kids, or for me. Still want to see it? Here you go. [Edit: yep, the original post is gone now.] I may or may not screen-grab the post for posterity. I haven't decided yet if that's fair to all involved, or if I want to have that kind of language saved anywhere associated with me. Call me a prude, if you want, but them's my boundaries and it's up to me if I want to cross them.

** I'm aware that by linking to that image, the artist may find my post, so I'll just say right up front that while I welcome constructive comments and discussion, I reserve the right to delete any crude or abusive comments. And I get to decide what constitutes "crude" or "abusive."

Well Hello, Blog

2009-07-03T11:27:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I had reason to point someone toward a couple of old blog posts I'd written. Popping over here to collect the links brought me up against a sobering realization, though: I posted once last month. Once. And that was a post I'd outlined weeks ahead of time. I've had dry spells before, but never like this.

It crossed my mind that maybe I should just put this thing out of its misery, but I don't think I'm ready to follow in CavLec's footsteps yet. So here I am again, and here's a bit of what I've been up to since last I thought much about blogging.

We had an unusually busy Spring term at Carleton. Budgetary adventures, a new initiative to archive digital versions of all senior capstone projects, revising our strategic plan, and some internal restructuring took up a lot of time and brain space.

My sister got married, my cousin got married, and my youngest brother graduated from college (with honors!), all in the space of a month.

Then I took two weeks off of work to do as much of Nothing At All as I could. In case you missed it, that was TWO WHOLE WEEKS off. In a row. Bliss. During that time, I became a big fan of sitting on the porch with a book, a laptop, and some iced tea. (In fact, I'm reprising my role as a porch-sitter right now, thanks to early observance of Independence Day.) Coming back to work was kind of a shock to the system after that, let me tell you.

It's been a weird few months in which many individual good things happened but the whole felt kind of awful. I was tired. I am tired. But I think things are starting to turn around. And while I'm not sure how frequently I'll post or what I'll write about, it's nice to see this space sitting here and waiting for me.

Four Years

2009-06-16T09:43:00.002-05:00

Since the age of 14, I've been measuring my life in four-year increments. Each increment had its own challenge, and each one culminated in its own major life transition. But now, for the first time in my life, I'm not going through a major life transition after 4 years, and I'm not reaching toward some tantalizing, terrifying, and fascinating goal four years distant

First there was high school. I'd decided to continue being home schooled, which terrified me. How could I be sure that I'd learn enough to get into college if I stayed home? I couldn't. So I learned absolutely as much as I could, fueled by a deep smoldering panic that I'd be horribly under-prepared for college. As it turns out, I wasn't under-prepared. So I graduated from high school and went to college.

Then there was college. That terrified me. How could I possibly both figure out what I wanted to do with The Rest Of My Life (in my head that phrase was always in capital letters) and also learn enough to do whatever-that-was in only four years? As it turns out, I didn't. And as it turns out, this is normal. So I graduated from college and, since I still didn't quite know what I wanted to do for The Rest Of My Life, I went to grad school.

Grad school terrified me. All these smart people, all this work, all this pressure. I had no idea how I'd make it through the reading assignments, let alone the term papers that were twice as long as any I'd written before (with the exception of my college senior thesis). After two years of that, I'd learned enough to decide that English Professor was not going to be my title for The Rest Of My Life, so I skipped out with a masters and moved over to the School of Library and Information Science... which terrified me for a whole different set of reasons. The classes didn't inspire me, and I'd never worked in a library, so I wondered what people did beyond sit at a desk and answer questions all day, which seemed like it could be unendingly dull. But just as I was going to quit and go back to the English Professor idea (the program had said I could come back any time), I got a job in a library and decided that this might suit me after all. As it turns out, it does suit me. So, after 2 years in English and 2 years in library school, I left graduate school and started my first job.

This Carleton job terrified me, so when I took it I promised myself that it need only be for four years. (After that, I planned to find a job closer to my family.) It was a job full of all kinds of opportunity, but also all kinds of responsibility. The people here were wonderful, but I worried that I'd be the weak link in their exhilarating, intense, and creative chain. As it turns out, our individual strengths and weaknesses seem to complement each other pretty well, so the job quickly grew to become my dream job. And so, as it turns out, I'm not looking for a job after my allotted four years.

And now, on this, the anniversary of the day I started here, I feel nearly qualified to hold the position I have. I've done a lot (started this blog, taught dozens of classes, met with hundreds of students, given conference talks, written articles and a book chapter). I've learned to negotiate tricky situations with at least outward confidence. And I've made fast friends for whom I'm continually grateful. These friends have talked me into confidence I'd never have found on my own, and they've talked me down when things seemed to be too much to handle. If it takes a village to raise a child, it apparently takes a sizable chunk of the internet and fair few face-to-face friends to raise a librarian, or at least this librarian.

I wonder what the next four years hold.

P.S. If 4 years seems about long enough to train up a librarian, I wonder how people like presidents feel.

Making FriendFeed Look the Way I Want It To

2009-05-08T08:18:00.004-05:00

I interrupt your regularly scheduled library-related thinking to bring you a brief note about FriendFeed. It recently changed its look rather significantly, and a few of us felt a little claustrophobic every time we looked at it. Luckily, if you're running Firefox you can install Stylish, which lets you modify a site's CSS. Once you install that, you need one or more of the following:

Enough knowledge of CSS to modify the site as you wish
Friends who know enough CSS to do that for you
The Internet, where you can find ready-made styles like this one

I know enough CSS to break things or tinker mildly with things that already exist, and I have friends who put up with my requests for help and whose code I steal mercilessly (hi Steve), and I have the Internet. So I started with this style, modified it to make it look more the way I wanted, begged for help making it look even more the way I wanted, and now have a small suite of style options (which you can copy and paste into new Stylish styles):

For when I'm in friend mode, at home: this cleaned up version. (last updated 5/29/2009)
For when I'm in work mode and really just want text to skim: this stripped down version that gets rid of user icons. (last updated 5/29/2009)
And since I'm not a very picture-oriented person, it seems: a style that makes all posted images into teensy thumbnails that I can click on to view in their larger sizes when I want to.

I have (1) and (3) running together at home, and I have (2) and (3) running at work.

Lest you think I'm at all good at this, I should point out that my tweaks were incredibly minor. Steve Lawson did the big stuff (by which I mean shrinking images to thumbnails, highlighting direct messages, and removing user icons). You'll also notice, if you look carefully at the code, that I just commented out portions of the original code, so you can restore that stuff and tweak it if you want.

A couple of other people really liked seeing which services were responsible for individual FriendFeed posts (like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc). If you're like them, try this Greasemonky script (after installing Greasemonkey, of course).

Just When I Thought Life Needed a Little Spicing Up...

2009-05-07T18:32:00.000-05:00

... Elsevier delivered for me. Ah, the sweet smell of fraud in the evening.

Tuesday, I heard that they'd (oops) published a fake journal under a fake imprint. Now they've admitted it, but not before the LSW had sunk its teeth in and decided that the upcoming zine could be hilariously renamed The Australasian Journal of Library Science (complete with some of the most pesky problems any journal could ever have... seriously, go read the thread behind that link), and that Elsevier could perhaps benefit from some customized Cod of Ethics merch.

Now we're up to six fake journals (sorry for the registration required by that link, but it's free), and Dorothea has contributed some less hilarious, more to-the-point commentary.

If I were writing the "scenes from next week's show" for this particular drama, it'd include revelations that their peer review system is run via seance, or that there's an invisible clause in their author agreements that really does sign over the authors' souls in addition to their copyrights. But since I'm not in charge, all I can say is Stay Tuned!

Crazy Thought

2009-05-07T08:19:00.002-05:00

Thinking about the things that I like about Google or about library databases in comparison with each other after my last post, I realized that library databases need crazy-easy URLs. I don't click through 2 or 3 layers of a website to get to Google. I type "goo" into my address bar, which fills in the rest, which takes me to Google. If I could type "MLA" into the address bar and get to even something as complicated as "MLAbib.csa.com," life would be easier. Sure beats my current option:
http://www.csa.com.ezproxy.carleton.edu/htbin/dbrng.cgi?username=carl&access=[gobbledygook]&db=mla-set-c&adv=1

If I could also set a cookie that would authenticate me from my own home computer, life would be even easier.

Still need to work on the seamless access to full text part of the equation, though.

I Really Wish It Were Easier

2009-05-05T16:10:00.000-05:00

Tipping point: reached.

Up until maybe the middle of last year, it was pretty easy not to worry too much about the problems of doing "real" library research on the free web. "The kids are doing it" was a phrase that simultaneously helped us to worry about the state of information literacy in this web-ified era and to dismiss the problem as one that "the kids" would outgrow, like braces or a lisp or chicken pox, as they became better versed in scholarly research practices.

Well, it's not just the kids any more, folks. Enough journal publishers have opened up their indexing and abstracts to the free web that it's now possible (especially in some fields) to actually do "real" library research on the web. And so people are doing just that. This year, our new faculty orientation session brought questions about Google-friendly access right to our door-step in a big way, and part of this rather disorganized thread on FriendFeed brought it up again.

And yes, ideally everyone could use one nice, big, easy search mechanism to do everything from the most broad to the most narrow topic and then get instant access to the full text of whatever they find. Too bad that's impossible.

Google is more familiar and forgiving, it's faster, and there's a lot of good stuff in it (particularly if you're searching for something that hasn't had any controlled vocabulary assigned to it, yet). But currently, disciplinary databases do a better job of collocating like items based on something more robust than the author's choice in vocabulary and PageRank. Currently, disciplinary databases do a better job of allowing scholars to leverage their disciplinary vocabulary and a better job of helping novices stumble upon key vocabulary terms. Currently, disciplinary databases are the only things that can offer relief to my students who say that there are just too many false hits in everything from Google to JSTOR (free text search may be what they're used to, but they're often relieved to leave it behind as soon as they're shown controlled vocabulary).

But all that aside, neither option does the "access to full text" piece of the equation very well. Unless your library subscribes to the publisher versions of pretty much every eJournal out there (an expensive proposition) Google can't actually help you get to whole swaths of full text, and even then you'd have to be on campus or logged in to your library's proxy server or something. And even if researchers are in a disciplinary database, they'll still often have to step outside of that database to get the full text, and while a link resolver is a wonderful thing, it's still a long way from being a perfect solution to this problem. Either way this lands you at the A-Z list figuring out if we have access to the particular issue of the particular journal you want.

I wish it were easier. I wish access issues didn't make researchers jump to the conclusion that we're "hiding" stuff from Google, or that we're being unnecessarily silo-ish, or that indexing is over-rated, or that you have to do "complex" searches in library databases. I also wish that we could bringing together disciplinary databases in ways that allow easy cross-searching without giving up the time-saving specificity of disciplinary focus and vocabulary.

Right now it feels like we're balanced precariously on that tipping point with a precipice on each side.

And So They Burned It

2009-04-30T22:07:00.001-05:00

As I drove in to work this evening the familiar voice of a piano professor here spilled out of the car speakers that generally only bring me voices of people like Steve Inskeep, Michele Norris, Scott Simon and the other body-less NPR friends that follow me through my days. She was explaining that Annea Lockwood composed an avant-garde piece in which a piano is burned. It's called "Piano Burning" (which strikes me as a not very avant-garde name for such a piece), and tonight they're performing it on campus.

Arriving on campus, there was the dilapidated piano standing alone in the middle of the Bald Spot, waiting to be burned.

Pianos I've known have always lived in warm, homey spaces, or stood in state on a stage. They've always felt like they calmly conceal the potential to thrill you tomorrow or next year or when your grandchildren come to visit. They've always promised great things for the people who can touch them with care and skill, and for the people those artists know.

This piano, though, is just sitting in the middle of its rectangle of cleared earth in the middle of a wide, blank field, hunched under the gathering clouds, and waiting to be burned. I've never seen such a starkly alone piano.

And then they burned it.

It's Been Quite A Week

2009-04-28T20:28:00.001-05:00

Last Tuesday we hosted one of the periodic meetings of the reference and instruction librarians that work at the five Oberlin Group libraries in Minnesota. At least once a year we have a "Round Robin" session where we basically sit down, eat lunch, and then talk all afternoon about what each of our libraries are doing. We'll set a theme for the day, but the themes are broad and nobody really cares if the conversation runs off on tangents. I love these days. This time the theme was about "Looking Forward" and included discussions of everything from mobile technologies to budgets. We also learned that we had about a week to decide if we wanted to purchase LibGuides.

That same day, the steering committee for that group of librarians met to begin planning what I'm now thinking of as the Coolest Project Ever: a day-long mini-Immersion just for us. We'll meet, we'll learn, we'll teach each other pieces of the best instruction we know how to do, and we'll remember again how much we can learn from each other. I can't wait.

Wednesday was full, and neatly bookended by dentist and doctor appointments.

Thursday was a more-than-12-hour day that started with an un-fun budget meeting and finished with evening reference.

Friday I taught two classes and had two meetings before lunch, picked up Laura Crossett at the airport, made her hang out for a while so I could get a complicated research guide published, and then began the Weekend Of Fun. I have a very small handful of "best friends," and two of them spent the weekend visiting me. Martha Hardy came down from the cities and joined me and Laura in what she called The Library Camp of Iris' Living Room. Wonderful.

Monday morning, it was back to the airport and a fond farewell to Laura, followed by probably the hardest class I've ever had to teach, followed by a reference shift.

Which brings us to today. Today we got word that we have rooms and everything for MnObe Immersion, and I filled out paperwork that makes our imminent acquisition of LibGuides official! (I think that makes this the fastest library-related non-book acquisition I've ever been a part of, by the way.) I also started seeing some of the 60 students I've taught in the last 2 work-days, plus some of the students in another class that, yet again, cannot seem to make American Memory work for them. The professor and I have tried so many different ways over the last couple of years to make this particular class understand this particular resource, but for some reason it never seems to work out. I'm flummoxed.

In amongst all of this, in the last few days my cousin gave birth to a baby with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, a friend of a friend's husband killed himself, another friend's father tried in earnest to kill that friend's brother, and my cousin spent all day today waiting for her baby girl to make it through the surgery that will begin the long process of constructing a functioning heart. I was feeling a little sorry for myself last week because of over-long work days full of too many things to do. Perspective gained. I have it pretty good.

The New New OCLC

2009-04-24T07:24:00.001-05:00

Just when you thought you'd gotten to know the new OCLC, it shakes things up again. OCLC is now in the ILS business and WorldCat Local is now free to FirstSearch subscribers.

My first thought on reading about all of this yesterday was that all those pilot WorldCat Local schools must be steamed that this is now free.

My second thought was almost equal parts pleased and worried. I'm pleased that this is yet another competitor against the current lumbering giants in the ILS market, and I like the idea that (if I understand correctly) this will add a hosted option to the ILS market. (Hosted options aren't always the best, but I like the idea of having it available as a choice for people.) On the other hand, this means that that pesky new policy on the transfer and use of OCLC records really wasn't just about protecting a bunch of member-produced data after all. There were bigger plans afoot, and these plans involved leaning even farther toward the vendor model rather than the service model. And if OCLC is a vendor rather than a service, that new policy feels even more like a land-grab rather than an effort to protect member investments.

My third thought, on further reflection, will hopefully be less nebulous and conflicted and more grounded in fact and reasoning.

LSW's Growing Pains

2009-04-22T21:54:00.000-05:00

An interesting thing happened. This little group of friends decided, mostly as a joke, to call themselves the Library Society of the World. Then that Society got big.

The amateur anthropologist in me has been watching the group negotiate this phenomenon for a while now, and it's fascinating. Here's a short sketch.

Two years ago, Josh created a wiki and basically told his friends "Wouldn't it be fun if we called ourselves the Library Society of the World? Sign up, give yourself a silly title, and have fun." At that point, we mostly communicated via Twitter and a Meebo chat room. At that point, we talked just like we'd been talking before. The only difference was that we'd adopted a group name.

Fast forward about a year as friends of friends started joining in the discussion. We still hung out in the Meebo chat room, though Twitter had blown up one too many times and most people had jumped ship for FriendFeed. I now no longer knew everyone I was talking to if I posted to the LSW FriendFeed room, which was pretty cool. My core group of friends was still my core group of friends because we'd been friends for a while now (of course there were a few new friends in the mix, because that's how friendships work over time), but the LSW was bigger and broader than that core group, and there were even whole social networks of LSW members that I hadn't joined (like LinkedIn for example).

Then an interesting thing happened. People started joining the LSW never having known it in its infancy. People started hearing about it at conferences and workshops. Big Names started declaring allegiance. New members figured they were joining A Group, something substantial, something with heft and momentum and growing name recognition (albeit, a Group with a pretty lose sign-up mechanism). Joining and participating in A Group comes with a whole different set of expectations than joining and participating in a circle of friends.

And at this point, with membership estimates topping 800, it's entirely reasonable for new members to expect the thing to feel like A Group rather than just a group. Protesting that it's "just a group" is becoming less and less productive. At the same time, the thing is a grassroots collection of librarians doing stuff and sharing information, which means that there's really no formalized set of processes, governance, or oversight that people might expect from a Group. I'm not even sure I know where all the social networks are that have been created in the name of the LSW. The whole idea is for people to jump in and just do stuff, kind of like we did when we were just librarians doing stuff who also happened to be friends.

I'm fascinated to watch this Group (for it is undeniably too big to protest that it's not A Group) and see how it weathers these growing pains. For my part, if I hear "I wish the LSW were more [fill in the blank] than it is," I hope I'll answer with an encouraging "Then help make it that way! Or at least make your corner of it that way," rather than with something along the lines of "But that's irrelevant because it's really not a formal Group."

Personally, I think this is an exciting development. It means that things are different, sure, and that we should probably take a step back and decide what will have to change and what can and should stay the same. But if more and more people start doing stuff in the name of the LSW, developing friendships, and forming their corners of the LSW into whatever it is that they need it to be, I think this can only be a good thing.

Have Interest - Will Adopt New Conference

2009-04-08T09:24:00.001-05:00

For the last couple of years, I've been wondering just which conference I should adopt as "my" conference. I want it to be one where the sessions are thought provoking and where I'll get to hang out with people I know and like and are interested in things I'm interested in, and where I can meet people I've never heard of before and that have the potential to become my new best friends. So far, the conferences I know about are either so far above my technological abilities that I'd be lost the whole time and not have much reason to apply those skills in my everyday life, or they are at the "no really, the web can help you" level. And so far, I've attended the latter sort of conference primarily because that's where other people who are stuck in the middle like me attend. These are the people I learn from the most, and this is where they go, so that's where I want to go.

My experience last week reinforced this for me. I had a great conference! But reading Kathryn's post, I realized that what we all want is a different conference to attend. We want something that falls in between the two kinds of conferences that are out there already but that has national (and international) draw like the current options do. Personally, I want something that gives nearly equal time to carefully thought-out presentations and less structured discussion. I want to hear from library-types and non-library-types. I want the moon.

Does this exist? Shall we descend on some unsuspecting conference and make it so? Shall we invent it from scratch?

Notes from One Who Aspires to Great Public Speaking

2009-04-07T20:49:00.001-05:00

Catherine Pellegrino talks quite well about how active learning could be as much a part of conference presentations as it is a part of our classrooms. I won't recreate her arguments here (go read them!), but they got me to thinking about my own presentation style, the styles of presenters I've seen recently that kept me engaged. I will simply add that active learning may not scale to suit large audiences, or suit every topic, or fit every audience. If, for whatever reason, I decide not to include active learning in my future presentations, it will be by choice, and I will remember that this choice comes with the same huge consequence that I face in similar circumstances in my own classroom: I will have to work even harder to make sure that my presentation is engaging in the absence of mandatory engagement.

While I'm at it, I will remember how comfortable I've become in my own classroom not using PowerPoint, or using it very sparingly. And I won't feel cowed into using it simply by nerves or a false sense of serving future audiences. Back in the day (by which I mean, "I've heard of such things but only seen them in disciplines other than mine these days") people used to present papers, which meant that the actual paper was available for perusing later. Pretty handy if you weren't able to attend the actual session, but unfortunately you have to have a pretty stupendously amazing paper in order to be engaging as you stood in front of everyone and read it. I can't imagine ever having such an amazing paper that I'd be comfortable delivering this type of presentation. My style is much more pseudo-extemporaneous: me, a few notes and an outline, careful rehearsal, and maybe a handout or a PowerPoint. And for me, this PowerPoint does not substitute for a presented paper because that entire genre of presentation is foreign to me. No, if I'm worried about future audiences I'll make a handout or a summary or a blog post or a video or anything that will make sense to that audience without saddling my present audience with stuff they don't need.

It's too bad that knowing and doing are such completely separate acts. I guess the best remedy will be practice... which would mean submitting proposals... and, you know, actually presenting.

"The Library" and Other Grand Unifications

2009-04-05T18:59:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago, while attending ACRL, I heard a question that nagged at my imagination: "If we define a doctor as 'one who practices the art of healing,' what is the analogous one-sentence definition of a librarian?"

Yes, I know that boiling everything down we do into one sentence is a little bit absurd, and that the given definition for a doctor is similarly circumscribed. But to the extent that we use such questions to focus and motivate our thinking, I think they can help us to step out of our own day-to-day existences (full of tasks and politics and committees and budgets and "where is the bathroom") and gaze out at the broad, breathtaking, and inspiring vista of our profession as a whole.

This is exactly what Kathryn Greenhill, John Blyberg, and Cindi Trainor have done in their Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians.

So what happens when you make "grand, optimistic, obvious, and thankful" statements about The Library-with-a-capital-L? So far, it seems that people take a deep breath, let the statements sink in, feel them, taste them, and then start comparing them to everything we do and have done and hope to do in this profession, trying to see how the statements stack up against reality. This strikes me as a beautiful response. Even most of the responses that contend that "Your Library-with-a-capital-L doesn't pertain to my library" or that "saying that 'The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization' is far too ambiguous" are evidence of this kind of productive, stimulative thinking.

Today I've been thinking about the relationship of The Library to individual libraries, asking myself "What is the one-sentence definition of a library?" and wondering if it's similar to asking "what is poetry?" Is it like porn, where you'll "know it if you see it?" And what do we learn by theorizing a Platonic Library? In what ways does this focus our thoughts and motivate our futures regardless of our individual circumstances?

T. S. Eliot theorized about the art of great poets in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." A great piece of criticism in itself, I have always particularly appreciated the way he positions the best poets as those who display their individual talent through grounding in the poetic tradition rather than in opposition to it. He explicitly does not say that the best poetry is "traditional" or copy-cat-ish or anything like that. Quite the opposite. He writes that "tradition is a matter of much wider significance [than "blind adherence" to past forms]. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour" (Eliot, paragraph 3). In his view, writing from a sense of tradition requires that poets step outside of their own location in time and space, "write not merely with his own generation in his bones" (Eliot, paragraph 3), and become the catalyst that will make the particular and the general spark into art. In the same way, being a librarian in a particular library is rendered meaningful and significant not solely based on our own individual missions and actions. We have the fundamentals of The Library that bolster our efforts and define our innovations.

The beautiful part of Eliot's essay, though, comes in the 4th paragraph in which he explains the ramifications of having all of poetry tied together by Tradition. "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone," he writes. Everything written must be valued and appreciated in relationship to everything else that has been written, but this influence is not unidirectional. "The existing order is complete before the new work arrives," he says, "For order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered" (Eliot, paragraph 4). If we accept the theory of the Platonic Library, the Tradition that allows for poetic creativity, then we are also accepting that as each of us effects change, we fundamentally affect The Library as a whole. This strikes me as a daunting, inspiring, thought provoking, somewhat terrifying, but empowering outcome of theorizing a Platonic Library even for the many individual libraries that may not feel included in the Darien Statements.

This post has gone on over-long and is really just a sketch, just my first attempt to figure out what about the idea of a Library-with-a-capital-L resonates with me so strongly. I hope some of you will speak up and help me figure out what I'm saying, where I've gone wrong, and what makes sense to you. I don't fully understand my own stance at the moment, but like Steve, I know which conversation I want to be having.

Best Conference Ever... In An Odd Way

2009-04-04T16:49:00.001-05:00

I've been lying here on the couch for most of the day, too tired to move, or read, or get up to put on a CD. I feel like I've been extruded, or beaten about the head, or like I've given blood twice in one day. But you know what? It was totally worth it to spend time in DC with so many of my favorite people.

The really interesting thing, for me, was that I left this conference feeling like it had been the most productive conference I've ever attended... only I didn't attend this conference. I just hung out in the lobby (or on the floor when our LobbyCon ran out of chairs and so we invented CarpetCon). And yet, I had all kinds of interesting conversations with other librarians about merging IT and research service points, unconferences, taking what we can from unconference philosophy and applying it to instruction (this Catherine's idea, which she blogged about here), academic media librarianship, the death of Second Life as a viable experiment, Open Source library catalogs and how many people are seriously considering them now, to what extent it's a good idea to shift our information to the cloud, benefits and drawbacks of WorldCat Local, ... and whatever else came to mind. It was so much fun to sit there among these incredibly smart and talented people for two days and two nights, soaking in their ideas, feeding off their energy, and doing a healthy amount of joking around in the process.

I wish I'd had a little more energy to participate in everything while I was there. A couple of times I hit that "it hurts to be alive" level of tired and had to sit out some really interesting conversations. But other than that, there's nothing I would have changed about this trip. I loved having the actual conference right there, with all the people going to actual sessions buzzing about the things they'd heard, what they thought had been interesting, and what they thought hadn't worked out quite so well. It was like having the blogosphere happening in real life right there in front of me.

Oh! And since every conference must have at least one "Wow, it's a small world" moment, here's mine from this trip. Jessamyn and Laura Crossett and I stayed up far too late Tuesday night talking in full middle school sleep-over mode. Part way through the conversation, Jessamyn mentioned the town where she lived when she was young, and it turns out that for several years I drove right past her house every single week, at least once, on my way to the church where my dad was the assistant pastor. From there I moved to a suburb of Chicago and lived less than a mile from the Dominican, where Laura Crossett was at the time. So there the three of us were, in that room, and I'd spent years and years so near each of them. Weird.

P.S. The picture above was taken by baldgeekinmd and features me (or, the half of me that didn't spill off the right hand side of the picture... yep, that's me in the white sweater and jeans) and a healthy chunk of the lobbycon regulars.

I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane

2009-03-29T19:05:00.000-05:00

At the very last minute, I decided to fly out to DC (well, Crystal City, actually, which is the travel equivalent of buying a vinyl rather than a leather couch). The chance to hang out with a whole bunch of incredibly cool librarians, talk about whatever comes to mind, and do so without registering for an actual conference just doesn't come around all that often for me, so I'm pretty thrilled.

Actually, in my better moments I'm thrilled. I think of seeing some of my best friends in the world, of joking and being serious, of eating out, and of generally doing whatever seems best to do at the time, and these things seem very very good. Then I remember that doing this requires that I do unpleasant things like pack and figure out logistics and in many other small ways step beyond my comfort zone, my routine. These things feel much less good. In my worse moments these things are nearly enough to make me question the whole prospect of the trip.

This is a pretty typical set of emotions before I travel, though, so I'm not surprised. The day before the trip I always wish I'd just decided to stay home. But then I get to the airport, through security, and up to the gate. I sit down to wait for boarding, and suddenly everything seems better. At that point all the preparations over which I have any control are done and all I have to do is go with the flow. At that point, I can blend into an anonymous crowd and watch people or daydream or read or do whatever comes to mind. At that point, the trip finally starts to feel like a good idea.

I'm looking forward to that moment. And this time I'm particularly looking forward to what comes after I reach Crystal City since I'll get to meet some new people and reunite with some of the people who know me best. And I can't wait to experience my very first LobbyCon.

So all in all, things are going well. And now I'll concentrate on the glorious potential of this trip as I go out and run some errands and then pack.

Charitable Writing

2009-03-27T11:19:00.000-05:00

A couple of years ago Meredith Farkas wrote a post in which she introduced Josh Neff's phrase "charitable reading" to the library blogosphere. The phrase is a good one, so it has bubbled up from time to time over the years. Essentially it means "read what people write and assume that those people meant well and that they are not stupid." Granted, occasionally people don't mean well, and sometimes they are stupid, but the idea is not to have those as your baseline assumptions.

I've been thinking a lot about this in the last several months (two years is an eternity in blog years but not very long in human years, so I'm allowed to still be thinking about this, right?), and I think that this is only half of what makes for productive written discussion. The other half is Charitable Writing: assume that your audience is not stupid, that they mean well, that they are probably trying to do the best they can or think carefully or otherwise conduct themselves well, and that they wouldn't be reading and interacting with you if they didn't want to.

Lately I've found myself unsubscribing from blogs and twitter feeds that, even though they have potentially useful content, present ideas in ways that sound condescending. Somehow that tone of writing screams "I'm pretty sure I'm smarter than you!" so loudly that it drowns out the calm murmur of the authors' interesting ideas. This tone forces to me to work far harder at Charitable Reading than feels fair. It eventually wears me out. And so I unsubscribe and trust that others will point me toward the truly important posts.

Charitable Reading is hard. I fail at it frequently. But I think Charitable Writing is even harder because it it requires that authors see beyond the facts that they're conveying, step into somebody else's head, and hear from that other person's perspective the tone that they probably didn't know they were conveying... and then to do this from multiple potential readers' perspectives. With so many potential ways of failing at this kind of writing, it's a good thing that readers will be trying to read charitably!

Mini Rant About Gtalk's Idle Status

2009-03-24T08:27:00.000-05:00

Part of the reason I love IM and dislike the phone is that I have a better chance of telling if the person on the other end is interruptable before I interrupt them when we're talking via IM. Phones don't have statuses, so I get shy.

Most the time IM statuses make sense. People are either available or away. It's not rocket science. But Google just had to mess with a good thing and use an "Idle" status that every other chat client I've used interprets as "Away." Not only that, but if you were once available but haven't done anything for a couple of minutes, it sets you to Idle. If you were once busy but haven't done anything for a while, it sets you to Idle. Both look exactly the same, and both look like you're "Away" from any other chat client. This means that I now have no clue if you're available, and that the only ways I might have a chance at guessing are if I remember that you tend to use Google Talk through the Gmail page or the Gtalk client or if you add clarifying text to your status.

Dear Google, if you're going to do Idle statuses, you should really stick to something that means "I used to be available but I haven't chatted in a while," and this should not look like an Away status to every other client out there. If people were Away and have been for a long time, chances are they're still Away, so switching to Idle doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If it makes a difference, though, you could have another status that means "I used to be away but I haven't checked in for a while." This way we're return to a land of less confusion.

Shoving and Making in 2009

2009-03-23T12:17:00.001-05:00

The first annual (I hope) LSW Shovers & Makers awards are being announced as we speak, and I've got to say, it's inspiring.

We all know that we do a lot of good work in this profession, and that it takes a village, and all that. This is tangible expression that these things we know must be true in theory really are true. I've been sitting here refreshing the site and getting inspired anew by what I've read there, and I hope that each of you will take the time to write up a little bit about what you've done lately that you're proud of. I know a few of you and can't wait to see you post about the work that you do, and I'd like to hear what those of you I don't know so well have been up to.

P.S. Here is my profile on the site.

Reflecting on ACRL

2009-03-19T19:07:00.002-05:00

This time around, ACRL was a better experience than last time, thanks in a large part to those of you who introduced yourselves to me, and to several of my LSW friends who spent a great evening together on Saturday. As I sat in the closing keynote (with IRA GLASS, people!!! Now that's how to close out a conference!), Ira's performance reinforced what I love about this profession, what made the sessions that worked work, and what had been missing from the sessions that failed to live up to my expectations.

He sat on that stage, surrounded by drapery, potted trees, two giant screens, an ACRL logo-bedecked podium, and stage lights. He sat there in a hoodie behind a tangle of cords, a mixing board, two high-powered CD players, and a large microphone. And in the midst of all this, there in that stark contrast of the majestic and the mundane, he explained that facts and their presentation can either be surprising and joyful, or they can be confining and boring. Story telling depends on suspense and on the story-teller's ability to couple facts with ideas. Plot isn't enough to hold our interest. Plots become stories when the story-teller can zoom out, so to speak, and show the broader landscape that gives these factual details their context. Story is all about how facts -- so local, so specific -- apply to something larger, something more meaningful.

Most of the sessions I attended were chock-full of facts. Several had organized those facts into a cohesive plot. Only a couple, though, managed to make those facts interesting and broadly applicable. Only a couple managed to zoom out and perform that first level of abstraction that would lodge in their listeners' minds, prime them for that level of anticipation and surprise that makes learning enjoyable.

Even beyond explicating my own enjoyment and my own learning at this particular conference (or lack thereof), I hope I can work a healthy respect for surprise, suspense, joy -- story -- into my teaching. Research is the quintessential environment for coupling facts and ideas, and it can be presented in ways that either stifle interest or expand it, ways that either bore or surprise. If my students learn nothing more than that what they find can interest people, I will consider that they have learned something important (and that they should come back to me to learn how to actually go about mimicking the research habits of scholars in their fields).

Ira may have covered this in the 20 minutes after I had to leave to catch my flight home, but I think the musical pauses he works into his show (and which he worked into his performance at ACRL) are also key elements of story telling. If his structure is plot, plot, plot, plot, idea, plot, plot, idea, then I think the pauses exist to give people space to comprehend. It's the serious version of comic timing, and it's just as important to the overall effect. And if there's one thing that I learned from watching both Ira and Sherman Alexie (another incredible speaker that I truly enjoyed listening to at this conference), it is that these pauses are carefully planned. There is nothing accidental about them, just as there's nothing accidental about the ideas that these story-tellers present to give their plots meaning.

I am very bad at pausing.

Little by little I will become a better teacher and presenter. And in a strange way, both the successful presentations at this conference and the presentations that failed to deliver served to illustrate just where I want to concentrate my efforts this coming term.

Basking in the Reflected Glow

2009-03-16T14:30:00.002-05:00

I was busy recruiting ACRL attendees for the Library Society of the World this past week, which involved several conversations about how it got started (a funny story that can be told with more or less snark depending on the situation... I love snark-flexible stories). My favorite part to tell, though, is the "you are here" part. If you decide to take up with this crew, you'll find yourself surrounded by smart, thoughtful, innovative, energetic, inspiring, and just plain wonderful library people.

There have always been anecdotes of useful conversations and interesting ideas to share when trying to explain why I think the group does good work, but as the group and individuals within it continue to work hard to improve the profession, it's getting easier and easier to point to things that non-LSW members will have heard of and say "Look at this, and this, and this. See? These people really are cool!" Take, for example, yesterday's announcement of the Library Journal's list of Movers and Shakers. That list includes so many people that I know from LSW: Dorothea Salo, Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, Jason Griffey, Karen Coombs, Michael Porter, Rachel Walden, Dave Pattern, Lauren Pressley. Then there are a few other people listed that I know but am not quite sure if they've declared themselves LSW members (one of the fun things about the LSW is that there is no comprehensive roster of members): Chad Boeninger, Melissa Rethlefsen, Sarah Houghton-Jan, and the "Dutch Boys" (Erik Boekesteijn, Jaap van de Geer, and Geert van den Boogaard). That's a quarter of the LJ list, folks. That's nothing to sneeze at!

On top of that, there are all the other cool things that LSW members play huge roles in, like LCOW, Library Camp Kansas, the ALA unconference, the Lib2.0 Unconference (in Australia, since this is "of the world," remember), BIGWIG programming, setting up all kinds of conversation spaces online (the LSW Meebo room, the LSW forum, the LSW LinkedIn group, the LSW FriendFeed room)... the list goes on and on and on. And now, the LSW is coming up with a way to recognize all the amazing things that its members do day in and day out. If you haven't seen it yet, check out the Shover & Maker award site which appears to be gearing up for something big.

What started as a joke has become an actual force in the library world, and I, for one, am honored to bask in the glow of these truly inspiring people

Settling in for ACRL in Seattle

2009-03-12T18:27:00.003-05:00

I love Seattle. This is only my second time here, but it's just such a pretty city. And seriously, the entire down-town area smells of coffee, which strikes me as the perfect smell for a city.

I'm sitting here listening to announcements before the opening keynote and hoping that this conference will strike that tricky balance of being both fun and informative. My last ACRL (which was also my first) wasn't such a great experience, so I'm on a mission to make this one different. Last time I think I chose my sessions poorly, and I had no idea how to meet up with people, so I ended up feeling like the most anonymous person in a sea of potential friends. This time I hope to choose better sessions to attend, and I'm hoping that I'll manage to connect with some great people and re-connect with previous acquaintances. Part of this depends on you! If you're here and see me (mostly recognizable by my olive green back-pack, which complements my jeans nicely) please introduce yourself! As a hint, I'll probably be near a power outlet, and yes, I'm happy to share my extension cord with you.

So here goes. Keynote, then dinner, then hanging out, then back to the hotel (which is right across the street from the Seattle Public Library!). Here's hoping for a useful, engaging, and fun conference. See you there!

Digital Humanities and Digital Collections

2009-03-04T13:28:00.001-06:00

If you've been following the work and discussion that's come out of Project Bamboo, you will have noticed a few sticking points: there are the IT folks, there are the humanities faculty, and there is the original proposal, and so far there is not a whole lot of fundamental consensus between the three about an ideal path for this project.

You'll notice I didn't include librarians in that list, because for the most part they've been marginalized or absent from the discussions I've heard. When librarianship does make an appearance, it has mostly been in the context of finding stuff or of bridging the gap between the IT folks and the faculty. (There could be another whole blog post about why I think librarians could play a much larger role and how we do more than find things, but I don't think that's actually the fundamental sticking point. At least not yet.) But I digress. As I was saying, I hear one of three distinct voices whenever I hear about Project Bamboo, and this was never more clear to me than yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday afternoon one of our three representatives to Project Bamboo, an art historian, explained to a small group of humanities faculty that she wanted to collect their research stories so that she could report back to her subgroup in the Project. She said the IT folks kept talking about building things, but her subgroup was sure that the people who wanted to build things didn't understand the research practices of humanities faculty well enough to build anything that would suit these practices well. She pointed out that each humanities professor's practice is quite different because each person's area of research requires different kinds of evidence, and that she wasn't sure that "a tool" would help a wide enough group of people to be worth it.

I agree, for the most part. I also agree with Dorothea who has pointed out that there are already good tools out there just waiting to be used. Several times in this meeting yesterday, faculty members would say that they wished for a tool that would do x or y, and I'd think "oh, you need del.icio.us" or "oh, you need a wiki."

What I hadn't anticipated, though, and what seemed to surprise most of the people in the room, was the amount of commonality between the research practices of every single faculty member in the room. To a person, they all talked about going somewhere to look at a bunch of related stuff and use this exploration to find connections and draw conclusions. One will go to archives in Italy, another to an art library in the Hague, another to TV broadcast stations in Lebanon, another to a specific library in France... and the list goes on. Each one talked about travel and working within the constraints of the place they visited as their major hurdles. But each and every one of them said that there was no way to know exactly what was there before they got there, no way to predict in advance what insights they would draw, and no way to conduct their better research without this process of going and looking at heaps and heaps of stuff. Each one said that it wouldn't solve all their problems, but what they really wanted were digital collections from which to work, or comprehensive highly detailed finding aides at the very least.

When I first heard hints, way back before the first workshop last year, that this would be the direction of the project, I was kind of disappointed. "You have all the power and money of the Mellon foundation and these massive groups of skilled people, and you want digital collections?" I screamed silently to myself. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that building the perfect marriage between digital collections of this scope and intuitive interfaces could be a very good goal for this group. If these interfaces could be built on careful metadata and powerful yet flexible indexing, and if they could mimic the best parts of spreading a box of photographs out on a desk while stripping away the clumsiness... that would be a thing of wonder. Just because it's a thing that people have been trying to build for years doesn't mean that it couldn't be a "new" project for by this amalgam of participants. And in fact, this amalgam could possibly move farther toward accomplishing such a goal than any other group I've seen.

Thundersnow!!!!

2009-02-26T20:34:00.000-06:00

People said it wouldn't happen. People said our meteorologists were exaggerating again. But it happened. Right in the middle of a lunch-time presentation, everything we were learning got suddenly upstaged by massive, long, drawn-out rolls of thunder while snow fell at a rate of 4 inches per hour. I've never seen anything like it. Four Inches Per Hour! The only people who find this more exciting than I did are those meteorologists. They were practically popping champagne.

I was glad, though, that my sled-car and I only had a couple of miles to drive after work, because the plows couldn't keep up and there were areas where the snow was still 4 or 5 inches deep on the roads. (I worried about my van-pooling commuter friends all afternoon, but luckily they made it home. Whew.) If we get the inches people think we will overnight, tomorrow morning's drive could be very exciting.