shinylib

Librarians love praise

I just taught a really awesome WR 121 class. There were no sleeping students; the obviously mentally elsewhere managed to keep the IMing to a minimum; and students were engaged and asked really great questions. That generally is enough praise for me—I managed to keep your attention. So when a student came to me at the end of class and handed me this note, I almost fell over:

Allinee,

Thank you so much! You are phenomenal! I learned so much from your presentation. I have a new attitude towards a library now.

WOW—Thanx!

[StudentName and email address]

Yay! Librarians love praise.

In process…

Well I am relieved to find that it’s not the upgrade to 2.5.1 that totally borked the shinyblog, it was that post on Course Hero (see, I knew they were evil!). This is good.

Since I had to completely disassemble and reassemble the php so many times I am now thinking about overhauling everything in its entirety. For that reason the shiny will be a bit tarnished in the coming days as I iron out exactly what it is that I want. Thanks for hanging in there…

Worms and their cans

Cans of worms a’poppin open all over. There’s a discussion on one of the campus listservs pertaining to hate crimes. A banner for Semana de la Raza was stolen recently after it had already been defaced with KKK and other such crap.

The discussion on the faculty list has been variously wounded, combative, and most of all passive aggressive. I believe that whenever you reply to a person by using their language in quotes throughout the email you are really just attempting to bait them into some kind of conversation. Some kind of “conversation” indeed.

So although I really try like hell to avoid these interactions, I felt compelled to send a message to the list. Here’s hoping I don’t get flamed to death. I just feel strongly that a) I don’t want to receive these damn emails every day, b) this is totally not the point of the faculty list, and c) the “conversation” has already gone to crap.

I agree that there is a conversation to be had here but I would respectfully ask that the conversation take place off of this listserv. This asynchronous email environment is one in which there is great potential for misunderstanding one another without the benefit of both vocal and non-verbal expression.

If we are a community then let us come together as a community:  honestly and with good intention. Strive to use language that is transparent– not to bait one another into responding. We have to embrace the notion that we may feel and experience these complex constructs very differently. We should allow language to open us to one another and to ourselves, not to close each other off.

In the words of John Dewey, “There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication…. Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing.”

Out of respect for my colleagues I won’t be sharing any of the other emails on this topic. I can say that while I was writing this an e-mail came through that in response a face to face discussion has been scheduled for next week in the TLC. That’s all I really wanted.

Hysterical climate

I just got back from what can categorically be called NOT a relaxing lunch. I am having something of a frantic and exhausted day to begin with so I decided to forgo my carton of soup in favor of a burger and fries from the caf (I know, I know).

While in the cafeteria a very loud alarm, possible the active shooter alert, began chiming. Only one caf employee began freaking out—and boy did he freak, but understandably—while the students sat complacently in their chairs, staring like downer cows waiting for the death to come and find them. I felt extreme pressure because, as faculty, it’s my job to drop everything and start doing emergency procedures. The most stressful part was the not knowing—is this an emergency? And the alarm stopped 30 seconds later… we still have no clue, but judging the pacific faces in the library I am guessing there was no emergency.

Existing in this hysterical climate is beyond exhausting. As though students and faculty both didn’t have enough to contemplate on a daily basis… now we worry that we come to work and to school and get gunned down in the course of our mundaneity. Although nothing came of it and people really looked at the caf worker like he was insane, I really appreciated how seriously he was prepared to take the incident. If someone’s coming to blow me away (maybe they hated ARTStor that much?) I would much rather someone take the idea of keeping us all alive very seriously.

Did I mention today is the anniversary of the Virginia Tech tragedy? No, I’m sure you knew that already.

Perspectives and learning experiences

This is totally what happens every time. I sit down with things to say. The phone rings. I spent 20 minutes explaining the process to search our OPAC for streaming videos. Why is it a note field that you have to search? It just is. What’s a note field? A field with notes. Not a field with oats, a field with notes. Then I forget what I was going to say.

I have known for a very long time that I need one of those voice recorder whatsits. I need to just speak into the mic for a few seconds so I can have some clue later of what I was going to say… it was about perspectives and learning experiences. That’s all I got, and that’s only because I’d already typed it into the title field, heh.

Note: the caller did not ask actually ask me about a field of oats.

Behind the times…

Well I have obviously been quite remiss in my blogging lately. There’s just been such a whirlwind of activity, none of which has left me any time for reflecting!

I changed campuses for Spring and am now at a campus I refer to as “The Farm”. The farm is replete with all the signs of springs—baby things being born or hatched, the poop baby things leave behind (such as from all those gosling upon my new car), scantily clad students making out (don’t they know it’s still 49 degrees out?)—and I am enjoying a great many. My colleagues here at the farm maintain this is because I have the “good view”—meaning the side of the office with a window.

Despite the pastoral vista there are some downsides to working at the farm. There aren’t enough librarians working here! Sometimes I have to work these shifts that are less-than-ideal…srsly. I’ve spent a small bit of time trying to figure out whether I am a) spoiled by my other campus b) just whiny and should investigate how much worse it could be c) in a good position to recommend changes or d) better off ignoring it until I return to “my” campus in the Fall.

In addition to being stymied by scheduling, I am also stymied by our multi-use desk setup at this campus. At my other campuses we have clearly defined reference and circulation desks that are nowhere near one another—and this is a good thing. I feel that at any campus with a sizable student body having multi-use desks just creates an environment in which you can do nothing but offer terrible customer services. I spent a good part of my desk time sending people to the station right next to me. A student summed it up best the other day when he looked at me and said, “Really? You really just made me stand in line to go stand in line again?” Have you seen any footage of Parking Wars, where people spend hours in multiple lines, attempting to retrieve their vehicles? It’s like that only with manky headphones and battered chemistry course reserves.

The other issue with mixed use desks is that I catch people attempting to do my job a lot. I feel fairly intimidated by the circ workers here—largely because we don’t know one another. At another campus if I found someone unintentionally roaming into the reference aspect of question answering I would just give them a friendly reminder that they can pawn those folks off on me. They would likely grin and respond that more work for me is less work for them. Here I suspect such an approach would be taken poorly, which I take to mean I need to give further thought to this issue. My ultimate concern, of course, is that students often ask questions that mask a further information need. At any rate, I did speak with a colleague here about my perceptions of the issue and I feel as though in general librarians at this campus are more comfortable with more loosely-defined question answering roles. That’s fine, I’m not here to rock their boat, just to help paddle it along so we’re not going in circles.

Support

I try to keep shinylib pretty attuned to the professional, much the same as I try to keep my work environment, but sometimes your life spills over into…well, your life.

It’s times like these that allow you to take stock of your colleagues (and yourself). There’s a rough patch in the shiny world right now, nothing dire, but it will pass. Thinking that tunneling into some work would help with both the physical and the emotional aches, I went to work only to discover myself useless after only five minutes. It was all staring blankly and exhaustion.

My lovely coworkers were able to support me by making the necessary call for a sub on my behalf and to send me home because I clearly should be sleeping right now. They respected that our awesome working relationship is probably not going to benefit from any deep probing into what is going on in my life, but recognized that I just needed some personal time and a long nap.

Having had working relationships in the past where one or multiple parties continually blurred the lines regarding appropriate personal sharing at work, I can only say over and over how much I appreciate my coworkers. I am going to attempt to power down this smoothie and get on to the aforementioned nap. I just wanted to take a moment to recognize the many types of support you can get from your colleagues, if you’re lucky. Today it was just what I needed.

Connotea

For quite a while now I have been thinking about this massive archive of PDF formatted articles that has been accumulating on my hard drives for years. As it happens, I am a physical and digital packrat and the idea of having to search for these articles again one day irritates me. I spent some time tinkering about in Access and various other DB tools, trying to find a way to sort, classify, and house my articles.

Eventually I abandoned the idea of developing such a tool myself because I really just don’t have the time or the know-how to design and implement something particularly well done. The folks over at Infodoodads recently reminded me about CiteULike, so I gave it a whirl. CUL comes close to doing what I want, but there’s one critical issue that drives me bonkers. CUL does not support multi-word tags. I cannot stand the insert underscores all_over_the_place and so I abandoned the project after inserting a paltry three citations.

I am now attempting to use Connotea to achieve the same purpose and I am happily able to report that I can at least use multi-word tags, although I haven’t investigated much beyond that first feature. What I am noticing right off the bat about Connotea is that you cannot upload the actual document to your personal library, an aspect of CUL that really lends some portability to your documents. In reality I have all of these articles on both a portable drive and my stable home drive, but still…

Anyone know of a cite that blends these features? That’s what I really need.

DDC/LCC

There has been a recent discussion on the Community and Junior College Libraries listserv regarding the use of Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification schemes in community college libraries. Not surprisingly, members of the list have been quite vocal in expressing their views on the use of either.

Much of the discussion centers on the belief that DDC is a step “backward” for students coming to the community college environment and that it inadequately prepares them for transfer to a 4-year university. I was particularly struck by the notion that using DDC keeps students “stuck in public library/high school mode”. I feel that this is a great disservice to public libraries and to the classification system itself. There is an implicit belief that academic libraries are somehow better than public or high school libraries and I think that kind of divisive thinking sets us at odds with one another and with our shared professional goals.

Having worked in both classification systems at different community colleges it is my belief that students are ultimately adaptable and will do just fine. And if they’re not–well what on Earth have we been doing to prepare them?

An example from a completely different arena: in one of my many committee meetings we’ve been debating restructuring the admissions and add/drop forms. For years the add/drop form has been purple and everyone has called it “the purple form”. Now that the form is printed on different colored stock the concern is that students won’t know which form to use. Imagine the collective shock when I, as the only library representative, suggested that we stop creating idiots who don’t read forms. If a student can’t be bothered to read the tops of the forms and select the one that says “add/drop” then I think we’ve done them a great disservice with the hand-holding and color-coding.

I feel the same way about classification systems and transferability. We can’t teach students that everywhere they go in this life will cater to what is most comfortable to the individual–it’s going to be a rude shock when they discover otherwise. What we can do is teach them that information and instruction professionals will be available to see them through the rough spots, provided they want to learn. This is a transferable ideology–from grade school to 4-year universities.

Flock redux

Several weeks ago I wrote about Flock, a “free, next generation web browser” which is built on the Mozilla Firefox platform. I said that I could see some merit to the functions of the browser but that ultimately I wouldn’t be making the switch.

I have to report that since that time I haven’t stopped using Flock. It slowly took over my browsing needs. To be sure the thing is a bit buggy at times–during my recent new car research I had to fire up the ole Firefox because Flock balked at some of the code on these flashy auto websites, VW in particular.

Since the original post there has been an update to Flock and although I haven’t felt any performance differences, I trust there are some. There are some bugs with posting to WP–like editing a post with the Flock WP client will totally bork the post you’re trying to edit. Flock acknowledges this and I assume they are working to fix the problem. Regardless I still find that Flock solved my need for a WP client that was fairly lo-fi yet didn’t require me to visit my blog and login.