Annoyed Librarians

There is a very important matter I need to discuss with you. Please meet me in the southeast corner of the lower level of the Mall parking garage across from the hotel at 2 am. I know the identity of the Annoyed Librarian. ¹

I'm not sure whether you've been following the latest controversy in the world of library blogging (Did I really just pass up an opportunity to use the word "blogosphere"?).  I'm at a little bit of a disadvantage because I'm newly acquainted with most of these blogs, but let's see if I can summarize.  There is a blogger known only as the Annoyed Librarian whose postings in her eponymous (pseudonymous?) blog are known to irk a lot of other library bloggers who like neither their content nor the masking of the author's true identity.  Things got even more emotional in the the last few weeks as Library Journal hired the Annoyed Librarian and began hosting her blog on their site, increasing both the profile of her blog and the irksomeness of her detractors.  The Journal of Access Services has thrown further fuel on the fire by publishing an entire issue devoted to the work of the Annoyed Librarian.

Several bloggers have speculated about the true identity of the Annoyed Librarian with guesses ranging from former ALA Director Michael Gorman to fellow bloggers like Meredith Farkas², and others have threatened to out her if she doesn't identify herself (I'm thinking about a long, vague, rambling post on One Big Library which has since been removed³ but which was seconded by librarian.net⁴).  There's even been lame attempts at Watergate jokes, with the shadowy figure of Deep Link working as an informant for intrepid bloggers.

So what do I think about this whole controversy?  Well, for one, I'm not sure the issue here is really about blogging under pseudonyms at all.  As the Annoyed Librarian points out, the creators of the library-themed comic Unshelved get no flack for their pseudonymity, nor do several other popular library blogs.  The issue is really about disliking the Annoyed Librarian, which I can totally understand.  I am quite often wholly put off by the tone of her posts.  For example:

Sometimes it seems that I'm the only librarian who believes that public libraries should have some sort of purpose larger and more important that [sic] subsidizing the puerile entertainment desires of the mass of people who can't afford Netflix or videogames.  Some naive people think that the masses should provide their own puerile entertainment and public institutions should contribute to the public good.⁵

What don't I like about that paragraph?  Well, for starters, the classism inherent to the idea of "the masses" which the librarian stands apart from and deigns to serve.  I'm also not so fond of this particular tenor of sarcasm-- which makes me wonder if the Annoyed Librarian is, in fact, Ann Coulter.  And then there's the idea of railing against the "puerile" which is a concept that just makes me think of think of the Comstock Laws or the trial over Lady Chatterley's Lover, or Jesse Helms railing against Robert Mapplethorpe-- I can't imagine myself ever thinking it okay to deem something puerile.

A few days later in a new post the Annoyed Librarian decided to rephrase this idea (not because there was anything wrong with the tone of the first post, mind you, but because an awful lot of her readers seem to have been "thick librarians" who didn't get her brilliant and eloquent argument).  This time around she clarifies:

This whole discourse about what libraries need to be doing and how they should change has no persuasive power when hard times come. We need arguments that show libraries are necessary for the republic and librarianship is a serious profession where the leading voices in the field aren't telling us the problem with libraries is that they aren't frivolous enough. Library 2.0, video games, and dance parties aren't going to save anything or persuade anyone that libraries are worth saving. The purpose of public libraries isn't just to get more people through the door by any means necessary. Libraries have a grander purpose that seems to be ignored most of the time. If libraries become identified as Internet cafes or video-game rental stores, no one's going to bother to fight to save them because they won't think they're worth saving.⁶

See, this is an argument that I have a lot more sympathy for.  In fact, I think I've expressed some similar concerns in my own blog, and in ways that, I have to acknowledge, have sometimes been sarcastic or mean-spirited.  I've poked fun at the reading taste of book group ladies and criticized the idea of performing reference interviews via Second Life which are both snobbish ways of pointing out that I also believe that too often libraries are ignoring the idea of a grander purpose and turning their backs on the idea of serving a vital role as an institution for educational advancement.  And it's here that the Annoyed Librarian spells out the role that she should be playing, and that I should be playing-- which is not to write whiny posts prophesying the End Times of an educated civilization, or demonizing fellow librarians, but to do something constructive-- to make the case for a grander purpose for libraries.

¹  The Annoyed Librarian: Unmasked?, The Medium is the Message, 10/18/08.

² I'm REALLY not the Annoyed Librarian (nor am I annoyed), Information Wants to Be Free, 11/18/08.
³  Dear Annoyed, One Big Library, 11/21/08
⁴ Dear Annoyed..., librarian.net, 11/21/08
⁵ Librarians, Amuse Us to Death!, Annoyed Librarian, 10/27/08.
⁶ Take Two, Annoyed Librarian, 11/12/08.

Is PowerPoint Making Us Stupid?

This week I started thinking about a long-term assignment in my Evaluation class to write a professional research project proposal which will be presented to the class in an oral presentation.  It's likely that many of us will use PowerPoint in this presentation, which I have no experience with as a presenter, but have experienced extensively as an audience member.  In researching PowerPoint, I came across Edward Tufte's excellent pamphlet "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint", excerpts of which are also available on his website.

Tufte is most widely known for his 1983 book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, in which he critiqued the proliferation of chartjunk, or the extraneous decoration of graphs, and argued that every visual element in a graph should signify data.  In the 2003 pamphlet and a more recent essay on his website Tufte applies this critique to PowerPoint presentations in which only 30-40% of the average slide is devoted to content with the balance belonging to clip art, logos, and other design features.  He argues that PowerPoint presentations tend to suffer from a number of flaws.  For instance, the program encourages presenters to rely on bullet outlines and hierarchical multi-level lists that obscure or only imply the presenter's posited relationship between list items.  Also, the spacial limitations often cause presenters to segregate data and analysis on separate slides rather than side-by-side.  Tufte applies these arguments to a PowerPoint presentation that Boeing gave to NASA concerning the possible damage to the space shuttle Columbia during its final mission, and argues that several common limitations of arguments made via PowerPoint presentation contributed to the official underestimation of the threat of this damage which resulted, unfortunately, in the destruction of the ship and the loss of its crew during re-entry.  This analysis was eventually incorporated into the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's final report with the recommendation that NASA should end its organizational reliance on PowerPoint presentations in favor of technical reports.

Tufte's aims much of his dismay at the institutional sanction of PowerPoint presentations, mentioning, for instance, the PowerPoint policies at the Harvard School of Public Health, which encourage the use of no more than six lines of text per slide with no more than six words per line-- limitations better suited to reading primers, he argues, than scientific analysis.  He contrasts this to a seventeenth century chart of causes of mortality (which includes such colorful causes of death as gout, grief, and plague-in-the-guts) that clearly and efficiently organizes twenty years' worth of deaths on a single page.

Ultimately, the thrust of the essay is that businesses and academic institutions are adjusting their presentations to suit the limitations of the presentation technology rather than adjusting the technology to suit their presentation needs.  PowerPoint was conceived for the convenience of presenters and at a huge expense to the content and to the audience of the presentation.

I'm glad to have read this essay in time to think about alternative means of presenting my research proposal.  I was thinking I'd I'd want counter the ubiquity of PowerPoint with something more original anyway-- now I have a justification for that decision.

Improving Web Presence

Sarah Houghton-Jan, author of Librarian in Black, shares in a recent post the slides from her latest workshop, The Broke Library's Guide to a Better Web Presence (PDF).  The workshop is constructed around twenty free and low-cost tips to improve library websites.  The tip that I found most useful was the operational planning advice about plotting out a hierarchy of technology needs to provide the basis for a three-year plan.  Technology needs are sorted into a pyramid chart (think USDA Food Pyramid), which seemed like a clear and concise way to advocate technology improvements to the folks in control of the budget.  I'll certainly think about incorporating such a schema into the technology memo project due at the end of the semester.

Another tip I liked was the creation of dynamic and interactive employee recommendations, perhaps in a blog format to invite user feedback.  I've always been a big believer in employee recommendations although, truthfully, they've often been a letdown as I find myself championing a service that my coworkers are reluctant or slow to participate in, or that just winds up looking like books dumped on a shelf, or that doesn't really speak to the needs of the customers/patrons.  So I like the idea of it being interactive and easy to update, and particularly, the idea of allowing patrons to review books on the site (i.e. farming out some of the work!).  I'm not sure that putting the program on the web will necessarily solve the problem, but it wouldn't cost much to give it a shot.

Something that was new to me was the idea of improving OPAC functionality with enhancements like Library Thing for Libraries to allow for library 2.0 interactive features without having to replace the ILS.  Brilliant!  It's not free, or necessarily even cheap, but it's a way to vastly a product that you might be stuck with for awhile.

Some of the other tips involved getting the most out of free services like flickr, blogger, and various mash-ups and image generators.  Some of these suggestions very much oriented toward attracting teenagers to the library, which is certainly a noble goal but not a particular area of interest for me.  Call me stodgy, but I do think that library 2.0 goals can err on the side of being too informal, too trendy, and too compromising of the profession.  I will not answer reference queries via some web-generated avatar-- not if I have any say in the matter.  I just don't believe that it sets the right tone for the kind of professionalism I strive for.  Furthermore, it seems like there's a lack of discussion about the idea of keeping a healthy distance between librarians and patrons and between librarians' private and public web personae.  Still, there's an awful lot of good advice to experiment with in this presentation, and I'm glad to have been given some new ideas to research.

Oriented.

In which our young hero emerges triumphant from a fortnight's battle waged courageously against the forces of drudgery, breaking free of the shackles of library homework...

It's been a busy few weeks in library school. In addition to the Evaluation paper I alluded to in the previous post, the second part of the TOR was due on Monday. I'd long ago finished my wiki page, and had all but the content done on my HTML page, but it still seemed to come together at the end of the week as a perfect storm of work. I thought I'd report out on the TOR since it was my first ever library technology project.

My familiarity with wikis was, unsurprisingly, shaped by my use of Wikipedia. Despite being a borderline obsessive reader of Wikipedia, my editing experience consisted of correcting a couple of glaring grammatical errors in the pages of others. Still, the TOR page was a breeze. The element of wikis that I like the best is its transparency. When I saw a feature I liked in a Wikipedia page, all I had to do was click "Edit" to see what was going on in the code. It's so simple that it feels illicit, like I'm stealing, but I guess I could also view myself as an architect exploring an old building to see what holds it together. I quickly learned how to make simple charts, frame and re-size photos, and add a table of contents, and I managed to put together a pretty rockin' page.

HTML was a little tougher, but I relied on a couple of W3Schools Online Web Tutorials for the basics. I was determined to make something more complex than the barebones minimal-requirement pages that a lot of folks were turning in (I'm not knocking them... okay, maybe just a little). I was very surprised to find that what I thought had been an innovation of wikis (the transparency of code) was something that had always been available to me if I'd only just selected the "Page Source" option in the View tab of the browser, although that got exponentially more complex than the wiki code. Still, armed with a list of tags and my text editor, I put together a decent little webpage, and even experimented with a css stylesheet. While my more technology-minded friends scoffed at some of the coding choices I made, I maintain that it's pretty good for a first try.

In all, the wiki felt like a better match for my temperament because I could pick at it here and there and make finicky little adjustments to it right up through the homestretch. The HTML site, on the other hand, went live with a couple of errors in it that are just going to have to stay there until I have time to take it on again (Um, January?). Which I will-- a revision is already forming in my mind. Geekdom, here I come.

Bookmarking to a Better Me

Friends of mine who put much more stock into astrology than I do are never surprised to find out that I'm a Virgo.  And apparently when you take into consideration the varied other nuanced planetary alignments of my birth I'm something of an Ubër-Virgo.  Wikipedia summarizes Virgo personality traits as analytical, meticulous, methodical, responsible, perfectionistic, shrewd, witty, and reserved-- all fine traits until you consider the kicker, that the Virgo tends toward displaying these traits in excess.

Somehow or another my Virgo instincts have gone to seed in the past few years.  Luckily for me, I have the influences of library science to get me back on track to an ordered and organized existence.

When I was working on my TOR I came across a link to the GSLIS Tech Lab's bookmarks on delicious, and was immediately intrigued by the possibilities of this site.  Delicious allows users to store bookmarks on the web, which solves the problem of portability that I'd never really found a good solution to.  Before I had a delicious account I was emailing hyperlinks to myself, writing URLs on scraps of paper, saving them in word documents, or even just memorizing precise search terms so that I knew how I'd previously found a site.  Now, between my delicious account and my flash drive, and this is not the empty hyperbole it sounds like, using any computer feels like using my computer.  And this is important, because I'm just as often computing from the library, or the GSLIS office, or work as I am from home.

Another innovation of delicious is that it's organized with user-specific tags rather than file folders.  Some catalogers get really nerdily gleeful about the idea of the masses generating metadata, a process known as folksonomy, which may be the key toward developing the Semantic Web.  Alright, alright, I think it's exciting too, although I'm more thankful for it on a personal level because it's got me fixated on experimenting with various ways of organizing and standardizing the organization of my my personal bookmarks (Welcome back Virgo-self, where were you hiding all this time?).

And while the social networking aspect of delicious wasn't initially a draw for me, I'm beginning to understand its appeal.  I think it's safe to venture that librarians make up a sizable chunk of the site's users, and it has often been useful to investigate fellow-bookmarkers to see what other sites they're using.  For example, all this week I've been frantically writing a paper for the Evaluation class and I'd bookmarked a number of journal articles to come back to later.  Checking out the bookmarks of other users who'd tagged these articles gave me some useful research leads, including a link to an automatic bibliography formatter that literally saved my ass proved helpful.

Delicious has helped me to regain those organization skills that I'd been slacking in, and even to rethink the way I use computers in my research as a library science student.  And thanks to delicious, I'm back on solid astrological ground as the Virgo I was born to be.

Google and Informal Reference

Since coming to library school I've participated in a fair amount of disparaging of search engines.  While I agree with the premise that search engines aren't the be-all-end-all of research that a lot of lay people consider them to be, and while I don't that they aren't going to be replacing librarians or more formal reference queries anytime soon, I also don't want to to underestimate the value of search engines, and Wikipedia, and other informal research tools, and the way that they have revolutionized the availability of information.  

This week a co-worker of mine came in wearing a shirt which had a word written across it in an Asian script.  I asked her if she knew what it meant, but it turned out she'd just bought it at the Salvation Army because it looked cool.  I decided to take on the challenge of finding out what it meant.  I copied it as best I could onto a scrap of paper which I shoved in my pocket.

When I got home that afternoon I did a little detective work.  My guess was that it might be Khmer, the language of Cambodia.  This is where people always stop be in telling these types of stories-- wait, how did you even make such a guess?  I don't really know how I know half the things I know except to say that I've always been the type of person who browses encyclopedias and stares at tables of flags of the world or scans bilingual menus in Chinese restaurants until I can guess, by process of elimination, which character means "chicken" and which means "pork".  So I can't really tell you why the font resonated with me as Khmer, but it seemed like a reasonable guess.

I started out on Wikipedia, looking at the entry for "Khmer alphabet" but my computer lacked the ability to process the fonts so I just saw a bunch of boxes and symbols.  So I did a Google image search for "Khmer alphabet" instead and found several tables to compare my crumpled handwritten letters to.  They didn't match, and I concluded that it wasn't Khmer after all.  Thai, then?  Again, as much as I tried to make them, the letters didn't match.  Let's see... Vietnamese uses a Roman alphabet, what other countries are in Southeast Asia.  Laos?  Bingo, my letters were there on the Lao alphabet charts.  Now I figured that since I was working with an alphabet, it doesn't matter whether you understand the letters-- as long as you have a chart of the alphabetical order you can browse a dictionary.  This is where I ended my informal Google-led research and headed to the library because I thought pages of a book would be easier to browse than pages of a website.  I found a Lao-English dictionary, consulted the page on alphabetical order, and found the word pretty quickly: "Laos".  The shirt said "Laos" in Lao.

So while I know Google's not always the best tool for a reference query, with a little creativity on the part of an experienced researcher it can be a great shortcut.  In all the research took about twenty minutes.  And while it really wasn't that hard, it was fun to impress my co-worker when I brought in the photocopied dictionary page the next day.

Open Library

A few classes ago we discussed the obscure prefixes used to describe very large amounts of data. My own conception of computer storage is pretty limited. My base of comparison is my iPod, and even its 30 GB overwhelms me. I've loaded my entire music collection on to the thing and I'm still left with 22 GB of space in which to expand. When I bought a flash drive this morning for school (in order to break myself of the sloppy habit of constantly emailing my documents to myself) I thought "okay, 2 GB, that's a quarter of my iTunes library." I find a blank word document daunting, I'm not at all sure how to approach producing enough content to fill 2 GB of empty space.

Brewster Kahle doesn't have that problem. As the founder of Internet Archive he's already using more than 2 Petabytes of data. That's two quadrillion bytes (I was going to calculate some astronomical number of 30 GB iPods to illustrate this figure, but I'm frightened off by all those zeros. I trust the number is, however, astronomical). Of course Google processes ten times that in a day, but I'm not trying to segue to Google. I'm trying to segue to Brewster Kahle's latest project, the Open Content Alliance.

Brewster Kahle's stated goal is nothing short of "Universal access to all knowledge" and the Open Content Alliance is a major step in that direction. The Open Content Alliance is an organization working to digitize the collections of a consortium of major academic and national libraries. Participants include the Boston Library Consortium, The British Library, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the National Library of Australia, the University of Chicago Library. Unlike a similar project sponsored by Google (Google Book Search), the Open Content Alliance is open to searches from any search engine and is managed as a nonprofit organization, quelling potential concerns about the commercialization of public-domain content.

Currently the Boston Public Library has ten scanners working to digitize its collection. Title are made available for download at Open Library, an open-source database of book records that anyone can modify or search for scanned books. That's where I got this page from Moby Dick about eating whales.