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?”

Stress!

Lemme preface this post by saying I dig and respect my colleagues. I’m about to go on a major rant, but please don’t think I don’t value my coworkers. I am frustrated and emotional and they’re just feeling a bit more like co-irkers than coworkers at the moment. It will pass. If any of my colleagues are reading…well it’s a free world. Go right ahead, just don’t get passive aggressive with me in the workplace. We’re all adults.

As you know from my long-ass-list-of-junk-I’m-working-on-right-now post, we’re trying to get our chat reference program off the ground at PCC Library. This means we’re knee-deep in conversation about how to staff this thing.

I spent months trying to get folks to have a conversation about these things only to be told “yeah yeah sounds good” about my proposed ideas. Sure we can staff chat from the reference desk, it’s just like another phone line, right?

Now that some “practice” (I use the term loosely, very loosely) has actually happened, the librarians are deciding that maybe staffing chat from reference is too hard for them. I don’t think that’s true at all; they’re just scared. I’m really struggling with my boundaries as the web specialist. There’s a real temptation to say, “You know what? That lady who signs the paychecks seems to think I have some expertise in this area. That’s why she made me the web dork librarian. Just do it my way.” Yeah, that will totally make me friends in my library. Only not.

I sent an email to the librarians asking them to have a little faith in me, in the proposed pilot service, in themselves, and to give it the ole college try for Summer and Fall. I made promises to review transaction data and anecdotal responses at the end of Fall and reevaluate the staffing situation then. Data, data, data I kept saying. Why? Because it’s wicked easier to get the boss to sign-off on proposed staffing changes (or, eee, possibly dig up a few more hours for us from somewhere) with numbers in hand. We served X students, Y per cent of whom waited more than 60 seconds for a response. Based on on X and Y we should really try Z for Winter and Spring.

I even had some comments from various managers who saw my email and said that it was a very well-written email that made a lot of sense. So why did I get back what boils down to a “hellz no” from one of our librarians?

I get that things felt scary during practice (when you didn’t even have real patrons yet) but I also know that some of the librarians didn’t actually practice. Of their own admission, whenever a triage situation arose, they just dumped their pretend chat patron. “Oh, someone’s here, gotta go.” Well, that’s not stretching your skills and abilities at all, now is it? You can’t get better at typing “just a minute please, I have someone on the phone. If you need to go make sure to leave your email and I will follow up with you there,” if you’re not actually doing that.

So I’m super frustrated. The counter-proposal from the librarians is to staff reference from shifts in their offices. Remember this is a community college, not some fancy-pants university library. We don’t have the luxury of office hours and pretty much all of our time not spent teaching and manning the desk is spent in meetings or prepping for eleventy-nine other things. So this alleged time in the office doesn’t even exist. To propose that non-existent office time should be used to staff chat is not especially feasible.

There’s also the issue of inequity between campuses. Everyone is stretched thin and doing more with less. For some reason (dates back to before I was here) our librarians really get off on finger-pointing and insisting that things were better before one campus stole the other campus’ part-time librarian hours. At the campus I work for, we’re generally pretty sure that we’re getting the shaft in this battle, but we’re over it. There’s a perception that we have more hours of librarian allotted to us, so we must have it easier. We also see more students, open reference an hour earlier, and often teach WAY more classes…but hey, whatevs.

So I have a lot of fears that this magical librarian-in-an-office solution will really turn into “why don’t you guys do it, you have more librarians”. Which will then boil down to, “Hey Allie can do it all the time. She types more quickly and is better at that stuff.” And I am willing to sell my time. Hour for hour, desk time for chat time—but I don’t think that’s what they had in mind.

I have a lot more I could say on this, but I’m just getting myself irate while at reference. Egad, I can answer questions, the phone, chat, AND write blog posts at the same time. Maybe I am a freaking genius.

</vitriol>

What I’ve Been Doin’

Friends and colleagues were recently ragging on me about the lack of posts here at shinylib. In lieu of an actual post, I’ll just tell you what I’m doing that keeps me too busy to post.

If you work in an academic library, you know that late spring/summer is project season. PCC Library is totally no different, except many of the projects involve me (read: I’m in charge of) this year.

1. Chat reference.
   • PCC Library is finally getting it on virtual style. Our chat reference services will go live the first day of summer term.
   • We’re using Libraryh3lp to power this beast.
   • For some reason I said I’d be the one to do the coding for this. I have been endlessly mangling a copy of the Ask a Librarian page, but I’m getting it there.
   • I also have been powering the training program for the librarians.
     • + all of the documentation
     • + practices and procedures statements
     • + other junk I keep forgetting to plan in advance
2. Subject guides 2.0ish
   • We’re making the jump to using the Library A La Carte system this year. It’s an open source CMSy thing for our subject guides.
     • this involves much development and training: for me, for other librarians, for web team
     • props to my web team for the intense server work, I claim no responsibility for any of that magic
     • endless migration of content. props to my librarians for sucking it up and migrating their own content!
3. Manuscript
   • I’m finally trying to publish that thing. Yeah, that thing.
   • What up with the confusion, Chicago?
   • I’m trying really hard not to stick this on the back burner again. Is it sad that I have relatively little tolerance for anything non-APA?
4. I should really work on publishing that other thing. Which means I need to write it first. Heh.
5. Did you see my post about the CFP for ACRL NMDG @ALA Annual? Putting together an entirely new type of conference program takes some work. Not tons of work yet, but there’s work.
   • Props go to Merinda Hensley and Linda Hofschire for much work here
6. Speaking.
   • At OLA 2009
     • Librarians Can Help Me With That? Getting the Word Out About Your Reference and Instruction Services
   • At Oregon Virtual Reference Summit
     • Face-to-Space: Creating Buy-in for New Virtual Reference Mediums (check for video here, should be up soonish)
7. School is still in session. These are quarters, not semesters, buddy. No intersession here just yet. (That always makes me think of intercision, like do I just cut away the students? And would that make them demons or dæmons?)

And wait, there’s more. But I really don’t have time to talk about it right now. Those were the 8 minutes I had to spare. (:

I’ll leave you with a bonus… I’m just obsessed with this song at the moment.

Hiatus

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.

And I thought our questions were difficult…

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!

Fail

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.

Autopilot…not so much FTW!

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.

Communication Breakdown

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.

Fried!

It’s the week before finals. That’s all I have time or energy to say… ♥ to those of you in academia and to our public counterparts who see our procrastinatory slaquers during our off-hours (and all other times, I’m sure).