America's Next Top Information Professional

I was in Portland last week for, among other things, the Public Library Association conference. I went to a couple of great presentations, but I have to say, it was the free stuff that blew me away. It was my first national conference, and I was floored by the richness of the exhibition hall.

Free is a very good price.

We trained down and back, so I didn’t have room for quiiite all the books I picked up. Some remain stashed in my parents’ house, but I had to bring back the new Nick Flynn and David Mitchell (!!!) so I can get reading. Oh, and the Harlequin bag to carry them all in.

Just in case you haven’t seen this elsewhere, the winners of the Copus Year of Science Zine-a-thon have been announced.

Here’s the lovely grand prize winner, Meeting a Giant Octopus, by Chen Dou of Gaithersburg, Maryland:

Giant Octopus!!!

I’ve been a terribly negligent blogger, but I’ve been saving some things up. First off, let’s talk about Google Buzz, since everyone else is also talking about it.

At this point, I just have my most initial personal reactions to Buzz, plus the mix of confusion and annoyance I’ve seen playing out amidst my own connections. First off, I find it annoying that there’s a lot of duplication. I loves me my Google Reader, and I have started getting things through multiple streams here. That is, when my friends share something through Reader, it shows up in Buzz. And then, if I comment on it (in either format), it then shows up in my Gmail inbox when someone else comments. Then I will also see it when it pops up again in my Reader.

Basically, Google is trying to force me to consolidate things I want to keep separate. Maybe I don’t want to share my comments with everyone in my email book — although Google has conveniently set up me with a group of followers, I use my Gmail account for both work and play. This is just one more way to muck up the line between personal and professional: in the records business, there can be serious consequences when these divisions are blurred. (Think of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.) Google Buzz isn’t creating this problem, of course — it’s just one more tool that could make it easier. The privacy settings with Buzz are also a bit fuzzy — I don’t like when it is hard to opt out, rather than just easy to opt in.

Buzz has been called Google’s response to Twitter. See, one of the brilliant things about Twitter is its simplicity: you use it to do one very simple thing. Of course, you can use those 140 characters for a lot of different purposes, and you can incorporate them in diverse ways, but the root is simple.

All this being said, I know I can be stubborn with new tools. I was slow to get into aggregators, because I really liked to go to separate websites and catch up on my blogs periodically. But, thanks to a gentle push, I gave Google Reader a try and now I just adore it. So, we’ll see.

It’s been a while. I have been meaning to post for nearly two weeks now, and yet here it is December 27. Apologies for the long silence, but what can I say? First it was a mad rush of final papers, then a train ride and excessive holiday baking and cheer. I’ve just been lounging the past few days, and am only now fully headed back to the Internet.

However, it was more than just general busy-ness that kept me away. See, right as I sat down to write my second-to-last paper during the last week of the term, my computer died.

Died, like, Jacob Marley, dead-as-a-doornail dead.

Which would have been disturbing, given the timing, even if I had backed up my data. That’s right. I didn’t back up my computer. Ever. Sure, I have a few thumb drives with key documents, but I never quite got around to getting an external hard-drive or using any comprehensive online storage. So, while my dad tells me I can probably salvage some of the data, I’m currently working from scraps of documents hither and thither.

This is pretty humiliating as an librarchivist, and just annoying as a computer user, but I’m telling this gruesome tale as a warning story to anyone who has bah-humbugged backing up records. It’s like Scrooge says: you must live in the future, present, and past. Take care, folks, and happy holidays.

In 559M, we’ve been talking a lot about information overload. Weekly coursework includes a forum that’s just shy of the 1000 post mark, Twittering, blogging, reading, and other experimentation. (Of course, there’s no 3 hour in-person lecture to attend.) A day (or a few) off can mean quite an avalanche of messages awaiting your response. Sometimes that makes it hard to get started again.

I’m a fan of Preene, Nonnecke and Andrews’ statement that “many lurkers are not selfish free-riders.” If only for selfish motivations, of course. See, silence online can mean many things. It can mean that my wireless has gone out for a few days, or that I am just working through the content at a slower pace, or that I am totally lost. If I’m silent when I physically attend class, it may mean that I didn’t do the reading, or that I just am digesting information, or simply don’t have anything to contribute. Online silences are harder to differentiate. Lurkers lurk for an equally open number of reasons, but those do not get articulated through body language or other visual and verbal cues. 

But I’m off lurking for the rest of the term. Scout’s honor, dad.

Yesterday was another full day of stimulating talks. First was the SLAIS colloquium student panel, “Learning on the Job.” Students spoke about their summer work experiences at the music division of Library and Archives Canada, SFU’s Bennett Library, RM and archives of the UN, and the library at the Museo Nacional del Prado. Seriously, I never cease to be surprised at the variety of fun things that librarians and archivists get to do. Cataloging wax cylinder recordings? Be still, my beating heart! Kirsty really emphasized the network of contacts we all have as student librarians: we can tap into SLAIS faculty, UBC Library staff, SLAIS alumni, as well as contacts in whatever organization we find ourselves in. It’s a reassuring reminder that we really never are alone.

Directly following the panel, Donna Kynaston talked about her experiences in records management and archives at the World Health Organization. She highlighted some of the quirks of recordkeeping in many of the international organizations founded after World War 2 — namely, that they inherited a British registry-based administrative system (and some funny British colloquialism as well). There have been the typical problems with email, particularly when transactions take place entirely through email. When there’s a business requirement for the official record to be on paper, that obviously becomes a problem.

She also discussed the lack of legislation in international organizations. In most jurisdictions, records managers have a lot of legislation both to uphold but also to help motivate the folks who create and use records. Laws about freedom of information, protection of privacy, public records, e-discovery and the like all give guidance for records management. International organizations like the WHO don’t have those laws to follow. (This makes public access very interesting — you can get a pdf of the WHO archives access policy here.) She pointed out that other drivers are effective — namely, desire for accountability, administrative efficiency, and the preservation of historical memory — but it’s an interesting environment for records management.

Finally, she gave a delightful nearly-lost-but-found archives anecdote. One of their most heavily used collections is a fonds of historical photographs, 30,000 prints and even more negatives from the 1940s-1980s. (I believe this is its finding aid.) It was about to be thrown out, but was rescued from a storage space beneath a boardroom when the facility manager thought to ask if the archives wanted to keep ’em. It’s a familiar, shocking, and heart-warming story. And a good reason to work on raising awareness of archives, eh?

Yesterday was my Science Zine Workshop over at Woodward Library. We had an intimate group of mostly library folks, but an absolutely delightful time looking at zines, talking about what makes them special, and then making a zine together. I used a modified version of the Independent Publishing Resource Center’s Zines 101 lesson plan, and yes, we focused on science. You might not realize how thrilling this is for me — science zines are relatively rare in the sea of perzines, how-to zines, and political tracts.

We talked a lot about why authors might choose the zine as a format, rather than say, posting information to a blog or submitting an article to an academic journal. I have to say, I found myself making some comparisons to the instruction UBC Library does for English 112 students: when you look at a zine, think about these questions:

• Who is the author? (it may be anonymous or pseudonymous)
• Are there ads? (almost definitely not)
• Do they cite their sources? (rarely in a properly formatted bibliography, more likely in a “further reading” sort of way)
• What kind of language does the author use? (often conversational, sometimes spicy)

We also talked about why zines are a good forum for talking about science in particular. Zines can be used to break complex topics into more simple narratives. They offer a space to discuss something you care about without the pressures to meet any standards or uphold obligations to advertisers or other parties. They can be anonymous in a deep way: I can make a zine and leave copies on the bus and no one will ever know that I made it. It got me thinking about why *I* value zines so much, both as a creator and as a reader.

Thanks to everyone who came, and to my supervisors at Woodward who helped me put it together. We’ll be sending a copy of our zine in to the COPUS Year of Science Zine-a-Thon contest, so keep your fingers crossed.

Later in the afternoon, I went to the also delightful but otherwise dissimilar panel discussion on Video Games, Virtual Worlds, and Real Learning. A couple times throughout the presentation, I heard the statistic that in 2011, 80% of active Internet users will be using virtual worlds. (I didn’t catch the source for this number, if it was given.)

Eric Meyers talked about his research in virtual worlds specifically for children, including places like Webkinz, Woogi World, and Barbie Girls. According to numbers from webanalytics sites, the vast majority of users of virtual worlds are under the age of thirty, many of them between 5 and 15. Eric posed some intriguing questions: How can schools allow or benefit from these spaces? How do children understand truth and authority in virtual spaces? How . Where does the learning happen? He described spaces where kids make tutorials for other kids, helping shape the experiences of other users. Fascinating stuff that I had no idea about.

He also asked about the use of virtual world Second Life among folks in the audience. (Minimal.) He used the term “dead avatars” to contrast the steep learning curve in adult virtual worlds like SL to the low threshold for entry in child-specific sites. To be honest, the stories of new avatars running around naked and confused (or bored) has kept me from trying SL yet. However, our final presentation for LIBR 559M will be held in SL, and I welcome the push to get in there.

The other presenters were Kathy Sanford and Liz Merkel from the Faculty of Education at UVic, talking about their work with adolescent gamers. They focused largely on a crisis in (dis)engagement in schools: by looking at kids who are very, very engaged in their gaming, what can we learn about how they are not similarly engaged in school? It sounds like a fulfilling research project, they’ve been working with some kids for about 4 years now. There was some theory I didn’t completely catch onto, but I took down some titles. (Things on “complexity science” and emergent systems — sounds pretty adaptable.)

I also felt a little unsettled by their discussions of “survival of the fittest.” This was given as a model used in education, one that may be challenged by the kinds of cooperation used in video games. Hmmm. See, the misrepresentation of evolution is one of my personal pet peeves. I actually made a zine about natural selection this summer, intended as a pocket-guide to prevent the kinds of agonizing things that I hate to hear. Which includes the term “survival of the fittest.” Merkel rightly pointed out that Darwin never used this phrase, but I would’ve appreciated a bit more on what he actually meant by “fit.” Fitness, in the Darwinian sense, is not about being strong or fast. It’s about reproductive success: basically, you are considered fit based on how many grandkids you have. Which may be based on your strength or speediness, but could be based on all kinds of other factors. This is why we have developed all kinds of cultural adaptations to improve our lives — the competition for survival does not result in a simple throw-down where it’s every man pitted against every other.

This is a fairly minor quibble though, as their talk gave me a lot to think about. I appreciated their point that no two players experience exactly the same game — it is an individualized experience. They also emphasized the cooperation and creative collective action these kids use to improve their experiences. For example, one of their participants told them about a Halo party he had hosted, where he and his friends collected all the computers and TV screens they could find, so they could all play the game together. They ended up with more kids than space, so one kid played, presumably on a laptop, while sitting in the bath tub. It requires creative and collaborative action to have that kind of fun.

It’s been a busy week, and I haven’t caught up on my posts. On Thursday I went to the first Works (un)Cited event, put on by LASSA, our department’s student association. The goal of the evening was to give students a chance to practice public speaking in a low-risk environment, and also give us all a chance to learn what other folks are thinking about. The line-up was excellent — I missed the first talk, and walked in on the last tantalizing slides of Mahria’s talk on the human brain. I wanted to highlight some rambling thoughts relevant to LIBR 559M. Professor Heather O’Brien talked about her work on engagement. It struck me that this is a concept considered in many different disciplines, but rarely in intersecting ways. (This is a little of how I felt at infocamp — all the UX business has been going on in a big way, and I had just not tapped into those conversations at all.) To give just one example, take a look at this delightful article I found over the summer. It’s a designer’s musings on an issue that regularly wrestle with: how do we physically manifest the memories and information that exist in digital format? As the author states,

If so much of our personal history is getting compressed into data, and digital imaging, cloud computing, and streaming media have become an integral part of daily experience, being sensitive to the physical presence of these devices is an important responsibility.

I’ve been seeing many tweets about the Barnes and Noble e-reader Nook, which are mixed, as usual, with misguided statements about the death of print. My boss over the summer pointed out to me once that books have been a very successful media for a reason. Just because another format for reading will also be successful does not mean books will suddenly have no audience.

I realize this is all a bit of a ramble, but I’ll accept it as one of the “half-baked” blogs mentioned on the Sunday Edition’s enjoyable piece on News 2.0 this morning. One of their interviewees used that term to describe reports that say, basically, “This is what I know, this is what I don’t know…what do you know?” So, whaddya know?

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p.s. Did you know it’s Celebrate Learning week at UBC? There are a few events I’ll definitely be attending.

Monday is the zine workshop I’m teaching at Woodward, followed by “Videogames, Virtual Worlds and Real Learning,” which should be a lively panel. It’s 4:30-6:00 p.m. in the Dodson Room, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

Wednesday, there’s a student panel for our normal lunch hour colloquium, 11:45 in Barber 155, directly followed by a talk by Donna Kynaston, the head of records and archives for the World Health Organization.

Anyone keen on any of the other events?

I just came from a SLAIS colloquium by Vancouver’s City Archivist, Leslie Mobbs, with the fantastic title, “Raising the Roof: Towards an Outreach and Awareness Strategy for the City of Vancouver Archives.” The Archives seeks to increase visibility through four tactics: strengthening existing relationships, establishing partnerships, building community, and leveraging technology. These are, of course, all intertwined. I’d like to highlight some of the great technologically-enhanced-relationship-projects Mobbs discussed.

Most prominent is their Youtube channel. This has been a vehicle for promoting their Archival Films Online initiative. The films in question, many of them privately donated home movies, were essentially inaccessible to the public, since the Archives did not have a projector to play the films. Digitizing the films and posting a copy on Youtube allows greater access than was previously available. However, Mobbs noted that the Youtube videos are not intended as a definitive display of the holdings. For archives, the context of records is imperative to fully understanding them and Youtube presents certain limits for the amount of description that can be appended. (Alas, it doesn’t permit the hierarchical display that, say, EAD-encoded descriptions do.) Mobbs said that the point of their Youtube postings (and of their new Twitter account) that these tools are aimed to bring people into the archives, not to be the primary display of holdings. Interesting, eh? It highlights their position to explore both in-person and online connections. It seems that the Archives has intentions to do both, so keep your eyes peeled.

p.s. The Archives also recently hosted a Hackathon, encouraging folks to play with the data freely available from the city. Read about it here and here.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzmAav8yCkI[/youtube]