Beta-licious

Yeah, the air conditioning is back on at my library!

A few days ago my husband passed on a link to Valley Beta. You can sign up as a potential beta tester for new Web 2.0 apps. You fill out a profile and they broker your participation to developers who can pick testers by "demmy-graphic and location." We'll see if library students can find a niche.

These same people also run the equally cool-making and less work intensive Valley Schwag, which sends you a monthly care package of schwag that startup software companies distribute for a subscription fee of 14.95/month. I'm pretty new to the Web 2.0 world, but I'd sure love to look like I was in the know!

Got Gwigle?

Thanks to Wired, I now know about this fun way to learn advanced search techniques on Google. Gwigle is an online game that challenges you to guess what Google search terms yielded a given set of results. Along the way they throw advanced techniques into the filled in part of the search bar, such as the minus symbol (to exclude certain results) and "intitle" (to find webpages with the search term in their title). All of these cool ways of getting closer to getting the exact hit you need are out there, but I had procrastinated getting up to speed until this fun, challenging, fast method made it irresistable. I barely realized I was learning.

Why don't more tech tutorials work like games? I had a lot more fun working my way through the levels and seeking tips as I needed them than reading about it or watching a disembodied clicker do it on a powerpoint presentation.

Thanks Gwigle!

Plugging into the conversation

Yesterday was a postless, nerve wracking day–what if I never came up with any ideas about what to actually write about on my library blog? I was sure mine was destined to be a short foray into the biblioblogosphere. All of you library bloggers out there make it look so easy! So I took a deep breath and did some deep digging… well, deeper digging than I had done in the past. I figured the best way to get into the conversation was to take awhile to seriously think about what people were talking about.

How perfect, then, that I soon found myself at this week's Carnival of the Infosciences hosted at Library Garden. So much to digest, so little time. Once I had landed at Library Garden, I found Peter Bromberg's post "Thoughts and ALA Bootcamp: An L20 Manifesto." I've been following the Bootcamp a little bit but I wasn't aware that any controversy had developed until reading this post, so I don't really have any comments about that. What I really grooved on was his vision of Library 2.0 and how I imagined it could help young and future librarians connect with the field. He proposes that we begin to imagine Library 2.0 as "a conversation" that will grow as large and as wide as we let it. That way nobody needs to feel threatened or criticized and an atmosphere of give and take idea sharing can help the good ideas rise to the top and the less helpful ideas become more helpful. His 30-point manifesto, I think, offered a great mental checklist for how to approach all this excitement and change with a purpose, no matter where you currently stand in the library hierarchy.

A sense of purpose is one thing that library school is really making me look for. I had a high school philosophy teacher who endlessly emphasized that all human knowledge is won through cycles of clarity and confusion, each cycle leading deeper into the maze. Well, the same has been true with deciding to become a librarian. You do informational interviews, read articles, peruse career outlooks, and think you have a pretty good feel for what it will be. So you get a job in a library and sign up for classes, and wham here comes the confusion. If I may be so bold, I'd like to call it Student Librarian Schizophrenia (SLS). By day, you scan barcodes, shift shelves by the ton, and make sure the sticky labels stay on (when you're not giving directions to the restroom). By night, your mind is filled with fresh articles and ideas and technological toys that seem to have nothing to do with the library as you know it. Your classes are challenging and the work anything but. On top of that, people give you funny looks when you say you are pursuing not one but two Master's degrees in order to work at a library. Is this really what you want to do with your life?

Don't get me wrong–I understand that my work now is simple by design and that if I hang in there there's some really exciting stuff in store. I care about the detailed, tedious work I do because I value what a library provides and I know it depends on the small stuff as well as the big ideas. So I sweat the small stuff and keep a sense of humor.

Anyway, to get back to Peter's manifesto, I think joining in the Library 2.0 conversation would be a valuable way for any library students to start to develop their own sense of the profession. Keeping in mind that "Anyone can participate in the conversation" but also that "The best listeners extract the most value," we have a lot to gain from plugging in. And if you know some young'uns and new'uns that are plugged in yet, give them a nudge because they might just love it.

One more painstaking burrower joining the ranks

To start out, I will confess that I have been a blogger-wannabe since I started library school one semester ago. I have been shamelessly soaking up the insights of countless librarian and library-loving bloggers and contributing nary so much as a comment in return.

Lucky for me the library blogging community seems to be a welcoming and optimistic one, so that even a second semester MLIS student such as myself might find a small corner to share.

My other grand confession is that the main thing holding me back has been the lack of what I considered a worthy title. Having tossed out suggestions from co-sub-sub’s such as “Shelf Reading ‘Till My Eyes Bleed” and “The Gnomes Stole My Truck,” I turned to Melville, who supplied us with one of the humblest specimens of a librarian ever to roam the stacks: the Sub-Sub-Librarian who:

appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane (Moby Dick, “Extracts,” p. 2)

Yes, that’s what I hope to be–an apprentice to the timeless art of digging and collecting and hoping that I am helpful to someone somewhere in time. Without the Sub-Sub, there would be no “Extracts” and “Cetology” might have been a whole lot harder too. All these invisible hours of work add up, right? Of course, Melville goes on to make it clear that he feels the Sub-Sub has a pretty sad lot in life:

Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless!

Yeah, some days that sounds about right too. From the little I already know about librarianship, it seems like most days it’s tough to draw the lines between passion, professionalism, and manual labor.

So as I learn, I accept my role as Sub-Sub-Librarian and embrace the work at hand. This blog will be my digging into the life I hope to enter.

Cheers!