joy at moll projects dot com
Late last year, someone on newlib-l asked for ideas about how to familiarize oneself with the reference collection in a new job. I described the technique I learned in my Reference class. Last week, a newlib-l reader remembered the technique but not the details. Someone more clever than me pulled my post out of the archives. Since it has now helped newlib-l readers twice, I thought I would post it here. I've changed a few words to make it clear since my original post was in the midst of a continuing conversation on the discussion list.
In our Reference class we learned to use the "Magic Grid." (thank you, Anne Watts). Make a grid with boxes about an inch square (the top row and left column can be smaller). Make copies so that you can fill out several sheets.
Put the titles of the reference sources you are reviewing on the left and the criteria you want to look at across the top (things like scope, ease of use, authority, physical features like color so you remember where to find it, presence of indices and bibliographies, etc--anything you want, it doesn't really matter because it's just a tool to look at each source carefully but quickly). Then look at each source and fill in the corresponding grid point with a few words to describe it.
We did one type of resource at a time--dictionaries one week, encyclopedias the next, directories sometime later in the semester, etc. We were to spend a maximum of three hours on the process--but with this method, you can look at thirty dictionaries in three hours.
So, if I were starting a new job at a library, I'd work on filling out magic grids during any quiet moments at the reference desk. They would help me remember the sources and I could keep the sheets around for awhile as a quick reference.
This week, a couple of newlibbers sent us the Magic Grids that they made using the table feature of Microsoft Word. Both of them put the Call Number as one of the columns, something you would certainly want if you're working with your own collection.
One person planned to use the Magic Grid but to tackle her reference section by subject rather than by type of resources. I could see doing that, or a little of both--by type for the more general resources and by subject for the subject-specific ones.
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I suppose it would be cheating to just point to this post by college teacher, Barbara Ganley, about student blogging (discovered via Will Richardson's blog). But I have experienced many of the benefits she describes for her freshmen, even though I am in graduate school and a mature student and writer.
My blog started out, in the summer of 2004, as a kind of annotated bookmark keeper--with maybe half a thought to eventually being a kind of electronic portfolio. I formulated a new mission for my blog around January of this year for several reasons.
For one thing, I no longer needed annotated bookmarks. The tool del.icio.us had arrived to serve that purpose. But, even more, my searching skills had improved so dramatically in library school that I no longer needed to keep track of every cool thing I found on the web. I trust my ability to find it back--or something even better--should the need arise.
I realized at the beginning of 2005 that this would be a unique year in my library career. I had taken all the required courses except Management. I read widely and regularly in the field. I provide expertise to meet the information needs for family, friends, and strangers on the internet. In short, I feel like a librarian but I don't work in a library. I can think about libraries in imaginative ways because I'm not burdened by any physical or fiscal constraints. My blog became an on-line manifestation of what I learned in library school, an expression of my inner librarian. Pretty much what Barbara Ganley sees with her students:
the first attempts at blogging by my first-years have me convinced that sustained blogging over the years, not just in the classroom, but after and outside the classroom experience, as a way to reflect on and discuss the connections between the lessons learned inside the class and the world outside our walls, is perhaps the most promising way to use blogging and other social software in a liberal arts institution.
Then the most amazing thing happened. I began to connect to people because of my blog. First it was the occasional email or the rare link from another blog to mine. Then it was the price of admission to the blogger dinner at ACRL and the blogger bash at ALA, like being invited to eat at the cool kids' lunch table. Now it's the vehicle for collaborative ventures with other librarians like the Carnival of the Infosciences and this post to participate in Travis' round-up of student posts about why we blog. The spontaneous collaborations are great, too:
I blog to remember. I blog to learn. I blog to connect. That's why I blog.
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Mark of ...the thoughts are broken... has been keeping track of the members of the biblioblogosphere who were affected by Hurricane Rita. They all seem to be safe and accounted for, with different stories to tell about weathering the storm or surviving the evacuation. Glad to have them blogging again.
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The Carnival of the Infosciences #8 is up and running, hosted by Dave, The Industrial Librarian. Check it out! He reports, on a tip from Mark, that our carnival has been discovered by Blog Carnival. This is an opportunity for the biblioblogosphere to get some exposure outside of its own realm--a great way to promote libraries and librarians on the web.
Mark volunteered to host again, getting us through our first Carnival crisis. But if this thing is to survive we will need more participation.
If you have ever read a Carnival submission that you liked, return the favor and submit a post of your own.
If you have ever submitted a Carnival post, now is the time to sign up with Greg as a host. Here are the guidelines with a link for his contact form.
If you have ever wished more people were reading your blog, do both! It really works. My Bloglines subscriber number was around 60 before I began participating in the Carnival. It is currently 97! (and thank you all for reading....)
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Getting Things Done is surely a legitimate librarian subculture now--it is featured in today's comic strip of Unshelved. Rikhei at The Lethal Librarian should be happy.
As Tamara asked Mel, "what sort of an action management system are you using?" I've switched to index cards in a variety of sizes and colors. I keep them in a 5.5" x 10" vinyl accordion folder that lives on or near my In Box except when it's in my school bag. My non-school projects are in hotfiles near my desk (using what Merlin Mann calls the Ternouth Paper System--scroll down to the section on Avery Document Sleeves). Each class gets a bookshelf of its own for project support material--library books, notebooks, large accordion files, CDs that implement my music-coding.
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My library school program requires a comprehensive exam for graduation. It consists of an essay question for each of four topics: Information Technology, Issues, Management, and Services. We were given "hints" about each question, most including suggested readings, in late August. We will get the questions on October 29 and will turn in our answers (up to 6 pages each) on November 6.
Other library schools have different graduation requirements. A few require or provide the option for a Master's thesis, which would be an opportunity to write something publishable while in graduate school. Other schools require an electronic portfolio, a helpful device during the job search. I like the possibilities inherent in both of those. But I'm finding unexpected benefits in the comprehensive exam.
First, my study group is awesome. Every week I spend an hour or so with several other almost-librarians talking about library issues. Hard to imagine a better experience in one's last semester of library school.
Second, and related, I am reading widely in library literature--including IT articles about Google Scholar and federated searching, recent ALA council actions, and the 1848 preface to Poole's Index to Periodical Literature.
Third, I'm using all of my newly-minted librarian skills to find material relevant to the four quesions. The hints for the Management question mentioned the Enlightenment, Max Weber, and a couple of guys in the "Frankfurt School" of sociologists. Those have been fun new topics to explore, although it's not completely clear how this is all going to relate to the management of libraries.
Finally, I am really looking forward to Comps Week. I'm keeping everything cleared off my calendar for that week. I intend to spend all or most of the week at the cabin where I will walk, think, and write. Doesn't that sound like an inspiring vacation?
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Calling all current and former student bloggers: Travis Ennis wants to know why do we blog?. If you are, or have been, a student blogger, tell us about what made blogging work for you and email your post to Travis, travis.ennis[at]gmail[dot]com, by October 1. He'll compile our posts into a Carnival.
This should be fun and inspiring to each other as well as future student bloggers. I'm posting an updated list of the student bloggers below--I look forward to reading all your postings about why we blog in the next week or so.
Here is a new version of the MLS student blogger list, with a couple of additions:
Here is the graduated student blogger's list:
And, here are some blogs that are good resources for future librarians:
I have an idea for a more permanent home for this list. I'll let you know when I work it out!
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I owe a debt to a person I never met and never will meet. Michael at Tame the Web shared an email announcement that Dr. Laurel Anne Clyde died. In my entry for the graduate student paper competition for the Missouri Library Association, I mentioned the survey Clyde published in 2004 ("Library weblogs", Library Management, 25, 4/5, 2004, pp.183-189.). It was a big piece of my evidence that blogs in libraries are a scholarly enough subject to be worth of study. I won that competition and will be reporting the results of my study at the conference near the end of October. Thanks to Dr. Clyde for paving the way.
Unlike Christina, Michael, and me, Fiona actually met Dr. Clyde and shares a delightful story.
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Thinking of Jane, David, Ranger, and Angel, our biblioblogosphere citizens in Houston, as Hurricane Rita approaches. Thanks to Mark for collecting those links. Mark, like me, lives in the Midwest where we worry about tornadoes and The Big Earthquake on the New Madrid fault line. Hurricanes have a whole higher level of stress because you know they are coming for so long ahead of time.
This is from the most recent update by the National Hurricane Center:
650 PM CDT WED SEP 21 2005
...RITA BECOMES THE THIRD MOST INTENSE HURRICANE ON RECORD...
And there's still a lot of warm Gulf water for it to pass before reaching the coast.
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Mike really got into the spirit of the Midway for Carnival of the Infosciences #7.
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Have you seen how the Internet Movie Database uses tag clouds?
I wanted to find movies about the theater. Using Shakespeare in Love as my "pearl," I checked both my local public library's OPAC and Amazon. Neither gave me useful subject tracings for finding other movies about the theater.
At IMDB's entry for Shakespeare in Love, I clicked on "more" in the list of Genres. That took me to a list of plot keywords (not exactly intuitively obvious that it would do so, but I didn't complain since it was just what I wanted). Click on "Theater" to get the 613 movies tagged "theater", plus a tag cloud for narrowing that selection by choosing tags to do a Boolean AND with "Theater."
Now, I want to see this in NoveList, WorldCat, and in some method for searching scholarly papers. Is someone doing something like this with websites, using del.icio.us tags, for example? (joy at mollprojects dot com) I haven't been paying enough attention to tag clouds to know. Clusty gets me a similar functionality but a tag cloud is a nicer representation than a list.
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In the last two days I have taken a careful look at (but not fully read) Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar H. Schein and Communication & Organizational Culture by Joann Keyton. These books were recommended background for one of our Comprehensive Exam questions--I imagine my exposure to them will help with my Management class as well.
Besides Comps, my immediate interest in these books is to help me think about how library cultures differ from other cultures I've been exposed to and how one library's organizational culture might differ from another. What kind of organizational culture might be a good fit for me? An answer to that could aid me during my job search.
Both books make it clear that professional culture and organizational culture are not equivalent. In many libraries, there are enough librarians and they have enough power within the library that a librarian culture will be primary. But that's not true in all libraries. One of the reasons I didn't pursue that Top Secret job was because I could see that I would be entering a government contractor culture. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm too excited about entering a library culture to settle for anything else in my first job as a professional librarian.
As someone who was a computer programmer in the 1980s working on a Vax computer by DEC, I enjoyed this quote on page 5 of the Schein book:
It turned out that at DEC, an assumption was shared by senior managers and most of the other members of the organization: that one cannot determine whether or not something is "true" or "valid" unless one subjects the idea or proposal to intensive debate; and further, that only ideas that survive such debate are worth acting on, and only ideas that survive such scrutiny will be implemented.
Although I didn't realize it at the time, that was a widely held assumption among computer people and my lack of debating ability was a detriment to my career as a software engineer. Fortunately, intensive debate does not appear to be a prominent aspect of library culture. Plus, I improved at it as I got older and more confident.
(Here's an inside joke for readers of newlib-l: I am over 40. I am a woman. My oldest computer program, written on cards, is older than some of my classmates. No library science classes were slowed down to remedy any lack in my computer literacy.)
How do the professional cultures of library school professors differ from librarians? Most of my professors have been librarians earlier in their career. But their current concerns are academic ones and so, as they should, they model academic culture rather than library culture. One of the things I like most about the Mizzou program, as it's implemented in St. Louis, is that many of our face-to-face classes are taught by working librarians from different libraries. We get a good, if vicarious, exposure to several library cultures. Mizzou's program provides a nice dose of the real library world with enough theory that you don't forget that you're in graduate school.
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My article "Meet Me at the Placement Center" was published at LIScareer.com.
Mark breathed new life into the Carnival of the Infosciences #6.
Meredith has put up the results of her survey of the biblioblogosphere. She says that Midwesterners rock!
As other bloggers have pointed out, last week's This American Life is stunning. Go hear it. I was paying a lot of attention to what was happening in New Orleans. I didn't know as much as I thought I did.
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Last summer's posts about blogging and work by Rochelle, Dorothea, and Meredith have been in my head again recently. I had the opportunity to pursue a job that required Top Secret clearance. I didn't pursue it, for reasons that had little to do with the security clearance, but it brought up issues about work and blogging.
The guy who called me about the job liked my blog. Let me repeat that, a government contractor with Top Secret clearance was interested in hiring me in a Top Secret position, in part, because he read my blog. Makes me think that employers who are afraid to hire bloggers because we might air dirty laundry in public should be working on their own trust issues.
When I was considering the job, I wondered how work that requires a security clearance would affect my blog. As the bloggers above pointed out, there are lines that you don't cross in your blog and they aren't always easy to see. The line for this job would just be in a different place. In the case of Top Secret work, that line is broad, deep, and spray-painted black so that you can't miss it. Are there enough things that are on this side of that line to write about? Sure there are--conferences, articles, other blogs, many of the same things that I write about now. In fact, it might help me establish a broad focus instead of narrowing in on minutia.
There are lines I don't cross in my blog right now--and I don't have an employer to keep happy.
When I get together with other students we complain--a lot. I believe it is an inalienable right of students who have little choice but to jump through each hoop whether it seems to be the right hoop at the right time to us or not. We need outlets and I prefer venting with other students rather than my husband. Or the readers of this blog. Complaints are boring unless you happen to also be trying to figure out how to handle an on-line assignment that still has a vestige of a blue book exam.
But I also don't complain much on my blog because I don't want my teachers to read about my problems here. (Not that I believe any of the teachers at my school read my blog, but they could.) If I have a problem that I should bring up to a teacher, that's what they invented email and the telephone for. Just as Rochelle, Dorothea, and Meredith wrote about in relation to work, I also want to retain an aura of professionalism on my blog by not dissing teachers or the school in a public forum over momentary frustrations. I chose this path and I like it, teachers and school included. My blog is about the path, not the momentary frustrations.
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Newlib-l erupted this week, as it does periodically, about distance education in library science. I have read very little of the discussion and don't remember how it started, but usually some innocent librarian wannabe asks about distance education versus face-to-face (F2F), not realizing that the question is troll-bait. The ensuing discussion is less about the merits or drawbacks for distance education and more about the perceived lack of jobs for librarians and whether it is responsible for library schools to train as many students as they do, much less attracting more students by offering distance options.
I don't have a thing to offer to that discussion. What I can contribute is a kind of slice of life description that might help future library students know what a distance education class in library science would be like.
This semester, I'm taking the required class "Management of Information Agencies." It's three credits and meets F2F on two Saturdays during the semester. All other interactions are on the course management software called Blackboard.
Blackboard requires a login, so all class documents and discussions are available only to the students taking the class. The site comes up on the Announcements page--my teacher writes a friendly paragraph each week when she puts up the lecture.
A syllabus and calendar are available in the Course Information section, and have been there since the first day of class. This information includes the reading list, so I know that this week I'm to read three articles about bureaucracy. Many of the articles we will read this semester are available through the databases at Mizzou's library web site (as library students, we're expected to be able to track those down--we can and do help each other out as needed, particularly with new students). Other readings, often older articles or chapters of books, are available on electronic reserve (Eres), which is even easier to use--a matter of logging in to the library system and putting in my class number and class password, then going down the list to find this week's articles.
Each week, a new lecture is posted in the Course Documents section. This week's lecture is six pages, single-spaced. It's written in a conversational style and provides an overview of the readings and related issues, pulling them together in a coherent structure--just like a good F2F lecture does.
At the same time that the lecture goes up on the website, we also get questions on the discussion board. This week we have three questions to consider. These questions try to draw out our responses to the readings and our own experiences. I'm expected to produce at least one substantive post a week and can choose any of the three questions to answer that I want. A good give-and-take conversation often occurs on the discussion board, similar to an email discussion list (but with no trolls allowed).
This course has five assignments. All were posted on the first day of class, although this isn't the case for all classes. There are four 5-6 page papers and one group project. I can't start the group project yet because we haven't been assigned to groups. I can start the other papers although they are designed to build on the readings and lectures throughout the semester. The first paper is due next week so I have already been thinking about it and expect to write a good draft over the weekend. The second paper is due in about a month, which is plenty of time, but the third paper is due about a week and a half later. So I'll want to get started on one or both of those pretty quickly to make sure I have enough time and energy to devote to that third one.
The Mizzou library program has both F2F and distance education classes and others, like the Management class, that are a blend. The amount of work for a three-credit class is roughly equivalent across the curriculum regardless of format. Obviously, writing skills are more useful in the on-line format and speaking skills are more useful in the F2F format, but none of the classes require extraordinary talents--just the same communication skills one would expect to utilize in a professional position. F2F classes sometimes offer the opportunity to make formal presentations, a compelling item on a resume. On the other hand, distance education classes sometimes offer the opportunity to work on group projects on-line, an increasingly common scenario in the working world.
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The Yahoo Group, Geaux Library Recovery, for library professionals interested in assisting with Katrina-related recovery efforts is up and running. And a bit overwhelming. For a more filtered approach, try the Geaux Library Recovery Blog. Rochelle of Tinfoil+Racoon fame is running it.
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Christina managed to put together a respectable collection for the fifth Carnival of the Infosciences after a difficult week.
I'm late posting about the carnival because the last twenty-four hours have been the most exhausting, satisfying, and grief-filled day since my mother died. The satisfying part was that my mother's small town was loading a tractor-trailer truck of supplies for the Katrina relief effort. I happened to be in town. I happened to be listening to the local radio station and heard the request for donations. No coincidence that I had available many household items and cleaning supplies to contribute. The exhaustion and grief were all mixed up in the satisfying process. But I suspect it was just the mix that I needed right now.
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The St. Louis County emergency management people are taking contact information for people willing to help if refugees are brought to St. Louis. A 300 bed facility has been offered to relief officials.
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Alumni of the LSU School of Library and Information Science have started a Yahoo group to try to bring together library professionals who can help with Katrina-affected library workers and libraries. Join. Once you're in, be sure to go to the Databases and add your name and ways you might be able to help in the Contacts list.
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