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?  

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought...

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.

Welcome

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