joy at moll projects dot com
I registered for my last semester today. In the fall, I'll be taking Management of Information Agencies, a required course, and a one-credit seminar called "Tracking Legislative Information." I will also complete the required comprehensive exam that semester so that I can graduate in December.
The light course load with no courses in the summer will give me time for a job search and for off-line writing--you know, the kind that goes "through the publishing/editing process."
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Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association, has not given me much of a welcome into my new profession, denigrating the tribe of librarians, blogging ones, that I chose to join.
If Seth Finkelstein is right and a post from Dorothea's blog is part of what set Gorman off, the whole situation gets more laughable. Gorman argues that one should be reading complete texts, but he apparently made his judgements about blogs from things sent to him. Did it ever occur to him that snippets of blogs in email are not giving him the context that he needs to make a reasoned and informed judgement?
And what context we get from Caveat Lector: a William Morris pattern! Latin words! And, look, she reads books!
More important, and the reason I'm writing this post, is that Gorman missed an important textual context. A link in the "Gorman is anti-digital" post sends us all the way back to an amazing piece that Dorothea wrote during last year's ALA election in April.
One response I could have to Gorman's rant is "if this is who ALA chooses for president, than I don't want anything to do with it." A, perhaps, healthier response (and it has appeared on Web4Lib) is to say, "well, it looks like us techie librarians are going to have to get more involved."
Gorman framed all this as an US vs THEM battle. But it isn't and we don't have to make the same mistake. That's why I think Dorothea's April piece is so important to read again, now. Techie librarians can be the ombudsmen that value both the traditions of libraries and the possibilities of technology.
Did anyone else read Michael Stephens' Open Letter and think, "now there's someone who, in the next decade or so, might be a good president for the 21st century ALA"?
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I'm not much tempted to join the trend of podcasting librarians (Greg, Karen, Steven, Michael, Karen) because I write much better than I speak.
So I started thinking about where one could get copyright-free audio material to use in a regular podcast. Of course, I always thing of government documents when I think of copyright-free. Are there government-produced audio materials available for podcasting? I didn't find anything while just goofing around in the Mobius catalog (which includes several depository libraries) and the NARA site, but the Library of Congress has put up some sound recordings on its sites. See, for example, the "I Hear America Singing" collection.
Another source, and some of the podcasting librarians have already been tapping this for music, is the Internet Archive.
ADDENDUM: Not everything at either Internet Archive or the Library of Congress is copyright-free. Pay attention, read the fine print, ask questions, know your rights.
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Did you know that the Presidential Libraries operate under the auspices of the National Archives and Records Administration, the same people who are responsible for the founding documents of the U.S., displaying them in the newly-refurbished Rotunda? I learned that, among other things, when I researched NARA for my Government Publications class last semester.
It has bearing on one of my classes this semester, as well. My Digital Libraries professor, Tom Kochtanek (affectionately known as Dr. K), is involved in the digital collection on display at the Truman Presidential Museum & Library web site.
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I'm applying for my first professional librarian position today, months before I intended. I won't have my MLS until December, but I'm otherwise very qualified for this position with some relevant traits that are rare in librarians (like an engineering bachelor's degree in Computer Science). Either my application will never get out of HR or I'll be a top candidate.
Rick and I are both all ready showing signs of stress--and I only heard about this job on Friday! This is going to be a tough year for two intuitives. Give us a set of potential circumstances and we can imagine a half dozen scenarios from the sublime to the tragic and everything in between. It's very exhausting to live six imaginary lives along with the real one. I don't even want to think what it will be like when I have a dozen applications out to as many universities in as many cities.
I really related to Meredith earlier this month in her attempt to balance the fantasy of a potential future with the possibility of that dream failing to materialize. I thought, "That will be me in a few months." It's only been a few weeks and it's all ready me!
The best coping mechanism I've come up with so far (if you don't count chocolate) is to cultivate an attitude of trust. I want to trust that Rick and I will make good decisions and that the things we can't control will work out just fine, too. I can be a fatalist when it suits me.
Dorothea has given a fictitious name to her current job prospect. I think I'll steal that idea. For reasons that are probably best left unexamined (although yesterday's confession of romantic notions might be enough of an explanation), I think I will name my job prospects after British Castles. So, today I'm applying for the job of instruction librarian at Rothesay Castle.
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In Digital Libraries class this week, we're exploring actual digital libraries. For an example of a book-oriented Digital Library, I discovered these 19th Century Schoolbooks. I'm a bit of a romantic about both learning and about the 19th century. No need to apologize for the former, but I am aware that sustaining romantic notions about the 19th century requires selective attention. So, I was actually surprised by how charming these schoolbooks are.
Take a look at this page, for example. I could imagine a modern first grade teacher having little difficulty teaching from that. Besides learning to read and write the words "cat" and "dog", we could draw cats and dogs, use the drawings to count and add and subtract cats and dogs, and tell stories about cats and dogs. A delightful day for a six year old. Or anyone. Maybe I'll go draw a cat right now....
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I looked at the registration and hotel information for the Annual Conference of the American Library Association in Chicago this June. I've been assuming for more than a year that I would be going to this conference. It's close and it coincides with when I want to get serious about a job search for an academic library job beginning in December or January.
But.
I read a lot of things from frustrated conference goers after last summer's conference in Orlando due to inadequate shuttles and dispersed hotels and programs. Just looking at the hotel map makes me think this conference will have similar problems. That slow-loading pdf map isn't very clear--but the big circle at the bottom surrounds the conference location and the red and white circles many blocks north are the many conference hotels.
Although Chicago is close to St. Louis, driving anywhere near Chicago is not my idea of a good time (I have made long circles through Wisconsin just to avoid it). And flying into O'Hare is no treat, either.
One last problem. June will be a good time to start my job search, but is ALA Annual a good place? Or is it so busy that it will be hard to hook up with people?
In all likelihood, this negativity has a lot to do with not feeling well today. So I would be happy to hear about positive arguments for going to the conference. Starting with, is the Lake Shore Drive area as lovely as I remember? Email me at joy [at] mollprojects [dot] com. Or AIM me at "iama411expert." Yes, I know I should figure out how to turn comments on if I'm going to ask questions like this in my blog....But not today.
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Here's my word for the week: avatar. If you can find the definition among all the ads, I'm interested in the second one--a visual representation of a person in an on-line environment.
My little picture on 43 Things is an avatar.
I'm participating in an on-line conference this week and someone mentioned a desire for avatars. I can see why. It's hard to remember who said what in a conference with over 400 participants. One extra little clue, particularly a visual one, might be all it takes to pull that information out of my brain. I wish we had them on Blackboard, the course software we use for on-line classes, too. I'm constantly confusing Carly with Clare.
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Here's what I wrote on 43 Things for my Read 30 books in 2005 goal:
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How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff
I read this book hoping it would help with my Research Methods class and I think it worked! Hard to imagine that a book with “statistics” in the title could be funny and enjoyable to read, but it was. Written in 1954, the book has all kinds of cultural references that I didn’t get but that just added to my amusement—and the Kinsey examples are oddly relevant since the movie just came out.
As has already been announced at Research Buzz and TVC Alert (yeah, I'm excited!), I have put up Bloglines for Librarians in Three (and a half) Easy Steps. This is a fast, easy way for librarians to set up RSS feeds in an aggregator--a way to read many blogs and other quickly-changing websites in one place, customized to their interests.
There's been a lot of stuff this week in the library blogosphere and on Web4Lib about RSS feeds, much of it summarized with links in this post at The Shifted Librarian. Although she missed my favorite tangent of the conversation, Dorothea's hacking rant at Caveat Lector.
Here's my tangential contribution. With all of these comments about how many of our patrons do or don't use RSS aggregators, nobody has ventured a guess on what percentage of librarians use RSS aggregators. I'm guessing it's no more than the Pew Report on The state of blogging came up with for the general population of internet users--about 5 percent.
I am not going to argue that every librarian should be using an aggregator. But I do think that every librarian with an interest in technology and the Internet and their near-term impact on libraries, should be using an aggregator. You will get more news on those fronts, more efficiently, from RSS feeds than anywhere else.
Most library students would fit in that subset of librarians with an interest in technology. Are we being taught about RSS aggregators? Nope. I'm in library school and I had to pick this stuff up on the street like everyone else.
So, last week, members of my study group asked me about RSS feeds.
Most articles and presentations for librarians about RSS feeds offer three or four choices of news aggregators and direct librarians to three or four lists with hundreds Library and Information Science feeds. In fact, that's exactly how I would organize such an article or presentation, given the opportunity.
But it seemed to me that all these choices were creating a barrier for librarians to get them going in an aggregator--which is actually an easy process. It might be better for many librarians to get started in anything and go back later, when they know how well the RSS aggregator is working for them, to revisit the choices.
So, for my study group, I set up a dummy account on Bloglines and came up with this handout to tell them how to use it to set up their own accounts of library-related feeds. I think it will take less than 15 minutes to get going. Given the interlinked and ever-changing nature of blogs and the web, they will be customizing their lists of feeds for their own interests for a long time to come.
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This one's for my mother.
In our Digital Libraries class this week, we're looking at different collections in the Library of Congress' American Memory Project. One that our professor featured is the collection of Coca-Cola Television Advertisements.
Those of us in the class who are old enough found ourselves quite nostalgic watching the Mean Joe Greene and Hilltop commercials. Everyone sing along, now: "I'd like to build the world a home...."
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I finally made a decision for choosing a wiki to support my writing. I wrote about this last Thursday.
Most of the wiki engines are written by programmers for programmers. Many of them require you to have a web server and/or other software on your desktop as well as the wiki-generating software. Many of the extra programs required are freeware, but I didn't want to download extra software for this purpose.
The wiki engines that seems easiest to use, seedwiki and JotSpot, are hosted on the web. I really prefer to have my writing notes sitting safely on my own hard drive.
So, I went for a note-taking program called NoteStudio largely because it can sync with a Palm--a feature that may be very useful to me in the future.
My second choice was WikiWriter.
I found no particularly good way to explore this topic. Most of what is written on the web about wiki engines is for programmers and is very confusing to those of us who aren't in that biz (anymore).
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Podcasts were also in the air this week in the library blogosphere and on the email list servers. K.G. Schneider did her first podcast and Greg at Open Stacks did his second. Karen also wrote a fascinating account of how she produced her podcast.
Since I don't own an i-pod or an MP3 player of any kind, I'm sure I'm not getting all the nuance of this new phenomenon. But as far as I can tell, the "pod" part is just that if you build it in MP3, they will come. So a variety of amateur and some public radio programs are showing up as podcasts.
The broadcast part is that these MP3 format shows are put in an aggregator so that a listener can subscribe to certain programs. When the listener synchs up his or her i-pod, any new episodes of the programs are downloaded onto the player ready to be listened to at any time.
I'm getting a benefit from all of this activity, even without an i-pod. I can subscribe to these shows in Bloglines. When a new show is available, I just click on the appropriate link and it plays in Windows MediaPlayer. Of course, I can't get enough of Library and Information Science content shows since there have been a total of three now. In the meantime, I've been listening to some higher education podcasts that I found at ipodder.org.
On the public radio side, I'm getting to hear some programs that my local NPR station doesn't run. And others that I enjoy if I happen to be listening at the right time but can never seem to develop a habit to hear them every week. With the podcast technology, they show up in my aggregator and I can listen when it's convenient for me. And PAUSE the program. I can usually listen to talk radio while surfing the web, but if I want to write or read something very long, I have to turn it off. Now I can pick it up right where I left off! And I can fast-forward through stories that I'm not interested in, or rewind if I missed something. Of course, I could have done all this before from archived shows--the difference is that I remember to do it if it shows up in my news aggregator. Now, I want all of my favorite NPR shows in this format!
My current list of shows is here under the Audio file.
Of course, the next question is "How can libraries use this?" I think it will be important to remember as we are thinking about this, that libraries are competing against some very edgy stuff in the podcast world. It's hard to imagine a teenager or college student listening to a librarian read off the list of new books at the library when they could listen to the ultra-cool Adam Curry talking comfortably in his own cottage studio or to the ASCAP-licensed music at Coverville.
Something short and slightly educational like the word of the day format at Today's Podcast might work. Perhaps a Sonnet a day? Particularly if it was read by someone with a beautiful voice.
Actually, the best idea I had was for the campus library to facilitate podcasts by students. The library could convert a cubicle or closet to a small sound studio for higher quality sound than the students can create in their dorm rooms. More importantly, the library could provide the technical support--assistance in recording the MP3 programs and a campus aggregator on the website for distributing them to other students. And, of course, librarians could provide assistance in sorting out copyright issues and in background research for creating original content.
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Saturday, I asked on the NMRTWriter email list server if anyone had used a personal wiki for organizing writing projects. I received encouragement and leads, but no stories from actual experience. I started looking around at various wiki softwares on Sunday night, but halted after an hour or so in complete confusion. I'll try again soon and update my progress on my blog and NMRTWriter.
Meanwhile, wikis have been in the air this week in the library blogosphere. Several blogs commented on the article "Making the Case for a Wiki" by Emma Tonkin in the on-line magazine Ariadne.
Yesterday, Information Wants To Be Free had a wonderful long piece about wikis. I particularly appreciated that she linked back to a September post about wikis on The Digital Librarian with an idea about using wikis as interactive finding aids at archives. Cool! It might work for subject guides in academic libraries as well. And the Searcher article (Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki and the Plone Wars Wiki as a PIM and Collaborative Content Tool) looks like a good starting point when I next plunge into an attempt to find wiki software.
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The Daily Checklist is a piece of my new implementation of Getting Things Done from David Allen's book (I wrote about this on January 13) that is working well for me. I got the idea for laminating a daily checklist from Ricky's A Daily Preflight Checklist. Using a dry erase marker to mark the large check box next to each item really helps me see where I am and what else I may want to do today.
Here's the list:
Ricky's preflight list is designed to be completed in under half an hour before he starts his working day. Since my working day and preparation and everything else kind of gets blended into one, I went for a much longer checklist. If I rush through, I'd complete it in an hour.
Since I actually find it useful to work out of my In Boxes (a no-no in the GTD method, but it works for my student lifestyle--I'm not sure that will carry over into the work world), I expect to take all morning to complete this list. In fact, some days, it's just fine if it takes me all day and I don't do much of anything else. Following this list, I touch on just about everything that I want to be attending to on a daily basis.
June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007
