And I now need to figure out how best to maintain a local backup.

The Cloud: It's great until it isn't

The back story. Early this month I took extensive notes, almost a transcription, of an intense two-day meeting. My department was going to use these notes as the basis of several important projects (a strategic plan for Information Literacy on campus, just for one). I carefully synced with the servers even more often than the automated sync happens along the way, added and edited the note over the course of the next two weeks (on several computers, always carefully syncing with the servers), and then opened the note at the beginning of the first follow-up meeting at which we were going to actually start mining it and using it. But between the time when I opened the note and when I came back to my computer after talking about a minor scheduling thing with a co-worker, the note had gone completely blank.

Totally blank. Nothing there.

So I freaked out (very quietly and over the course of several hours) while we tried to see if we could recover it and opened up a co-worker’s notes to see if we could work from them in the mean time. After searching user forums and even buying a premium account so that I could see note histories (still to no avail), I emailed Evernote in desperation.

Their reply? Don’t worry, there never was a note.

Now, it was good of them to have a technician go back into the server logs for me, for sure. The fact that the server logs showed that the note had never been edited after I created it, though, was much less heartening. Combine this with an email my mom received earlier this month saying that they may have accidentally lost some of her notes off of their servers, and I’m much more motivated to create local back-ups.

So, if you use Evernote, here’s what I recommend (and I’m open to better recommendations if you’ve got them):

1. Select all your notes
2. Go to File > Export
3. Save all your notes someplace easy to remember
4. Repeat often, particularly after taking transcription-like notes during department-shaping 2-day meetings.

It’s kind of a clunky back-up mechanism, but for now it’s the best I can come up with. Too bad there isn’t a 4-step mechanism to reset my feelings toward the far too happy elephant in their logo.

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Anyway, my Ah Hah moment of the day was when this professor said that searching is a fundamentally empathetic tasks. That crystallized for me a lot of my thinking about searching — how you have to not ask a search interface a question (usually) but instead think of terms that your ideal article would have in it or associated with it. So, not my terms for a concept, but my ideal article’s terms for the concept. When I can get my students to make that leap, their results usually get much better.

I don’t know how useful it will be to use “empathetic” as a term when I teach (it’ll depend on the class), but it sure does help me think about the process.

Taking down shelving

I’m pretty excited that our current periodicals are moving to join their bound brethren.  The current print periodicals (which no longer actually reflect our current periodical holdings, now that by far the majority of our current issues are online) were housed in a huge, beautiful room on long white shelves, and they were shelved alphabetically by title (which I always hated because it assumed that you knew what you were looking for before you got there).

Now they’re shelved with their LC-classified backfiles! (And now we have a huge, beautiful room for studying in!)

This will make my life easier when I teach because when I teach using print journals (which isn’t always), it’s usually for one of four reasons:

New furniture being unpacked and arranged

1. I’m teaching stack browsing, and point out that a call number means a topic, and that this means that if you find a great subject encyclopedia in the reference collection and note its general call number, you’ll find lots of books on related topics in the book collection, and you’ll find journals on related topics in the periodicals collection. Before I always used to hedge saying that they should go over to the bound periodical collection, write down names of journals, and then check the current periodicals to see current issues. Now I can skip that last bit.
2. I’m teaching topic-selection. Most early-career students tend to think in book-sized topics, and we browse periodicals in their fields to get a sense of what a paper-sized topic looks like. That will be no harder to do now, and might be easier since all the discipline’s journals will be classified together.


What we're up to

3. When I’m teaching online browsing. It’s easier to see that scholarly journal issues usually have a stated or implied theme for every issue when you’re looking at the print version. Then I can stress the importance of browsing the online version to see if the great article they just found is part of a themed issue. Again, this won’t change.
4. When students will need to use some type of periodical. It’s easier to see the difference between a magazine and a disciplinary journal in print. This won’t change.

So for me, this is all gain and no loss. I hope it’s that way for the rest of the campus, too.

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The Old Spice Guy made custom videos, by request via social media.

Andy did his awesome Andy thing and took that as a challenge, and so we ended up with this library-related video:

And then came the news that 8 out of 5 dentists say that studying in the library is six bajillion times more effective than studying in your shower!

If all advertising were this fun I’d turn off my spam filters.

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So, if they write responses to readings and are asked what kinds of evidence the author used to support the argument, and what other kinds of evidence could have been used, that’s information literacy. If we talk to them about the ways that citation styles reveal epistemology, that’s information literacy. If we ask them to think about why articles appeared in one kind of publication rather than another, that’s information literacy. If we talk about disciplinary vocabulary, that’s information literacy.

And all of this will, of course, mean introductions to standard sources and search strategies and things. And some of this will involve 10-15 minute visits from me. But all of it should help these first year students move from thinking of published literature as The Voice Of Truth (to be paraphrased and revered) and start seeing it as a living body of work that each scholar navigates, and that each scholar shapes while navigating.

So I guess that’s another piece of the answer to my ongoing question: An information literate student can recognize intellectual choice and make appropriate intellectual choices when gathering, evaluating, and communicating evidence.

I normally think of vendors and technology-types who tell me “you only want the interface to work that way because you’re a librarian” as offensive, dismissive, supercilious… Well, you get the picture.

Last week I realized that these two ideas are actually related, and that neither I nor the vendors realize the other half of what’s going on at the reference desk. Neither of us realized that I watch students navigate a whole host of interfaces day in and day out — clean interfaces, cluttered interfaces, interfaces with facets, interfaces with single search boxes, interfaces with menus, Google, L’Année Philologique, Zotero, EndNote, ARTstor, Wikipedia. Neither of us realized that year upon year of watching students use or fail to use all these different kinds of interfaces means that I have a pretty good sense of what students at my institution are looking for in their research tools. Every single shift at the desk is a mini-usability study.

And sure, I’m expected to intervene in these mini-usability studies and guide the students toward the functionality they’re looking for. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not learning what constantly trips them up, or what I never have to point out.

So as it turns out, the desk is a two-way pedagogical space. And as it turns out, the vendors should take me more seriously when I point things out about their interfaces.

So, the Associated Press reported on Amazon’s acquisition of Woot.com. Looks like pretty standard reporting to me. A couple quotes here and there to give some substance — normal stuff.

How much do I owe you?

Woot noticed the article and realized that those quotes came from Woot’s blog. Woot remembered when the AP had cracked down on bloggers quoting AP material and created a handy web form for easy calculation and payment based on the number of words bloggers wanted to use when quoting the AP. And so, Woot decided that it was only fair to charge the AP for the quoted material. Here’s what Woot said (quoted for the purpose of comment and criticism, as allowed under section 107 of Title 17):

… We couldn’t help but notice something important. And that something is this: you printed our web content in your article! The web content that came from our blog! Why, isn’t that the very thing you’ve previously told nu-media bloggers they’re not supposed to do? So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we’ve figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post….

If you read the whole post, you’ll find that Woot proposes a compromise. I won’t spoil it for you.

So, since I quoted for the purposes of comment and criticism, here’s my comment followed shortly by my criticism.

Comment: I love Woot’s response because THIS IS SO DUMB! Oh, wait, that might have been my criticism. I guess I find it both hard to believe and stunningly easy to believe that the AP would have a web form that does everything it can to make you believe you have to pay $17.50 for up to 50 words of quotation. (It does mention Fair Use, in the little pop-up you can open if you want to know more about this license, but it makes Fair Use seem like a pretty rare thing, and a risky thing for both you and your employer.)

Criticism: This post is pretty much all criticism, I suppose, but I’m particularly critical of the “It’s only Fair Use if we quote you, not the other way around” and the “my lawyer is bigger than your lawyer” approachs to copyright. And then there’s the AP’s list of copyright dos and don’ts where all the dos are “do know about the risks of copyright infringement to you and your employer” and all the don’ts are “so don’t infringe our copyright.”

This isn’t copyright — this is playground bullying. If you take my milk, that’s stealing. If I take your milk, that’s my right.

And in a lot of ways, these Production Meetings seem to have worked really well. I always try to talk very clearly with professors about the learning goals for their courses and assignments so that I can figure out the ratio of fish to fishing polls I should be handing out to students, and these meetings gave me much more nuanced views of the goals than I’m often able to glean in other settings. It also gave me a much bigger picture view of the course, so that I could recommend (in one case) reducing the library-related work quite a lot in order to leave time for the more pedagogically relevant work in the course.

One thing the Production Meetings didn’t do, though, was make me any less reactive. If you’ve ever taught a course, you know that the syllabus is never quite chiseled into stone. Due dates shift. Assignments adjust as you get to know your students. And so when these Production Meetings left me feeling like I had a timeline for my term’s work, with specific due dates for things like a research guide, individual meetings with students, and classes, it turns out they did me a disservice. With everyone feeling so much more “in the loop” than we really were, we forgot to check in with each other and keep each other apprised of changes. In my case, it ended up leaving me scrambling at the last minute over and over when I would otherwise have just been scrambling at the third-to-last minute.

Granted, it was a pilot program, and we all learned a lot from that experience. Next time we’ll have a much better sense of how and when to check in with each other. Next time there will be more expectation on the part of the professors that they can’t change their syllabi quite as much when 5 or 6 other units on campus are depending on the plan. Next time the 5 or 6 other units will know better than to think the syllabus is final.

But I wonder if being proactive is really the highest good in the first place. I advocated for it strongly for years, and I still think that advanced planning is better than no planning most of the time, and I still think that the more we can talk with professors about their learning goals in advance, the better. But a classroom is actually an inherently reactive place. Students react to new knowledge, each in their own way and at their own pace; professors react to students, modulating delivery and content to match their students’ needs.

There’s got to be a way to balance the delicious reactiveness of a classroom with some organizational proactiveness, of course. But for right now, I think I’ll practice privileging ways of making space for reactiveness.

Just recently I joined two other communities, one where I was invested in figuring out the culture and in participating enough to build up trust and camaraderie with its members (or at least a subset of its members), and one where it’s likely I’ll never be an active participant. Right now I’m watching the first community mourn the death of one of its members, and I’m watching the other one hum along in a way that feels like an interesting but entirely foreign groove. And having both of these things as foils for my other hangout spots has set me to thinking quite a lot about what it means to be a community, and what this means for people who are hoping to build and maintain hang-out spots for groups of people.

I love it that my library is a community hang-out spot on campus. I love it that it has a culture and that there are both written and unwritten rules governing community participation there. And from what I’ve seen of the communities I’ve felt a part of in my adult life, these things are important for community building and maintenance. If these things aren’t explicitly shaped by some moderating force in the community, the community will come to these things on its own.

At the same time, I’m more aware than I was before that the very things that make a community feel like home to its denizens can also pose a barrier to entry for newcomers. Some barriers are higher than others, of course, but they’re barriers nevertheless. And since my job is to help usher my students into the community of academic scholarship, using my library as both a sub-community and a vehicle, I wish I knew how to see and overcome some of those initial barriers for my students. Because you know what? Belonging to these kinds of communities is a wonderful thing.

• We’re in the odd position of accomplishing two goals with every student: teaching them how to think like scholarly researchers in their chosen fields, and teaching them how to get access to the material they need. Depending on the student and the situation, we have to make snap judgments about which of these to privilege, and this often determines what kinds of tools we use with the students. Google (and Google Scholar and Google Books) is often mostly about access — disciplinary databases can be about that, but they are often mostly about epistemology and terminology. Google is a far more effective access tool if you know the epistemology and terminology of the field not only because you can search it more effectively but also because whereas the disciplinary databases do much of the selection and evaluation for you, Google requires that you be savvy enough to weed through gazillions of results (or change your strategy so that your results end up on the first couple of pages). While it’s not always needed, privileging the metadata over the text can sometimes be highly educational.
• Sometimes, metadata is content. The longitude and latitude fields in GeoRef, the historical period fields in Historical Abstracts, these bits of metadata allow researchers to do searches that are fundamentally impossible in other databases. You couldn’t get that stuff from free text searching. So I guess the indexing we pay for is even more fundamentally part of our collection than I’d thought of it before.

This wasn’t part of our discussion, but I’ve realized that while I don’t specialize in knowing the full disciplinary context of my students’ questions, I do specialize in knowing the metadata structures in the various tools at my disposal, and I guess a large part of what I do is choose between matching the metadata structure to the student or teaching the student a new metadata structure so that they can grow as a scholar. Content is usually accessible through more than one tool, so the trick becomes finding the most useful tool for the job.

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