Mistress of my own domain

Hey. I finally coughed up the cash for my own domain.
New Jack Librarian lives at: http://www.newjackalmanac.ca/newjacklibrarian.html

Unfortunately, the URL cloaking is a little too robust. For example, if you click on New Jack Facts or the motherblog, New Jack Almanac, the URL doesn't change.

In the Age of the Overamplified, a Resurgence for the Humble Lecture - New York Times

In the Age of the Overamplified, a Resurgence for the Humble Lecture - New York Times:

"'I feel like I'm running a rock concert series,' he said (though unlike at rock concerts, the performers at the library are rarely paid; many do it because they have a book to plug). 'I wanted to go beyond academic discourse and speak to a very large public, and to the common reader.'"

The reflective fox

I don't really have a true specialty as a librarian but most of my interests as of late fall into the broad categories of information literacy and the social life of information. What I realized today is where these two venn diagrams intersect: the reflective person.

This idea was a two day process.

Last night I began to slowly make my way through the constructionist theories presented in Seeking meaning : a process approach to library and information services. What I've read so far rings true to me and what I think about information literacy: students write better papers when they take the time to reflect and reconsider what they've learned during the research process. More broadly, it also makes for better learning.

Coincidently, better learning is the same reason why I blog. By taking the time to reflect and write about what I've read, I learn more, I feel that I've done something more than just consumed something, and I make myself eligible for egoboo. Bloggers, wikipedia volunteers, Amazon review addicts - they are all reflective users.

I had this epiphany as I was working through my thoughts generated by reading Dan Chudnov's personal mission: ("Help people build their own libraries") that I found via Lorcan Dempsey's post entitled hedgehogs. I immediately loved the concept and it seemed to fit keeping in mind the recent flurry of library-building endeavours currently underway (RefWorks/Endnote/Procite, LibraryThing, weblogs, A9 stream capture, WebDAV, coins).

But the more I thought about this mission of the library, the more I was becoming unsure of it. Was this The Library's hedgehog concept before the Internet? I don't think so. And does the average public library user necessarily want to create their own library of leisure reading? Again, I'm doubtful.

But should The Library help people (the students, scholars, journalists, activists, bloggers) build their own libraries? Absolutely. Why? My first thought is that reflective users are our core constituency... but I'm going to have to dwell on this a bit more.

Anti-social Software: The book

Daytime television is so unbelievably bad that I regularly choose to watch TV shows about video games rather than suffer the constant chirping of celebrities, even though I'm not much a gamer myself. I'm treating it as a learning experience.

One thing I've learned by watching video game review shows is that there is a very strong emphasis on multiplayer gaming. If a hot new PC, console, or handheld game doesn't doesn't allow you to play over the web, connect to a service like XBOX Live, or allow wireless play, then the makers of these games are called on the carpet. No one is content playing just against a computer anymore.

I thought of this as I was reading Everything Bad is Good For You. Steven Johnson imagines a world that's identicle to ours except that video games are invented before books. He then guesses what teachers and parents would have to say about reading:

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of sensory and motor cortices.

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new "libraries" that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sittle alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers...

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. . . . This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to "follow the plot" instead of learning to lead.

While Steven Johnson is trying to make a point how much video games have been demonized by parents and pundits, I think we can still take some of the passages at pure face-value. To an outsider, reading looks terribly anti-social. To a non-reader, the library wouldn't been seen a social place (much less as a lauded "third-place") but as somewhere where people can be alone, together.

If we want libraries to be perceived as social places (and thus, have a place in a society where TV channels are dedicated to video games), we are going to have do more than provide chairs where people can read.

Gang of Four

4 books I stumbled upon in my local library that changed me good

1. computer lib/dream machines
   
2. whole earth catalogue
   
3. forget all the rules about graphic design (including the ones in this book)
   
4. how to raise your iq by eating gifted children
   

4 movies

1. I heard the mermaids call my name
   
2. crouching tiger, hidden dragon
3. trust
4. the nasty girl

4 websites visited daily (other than bloglines)

1. kingdom of loathing
   
2. doonesbury
3. songs to wear pants to
4. cardhouse
   

4 things on tv

1. attack of the show
2. this is daniel cook
3. world cup soccer
4. the office [bbc]

4 songs

1. "hollow log" by beck
   
2. "you're going to make me lonesome when you go" by madeleine peyroux
3. "polegnala e todora (love song)" by le mystere des voix bulgares
4. "bossa bye baby" by songs to wear pants to [mp3]
   

4 food groups

1. bread & grains
2. fruit & vegetables
   
3. meats
   
4. dairy

4 places to eat

1. baccus roti, toronto
2. three: a tasting bar, windsor, ont
   
3. bonnington cafe, london, uk
4. schwartz's, montreal

Amazon Approval Slips

I've never had much fondness for third-party approval plans for buying library books because I haven't had much luck with them. Now, I understand that many of these approval plan companies are revamping their products and I haven't tried these next generation systems yet. For their collective sake, I hope they come up with something as simple and as powerful as Amazon's Approval Slips.

I just realized that only librarians will read the phrase "Amazon Approval Slips" and know that slips is meant as a noun and not a verb. Library jargon can sound so silly.

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

I learned from The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture that it is thought that 30% of the web is porn. I was also reminded of the time before Google when most search engines would regularly have porn sites in their results of even the user had the most benign of intentions. That pretty much stopped once Google and its vastly superior indexing algorithms appeared on the web and well, then pretty much took over.

John Battelle begins the book not the conventional way that I have done by mentioning the superior results that Google first brought but reminds us that every search begins with an intention and that Google has, in its sea of servers, the largest database of human wants the world has ever seen. This is just one of the reasons why Google is increasingly becoming a conduit for business on the internet and why businesses like Amazon are getting into the business of search.

This book is more than a simple history of a business - and not just because Google is positioned to be more than just another company. At the moment, Google is the best "Yellow Pages" of the Internet but in the future it could very well become a new layer of Internet infrastructure. Ironically, after reading the book, I'm more wary of this future because Google now seems much more human to me. Recommended.

Asking Metafilter

I have recently become enamoured with Ask Metafilter:

Ask MetaFilter is a discussion area for sharing knowledge among members of MetaFilter. There is also a filtered view of this page showing just questions with "best" marked answers and another page of fantastic questions and answers suggested by members.

Last year, when I did information literacy sessions for first year students I would frequently begin by asking the class where did they normally go when they need answers to their questions. They would answer: friends, google, professor, library, parents... and with some pressing, they would then expand their answers a little to include such things as The Yellow Pages. One reason I liked beginning this way was it let the students know that we knew that the library was just one of the places they went for when they needed help.

No one answered "my virtual community".

I haven't even heard the phrase virtual community in years. Years ago, I once worked a company that tried to build one (inspired by this book) and it failed miserably. I think the phrase died because it was too grandiose and community is a very hard ideal to meet. So the phrase doesn't describe what I think Ask Metafilter is. But its close.

Ask Metafilter Its an active (almost too active) discussion area where there are (mostly) intelligent, confounding questions and (mostly) intelligent, insightful answers. I think Ask Metafilter works because it has a large population filled with folks from all different parts and varied different backgrounds and because the one time $5 donation to join in keeps most of the bozos out. As a librarian who is obsessing over questions at the moment, I love Ask Metafilter but I know I'm late to the game as jessamyn from librarian.net has been answering questions there for a while now.

Which got me thinking. I think a public library of a city with a relatively large population should try hosting a local copy of Ask Metafilter. The set-up would be exactly the same - with a possible exception or variation of the $5 manditory donation. There would be librarians partcipating but unlike "traditional online reference service" any library user could answer anyone else's question. The more I think about the idea, the more I like it. It would demonstrate that the library is a place where conversations occur and questions are raised and answered. And it would recognize and reward the everyday experts in the community. Librarians have to recognize that sometimes the fastest way of getting an answer is not to pick up a book, but to pick up the phone and call that someone you know who's read that book.

While I'm relatively optimistic of such a project in a public library, I don't think this could work in an educational setting as there are too many students already that don't parse their assignments properly into bite-sized questions. These are the types that bomb mailing lists and such with their assignment verbetim. But then again, an Ask LibraryFilter may be a way to demonstrate the benefits of being able to ask a good question.

I should Ask Metafilter to see what they think of its viability.

Predictions for 2006

I'm taking up Karen's request for Top Trends that will affect libraries.
Here's three ideas:

1. More discussion about The Long Tail will ensue

I'm cheating: I know there will be *some* further discussion of this idea in 2006 because Chris Anderson has expanded his influential essay in WIRED into a book due to be published in June. I know librarians will be talking about it as librarians have responded positively to the idea of the Long Tail because its a new way to explain the value of libraries. As libraries are storehouses of rarely used out-of-print material, we are the original long tail. But there are greater ramifications of this theory as Lorcan Dempsey suggests in his presentation at Access 2005. The Long Tail suggests that we have to distribute "deep" goods over a "wide" audience. Will this further drive consortial partnerships or collaboration with OCLC?

2. Google will lose a bit of its luster

I'm wagering that Google's honeymoon period is going to end soon. Granted, my thinking is coloured by my recent reading of The Search but recent developments hint that the general public is eventually going to realize that Google's is a search engine that is meant to drive the vehicle for commerce and that whole "Don't Be Evil" shtick was just engineer hubris. Libraries will look more favourably to Amazon because of its A9 service.

3. Someone is going to develop automatic tagging

Or structured blogging is going to emerge. Or GoogleBase will be re-designed so it will make more sense to its users. Or some other attempt to bring about the labeling necessary to bring rise to the Semantic Web is going to come about.

New Jack Librarian is so very 1999

The only incidence of New Jack Librarian that I can find on the web is from 1999. Concidently, in 1999 I started my current job at the Leddy Library at the University of Windsor. So I think it will make an appropriate title for this blog on some of my thoughts on libraryland.