shinylib

in which shinylib tangles with the media

So…I had my first libraryland media interaction while at ALA Midwinter 11. I’ve gotten in the ring with the media in the past over public health and vector control related issues at my previous place of work, but this was a new one for me.

I’ve now learned the valuable lesson that reporters will mangle and misrepresent you. The text accompaniment to the audio interview is disappointing and trite. Apparently KPBS doesn’t offer podcasts of their audio content, so although a friend did hear the interview, I sure have no idea how it was edited together, but I really hope it was a more faithful accounting of my views.

As I said in the comments on the article:

I’m frustrated by the misrepresentation of my comments regarding age of library patrons. I was speaking, contextually, to the importance of employing frontlines staff of a variety of ages because of the aforementioned potential for intimidating appearances of overly “hip” librarians (including myself, of the hot pink hair and tattoos). Patrons who may already be overwhelmed by the process of returning to the academic environment after many years away (or for the first time ever) may be more apt to gravitate toward librarians who offer a comforting “sameness” of appearance.

Agreed with RealityCheck regarding the importance of open-mindedness. I’m all for hiring anyone with a current, relevant skillset.

I was unable to catch the audio version of the interview with myself and Chris Davidson (Northwestern University) but I hope that it was a more faithful accounting of our perspective on the changing landscape of librarianship and the perceived values rift within multiple generations of librarianship.

We also talked about the importance of understanding different library environments and the appropriate staff/faculty for each. As for example, a community college in which patrons are between 16-80 years old and may need help operating a mouse versus a large academic research library in which patrons have specialized subject research needs.

Overall I am grateful for the attempt to call attention to libraries and librarians, but disappointed in the manifestation. I care not for your dress, shoes, or ambitions, frankly, and am interested in your skills and what you bring to the job. I stand behind my assertion that our patrons benefit if we “come to a total melding and blending of talents and personality types.”

I’m appalled to read that I allegedly struggle to connect with older patrons, and that my comments regarding different academic environments having different patron needs was totally disconnected to make it sound as though I were snarking about older patrons. Lesson learned: tangle at your own risk!

thoughts on email lists, unreasonable requests, and user research

I’ve been thinking a lot about email lists recently. They loom large in most librarians’ daily lives and usually I find the content of most email lists really obnoxious (incidentally this is why I love Twitter, there’s less room for obnoxious crap in 140 characters). There’s the endless repetition of questions that could be answered by a quick archive search. The infinite requests to “let me off of this list!” that could be solved by reading the footer of any single message to the list. The tidal wave of messages that convince me that I really am thinking about completely different stuff than my colleagues (really, you’re still asking about Credo…for the 900^th time since September?)—and increasingly I see a new category of email, the add my awesome feature idea email.

I’ve spent the last year-and-some of my life actively dialoging with a super large libraryworld vendor, many of you probably already know whom, in a product development relationship. I’m on conference calls with this vendor every other week, and the alternating weeks I’m on conference calls with my consortium operations team discussing what to do about the vendor calls. This relationship has caused me to enter the world of vendor-hosted email lists, principally in the form of various product-oriented user groups. The stuff I see on these lists is no less annoying, but it has a peculiar bent.

I cannot count the number of times I have seen the vendor castigated for making decisions that the end-practitioner user cannot understand. “Do more usability studies!” the practitioners cry and then in the same voice they add a request to “also please add my new awesome feature idea to the next update.” Never “I have an idea, please run some usability tests and then consider implementation after consulting the user group.” Just, “add my awesome idea now, kthx.”

Let me be clear librarians, systems folks, and other libraryland geeks. Your awesome ideas need testing just as much as the vendors’ ideas, probably more. Being a librarian, especially a frontlines librarian, does not mean you have magic pen* access to product interfaces, nor should you.

This is a case of what’s good for the goose being good for the gander. Everyone benefits from user research and when user research nerds say things like, “But you are not the user,” we mean you too.

*magic pen refers to the erroneous idea many end-users have about interfaces, that you can simply draw in a new feature somewhere, and is often accompanied by the question, “Can you just put a button over here?”

Lessons from the real world

Today I gave myself a small gift: a few hours in which to actually go into a bookstore and review a ton of books I am considering purchasing–either for the library or for my personal geek collection. I spent about an hour on the Powell’s website before going in and had made a detailed list of titles, likely shelf/aisle locations, and other notations that made sense only to me (mostly to do with pricing elsewhere and consortial availability).

I went into what I think of as big Powell’s with no problem–that place is a crazy jumbled rabbit warren full of rooms in different colors [pdf] with somewhat nebulous subsections, but it’s still somehow vaguely navigable. I forced myself not to spend $40 I don’t have on stupidly cute San-x folders and headed across the street to Powell’s 2. Powell’s 2 used to be Powell’s Technical…I think. It’s hard to tell.

There are two paths to information: Stores & Events and find a store. The Stores & Events listing for Powell’s Technical was totally broken, presumably because there’s no more Powell’s Technical but find a store told me that “Powell’s Technical Books is now Powell’s Books Bldg. 2, on the corner of 10th and Couch, across the street from Powell’s City of Books. The new space brings our mathematics, sciences, computing, engineering, construction, and transportation sections closer to our flagship store.”

Okay, clear enough. Except I didn’t look for any of this information until I was already inside the store. Why? Because the item records told me all of these books were at the Burnside location (which, in Powell’s speak, means at big Powell’s). Once I figure out that most of these books were a block over I figure I have all of the other information written down so it should be applicable once I am in the right building. Except it totally isn’t.

Since I’m an annoying librarian type I spend 70 minutes or so roaming through the store carefully hunting down my next nerdgasm. I manage to find this peculiar section called Graphics – User Interface pretty easily because the in-store online catalog (which is quite different from the website catalog) had told me it would be aisle 19 and it was. Sweet. Hm, now I am hunting for aisle 99C (which is going to be home to Engineering – Project Management and somehow is gonna contain a book about persona development) and feeling mystified because the last aisle in the store is number 30 or something (it’s a small store, this one). Along a side wall I finally find a hand-scrawled number on a piece of scratch paper taped to the shelf that says 99B. I figure 99C will surely come after 99B…but find instead 99D. I walk back and forth anxiously scanning the shelf labels between B and D, certain that somehow I have missed the next clue.

Eventually I give up and do the thing I dread most. I ask for help. I wait nervously for the info guy to return to his post because I’ve overheard several people chastised for asking at the wrong counter and I really want to avoid that apparent bookstore faux pas myself. He comes back and I ask my first question regarding the whereabouts of 99C. He leads me back to the section whence I came and aha! There simply is no sign but it’s sorta thereish in between B and D. The Engineering – Project Management section is about half of one shelf, so I’d overlooked it. He’s off and running before I can ask my next question, so I chase after him.

Clutching my (by now very rumpled) piece of paper in my hand I ask him where I might find Computer Reference – Social Aspects-Human/Computer Interaction which had been home to so many books I just stopped writing down titles and wrote down the entire aisle name, even though I was unable to find an aisle number for these using the in-store online catalog. Are you confused yet by the multiple online catalogs, aisle numbers and aisle names, aisle number schematic, room color schematics, and various other location designations? Because I sure as hell was. I got so confused that when the man stared at me blankly and said he didn’t know and started walking away again I thought it was almost reasonable. But really, it wasn’t reasonable, so I persisted until he dumped me off on a slightly frazzled looking woman after sort-of-relaying my original query.

The woman starts doing the thing I find most infuriating about store personnel…she starts walking along reading the hanging signs over the aisles to me. Yes, lady, I can read those as well as you can. In fact I have already done so three or four different times. She’s also mumbling about how the problem with the signs is that she can’t really read them anyway. She leads me back to the User Interface area and I wait to see if I had perhaps missed another small shelf, but no, there’s nothing there. I reiterate to her what the precise name of the section I am looking for is and she asks me if I have a title. I explain that no, there’s no specific title, I just want to see everything the catalog listed as being in that section. She asks again for a title and reaches to grab my poor rumply sheet of paper. I clutch it more firmly and tell her that no, there are no titles on there that are related to this part of my quest. She tells me that it would be easier for her to help me if I could just give her a title and then leads me around the store again, mumbling about the various sections my books might be in, even though they are clearly unrelated to my quest.

I finally say, “Look, thanks, but just forget it. I’ve been here for several hours now and I think I’ll just give up for today. It’s clear that there is no computer reference section in this store.” By this point I am well past the end of the work day, ridiculously past time for lunch, and about to hit the end of my rope in terms of patience. I know what it’s like to get railed on by frustrated customers, so I’m really trying my best to smile and say thanks repeatedly and get the hell out but she won’t let me. She asks yet another time if I don’t have a title to give her and I sort of lose it. She finally snaps at me, “Fine, I’ll just stop trying to help you then.”

Hallelujah. Thinking that I am going to take one last swing through the Science Reference section to see if I missed anything nerdtastic, I turn on my heel and…oh my god she is following me. She is following me around the store and she won’t stop talking and I am losing my mind. She is explaining again that she’s sorry she wasn’t able to help me and that really, it’s best not to rely on the website too much because it says a lot of things that just aren’t true or don’t exist. I walk away from her in the middle of her sentence and run for the checkout. I buy my one coffee stained used book about visual communication and get the hell out of dodge. Next time? Summit and/or half.com.

So, my lessons from the real world today:

• Just because you think your navigation makes sense doesn’t mean anyone else does.
• Themes are cute ways to organize stuff…until they’re not.
• Numbers are really useful for organization, almost everyone gets how numbered aisles work. Try not to skip about 60 numbers for no easily discernible reason.
• Random breaks in pattern are hard to understand and cause affective distress. If your convention or pattern is say, to use white lettering on black background, avoid suddenly using black marker on red scratch paper.
• Explain handoffs to the customer. She won’t understand why she’s suddenly become someone else’s concern if you don’t tell her.
• Explain handoffs to your coworker, she also won’t understand why someone has suddenly become her concern if you don’t tell her.
• Finally, sometimes you need to just let the customer escape. Phrases such as “no thank you” and “I’m going to leave” are often indicators that the customer is ready to go. Failure to discontinue pursuit past this point in time may result in beatings.

some unpopular thoughts…

There’s all this hype in libraryland about hiring and diversity. I’m not really entirely sure what diversity means to most people, it seems that it was a huge ALA buzzword that I started really noticing around the time of Loriene Roy’s election. So far as I can tell it’s being used to mean “more brown folks”, which to my thinking is kind of missing the mark.

The trend toward intentional diversification in libraries is interesting and important, particularly in academia I would say, however often misses the most important level of diversity for libraries today…era of education/skillset (which often involves age but doesn’t have to). The truth is that recent library grads will come out with an entirely different collection of skills and a different (notice I didn’t say more valid) understanding of the shifting paradigm inherent in the world of electronic information.

You can see this trend very evidently in the shift from known item searching to discovery-based searching. I would absolutely favor a candidate with the following skillset over a candidate with a “traditional” skillset: digital learning object creation; information architecture; user experience design; usability testing; interface and interaction design; web content development; instruction skills grounded in an asynchronous, online environment and more of the same…It’s really just about marrying the new with the old; we’re still user-centered, we just have evolved the science of understanding those users.

Libraries have had a longstanding practice of hiring the same exact librarian over and over again…those librarians will more-or-less become irrelevant at the same time (unless we get serious about continuing education and tech competencies for librarians), retire at the same time (well…sorta, if we can ever get them to let go), balk at many of the same change-related fears, and provide similar perspectives. Yes, I am grossly and wildly generalizing for the purposes of making this point. Yes, I know LOADS of awesome librarians who have been at it for 20+ years, understand current interface design, and speak from a place of impassioned comfort with technology, but they are a minority (see, we’ve come full circle to diversity again).

how do you keep track of tacit knowledge and collaborative stuff?

I’m part of a two-librarian team tasked with research solutions for what we’re calling a knowledge bank or internal repository.

What kind of solutions do you implement at your library for this? We’re currently using a shared network drive but it has many problems and doesn’t meet our needs. Shared files are constantly deleted or misplaced (inadvertently) by users. The network isn’t accessible from off-campus. People can’t really share narrative, short of creating a word document and putting some thoughts in it and hoping people intuit from the file name why it might be useful.

Tools already under consideration (or nixed from our list): Drupal, WordPress, various wiki products, NING, CONTENTdm. What am I missing?

Full disclosure: I just want it to be Drupal, but due diligence means I gotta consider some alternatives. (:

privacy and suckers

I just watched a patron get suckered by one of our frequent flyers. He’s a nice guy, but I’ve seen him do the “woe is me, I have no printer credits” performance many times. The well-meaning student logged into her student account to help the other guy print (100 pages no less, which I know will have wiped out the student’s entire term allowance for printing).

The other guy is not a student, and uses the library every day on a 1-hour guest account, which doesn’t come with free printing privileges (community patrons can purchase their own print credits with a debit card, I believe).

The question is, is it my job to get involved? On the one hand I sort of resent the part where the student attempted to swoop in and save him because the mean librarian wouldn’t print 100 pages for him (hey I’m human, whatevs). I feel like they are her printing credits to do with as she sees fit. I also wonder, is it a breach of dude’s privacy to tell this woman “that’s nice of you honey, but he does this to a new person every day and you’re perpetuating his belief in the success of this method”?

Ultimately, I have bigger fish to fry, but it’s something I was wondering about…then a nosy student came along and literally started reading this blog post over my shoulder. Don’t blog at the refdesk, there’s a lesson learned. (:

Info lit or just plain lit?

I really do have great intent when it comes to blogging and posting. I even have a whole stockpile of half-finished drafts that I sift through every so often. I was just cleaning out the less…um…friendly of my drafts (I do actually have a filter, sometimes it even works) and came across this one…

I’m seeing them more frequently these days. They’re in the library just like everyone else, looking for books to flesh out a Works Cited, hoping I can connect them to a movie that will do what the assigned reading did, trying to find a topic for a Writing 121 assignment. I’m talking about potheads, stoners, whatever you want to call them.

Does that mean there’s a connection between marijuana and literacy, marijuana and community colleges, or none of the above? Hm.) I have no personal or professional judgments on those students, but negotiating a reference interview with someone who is actively craving Cheetos and a Slurpee is difficult.

I think I was planning to go somewhere funny with those thoughts, but they are just so true. This year has totally been the year of the stoner in the library. I actually don’t have a problem with that, I just get frustrated with any student who shows up unprepared and expects me to magic them through an assignment.

Let’s not be too hasty to judge, though. One of my favorite outspoken pro-weed students was apparently recently accepted to an ivy league college. Go dude, go!

Make it better

Hey, lucky you. You have this amazing opportunity to help me. I need to rewrite some text and I need inspiration help.

In the PCC environment, when you go from here to some full text

Some back story: Debate amongst librarians ensues. MANY suggestions are made. None really rock.This text displays on a mostly blank screen for a bit while the resolver connects the user to the full text.

The complaint is that people think nothing is happening and quit. Not something I’ve witnessed—doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Try Here link connects users to a list of options which include any available full text access and various ILL options, etc.

Pretentious…language…dork

I usually get perturbed with faculty who refer to our instructional services as presentations, orientations, and other non-teaching language. It’s recently occurred to me that this mostly just makes me a pretentious dork.

I still think it is important that our colleagues value and understand what we do (teaching) but I’m realizing that many of them are simply lacking the language to describe what we do. It might sound ridiculous to suggest that a teacher cannot describe teaching but from their perspective they lack the language to describe librarianship. It’s just that no one’s ever told them that we teach. After all, the last librarian many of them spent any time with was 15-30 years ago in primary and secondary school. If that was your most recent experience with a librarian you might not know what we do either.

Add to this the fact that most of them have never seen our styles of instruction (creative, innovative, multimedia, collaborative, etc.) and…well, you see where I’m going.

I’m trying to look for the intent behind the language to help me understand how to respond. For instance, a health sciences faculty member contacted me for help with something recently and after I connected her to what she needed, she thanked me for giving her a tutorial. At first I wondered who in their right mind would call that a tutorial, but then I realized what she was saying was “thank you for the service you provide.” And isn’t that enough? Maybe I can let the semantics go for once…

#amazonfail

I’ve clearly been under a rock recently and so missed the news about Amazon’s ridiculous failures in de-ranking. Y’know, where they “inadvertently” removed the sales rankings in many books with gay or lesbian themes in them somewhere. Something to do with adult content. NPR explains. Tweeple are outraged. Amazon blames some French guy.  Tweeple apologize, sort of.

People in the tubes are predictably upset and I was kind of surprised when I was reading some of the comments at NPR.

Comments include sentiments similar to JustAnnie’s proclamation that she’s pretty much done with Amazon forever; feeling both lied to and discriminated against are more than she can take. Purly and others assert that Jeff Bezos is not a prude or a conservative and Amazon clearly fumbled here but meant no harm.  Clearly people are taking this stuff very seriously, very personally.

I guess when I heard and read about the issue it never occurred to me to think that someone made this decision on discriminatory grounds, for personal reasons. As noted in the NPR comments, Amazon has had financial success selling any number of adult books in the past (hey, not everyone wants to lurk around the OPAC looking for su:erotic fiction) so I don’t think it makes sense to assume any scenario in which they make it harder to sell something that’s got to be doing well.

I think this is what happens when you taxonomize in a vacuum. It seems perfectly clear to me that some well-meaning team of geeks (or some po’ French dude, apparently) somewhere structured this puppy in to existence. I’m sure there was an intent to make those materials more easily searchable by the folks who are looking for them and less prominently visible to folks who’d rather not know about those results. Bingobango and a few keystrokes later it’s done. Okay, we know it took longer than that. There were a number of D&D breaks and quests for cheese.

What I think is interesting is what this guy says over here, that no one else seems too worried about (emphasis added):

Daisey: I doubt anything will happen. While embarrassing to the public, it will fade quickly as the changes get reverted. Amazon is no longer the company it once was: it’s just an online Wal-Mart. Like any behemoth, there’s little accountability inside the bubble.

More interesting is that everyone in publishing entrusts their rankings and status to a single provider. That’s the story no one likes thinking about in publishing.

That bit about publishing and rankings gives me the heebies.  Pervasive Amazon is always a bit creepy to me. It first happened when the Amazon/Target thing happened.  I’ve talked about how we’re switching (PCC) to WorldCat Local soon (nowish, in fact) and one of the features you can enable in WCL involves rankings from Amazon. I’ve been wondering what the hell OCLC were thinking, and they’ve been asked as much at meetings I’ve attended and no one can say why they felt embedding Amazon ratings (and links to purchase materials) was necessary. Or maybe they were rankings. What’s the difference between a rating and a ranking? And where do reviews come in? Anyway. I’m not entirely opposed to giving people rankings or purchasing options, I just think it would be great to select those sources on our own. Then I’d send people to somewhere local and save on shipping and emissions.

Monoliths are another story, nothing there surprises me. I just like that phrase about the bubble. *eyes the ALA bubble warily*