On Sunday I read most of the book Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, by Alex Wright. It’s a quick read and very informative, and Wright actually knows something about libraries, so I didn’t get the odd feeling I do when reading books and articles by non-librarians that discuss libraries–the feeling that people don’t know what they’re talking about. As much as I enjoyed Everything is Miscellaneous, the mention of card catalogs and the Dewey Decimal System almost as if they were librarianship’s last contribution to information organization was strange. I won’t even discuss what I think about Nicholson Baker’s tirades against the profession. Though not a librarian as far as I can tell, Wright has an MLS and has thought deeply about the issues he addresses. Good writing and clear thinking are always nice to come across in a book.

A lot of librarians these days rage against the clunky machinery of the library. Some older librarians look at rapid technological changes and wonder why, while some newer librarians see what look like easy adaptations to changing circumstances and wonder why not. According to Wright, it might all be Dewey’s fault.

“Dewey’s relentless efforts to create a unified national library system, magnified by his considerable ambition, would prove a mix that yielded lasting consequences for American libraries. Dewey’s obsession with efficiency and his strong bent for hierarchical management made him an ideal agent of the industrial age. . . . His hyper-controlling personality exerted an unfortunate influence over the subsequent history of American librarians, who have long struggled with excessive bureaucratization and a process-centric work culture that regularly leaves libraries struggling to adapt in a world of fast-changing information technologies. . . . Many [librarians] spend their entire careers chafing under the often stultifying management culture that Dewey played a large part in fostering.” (174-75).

I don’t think I’m knowledgeable enough to judge this quote. I only wonder if the excessive bureaucratization and process-centric work culture, which may very well prevail in libraries, are the result of Dewey specifically, or just an earlier industrial work culture in general, and that libraries are slower to adapt than other industrial era organizations. It could be argued that most organizations dating from the nineteenth century face problems of adaptation.

The failure to adapt quickly enough to change might be explained by other reasons. Consider Wright’s own observations upon Vannevar Bush. “In later years, Bush would lament that the computer revolution had left libraries altogether behind. ‘The great digital machines of today have had their exciting proliferations because they could vitally aid business, because they could increase profits. The libraries still operate by horse-and-buggy methods, for there is no profit in libraries.'” (195).

This seems to me a more likely barrier to change than institutional structure alone. Certainly many libraries are hidebound, traditionally structured organizations, and we might owe all of this to Dewey. One might even say the older and more established the organization, the less adaptable to rapid change it might be. I speak in generalizations, and would never imply that my own library, richly endowed and predating the United States of America, would ever have any such problems. But in general, one might say this. Is it a problem, though, of adherence to Deweyian structures? (Is that the proper adjective? I confess, when seeing it I’m still more likely to think of John than Melvil.) Or does the problem lie elsewhere, most likely in the lack of financial incentive to change. Commercial organizations that fail to adapt eventually go bankrupt, smaller ones more quickly than large ones, but still, it always happens. Sears has been around about as long as the American Library Association, and at one time dominated the domestic retail market; it was a giant that might slowly be dying because it just can’t adapt. Smaller commercial organizations go under more quickly.

But American libraries aren’t commercial organizations. Public libraries are funded by tax money. In my state I think there’s a law that a certain percentage of property tax money has to go to public libraries. Academic libraries are perhaps even less commercial than public libraries, because their clientèle tends to be much more restricted and is, in some senses, a captive clientèle. The way things have been done means a lot, and some of us understand the losses that come with change even as we heartily embrace such change. The other day an elderly professor came asking for a printout listing all our databases. I’ve had such requests before. I didn’t say, hey, get with the 21st century! I explained that we had no such printout and why we couldn’t have such a thing, and instead offered to walk her through the online steps to get what she wanted. Some librarians disdain such professors, but I know that this person had accomplished some great scholarly work in her life, and her slow adaptation wasn’t a sign of incompetence or stupidity. Things just changed quickly without her noticing because she was busy doing something else, and for her the old ways would work just as well as the newer ones, since as we quickly established all she really wanted was an article. This example shows that change can occur too rapidly even for our patrons.

But back to the point. There’s no money to be made in academic libraries, and fashions are largely ignored. Money and changing fashions drive much of commercial culture, so it seems hardly surprising when libraries don’t adapt very quickly. Will this be ever such? Undoubtedly. Will it mean the end of libraries? I don’t think so. Libraries adapt slowly, but they do adapt. To consider the library a relic of the past seems hasty, and that judgment does not come from a habitually sanguine librarian. Librarians may chaff under stultifying management structures, and they may be dissatisfied with the pace of change. But it’s only that the pace is slow, not that the change is nonexistent. I don’t think we can envision the distant future of libraries, but that doesn’t mean we have to believe they have no future. Instead, like the bricoleurs we must be, we take up the tools we have and use them as best we can to solve the problems before us. The structure might very well be Dewey’s fault, but the lack of incentive to change comes from a culture of libraries separate from the structure itself. Without the incentive of money or fashion, it may be that libraries can never adapt quickly enough, but that doesn’t mean they can’t adapt.

A couple of days ago I attended a presentation from the Princeton Depression Awareness Program on how to detect problems with any students we might work with. PDAP, as it’s called, it trying to raise awareness with faculty and staff about the problems some students have and how we might be able to help them. I’m not sure how much I can help, since I usually don’t see the same students repeatedly over several sessions, but I applaud the effort. It seems a lot of students are diagnosed with depression, including severe depression, and that the onset age range begins about 15. From ages 15-20 I suffered from what I’ve come to understand was relatively severe depression, and there was certainly not as much awareness then. I just assumed thoughts of suicide and hopelessness were normal, but apparently they’re not. It might have been nice had someone mentioned that to me in high school or college. I probably would have ignored them, but at least someone would have made the effort. Nevertheless, the experience made me the man I am today, and those of you who know me can now nod sagely and mutter, yes, tis a pity.

During the presentation, one of the presenters talked about various stressors that can bring on depression, a common one being erratic sleep patterns or complete lack of sleep, which then led to a brief discussion of the importance of regular sleep patterns on health in general. She noted that some students seem to wear their lack of sleep like a badge of honor. “I stayed up all night studying for this exam!” Most of us who work in public services get emails at all hours of the night from students, as I’m sure some of you do, too. One of my colleagues then brought up the demands libraries are sometimes under to remain open and accessible all the time. Students are used to and demand a 24/7 culture, according to just about every student trend-watching document I see. There are plenty of good reasons not to open libraries 24/7, from maintenance costs to the health of the staff, but one I hadn’t thought of before was the health of the student.

I always have reservations about meeting every student desire, because part of the educational mission of the university is to mold desires as much as meet them. The gratification that comes from learning is seldom instant, neither in its attainment nor its duration, and that is an important lesson to learn. No step along the way (e.g., retrieving a book) should be more time consuming than necessary, but there are some things that just can’t be done quickly. Normally, though, I think 24/7 access to the library is a good thing if possible, but now I wonder about the possible links between 24/7 access and the health of the students.

The assumption always seems to be that regarding library research, anything the students want is a good thing. It’s not like we’re setting up kegs in the stacks or anything. But by the creation of 24/7 libraries, are we capitulating to a demand that encourages unhealthy behavior? By advocating them, do we say, yes, it’s a good thing to stay up all night and sleep erratically so that your health suffers and you possibly bring on depression? Are sleep deprivation and the attendant health problems things we want libraries to encourage? I’m still not sure where I stand on this, but I do think these are important questions to consider.

With ALA coming up this weekend, my work is particularly busy. Add in a pile of essays to grade and some students to meet and books to buy, and the work starts piling up. On the other hand, I know more about British Islamic hip-hop and whether it’s haram or embodiment education and its relationship to feminist theory than I did a couple of days ago, and one never knows when that information will be just the thing to make me a hit at a cocktail party.

Sometimes I ponder just what I get out of ALA attendance. Technically, I don’t have to go to ALA conferences, though some sort of national or regional professional participation is more or less a requirement of my job, and I can most easily fulfill that requirement through ALA, or rather ALA divisional participation. It also seems to me that a lot of newer librarians don’t have much good to say about the ALA and its conferences. ALA business is so arcane.

I always seem to feel like an outsider, even though I’m always busy. I’m typically on the maximum three committees at any given time (right now an ALA committee, a division committee, and a section committee), and yet ALA is so huge that my maximum active involvement is such a tiny part of the picture. Who does feel like an insider, I wonder? Perhaps the ALA Councilors and the top officers. I’ve burrowed comfortably into my RUSA home and don’t look out much.

It took me a while to find something useful to do. I was on a couple of committees early on with people I really liked, but we didn’t seem very busy. I had a great time going to meetings and chatting with people, but not much came of it. Since then, I’ve tried to work only on committees that get things done, and I’ve felt much better about it. I’ve worked a lot with RUSA guidelines, which some people ridicule or ignore, but I think the RUSA guidelines provide useful touchstones for public service training, and it’s important that they be as good as they can be. Part of the satisfaction I get from ALA attendance is the actual work produced.

One of the greatest professional benefits I get is definitely psychological. I feel better getting away from my own library for a few days and talking shop with other people from around the country. Don’t get me wrong, I work in a great library, and I have a great job, and I have many thoughtful and talented colleagues, but my library often has a closeted feel. Perhaps because of all the resources and the talented colleagues, there’s a tendency to look inward rather than outward. Nowadays I can get a feel for what others are doing from reading library blogs, but until very recently conference attendance was one of the only ways to get a more immediate feel for what other libraries were doing than the traditional library literature offered. It also helps me get a perspective on my own library and job. Our library has problems just like any other large institution, and some of the more insular librarians obsess over them, but after talking to other librarians and hearing about other libraries I usually come back thinking about the positives rather than the negatives.

There’s also the socializing, which is sometime personal and sometimes professional. Some friends from library school and I have a regular Saturday night dinner at a nice restaurant, which is always enjoyable. There are also the more professional social engagements. This year I’m considering going to the OCLC Blogger’s Salon, for example, even though I have no idea what to expect, and don’t necessarily identify as a library blogger. Also, since I’m pretty shy, entering a roomful of strangers is always daunting. Regardless, usually when people get together who have little in common except being librarians, the discussion turns to libraries and librarianship, and I learn something new that’s useful in a way hard to quantify.

I know a lot of people attend the programs, but I’ve never gotten much out of them. My learning style is to sit in a room alone reading or playing with software or something, preferably with some good music playing in the background. Usually whatever people are speaking about I’ve already learned. The discussion groups, on the other hand, are often engaging.

I’m not sure if I have a point in this. It seems to me that some newer librarians wonder why they might attend ALA at all, especially since there are other conferences they might go to. Smaller conferences certainly have their appeal, especially because you can focus on smaller topics and talk more about relevant subjects. But the gigantic nature of ALA has its appeal as well, because so much is going on that you can satisfy almost any librarian urge.

The NYT reported on a new study from the National Endowment of the Arts demonstrating that people who don’t read don’t do well on reading tests. I’m glad we have the NEA around to point these things out to us.

While the reading news nationally may be discouraging, I will give thanks as we move to Thanksgiving that my own child seems to have the right environment for academic success. I wrote earlier how I believe just having books around encourages reading and thinking. Even math seems to improve, which surprised me some. According to the NYT article:

“In examining the average 2005 math scores of 12th graders who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books, an analysis of federal Education Department statistics found that those students scored much lower than those who lived in homes with more than 100 books. Although some of those results could be attributed to income gaps, Mr. Iyengar noted that students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books.”

With a few master’s degrees and 2-3000 books around the house, maybe my daughter’s math scores will even be good.

This news is relevant to higher education for obvious reasons, since students who read and do math well will probably succeed in college, but what should also be obvious to us all is that reading ability is necessary for all sorts of jobs, especially jobs that pay enough to eek out a middle class existence. 75% of those employing people with 2 years of college, and 90% of those employing people with 4 years of college said reading comprehension was very important for their workers.

The article notes that reading better means more money. “In an analysis of Education Department statistics looking at eight weekly income brackets, the data showed that 7 percent of full-time workers who scored at levels deemed “below basic” on reading tests earned $850 to $1,149 a week, the fourth-highest income bracket, while 20 percent of workers who had scored at reading levels deemed “proficient” earned such wages.”

However, I assume that is an average, because I know of a lot of people with PhDs, who presumably can read well, who don’t earn $1,149 per week. The Times also reported this week that non-tenure-track adjuncts outnumber tenure-track faculty at colleges and universities nationwide now. This trend hasn’t been news to anyone in academia for years. The story profiles one adjunct teaching six courses at four different schools. With that schedule, I hope she earns $1,149 a week, but I doubt it.

This leads to a different question about reading ability and jobs. It puzzles me why so many people, especially in the humanities, are willing to work for years on a PhD knowing their chance of a tenure-track job at a decent school is very slim. Here are thousands of presumably well educated people who end up working for several schools teaching courses for a couple thousand dollars each per semester. The Times article quotes a lot of people complaining about the lack of tenure track jobs, and how students who take more classes with adjuncts don’t do as well because the adjuncts aren’t around for them since they teach several classes a semester. I don’t think the problem is with the lack of tenure so much as the treatment of adjuncts, which is deplorable in most places. I was discussing this at lunch with a friend of mine, and his opinion was that the two-tiered class system created by the miserable treatment of adjuncts was worse than the lack of tenure, and I agree. It’s not the absence of tenure, it’s the absence of decent treatment and pay of adjuncts that rankles the most.

On the other hand, it still puzzles me why people are willing to put up with that treatment. Scholarship and teaching is often seen as a vocation, and understandably so, but teaching 5-6 courses a semester to make half of what a tenure-track professor might make and never having any job security can hardly be considered a vocation. Based on the people I know, it seems that after 5-10 years of grad school people seem unable to think of doing anything else, and living like a grad student for the rest of their life seems more noble than trying to work for a corporation. Regardless, with the glut of PhDs willing to work for peanuts, there’s no financial incentive to create more tenure-track jobs, and the situation at most schools is unlikely to change in the adjuncts favor. I like teaching a lot, but I think I’d rather be a librarian at Princeton than a professor at most other schools or an adjunct anywhere at all. I always thought I might be willing to sell my soul to some corporation for a ton of money, but it turns out no rich corporations are interested in my soul, so I’ll probably stay a librarian. I’ll just be thankful I’m a librarian with a good job and not an adjunct teaching 10-12 classes a year to stay alive. Sometimes life is good.

If you were reading around in the library blogs today, it was hard to escape at least one discussion of the Kindle, the new ebook reader from Amazon profiled in Newsweek.

I skimmed the Newsweek article and listened the accompanying video review. The Kindle does look like it’s slightly better than some previous efforts, but I don’t think I’ll be buying one.

This isn’t because I’m anti-ebook. Far from it. I became an enthusiastic devotee of ebooks three years ago when I loaded Mobipocket onto my then new Dell Axim. The convenience and portability are great, and I love the Mobipocket interface. I also like the ability to create Mobipocket files from Word or text documents, so I can essentially take any text content I find on the web and turn it into a uniform ebook file. Since I don’t buy a lot of new books, it works very well for me. I can download and read plenty of classics from Project Gutenberg and create my own files if I find something I like. This past summer I got a Samsung Blackjack and loaded Mobipocket on it as well, and still love the convenience. Being able to carry several hundred books in my pocket at all times means I never have to be without something good to read.

But I wouldn’t buy the Kindle (or the Sony reader either) for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t want a separate tool. I like my Mobipocket because I have the ebook reader along with the email, calender, feed reader, browser, chess program, camera, and everything else fitting nicely in my pocket. If the iPhone ever holds enough music, I’d be willing to add in the iPod as well, but I want fewer devices that do more rather than a separate device for everything. It seems like the things the Kindle can do, I can do now on my phone, and even though the screen might be smaller, the text is very clear.

It also bothers me how rigidly controlled commercial ebooks are. Ebook readers want to try to emulate the book, but only in the reading experience. Ebook readers and publishers are trying to stop many of the other ways people use books. In general, I don’t like the way digital rights issues interfere with ebooks in a way they don’t with paper books. I might be willing to buy a book, since I buy books now, but after I buy the book I want to do with it what I please. If I want to lend it to a friend, regift it to an acquaintance, donate it to a library, or sell it to a used bookstore, I want the freedom to do that. Publishers naturally want to keep me from doing that, though they never could with paper books, and paper books have long sold even though libraries, used bookstores, and reading friends exist.

The stranglehold on information will be difficult to maintain, but as long as it will be illegal for me to do with digital books what I now do with print books, I’ll resist buying them. I have bought a few, mostly reference works, but my ereading is mostly confined to those texts I can get and trade for free. What that means for publishing, I have no idea, but if ebooks are restricted in the way that paper books aren’t, then they’re not as much good to me. I’m surprised publishers don’t start suing used bookstores for reselling their books. One could argue that iTunes does the same thing with music, and one would of course be right. However, even with my iPod I prefer to copy my own CDs rather than buy from iTunes whenever possible. Regardless, as long as I can buy used CDs or legally obtain free music, then I can legally still control what I purchase in a way I can’t with iTunes purchases.

With the Kindle, one can also subscribe to newspapers and blogs for a fee, but again, I can read these things on my phone for free. The idea of paying to subscribe to a blog is bizarre, and perhaps I read that part wrong.

Anyway, I hope for a day when I can do with ebooks all the things I can do with paper books now, but I know that won’t be the case if publishers have their way. If we have ebooks without the freedom to lend, give, resell, or donate them, then in many ways we’ll have a bleaker book future than we could have. This isn’t a complaint against ebooks, as much as I like traditional print books, but it is a complaint against the commercial restrictions that may dominate the future of copyrighted books.

I should add one more reason. 400 bucks? What, are they kidding me?

Since it’s Halloween, I thought I’d write about something scary, like getting rid of library instruction.

As is probably clear from the last post, I’ve never had much faith in traditional library instruction. At this point I’ve taught countless standard BI sessions (is that a hopelessly dated phrase?) and numerous other potentially innovative variations, and I’ve never been satisfied that any of them were worth my time.

My dissatisfaction isn’t with my own performance, necessarily. Without being immodest, I think I can say I’m a good public speaker, informative and even entertaining at times. I can hold the students attention and get them to participate in the process. The problem isn’t me so much as the general nature of the instruction. Two different possible alternatives to standard instruction come to mind based on my experience, but both have obstacles to overcome.

My most rewarding instruction experiences are with the religion juniors here (all juniors have to write independent papers, and all seniors have to write theses). When I first became the religion librarian I began targeting the juniors as a likely place to begin research instruction. I was allowed into their seminar, but only for a few minutes to introduce myself. My introduction consisted of me chatting them up, showing them what a good fellow I could be, and inviting them to set up appointments with me once they started on their research. Most of them did in fact set up individual appointments with me, and I’d sit in my office for an hour or more going over their paper topics, explaining what they needed to do, suggesting promising avenues of research, and searching for primary and secondary resources. Sometimes I met with them multiple times. It worked very well, and many students had good things to say about the process. Over the years I get more time in the seminar, but the individual consultations are still where I can give the best help to the student because the sessions are focused and I tailor the instruction to their needs and their questions. It’s also where I learn the most, because I always learn something new when preparing for a topic. I believe this is the ideal model of library instruction: focused individual consultations.

The problem is that most schools can’t afford this level of instruction. If you’re teaching in a large university with tens of thousands of students, most likely you don’t have enough librarians to devote to instruction this intensive and individualized. In a liberal arts college it might be possible, though. I also provide library instruction for a few freshmen writing seminars, and though I invite everyone to meet with me, only a small percentage do. I would probably be overwhelmed if I got the same response I get with juniors.

My second most rewarding instruction experiences are with my own writing students. When I act as my own librarian for my students, they get better instruction than they might otherwise, for a couple of reasons. First, I know exactly what they need. Second, they pay more attention to me because I’m also the instructor. Students know who has the power. Because of this, I have often considered a train-the-trainer model, where I prepare the instructors and they integrate research instruction into the class. This sort of seamless research instruction would probably be better for the students.

However, I see two problems with implementation. For one, the instructors would most likely balk, and for good reason. Just as I’ve given up keeping up with the latest trends in web design and resent it when some web developer expects me to master my job plus his, so the instructors would resent it if they’re expected to master their subject matter and mine as well. For the most basic level of library instruction, say, quick searching Proquest, this might be fine. But it’s undoubtedly true that I know more about general library research and approaches to teaching research skills to students than would any instructor. I should know more, that’s my job. Another objection is more selfish. If the instructors are also the librarians, then what need have we for librarians? If it’s so easy to assist students in their library research, what’s the point of having that staff of professional librarians who claim some expertise? Training the trainers might harm the already shaky status of librarians.

Obviously I have no firm objective in considering alternatives to instruction, and I have little control over the matter anyway. However, I still can’t help but think that the more personalized the service the better it will be for the students. The problem is how to sustain that.

I think I will make another irrelevant and grasping video game analogy for today because this is an issue I’ve been thinking about for a while. Some of you may be familiar with the video game Guitar Hero. My nephew and his friend were telling me about this game. It’s played with a controller that looks vaguely like a Gibson SG, only without any strings or frets and without looking cool. The game plays rock music, and you’re supposed to press buttons at different parts of the song and act like a guitar hero. I haven’t played, but the description on the Wikipedia makes it sound like a rock version of that game Simple Simon, only with a different controller. I told them I didn’t think I would like it, since I know how to play a real guitar. If I wanted to pretend to be a guitar hero, I could pick up my Strat and start playing some rock music. At one point in my life I wanted to be a Juke Box Hero, and even bought a beat up six string in a second hand store. Eventually I realized that I like reading and research and ideas, and didn’t like working with other people in a band.

This contrast between the Guitar Hero and the Juke Box Hero makes me question the training we give students and whether it has anything to do with what they want or need. Academic librarians (and I think a lot of professors as well) want students to be juke box heroes, but the students only want to be guitar heroes. We want them to train them to be scholars, but they just want to play at being scholarly.

In one of the encyclopedias of library science there’s a distinction between liberal and conservative reference service. Liberal service is giving the patron the answer, and conservative service is teaching the patron how to find the answer. Obviously it varies within context, but usually for students I take the conservative approach. The idea is to make them independent scholars, able to locate and evaluate scholarly resources for their work. Some students enjoy this a lot. They want to be the scholarly equivalent of the juke box hero, with a book in their hand and their laptop slung low. I get the feeling that a lot of the students would rather be guitar heroes, going through the motions and putting on a good show, or in this case writing a decent paper, but they don’t want to be independent scholars. They want someone to hand them the resources and they’ll play the game.

Professors tend to like the students who are most interested in their discipline, and they love creating future scholars. I think librarians are similar. I like to encourage students to do research and see it as part of a life of learning rather than a chore for an essay assignment. However, one might question how realistic it is to think that most students have any interest in scholarship. And here I’m talking about very bright and well prepared college students, since based on my experience at a big state university and a mediocre liberal arts college, at many places most students have almost no scholarly inclination and are interested mainly in getting a diploma in any way they can because they think this will get them a job. It’s possible our research instruction falls mostly on deaf ears because the majority of students don’t want or need what we have to give. We want the students to be juke box heroes, passionate about scholarship, interested in research, but they want to be guitar heroes. I don’t see this as a problem, because our purpose isn’t necessarily to help all students equally, but to aid and further scholarship and scholars.

Right now I’m playing around with the new Libguides service that most of you have probably heard of. I’d read about it on various blogs, but we just got a trial subscription, which I’m hoping will become permanent very soon.

For those who don’t know, Libguides is a site that lets you create locally branded subject and library research guides that are very easy to make and take advantage of lots of social softwarey stuff. Here’s what our trial version looks like. Here’s what the developed and implemented site at Boston College looks like. Libguides has all sorts of features I haven’t used yet, such as chat and rss and alerts, but the main part of it works like a wiki. It’s easy to add content and make it come out looking good.

Warning: the next three paragraphs are a rant only tangentially related to Libguides. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

When I got here almost six years ago I set about making new research guides with little help other than Dreamweaver. The research guides we have were, and still are, not at all uniform and are housed in a variety of places, including personal public html drives. My research guides are still housed on my own drive. None of our subject or course research guides look alike. At the time I went out of my way to make mine mimic the color scheme of the library website. Two years ago our website was redesigned, but no concerted effort made to make it easy for us to create new research guides in line with the new template.

Along with some of my colleagues, I think it’s my job to come up with the intellectual structure and try to understand what users might need, and someone else’s job to manage the technical nuts and bolts to make it easy for me to do. I’ve learned that I can’t keep up with everything, and keeping up with the latest website development technology hasn’t been possible. I remember sitting in computer class in high school back in 1985 learning how to program in Basic and Fortran and being told that if we didn’t know how to work with computers we would never get a job, because the future was all computers. I recall thinking something like, if this is the future of computers, only programming geeks are going to use them. At the end of the class I got an Apple IIc. Strangely enough, I could do several things with it without knowing how to program, which was no big loss for me because the only thing I ever learned to do was make a message scroll endlessly across the screen. I can do that with my screensaver now if I want to.

I’ve been feeling the same way about website development the last couple of years. Most larger libraries at least are past the days when one of the reference librarians doubled as the web designer. Web design and the systems that support it have grown more complicated and specialized. It’s a full time job. In some places, it’s several full time jobs. If this is the future of library website development, I might have said, not many librarians are going to be doing it well. That’s the beauty of social software like wikis and blogs. We don’t have to do it well. We just have to create the content and organize it. We don’t also have to program it to look good. Admittedly, it helps to know html to get this Movable Type blog working correctly, but I shouldn’t have to keep up with the latest developments in someone else’s job to do my job well. I don’t expect the web developer to help students do library research or answer reference questions.

Sorry about that rant. I got a little carried away.

I’d already decided that if we didn’t do something different by January, I was going to move all my research guides to a wiki and be done with the current library system. If all goes well, I can recreate them in Libguides instead. It’s easy to use and it looks good. I like it.

I haven’t done anything with the widgets and other features yet, but making the basic guides themselves seemed very intuitive to me. It works like a wiki, but is perhaps even easier to use, with more hints. Once you start a new guide, click “Add a Box” to add content and you’re given the following choices for the” Type of Content Inside the Box:”

• Rich Text/Images/Dynamic Content
• Web Links
• Web Links
• RSS feed
• Podcast feed
• Embedded Video
• Del.icio.us Tag cloud
• Documents and Files
• Dates and Events
• Interactive Poll/Voting
• Link to another box in the system
• Copy another box from the system

Lots of choices right there, all apparently easy to add. You can also add a profile of yourself with pictures and contact information. I’m working on the philosophy resources guide right now, and I’m hoping to at least try out many of the different features. I don’t think I’ll add the interactive poll or embed a video, though I might add a podcast just for the heck of it. I can’t think of anything more exciting than Wayne’s Weekly Research Broadcast, brought to you by Libguides.

Lately I’ve been working on a slightly different library project than usual, and I’ve learned some important things about digital libraries, my job, and myself. (That sounds a bit like those revelations celebrities always make on the covers of women’s magazines. I always thought it strange that the celebrities learn everything in threes.)

A philosophy professor here wanted the library to acquire and digitize a copy of Histoire Naturelle de Mre. Francois Bacon, a seventeenth-century French translation of Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, published as far as I can tell just a few years after the English version. The library did manage to acquire a copy, which makes us one of the few libraries in the country to have one. I know you’re jealous. The finding and purchasing was relatively easy. I was pleasantly surprised that the book was under a thousand dollars considering its relative scarcity and decent condition. However, I wasn’t sure about the digitization because I hadn’t worked with the digital projects people before. Partly to get the project going, and partly to learn something new, I agreed to help out with the project if it was accepted into the queue. The project was swiftly approved, and within a couple of weeks of receipt the book was digitized (with excellent images).

I’m hesitant to admit my previous ignorance of what goes on behind the scenes of these digital projects, but I had little idea. I figured it was more than scanning pages and loading the images on the web, but that’s about it. I use these projects all the time, but hadn’t thought much of their creation, much like I’m happy to use the catalog but glad someone else does the cataloging. This may be the only project I’ve followed from selection to the very end, which I hope is near. I watched the digital photographer photographing some of the images. I watched the head rare books cataloger do some minor tweaking of the MARC record.

Then came my part, the METS record, which according to my favorite easily accessible encyclopedia–the Wikipedia–stands for “Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard” and “is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium.” That sounds about like what the more knowledgeable programmers and catalogers told me, so I’ll stick with that. My task in this project was to help create the METS record, which among other things creates the points of entry into the digital document. You probably knew that already. I had no idea. I don’t know what I’ve been doing with myself the past few years. If you go to this project and click on the drop down box that marked SHOW, you’ll see one thing the METS record does.

With 628 images, I suspected the METS record might be a little tedious to create. I also knew that it was in XML, which I have no experience with. I foolishly thought there would be some sort of editor program to help with this. I don’t mean an XML editor, because I had one of those. I mean something more like Dreamweaver, that creates html and css and all that good stuff without having to hand code it. I wanted a Dreamweaver for my METS record. Imagine my shock when I was told there wasn’t one, that some people have been handcoding parts of these projects. I’m always more or less happy I’m not a programmer or a cataloger, but this confirmed my feelings.

Fortunately, another of our catalogers has created a macro that translates an Excel spreadsheet into a proper XML METS record. Though initially thinking this project might be a good way to learn XML, I was counseled by wiser heads to use the spreadsheet method instead. Most of it was me going through the images and creating points of entry on chapters or subchapters, labeling them, matching page and image numbers, etc. Very detailed work. I finished the spreadsheet was told it looked pretty good, and am waiting to hear if it made its miraculous metamorphoses into a workable METS record.

What I learned about digital projects is how complicated they are and how much work goes into even the simplest one. Some of my colleagues have criticized the rate at which the digital projects have been moving, but after seeing how much had to be done, and how many people had to work together just to digitize one book properly, I understand why it’s not the same as scanning and loading onto a website, which some people seem to think. The whole project has given me a better understanding of the behind the scenes work of a lot of my hardworking colleagues.

I can’t say I learned anything new about my job, but I needed a third insight to sound like a celebrity. Still, it was reinforced for me how dependent we all are on other people doing their work well. When I’m doing it, it seems to me that most of my work is independent. I don’t often work in teams, and I can do a lot of my job without interacting with other librarians or being in a particular location. In any given week, I’m much more likely to interact with a professor or student than with a colleague. I like the autonomy, but my autonomy depends on all the teams working behind the scenes making sure that when I click a button ordering a book, that book later shows up on a shelf, or even in a digital project.

What I learned about myself is that I’m still glad I’m not a cataloger or programmer, but now I have more concrete reasons. I’m just not cut out for that detailed work. I’m an end user and proud of it, but I’m even more thankful for the detail-oriented people in the background making all this stuff work for me.

I’d like to find more information about this story from the Chronicle: College Student Banned from Internet.
A University of Connecticut-Torrington student arrested for sending harassing emails to another student has been told by a judge to stay away from the other student and her friends, but also told to stay off the Internet. There’s a link through to a Connecticut paper, but it requires a subscription for details, and I’m not that curious. Still, I’d like to know if that Internet ban is for all use, or only non-academic use. How long is it for?
I wonder if the judge realizes what this means for a college student. Can a college student even do the required work anymore without access to the Internet? That would mean no access to the university’s WebCT system, the library catalog, library online databases, any online readings or lectures, and most university information.
It’s hard to feel too much sympathy for a guy sending creepy emails, but this seems a bit harsh. The judge might have just ordered the student to drop out of college.