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.

The OPAC as Blog

In an earlier post I mentioned my local public library's blog as an example of an ineffective use of technology in a library. I wanted to expand a little on that criticism, and then offer an example of a library which is using its blog in innovative and effective ways.

The problems with the local library blog (which I'd rather not identify here since it's negative criticism) are pretty typical pitfalls of blogging in general-- certainly problems I've experienced with my own attempts at blogging.

1) The first is that there's no steady rhythm to posting-- In the past four years there have been some months with fifteen posts, other months have had only one or two. There are times when I'm inundated with information, and there are times that I double check the RSS feed because it's been so long since anything has shown up in my blog reader.

2) Contents of the posts have also been unpredictable-- There's a sort of bipolar character to posts where some are quite thorough and interesting and the others are one-sentence recaps or reminders. It seems like they need to hash out what topics could make for interesting posts for readers at home and which are, say, small matters of policy that would best be communicated by a sign in the library.

3) The blog isn't prominent-- From the library's home page you have to choose "What's New" from the tool bar and then select "What's New @ the PL" before you're linked to the blog. There's two distinct toolbars on the homepage (one horizontal across the top and one vertically down the left side) so there's a lot of choices, none of which are marked "blog".

4) The blog is redundant-- You can get the same information in slightly different forms from the printed newsletter, the library's various social networking sites and updates on the homepage. No one source is the definitive voice of the library. The result is the impression that they're stretching themselves too thin disseminating information in all these various media rather just maintaining one source well.

A good example of a library which has resolved some of these common blogging issues is the Lamson Library at Plymouth State University. The brilliance of the Lamson Library website is that they've merged the functions of a blog and an OPAC into one site. The blog is accessible because it's the first thing you see. The presence of the blog, and particularly its photographs, frees the OPAC from the static and stodgy sterility that is normally its fate at academic libraries. The site provides a lot of information without seeming cluttered or impairing usability. It's a good model for how both online catalogs and library blogs should work.

Of the Five Colleges, only Amherst College has approached this model-- they've added a blog to their OPAC but there's no pictures and site is blandly monochromatic (just a lot of school spirit, I guess). Still, they're headed in the right direction. I suspect other libraries will follow suit. It makes sense from a library's perspective to streamline various web functions into one site, and especially so if it improves the experience of the user.

Email Overload

Microtrends, the technology blog of the Times of London, recently introduced me to the concept of Inbox Zero, a program to help people overcome the problem of Email Overload. The program is the creation of Merlin Mann, a blogger who developed the project as part of 43 Folders, his blog on productivity and creative potential (to the best of my discernment-- he insists that he writes about the much broader topic of "how people make stuff"). Mann's prose is a blend of 12-step recovery jargon and macho posturing that reminds me of Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia. One moment he's consoling that "there's no need to be ashamed of admitting that you aren't perfect and can't do everything flawlessly all the time" and the next he's making reference to Neal Stephenson's, um, "pants stones" which I think is some sorta jock term for "courage."

Inbox Zero advocates a triangulated attack on email through ruthless unsubscribing from email lists, heightened filters and better archiving practices. There's also a lot of advice on responding to email-- using template emails, being brief, and being honest about what you have the time to answer. It's all very practical, commonsensical advice, nothing very groundbreaking.

Yet the message is obviously resonating. Inbox Zero isn't the only website addressing email overload. On Inbox Victory folks post screenshots of their empty inboxes to celebrate their victory over email overload. The Washington Post has reported on "email bankruptcy", the idea of just deleting it all and starting fresh, which is a tactic that the blog Email Overloaded considers "worse in some ways than financial bankruptcy" if you haven't thought through a recovery plan.

What's really interesting to me is in all of this is the level of emotional baggage that gets pinned to email. I'd never consider myself a likely candidate for a recovery program, but I do see some truth in Merlin Mann's suggestion that we're looking to the number of emails received as a form of validation-- of being are well-liked, or in demand for our professional expertise. The implication is that this isn't a problem with email, but an emotional problem manifesting as a problem with email.

As far as I can tell, the metaphor hasn't been extended in the other direction. There's cultural significance to purging as well as to overconsumption. The empty inbox zeal shares the same less-is-more premise as a whole strain of evangelism from religious ascetics and abstinence pledgers to calorie restrictionists and colon hydrotherapy fanatics. Look at my inbox, I'm so uncluttered and Zen and pure! Look at your inbox, it's so lazy and gluttonous and sad!

The argument cleaves along the line of puritanism and decadence, a familiar framework for so much else in our culture as well.

READ Mini Posters

I vaguely remember that the public library I went to as a kid had posters promoting reading featuring the likes of Bill Cosby and the Muppets. I haven't visited a children's section in quite a few years since, intentions aside, I can understand how a lone man browsing the picture books could be perceived as creepy. It was news to me, then, that the ALA has continued this poster series all these years, featuring such current child- and teen- appealing celebrates as Keira Knightly, Stephen Hawking, Missy Elliott and Daniel Radcliffe (I was pleased, but puzzled, to see that William H. Macy had enough name recognition to make the cut). The celebrates pose with a children's book, ostensibly a favorite title, and the ALA sells the posters through its website for $16.

Librarian in Black, as well as several other library blogs I've seen, plugged the latest offering in the series, a Make-Your-Own ALA Read Mini-Poster. I had a hard time finding it because the recent redesign of the ALA website killed off all the links I'd seen, but eventually found the poster generator. Here I am posing with some of my own favorite childhood reading, the gothic mysteries of John Bellairs, illustrated by Edward Gorey.

The positioning tools could be improved upon, but it's clear that the person who created the poster generator has a sense of how people actually use the Internet. I can save the poster, email it to friends, post it to Facebook, and provide the link so my friends can do the same. I'm not sure whether it's actually reaching its target audience of young people (as opposed to just hipster librarians) and I think ALA would do well to feature it more prominently on its website. Still, it seems like it could be a successful example of how to increase interaction with library tools and website.

Sounding the Alarm

What I come away with most of all from Nicholas Carr's essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"* is a conundrum that has much more to do with the world of publishing than it does with the article's contents:

A) I would probably be much more inclined toward the points Carr makes if he hadn't been so direly sensationalistic about making them. But,
B) If the article hadn't been so utterly sensationalistic I probably never would have heard of it, let alone read it.

The purported subject of the article is the impact of a newly pervasive technology on the way people think. Carr acknowledges that his knowledge of the subject is basically anecdotal since there aren't many published research articles in the subject yet. But he has no problem with relying on those anecdotes as the basis of his article, however hyperbolic they may be.

Take, for instance, the case of blogger Bruce Friedman who insists that due to his frequent Internet use he has "almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article" which is especially sad because he "can't read War and Peace anymore." I guess we're supposed to generalize from Friedman's experiences and agree that, yes indeed, these are dark times for the written word. I mean, this is embarrassing because now I have to admit that I received a copy of the new Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace last Christmas and I also petered out after a hundred pages. But I don't blame the Internet for this failure, it's strictly a matter between me and Tolstoy. In fact, I'm not sure I could have made it even as far as I did were it not for Wikipedia and the ability to quickly look up the bits of Napoleonic War trivia dished out generously on each dense page of that heavy, heavy tome. But seriously, was there ever a point in history when the ability to read War and Peace constituted a reasonable standard by which to measure the attention span of the average reader? I have no doubt that Friedman's having trouble getting back into serious novels after being away from them for awhile. But it's a false dichotomy that Carr sets up-- that you can accustom your brain either to novels or to the Internet, but certainly not both.

Carr slips into this fallacy throughout the piece, in the process constructing a good-old-days revisionist imperative of what it was like to read from books. Books are better because:

"The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds."

But isn't this confusing the format with the content? I mean, would just any old sequence of printed pages do? Doesn't it matter what's printed on those pages? How about the phone book, wouldn't it meet this criteria?

And then there's: "In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas."

Since when is book-reading necessarily an act which is sustained, undistracted or contemplative? If I could counter with another of my own anecdotes (since this is the level of discourse established by the article), I remember plenty of times in college that I'd be reading something unengaging. On a deadline. In a cafe. While the counter staff were blasting David Bowie. So just what is it about book-reading that transforms one into a bodhisattva while reading on the Internet necessarily makes one a scattershot wreck?

*Carr, Nicholas, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the Internet is doing to our brains". Atlantic: July/August 2008, (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google).

Libraries and Social Networking

What constitutes a useful web presence for public libraries? It seems to me that while certain services have become quite standard and expected-- a website for instance, an online public access catalog, and access to a librarian via email or instant messaging, there's a large gray area when it comes to other services. Is it necessary to maintain a blog? Should your library have a presence on social networking sites? Which one(s)?

I was thinking about this the other day when I was browsing my local library's website. It features links from the home page to its profiles on MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. There's a place to sign up for the email list and a pitch for the Ask the Librarian service, with Instant Message screen names for five different chat clients. There's a link to their blog. Just a little further research turns up a web presence on del.icio.us, and three book-specific social networking sites: LibraryThing, Shelfari and Goodreads.

Truthfully, I found this to be a little overwhelming. Maybe this is reflective of my own sense of minimalism when it comes to social networking.  I'd rather concentrate on keeping one or two profiles well-designed and thoughtfully groomed than divide my attention among several sites that risk seeming redundant or poorly maintained.  

It's understandable that a library would want to cast a wide net when seeking to connect with current or potential users through social networking.  But it also seems like they might want to consider what constitutes a successful web presence.  It's possible that libraries don't think to do this sort of evaluation because there's no start-up or subscription costs with memberships to these websites.  But after all, they do pay staff to maintain these profiles, and it would be useful to know whether and how these services enhance the experiences of patrons.  What are the library's benchmarks for success?  The number of folks who friend them on MySpace?  The number of visits to a blog?  The number of virtual rum-and-cokes they're gifted on Facebook?

And how do patrons feel about the library's presence on these sites?  The place of public institutions on social networks seems fraught with all sorts of dubiousness.  Do the teenagers take your MySpace page seriously or as an awkward adult attempt at hipness?  Are you inadvertently alienating non-users of social networks by overloading the website with references to services they've never heard of, making them feel outdated and exacerbating technophobia?  Do you offer workshops to train people who might be interested to use these tools?  And are you really producing enough programming to warrant a events blog or listserv?

Tough questions, but isn't it better to have a strategy than to create something ad hoc?  

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This morning I installed the latest update of iTunes, which includes the new Genius application. This feature allows you to choose a song from which Genius will instantly generate a playlist of similar songs from your music library, as well as make suggestions for additional purchases from the iTunes store. It's similar to Pandora, the Internet radio website which allows users to build radio stations based on particular artists. Unlike Pandora, however, Genius has the disadvantage that you can't give it feedback to improve future selections. A major drawback I've found to both services is that they can't distinguish more subjective traits like mood, thematic similarities in lyrics, time frame, or social contexts. For instance, both services totally miss the mark when it comes to The Smiths. There's a whole genealogy of bands heavily influenced by or downright imitative of The Smiths' moodiness, bookishness, queer sensibility, etc. that get passed over in favor of songs that Genius perceives to have the right rhythm or combination of instruments.

This is a (maybe digressive) way of coming to my point that whatever their faults, these sorts of recommendation tools are becoming more prevalent in my life, and I wonder what role they are going to have in libraries in the near future. I don't think it's presumptuous to guess that they will have some role, considering the countless other ways that chain bookstores have shaped the public's expectations of library services. Both the Barnes & Noble website and amazon.com make use of a recommendation feature, and although I don't work in a library, I'd wager that many librarians are already using these sites in their everyday work. I know that I used them all the time as a bookseller, ironically at a fiercely independent academic bookstore. Despite subscribing to multiple other databases like Books In Print and BookSource, we all had to admit that amazon.com was easier to use and provided multiple features (like cover images, tables of contents and reviews) that the others lacked.

And yes, when we found ourselves having to make recommendations beyond our personal areas of expertise (or more snobbishly put, below our areas of expertise), we would sometimes fall back on those automatic recommendation tools on amazon. While I don't think it's a bad thing for booksellers and librarians to use these tools, I do think it's important to have a sense of perspective about their advantages and disadvantages.

First of all, amazon.com is going to make every attempt to sell me a book, not caring at all that its recommendations may become redundant or illogical. For instance, I once bought a copy of Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower on amazon.com. This was maybe four years ago. To this day amazon recommends books based upon this title including the very same title in a large print edition, an audiobook, a Canadian edition, and a hardcover edition. Why I'd want to buy the same title in five formats is beyond me, but it makes sense for amazon.com to give it a shot. Swann's Way is also heavily in the rotation of recommendations, which they might have logically deduced I don't need since it's the volume in the series that comes before the once I bought; I'm told I may also like Within a Budding Grove, which is the book I already bought in a different translation. There can be a lot of weeding to do to get past the repetition.

There are also places that amazon.com excels at, however. I recall that amazon.com could come in really handy with book groups. People would tell me they'd just finished The Kite Runner and want to know what to read next. I could query Amazon and find that customers who bought The Kite Runner also bought Water for Elephants, Reading Lolita in Tehran, and The Mermaid Chair. Sure enough, those were popular choices with the book groups in Amherst as well. While it did feel a little lazy to me to do this, and while I felt guilty for making generic and popular suggestions, in truth I knew that this was often what the customer wanted. Asking for a book recommendation was often overtly synonymous with asking what everyone else was reading and what sold well. In this sense, amazon.com was better equipped to make recommendations to this cohort of readers than I was.

Of course, those weren't the recommendations that I was proud of making. I much preferred the occasions when I knew from experience just the exact shade or mood or sensibility that attracted a reader to a particular book, and actually felt a sense of investment in what she should read next. But much of the time it was all I could do to recommend on the basis of a similar tempo.

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Welcome to Library Scholar, my blog for LIS 488: Technology for Information Professionals.