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. (:

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. (:

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!

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.

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…

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*

This is a presentation for the Emporia State University SLIM Oregon cohorts brownbag lunch today. FYI, my reference to ITLWTLP is to point out that they are critical while remaining professional. Just in case you thought I was calling them jerks. (;  If you’re thinking this presentation seems incredibly simple and obvious, that’s the point! It’s a group of two cohorts: one about to graduate and one just getting started.

Also, I realize that most of the “futurists” I mention don’t necessarily describe themselves that way. They are people I like to watch because I generally catch glimpses of the future. Except for JFW. Everyone knows what that’s all about.

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.

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…

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.

Essentially, Anne-Marie is riffing on some discussions from the fall OR/WA ACRL meeting. One of the points (attributed to Terry Reese) that really stuck with me is the idea that we need to do more than move the ILS to the network level, we need to shift the entire discovery process to that same level. Not surprisingly the reaction to this statement was varied and emphatic, with some librarians giving the response that Caleb correctly surmises is connected to my thoughts on teaching a systematic approach to research and reference (articles come from databases, databases can usually be found on the library website).

I want to be clear about something here, something that kept coming up for me as I pretended to participate in this conversation. I don’t for a moment suggest or desire that we teach that articles ONLY come from databases. But let’s  be very clear about the context I operate within. My students are community college students and their instructors are often, dare I say it, overworked and less-than-imaginative with some assignments. We see students who have been given instructions like “don’t use ___ database, those articles are too easy” and that doesn’t even touch on the “nothing from the Internet” assignments we see weekly. I had to fight with a department chair last year about whether or not Ebsco products contain peer reviewed articles (he doubted the veracity of the student who said the librarian helped her find a peer reviewed article in some Ebsco DB). So when I’m teaching, what I’m really teaching is: here’s how to efficiently and effectively work within the system that you’ve been relegated to. Does that meet the lofty ideals I had in library school, whereby I’d motivate everyone into their own happy info-is-everywhere bubbles? No, but this is reality. Community college reality.

I get 50 minutes, sometimes 110 if I’ve really been working the outreach to that particular faculty. This is not enough time to instill a deep-seated value of information from far-and-wide. It’s probably not even enough to start that conversation with the students. You know the rest of these arguments, they’ve been made by every instructional librarian relegated to the one-shot, I’m sure. The work of groups like OWEAC (The Oregon Writing and English Advisory Committee) and the IL Summit participants make really important steps toward this “more perfect” (heh) end, but they are baby steps and there are so many more to be taken. What those groups will engender for us is a place in curriculum where IL has some mandated support. It doesn’t take us into that philosophical and ideological space where we get warm and fuzzy about information. I don’t know how to get us there. I don’t teach credit classes and it’s a rare pleasure when I see students more than one or two isolated times. I’ll have to count on the credit instruction librarians to let me know what that experience is like. We have a 1 credit class at PCC Library, but even that doesn’t have the room to really get deep with the “creating lifelong learners and productive citizens” (Anne-Marie). It’s an assignment-based class, really, although the assignment isn’t ours.

As noted at command-f, many librarians remain convinced that the local user needs to be connected to local content (quickly). For me this is about two things: practicality (students need snappy turnaround, and they procrastinate like mofos) and pride (more on this in a bit). I totally agree with everyone who wishes we’d stop catering to these last minute people, but I can’t find an actual way to get college students to stop leaving things till the last minute (um, no, you can’t receive that ILL by tomorrow). I think to some extent this is why I want to see our website give some preference toward the moderately information literate user. I require that it be functional and easy for the novice to get in and get out, but I really want it to have something more for the student who really benefits from the experience. I’m hoping that our move to WorldCat Local is going to help us in this quest.

There are going to be new interesting challenges in the WorldCat environment, no doubt. For starters we don’t know how we’re going to limit by campus. This is an important feature, not just for the slaquers, but for the browsers. The people who just want to find the audio fiction while they kill an hour waiting for the shuttle. As my boss is fond of reminding us, this is their library. If they want it to be easy to get a list of the available audio fiction at the building they are already standing in, far be it from me or my system to stand in the way.

The other thing I’m really unsure about is the default location. I believe the default holdings location is local, followed by consortial, followed by WorldCat. I can’t say I’ve worked out what layout works best for which users in which scenarios, but I do know that the decision was probably workflow related. It’s not bad reasoning, libraries are busy and the staff can’t spend a ton of time weeding out requests for things we already own locally, just because someone didn’t notice our  holdings. It seems to me that the ultimate solution is moderated by software and interface changes, not by forcing either staff or user to accomodate the system. But we’re not there yet. I don’t have any idea what there looks like. Hm.

Remember I said pride was also at issue here? One of the principle factors is that we’re proud of our systems, tools, environments. We want to promote them to our users. “Learn to use the magical database— it can give you so much.” But should we be proud?  I mean to the extent that we’re complacent. You don’t need to read snarky librarian blogs to know that whole aspects of the library experience are completely dysfunctional. Everyone from shelver to director has had some sort of experience with/as a user that confirms this. Obfuscation by call number, crappy interfacing, incomprehensible and aggressive signage.

Read anything related to library history and you are struck immediately by the sweetness of the origins of information and archive management and also with reverence for how far we’ve come. But we seem to be at a total crossroads. We want to give our users everything they could ever need in an easy to use package they never have to leave home to receive but we’re also trying to honor those users for whom the edifice still means something. We’re trying to blend the old track with the new track and coming up with what a DJ would call a trainwreck, except that when a DJ’s trainwreck is caused by technical malfunction we forgive her. When a library’s trainwreck is caused by techinical malfunction it’s something altogether different, I just can’t figure out what.