Flocking
Okay, I’m trying out this Flock built in blog editor. Hello World!
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?
Make that a yes
My library class this semester is Health Sciences Librarianship, and it’s getting to be about that time to start thinking about what to do my final paper on. One area that I have consistently been interested in investigating throughout past classes has been, how is this area of librarianship affected by computer-mediated interaction in general and social software in particular. Just as I was about to ask, hmmm, are medical libraries testing out the social software waters, and if so what does it look like–what pops into my Google reader but this cheery little post about the establishment of the MLA’s Task Force on Social Networking Software blog:
Behind the scenes, the SNSTF is working on recommended Web 2.0 software, suggested guidelines for using Web 2.0 technologies, and tips and tricks for MLA units wanting to use blogs or wikis to collaborate. But check the SNSTF public blog for related news on Web 2.0 technologies and how they impact MLA members.
Perfect timing!
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.
LITA: Open Source for the Reference Librarian
Open Source for the Reference Librarian
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Sponsored by LITA Open Source Interest Group
Basically, my notes for this program consist of a list of links that they provided on a hand-out. The program started out with a brief introduction to open source software, pointing out that one major drawback was that CS programs were graduating the least number of qualified open source systems administrators (b/c there is as yet little job market for them), most graduates said that open source programs were the ones they were most interested in working with. So the future may just be free. The presenters were split between reference people and systems people, so it mostly focused on functionality rather than details. Their presentations were nicely consistent in visual style and format–each started out with a description, discussed features, touched on technical aspects, and then broke down advantages and disadvantages for their users. Here’s a slightly annotated list of stuff they covered.
General sites of interest:
Open Source Systems for Libraries
Presenters discussed the following applications in detail.
This program allows you to create, organize, and search collections of online materials. Allows manual resource adding but relies mostly on automated crawlers that comb the open web for useful stuff. They call this Expert Mode, so I’m guessing it must be fairly demanding when deciding which pages to add. Likewise, authors can supply their own metadata but the program will also extract it. This features pages explains it better than I can. The presenter also pointed out visual cues that can be added to indicate that the material is one the particular library has access to or one that you have to pay for.
The coolest one! Don’t trust my description, go to the website!! This stuck in my head. It’s an extension for Firefox developed by Virginia Tech that creates a toolbar in the Firefox browser for searching the OPAC, Electronic journals, whatever you want. It also allows the user to highlight titles on webpages and immediately search them in the library’s collection. Super-duperest of all, it has embedded cues which pop up a little your library icon (unique to each school that sets up the extension) right next to titles on Amazon.com, so that a user doesn’t have to go back to the library’s web page or even copy and paste into the toolbar to check if the library has it before ordering. As the presenter said, I don’t know how it works, so it must be magic, but it works. I personally think this is the start of what libraries have to do if they want people to take advantage. Users don’t want new destinations, they want new integrations. Bring the library to the internet, because we tried getting internet to the library and it’s not working.
Get non-commercial with your chat–choose Jabber as your open source AIM. And while you’re at it, stop having 6 different accounts and get Gaim. Gaim lets you chat w/ AIMers, MSNers, Yahooers, etc. all through the same interface.
I think we’ve all got the basic idea of wiki’s (although the presenter did not assume everyone did, which was smart I think), so I’ll just share one piece of advice mentioned about creating a wiki for your organization: only do it if it can replace something else. Creating multiple communication forums is counterproductive. Making a wiki should be an or not an and.
Open source RefWorks. Has a good GUI, but doesn’t hurt to have a little programming chops to make it do exactly what you want.
Now I just got to get me some skills and I ain’t never licensing Microsoft again!
I’m del.icio.us
I'm taking a break from churning out my first paper for Digital Libraries to express the childlike, hyperactive joy which is welling up inside me. Well, maybe that's just the caffeine. But here it is, I am now officially jumping on to the bandwagon that all my favorite library bloggers have been on for months if not years. Social bookmarking rocks my world! I knew del.icio.us was out there, but I never bothered to actually use it until I kind of sort of got this idea that I should write about is a form of metadata which can improve access to information on the WWW. (The topic for aforementioned paper was access to info on the Web). Researching social bookmarking led me to folksonomy, which led me to these awesomeful conference talk notes by Clay Shirky. He has got me totally bending my mind about why navigating the Web really is different from navigating the stacks of your library, and how if we ever want to really harness what the Web can do for us we have got to come up with better ways of searching it and being able to locate what we want. Best of all, the best people to figure all this is out is all of us! As Mr. Shirky says, the only group that can organize everything is everybody. The web will not be tamed by librarians, it will be tamed by librarians providing ways for people to find the cool stuff and share it. Or librarians will be totally out of the picture, who knows. Hunting the Web is a big sloppy kiss of words, desires, and information at your finger tips.
This is what I dig.
