joy at moll projects dot com
The title of this post was the headline in today's student newspaper, Student Life, for an article about me!
Like Bill Drew, the Baby Boomer Librarian, I've been experimenting with social software in a variety of formats--IM (WULibrarianJoy on AIM and Yahoo), Facebook, LiveJournal, and MySpace. Bill started some conversations on library email lists about librarians using social software on college campuses and received some skeptical comments. Given the skepticism, I've been careful not to stalk students and not to look for evidence of the party scene. I've joined a few appropriate groups on Facebook (a campus group, alumni, and fans of Harry Potter and West Wing), joined a campus-wide group on LiveJournal, and made announcements on both about research workshops at the library.
So far, it's all been positive for me.
Student Life found me through my LiveJournal account. I know because the initial contact came through my Yahoo email, not my work address. Not only did the article emphasize my availability on social software, but my presence on social software is what first attracted the attention of the student newspaper.
A student in one of my freshmen EComp classes wrote on the evaluation form that he or she appreciated all the different ways I could be contacted because it showed that I cared.
To me, it's felt about the same as establishing a librarianship blog. My blog gave me an on-line presence in the library profession. To get that same sort of on-line presence on my campus, the answer appears to be Facebook and LiveJournal.
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Pandora, the streaming internet music site that lets you define a radio station by listing your favorite music, just delighted me. A couple of weeks ago I created a radio station with Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland. For me, what these two singers have in common is that I like them and my mother didn't. My husband and I surmised one evening that it was a generational difference that had something to do with a comfort level of strong women's voices. The times I've checked with Pandora about why it chose a song, it said that it was giving me things with lyrical melodies, rich singing voices, and complex orchestrations, which works for me.
The last four songs on my Barbra Streisand / Judy Garland station were:
When I heard two songs about parenting in a row, I wondered how long that would carry on as a theme--moving directly to two songs from Disney films was just wonderful, and yet unexpected.
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This afternoon, I'm delivering (with a coworker) a "What's a wiki?" presentation to the Reference and Access staff. Very informal. But I like having some sort of structure to talk from, so I went "meta" and created a wiki presentation wiki.
I know that I owe you all a follow up on my post about How to choose wiki software. I came up with a pretty good set of questions to ask about wikis from a number of great sources. Coming soon.
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We had our big celebration yesterday for the 100th anniversary of Washington University Libraries as a Federal Depository Library. The physical exhibit looks great and the web exhibit is up and running. We know there are some problems with the web exhibit--let me know if you run into any because it looks like one of my first web projects is going to be aiding in the repair and maintenance of that site.
It was a delightful ceremony. Professor Wayne Fields delivered a funny and profound talk for the occasion, Superintendent of Documents Judith Russell gave us the historical context as well as presenting a very handsome framed certificate accompanied by gold seals, and the bubbly wine was tasty.
Unexpectedly, I missed my dad. He collected government documents like the Uneven-Aged Silviculture for the Loblolly and Shortleaf Pine Forest Cover Types (pdf) and House of Straw - Staw Bale Construction Comes of Age back when you had to request them for a nominal fee from the distribution center in Pueblo, Colorado instead of grabbing them off the Web. The Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), where the government sends information to more than a thousand libraries across the country, was high on my dad's list of things that make America great. He would have liked that I had a small role to play in celebrating a hundred years of government document collection at the institution where I work. He might have driven to St. Louis for such an event and enjoyed a slice of cake with the FDLP logo on it.
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From Sarah Houghton, the Librarian in Black, I learned that Stumpers List = Project Wombat. I subscribed to the Stumpers List, an email discussion list for reference questions that stump librarians, while I was taking my Reference class but unsubscribed because the number of posts was overwhelming. Project Wombat replaces Stumpers which apparently lost its email list service recently.
In its new format, there is a kind of Stumpers-lite available called Project Wombat FM. This will only send out the questions and the answers without all the chit-chat that this long running group generates. With a lite version and my relatively new adoption of gmail for email lists, I think this will be very useful to me as I slowly move toward offering reference assistance at my library.
Speaking of real librarian work, yesterday I spent nearly my whole day doing library research. What fun! And surprisingly rare.
I'm teaching one of the one-shot sessions for freshmen next week. We get to see their research preparation assignments with their topics and initial attempts at research. That allows me to offer some specific suggestions and to tailor my presentation to address any problems the class is having. Yesterday, I found sources for sign language, magazine cover art, Hudson River School paintings, video games, soccer, and the colonization of Mars. I was somewhat stumped by Paleolithic Venus figurines, but I have colleagues to ask about that before I send a message to Stumpers.
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Michael Stephens (Tame the Web blog) is going through a reinvention--he just accepted a tenure-track teaching position at the library school at Dominican! This is great news for future librarians who will learn about blogs, wikis, and other cool tech things in school instead of picking it up on the street like I did.
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Chris DeWeese at Clam Chowder tagged me (in this post) with the 4 Things meme that has been making the rounds of the blogosphere, including the library corner of it.
Four jobs I’ve had
It's cold here today!
Continuing Eli's additions
Four books (or series) I love
Washington University in St. Louis has been a Federal Depository library for 100 years! There's a great physical exhibit. They're still working on the virtual exhibit--I'll post again when it's up.
Next week is the biggest event of the celebration when the Superintendent of Documents, Judith Russell, is coming and our director of American Culture Studies, Wayne Fields, is speaking. (Details are about half way down this page). So far, my responsibility is to make sure the lecture hall is clean before the event.
Last night, our government documents librarian, Barbara Rehkop, was interviewed on LIS Radio for a show called Government Information at the Crossroads. Give it a listen!
I've written about LIS Radio before--it still doesn't seem to be a podcast. I'll be sure to advertise that when the happy event arrives as well.
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Bill Drew, The Baby Boomer Librarian, is asking today about Academic Libraries and Library 2.0 on his blog and on COLLIB-L, the email discussion list for college librarians. He wants to know why more academic librarians aren't talking about it. I think the consensus is along the lines of "because we're too busy implementing it (whatever it is)."
With that backdrop, I was taken in far too long by the article "The Fully Electronic Academic Libary (R)" by Norman D. Stevens in the January issue of the College & Research Libraries journal (Here's an abstract but that gets you nowhere near the gist of the thing--you'll have to be a member to get it from that page. I was also able to pull it up from Wilson's Education Full Text database).
It's hilarious and so unexpected in an academic journal. I think the people in the lunch room must have thought I was nuts laughing over my C&RL.
This is Library 10.0, I'd say. Not only are books and papers not collected, no paper is allowed in the building. "This will require users and staff to use their imagination rather than simply to print out copies of information to take home that they might never look at again."
The administration of the library is by consensus using an amazing system that I can't possibly describe as well as the article. But I know we'll all support this aspect:
Salary levels will reflect the shared administrative responsibilities as well as the productive nature of the staff's professional assignments. The minimum starting salary will be $100,000.
The biblioblogosphere will be pleased to see that Michael Gorman has been named a fellow to The Fully Electronic Academic Library. But don't get your hopes too high for the legitimacy of that--Ted E. Behr is the Curator of Artifacts.
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I read about Pandora in several places but didn't really get why it was so cool until Walt Crawford wrote about his experience on Walt at Random. Pandora is a streaming audio website that lets you create your own radio station by seeding it with your favorite artists and/or songs.
I started defining my station with "Rosemary Clooney." When I got five songs in a row sung by women, I added "Bing Crosby." Now I have my own station of popular music from before I was born. I got similar music from AccuRadio by selecting Swinging Pop Standards and then choosing one of several subchannels that eliminated Rod Stewart's versions of the standards--but that took four clicks in two windows. Pandora has a much slicker interface.
Just now, I started a new station with "Glenn Miller" to get a bit more of a World War II era, Big Band swing to my Saturday.
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The office environments where I worked previously were very social. I worked for several years in a converted house. My office had three other programmers in the same room. Later, I worked in a cubicle farm. Both places had an actual water cooler in a kitchenette area that was a gathering spot. I always seemed to know where my coworkers were and often exactly what they were working on.
If you had asked me a month ago, I might have said that was one of the most delightful aspects of working in an office environment.
The offices of the reference staff at Olin Library are lined along a hallway. With doors and walls that go to the ceiling, I'm barely aware of the activities of the two neighboring librarians, much less the one at the farthest end of the hall. There is no water cooler or anything else in our area that acts as a magnet for people.
Am I disappointed? No, it turns out that I'm not. Hours of my day don't slip away into gossip. My workplace is a place for just that--creative and productive work--not the high drama of conflicts and personal infatuations. Conversations are pleasant and informative and honest, without strong undercurrents or ulterior motives.
The only thing I miss about the water cooler is the water--and I'm managing with ice and tap water from the staff kitchen upstairs.
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While exploring the documentation of the library catalog at Washington University, in my quest to become a power user of the system, I was surprised to read this:
Search tip: If you wish to retrieve titles beginning with the word 'a,' 'an,' or 'the,' which are normally considered to be initial articles, (e.g., the title "A to Z, the Alphabet"), type the initial article twice when performing the search. For example, entering "A A TO Z, the Alphabet" will search for the desired title. Use this method to search for titles beginning with the German 'an' and the French, Spanish, and Italian 'a.'
Sure enough, a title search on A to Z brings up titles that begin "To Z," the first three really are A to Z titles, which probably have something strange going on in the records because there are many more A to Z titles that don't come up unless you do the funny double-A thing like the documentation says. Then comes the poem "To Zbigniew Herbert" by Michael Krüger.
I checked the public library catalog that I use most often (St. Louis County) and it has the same problem with, apparently, the same solution although I didn't find that documented anywhere.
I don't understand it. When I learned cataloging we put in the number of characters to be stripped as needed for initial articles. A to Z titles would have no stripped characters because the initial A is not an article. I checked out the catalog where my cataloging teacher works, Lewis and Clark Library System. Aha! Her catalog brings up A to Z titles just as I would expect. I believe all three systems are Innovative underneath, so it's something in the local set up of the catalog and the records. Not too surprising that I like this last way best--after all, it was the way I was taught!
Oh, and this post demonstrates something else I learned this week: how to link to things in the catalog. The same format that is documented for our Wash U catalog worked great for linking to the St. Louis County catalog and the Lewis and Clark catalog as well.
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