Nola on everyone’s mind

This is the top WordPress blog post right, and I’ve seen it cited two other places already, so I thought I would pass it on. It’s about the untold stories of New Orleans, today, now, 11 months after Katrina. Reading it this morning brought back the anger and pain that was so palpable as we got a little bit beneath the skin presented fr us library tourists in New Orleans. This is not meant to take anything away from the brave, optimistic people sweating it out in the restaurants and hotels that are helping to bring the city back to life, but the tourist district is a small, misleading slice of the true state of affairs, which is outright neglect. At the same time as I was blown away by how many people, even people who lived in the projects and in places most of us white middle class suburbanites would have assumed they’d be desperate to leave, want the city back, exactly how it was, all of gritty pleasures and troubles intact, I am daily confronted with the reality that at best nobody in power cares and at worst are actively plotting how to rebuild the city to their liking on their timeline. Some of the comments for this blog’s post bring up the fact that not even left-leaning groups like the ACLU are pushing these stories to the forefront, and I had to agree. As pathetic as it was for the Bush administration to respond to criticism by telling people not to play the blame game, the truth really is that blame is not enough, not now, not for a city in our own country that looks like a war zone. What will be? Will it get here soon?

Endeca is coming to my library

Like all of the state university libraries in Florida, the library where I work has recently migrated to Aleph as its integrated library system. We are about five weeks into Aleph usage, and we are one of the last schools to have adopted it in the three year statewide migration plan. I work in tech services, and besides a quadrupling of my average clicks per book I haven’t had a huge change in workflow. When searching the Aleph OPAC, though, I have had to learn some new quirks and adjust my searches accordingly.

Word came down yesterday that is going to change, eventually. FCLA has been authorized to purchase Endeca for use as Florida SUS’s OPAC. We were given a link to North Carolina State’s Endeca interface and sample search results. Our configuration is going to be substantially based on theirs. At first glance, I was impressed by how much it looks like one of the better web search engine’s results page, with lots of additional navigation tools and good use of visual space (it might look a little busy to the untrained eye, but there’s a lot more front and center than the average OPAC provides–no hunting or imagination required). Like a search engine, it has one omnipresent top of the page “search the catalog” bar. It also allows you to narrow results to available items with one click. The only sad part that I can see is that there is no timeline for adoption suggested, so I’m thinking upwards of a year before we get to play with our toy. In the meantime, the email mentioned that FCLA will continue to track developments in the guided navigation OPAC market, while admitting that that has become something of an empty term as it becomes all the rage.

I hereby pronounce this exciting, at the very least to see the SUS libraries taking a chance on something kinda new and kinda fun.

Sometimes the blogosphere reads my mind

As you can tell from my last time stamp, this is a post I’ve been meaning to make for a about two weeks. In the midst of three weeks of wall-to-wall homework and hostessing, this is what’s been brewing. It all got started when I dug into Caveat Lector and started hearing about this thing called Code4Lib and how there were very few women at its recent conference and why is that, and then saw a similar post over on Library Web Chic. In other words, at the same time two female library bloggers I respect deeply started talking about what life is like as a woman on the tech side of library workings. I paid attention, because when I’m not too shy to admit it, that’s where I think I’d like to be too. Too bad I turned up my nose at all things mathematical and scientific and wrote poetry for the better part of my educational career. Looking back, I should have been all over this computer science stuff, but I was too narrow-viewed to realize how much truly creative, useful work is being done by people in software design. I’m starting to see that now, and it’s really expanded my ideas about things I might like to do with my life as a librarian.

So now I’m looking at a long road of catch up, and trying not to count myself out before I even start. Once upon a time I got awesome grades in physics and advanced algebra, so I know it’s in there somewhere. I’ll never be a coding whiz, but I’m vowing this time not to say can’t possibly do <fill in blank> until I really have reached the point where that is true. Reading CavLec and the Web Chic gave me hope that you can start building some chops even after you’ve finished your undergraduate education and that if you work at it, you will eventually have a skill that someone can use. Also, they strongly encourage women to get over the mental hang-up of “not being techie enough” to join in the conversation. Well, for the moment I know I am really not, but once I do have some genuine skills I know I’ll have to push myself into new social arenas if I ever want to use them, so that is good to keep in mind.

How did I get started with this crazy idea that I want to become techie? Here’s the reader’s digest version.

Like a lot of people, I gravitated toward starting the MLIS because I loved books. During my 8 month stint as a salesperson at the Online University Which Shall Not Be Named, the only way I could decompress and let go of some of my existential anxiety was to drive down to my public library, take a deep breath of the oddly comforting fumes of molding paper, and start browsing. Somehow this seemed to remind me that I was more than my current job, and that taking any given job did not change your basic definition as a person. Casting about for professional options, academic librarianship suddenly sounded like a logical nirvana for me to pursue.

During the first semester of the MLIS, I took a class called Information Science in Librarianship and had to read A Brief History of the Future by John Naughton. To my great surprise, I loved it. Reading about all the technological baby steps that brought the Internet to me woke me up to how this tool we use so casually took the work of many brilliant and hardworking people added together over the course of many years. Reading about all the headaches and hoping that early hackers went through to create something people would end up taking for granted only made me want to 1) learn as much about it as I could and 2) learn enough to maybe one day give a little something myself.

Now, two semesters into my program, I am so over the books and waking up to the fact that what I think I really, really want to do is dig into the guts of this amazing little thing in front of me and understand why all my favorite things like the Internet and blogs and little widgets on my dashboard and open access journals actually work. And when I understand who they work, I want to be able to have a competent two cents to put in about how they could work better and what we would have to do to the guts of it to make it better.

In other words, my inner “hacker” is waking up. I use the word in quotations, because after a quick spin through Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar, I know I am nowhere near that status. But he does offer a helpful plan on how to get started. The first step is trying to get some skills and the second step is finding a problem that motivates you to do what it takes to solve it… I’ll keep you posted.

Here’s homework, where’s the learning?

Why does it always surprise me that in the last 20% of any given semester I need to do about 80% of the work for a class? Digital Libraries and Organization of Knowledge are headed into the home stretch, which has meant starting the familiar cycle of reading massive amounts of articles and moving my fingers up and down over a keyboard in order to fill up pages with words and then turn those pages in for credit. Meanwhile, Research Methods is off to a fast start with 120 pages of reading and article write-up due Monday. So I’ll be busy, but the real challenge won’t be turning everything in on time. It will be figuring out what I’ve taken away from all of this and how I will apply both to next semester’s work and the career I’m trying to build.

I still haven’t quite nailed the relationship between course work and learning in library school. I’ve encountered challenging, well-planned projects and busy work in equal measure. I have slogged through the pages of mind-numbing studies of nothing, but to be honest not as often as I’ve spent hours chasing links across the web to learn about a new idea or technology that my class reading turned me on to. This degree is exactly as exciting as you make it. I think the main thing that sets off my Student Librarian Schizophrenia is the realization that for every moving and shaking blogger that makes me say hell yes, that’s what I want to do, there’s some classmate or colleague to face on a weekly basis who seems pretty focused on getting through classes with the least amount of work with the highest GPA possible. And am I alone in feeling, sometimes, that library school classes are geared exactly for them?

Before tossing it into the rubbish, I happened to thumb through the PBK Newsletter that my sister toted down from my Michigan address for me. It’s a strange little publication, devoted entirely to reminding people who have been told they are smart how smart they are. What I did find was a personal essay about what happens to people who get good grades after they graduate from college. His point is that when faced with the choice between security or risk, most adults end up choosing security (not without valid reasons) and abandon their A+ ambitions for B- complacency. Although I don’t think I’m quite there yet, similar thoughts have crossed my mind when I think about my current educational track. About 3 papers into my first semester, I figured out that the average grade given out in my classes was somewhere between an A- and an A. When, later in the semester, I downgraded my effort just a little to accomodate social agendas, the grade stayed the same. I’m the kind of person who wants to work hard, who wants the work that I do to mean something, but it’s not easy to keep up that level of discipline when you get the distinct impression that it might just be self-deception. Do I really need to work hard? One of my classmates, who also a law degree and several years of practice under his belt, caught on even more quickly and broke it to me around the time we had our final poster presentation due that I could probably turn in a smiley face drawn on a paper towel with ketchup and not flunk the course. That’s an obvious exaggeration, but pretty accurately describes how you can start to feel when academic standards aren’t clearly enforced and you have a schedule full of semester-long classes that seem like they could be taught with about four focused hours of explanation. To be fair, I understand that most libraries just need qualified practitioners, not flaming intellectuals. On the other hand, some of us didn’t choose this degree as a way out or as a soft option, because we couldn’t or wouldn’t choose something more challenging, we chose it affirmatively, believing that there was a way to serve communities and be a part of the academic world at the same time, believing that it was a profession that could put all of our motley talents and experiences to use at one time or another. We want to rock!

Learning in library school is probably the same as learning anything: no one can make you do it. Especially as a grad student, it shouldn’t take an awesome teacher or an exciting subject to keep me motivated. All it should take is a library and an internet connection. I’m already looking for ways to start finding my own interests and ways to pursue them in small ways, such as taking the ACRL’s Web Design for Academic Libraries online course (gotta get the student rate while you can). I’m spending hours scratching my head, trying to figure out a way in to the wonderful world of open source software without the benefit of a computer science degree. I’ve started to realize that this is a necessity for defining your own sense of purpose in library school and then sticking to it. The people who keep their A+ ambitions are the ones who set their own grading scale.