Category: librarians

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librarians

Immersing Yourself at the Library

I have tried Second Life. I have tried Active Worlds. On the whole, I’d have to say that prefer actual life and the real world. (Not to be confused with MTV’s The Real World, which I only prefer to major dental surgery.)

I think it’s important for the library-archives-museum world to know about these worlds, and it’s probably important for some libraries/archives/museums to take an active role in participating in them, just as we should know about Facebook, twitter, the blogosphere, etc., and participate in those, when it is advantageous to our institution.

However, there’s a lack of attraction for me in these online virtual worlds partly because I have another way to immerse myself in fantasy, history, or anything else I care to, and it’s always been as close as my local library. As Lane Smith might say, It’s a book.

Oh, Rachel, I hear you say. Must you be one of those boring old librarians who talks about how great books are? I mean, how predictable. How boring. How last millennium. Wouldn’t you rather be one of those super-cool, Grand Theft Auto-playing cybrarians?

Well, actually no. I’m not against gaming in the library. (I even created a website about it for LIBR 500: Foundations of Information Technology.) I certainly support technology in, and for, the library; I’m taking this class online, after all. But I’m happy to have both a future job title and a future work place whose names are derived from the word for “book.” That’s because I love books, and I think they are the single greatest tool for immersing oneself in another world that humankind has ever known. Perhaps they will be surpassed in that capacity someday, but that day is not today.

Recently, at the public library, I overheard an extremely earnest young man say to his equally earnest young friend, very earnestly, “If I read a book, when I finish it, I suffer an emotional loss” (emphasis his). (To be fair, I was browsing the drama collection at the time, and when I was a young thespian, I’m sure I was just as painfully earnest.) Although it seemed as if the young man were trying a little too hard to prove his emotional depth, I have felt the same sentiment. It’s part of the reason series fiction is so popular; when we love a character and the world he lives in, we want to go there again and again.

Some people may have the same experience in a virtual world, which is why we librarians should know about such things. Our patrons may come to us with questions about how to create avatars, and we should be prepared to answer them, just as we are prepared to answer questions about how to raise begonias or how to diagram a sentence. Our patron’s interests don’t have to be our interests, but they are our business. As a future librarian, a big part of my job is to help you find out more about what you want to learn about, be it constructing an alter ego in Second Life, building a birdhouse, or finding the picturebook that will turn your preschooler into a lifelong reader.

Thank you, future patrons, for giving me a good reason to always be learning.

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2.0 librarians

2.0: Help or Hindrance?

Originally posted on the Vista discussion board for LIBR 559M on July 21, 2011.

For my money, any jargon, such as the “2.0” suffix, is helpful when it successfully serves as shorthand for a more complicated concept, and becomes a hindrance when it is used erroneously or with an audience that isn’t privy to the jargon.

Medical terminology is a good example of this concept. Having worked with doctors and nurses in the field of medical publishing, I have been exposed to, and come to understand, a great deal of medical jargon, abbreviations, and acronyms. The first law of medical school appears to be, “Never use words when a string of letters will do.”

Take the sentence, “With GERD, we have to avoid NSAIDs. We’ll start with an OTC H2 antagonist and move up to a PPI if necessary.” If a doctor says that to a nurse, no problem. If a doctor says that to a patient and then walks out of the room with no further explanation, it’s potentially a serious problem.

(By the way, that sentence translates to: “With gastroesophageal reflux disease [i.e., heartburn], we have to avoid nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs [e.g., aspirin, ibuprofen]. We’ll start with an over-the-counter [i.e., non-prescription] histamine antagonist [e.g., Tagamet] and move up to a proton-pump inhibitor [e.g., Prilosec] if necessary.”)

Here’s when I think it’s appropriate for information professionals to use the “2.0” suffix in describing their library’s programs or services:

  1. With other members of staff if there have been previous discussions of what, specifically, the 2.0 suffix means for that library’s programs and services, and everyone has agreed to those definitions.
  2. Never with patrons. There’s no way to establish with each patron that what you mean by “2.0” is what they understand by “2.0” – if they understand it at all. If you mean chat reference, say chat reference. If you want to say that the new online catalogue allows user tagging, say that. (And don’t call the catalogue an “OPAC,” either.) It’s possible that even these specific terms may need further explanation, depending on the patron. As information professionals, our job is to provide information, not to obfuscate it with jargon.

Here’s Balko’s First Law of Librarianship: Never use jargon with patrons when plain old English [or insert other culturally appropriate language here] will do. (By the way, that’s always.)

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2.0 librarians online tools

Your Online Presence: How Much Is Enough?

Despite the stereotype of the Shy Librarian (which is also an online game where you get to dress up your very own smokin’ hot librarian – who knew?), it seems like the biblioblogosphere is full of information professionals with something to say. A Google search of the term “librarian blog” yields more than half-a-million hits, and the more emotionally loaded term “librarian rant” gets you 5,680 results.

(My favorite example of the latter is the appropriately titled “Unemployed, depressed old librarian’s rant” on DiabetesDaily.com, which starts: “I live in the western part of Kentucky where jobs are scarcer that hen’s teeth. I was released from my prison job for being too nice.”)

So what is the “proper” use of social media for information professionals? Like most things, it depends. Where are you in your career? If you’re two months from retiring, I wouldn’t worry about it. For those just starting out, there are many, including Hack Library School and American Libraries magazine, who believe that a strategically designed online presence, including an e-portfolio, is necessary to help you stand out from the crowd of recent library school graduates. If you have any desire to someday hold a title such as “Emerging Technologies Librarian”, the answer is obvious: Start tweeting immediately, no matter where you are or what you’re doing. Even if you’re at church. Even if it’s a wedding. Even if you’re the bride. What am I saying? Especially if you’re the bride.

Henry Jenkins, currently the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and the past Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, says:

Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to take an ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationship among all of these different communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up around them, and the activities they support. Media systems consist of communication technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions, practices, and protocols that shape and surround them (Gitelman, 1999). The same task can be performed with a range of different technologies, and the same technology can be deployed toward a variety of different ends. Some tasks may be easier with some technologies than with others, and thus the introduction of a new technology may inspire certain uses. [p. 8.]

The focus shouldn’t be on using technology; the focus should be on what we want to accomplish. Only after we have determined that should we begin thinking about what types of social media (if any) would work best to accomplish our goal. If your goal would be best served by a blog, by all means, blog away. If your goal would be best served by a plain, old-fashioned phone call or an in-person chinwag, do it that way, and don’t even think of apologizing for not being “2.0” enough.

Because information professionals are supposed to be knowledgeable about all the latest technologies (and we should do our best to stay informed on the topic, so we can serve our patrons better), we sometimes get distracted by all the bells and whistles and forget that any technology is just a tool. A tool is only useful if it helps you accomplish what you want to accomplish. Remember:

What you want to do and why you want to do it is always more important than the how of getting it done.

Categories
2.0 librarians

Librarian 2.0 – Are You One?

I did a Google search of the term “2.0”, and in the first five pages of results, I found the following:

  • Web 2.0
  • HTML 2.0
  • RSS 2.0
  • Health 2.0
  • Classroom 2.0
  • Museum 2.0
  • Where 2.0
  • Efficiency 2.0
  • Life 2.0
  • Enterprise 2.0
  • Data 2.0
  • Women 2.0
  • Nerds 2.0.1
  • StrengthsFinder 2.0
  • Wisdom 2.0
  • Identity 2.0
  • Publishing 2.0
  • Government 2.0
  • Art Education 2.0

I found the term “Women 2.0” a bit disturbing and wondered if I am one, or whether I’m a plain old “Woman 1.0.” “Women 2.0” does sound vaguely fembot-ish, so perhaps I will upgrade myself.

I was also oddly pleased that the Nerds saw fit to extend their designation to “2.0.1.”

In the library community, I have found that the “2.0” designation generally refers to adding/integrating some sort of interactive online/social media component to whatever it is you’re discussing.  However, as in many industries, some library folk use “2.0” to convey a general sense of hey, we’re cutting-edge, technologically savvy hipster types who just might have a tattoo somewhere interesting, without any real definition of what that might mean, in a concrete way, to an actual library patron.

David Lee King, the Digital Branch & Services Manager of Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library, has a list of what a “Librarian 2.0” should be able to do. The “most important, big-picture” skill he lists is “the ability to tell the library’s story, through various media – writing, photography, audio, and video.” If that is what’s most important, then the point of Library 2.0 is to promote and advocate the library and/or the librarian (and we are two different things – perhaps the subject of a later post), as opposed to serving the library’s patrons.

Is King right? Is Library 2.0 really all about us, the information professionals? Or is it (or should it be) about the people we’re trying to serve?

Categories
librarians online tools

How (and If) Librarians Use Online Tools

WebJunction, the self-described “learning community working together to ensure that all library staff have the resources they need to power relevant, vibrant libraries” whose mission is “to promote learning for all library staff by providing open, affordable online learning communities” (WebJunction website, “About Us”), recently (July 6, 2011) released the results of their survey of WebJunction members about their use of 10 types of online tools and resources. The tools in question (listed in descending order of reported daily use) are:

  • Email discussion lists
  • Professional or social networking sites
  • RSS feeds
  • Chat or instant messaging
  • Online library news or magazines
  • Blogs
  • Wikis
  • Bookmarking sites
  • Mobile apps
  • Discussion forums
  • Video sharing sites
  • Photo sharing sites
  • Online games
  • Self-paced courses or tutorials
  • Webinars or other online events

Interestingly, this survey separated personal use of these tools from use in a professional setting, which I believe makes the results more relevant to a discussion of how librarians use online tools as librarians, rather than as private individuals. I find this to be an improvement over the similar survey WebJunction released in July 2010, which asked members about their use online tools but didn’t specify whether the tools were being used for personal or professional use.

Even the current study is flawed, however, because of the vagueness of the term “use of online tools in professional setting.” Does that mean that the tool is actually being used for the business of the library, or just that it’s being used when the librarian is on the clock? These could be two very different things. As the Annoyed Librarian points out in her critique of the survey:

I’m also skeptical about what using the tools “in a professional setting” means. I would speculate that the majority of librarians using social networking for “professional” purposes aren’t really using it for anything to do with their jobs. At least that doesn’t seem to be the case for the librarians I know, including myself.

They may hang out on Facebook or Friendfeed or Twitter communicating with other librarians, and maybe even about topics related to libraries, but rarely about their actual library work.

What if the question was changed to, “used the tools for work,” defining “work” as “the stuff you actually do for your job,” rather than, “any activity even tangentially related to libraries that I could therefore consider professional activity”? I suspect we’d find a huge difference in the statistics.

While the survey has serious flaws, including a relatively small (1,039 responses), self-selected study population (members of WebJunction are, presumably, interested in its mission “to promote learning for all library staff by providing open, affordable online learning communities” [WebJunction website, “About Us”]), and a tendency for WebJunction to use the survey findings to promote its own products (such as webinars), the results do provide an interesting starting point for a discussion of how, and whether, librarians are using online tools in their work.

What do you think?

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