The library rhizome grows
As cited in ALA Libraries Direct this week, the Contra Costa County Library is going to place book vending machines in public transportation hubs. I love this idea, and I hope it works. The press release has some very promising angles. First, the emphasis is clearly on meeting readers where they are, and finding a way to fit in to their hectic life/workflow and lowering the barriers to access. Secondly, it sounds like this is being seen as a genuine collaboration on both sides. It is the BART Board President, Gail Murray, who proclaims, “BART has a history of being at the technological forefront. Being the first in the nation to install the book lending machines continues this tradition. This project falls right in line with BART’s overall goals to help protect the environment, enhance accessibility and improve service to our customers.” Bingo–the library mission is interconnected with other public service goals. It’s wonderful to hear that coming out of a non-librarian’s mouth.
And of course, the whole principle of this is simply cool: the library (not just information) is an entity that is no longer tied to single physical spaces, but a large idea from which offshots can adapt and grow into new areas.
See rhizome.
CNN shows the love to librarians with consumer health literacy skills
I want to print out the opening line of this article on using the Web to find accurate medical information and stick it on the wall behind my desk:
When Mary Ryan’s 4-year-old nephew, Nick, landed in the hospital with a serious infection, her brother called her in a panic. Ryan isn’t a doctor. She’s not a nurse. She’s a librarian.
Yeah she is. Right on.
Besides a nice shout out to savvy librarians, the article does provide good tips for med-surfing, such as
- Use PubMed to find review articles that give a broad overview of current research
- Invest half an hour in the PubMed tutorial
- Click on information about annual meetings related to medical specialties
- Find smart bloggers with your disease
Me 2.1
This piece by Christina Wodtke on Boxes & Arrows is full of gems for people who are on the verge of a new career–like, of course, yours truly as I near the final semester of my MLIS. I particularly like this passage:
It feels like “artist” or “writer”—something inherent in your makeup that chose you, and you didn’t choose it at all. But don’t be fooled! A curious person of talent and intellect can end up many places. A rocket scientist could be just as easily an engineer, a theoretical mathematician, or a concert pianist. The left and right brain play nicely with each other in certain people.
Probably, a lot of librarians feel just this way. Our stock in trade is sensing the idea behind the action and performing that action that makes the idea live. I love academic work; I am also inspired by technical challenges and being tangibly helpful to others as they seek information. I like projects that are intensely creative as well as projects that are have a grunt labor, applied theory dynamic to them. I think I like these two kinds of mind work so much that I often tend to seek out aspects of both of them in any project I am doing, even if it is not obviously either of those two things. So, not surprisingly, every career test I’ve ever taken has come up woefully inconclusive. Yet I constantly seek that one perfect livelihood that will match all of me, and I worry when a drastic change seems appealing. As Wodtke asks,
Think of the places where you hit a self-imposed wall in the past: the opportunity to become a product manager, the time you took a programming class and loved it yet didn’t follow through. Was it because you were afraid of losing your sense of self?
Yes, often it was, so it’s encouraging to read that others feel the same way and somehow have made it through. I’m beginning to realize that I may never find the perfect field for me, but what I will do is find a series of jobs that I can find challenge in. Somehow, I hope, if the job market willing 
Learning smart
Okay, a recent internship interview has really got me thinking: if I want to be a techie librarian (more or less, although I have no illusions about my long term prospects as a general market techie), but still at core a librarian, how much tech is enough and which skills are the truly useful ones? This came up b/c the internship involved metadata creation, which for some reason I assumed meant writing XML code, I guess b/c that is how I am used to looking at it. But duh, of course it doesn’t–it involves filling out a form that creates the XML code for you. The real skill is filling out the form perfectly. As a librarian, I might just be wasting my time if I try to take it further than that.
But then when I read blogs like Caveat Lector and Shifted Librarian, I start to wonder how I’m going to know just when I’m going too far and possibly wasting my librarian learning time. These librarians clearly have some, um, mad skills. Jenny writes “In my previous job, one of my tasks was to create authentication scripts for remote access to databases for my libraries.” Wow! That sounds pretty awesome, how did you learn to do that, and how did you know that was a good thing to do? I guess part of the answer is in her next sentence: “This was something I proactively pursued because most of my libraries didn’t have a programmer on staff who knew how to create these scripts, let alone a server to run them on.” Jenny responded to a need that no one else at her institution could meet. It would have been her job to bring the problem to the dedicated tech staff, if there had been one. But there wasn’t, so it became her job. It seems probable that the main answer to my question about what to learn and fiddle with and suffer through is “can anyone else already do it?” If the answer is yes, then it’s not a good use of my time.
Still, I’m wondering how one can decide which skills to work for as a librarian in training that will translate best into a wide variety of potential future jobs, b/c the market I see now may not be the market I am entering six months or a year from now. If I am at an institution that has a tech staff, how do I get/stay up to speed enough to transition to a situation that is less helpful? Or will there come a point when most places have a tech staff, and really I need to be honing my coordinator/patron advocate skills to communicate w/ that staff to get stuff done?
The rhizomic library
Aaron at Walking Paper writes about libraries starting cafe branches, i.e. bring the library to the cafe rather than the cafe to the library. He goes into much thoughtful detail, so I recommend reading the post, but reading it triggered a connection for me: how can the library become rhizomic?
The cafe branch idea reminds me of an article about successful television shows that the NY Times ran a couple of weeks back. Basically, the critic’s idea was that shows that are currently successful have a rhizomic (root with many branches that can take on a life of their own) model rather than a single, grand entity. The example was Heroes, which has fan fiction and the potential for spin-off’s and interconnecting worlds, versus Friday Night Lights, which is perfect but more or less complete w/ out participation of the viewers. Libraries think of themselves as single entities, often, but there might be a way to think about ourselves as a something that can spawn many smaller, equally vital offspring… and enough of that metaphor already, but I like the model as a way of imagining future libraries. If access to information is the root, what are the branches?
