Grouse of the week

Every time I not only have to walk the whole length of the Main Library from my workroom to the one, one-seater staff restroom on our floor...

...but also have to take the elevator to another floor because our restroom is in use...

...another pin goes into my Robert A.M. Stern voodoo doll.

>:-[

Multi-tasking overload?

If you need to do a self-check to find out if you've been doing too much computer multi-tasking, click here.

Playing around with PBWiki

I've been editing websites since lib'ary school, and I've been using blogging sites since 2006, so I enjoy experimenting with how to configure and post online.

Hence, I liked this sandbox, especially since I've already used "Peanut Butter" Wiki a bit for other purposes.

I added a Favorite Book, a Favorite Vacation Spot, and a new page with a book review which was just published in the July/August 2008 issue of Public Libraries magazine.

Wikis

I can't give as much time to this topic as I have for others, thanks to Fay. There's too much I was going to catch up on last week.

:-(

I've considered creating a wiki for Remote Customer Services, at least for the Ask a Librarian team. We have a webpage on JPL Neighborhood which we use to give chat team members schedules, contact information, training how-to's, etc. It might be useful to be able to have collaborative communication across the team membership, especially for group planning, coaching, problem-solving, etc.

We'll have to experiment with the idea.

Thanks,
Mike

"Getting The Most Out Of Your Library"

Here's an interesting article by Williams Hicks of Digital Web Magazine which could be read as a counterargument to Rick Anderson's Away from the “icebergs”.

I found the article linked from "Why use a library?" on Tame the Web.

What first caught my eye was this blurb:
It says succinctly what I've been blathering about for several posts now.

Hicks is addressing a readership of Web professionals, and he catches his readers' attention in this way:

So I want to talk about libraries. No, not the JavaScript kind, the old ones—bricks, mortar, and books.

Chances are that when you need design inspiration, help with some code, or almost anything related to the business of web design you hit Google, Flickr, and in quick succession a dozen or more sites that you’ve found consistent and relevant to your needs over the years.

You’ll probably harass your friends over the favored social network of the hour, and usually the results from all of the above will be immediate and relatively decent.

However, if you find yourself on page six of a result set, spending much of your hard earned cash on tech books, needing more art inspiration, or if you’re just looking for one of those “old” things that will probably never make it onto the web, I’d like to offer some suggestions.

He then give a beautifully detailed and nuanced guide to the materials and services which physical libraries have to offer, ranging from archives of non-digitized information and images, to Interlibrary Loan services, to information architecture.

On a lighter note, the article mentions that if

you are a developer who hangs out at a coffee shop then you might be surprised to know that in an attempt to draw more students in, many academic libraries have built small coffee shops into their floor plans, and that many larger institutions will offer free Wi-Fi throughout the buildings.

Further, you’ll find that their floor-plans often offer both low and high traffic/noise areas in which to work, and either might work for you, depending on your tastes.

He concludes as follows:

I hope I have demonstrated that libraries may be worth returning to if they don’t currently receive any of your attention. Many large institutions have nothing but their patron’s, and often society’s, best interests at heart.

While you may not get instant gratification from a library, and few if any are really cutting-edge when it comes to their use of web technologies, there is something to be said for the diversity and quality of information they provide you in your daily development tasks.

An excellent piece of writing!

Mike

On Library 2.0: or, Digital Refugees

I'm seeing a theme emerging in my own posts throughout this Learning 2.0 process: "This is really great, and I can appreciate its value to global culture...but I'm not interested in using much of it myself."

Hmmm...I guess this is why I named the blog The Surly Librarian. I could have called it Old Dog Librarian, except that I can learn new tricks. They just have to be ones I intend to use. Convince me that I might value using a trick and I will learn it.

That grumpy intro having been written, let me step back from personal preferences and intentions, and see what I want to say about 2.0....

I began with Tom Storey's introduction to Where will the next generation Web take libraries?. He describes what he sees as the plusses of Web 2.0. I have mixed feelings.

In Web 2.0, the Web becomes the center of a new digital lifestyle that changes our culture and touches every aspect of our lives. The Web moves from simply being sites and search engines to a shared network space that drives work, research, education, entertainment and social activities—essentially everything people do.

This "shared network space" has obviously changed the political and economic realities of the whole world...for the people who have access to it.

I don't object to the positive changes; I make use of them myself. In fact, I believe the opening out of the world of communication—across space and time, across every sort of political, cultural, ethnic, religious or other barrier—may be the most importance evolutionary step the human race has made since the development of empirical science.

Just one non-trivial example: The Chinese government could not prevent global awareness of it's negligence and political manipulation following the earthquake in May, and people across the globe have been able to coordinate with each other to send aid, all because of this "shared network space."

However, as I keep saying, I am extremely concerned for the millions, perhaps billions, of people who do not have access, or, if they do, lack adequate skills, education and savvy to navigate the high-speed, consumer-oriented world to which the Web caters.

As I wrote in an earlier post, I have an ethical concern over the cavalier way in which contemporary American society neglects and abandons those who cannot "keep up" with the latest in social, economic and technological interaction.

There is a moral tradition of responsibility for the well being of those less fortunate than oneself which seems to have fallen out of the American mindset. We may pay lip service to the notion of the digital divide, yet we don't generally see a moral obligation to help digital refugees to cross the divide.

Non-trivial example: JPL cannot realistically afford the staff time it would take to help non-computer savvy customers to apply for employment, unemployment, welfare benefits, etc., all of which must be done online. It's not our mandate. We aren't funded to do it.

However, the government agencies which do have the mandate to provide such services send their customers to us.

This leads me to my second comment, responding to part of Rick Anderson's Away from the “icebergs” piece. Here's the passage which bothers me:

Reliance on user education: Libraries are poorly equipped and insufficiently staffed for teaching....

We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning.

Obviously, we’ll help and educate patrons when we can, and when they want us to, and the more we can integrate our services with local curricula, the better. But if our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons.

Anderson perpetuates the conventional fantasy: namely, that our only obligation is to make stuff available, the "newest, most improved" stuff, for those consumers who know about it and want it.

My professional training and ethics focus elsewhere. As a librarian, I understand my primary role to be helping customers learn how to access and use information resources for themselves.

If all of my attention and skills and time much be committed to dumbing down technology so that customers can use it without having to think about it, then I may be in the wrong profession.

I am greatly distressed that learning how to learn is no longer a core expectation of our culture. I'm not interested in cooperating with the abandonment of that expectation.

Call me old fashioned. It's a moral as well as a practical issue for me.

Thanks,
Mike

Note: See my next post for an article I had bookmarked before I read Rick Anderson.

It's called "Getting The Most Out Of Your Library," by Williams Hicks of Digital Web Magazine, and it could be read as a counterargument to Anderson's "Away from the 'icebergs'."

Technorati: or, Digital Immigrants

Unlike del.icio.us, which helps me keep track of sites and pages I am interested, Technorati seems less useful to me personally.

I do have an account, and I have claimed my blogs. Again, this is a tool I learned about in the "Social Software in Libraries" course, so I tried it out during that course and have puzzled over it since.

For my purposes, Technorati would mainly be useful in pushing my blogs to other readers, something I'd very much like to do, since I'd like to increase my readership.

However, its main purpose seems to be finding blogs or blog posts on the various tagged subjects. That's a very valuable resource, yet not one I personally would use very much.

My experiment of searching Technorati for “Learning 2.0” did give me a taste of the huge variety of blogs, fields of interest, etc., which intersect on that tag. As a professional observer of the Internet, I'm fascinated at how rich and multidimensional this cyberworld has become, and how much the human race has advanced in the free sharing of information—the very thing which Public Library was invented to do.

However, for an old geezer like me, its just WAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION.

I'm glad it's out there, I'm glad people are sharing it so freely, I'm glad there are all these free social software tools for pushing and finding the information. It's just not my speed.

My mid-20th century brain was programmed to use books and pens. I've managed to get it to use PC screens and keyboards...but I don't do downloadable media or MySpace or any of the vast online social-connection stuff, I don't use a handheld device or a laptop, and my cellphone only makes phonecalls. I don't even have a TV.

This is no judgment against all that technology or the people who use it. It's a personal choice, based on how I've learned to nurture my thinking and learning and creative work.

I'm comfortable being a pre-computer person, a "digital immigrant."

One catch: my job is speeding away from me at cyberspeed! That's part if why I value this JPL Learning 2.0 course.

Thanks.

Note: Several times now in doing these assignments, I've stumbled across Tame the Web: Libraries, Technology and People. It looks like it's worth subscribing to in Bloglines.com.

del.icio.us

I've been using del.icio.us for almost two years, ever since I learned about it in the "Social Software in Libraries" course I mentioned in "#8: RSS and Bloglines."

Since I'm often browsing away from home and/or away from my own workstation, it's extremely helpful to be able to quickly bookmark a website or web page in my del.icio.us account.

I don't always use the bookmarks. Often I don't even go back to look at them.

But the great thing is I don't have to remember where I saw such-and-such online. I have my own tag cloud and tag bundles, and these let me browse again later.

Now there's a catch to using deli.cio.us: the default for bookmarks is that they are public, unless you save them as private.

I didn't know this when I started using deli.cio.us, so all of my 120+ bookmarks are public. Though there's nothing I particularly want to hide, I'd rather not have all of them public. I just haven't had the time to go back and edit 120+ bookmarks.

>:-[

So...I'm not going to give out my deli.cio.us username here. Sorry. Maybe after I edit. (I also won't do a Network Badge till I've edited.)

Anyway, I looked at PLCMCL2's Bookmarks, and found this one: Welcome to the Blogging Libraries Wiki. Looks like a handy resource.

A neat Web 2.0 tool!

Footnote: I'm ambivalent about the whole tagging phenomenon, partly because I probably was an "old fashioned librarian" the moment I was born.

I've spend fiftysome years creating and using hierarchical classification methods: both paper and email filing systems, library classification and cataloging, etc. It's how my mind has learned to work.

I'm also used the searching value of "controlled vocabulary."

This means that the newer approach of non-hierarchical tagging sometimes feels too amorphous and slippery to me.

My mental style of managing information is usually by visualizing it in spatial relationships. Until I can imagine such a spatial display, it's hard to wrap my mind around what I'm learning or using. It's still more difficult for me to do this with non-hierarchical systems...even though they, too, can be displayed visually (witness the tag clouds).

On the other hand, to me the real potential in tagging appoaches is that we get to see how "real people," not only professional catalogers, sort and label things in order to find them again.

That's the key: findability (check out this blog by Peter Morville).

A very interesting new challenge for all of us.