Strange behaviour from the web

Twice in the same day, the simple act of clicking on text in a web page threw me for a loop.

The first instance occurred while I was doing preliminary research on the upcoming game World Without Oil. I learned about it from Cardhouse and was excited about being able to join an ARG on its startup. I have never played an 'alternative reality game' before and so I did what most newcomers to a discipline do: I checked it out in Wikipedia. Except the entire ARG entry had turned into one giant link to some gaming site. I couldn't 'undo' this change because this invisible link covered the entire entry page. I guess this was an apt entry point into an alternative world.

The second instance occurred when I was testing out our library's beta LibX Firefox toolbar. It has some great features and I'm particular excited about its ability to send search terms directly into Scholars Portal Search in the New York Times website. When I attempted to highlight the word murmeration by double-clicking on it a new window popped up with a definition provided by Answers.com. And I thought, when did simple text become aware of the double-click? How did they do that?

Small shifts in reality can still make you feel a little uneasy.

Life is a trip towards death

I am regretting separating my blog into library-related and non-library related halves but I am going to live with the decision. I am going to keep cross-posting at a minimum. After this, that is:

On that other blog I wrote about my strange journey home from cil2007.

Twitter or Twitcher

I know its unfair for me to comment on Twitter without trying it but I think I can figure it out. It's the 'status' feature in Facebook without Facebook. Its the 'share personal message with contacts' in MSN without MSN.

It's a message in a bottle.

I don't think I will join Twitter unless it develops into a blossoming poetry machine. I'm going to avoid it if its just becomes another conduit for business.

I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon. I am all for connectivity. For social software. For contact. For friends of friends. For community. But right now, I'm in the mood for idleness.

Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idleness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had "too much time on our hands." They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, "Quick, look busy."

Slouka, M.. "Quitting the Paint Factory." Harper's 309.1854 (2004):57-66.
openurl

On the way to work, I was stopped in my tracks twice by birds singing. I'm not sure whether I found the songs captivating because I haven't heard them all winter or because the bird songs of spring are different and more pronounced from the songs from the rest of the year. I would love an afternoon dedicated to finding this out. And to stake out the bird's nest I found by my work parking lot to properly identify the singer.

But to make best use of the spare time I do have, I tried to save its call by filming a blurry video of the bird with my digital camera. Later today or tomorrow I will flip through my Sibley and perhaps check out our library's Birds of North America.

That's how I use Twitter.

There are only 11 US newspaper reporters in Iraq

Today, there are all of 11 U.S. newspaper reporters in Iraq, covering the biggest foreign policy story of the decade, employed by just three papers – the independent Washington Post and New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. The common ownership of the former Black papers helps explain why almost every major English-language daily in Canada, apart from the one you're reading, supported the war in Iraq. Indeed, it was the paucity of divergent views in U.S. mainstream papers on the activities of the Bush administration that spurred the growth of political websites – one of the largest subject categories on the Internet. It also drove readers away from the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Toledo Blade to the online editions of the Toronto Star and the U.K. Guardian.

In 2003, Lisa Sloniowski and I created a website called Iraq 2003: Sources of News as a companion to a discussion we hosted in the library about press coverage and the war. You think I wouldn't be shocked by the paucity of reporting in Iraq 2007 but evidently there's room for me to become even more jaded.

New tutorials from RefWorks

RefWorks.com now offers more tutorials with their latest release:

Advanced Searching and Lookups
Viewing, Sorting and Printing References
Editing Multiple References
Advanced Searching and Lookups
My List
Checking for Duplicates
Using The Output Style Preview Utility
Working Offline
Importing From RSS Feeds
Capturing Data From A Web Page
Backing Up Your Account

They also now offer a RefShare tutorial. [LIBlog]

RSS Chocolate in the SFX Peanut Butter

I was curious whether anyone had created an SFX menu option to drop a citation into del.icio.us and so I consulted The Oracle. Didn't find any such thing but did inadvertently find out that the MIT libraries have added RSS feeds into their SFX options:



I like the idea of making a journal's RSS feed available in this venue and I'm not the only one as evidently other libraries have expressed interest in the code MIT used to do this. I haven't inquired myself because I suspect that it may involve maintaining a database of RSS feeds.

But since Ulrich's is now providing information about RSS feeds in their Periodicals Directory, I think it would be ideal to use the SFX menu to look up potential RSS feed info from Ulrich's.



Not sure whether its possible or feasible. Right now I'm just considering it.

Oh yeah... MIT's LibX Firefox Toolbar looks dead sexy. I'm definitely considering working towards our own LibX Firefox extension.

Filtering out the boolean searches

There's something about PubMed's filtering function that I love...



Essentially, registered users of PubMed can create up to five customized filters that immediately narrow down your search to either the type of research you are interested in (randomized control trial, review articles) or by access (free full text, your library) or by some other means you devise.

What appeals to me is that the filtering is that it occurs automatically post-search.

In the days of yore, librarians used to try get students to stop and consider alternative keywords and how to construct a proper Boolean search and so on before they searched. But now, even random words generate something vaguely useful in the Googlesphere or the scholars portal. So rather than encouraging the user to revise the search, I think we should try to build the tools that allow the user to refine results.

With every search in Pubmed, I can immediately see the impact of five different refinements. And of course, now I want more filters.

Representing Public Service Librarians

I'm currently a member of the OCUL Public Services Advisory Group and will be representing the group while being a member of the OCUL E-book Working Group. More to follow.

Oblique Strategies for Researchers - 1

Who is the hero of your story? The villain?

Should we open a Socratic Reference Desk and other Questions

Last week a co-worker and I joked about setting up a Socratic Reference Desk where the librarian seated would only respond with questions.

Then this week I had a fabulous coffee break (more productive, enjoyable and inspiring than a year's worth of meetings) with a couple of other co-workers in which the topic of questions came up again while we were thinking of possible library displays.

Over coffee, I brought up The World Question Center. This year they asked 160 scientists and 'public intellectuals' (for lack of better phrase) this question: "What are optimistic about? Why?"

The very first question the center put forward in 1998 was, What questions are you asking yourself? That seems to be the starting point of the website that Alec introduced us to: The Dropping Knowledge site.

I've only just started browsing their dropping knowledge 'commercials'. I first started with Laurie Anderson, since she is a hero of mine, and what I found endearing is that she did what so many professors do: strongly recommend a book but give a slightly wrong author name and a slightly wrong book title. (BTW, she means this book)

As librarians, we are consumed with answers, but as teachers, we should be consumed with questions. One way of describing Information Literacy is the encouragement of having questions in mind while searching and re-searching. (Would that make, 'critical thinking is having questions in mind while reading?')

As much as we were kidding around when we were talking about the Socratic Method Reference Desk, I think we may have been on to something there.

There is a deep human need in times of trouble to consult someone with answers. I don't think its a coincidence that the sources where humanity has referred to in the past (and in the present)- tarot cards, the i ching, and the oracle - all answer us in vague poetry.

When I was in library school one of my friends had a tarot deck. She didn't believe that the deck possessed any particular magic or personal energy claptrap. To her, the magic was in its randomness and how it encouraged the her to consider her situation in a new light.

And with that I have a new project. To create desk of oblique strategies for researchers. Should they all be in the form of a question? I drew a card and it said, " Lost in useless territory".

Learning not to say Learning to Learn

With the power of hindsight, its easy to look at the library's online catalogue and lament the fact that the original OPACs were designed to mimic the paper-based card catalogue, rather than to imagine itself anew to take full advantage of the online medium's inherent benefits.

What's not so easy is to look at the array of online databases that libraries subscribe to and ask ourselves, are we just trying to mimic paper-based indexes, rather than to imagine the scriptorium anew to take full advantage of the online medium's inherent benefits?

That question came to mind after I had a conversation over coffee with a colleague of mine. We are both librarians at an academic library and when we are at the reference desk, most of our advice is given to students who are there only because they have been instructed by their professor to use "X" number of peer reviewed articles in their soon-to-be-due research paper. He and I share the same misgivings over the disconnect between 'find x recent peer reviewed articles' and the act of learning (we, of course, are not the only ones).

Keeping up with the most recent scholarly literature is a daily task for experts in their field but it isn't the way that one that one becomes an expert. At least not easily. If I wanted to learn about [insert something here... bone structure, castle construction, criminality], a very bad way to go about it would be to read 'x' number of recent peer reviewed articles on the topic.

So how would someone create an genuine online tool for learning? Would it resemble Wikipedia? A collection of textbooks? Or it would be simply a collection of annotated reading lists?

Now, it is commonly understood that learning is a constuctive process and a social process as well. The student pieces together bland writing in the textbook looking for emphasis and key themes brought out by the lecturer and then applies the concepts through writing and testing. The natural habitat of learning is in conversation and debate, in writing and argument, and in serious contemplation of ideas fueled by observation and by text. So now I am asking myself this: is there some form of social software that will emerge as a natural online tool for learning and will make us look at our array of online library databases and lament?

Or will the natural location for learning be where it always has been: right between the ears.

Radical Mistrust

According to the recent Pew report called "A Portrait of 'Generation Next' : How Young People View Their Lives, Futures and Politics", more than 4 in 10 "Gen-nexters" have created a personal profile on a site such as Facebook or MySpace.

Contrast that fact with this one: out of the twenty libraries of the OCUL consortium, only one library provides profiles of all their liaison librarians on their website. McMaster, Guelph, Waterloo and Windsor have only two or three librarians who share a little information about themselves. This leaves the vast majority of Ontario academic librarians with only a email address and phone extension to endear themselves to their faculty and student constituencies.

One of way of reading this situation is to suggest that there is a serious lack of radical trust going on. That being said, it may also may be simply the result of web designers being consumed with connecting users with resources. Luckily, this is one technological problem that can be resolved with some attention.

Bored@YourLibrary

The most recent issue of The New Yorker has a Talk of the Town piece called The New Bathroom Wall about, what is in essence, the online equivalent to the graffiti one can read in most library study carols - that is, if the graffiti was realtime and refreshed automatically. The Bored@ network boasts eleven American universities and most of them are named after their respective undergraduate libraries.

I must be bored because I find these sites both sad and yet fascinating.

Towards a teaching philosophy

Along with ruminating about linking and libraries, the other side of my brain is getting a workout as I try to integrate my experience of teaching library skills with the information literacy policies developed at my library into a formalized teaching philosophy. Creating an entire philosophy is a little daunting so I am going to work at it in a piecemeal fashion and write down small grains of thought and see if, in the future, I can build some sort of sand castle out of them.

Here goes.

Students should not be subjected to 'library assignments' but research assignments. These assignments should encourage a student duplicate an expert's research processes as opposed to an idealized 'research ideal'. We should try to avoid prescribing any artificial tasks that we wouldn't perform ourselves when we do research.

Some examples of tasks to avoid:

• construct a research strategy that results in only five results
• first consult an encyclopedia to find keywords for your search
• analyze a research paper that no one else in your class is using

Nitty Gritty Stuff

Now that my maternity leave is over and that I'm back at work, I suspect that my blog is going to become a little bit more focused on the nitty gritty of library technology.

Right now I'm submerging myself into the world of RefWorks once again and am becoming consumed with how I can get it to link in and out of our library's opac and databases and my university's soon to be launched 'learning management system' and 'portal'.

I knew that RefWorks offered a means to 'search' RSS feeds but until today, I wasn't sure why they added this functionality. If you wanted to read RSS feeds, why would you choose to use RefWorks over a free service such as Bloglines or Yahoo? But I now I think I know why.

If you create an RSS feed in a service such as PubMed...


And add this feed into RefWorks...


You will be able to browse the most recent citations that match your search and add the citations directly into your RefWorks account...


I'm not sure whether this functionality extends beyond PubMed so I will be investigating further.

A comment on institutional repositories

The following is a comment that I posted today on Free Range Librarian's post on DSpace and Open Source software. Karen's post has spawned a comment thread that had developed into a conversation on the culture of software developers. But I wanted to talk about the whole notion of institutional repositories themselves...

---

Let's just say that I have reservations about institutional repositories. One reason I have misgivings is due to the fact that institutional repositories have to be *explained* to users why they should be used. No faculty member stumbles upon one and cries Eureka! Furthermore, the benefit of depositing articles belongs to the institution and the "cost" of depositing the article belongs to the researcher.

I read this summary of a DSpace User Group session at Library Web Chic and was most interested in this faculty feedback:
* Access to literature is a non-issue for faculty
* Using alternatives to institutional repositories
* Have their own websites and like using them better
* Subject based repositories (preferred over IR if available)

We also know from other research that more than 70 percent of faculty said they maintain their own collections.

If I'm not mistaken, one of the the promises of open source institutional repositories is that it would allow all the repositories to be searched through some sort of federated search.

So why don't we develop "good" *personal* digital collection software that can be *searched* as an institution? Maybe this time, we would learn from our mistakes and build the interface first.

Love the BiblioCommons logo

BiblioCommons has a website.

The site feed has changed

The New Jack Librarian feed has moved to http://www.newjackalmanac.ca/newjacklibrarian.xml
where it should have been all this time. As well, I'm moving all these files to a new server so all the 'Cogeco' links will disappear shorty. Please adjust accordingly. All apologies.

Arrested Collection Development

Inspired by the collection policies thoughts of Peter Zimmerman, I thought I would try to briefly summarize my largely antagonistic feelings towards collection development policies. That being said I should state that I have hostile feelings towards the policies I was taught in library school long ago.

From what I recall, a collection development policy can be summed up as several pages of call number ranges with words that essentially express: "we are trying to get lots of this", "we want some of this stuff", and "there's not much on this subject that we want".

Now I collect in the sciences for a middle-sized Canadian university and I am responsible for selecting books that support the research needs of our faculty and graduate students as well as learning resources for our undergraduate population. This means I collect for very specific research topics (e.g. apoptosis and nitric oxide ) and for very general areas (Chemical composition of everyday products). It is possible to describe what I collect using the above collection development method, but it is uninspiring, to say the very least.

And what does it mean to 'collect generally for the sciences' really mean, anyway? Does it mean I buy 'real science' for the faculty and 'popular science' for the undergraduates? Or does it mean I try to buy "the canon" for all the sciences and simply buy more books on local research interests? And how can I - a layperson - describe to my community what I consider 'the canon'?

And so over time I developed a one sentence description of my collection development goals: "I will collect the books necessary to follow the research of the university's faculty and to collect the books most cited by the research published in Nature, Science, and PNAS, supplemented with books dealing with local geography and ecology and well-received popular science". IMHO, I think this one sentence is more useful than a twenty page wish list of call number ranges.

Over the years, I have internalized a number of possible 'rule-based' collection development guidelines that I think could be appropriate for academic or public libraries:

"We strive to collect the books ...
- in Oprah's Book Club
- nominated for the Man Booker Prize in Literature
- published by faculty
- suggested by faculty and graduate students
- published by local authors and publishers
- on the topic of local history and geography (Windsor, Essex County, Detroit) and ecology (Tall Grass Prairie, Carolinian, Great Lakes Watershed)
- that were most frequently requested by Interlibrary Loan
- that make the New York Times 100 Most Notable Books of the Year
- are reviewed in Highly Important Journal in field in question"

Other than being clear and concise, an additional benefit of using 'rules' is that it gives you a means to measure whether you have achieved what you set yourself out to do. If you say that your library is going to have up-to-date dictionaries for the top ten languages spoken on campus, then you can measure your success at present and then again in five year's time. Your community can judge your efforts as easily as well.

I understand that there may be reticence to this form of collection development policies because it appears to hand over the collection making decisions away from the librarian to outside forces, some of them being commercial interests. While I am not in anyway trying to negate the role of the collections librarian, I do think it is about time that libraries try to align the way we decide to add material to our collections to the way that our communities decide what next book they want to read. They certainly aren't decided what to read next based on our collection development policies.

In case this goes offline...

I am going to transferring servers in the next couple of days. Should have done this properly last year.

The most impressive library-oriented business without a website

All of my misgivings about tagging in the catalogue have been made mute by the user-interface (in progress) of Bibliocommons : "Most Impressive Library-Oriented Business Without A Website".

Reading Reading Lists

I was going to write a post about a hypothetical academic library catalogue in which only faculty are allowed to tag and link items. But before I began I thought it would be best to search about aimlessly on the web on the topic of university reading lists.

You see, I have a half-baked notion in my head that a university education can be reduced to a professor helping a class work through texts to achieve familiarity in a subject. I have had this theory ever since I had a conversation with a colleague who told me that the coursework of Oxford and Cambridge is largely consumed by the act of reading and learning from daunting readings lists. And then I got distracted by all the reading lists I found online: those for preliminary reading for prospective university students, those to introduce students to the intellectual life of the university, those provided by libraries and those provided by publishers.

Before starting this post, I had assumed that most university reading lists were in locked in course management software (oh why did we call them 'course reserves' instead of 'reading lists?'). Now I'm not so sure. Perhaps there's still time to integrate reading lists into the very realm of reading.

The future is here its just waiting to be introduced

So I was reading this document from the near-future (the January 2007 issue of WIRED magazine to be exact) and the first article is about a new library at Chicago State University that is closed stacks. All book retrieval is done by robot.

My favourite stats from the article:

• Average time for a robot to retrieve five books: 2.5 minutes
• Average time for a student to retrieve five books: 2 hours

And then it became oh so readily apparent: academic libraries were going to back to close-stack entities. It just seemed to be the logical conclusion if you consider the following:

• academic librarians love to buy books and are loath to discard books
  
• our present day institutions rarely commission new library buildings
  
• Google, Amazon, and other organizations are beginning to scan the out of print books that make up academic library collections and make them available online for browsing
  
• consumers are used to having books and DVDs delivered to them
• the ability to browse the library shelves is largely unappreciated
  
• students want quiet places to study
• people complain about long reference numbers

I love external validation

I am part of a sad, bizarre subculture.

Hosting a Party on the web

There's been a lot of talk as of late about social networking software. To my mind, there's been too much attention given to 'software' and scant attention given to the 'social'.

So next time someone you know suggests that the website in question could benefit from a wiki, comments, or a discussion area, make sure you ask them who is going to host the party.

In this interview with .net magazine, Flickr founder Caterina Fake likens building an online community to throwing a party:

According to Caterina: "The most difficult part is not the technology but actually getting the people to behave well." When first starting the community the Flickr team were spending nearly 24 hours online greeting each individual user, introducing them to each other and cultivating the community. "After a certain point you can let go and the community will start to maintain itself, explains Caterina. "People will greet each other and introduce their own practices into the social software. It's always underestimated, but early on you need someone in there everyday who is kind of like the host of the party, who introduces everybody and takes their coat.

I recall those early days of Flickr...Stewart and Caterina were everywhere, commenting on everything. A core group of people followed their example and began to do the same, including Heather Champ, who now manages Flickr's community in an official capacity. Matt did a similar thing with MetaFilter too...he spent a lot of time interacting with people on there, taking their coats, and before long others were pitching in. [kottke]

With all the social software options out there, at least failure is cheaper now.

Back in my day (*ahem*) virtual communities were all the rage. In fact, a corporation that I was working for decided to create its own virtual community for a certain segment of a certain industry because one of the company's VPs had read this book. And after thousands (tens? hundreds?) were spent in developing the site, it was ready to launch.

I was skeptical of the whole enterprise and so I was surprised that after the first day, users were posting questions in the (empty) discussion boards. But no one in the corporation bothered to respond until later in the week. You see, while the VP didn't spare any expense in getting a great outside development team to create the site, he essentially tacked on the content responsibilities to existing employees with already stressed and busy work lives and furthermore, gave them no incentive to participate in *his* project. The site was stillborn.

Like most things, it needed love and attention to survive. And a party atmosphere.

By sharing we learn what has been lost

Today I felt a little delight and a little disappointment as I tried out some of the newest Refworks features.

I love love love RefGrabIt and the ability to create RSS feeds from RefWorks folders has made me giddy thinking of the possibilities of integrating RSS feeds into our library's website. In my eagerness to create an RSS feed of articles that I can't help but write about on my other blog, I started trolling my library's databases for some past gems. And that's when I noticed that Art Spiegelman's "Drawing Controversy" article was not available online. It's the article that reprints "the danish cartoons". I was horribly worried about this until I realized that at least the Leddy Library still subscribes to the microfilm version of the magazine so present and future researchers will not be shortchanged by the idiosyncrasies of online reprinting rights.

Anyway, this all got me thinking that library consortiums should start designating "library of last resort" status to our collective print serial collections because we can't assume that someone has a copy somewhere. Because sharing responsibility is just as important as sharing resources.

From MemoryBlog

MemoryBlog: "From Michael Ravnitzky, a frequent contributor to The Memory Hole, comes this article on 'the Directorate of Legal Research (DLR), a little known but well-regarded and highly influential research department contained within the Library of Congress.' As with its sibling, the Congressional Research Service, the massive amounts of world-class research being produced by the DLR (almost 2,000 publications in 2004 alone) virtually never make it to the public, despite being funded by taxpayers. "

Thanks George!

Solvitur ambulando » Blog Archive » Library-in-a-Box: First thoughts: "George Soros and a host of other funders are going to pay smart people around the world to develop free and open source software for libraries, specifically targeted at libraries in the developing world. This is kind of a big deal."

I think its a very big deal indeed!

The people's history of the Marginal Librarian

I found out from Library Juice that my alma mater's publication, the Marginal Librarian has recently published another fine issue of library school goodness.

And I was pleased to see that this issue had a little section on the history of the 'Marginal'. I was there at the beginning and I can say that what is written is correct. Although, it is missing a little 'pre-history'...

Before Andre took upon the task of starting up a student publication for the library school, myself and my seat-mates in the back of the classroom would entertain ourselves during class by producing a little sloppy zine called 'The Marginal Librarian'.



I think I have all but one of the issues. I'll check with one of the other partners in crime to see if she still has the one I'm missing.

Anyway. Keep fighting the power, Marginal!

I like Wikimedia

Hey. If you are ever looking for graphics for your website, library or otherwise, a great source is The Wikimedia Commons.

I'm currently in the process of creating a website for a friend and found the site quite useful. I was in need of images of flags of a number of countries found Wikimedia most useful because it offered images in a vector format which makes for perfect rescaling to get everything just the right size.