Pimp my Bookcart

Book Cart Pimpin'

This is amazing because A. my library director sent me the link and B. because it's just fun stuff. Our tech services department has been considering how we could pimp some of our own book carts for next year's competition. I can't give away our ideas though...

Googlization

Sitting at the reference desk on a Sunday is pretty slow. It's the end of the semester so most of the questions are regarding creating citations for bibliographies or panic about frozen computers and unsaved research papers. In between requests for help, I'm catching up on reading professional literature.

Library Journal (Vol. 132, no. 18) directed me to the work of Siva Vaidhyanathan, who is writing a book online titled The Googlization of Everything. His blog is a really interesting examination of the role of Google in information access. In particular, I'm really interested in his analysis of the partnership of Google and several libraries in the digital library project. Haven't come to my own decisions about it yet, but he brings up some really interesting points.

A Good Cause

My library director just sent this link around: http://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/main.asp?SectionID=43&subsectionID=120&articleID=7533

If you need to get your license plate renewed in Georgia before the end of the month, please consider buying one of these new library plates! Proceeds go to purchasing new materials for public libraries.

Rowling Outs Dumbledore

Just read this while sitting at the reference desk...in a question and answer session in New York author of the Harry Potter series J.K. Rowling outed Dumbledore. Asked if Dumbledore had ever been in love, Rowling replied that she had always thought of him as gay and that perhaps he had been in love with his nemesis, the dark wizard Grindelwald, who he defeated in a battle of magic.

I think that this is awesome. Doesn't change the books one whit and doesn't change the characterization of Dumbledore in the novel. I do fear that this does give further ammunition to parents who try to get the books banned from libraries and schools. I can only imagine the claims that will now come out about Dumbledore's interest in Harry and if he should be a school administrator, etc. It would be great though if instead people were able to read the books and see him instead as just a positive role model.

Duelling Moustaches

On Wednesday our campus had it's fall festival - AASU Day. Our library booth won Most Creative which was definitely justified as we'd put a lot of hard work into creating quite the scene. Our theme was "Your future starts at Lane Library" and we had a gypsy telling fortunes inside the tent (of how the library would help them in their future) and a Wheel of Destiny outside the tent to spin for prizes. Here's a picture of our library director and I working our magic as carnival barkers. While my fake moustache got rave reviews, it just can't compete with the real thing.

Banned Books Week

I'm a week late. The ALA sponsored Banned Books Week ended this past Saturday, but still I thought that it was interesting to note their top ten list of most challenged books for 2006:

• "And Tango Makes Three," by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, for homosexuality, anti-family and unsuited to age group.

• "Gossip Girls" series, by Cecily Von Ziegesar, for homosexuality, sexual content, drugs, unsuited to age group and offensive language.

• "Alice" series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, for sexual content and offensive language.

• "The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things," by Carolyn Mackler, for sexual content, anti-family, offensive language and unsuited to age group.

• "The Bluest Eye," by Toni Morrison, for sexual content, offensive language, and unsuited to age group.

• "Scary Stories" series, by Alvin Schwartz, for occult/Satanism, unsuited to age group, violence and insensitivity.

• "Athletic Shorts," by Chris Crutcher, for homosexuality and offensive language.

• "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," by Stephen Chbosky, for homosexuality, sexually explicit, offensive language and unsuited to age group.

• "Beloved," by Toni Morrison, for offensive language, sexual content, and unsuited to age group.

• "The Chocolate War," by Robert Cormier, for sexual content, offensive language and violence.

I don't know the rest of you, but knowing that they are challenged just makes me want to read them more!

Lyrical Ode to Librarians

Just came across this from reading the Tame the Web blog. Local North Carolina indie rockers, SNMNMNM, have recorded a catchy little ditty in honor of a librarian that they know. The song is great because it's about the experience of a patron who is helped by a reference librarian who helps them find some pretty obscure information. Besides that, I've never heard call numbers sung so that they tug on my heart strings before.

What's also cool is that the band is inviting librarians to record themselves singing along to the song so that they can be included in a music video montage. AND there's a library challenge to find the books belonging to the call numbers highlighted in the song. First ten entrants win a CD.

Check them out: http://addywillknow.pbwiki.com/

Creating Metadata for electronic works

I read this morning that the Library of Congress has announced several partnerships within the private sector to help to create metadata standards for digitally-born records - specifically for photographs, films, sound recordings, videogames, and cartoons. Why should this be exciting?

Well, I must admit that electronic records scare me a bit. When I think about how many years it's taken me to feel comfortable with describing the various physical formats that I work with within my job - books, journals, archival collections, DVD's and CD's, etc - and then think about how to approach a record that has been created digitally, I find it pretty intimidating. Here I am learning all the idiosyncracies of how to catalog formats that have been around for decades or even centuries and I'm expected to learn how to catalog and describe and potentially archive formats that change so rapidly that the systems they were created on are often outdated within months?

Having standards set and maintained helps to ease my mind. I'm sure that the day is not so far off that I may just be called on to catalog and maintain access in our online catalog to the electronic versions of much of what we're now used to seeing in print. Our E-books collection may continue to grow; perhaps we'll replace our DVD and audio collections with online access; our archives will begin to recieve digitally-born photograph collections and electronic files. And from an archival perspective, it's just mind-blowing to think about how we'll maintain access to these things as technology continues to change and upgrade. Overwhelming, but exciting.

Task : Summary

Final thoughts on the Lane Library 2.0 experience - overall fantastic. I've decided to keep the blog up and running and will try my best to maintain it with new posts. I've had a lot of fun going through the experience and definitely feel like I've learned a lot. I was either already aware of or very comfortable with at least half of the things on the task list, but there were definitely new things that I tried out that I had previously been a bit intimidate by before (wiki's and feeds for example).

In the end, I can definitely see the personal and professional value to this exercise. I'll incorporate many of the aspects into my own personal life and have been really challenged to examine how I can incorporate them into my professional life as well. In the end, I really can see the value in almost all of the different aspects that we looked at - one exception for me is Facebook. In that case, it's not that there isn't/couldn't be value, but I think that I am really stuck in my own prejudices about it. I don't particularly like the interface and found it difficult to browse through it and on top of that I think that I'm a bit stuck by my own use of myspace. However, I can see that it could be successful for other users as just one more tool to gain access to libraries and librarians.

In the end, this whole experience has really made me aware of just how much is going on online. While I like to think of myself as relatively computer-savvy and in touch with what our group of patrons are using the digital environment for, I've realized that there is so much more happening that I realized! Being able to speak meaningfully to our patrons about where they can find information online, how to evaluate it, and how they can creatively use it is integral to our success as a library. I am convinced that in order to have those conversations, we need to maintain our awareness of what's actually happening out there.

Kudos to our library director and our marketing team for pushing this program forward!

Task : Flickr

Even though the task is technically to create a Flickr account, I don't have any images on my desktop handy that I would want to bother to post online. And I keep forgetting to do this when I'm at home with my lappie or digi cam which stores all my photos. So instead, I'll talk about Flickr generally.

I will admit that though I don't post to it or have my own account (it actually threw me for a loop that I needed to create a Yahoo account to have a Flickr profile - what does that say about my Google-centered universe?), I have been known to look through Flickr. I've definitely used it to find uncopyrighted images for my own use. I've also viewed friends posted wedding pictures. I must also admit to looking at a silly number of cute dog pictures. After looking at the site a bit more critically this time around, there are several features that I like a lot. First, I really like that they've added the Creative Commons copyright options. Knowing that you can post your images and choose to make them available for use on several levels would ease my mind at posting my own. Additionally, now that I realize that you can also set your photos to private and require that you've approved the viewer to look at them will definitly impact my interest in posting.

But overall, I enjoy their searching capabilities. While I don't always celebrate tagging for searches, it does make some searches much more specific. On the other hand, a search for very general words does bring up just too many images. Like any library searching, clearly the user needs to think critically about what language to use for a search and alternate search techniques. The big kicker for me though was the searching by map for location specific images or tags. This seems to me what John Reimer was talking about regarding bibliographic data and searching within OPAC's. I had fun looking at images posted from my hometown, our childhood vacation home, my grandmother's neighborhood, etc.

Several groups caught my eye. There are an amazing number of groups that focus on libraries and librarians. Several that were really quite fun to look through included:
Libraries from around the world
Social Software in Libraries Alternative Book Cover Contest
Librarian Trading Cards
Librarians in Shower Caps

Task : Web 2.0 Awards

Wow - who knew there were so many cool sites out there. If I'm completely honest, there are times that I've sat in front of the computer completely listless and without any idea of what else there could be out there that I'd be interested in. This list of award-winning sites is a great place to go when you need something new to get excited about. I was happy to see that several sites that I already know and love were on there (Craigslist, LibraryThing, Pandora, Flickr, Threadless, Etsy and more). But it was mostly fun to check out several new sites just for fun.

I was especially drawn in to Yelp for recommendations of businesses in my area, Cocktail Builder to come up with drink recipes to finish off the large bottle of gin in my freezer, and One Sentence to see how creative people can get. Since I'm at work, I didn't even tempt myself by looking at any of the gaming sites. That would definitely be trouble.

Task : Image Generator

For the next task, I had to use an image generator. A friend told me about how you can create your own character on the Simpsons Movie website. So here I am...Simpsonized! and drinking a beer with Homer.

Task : Crystal Ball

The task was to read these opinions by librarians regarding the future of Web 2.0 and the impact on libraries and discuss it. I read it. And now I'll discuss it.

The idea that most strikes me about the challenge that Web 2.0 brings to libraries is that it really forces our profession to look closely at our core values and purpose and to determine how valuable we can continue to be as these huge shifts in the availability of information become available. While Rick Anderson challenges the value of even continuing to build up a physical collection of materials, I do believe that the importance of the library as a physical space and the act of patrons being able to physically get their hands on works will continue far, far into our future. Given the huge scope of material out there, it just will not be possible for it all to ever be scanned and made available online. However, I do agree with his proposition (and Michael Stephens, and Chip Nilges, and John Reimer) that we need to reassess our contribution in terms of what value we bring to making that information accessible to patrons.

It's been my experience, as a user of libraries and now as a librarian, that libraries tend to be very resistent to adapting our ports of user access to what user's actually express that they would like. Let's set aside the fact that we should be as concerned with aesthetics and useability for our websites as commercial ventures are (honestly, can you fault a patron who doesn't understand library jargon for not being able to find what they need on our sites?) It's clear from the success of sites like Amazon, GoodReads and LibraryThing, that users like generic keyword searching, tagging, visual cues, reader reviews, and suggestions for additional sources. Why not incorporate these features into our existing OPACs? We say that we value libraries as a source of "community", well, these are all features that would help to build up an online community centered around our own library collections. I especially love John Reimer's idea of adding the geographic coordinates into catalog records so that a user could search using a visual map for all items regarding a specific location. What a fantastic idea!

Up until this article, I had really been struggling to see the possibilities of Web 2.0 for any aspects of library work other than reference. I had definitely been able to the possibilities that it holds for incorporating it into bibliographic instruction and outreach. But here are ideas that really go to the heart of what we do - providing access to information for people in a meaningful way. I think that the struggle that we face as a profession is understanding what "meaningful" currently is and possibly will be in the future.

Links to other Lane bloggers

Just wanted to point out that I've added a links list to all of the other Lane Library bloggers. See to the left and below to quickly check them out.

Task : Del.icio.us

The task at hand is to create a del.icio.us account. Happily, I did that about a year ago - though I often forget to add sites to it. I originally started it as a repository for sites regarding my research on the pop culture references to librarians. I'm completely fascinated by the stereotypes of the people in this profession, but most especially to the image of the vampish, sexy librarian. Just find it totally fascinating. However, given the strange and disturbing sites that often appear while searching for those types of images, I decided it was probably not wise to do that searching at work - even if I did have an academic interest in it!

This post though reminds me of what a useful took del.icio.us is for saving sites though. I think that I'll be sure to use it much more and probably will be adding so much to it that it will be annoying. It'd be fun to add the folks from this project to my networks on there though and take a peek at what it is they are cataloging.

So far, I've added Jewell to my del.icio.us network. So easy because once she added her del.icio.us account to her blog, I just clicked on the "Add" link and she showed right up. Fun! Now I can see what goodies she's got bookmarked. Feel free to add my account to your own network!

Catching Up

I've been remiss and haven't been on top of posting anything new on here or completing more tasks for this project. What a wierd couple of weeks at the library...while the rest of the faculty are enjoying summers off, we at the library use the time to work on projects. For the past two weeks I've been working to track down all the books that need to be moved from our New Books shelf into the Main Stacks. It's amazing to me how many items just seem to get lost or go missing. This week was even stranger as the air conditioning went out on Friday afternoon and didn't come back on until Tuesday afternoon. That made for pretty sweltering conditions given that it's July in Savannah! Then my computer was held hostage for a day while CIS (Thank You Mike!!!) fixed some problems and did some upgrades. By the time I had it back, a fiber optic cable was accidentally cut somewhere about a mile up the road and we had no access to the network. Needless to say, it was difficult to get much done.

I am vowing to be more productive the next few days though on the blog.

Heck Yeah Librarians are hip!

Yesterday the New York Times confirmed what I already knew....librarians are way cool. In an article (may require subscription to access) focusing on the new crop of librarians (in this case living in New York and Brooklyn) who are hip, creative, and pop culture-savvy, the changing scope of the profession is discussed. In a world that is embracing vast amounts of information available through technology, librarians are as relevant as ever...if we can just get people to see beyond the stereotypes.

As a fellow "modified librarian", I was particularly excited that the article discussed the draw for creative-types and activists who are drawn to the profession because of the strong sense of ethics around providing access to information to patrons. While I wish that I lived in Brooklyn and could join up with the Desk Set one night for drinks after work, I am extremely happy that even here in my smallish city I've been able to build a professional network that includes some other librarians that often receive the remark, "Wow, you don't look like a librarian!"

Task : Feeds

I went ahead and set up my news feeds on Google Reader since I've already got a Gmail account and am using Blogger. Should I be worried that I'm using all Google products? In any event, setting up feeds really couldn't be all that much easier. I'm set up to recieve feeds for several news searches that I regularly do (including a Google news search for all news relating to libraries and archives) and also set up for several blogs that I frequent. It is really nice to be able to just see the quick news and blog headlines rather than head to each and every site. I'll have to do some work to narrow my feeds though a bit because on several of my news feeds, I get all aspects of the news including categories that I'm actually not all that interested in or that despite my best intentions I don't read all that thoroughly anyhow.

I had to do some thinking about how we at Lane Library could make use of feeds ourselves. An obvious option is to make our blog available with a feed so that people could just watch for updates. I think that setting up a feed for our new acquisitions could be really great, though we'd definitely need to narrow it to subject areas so that the weekly lists weren't totally overwhelming. I looked online a bit to see if there were other libraries creating feeds and to find out how successful they were. (If you create a feed, is there some sort of counter that allows you to track how many people are accessing it?) Here's a link to a good article about how libraries can use RSS feeds: http://www.llrx.com/features/richsite.htm

Coveting : Position on a Library Bookcart Drill Team

The other afternoon I was checking in some serials and happened to notice that the last page of the Christian Science Monitor (June 27, 2007) had a full page article on the National Championships of the Librarian Bookcart Drill Teams held at ALA quite recently. I'd never heard of such a thing and was so excited in reading the article that I forced a coworker to pull up some YouTube clips of said event.

Oh Lord! I want to be a part of a Library Drill Team! The hilarity, the creativity, the fun! The grace with which these librarians maneuver their book carts is something to behold.

Task : Facebook

I've created a profile on Facebook and messed around a bit in there. I'd like to think that I'm relatively savvy when it comes to working in these kinds of environments, but I have to admit that it took me quite a while to feel comfortable navigating within it. Just creating and editing my profile took a couple of hours and then I had to figure out how to search for friends, groups and networks. Still I can't for the life of me figure out how to change from the "Armstrong" network to the "Armstrong faculty" network. I've joined a couple of groups - one of Lane Library student workers (glad to know that they've got pride!) and a pseudo-professional group of librarians. I did sign up for a fun application called "Librarian" that supposedly puts my name out there as a local librarian contact and also provides links to online library services. I'll have to investigate this a bit more though because I'm not quite sure of what it's fully capable of and how others would find me. If I can figure it out any further, I'll post more about it.

I'm a huge fan of increasing library presence where the kids are at, but I do wonder if we're really going to be effective in this type of environment. I may be biased given my own experiences on Myspace. I have a current personal profile that I use to keep in touch with a large number of friends and acquaintances that otherwise I might lost track of, but I have set my profile to private because of the large volume of spam that I receive and lewd invitations in my inbox. I absolutely hate when people that I don't really "know" in real life contact me online and wonder if students might feel that faculty librarians are intruding a bit into the social lives if we proactively seek them out on social networks like Facebook. Then again, perhaps this younger generation who has grown up much more comfortable with having their personal lives available online will not see it as unusual. I'd be very curious to hear other people's opinions on this - either other librarians who have experimented with this or students and library users.

Task : GoodReads

Next up on the task list...joining GoodReads. So I joined up and have been enjoying working my way around the site. It's a pretty fun way to get book suggestions and read reviews by every day readers. As you enlarge your "friends" circle, you can see what books you have in common and their thoughts on what they have been reading. It's also possible to just take a look at what books are most popular/unpopular on the site as a whole. It's a fun site, but to really get engaged takes work as you need to enter quite a bit of information about your own reading habits to really get the most out of it.

I'm already a member of LibraryThing and to be honest, I think that I prefer that site to GoodReads. The biggest drawback to LibraryThing is that to enter more than 200 books, you have to have a paid membership but the fees are relatively low. But in return, I find that the cataloging is more fun - you can pick the standard catalog entry used by Amazon.com for an item or you have the ability to enter your own MARC cataloging (for non-librarians MARC refers to Machine-Readable Cataloging - a library standard). Additionally, it's easier to search for groups that you might be interested in joining and I like their book suggester which generates book recommendation lists based on a title or author.

EPA funding restored?

In case you hadn't heard (publicity on this issue was low outside library circles) the EPA had begun the process of restructuring their library system as a result of the Bush administrations 2007 budget which reduced the EPA budget to $500,000 for operational costs. Their plan was to close up to 10 regional libraries as well as the Washington D.C. main library. They had closed 4 libraries before the shut-downs were stopped by an outcry from the library community, Congress and other advocacy groups.

The closings would have severely affected major groups of researchers who rely on the EPA libraries for information, especially within the scientific community. Though the EPA was planning to digitize material to make it available on the web, the pace of digitization would still have create a major access problem as the information would be made available very slowly.

Possible good news on the horizon, however, as the Senate passed an Appropriations Bill last week that would restore funding to the EPA to be used to reopen and continue to keep open at least 5 of the EPA libraries. The bill now has to be passed in the House of Representatives as well, but hopefully with continued support, it will make it through.

Couple of articles worth checking out on the subject:
First Amendment Center
Library Journal

Task : Wikis

Task #7 on our Library 2.0 project is to become familiar with wiki's - specifically how they could serve libraries. I've used wikipedia (GASP!)and wikihow to find out basic information before. Because anyone can go in and edit the entries in wikipedia, I definitely don't recommend it as a definitely or authoritative resource for patrons. But because of it's size and comprehensiveness, it's fantastic as an initial source when I know very little about a subject. Often there are good links to other more authoritative sources in the entry or you can use the information in there to further your search.

I'd never considered creating my own wiki though. To be honest, I had no idea it was so easy. I've gone ahead and created a wiki to use for the use of planning a craft fair that I'm a part of with friends. I used www.wikispaces.com to set up a free account and it really couldn't be easier to set it up. As long as somebody has very basic knowledge of word processing commands, it's incredibly easy to create and edit the content. I've limited the membership to just those other people on my planning committee rather than making the pages public. I'm hoping that the other members will feel that it's worth while to use the wiki rather than email back and forth to us all and to try to find availability to schedule in person meetings.

I'm interested in trying to see how other libraries might already be using wiki's - especially in ways that patrons might be involved in. I can see their effectiveness for internal communication and project management. It seems like the idea of using them for interactive subject guides and reader reviews could be really fun and a way to keep patrons engaged. I'll post more if I can find good examples.

Library 2.0 Tutorial

This blog has been created for the first task of the Library 2.0 project at the Lane Library. This library-wide project is intended to encourage all library staff to take on the responsibility for experimenting with and learning about social software and it's impact on our patrons. With this in mind, the hope is to develop new ideas about how to utilize these tools within the library setting to reach our patrons. In our case, every year students arrive fresh on campus with an increasing comfort with technology and increasing discomfort with traditional library use. To this end, I hope this project will not only add to my level of interaction with our patrons, but potentially publicize librarianship as a whole as a profession interested in consistently challenging and experimenting with access to information.

Viva la Bibliotheque!