There was a recent article in the Library Journal about the dismissal of the head of the public library system in Lexington, Kentucky. Without much information, which is kind of the point of this article, it's hard to really take sides but there are two points that jump out at me when discussing something like this.

Firstly, the CEO makes some pretty strongly negative claims about the behaviour of the local newspaper and their role in all this. As I've said before, I've never been too impressed with most "professional" journalists. They seem more interested in selling papers than disseminating information. Honestly, if it comes down to a librarian's word versus a journalist's word, all else being held equal, I'd have to pick the side of the librarian, despite my obvious bias.

Also, one of the criticisms of the article and the CEO is that she was fired with no explanation. What on earth is that? What kind of open and transparent government runs things like that (rhetorical question, thank you)? I've always thought that very few, at least in an official sense and regarding important issues, decisions should be made without a specified and sufficient reason. Voting? You should have to write at least a couple paragraphs as to why you think this party or this candidate is better than the other(s). Government decisions? Whole reports could be provided explaining the reasoning and the consideration of other possibilities and options. Ethical beliefs? Well, its certainly got to include something more than, "it seems like the right thing to do." Without some clarification of our actions that will affect others to a meaningful degree, we're just animals (which is exactly what we are but nonetheless), which is not what we WANT to be. We seem to like to consider ourselves somewhat more advanced, somewhat more conscious, somewhat more enlightened. Setting aside any arguments as to whether we are or not, we should at least act like what we want to appear as.

What do you think? Am I being too hard on journalism? And should we really be held to account for our actions in some "literal" way?

[ From Lexington PL CEO Imhoff Fired; Threatens Suit, Criticizes Newspaper Coverage by Norman Oder at Library Journal ]

Labels: aboutEvents, aboutHumanNature, aboutInformation, aboutLibrarianship, aboutReason, aboutWork

 

The New York Times online has an interesting article about "Animal Farm" and "1984" being deleted from Kindle users after Amazon realized they did not have the right to have sold it in the first place. This is interesting in two ways, IMHO:

1. "Owning" something digital is not always clear cut: This is something that librarians have come to realize with the advent of online content. In the past, we have purchased journals and books comfortably knowing that whatever we bought we would have until it was destroyed beyond repair which, if care was taken, would be quite a long time. With electronic journals and books, ownership of content disappeared, to be replaced with something more like renting the works. We can purchase a whole run of a journal with back files and everything, often for not much less than the print would have cost, but if the distributor decides that something needs to be changed, anything from a typo to our access to it at all, we have very little control and sometimes no knowledge of it even. My suggestion: we should refuse to "buy" anything that we don't have actual control over. If it's digital, we need to factor in the cost of hosting it on our sites if we want to ensure future access at all.
2. Our concept of rights is confused: In this Amazon case, the reason for the deletions was that Amazon had mistakenly sold something they should not have sold. Do we really think we have the right to something just because we spent money on it? What if someone stole your TV, then sold it off the back of their truck to your neighbour? If you COULD get it back, wouldn't you think it was your RIGHT to have it back? Just because we haven't been able to return "stolen" merchandise to its rightful owner in the past, doesn't mean we shouldn't ever do so in the future. And they got their money back. No one lost anything (except the poor shmuck who lost his notes saved in the ebook - remember, keep control of your digital property). There are millions of copies of these books, some you can get for free, say, at your public library for example.

Both of these issues are summed up in a great quote from the article:

"I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased."

So either accept other's rights along with yours or hold on tighter to your stuff. Or maybe I'm wrong... What do you think?

[ From Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Devices by Brad Stone at NYTimes.com ]

Labels: aboutBooks, aboutEthics, aboutEvents, aboutInformation, aboutMoney, aboutTechnology

 

Any librarian having spent more than a month or so at a reference desk in a public library (or any library really) has had to deal with questions with too little information to really answer. Seattlepi.com published a short piece with an excellent real example of such a transaction. Here's a taste:

Librarian: ...Would you have any idea the name of the author?
Caller: No. Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. The lady's name is... oh, I can't read her writing. It's impossible. Um... My wife said the cover of the book is a really neat picture.

The hope is always for either an eventual (sometimes accidental) break-through, such as the one in the example article from seattlepi, or to show that you can help them but that they may have to take some time to come up with another detail or two before the item can be found.

[ From Hello, Reference Desk? at seattlepi.com ]

Labels: aboutBooks, aboutCommunication, aboutInformation, aboutProfessionalService, aboutReferenceService

 

Library Journal has reported on a new deal between the University of Michigan and Amazon where hundreds of thousands of digitized public domain books will be made available through their print on demand business.

Sounds good. Hopefully UMich is getting tons of moolah for the deal. And it's good to see efforts made to support the interests of the long tail, those people looking for works otherwise out of print and therefore much more difficult to obtain. I only have two problems with this. One, I see nowhere in this article any mention of any efforts to make this huge pile of etexts available to or through other academic or public libraries. They said that a lot of them are already available through UMich's catalog and Google Book Search but that limits the potential discoverers to those at UMich (and maybe a bit of the outlying area) and those who actually know that Google Book Search exists (I'm always amazed that people don't even try there). Make it easy to link through or host the content elsewhere and make those works supposedly owned by the public available for use by the public.

My other problem is in regards to Roy Tennant's comment that this is a sign that print is not dead. Well, no it's not but this doesn't suggest that it's going to live any longer than we thought before. Print's got it's place but speaking for myself, if it's a choice between paying for something in print and getting it for free online, I'm taking the latter. Even if the fee is nominal. But I'm a geek, so... All this will do it delay print's demise for certain otherwise doomed genres because the majority of those searching for books will pay Amazon not knowing that it could be free somewhere else.

[ From Michigan Deal A New Twist on Access to Scanned Book Content at Library Journal 7/23/2009 ]

Labels: aboutBooks, aboutEvents, aboutInformation, aboutMoney, aboutReading

 

Although it seems to be going in that direction whether we want it to or not, it certainly can't hurt to get a little push in the direction of thinking about our big problems on a global scale and to work together to solve them. That's basically the point of a recent talk UK prime minister Gordon Brown made at the always-fascinating TED conference. He starts out talking about the power of the Internet, connecting us all with communication, enabling us to develop a global ethic, then listing some of the major problems we have had to deal with and those we still are, and the tools needed to solve them.

Do you think that global institutions will save the day? Do you think we can manage to work together in the way that it looks like we must? Add you comments, please.

[ From "Gordon Brown: Wiring a web for global good" at TED ]

Labels: aboutCommunication, aboutGlobalization, aboutHumanNature, aboutSociety

 

I have two young children so I know all about distraction. I joke (or more accurately, STATE) that I can't get any work done at home and that going to work is much more relaxing and therefore productive. One of the writers over at Stepcase Lifehack wrote 10 really good tips on creating an environment and the tools for staying focused on your project, whatever that may be. My favourite is number six, setting a deadline:

Deadlines have both advantages and disadvantages when trying to force concentration. A deadline can make it easier to forget the non-essential and speed up your working time. If you give yourself only an hour to design a logo, you will keep it simple and avoid fiddling with extravagant designs.

Do you have any special ways you like to "play the game" of Concentration? Put them in the comments!

[ From "10 Tips for Razor Sharp Concentration" at Stepcase Lifehack ]

Labels: aboutProductivity, tips

 

Want an story detail that everyone will get? Want a good laugh? Want to use up about 30 hours of your life in one go?

Then you need to check out tv tropes, or "Television Tropes & Idioms". This is a wiki chock full of pieces of "literature", mostly from movies and television, that are well-used enough to be recognized in a number of works. For example, the article on "The Hero" describes the usual characteristics of this type of character in countless movies, tv shows, novels, etc.

"This guy is a hero, pure and simple. He's almost always right, is a friend to all his bandmates, and morally superior. He has a well-rounded skill set. He's not as strong as The Big Guy, or as smart as The Smart Guy, or as sensitive and socially adept as The Chick, but he's close."

Or the lesser known 'literary' tool of having two inseparable "twins" that are as different as night and day. There are so many links between each article that I found myself clicking from concept to concept, nodding my head at some, laughing at many, crying at a few. There's even a "random item" button! (Always a good choice in my books.)

Check it out yourself at tvtropes.org!

Labels: aboutMovies, aboutOnlineTools, CheckedOut, funny

 

A major U.S. government agency utilizing Web 2.0 methods and tools. It warms the heart.

The CDC is hoping that the next Surgeon-General's 2009 report on tobacco will "go viral" through using such tools as "Facebook, Twitter and MySpace" and RSS and devices like "iPhones, BlackBerrys and other personal digital assistants", and are going to try to make it possible for the public to share the information easily. It's certainly a good sign, but I have to say, not really a surprising one. We've all seen the effects of such simple technological tweeks enabling smoother communication, sharing and mixing, and how quickly a good portion of the public has taken to absorbing it into their lives and enriching the global society. It seems quite obvious by now that to not utilize this phenomenon would be to bury yourself and whatever information you are trying to get out to the world.

Now if only Canada would follow suit. lol

Anyone hear of any other group doing something similar? Do you think that efforts like this will succeed?

[From "Surgeon General's next tobacco report to get Web 2.0 push" by Doug Beizer at FederalComputerWeek found via Google News]

Labels: aboutCommunication, aboutHealth, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools, aboutSociety, aboutWeb2.0

 

I have been playing World of Warcraft for a while now. Just as with everything in my life, I try to tie it somehow to librarianship. I've thought about ways that I could look into and write about the information seeking behaviours of WoW players, what a service providing information in-game would or could be like, or the imagery and perceptions of books, libraries and librarians that exists within the game.

There are others connecting World of Warcraft (and other games or virtual environments) to something academic. Wow.com had an interesting interview last month with a professor of anthropology at the Inver Hills Community College in Minnesota who has created and offered a class entitled: "Warcraft: Culture, Gender and Identity". Beyond teaching students about some important cultural concepts in an environment they all know and enjoy already, this course also provided a chance to show how a gaming world like WoW can be used in teaching, which seems to be a slowly but surely growing trend.

What do you think? Is this an appropriate connection? Do games and software like these provide enough complexity or an appropriate venue to learn from?

(For those of you who may not have "got" my poor attempt at humour in the title, watch this.)

Labels: aboutEducation, aboutGaming, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools

 

So as some of you may have noticed, I've been using Twitter for a while now. Everytime I mention it in conversation to a person not twit-lightened (lol), they shake their head violently and laugh about reading about whenever people go to the bathroom (and it's not because I used the word "twit-lightened"... I swear, this is the first time!).

I really like it actually. I find I'm thinking up a kinds of new types of tweets to put up. I've started listing the children's books I'm reading to my son every night (as well as the books and stories I'm reading), linking to them and (since I'm at finding the link at Amazon anyway) writing a little Amazon review about them (example). I'm always complaining about the dearth of book reviews out there to inform librarians in their collection development efforts so I figured I could do my small part to help out.

I've enjoyed Twittering so much, and see it as so potentially useful as an information dissemination tool, as well as a networking and archiving tool (I actually back-up my tweets myself, not being confident in Twitter's own willingness to store my inane statements throughout the years), that I've put in on my daily to-do list. Crazy, I know. Anyone else been using Twitter lately? Or something similar?

Labels: aboutCommunication, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools, aboutReading, aboutWeb2.0

 

This is a rather atemporal story of a Jewish man grieving the death of his wife and son from the April 1989 issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine. I say "rather atemporal" because there are a series of what seem to be flashbacks that possibly turn out to be actually time loops or some kind of spiritual (for lack of a better word) bifurcation and release. To make up your own mind, you'd better read it yourself. You can read it in one of his latest collections, Jubilee.

One of my problems with the story is that I am not Jewish and therefore didn't understand many of the terms used: kaddish, Shekhinah, tallit, phylacteries, Akeidah, Shema, etc. I could have looked them up while I was reading but that would have been a break in the reading every time. In the end, however, this was not a huge barrier to enjoying the story, although looking at the definitions now suggests that another level of appreciation would have been potentially possible.

In the end, despite a story of desperation, near insanity, and frightening hallucinations/miracles, the main character is no worse for wear. Perhaps the story is a description of the turmoil and confusion of grief. All in all, a worthwhile read given how atypically science-fiction-like it is.

Labels: aboutHumanNature, reviews, shortstories

 

As of yesterday, Google has removed the BETA label from Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and GTalk.

Wow. What a time to be alive... Where was I, at, uh, 8:02 am?!?! Asleep? Eating breakfast with the kids? Well, I didn't notice until Lifehacker told me yesterday when I checked my RSS feeds at around 10 am. And it didn't really sink in until tonight.

But it is somewhat of a big thing. On the Google blog entry about this, they talk about the issue of our new "world of rapid developmental cycles where products like Gmail continue to change indefinitely". The beta label could have suggested that these tools were not "perfected" yet, possibly meaning that something could go wrong at any moment. I know I thought about that recently when I noticed the beta sticker on Gmail a few weeks ago and mulled over what that meant. Should I go with something else? What else is there really? Does that word really mean that another free tool lacking the label would be any better? And there's always the issue of data back-up. Should I be doing that? Do I want to? Do I have the time? Is it even possible in all the tools I may want to do so for?

Although the removal of the beta label from these Google products is virtually meaningless directly, it makes a kind of sense to be done around now. The nature of these tools are not really changing - they will still be improved and changed as Google sees fit - but it was probably past due keeping it as a conspicuous issue in these tools in comparison with the other new things Google is and will be producing.

What do you think? Was it a good move? And what does it mean for them or for us users?

Labels: aboutEvents, aboutOnlineTools, aboutWeb2.0

 

For what feels like years, I've had an item in my to do list that I've managed to continually postpone despite the fact that I was so gung-ho when I wrote it down. Learn something new. I know, as a librarian I'm always doing that but I wanted it to be an active, concrete task that chose. Each month (crazy, huh?). I even made a list that has quite a few items on it, ranging in specificity from the incredibly broad and vague (e.g. Health.) to the painfully narrow (e.g. Learn the basics about "canonical discriminant analysis".).

My idea was that I would systematically add skills and content to my repertoire that would help me in my work, my profession and my life in general. But it's hard to do! With time constraints, chores at home, kids running around, and a billion other potential projects waiting for my attention, I have yet to sit down and choose something for my "month of learning".

But today was different. I chose something. French. Ok, not everything. I don't expect to become fluent. Just the basics. I remember a good deal of my high school French classes. I'm Canadian (that's got to count for something). And it's in my blood - my grandfather is fluent and very French-Canadian. My goal will be some basic (re)understanding of the fundamentals of grammar, a handle on accurate pronunciation, and a small but practical vocabulary. Perhaps enough to visit Quebec or France and not have to hope that someone speaks English! lol

Any self-directed learning plans of your own? Have you had any difficulties getting them accomplished, or even started? How have you solved them, or have you? Any ideas?

P.S. Oh and my deadline is actually August 1st so I actually have less than a month but I wanted my repeating task (of choosing a new something to learn) to be scheduled for the first of each month.

Labels: aboutEducation, aboutProductivity

 

I already commented on the potential problems of adding Wikipedia articles to a library's catalog in the Distant Librarian blog entry that brought up the subject for me here, so I won't go over them again. What I want to do here is consider the benefits of doing so and doing it in the best way possible.

One benefit is that since an assumed good number of users see them as valuable and worthy of usage already, we can somewhat "ride the wave" of Wikipedia's success. Having their content linked to in our collection might say to a good portion of our patrons that, "Yes, we are hip and we can help you get to the resources we know you want." That may not sound like the best reason, but survival of an institution that most of us believe is worth saving may also be worth pandering a little to ensure continued appreciation. I'm not sure what the long term results of such pandering might be so this is probably not a sufficient reason but it does have a certain amount of short-term appeal at least.

Another benefit is that actually, many Wikipedia articles are valuable and include content not included in other resources to a sufficiently similar extent if at all. A venue where anyone anytime can add topics and start filling them up with content will always include more same-level topics than one that must pay authors to develop content. This is saying nothing about the quality of such content but if we assume some bare minimum level of quality that is sufficiently higher than neutral, or worse yet, outright falsehoods, then something is better than nothing. There will be somewhat informative articles in Wikipedia on topics that a for-fee or author-restricted resource will be able to provide. The benefit to a library catalog is that it can be filled with some content not available elsewhere.

A third benefit is that it is free, at least in terms of direct cost. Libraries do not typically have infinite budgets for collections and anytime a minimally worthy resource can be added to the collection for not outlay of money, it must be considered. Of course, the disadvantage of online resources such as Wikipedia articles is that they don't come with handy pre-made MARC records, requiring a certain amount of expertise and effort on the part of those who want them added.

Given these three benefits, how can the addition of at least some Wikipedia articles (and perhaps other similar online resources) be made easier particularly for those libraries with little time or smaller staff complements. First of all, they need to be linked to at the specific version level. This solves the issue of quality control that we tend to pride ourselves on in our collection (as mentioned in the comment mentioned above). Also, when a library/librarian has decided that a specific article version is worthy of addition, the metadata created needs to be shared, made available to other libraries considering it in the future. As a profession we tend to share well so let's use our large numbers to solve our general lack-of-local-resources problem. Finally, if we go down this path, we should go all the way down the path: if we're adding Wikipedia articles to the collection, advertise that we're doing so. One of the big problems with the library catalog as a tool is that users don't know what's in there. We need to tell them. It needs to be made clear all the kinds of resources are included in the collection and why. Not all at once though. One at a time.

Still not sure it's a good idea... May get too messy. But it seems to have a few useful positive side effects and is doable at least on a small scale. What do you think?

Labels: aboutClassification, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools, aboutWork