joy at moll projects dot com
Life trumps blogging for me right now. I told the landlady that we would empty my mother's house by December 1. That was about six weeks ago. About two weeks ago, I realized that was maybe a bit too ambitious. By then, however, she had listed the house with a real estate agent and scheduled a cleaning crew for the first of the month. So, we really need to get this done.
That and another secret project (which I will write about here if it goes well) have been a cause of a lot of stress the last couple of weeks, since I wasn't sure they would both be completed on time. But I'm now at the much more relaxed point of being confident that they will get done. The secret project has a good draft. Emptying the house has a good plan.
In the meantime, I accidentally discovered a good way to prepare for a job hunt. A friend of mine sent me sample interview questions (thanks, Hilary!) on the same day that I needed to spend about four hours driving. I asked and answered questions using my voice recorder. I did not fully transcribe the tape, but I did make some notes from it, mostly noting the stories that seem to work the best. I have read that the best way to answer those interview questions that begin "Describe a time when...." is to have three to five stories ready that illustrate what I want to say and tie it, however loosely, to the question that is asked (think like a politician on Meet the Press). Since that worked so well, I also used this list of interview questions. After three days of this, I got bored and quit, but I think it helped with my rhythm, my thinking, and my stories.
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Here's mine:
Collect them all at flickr. Steve Cohen of Library Stuff has all the details with the history of this project and a link to the software I used to make my card.
While you are at Library Stuff, check out the latest Carnival of the Infosciences. Don't miss Chris Deweese's posting about libraries and IT departments. I thought it was a great companion piece to the post Meredith Farkas wrote last week on the same topic. Meredith was writing from the librarian perspective and Chris from the IT perspective, but both came to the same conclusion.
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Remember when I compared emptying my parents' house to library collection management? Today, we had a problem that I sincerely hope to never encounter in a library: what to do with a gunny sack of military-issue, full metal jacket, live ammunition. Although, as it turns out, it's not a particularly difficult problem to solve. We called the local police department who recommended that we surrender it to them. When I indicated that I would happily do so, they sent an officer up to get it. Problem gone in less than an hour after discovery.
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"The future is text-based." D. Keith Robinson ("Things I've Learned From Blogging" at Asterisk)
"Over time we will be transitioning to a verbal society." Thomas Frey (Trend # 6 in "The Future of Libraries: Beginning the Great Transformation" at The DaVinci Institute)
One of these two guys is wrong. Actually, I suspect they both are. As the great Walt Crawford teaches us, most of the time the answer is "and not or." (Here's one and here's another).
The Robinson quote came via Angel's "What have I learned from blogging?" post on The Gypsy Librarian. I came across the Frey quote when Bernie Sloan posted the link on several list servers that I read. The most active discussion that I saw was on jESSE, the list server for LIS faculty (which I recommend, by the way--it's generally quiet but when discussions get started they get very interesting and there is less of a technology centeredness to it all than most of what comes through my Bloglines account or other discussion lists).
One of the things the professors pointed out about the quote above is that Frey probably meant "oral" not "verbal." I played around with some dictionaries to see why that is so. "Verbal" seems to be about words and so doesn't distinguish itself from text. When it does refer to the spoken word, it's only about the speaking half of the communication, not the listening half. "Oral" is the word for "Of or relating to communication by speech." (from the on-line Oxford English Dictionary that I access through St. Louis County Library)
Inexpensive, accurate voice input will be useful in many situations--to start with, it will be a boon to people with certain disabilities. I speak faster than I type--and I'm a fast typist (thanks to my typing teacher, Mrs. Boehringer, who taught in a classroom with half manual and half electric typewriters--we switched off during the semester). But, with a computer, I correct my mis-typings faster than I can imagine correcting mis-speaking or the computer mis-hearing me. Ingbert Floyd wrote on jESSE an amusing creation of what editing by voice might be like:
"no, not that 'and', delete the one, uh, one, two, three before it...yeah, that one...and replace it with a comma"
To follow Walt's "and not or" credo, it's very easy to imagine using voice input with keyboard editing. I still use one of those cassette recorders with the tiny tapes to record thoughts while I'm driving long distances. Most of those thoughts eventually get transcribed onto my computer in the form of To Do lists and files of ideas for papers. Even a badly done automatic transcription would be better than the time it takes to listen to the tape and type what I hear.
David Bigwood at Catalogablog points out that wide use of voice input would make a noisy world. "And you thought mobile phones were a disturbance."
The other half of oral communication is the listening part. When I read Thomas Frey's trend, it reminded me of something that Jessamyn West of librarian.net wrote about podcasting: "I would have rather read it quickly than listened to it slowly." I read much faster than anyone speaks (and if someone did speak as fast as I can read, I couldn't comprehend it). If we transition to an oral society, life is going to get very slow--and that's not a direction that I have ever seen American society take.
The consensus on jESSE about Thomas Frey and his "The Future of Libraries" is that you really ought to be aware of the past and present of something before you try to write about its future. For example, "Trend #10 - Libraries will transition from a center of information to a center of culture" doesn't seem very new when you think about the many Carnegie-funded, community-matched libraries at the turn of the last century. My small town library had been a center of culture since it was built over a hundred years ago.
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Many academic libraries provide library orientation tours each fall. Could a library give a backstage tour instead? It seems to me that it might draw a bigger, more enthusiastic crowd and provide more exciting ways to get across the same messages. What better place to describe circulation policies than where the library breathes--"at the start of the term, the stacks exhale books in great swirling clouds; at the end of the term, the library inhales, and the books fly back." (Matthew Battles, page 6 of The Library: An Unquiet History) Perhaps students will feel more comfortable making appointments with reference librarians if they have seen their offices. Many students would be thrilled by the opportunity to learn about the oldest books in the collection and how they are cared for by special collection and preservation librarians.
The backstage tour metaphor carries over to the library's website as well. When I gave my presentation about ways libraries can use blogs, I included two entries from the St. Joseph County Public Libary blog about the latest Lemony Snicket novel. They are little gems. The first gives a teaser about the novel, while hinting at the process that happens before a book is placed on a shelf at a library. The second encourages the reader to use the catalog and pay attention to the locations of the book. Both give a humourous, human voice to the library.
This entry was inspired by number 28 on The Cluetrain Manifesto. "Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what's really going on inside the company." Libraries never had a competitive secret reason for hiding the backstage. Perhaps libraries fear that people will find it boring. Some will. Some won't. The ones who find it fascinating will be our best customers.
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With a goal to keep a food and exercise log, I explored the world of web-based diaries with food databases this week. I'm going to try at least two and review them because, well, that's what librarians do. Also, I will probably have to go beyond the freebie versions to go from a good database to a great database of foods, so I want to kick the tires of more than one before I put down good money for a product.
First up, Nutridiary. It attracted me because it pushed the concept of "meals." Since I used Sierra's MasterCook several years ago, I understood the value of that. It's the difference between adding peanut butter, jelly, and bread as three items or adding a peanut butter and jelly sandwich as one item. The first time, you have to define what a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is using the three items, but after that you get to treat it as one thing. As you use the product, that savings of time and effort just gets better and better.
Now, to using it. The only identifying information needed to register for the free version is an email address. There are community forums, which I have, so far, ignored. You can keep your email private and still communicate with the people in the community individually through an internal email form.
In order for it to give you all the benefit of the data, you have to enter weight, height, and goal weight (or weight maintenance). Although you could use the diary sections without entering any of that. If you provide some other measurements, it will attempt to compute a Basal Metabolic Rate to use in the calculations of calories burned and calories left to eat for the day. There are all kinds of caveats and warnings about why the BMR may not be right, but given all of the data I put in, I want to get lots of data out. Over time, if the BMR doesn't seem right, I can just set it to a number that works for me.
The usability seems optimized for people who have been using the software for awhile. For example, the "add meal" button on the log page takes me to a page of meals that I have already defined. Since I have defined very few, that's not much help. I have to remember to go to the "meals" tab at the top of the page to get to where I can define a new meal.
I also had some difficulty when I wanted to change the quantities of foods I had put into a meal. The page for defining a new meal only lets you add new foods to a meal, not delete or change old ones. It turns out there's a great facility for doing that but it's hidden under the obscure "modify" button for the meal, above the area where I am adding foods to the meal.
So far, I have been able to do everything I wanted with the software, but I had a few frustrating moments trying to find the page that would let me do what I wanted. The help is pretty skimpy and of no help in those moments of frustration.
The food database in the free version of the software is the USDA one which means that you get "bread, whole wheat, commercially prepared" but not "Natural Ovens 100% Whole Grain." Also, I had to enter my Quizno's Turkey Ranch and Swiss sandwich as bread, meat, cheese, etc--taking a guess at how many slices of bread equals their small whole wheat roll. A larger database will have brand names. Nutridiary claims they have over 800 brands and 200 restaurants represented in their premium database of over 20,000 branded food items. Quizno's is listed, so that database will be both more convenient and more accuate for me. Not bad at $19.95 a year.
For the same $19.95, I also get rid of the ads (which are easily ignored banner ads, although some of them move in annoying ways) and more storage space for the customizable parts of the software.
Sometime soon, I'll try and review Fit Day.
I found the software I wanted to review, by the way, by doing a search on "diet" in del.icio.us. A search on "diet" on the open web is just scary--FREE Diets! FREE Diet Advice! order diet pills online !!! (The explanation points were on the search screen, not my addition).
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Scott Pfitzinger of Bibliotech Web is making a map of blogging librarians. I added myself easily with just my name (Scott says fictional is fine) and zip code. I put the name and address of my blog in the "Shout Out" section. And there I am!
Scott used a tool called Frappr and talks about it in his post about the Blogging Librarians map.
So, if you're a blogging librarian, put yourself on the map!
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The Missouri Library Association put up my slides, hand-out, and a link to my tutorial, Bloglines for Librarians in Three (and a half) Easy Steps. These are all related to my my presentation, Keeping Up and Reaching Out with Blogs and RSS. The slides are basically useless. Hmmm. Next time, maybe I'll try to find a way to design slides that are also of some use on the web. Or, perhaps, I won't send the slides even when asked. The hand-out is much better as a Web-based PDF document.
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Sarah Houghton at Librarian in Black blogged a speech by Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and most famous in the biblioblogosphere for uninformed comments on blogs, search engines, and modern music. The gem of his speech in California was: Any idiot can create a webpage.
Sarah has a great response:
Yes, any idiot can. Hell, a robot can. But an idiot cannot create a good usable webpage for a library that is well-organized and utilizes some of those principles of traditional librarianship he mentioned--it takes someone who is both a techie and a librarian.
My objection to Gorman's presentation of the issue is that it actually bears discussion, but his way of stating it makes it nearly impossible to make the leap over the insult and the lack of understanding to the substance.
We need librarians who can design well-organized, usable, complex web sites. But does it make sense for future librarians to take web development classes for graduate credit and at graduate school prices? My library school offers those classes; I chose not to take them. In part, that's because my computer science background gives me credibility in this area and a foundation that lets me learn most computer related technologies easily from a good book and a long weekend. But it was also because I knew that if I decide I would prefer to learn the information in a class, I could take similar classes for a lot less money at my community college. I wanted my library school classes to be directly related to libraries, because I can't get that at my local community college.
I suspect, at the core, I agree with Michael Gorman on the major thrust of his presidency, librarian education (I wrote about required coursework last month). But it's hard to be supportive of someone who dismisses me as an idiot.
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I turned in my responses to the Comprehensive Exam questions. The common wisdom is that everyone worries too much, that it's not as tough as you think it will be. Wrong. Maybe I just believed that too much and had dialed down my expectations too far. Maybe I will feel better about them in a week or a month and say the same thing. But right now, I think they were every bit as hard and as stressful as I imagined. And I am grateful for every study group meeting and for every hour that I spent preparing because I think it would have been even harder without that.
I struggled with every question, each in a different way. One draft was 9 pages long and had to be cut with a machete by a third. Another question caused a visceral response in me--when I was unable to detach from it, I wrote it into the paper which feels like a risk. One was more intellectually challenging than anything I've encountered in graduate school before (and this is my second Master's...). I took a risk on another by choosing an unconventional format--I think it works but that doesn't mean the person who grades it will.
All in all, I'm just glad to be done!
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Comps really trump blogging. Walt Crawford has posted a new Cites and Insights announcement with Life Trumps Blogging as a a short essay and a longer piece I won't read until later, but his trepidation intrigues me.
Taking Walt's advice, I won't apologize for my break. I really would like to blog about the train, my second presentation (it went well, too), and several of the sessions at the Missouri Library Association, but I'm devoting the time to the Comps questions. I wouldn't mind blogging about the questions either but that would be cheating....So that will have to wait until next week--maybe after the post-Comps party on Monday.
There's a carnival around here somewhere, too. Oh, yes. Rochelle Hartman has the Halloween edition up and running.
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