Library Voice

Mediashift has a post about how the new media is shifting the way we think.

the media shift isn’t just about small vs. big. It’s also about a new way of thinking, or perhaps bringing back an old way of thinking that’s been lost in the era of big media mergers and the bottom-line focus on profits over serving people. The democratization of media is about letting a billion flowers bloom, and turning the power of news analysis, commentary, punditry and spoofery over to the people, now that they have the cheap technology of blogs, digital video cameras and broadband Internet access.

How are technologies shaping the way librarians and patrons think about the library? Are folks still stuck in the old way of thinking about the library? How can we get them to embrace new and fresh thinking?  More on this later when time permits.

Tags:

 

Yesterday at the gym, the girl on the machine next to me said to her friend:

I’m not doing much cardio today because my iPod is dead.

I nearly fell off my machine laughing.

It appears that DemoStudio, the open source screen capture application, no longer has a project page on SourceForge. I have the software installed on my machine, but I wanted to find it so a colleague could install it on her PC. After poking around on the web a bit, I was able to find CamStudio, which looks amazingly similar to the version of DemoStudio that I currently have installed on my machine. After opening DemoStudio and CamStudio, the “About” links of the software give a little more inormation. My version of DemoStudio is version 2.5, and parts of the software “is based on Rendersoft Camstudio.” The version of Camstudio linked above appears to be that version. I’ve no idea what happened to the more recent version of DemoStudio, but it appears that Camstudio will function well enough to meet my needs as a free (and very basic) substiute for Captivate.

BusinessWeek Online has a list of the 10 Most Tech-Savvy Rock Stars. “Meet the musicians who best harness technology, especially the Internet, to market themselves, their products, and their causes.”

Gamespot has a guide for understanding HDTV, particularly in how the newer technologies apply to gaming on the new Playstation3. The guide gets rid of a lot of the jargon and is easy to understand, even if you’re not into games.

A new generation is upon us and like many, we are not prepared. Many of you have heard of this thing called HDTV and are wondering if it’s worth all the hype. The simple answer is yes. HDTV creates an image so amazing and so clear that it can be compared to going from black and white to color. Although, the technology is still developing, it’s still a good idea to understand some the key aspects of this new generation and this is where this guide comes in. It will cover the most important elements of HD and give you an edge over others when finally buying the TV.

In his keynote address on Monday at the ODCE conference, John Seely Brown discussed the idea that the world is becoming flat. Our world is no longer as divided by borders, time, or space as it once was, largely as a result of the technologies that we are using today. We have the ability to email, conference call, video conference, and IM with nearly anyone in any place in the world. While Dr. Brown was referring mostly to the globalization of world business, this could also apply to many of the things we are doing in libraries. This flattening of the world has a huge impact on how libraries provide services and how they define the communities that they serve.

During my IM presentation on Monday, one of the attendees asked about how we control authentication with the IM service. This is a very common question, and the answer is we don’t. We have no way of really knowing if a question is coming from an Ohio University student, or if the question is coming from someone in Wyoming. All we know is that bigbubba7236 is asking us a question, and we try to help him or her find an answer. That aspect of instant messaging scares a lot of academic librarians because many want to limit service to patrons at their own institutions. I can understand the factors that contribute to this attitude. The students who attend the university are paying tuition, and that tuition pays for a majority of the resources and services on campus. With dwindling staff resources and budgets, many academic libraries are finding it hard to keep up with serving their own patrons, so the fear of taking time to serve someone who does not pay tuition is legitimate. In the same sense, if a librarian is serving someone who is not paying tuition, he or she is essentially denying service (or providing lesser service) to someone who actually pays for the service. In the business world, paying customers generally demand the right to be served before — and be served better than — those customers who are not buying products or services.

While this argument may hold some water, I think it helps to take a larger view of the picture. If we base our service solely on who is paying for the service, then we have to question who is actually footing the bill. For most colleges and universities, a majority of the operating revenue comes in the form of tuition. However, public colleges and universities also get a large amount of financial support (although it is decreasing drastically each year) from the state. Because of this state support, it is very difficult to distinguish between a “paying” and “non-Paying” patron at a public university library. While the paying patron does pay tuition, the non-paying patron probably pays taxes. It’s a portion of those taxes that helps to build new campus buildings, fund acqiusitions budgets, and even keep the lights on.

It’s with that understanding that many academic libraries will serve both community members and tuition-paying students with the same level of service. Unfortunately, this argument is easier to rationalize when “service” means serving patrons in the physical library. But when “service” means “any time, any were,” then how far will the library go with serving both the tuition paying patrons and the community members. I think one of the concerns with IM or email reference is that with these technologies, it is incredibly difficult to define (or limit) the community that is served. With the world becoming more flat, a community member can be someone in your university, your town, your state, your country, or your side of the world. The question is, where do you draw the line about who is a member of the community you serve, and what lengths will you go to serve the community?

In some cases, this question is often answered by the availability of resources. Most database licenses limit the use of the resources to the current members of the academic community (faculty, staff, and students), so if the answer to a patron’s inquiry requires using one of those databases, then the database license defines the members of the community. However, if the inquiry requires using something like American Factfinder, then the community is no longer constrained by a third-party legal restriction. This can make the definition of the community seem artificial, because the members of the community may be determined not by those providing the service, but by those providing the resources. Even this definition of community can break down as well. What if a member of another university or community contacts you via IM or email, and he/she has the same resources available at his library? Will your library help this person, or refer him/her to their own library? If this person is in the same town, or state, do you consider that part of your community?

I don’t really know the answers to these questions. I suppose for now, the real answer is “it depends.” But “it depends” will need to be more clearly defined if libraries are going to remain viable and successful resources in the future. As the world if becoming more flat, libraries will need to find a way to broaden and define the communities they serve. Libraries will also need to work together through consortial arrangements and partnerships to extend the coverage of the community, and to provide better services to the community. I have no idea what these partnerships will look like, but I really think libraries need to think about how they can work together to serve large communities. How do you think these partnerships will look in the future? How does your library define its community, and are you looking to expand it?

In closing, I’d like to mention an IM question that we received last night. One of our overnight staff emailed me the synopsis of the transaction, and it is posted below:

Hi Chad,
I had a really interesting IM early this morning (12:30 am) from a university student in Malaysia(!). She was researching IM and virtual librarian concepts and practice and she was really interested in our service.
I was a steward for the IM and chat service and department, I can assure you, that the student left the chat with much more knowledge than she came to it with.
Just thought you would like to hear about it.

In this example, our staff member was providing a service. He did not limit the service based upon the patron’s location, even though he apparently knew that the patron was out of the country. As a result, the staff member was able to help someone with a research need, while broadening the concept of the library community. Do you have any similar success stories? What is your library’s concept of community? How is the flattening of the world impacting your library’s services? If you have any answers to these questions, or if you have more questions, please feel free to post a comment.

Usually the fortunes I get from fortune cookies are pretty cheesy. However, I got this one a few weeks ago, and I’ve been carrying it around in my Palm ever since. With Computers in Libraries 2006 right around the corner, I figured my fortune would be relevant to share:

This fortune came true for a little while this week. Our cable went out at home on Sunday morning around 7, and it was not restored until around 7 Monday evening. I realize that 36 hours is not a huge amount of time to sacrifice, and it was probably even a little healthy for us, but it was terribly inconvenient. Not only did we lose television access, but our internet service was out as well. We were homebound all weekend and Monday, as my son was ill, and not being able to give a 20 month old access to Disney, Barney, Bob The Builder, and the Wiggles is a very bad thing. We called our provider several times to check on the status of the repair, and they kept telling us that there was not an outage reported for our area. They initially told us that it would be Friday (today) before they could have someone out to our house to look at the problem. Fortunately, a repair truck pulled into the yard on Monday evening, and the repairman said the whole section of my neighborhood was out. Apparently the customer service reps weren’t reading the same memos as the repair dispatchers.

Teaching children to share is one of the most important things in parenting, and my son was nice enough to share his cold with me. I’m convinced that the germs mutated inside his body into some awesomely powerful plague before he passed them to me. I’ve been home since Tuesday as a result. While missing 3.5 days of work is never a good thing, it could have been a lot worse with the “lack of computer” or if my cable had not been restored. Because of the ability to stay connected, I’ve been able to at least keep my head above water while I recuperated. When I wasn’t wheezing, coughing, sneezing, or sleeping, I was actually able to get a little work done. I’ve read countless emails, sent or responded to about 20 emails, worked on a conference presentation, did some web maintenance, IMed a couple of colleagues, read some RSS feeds, and even ordered a few books—all without infecting any of my coworkers.

I know that my absence this week has been inconvenient for my colleagues, as they’ve had to pick up my missed reference desk/IM/chat shifts and two classes. I am very lucky to work with some really great people, and it’s a great relief to know that they have been pitching in and dividing up those duties. I think the fear of inconveniencing others when you’re absent can add considerable stress when you’re already sick. Add to that how far behind you get when you miss work, and there’s no question why people go to work sick and Americans don’t take very much vacation time. Fortunately, with the help of my home computer and a broadband connection, I’ve been able make a valiant attempt to keep up. Now I know some will say that you shouldn’t be working from home when you’re sick and that work will still be there when you return. This may be true, but I can tell you if my cable was still out, I would have worried myself sick not being able to keep current with what’s going on at work. Perhaps this means that my head cold is not the only thing that’s wrong with my head??

According to PC World, Opera usage has been growing among the visitors to the PC World site. This is due in large part to Opera becoming totally free. The post also discusses how Firefox continues to maintain a 20% market share among visitors to the PC World site, while IE 6 is still holding on to 65 %.

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.

It seems like these days everybody has got a wiki, so I thought I should have one as well. I have begun experimenting with using a wiki to replace the typical library research guide, subject guide, or pathfinder (or whatever you call your list of links and resources organized by subject).

In my area, I currently have three different research guides: one for general business, one for international business, and one for marketing, and I also have a blog to compliment these as well. Three research guides can be difficult to maintain, and because a lot of information is redundant between the three, one change often leads to two additional changes.

The usefulness of these research guides can be questioned as well. While I can measure through web stats that the guides are being clicked on, I honestly cannot believe that students or patrons are reading the information all the way through. I can attest that they are not the most interesting things to read. And, while they are organized in an outline fashion, they are not the easiest things to use either. They are not really searchable by themselves(unless you count using Ctrl-F as searching), and you certainly cannot “search” all three at once. The traditional solution might be to lump all three into one research guide, but then that might be considered cruel and unusual punishment for the patrons who are actually using them to find business information sources. Individually, they are quite length, and combining them would make the sheer quantity of information unbearable.

Therefore, I decided that as I update my research guides this summer, I am not going to rehash the same tried-and-true format that I (and countless librarians before me) have been using. As I go through the list of links, databases, websites, and reference books, I am adding what is worth keeping to what I am currently calling The Biz Wiki. The Biz Wiki will contain the content of all three of my research guides and will be organized by category. Currently there are broad categories of business information such as Company, Industry, International Business, and Marketing, and each of these contain subcategories with topics such as company histories, brands, advertising, etc. This organization will basically be a more narrowly categorized breakdown of what is listed in my three research guides. I have also included a new category that I am calling “Research How-To’s”. This category will contain guides such as How to Find Country Economic Analysis Information or Finding Industry Financial Ratios. While there is not a huge amount of content in this category right now, the flexibility of the wiki software will allow me to add How-To’s as the need arises. Previously, I had used my Business Blog for such on-the-fly how-to’s, but I am finding that I like the wiki’s organizational abilities better than a blog.

The Biz Wiki has only been running for less than a week, so currently it is a little rough around the edges. Overall, I am quite satisfied with how quickly I am able to create new entries and edit them to my liking. The Media Wiki software that runs the wiki was very easy to install, and it only took me about a day or so to get comfortable with the software. The Wiki Media help pages are very helpful, and are a necessary tool when trying to figure out how to format the pages.

In showing this to my colleagues in the Reference department, many of them seem very supportive of this new research guide format. Some seem to think that this will make their time at the desk a little easier when they are approached by business researchers. I hope to use the wiki to compliment classroom instruction, thereby making it easier for me to teach business research both in and out of the classroom. At the same time, I hope the wiki will make research easier for those researchers who never make it to one of my instructional sessions or to the reference desk. Only time will tell how (or if) The Biz Wiki is used, and what impact it will make for our library patrons.