shinylib

I know it’s been quite a while since my last update. I do have things to say about ACRL (it will be so outdated by the time I get around to it) but I’m dealing with some personal junk that’s occupying my time.

I received a pretty crappy letter from my employer over spring break. It was a we-might-lay-you-off-but-we’re-stalling-on-deciding-p.s.-have-a-rockin-vakay type of letter. Obviously I am not amused.

I hope you are all weathering these stormy economic seas okay out there in library land.

Meanwhile, I’m presenting at the Oregon Library Association annual conference this Friday (#OLA2009).  I am going footloose and slidefree. Feels a bit strange to be untethered, but I think it might rock—or I might just suck out loud.

We’ve been having a tough time supporting biology assignments. This isn’t really new but it comes with increasing frustration. Sometimes I feel like the biggest idiot, sometimes I feel like the Biology faculty need to get two clues and rub them together. We’re not at all sure what they are looking for, so we sure as heck are having a hard time instructing their students on how to find it.

Having said that, this email I saw recently on STS-l makes me feel a lot better about my shortcomings. At least I’m not being asked to answer questions of this caliber:

I cannot find *which* heme is formed from ferrous protoporphyrin IX. I think it’s Heme B, but cannot find out definitively. 2.) I need to know how and where best to search for DSC (differential scanning calorimetry) results for HSA (human serum albumin), A.) alone, B.) bound with three different drugs, and C.) simultaneously bound with the three different drugs AND that (or any) heme. The drugs are i.) ibuprofen, ii.) warfarin, and iii.) diazepam. All would most likely be buffered for control (buffer) comparison, and the heme may be bound to CO (or something else, like O2 or CO2). Any papers I have yet found only show one data curve and don’t address reproducibility, so I’m specifically looking for that aspect of the data. I have some ability with the Boolean terms, but the more complex strings get tangled. Any help will be much appreciated. Thank you!

I had this idea this morning. It came partially from having fallen down the stairs and broken a toe at 5:30 am (thus not falling back asleep, thus thinking weird stuff) and partially from having extreme lust for the College of DuPage Library Secrets marketing campaign. Library “secrets” are delivered via Facebook, Twitter, the library website and possibly some other places I haven’t yet noticed.

I was thinking about how one of the things I love most about my local public radio station (OPB) these days is their acknowledgment of a user-generated catchphrase, “I heard it on OPB!” They had begun branding mugs and other such ephemera with the phrase, but that seems to have stopped now. I really wish that the library and it’s people would generate that kind of buzz. “Dude, I heard it from the librarian!” or “I learned it at the library” (but something catchier sounding). At the same time I was thinking this  I was also thinking about how I really want to come up with a new marketing initiative this year…and the two thoughts collided mid-brainspace.

What if I start collecting and disseminating some of the interesting questions and resultant “stuff we learned” in a similar fashion to library secrets? Except, clearly, instead of tips and tricks (secrets) it would be more of a random info scrounged up at the reference desk type of thing. This pain in my toe is preventing me from articulating myself clearly, I apologize and hope that you get the gist.

Here’s where you come in. Do you think that I need to alert library patrons that I might want to start anonymously sharing questions they’ve asked us? I certainly wouldn’t be sharing personally identifying info or even the time and day the question was asked. I was just thinking that folks might be interested in knowing some of the random stuff we learn while chasing down information with our users. Or that’s more of that delusional librarian thinking. What do you think about the potential ethical implications here?

I keep wanting to write spiffy post-Denver posts and rambling-yet-fascinating commentaries about the state of the profession and everything else. The reality is that I just don’t have time. Fail.

Well, I do have a little time, so let me say a few things. Midwinter meeting is boring. If no one has come out and told you that yet, let me be the first. It’s expensive and boring and unless you’re on some committee I really wouldn’t bother. At least not for the time being. Because I am on a committee I can tell you that the people at ALA are well aware of our feelings about Midwinter. I think if more of us express ourselves and push for innovation things might change. Either Midwinter will become even less important, relevant, and mandatory or it will open up a space for (more) meaningful dialogue amongst colleagues who seldom get together en masse (for a smaller price, one hopes).

Speaking of meaningful dialogue, I was at several discussion groups at Midwinter. One of them shines in my memory as a glowing example of everything right about discussion groups (more like that and Midwinter might start earning some redemption)—so kudos to Merinda Hensley, Wendy Holliday, and any other ACRL Instruction Section Folks involved in the Pedagogy & Social Technologies (essentially Teaching 2.0) discussion.

2 of the discussions I attended weren’t so special for me. CJCLS Hot Topics is always a good discussion for me, but this time I got an irritating phone call and had to bail to deal with some stuff. Boo. The other discussion I dropped in on after taking care of my phone call really bummed me out. Without getting into funky detail, let’s say that I think the facilitators had a very rigid understanding of the proposed discussion topic and in an attempt to corral people into discussing exactly what they wanted (some survey results) they belittled and restrained the participants.

I could go into greater detail because one of the people made me very cranky, but that really isn’t the point. My point is that the best conversations are organic. Throw a topic out there and see where your participants go with it. That’s how everyone gets to learn something. I hope I remember this when I take over as convener for the ACRL New Members discussion group—this year we discussed the pros and cons of tenure and the various tenure granting institutions. I always love ACRL NMDG, but maybe that’s because I’m a new academic librarian. Relevance is tasty.

Anyway. Today I taught for four hours, had ninety minutes worth of meetings, failed to eat any food whatsoever, drank three cups of tea and a diet Dr. Pepper, and um…some other stuff I can’t recall.

Lather, rinse, repeat. That’s pretty much how it goes most days. I’ll try to come up with a more interesting way to frame that next time.

I have a lot that I want to say but not a lot of time in which to say anything. This is largely about getting prepared to leave for for the airport in 20 minutes.

In lieu of belated resolutions or some sort of similar post, I’m going to give a list of things I hope not to do this year. Some of them are totally self-explanatory, others I hope to get back to in greater depth…

What I hope not to do in the remaining months of 2009:

• fix or explain printer errors
• prep for classes I’m not actually teaching
• micro-manage the handouts/instructional resources
• work egregious amounts of undeclared overtime
• imply that the user has done something wrong when the experience has an unexpected outcome
• keep all of that crap in my inbox—or any other folders
• attempt to do so many things at one time
• give away so much of my time to library-related causes outside of work
• do so little for my community
• totally neglect my hobbies
• fail to read for pleasure
• rely on my memory to track my ideas and inspirations
• dread that peer reviewed teaching thing we have to do
• have so many unfinished drafts hanging around
• engage in a futile battle of shushing with students on the first floor
• allow students to trample the customer rights of other students
• a lot more, I’m sure…

Man, sometimes you just get on autopilot and there’s nothin’ to be done for it.

I prepped for a reading class tonight and when I went to teach the class I was told, “But that’s not their assignment!” It was however the assignment the instructor had sent me…twice.

So, I pretty much had to make it up on the fly. Banned books and censorship…not so difficult, but still.

Every so often I’d find words related to the original prep I’d done tumbling out of my mouth. I was able to wrap it all in, but the occasional blurb on Thoreau and Civil Disobedience would just come out unbidden.

Regardless, the instructor just came down and said how wonderful she thought the session was. I did not really concur.

So, I was just sent a student by circulation. He arrives at the refdesk shouting my name (alarming, but ok) and saying he hopes I can help him.

I hope I can help him too. It turns out he’s lost two reserve items. Hrm, I’m already wondering why this guy is at the refdesk. He’s irate and doing the usual song and dance about how this item can be replaced for $30 from Amazon. The library wants over $100. You and I know that the missing items are more than the cost of the cheapest irrelevant edition. He doesn’t know this and really, there’s no reason he should (until now).

Ultimately I can’t do anything for this guy. I don’t have a Millennium login, I can’t even look at what his record says.  I have to walk over to Circ and ask why they sent him to me. They said to calm him down. I’m not the professional calmer downer, I’m the reference and instruction librarian. A book on calming down? I’m all over it.

Apparently I managed to calm the guy down anyway…but I had to take some abuse in the doing. He asked me, not unfairly, if these departments even communicate when he’s not forcing us to do so.

I tried to explain to him that we do different things and that I’m happy to help, but I don’t do what they do all day. So I have to ask for more detail than they might normally ask him. I tried to explain it as going to the DMV and asking them why the bus was late.

He suggested that was an inaccurate comparison because they are different agencies who should not be expected to work together. I agreed with him but suggested that for some people, it’s all about transportation and the distinctions are somewhat irrelevant. He conceded the point and I wondered why I’d even mentioned it. I didn’t wonder because the comparison started to breakdown, but because it implied that he’d done something wrong. And he hadn’t. He didn’t send himself over to me for the runaround, Circ did.

And ultimately? We needed to call the Acquisitions and Technical Services manager, this is his bag. Surprisingly, the Acq manager said that the student had nothing but positive things to say about both Circ and Reference. I have no idea why that would be. I felt the communication breakdown was ludicrous and totally avoidable.

FYI I finally got around to rerouting my feed through Feedburner. Update as needed. Thanks!

Since I posted about my quest for moon boots the other day I’ve been thinking and rethinking some of my views. I’ve also been using our current housebound-due-to-snow status to catch up on a lot of reading. I suspect I’m about to go on a really long ramble.

I’ve talked in the past about the debate amongst my colleagues at PCC: some of us want to streamline and simplify the home page and others want to put everything conceivably relevant to a student right out there. I have always come down firmly on the side of simplify and streamline for a number of reasons. They’re not original ideas and most revolve around the idea of developing in users a base level of skill and competency that functions in any library system. I also just visually deplore homepages that are crammed full of links and blurbs.

That’s all well and good when you’re operating within a local library context, but what good is it when you’re not talking about the library? Like, when you’re shopping for boots. I realized that I’m asking these sportswear companies to do exactly what I don’t want to do with our website—put stuff front and center so I can find it (or use a reasonably structured schema of some kind). To me library and online retailer are different use environments most of the time, but they probably result in the same expectation from a number of our users.

That’s reminiscent of a conversation over at command-f. I wish I’d been paying attention several weeks ago when it happened, but I’ll just play catch up on my own now. Read the rest of this entry »

Once you start thinking about design and usability they start to haunt you everywhere you go. Here in Portland we’ve been having Arctic Blast 2008!*

This got me thinking that I’d really like to have a pair of moonboots. Moonboots are what I grew up calling those non-sport snow boots. Kinda like puffy nylon Uggs?

Anyway, first I went over to the Joe’s Sports website (Joe’s is cheap and near my house). I was trying to sort out how best to find these boots, and I was thinking for some reason that moon boot was a phrase my mom invented. So I typed in something like snow boots and Joe’s showed me some Asic running shoes, a bunch of snow tubes and toboggans, and some sidenav with different categories. I decided that the Joes site is possibly designed with browsing/categories in mind, so I tried a different tact. I searched for snow and then clicked the footwear category, thinking it would sort my results that way.

There are the Asic running shoes again. Hrm, weird. This time I tried using the topnav to go to Apparel & Footwear, thinking that I’d just try to find the coldweather footwear somehow. I found the Asics. After squinting at the screen for a bit I noticed that the Asic running shoe is a featured item and shows on every footwear-related results page. Ohh. Well that was confusing. I scan the categories of footwear but see absolutely nothing that looks like it would keep my feet warm or dry. At this point I’ve been at this for 5-7 minutes and I’ve given this way longer than seems reasonable.

I go to visit the fine folks at Columbia Sportswear (we have an outlet here!) and am greeted on the homepage by some “human element” photos and some topnav. I choose footwear and am automagically whizzed off to a page with—oh my stars—pictures of really awesome-looking snow boots. My options, according to the helpful text and images, are to see the coldweather footwear for chicks, dudes, and crumbsnatchers. Why wouldn’t you highlight the coldweather shoes? It’s freakin winter!

This is awesome. This is what needs to happen to help me find what I’m looking for and it didn’t really take a lot, on the surface, to get it to me. Sure it takes a fair amount of design and user interface construction but as the end user it required absolutely nothing of me—and that’s what most consumers (of information, footwear, groceries, whatever) want of the experience.

You know where this is going, you have to. What is your online experience offering your end user? Are you a Columbia or a Joe’s Sports? If you’re not sure, you might want to take some time exploring the idea. What are the experiences you have in the “real world” that cause you to reflect on the library experience? I have some other thoughts involving our campus cafeterias…more on that later. Those snowboots from Columbia are awesome, but I’m stuck on this moon boot thing, so I’m off to do more searching… Oh, these are cool.

*The local hysteria involving weather incidents is ridiculous. The local news folks have hijacked all of the airways and are playing endless coverage of what they call Arctic Blast 2008! We’re talking about a week of snow, folks. I’m thinking there are people who endure this all winter long, without too much trouble.