Tag: library

No, the world is not ending, I simply was convinced by kgs’s recent post. I expected to find the article she quoted from and rant again about Gorman’s lack of technological understanding.

Instead, I’m going to agree with him.

On one, very small point. And probably not in the manner he’d like.

In an article in the San Fransisco Chronicle, Gorman is quoted as follows:

“If you look at the Encyclopedia Britannica, you can be fairly sure that somebody writing an article is an acknowledged expert in that field, and you can take his or her words as being at least a scholarly point of view,” said Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and dean of library services at Cal State Fresno. “The problem with an online encyclopedia created by anybody is that you have no idea whether you are reading an established person in the field or somebody with an ax to grind. For all I know, Wikipedia may contain articles of great scholarly value. The question is, how do you choose between those and the other kind?”

Gorman thinks the answer for academia lies in encouraging students to think critically. “Anyone involved in higher education will tell you one of the biggest problems is uncritical acceptance (by students) of anything that’s online,” he said.

It’s that last line that I agree with, but I’d like to make an addendum. I’d prefer to say “Anyone involved….will tell you that one of the biggest problems is uncritical acceptance.”

Period.

What I want to know is: why should we be teaching our students to blindly accept anything? When we’ve had example after example after example of print sources being spurious, why should we not be teaching students to verify their research no matter what the source. That’s certainly what I’m teaching…verification is evaluation as it relates to information. Blind trust of any source is a problem.

Some really excellent blogging from Jenny over atTheShiftedLibrarian on the Gaming, Learning and Libraries conference.

More (since these people are all incredibly cool and are tagging like crazy) on technorati and flickr. Such a great topic! Here in my academic library, I’m not often jealous of public libraries. Here’s one opportunity for me to be so, since I don’t eeeeeeeeeever see us ordering games and game systems. I hope that I’m wrong, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Is anyone out there in library land leveraging Facebook for reference/instruction interactions?

Just curious…I’m trying, here at UTC, but have as yet had no students take advantage of it. I’ve created a Lupton Library group, and mentioned it in all my of classes over the last month or so, to try and get the word out. Given that it’s enormously popular, I had hopes that students might feel comfortable sending me messages via it, rather than email. I’m not giving up yet, but a month with nothing doesn’t exactly scream success to me. Fred, you’re the expert…have you seen anyone using it in this way?

If you’re on, feel free to look me up and friend me.

Just a quick note that in trying desperately to keep up with the ton of phenomenal writing going on in the biblioblogosphere, I somehow missed this post by Meredith that sums up some of the thoughts I’ve had about library systems departments.

I’ve wondered this myself…having gotten my degree in a department that emphasized both LS and IS, and had a significant number of opportunities to learn code, why more people with those skills aren’t recruited.

The sad fact of the matter is that it’s largely salary based. If you know PHP/MySQL/Java/AJAX stuff these days, you can make much, much, much more than any library is going to be able to offer you. I dabble in PHP/MySQL stuff, and I’m certain it was a large part of my being hired in my current position, even though I don’t directly deal with it on a day-to-day basis. But I also know that if I wanted to market myself in that way, my stock would jump quite a bit. I’m happy being a librarian, but it’s hard for a new programmer to look at $30K vs $80K and choose the $30K.

With that said…if I were a library director, I’d be scrambling like crazy for funds to hire a full time programmer. The amount of benefit there would so far outweigh the salary needs that I can’t even describe it.

EDIT: Turns out Jenny said a little something about this the other day as well.

This is a response that I sent out on LITA-l, but felt needed archiving here on the blog.

Originally written by Anita S. Coleman on Wed, 30 Nov 2005 on Lita-l:

The point is that blogs simply and plainly ARE NOT scholarly communications. They may be communication pieces, tools, etc. written or produced by scholars, but they are not scholarly communications. Just as non-peer-reviewed articles in trade magazines, newsletters, popular and general interest periodicals are not part of the body of literature regarded as scholarly articles, and are not weighted for tenure and promotion as do the “traditional” scholarly peer-reviewed literature.

“Simply and plainly”? They may not be of a form traditionally considered scholarly…does this mean they are intrinsically not so? Or that they could not become such?

Sitting aside the traditional view of scholarly information sources (see my views on that here), is there a better method of review than open publication and comment? Can anyone intelligently argue that allowing anyone to comment on your paper is worse than the current “insider only” method of scholarly publication?

There’s a lot of baggage tied up in academia’s love affair with the vetting of information sources…issues of authority, issues of access, issues of relevance…but with the current moving us towards individual or university self-archiving and the web taking publishing out of the hands of the few and into the hands of the many, we’re overdue for a shift in the academic publishing paradigm. So yes, I have to say…I think that blogging SHOULD be taken into account for issues of tenure and promotion. I think that any production of knowledge is a valuable one.

So there appears to be lots of talk among the biblioblogosphere about Library 2.0, a takeoff on Web 2.0. I’m a huge proponent here…but I think maybe we have a marketing problem hiding under the digital shine.

I get Web 2.0. We’re talking less one way and more two way, less top and more bottom, less central and more distributed, less professional and more amateur, less yahoo and more google, less page and more blog, less html and more xml. I get it, and I’ve been talking it up for a few years now.

What I don’t necessarily get is…how does this translate into library speak? I’ve talked about giving more power to the patron, allowing them to tag our OPACs and comment on our blogs. Over at ALA Techsource, they list a set of Library 2.0 principles:

1. The Library is everywhere.
2. The Library has no barriers.
3. The library invites participation.
4. The library uses flexible, best-of-breed systems.

With the exception of #4 above (where I simply wish it were the case), you could replace the phrase “The Library” with “Information” and get a much more robust series of statements, IMNSHO.

Information is everywhere.
Information has no barriers.
Information invites participation.

As librarians, our job is now to figure out how to make this information easily accessible by our patrons. We can do this by leveraging technology to make this information more easily found (Google Book Search), more easily organized (flickr) or more easily shared (del.icio.us). But we should remember that The Library != Information.

EDIT: Great set of Library 2.0 doubts and issues over at Ross’s blog. I share some of his snark.

Just catching up with my library news after my vacation last week, and discovered a couple of interesting blog posts that I wanted to comment on. I originally saw this from Jessamyn, but it originated with Jenny and was then picked up by Davey P’s weblog: a new opac interface that for some reason everyone is calling a “tag cloud.” Which, as far as I can tell, is wrong. This is a subject cloud, yes, but to me tagging is all about the folksonomic, the “consumer as creator” concept. The sort of thing I posted way back when….this is a clever way of viewing the frequencies of subject headings, but it’s not tagging and not a folksonomy.

I’d love to see an OPAC that allowed actual tagging to be done. I think it would tell us enormous amounts about our users, and would generate lots of ways that people use our catalog/view our resources that we could never have guessed.

Anyone want to try to whip that up as an add-on to their catalog? User-directed free form tagging, possibly even tied to accounts so that people can generate del.icio.us-like queries of the books they read…that’s what I want to see.

NB: This is a copy of the post I put together for the UTC Library blog, but I felt it was important enough that I wanted to cross post it. Forgive me the horrific blog ettiquette faux pas.

Completely and utterly brilliant keynote at the ACA Summit by Jo Ellen Parker, tracing the changes in the University in the 1860’s through the early 20th century and comparing them to the sea change coming over the next 20-30 years via technology.

As a teaser: her central point, among many phenomenal side points, was that the University will be moving towards a less centralized/compartmentalized model, and towards a more fluid, changable model. One of her questions was, paraphrased: “What happens when the library is no longer a place where information is stored, and is instead a method or activity?”

EDIT: Snippets from actual text follows…Jo Ellen Parker was kind enough to share her early draft with me, and here are some of the high points. The first exerpt is her illustration of another major shift in the Academy, when writing allowed education to move from the “seek a teacher, and listen” mode to “learning anytime, anywhere” mode.

…in the Phaedrus, where Plato depicts Socrates and Phaedrus talking a walk and talking of love and truth. Socrates tells Phaedrus a story about the Egyptian god Theuth, who presents various “divine” arts to the king Thamus – number, calculation, geometry, astronomy, and above all writing. Thamus is less than impressed, however, about writing in particular, saying “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance not from within themselves but by means of external marks. . . . And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing. . . “ After Phaedrus agrees that Thamus has a point, Socrates goes on to say that “anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who takes it over from him, on the supposition that such writing will provide something reliable and permanent, must be exceedingly simple-minded.” Written words “seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you the same thing forever.” In Socrates’ view, a book is a sort of inanimate parrot, mindlessly repeating a form of words of which it can have no understanding.

[. . . ]

Of course, Socrates speaks more principled objections as well. By relying on writing to preserve information, the argument goes, students would cease to exercise memory. (I seem to remember many similar discussions about the introduction of calculators and their effect on basic math skills in my own education.) But most serious of all seems to be the charge that books are “dead.” They can only repeat themselves, without interaction or nuance or growth, and so are a poor substitute for the live interplay of human minds through discourse, which in the Socratic view is the true mode of intellectual seeking. As I think about this point, I have to wonder whether Socrates would have found blogs and wikis, with their ever changing nature and open invitation to exchange, somewhat less objectionable than Greek scrolls. . . .

She goes on to discuss the changes in the American university before and at the turn of the 20th century. Within a roughly 40 year period, most of the things we take for granted about academia were invented or imported: the necessity of the PhD, tenure, universities as knowledge production facilities, the academic publishing model and specialization over generalization of learning. All of these things came into being in a terrifically short time, and one can only imagine the shock of the existing college professor in trying to hang on to the old ways of doing things.

I’ll close this with her paragraph on libraries…again, very forward thinking.

And, to bring us back to where we started, sort of, I believe that something similar will happen, indeed is happening, to libraries. James Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan and a very thoughtful commentator on higher education, poses a nice thought experiment: Imagine that all the information currently in your campus library could be contained in a device roughly the size and shape of a football. What would that mean for your library? One thing it would mean, obviously, is that the definition of the library as a physical space built to centralize and protect collections must be radically changed. Once regarded as repository of an institution’s accumulated intellectual and informational capital, the library must become an access point for information and materials, both digital and analog, owned by many different entities and located who knows where. What does a library look like that is a launching pad into cyberspace for students and faculty? What kinds of skills do librarians need to connect users with information in multiple media from anywhere on the globe? To put it really bluntly, how can your college librarian compete with Google to provide services to NetGen students and very soon NetGen faculty? Another prediction I have is that just as the barriers between disciplines and departments will become permeable and flexible, the distinction between library and student center, library and technology center, library and classroom will do the same.