Library Voice

The Pew Internet Study on Teen’s and Technology is now available. Of particular note is the section on IM. An excerpt follows:

For many years, email has been the most popular application on the internet - a popular and “sticky” communications feature that keeps users coming back day after day. But email may be at the beginning of a slow decline as online teens begin to express a preference for instant messaging.

The presence of email in teens’ lives has persisted, and the number that uses email continues to surpass those who use IM. However, when asked about which modes of communication they use most often when communicating with friends, online teens consistently choose IM over email in a wide array of contexts.

Teens who participated in focus groups for this study said that they view email as something you use to talk to “old people,” institutions, or to send complex instructions to large groups. When it comes to casual written conversation, particularly when talking with friends, online instant messaging is the clearly the mode of choice for today’s online teens.

Instant messaging has become the digital communication backbone of teens’ daily lives. About half of instant-messaging teens - or roughly 32% of all teens - use IM every single day. As the platforms for instant messaging programs spread to cell phones and handheld devices, teens are starting to take textual communication with them into their busy and increasingly mobile lives. IM is a staple of teens’ daily internet diet and is used for a wide array of tasks - to make plans with friends, talk about homework assignments, joke around, check in with parents, and post “away messages” or notices about what they are doing when they are away from their computers.

• 75% of online teens - or about two-thirds of all teenagers - use instant messaging,
  compared to 42% of online adults.
• 48% of teens who use instant messaging say they exchange IMs at least once every
  day.

Michael and Bill are Getting Things Done, although from the looks of Bill’s office, he has some catching up to do. I’ve ordered the book as well and hope to use it to get better organized. Like Bill, I will share my successes and failures with getting things done.

Meredith has written a great post advising library school students where to go to learn more about technology. My library school offered some basic computer courses which helped to build a decent foundation of technical knowledge. However, I’ve always been a hands-on kind of person, so I looked for a various ways to apply classroom knowledge to real-world scenarios.

When I first started my library school program circa 2000, I knew very little about computers or the Internet. I had learned a little about computers through high school and college, but most of what I learned could only be used to type a few papers. In 2000, I was pretty intimidated by computers and by the web, but that would change as I got further into my library school course work. Simply typing all the papers and being around classmates who knew about technology helped me learn a little more. For electives I took an html class, a graphic design class, and a computer networking class. These classes taught the skills that later work would build upon.

After my first year of library school, I was awarded a graduate assistantship within the library school. I was assigned to work with the technology coordinator and help out with distance education technical support. I worked 20 hours a week in this position, and my job duties soon expanded far beyond distance education support. Before long, my boss had me networking printers, installing software on laptops, configuring wireless connections, installing classroom projectors, and even building and configuring web servers. Usually my boss would tell me that something needed to be done without giving me a great deal of instruction. He would usually hand me a thick manual and say something like, “See what you can find out about this.” I believe he figured that part of the learning process was figuring out how to do something yourself. This approach to learning was terribly frustrating in the beginning, but once I finally learned how to network a printer or build a server, it was incredibly rewarding.

I think that what I learned from that experience still shapes my desire to learn more about technology today. I have a tendency to not only know that something works, or how to use it, I also want to know how something works. I know it sounds a tad geeky, but I really am interested in things like how the PHP calls the MySQL table in order to display the contents of this blog.

Now it would be a bit extreme for me to say that all librarians need to know how to build servers or know how to backup a mysql database. No one but the geekiest of us needs to know that stuff. However, to best serve your current or future patrons, some tech skills are needed. One of the easiest ways to keep up with technology is to try and do your best when answering patrons’ tech questions. If you don’t know how to answer the question, then find someone who does. However, when that more knowledgeable tech person arrives, don’t just walk away. Listen to the answer that is given, and ask your own follow-up questions. It is surprising how much you can learn by listening.

Another great way to keep up with technology is to take a few classes. Many university IT departments offer classes for university employees covering a variety of technical topics. I’ve taken classes on Access, Excel, and Photoshop and found them to be good ways to brush up on my skills. These classes are also great places to meet people who may serve as resources down the road, should you have a question about something in the future.

While classes are a great way to learn new skills, those skills are quickly forgotten if they are not applied. Try to take the new skill that you learned an apply them to a project of some sort. This project can be work related or not. It really doesn’t matter, as long as it gives you practice with the software or skill. Make a collage of pictures for a friend with Photoshop, doctor up your resume with Word, or put your recipes in Access, make a website for your mom. Anything you do will help you keep your skill fresh and you will continue to learn more.

One of the greatest things about being a librarian is that I never stop learning. This is a job where I have the incredible opportunity to learn something new every day. While technological change can be intimidating and frustrating at times, it also drives me to develop new skills and become familiar in different areas. I have come to realize that I will never know everything there is to know about a particular software, database, or tech gadget, and I am quite fine with that. That just leaves something else for me to discover tomorrow.

Chad at Hidden Peanuts writes about how he found a job. It’s good food for thought for anyone on the job market. Chad gives some good advice to new graduates looking for jobs: be flexible with where you are willing to work, and perhaps what type of job you are looking for. He writes:

To be honest, my story isn’t typical. Very few of my friends here have jobs coming out of school. I think the fact that I was extremely flexible in location helped me a lot - I’m not tied down by any real commitments to one area yet. Particularly if you try to stay in the city you got your library degree in, the market is going to be swamped. That’s just the way it is. If you look more broadly, competition drops off a bit.

A lot of folks ask me how in the world I made my way from Tennessee to Ohio. Well, Chad sums it up right there. I had to be flexible with where I was willing to go.

The Swiss Memory USB

is the perfect marriage of technology, practicality, materials, and quality design. It perfectly pulls together four important tools that no geek should ever be without (USB flash drive, LED light, Swiss Army knife, ballpoint pen).

One fo my favorite features of Trillian is the ability to send everyone in a contacts folder the same instant message. Some possible scenarios when this might be used are as follows:

1. You need backup at the reference desk
2. Printing is down, and you can’t wait for people to learn about this in an email.
3. You’ve got a tough reference question at the desk, and you know that many heads are better than one.
4. You want everyone in the office to know that you just made a fresh pot of coffee.

I went to one of my favorite sites, HowStuffWorks, to find out, well, how something worked. Upon arrival I noticed that Marshal Bain had an article about How Wikis Work. It’s a pretty good read for anyone intersted in wikis or for those needing basic information about how they work.

I am continuing to add content to the Biz Wiki, although a great bulk of my three research guides is now in the wiki. In working with the wiki I am learning a great deal about how to better organize information, and I am becoming more familiar with some key business resources. On Monday the Biz Wiki taught me something else—– that there are some really evil people in the world, and fortunately, there are also some pretty spectacular people as well.

I was out of the office Monday and was without an Internet connection all weekend. On Tuesday morning I opened my inbox to discover the following email:

Was just having a quick look at your business wikipedia. Looks like a great idea, but thought I should let you know I’ve just removed a ton of porn links from the main page — looks like someone had edited it to insert them above the text. Maybe you could check it looks okay now — I wasn’t sure of the original layout.

My first response was to be very, very, miffed that some (lots of censored adjectives go here) person would have the audacity to defile the project that I had been working on. In checking the history of the wiki, I was appalled that the entire home page of the wiki had been covered in tons of spam linking to some rather vulgar site. I immediately began considering “Protecting” every single page in the wiki, so that only someone with sysop privileges could edit it. But, I took a walk, had another cup of coffee, and calmed down a bit.

My emotions then swung in the other direction. I was very grateful to the person that fixed the wiki before other visitors had to see the vandalism. Most people would have probably visited the page, saw the spam, and thought “Well, it’s not my wiki, so the creator can deal with it.” Fortunately this good neighbor saw a friend in need and lended a helping hand. I thought that this was really, really cool, as the Biz Wiki is not as public or as well known as something like Wikipedia. If someone had defaced the entry of Yo-Yo on Wikipedia, it could have the potential to be seen my thousands of people. Someone would probably feel more inclined to fix a defiled page on Wikipedia, as it has a greater potential to affect more people. However, this person knew that wikis could be edited by anyone, and fixed a problem that would probably only affect a very small audience. Very, very cool.

While this event showed me the evil and goodness of the people in the world, it also opened my eyes to the power of a wiki. Wikis can be edited by anyone, which is why some are so scared by the idea of a collaborative resource. That’s the primary criticism for Wikipedia, as people can potentially post wrong or purposely misleading information (or even links to their favorite porn sites). The other side of the coin is that there are many more wonderful good neighbors out there who understand the value in a group edited resource. They are the ones who define a wiki community, and the strength of the members determine the strength of the resource. Whether they post to a wiki anonymously or with their real names, these types of people see the value in providing good free information. They understand that good information does not necessarily have to cost thousands of dollars or come from a big name vendor, but can come from a community of people that use it. I’m still working on my wiki, and I know that the community of users may take a great deal of time to develop. But from my recent experience with my good neighbor, I am confident that there are more good people out there to help build and maintain the Biz Wiki.

Rochelle fiords the “dangerous waters” of Wikipedia:

The ironic thing is that the Wikipedia is the best example we have of pure peer review. There is nothing posted on the Wikipedia that is not vetted by a cast of thousands, including lots of accredited Smart People™. Writing in the Wikipedia is like writing an article at a conference, with the document itself open and projected on the wall, and everyone in the room shouting out responses as you type, grabbing the keyboard from you, arguing about your facts and interpretations. The errors found in the DNC and Britannica would have been corrected rather than reported had they been wikis rather than paper publications. The problem with Wikipedia is that we don’t trust everyone.

In related news, NPR aired a nice story over the weekend that discussed the growth and concerns of Wikipedia.

Butler University Libraries has a Reference wiki:

WikiRef is a collaborative review of databases, books, websites, etc., that are part of the collection of Reference Resources available at or via the Butler University Libraries. It functions like a Reference User’s Group that facilitates discussion between and the empowering of reference users.

Butler librarians, faculty, staff, and students are welcome to add their comments about any reference resource we provide, including how useful you find it and what classes it may apply to. Please only delete or change text if it is factually incorrect or unprofessional in deportment. You are also welcome to add additional reference resources that you have used at Butler.

And right there on the front page, it encourages faculty, staff, and students to add comments. Talk about building a reference collection with collaboration, which should contribute wonderful things to the learning community. Good stuff.