Hello (again) World!

I’ve tried this blogging thing a couple of times in the past with little success. Lately, though, I’m finding myself frequently thinking “if I had a blog, I’d blog about that!” So I’m back. Maybe this time it’ll stick.

Primarily, I want this blog to be a chronicle of my attempt at a career shift. I currently work in a public service position in a library, but in the last five years I’ve become more and more interested in digital libraries, digital preservation issues, metadata, and the semantic web. With no money to go back to school, I’m left floundering in the sea we know as “too much information.” I don’t really know where to begin my new self-education, but I’m determined to figure it out. I’ve found a few syllabi, RSS’ed some blogs, and ordered a couple of introductory textbooks via interlibrary loan. I’m also trying to figure out which professional organizations would be most useful for someone who with little concrete knowledge and limited funds, but with lots of enthusiasm, so if anyone has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them!

From time to time I’ll probably blog about what’s going on in my current public service existence as well. And as I update and get a hold on my e-life, I’ll blog about that too. I’m excited about this! Maybe someday I’ll have readers who will be excited for me too!

Enough already!

I’m finding myself increasingly frustrated with the ignorance of the students at my 2-year college. And please understand, I’m not specifically picking on my college, because I’ve been doing some research and find that as far back as 1998 Tagg, et al. were prefacing their article “The Decline of the Knowledge Factory” (The World & I, June 1998) with this: “At a time when high schools cannot persuasively claim to produce even literate graduates, we focus our hopes for the educated person on colleges and universities.” (emphasis mine). And yes, I know that this is not a properly formatted MLA citation, but who cares? I’ve given you all the information you need to find that article if you choose to do so.

Students come to me with sample papers given to them by their professors. Presumably, the professors are giving these out so that the students will read them and understand what a good, quality paper looks like. See how are the arguments formulated? See how the author supports his thesis? See that the author, in fact, has a thesis? No, they don’t see this. They see that their margins are supposed to be 1″ and that they are somehow expected to put their name and page numbers at the top of each page, and that their professor has required them to cite two sources, so they are going to write their papers and then throw in a couple of quotes for good measure.

What if instead of focusing on the minute differences between APA and MLA citation styles, why don’t we teach our students how to think? How to argue effectively? How to communicate their ideas effectively and convincingly to others? Is this too much to ask? Because that is what they will need when they go out into the world of grown-ups. No one is going to care if they italicized or underlined a title, but people will care whether or not they can get their point across. That’s what we need to be teaching them.

on Workflows and workflows…

Projects I’m working on right now:

1. Trying to make Workflows spit out spine labels for about 100 new law books. Unfortunately this involves many phone calls to our consortium leader in another part of the state, many miscalculated label reports, and much headache-y cursing on my part. Under my breath, of course! Project for one day? Oh no. No no no no. Going on two weeks now. Someone shoot me.
2. Preparing for a meeting with my boss and coworker on Thursday in which we will discuss starting with LibGuides and trying again to make something of WebCT.
3. Lots of changes to make to our Webfeat page. Good thing I’m making this list right now or I would have forgotten about this one completely!
4. Serials. Always serials.

I suppose really four things is not bad. Of course that’s just the big things. It’s the little things that get in the way. I spend five hours a day on live chat reference, which means that from 8-10 and 2-5 I’m stuck at the circulation desk. (This is especially difficult from 8-9 and from 2-4 when I’m also the only person working. “What? You’re standing in front of me and want help finding reference materials for your paper? But that would mean leaving the computer. What if someone asks a chat reference question?! You’re on your own, dude.”) Then there’s walking to the other building to get change/make a deposit/get the day’s mail. Checking in the serials every day. Constant circulation work, computers being down, general information questions, and even a spattering of reference. I have three paper calendars and an Outlook calendar and I still can’t organize my day to get productive. Maybe by next week’s post I’ll have it all figured out. Until then, I’m gonna go have a cuppa tea.

To Shush or Not to Shush

Is the 21st century library really supposed to be quiet? In 2004 I had the opportunity to visit the Czech Republic on a two and a half week trip with the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science. I was particularly struck by one public library we visited that had been acoustically designed to allow people to converse without disturbing other library patrons. I’m sorry to say I don’t remember where this library was – Prague or Plisn or one of several other metropolitan areas we visited.

Ever since that trip I’ve been invisioning my ideal library space as a place where students (I work in an academic setting, but I suppose public library patrons could be considered students of a sort too) choose to go, not just to use the computers or complete an assignment, but to learn and communicate and share. I would place one library staff desk right in the middle of the room to serve as circulation, reference, computer assistance and general information. Staff would all have computers with high-speed internet where they would be logged into services for chat, blogging, micro-blogging, etc., and they would have Bluetooth phones so they could answer questions on the go. Patrons, in turn, would have conversational seating areas, white boards with markers, and anything else they might need to facilitate group work. Books would not be separated into so many different areas (in my library we have separate sections for “popular books” and “multicultural books” as well as a reference section, a health reference section, and a ready reference section.

“Study rooms” would be used by individuals wishing to study in a quiet setting rather than by groups who we’ve pushed out of the common area for being too loud.

Alas, I’m just a low person on the ol’ totem pole. Maybe someday I’ll get to design a library from the ground up and make it into what I want. In the meantime I’ll keep sushing people…but only when my boss is around to complain if I don’t.

My Head is Exploding!

OK, so maybe not really. But I do have a lot of ideas floating around up in the ol’ noggin these days. I alluded a couple of posts ago to my “next big project.” Our college uses WebCT, but our library has never really gotten in on it. So I was thinking about ways we could utilize it, since it’s already there and the students are already using it. It’ll be a big project, since at this point I know absolutely nothing about WebCT. But I’d like to see us do an online tutorial of library skills with a scored quiz at the end. Right now we do classes, some for extra credit and some at the request of the professor. But we don’t get nearly as many requests as we’d like because professors don’t want to give up an entire class session to bring their students to the library. But if we could start out with a general library skills tutorial and convince professors to make it a small required part of their class’s grade, then we could work from that starting point to create specialized tutorials for different subjects. We’d still offer in-person instruction, of course, but for those professors who don’t want to give us the time, this would be an alternative solution that would still get those students using the library.

Of course, I haven’t even proposed this to my boss yet. I’ve still got those citations waiting to be put online, website changes to make (when all involved staff have a free moment to work on it), and any number of other little projects to get out of the way. So this may have to wait until a few things are settled and out of the way first. Still, I’m pretty excited about it.

Next post…what if the library was the place to go?