shinylib

In Pursuit of the Obvious

There’s something especially slippery about the idea of obvious. For example, it seems really obvious to me that the little red card on top of the catalog terminals explains that you can’t get to the Internet-at-large on those computers. Judging by the number of times each day that I explain that you can’t do that on those computers, it is not obvious. Each of us can cite instance after instance in which we’ve explained the obvious to our  users and clients.

What is it about this idea of obvious that is so appealing and yet so unattainable in general?

Clearly whomever chose our signage thought it was obvious at the time. Even I thought the signage was fairly straightforward until very recently. One day I was trying to see our library through someone else’s eyes and I realized that our signage is mostly gray. The walls in the library are gray. There are gray cement supports running throughout the library. Perhaps our gray on gray on gray scheme is not especially obvious. It’s more like camouflage in fact. We do have an especially snazzy bright red floor, but alas our signage is not on the floor. (Although a colleague recently suggested we mark out on the floor routes to the obvious locations in the library—printers. copiers, reference, etc.—in the fashion of hospitals [and prisons]. I love this idea!)

It used to be that when I would design a handout or class exercise or whatever I would try to expose the students to detail—not the obvious stuff that anyone could notice. Now I do just the opposite. I take everything my training has taught me is obvious (sure, it’s obvious to most librarians) and strive to call attention to it in a way that is easy to understand and makes sense to the students in the context of their assignments.

In a larger sense I wonder if there is anything that is truly apparent or obvious—or is everything bound to be subjective forever?

Pirates, dang!

It’s days like today that make me wish I had started one of those snarky anonymous blogs. Then I could talk a lot of smack about some folks I witnessed or experienced today in the library. This is not the home of snarky anonymity—so I’ll just make a few pithy statements and leave the rest to your imagination.

• When he started shouting about pirates I just thought dude was on acid… turns out he wasn’t.
• Who sits in a library and eats jars of condiments?
• Jimmy Carter, not George W. Bush. Totally different presidents, I swear.
• I actually don’t know why anyone would smuggle paper towels out of the library.

Year 2 Starts Out with a Bang!

Man. It’s been a while since I’ve had much to say…or more to the point, since I’ve had time to say anything.

We’re just entering week 2 of the Fall term here. Our instruction schedule is just a wee bit scary, although certainly not unmanageable. There’s been a lot of speculation about what’s driving the current instruction boom, I’ll be interested to see if we can find out some of the real factors.

Despite all of my well-intentioned proclamations, my list of professional obligations for which I do not receive a paycheck is growing and growing. I’m on the Oregon Library Association planning committee for the upcoming conference. I’ve agreed to be on a panel presenting at said upcoming conference (April, I think). I was just asked to join the OLA president’s Vision 2020 committee (planning and visioning for libraries in Oregon, etc.). I won’t even bother listing off the national obligations, but they are mighty.

In spite of it all I’m still striving for some work-life balance this year. Let’s hope I can find it.

Quotable moment. At the end of a one-shot with the first year nursing students I ask if there are any questions. A young man raises his hand and asks me this, “How much caffeine are you ON?”

He was kinda shocked when I told him that I don’t consume caffeine. He said, “That’s nuts!” before shaking his head and wandering off.

I like those nursing students…moxie.

Putting Assessment Into Practice

Although I didn’t get to attend, I’ve been told materials from the UW workshop on assessment are available.

Links to online materials via delicious
http://delicious.com/assessment4librarians

UW Information Literacy blog
http://uwinfolit.blogspot.com/

Unmarketing

Since Anne-Marie and Rachel introduced me to the idea of alternate reality games (ARGs) back at OnlineNW, I have been thinking about fun, marketing and outreach pretty much nonstop. The problem is really that I don’t know how to take these awesome ideas and bring them down to PCC scale.

I know that Trinity has Blood on the Stacks and UF has Bioactive and while those are really cool projects, they don’t quite strike the tone I’d hope for. I also don’t necessarily see directed gaming as the way to go (although I am pushing hard for a finals week gaming throwdown at the library, completely study break and non-academic). ARGs in and of themselves are very cool, but largely known for their usage in viral marketing campaigns.

I think the thing about viral marketing is that it is exciting for a short time but largely lacking in staying power. After all, viral or not, it’s still marketing. As Kevin Marks and Brian Oberkirch have both pointed out—the future is organic, not viral. These two are also a big part of the reason I’m thinking about unmarketing these days. Well, these guys and Pabst Brewing Company.

The way I see the outreach struggle is this: the people who come to you are already predisposed to want to be in your space. The people who need you to connect to them are generally not thinking about you, your space or how either might be a benefit. Who do those people think of most frequently? The people who are up in their spaces.

This is where those wacky Pabst guys come in. They have gotten a lot of attention lately for their “unmarketing” scheme, which really consists of just being in the places their intended market likes to be. You want to sell to young hipsters who bowl? Go be at young hip bowling alleys. Eventually, later at the grocery on a Friday night, the bowling hipster will remember their association with PBR and buy some. This is an extremely oversimplified view of how this unmarketing thing works, but there you have it. I think I will have to do more reading to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the whole thing. Brand Hijack has been strongly recommended.

So how do we do this at PCC? I suppose first we have to figure out where our target market likes to be and when it is appropriate to go be there too. I’ve tried some limited electronic forays into this world, but somewhat predictably, no one on Facebook really cares that we’re there. Sigh, does this mean I have to attend a sporting event??? Maybe this will provide more backing to my belief that we should get that ice cream or hot dog cart goin’.

Summer

Summer is a weird time for a 9 or 10 month academic librarian. I am only working Wednesday afternoons this summer as everyone advised me to take some time off after year one. I’m glad for the time to spend on various pleasures involving geekery and bike riding, but there are frustrations as well.

As you know, the library sure as hell doesn’t stop going when I’m not at work. The emails don’t stop coming, the thinking never ends, and the dreaming big for fall goes on all summer. To some extent it feels like I might as well be a 12 month librarian, I’m doing 12 months of thinking about it all.

There are also project management aspects that are frustrating. I agreed in spring term to undertake certain ongoing projects and responsibilities. I can’t really make them all happen in 4 hours a week, so other people have to forge ahead with them. This is good and I love working with a team who makes stuff happen. On the other hand, it was going to be my project and I wanted to be the creative force behind it. I’ll still be the coordinating force, but you know that’s a bit different.

It’s just the way summer rolls, but it takes some getting used to.

Connecting to Users with Chat & Texting

I was really looking forward to this session for a number of reasons. I wanted to see Joe Murphy speak (we met in Anaheim at one another’s poster sessions) and I’m resolutely convinced that txt reference could really fly at PCC. By this point in the conference I was really understanding the distinction between chat (vendor-chat) and IM reference services and was wanting to catch the comparison of vendor-chat services to free IM services. Sadly I missed part of that session because I’d been chatting with Jamie LaRue. Ah well.

I had to dash out before the end of this session to catch my airport shuttle and head back home. This means I slammed the laptop shut when I got a txt message telling me the shuttle arrived early and was already boarding. Apparently I forgot to save my draft before doing so and lost most of my notes. Fortunately Joe wrote a guest blog for Tame the Web which talks about the Yale Science Library text a librarian program. Essentially Yale SciLib (and some others, as you see in the comments) launched a texting program and decided that the best option was actually to purchase a mobile device rather than a subscription service that forwards SMS to email/IM. Continue reading…

Plenary Panel: Theory Meets Practice

The plenary panel, for me, was the highlight of the entire conference. Granted, I have always been overly excited by the theory behind our profession, but I think it is so important to consider the big picture now and again. My notes are probably fairly jumbled, as I was so entranced I forgot to to type for whole moments at a time.

I appreciated David Lankes reminding us all that we make a lot of assumptions about “young librarians” (whether that means age or time in the profession). Just because we’ve just come out of library school does not mean that you should cram us into a lot of techy responsibility because that tends to alienate us from the organization, from time spent getting to know the culture where we work. I feel lucky that I get to geek out, but have colleagues who reach out to wrap me into the fold of our culture all the same. It is a good blend but I can see how it would easily become overwhelming in many situations.

Lankes also called for big changes in LIS education. Whenever I hear a speaker on this topic I am again affirmed that I really did get a great LIS education. I know there are people who think a theoretically-based/inspired program is a waste of time but it simply is not true. Tools and applications can be picked up later (hell, they keep changin’ anyway). This is not to say that cataloging is not important ( I took it, it was mandatory) but that there’s no point to it if we’re missing the underpinnings. It’s like wearing vintage couture without a bra: expensive and it wont hold you up for long.

Carla Stoffle, like many speakers, reminded us that we need to take the library to the user, not require the user to 1) figure out what they actually want and 2)find us to ask for it. Importantly, she points out that technology is a tool, not a finite set of skills to set and forget.

Marie Radford is not a woman I’d want to get into a barroom brawl with, she’d totally win. What a spitfire! She asserts that communication, content, and cognitive skills are the most important qualities in a reference librarian. Be an agent of change, don’t just get dragged along with it is the take home message here. Well, that and, “No more lone ranger librarians!”

Jamie LaRue of Douglas County Libraries reminded me about some of the softer, but essential elements of librarianship. The heart of communication is really the ability to be in the same space as another human being. As we face the destuction of the circulation desk via RFID and self-checkout this becomes so much more important. Do the simple things: look up and make eye-contact, examine your reference desk and determine whether you’ve got a fotress or moat effect going on.

Renee and I had a brief chat (she chatted, I gawked) with Jamie LaRue about some elements of the Working Together program spearheaded by VPL. Tres exciting. Take a look at what those wacky Canucks are doing, I am really impressed. I’m also impressed by the idea of bottom-up community mapping, also being done by VPL. Jamie was the perfect person to talk to about this as his talk during the plenary panel was really about outreach and putting ourselves where we need to be. He used the example of a librarian he “assigned” to attend community meetings (town council perhaps, I neglected to note it). Initially the meeting folks treated her like a mascot, not a useful member of the group. Within a short period of time they came to recognize how essential her presence and contributions were and the culture shifted to one of, “We can’t begin the meeting yet, the librarian hasn’t arrived.” How can you engender this in your community/library/environment? Continue reading…

Outreach, E-Learning, Resource Guides

I was hoping that the first presentation, on providing library services at Multicultural student services centers would help me figure out the next steps to take with a virtual outreach project I am trying to coordinate via the library website, involving student services providers at PCC. It did not, but did at least give me hope and faith that student services providers can take an interest in how the library can work with them to the benefit of our students. The UNM program is a physical outreach project, but many principles work the same: flexibility, visibility, marketing, etc.

Other speakers provided information about services at their libraries that are not transferable or relevant to PCC at this point. University of Colorado – Boulder has developed an in-house database that provides access to library FAQs, course guides, and subject guides. They are having success with this approach and are able to keep better statistics on what students are searching for and can shift the metadata attached to their guides to get students to existing guides that meet their needs but were missed based on the search strategy used. This has interesting implications, but ultimately isn’t what we want to do, I think. I was put in mind of Jared Spool’s talk at Online NW this year, I got the impression from him that search boxes can cause some issues, but I haven’t looked at the UC-Boulder page to see exactly how they have implemented the search feature. Continue reading…

Opportunistic Reference

Lots of talk of that QuestionPoint qwidget going on at this conference. I didn’t realize how many folks were into this vendor-chat thing. Overall I think I’m more interested in bringing IM to our virtual reference offerings. We participate in L-net and I firmly believe in the importance of the service, but I do believe that our students are going to be more apt to use IM. Actually, I’m most convinced that we need to figure out txt reference, but that’s another post.

I really appreciated Bill Pardue’s (slam the boards) talk on predatory reference. As he said, think of it as a nature film: we are question-eating animals. I love that! We consume questions and we need to hunt them down. It may have been once upon a time that our potential users had nowhere else to go, but that is not true any longer. Consider services like ChaCha that are actively stalking our prey (questions). How do we connect to our patrons when they are not in our buildings, virtual spaces, and other ‘expected’ locales? We need to be in the quad, at the caf, over by the gym, in the coffee shop, etc. See the notes on this section for a brief overview of what some academic folks have been doing. Hey bosslady, can we have a hot dog cart, too?! (Or one of those bike ice cream carts, as I quipped on Facebook)

Kudos to Greg Notess for actually making me take an interest in screencasting (libcasting as he calls it). I had really been yawning at this idea for quite a while now, but I am starting to see the light.

Continue reading…