Sandra Herber: Future Librarian

I had never edited a wiki (let alone set one up or managed it as many people in this class seem to have done) until posting my book lists on the wiki Amanda set up for this course.  All the information in this week’s readings, therefore, was new and interesting to me.

While I understand that the main focus of a wiki is on collaborative work, I found some of the examples that used wikis in novel ways to be some of the most interesting.  For example Chad Boeninger’s Biz Wiki at Ohio University was a really useful site, though not technically a collaborative space, where he had leveraged the searchability and malleability of the wiki to keep his subject guides fresh.

Some of the wikis in the cases studies as well as the ones that came up in the readings were really well done and compelling.  One I liked personally was the Library Success Wiki (mentioned in Using Wikis to Create Online Communities).  What a great place to find vetted information on topics that are of importance to librarians!

A theme that came up (and I think will come up week after week, as it relates to social software in general) is letting go of control.  It’s clear that the person who creates and administers the wiki can control how much or whether people can contribute to it, and some have chosen to make their wikis less collaborative than others.  In a true wiki that lets everyone edit the work of everyone else (such as Wikipedia) rules seem to emerge as to what is acceptable and what is not, but I wonder if using a wiki in a work setting is as easy. I imagine that it must take some practice to get people to let go of the ownership of their work.  To me, this is one of the central issues in using social software.

Many people commented on (and clearly enjoyed thinking about) last week’s reading by Jill Walker about blogging as a student.  One of the issues that came up was the chance that when you commented on another blogger’s post (or even on a published article), you might get a response.   I understood the feeling’s of Walker’s students who thought, “Who, outside of my professor and classmates, will be interested in what I have to say?”  Well, yesterday I received a comment on my blog post called Another Point of View from the author of the article that I was writing about.   You can go to the comments section if you want to see what she had to say.  I think that this is just amazing – not only that she commented on what I said, but that she and I are now engaged in a conversation (of sorts).  Now, this might have more to do with her openness than just the nature of blogging, but I find it fascinating and exciting to be able to interact with practitioners in the field in this way.

Some interesting points came up in this week’s readings, one of which (photoblogging) I’ve already mentioned in a previous post (and I now have a new addiction – following photoblogs).

The Long Tail

In Blogs in Plain English, the commentator said that blogs appeal to a high number of small audiences, referring (without explicitly saying so) to the Long Tail (which also came up in last week’s readings).  If you don’t know much about the Long Tail here is an interesting article in Wired magazine by Chris Anderson.  In it, he uses the example of Amazon which combines “infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. The result: rising demand for an obscure book.”  I find this concept fascinating – that now people with obscure interests have ways of accessing the material they are interested in – think zip.ca (or Netflix) or amazon.ca.  As a marketing tool, it has amazing potential:  “the average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles” (that long tail of demand).  Now – you ask – how can we use this in libraries?  Well, honestly, I don’t know the answer because, unlike Amazon, we don’t have infinite shelf space (for the really obscure titles Amazon doesn’t even hold the title, they order it from the publisher when you request it – just in time bookselling).  Any ideas how we can take advantage of the long tail in libraries?

Blog Criticism

I also enjoyed Jill Walker’s article “Weblogs: Learning in Public”.  It had many interesting points but the one that intrigued me most was that many people have an assumption that they can analyze and criticize blogs just like any other creative output.  However, when we do, we come to realize that we (as bloggers) are on the same level as the material that we are reviewing (so different from the print book review), that we will often get a response and sometimes hurt people’s feelings.  Just another reason to tread lightly.  I am very aware of these things (although I have to say I am with her students who were very surprised that anyone outside their class might read their blogs) and I might be engaged in a kind of (what I consider sensible) self-censorship.  Does that mean that, as according to Lindy Dreyer and Maddie Grant (in their article on why people don’t comment on blogs) that I am creating one of those bland, uncontroversial, unengaging blogs?

Virtual Roving Reference

I loved Brian Mathews’ ideas in “Intuitive Revelations”.  He created a kind of virtual roving reference, but I was sorry that he didn’t describe in more detail how he actually did it.  For instance, he said he followed bloggers who had selected Georgia Institute of Technology as their academic affiliation.  Now, how did he do that?  Is there a way to search blogs by affiliation?  Another interesting idea would be to do this sort of thing on Twitter – where people are even more likely to express their frustrations with library services or resources.  I know that you can search people’s bios on Twitter with TweepSearch and so it would be easy to follow all UWO students on Twitter.  Take note, this might be a good idea for a final project in this class.

Case Studies

This is already getting too long, but I did want to comment on the case studies.  I looked at the academic libraries because that’s where I want to work.  I think we hope that the blogs produced by these libraries answer questions and spread information about key library resources or information literacy.  But it seemed to me that The Virginia Commonwealth University blog contained mostly technical questions: about computers, the bathrooms, opening hours.  Now, I’m sure this in not unlike the ratio of technical to meaty questions that come up at the reference desk, and it was clear that the blog also answered some meatier questions.  I don’t mean to make it sound like we shouldn’t answer these technical questions – our users need that information, but how do we get to those people who have meatier questions but aren’t asking them?

The Google Reader blog just announced that now, through Google Reader, you can follow changes to a page that isn’t a blog or doesn’t have an RSS feed (like news sites).   My first thought was that this would be a great way to follow the four or five library job sites that I use.  Now, I use Bloglines, but for this I might switch to (or at least set up an account at) Google Reader.  How devilishly clever you are, Google!

Isn’t it funny how once you’ve heard a new word that you didn’t know before, you hear it over and over again?  This is what happened to me this week with foursquare.  When it was mentioned in our weekly chat, I had never heard of it.  Then a friend mentioned it to me on the weekend.  Today I saw a blog post about it.  Is foursquare useful for libraries?  Well  David Lee King thinks so.  Take a quick look at his post and see whether you agree.

In doing this week’s readings I came across an interesting concept: photoblogging.  It came up in Anatomy of a Blog (the 2.4 Commentary section).  Apparently photographers (many of them) are putting out photoblogs where they post their photographs with little or no information (except maybe the exif data).  The Photoblogs site has a Hall of Fame where photoblogs they’ve decided are significant are listed.  There is some wonderful work in these blogs and what amazed me even more was the number of comments they were getting.  As anyone knows these days, there are a lot of photographs online (there seems to be some debate about how many photos are on Flickr alone – but the consensus is somewhere north of 4 billion).  As Bill Turkel said in his Digital History class, in an age of abundance the only thing in short supply is attention.  As a photographer, how do you get your photographs seen?  In my case, I photograph for fun and pleasure, but I always want to be thinking about my photography and getting good constructive feedback – both what works and what doesn’t.  I’ve never thought of going to the web for that (yes, I post my photos on Facebook but that’s just for my family and friends and they generally just say really nice things – not that I’m knocking that!).  Perhaps I’ll create a photoblog one day.

I just read Rochelle Mazar’s article on “Libraries and Social Media” in the OLA Access magazine.  For those of you who get the magazine, you can have a read, but the article isn’t online at the OLA site.  The closest I can bring you to it is Mazar’s post on her blog which appears to be an early draft (or maybe parsed down version) of the article.

She has some interesting points.  She says that “I just haven’t seen any compelling reasons why libraries absolutely must use social media networks”.  That being said, she explains how her library (the University of Toronto Mississauga Library) is using Twitter to deliver announcements.  But that’s only the first step – their RSS parser then posts those feeds to the library website and they also go up on the library’s digital signage.  So – they are using Twitter as a tool to push out this information and they chose Twitter because it’s easy to syndicate and easy to use.  Interesting.  The librarians chose this tool because it served their purpose but, as Mazar admits, they have taken the interactivity out of the technology, thereby not really using it in the way others advocate it should be used.

Mazar also notes “that people over 25 make the best use of social media tools”, which I found interesting.  I had thought that as an academic librarian trying to engage undergraduates, social media would be the way – but maybe that isn’t where they are yet (or they don’t want to engage with social media technology except to keep in contact with their friends).

Finally, she believes that “social media’s current focus is on individuals with passions communicating with other individuals with passions” and because of that, it may not serve the needs of institutions.

Being so new to this discussion, I’m not sure what I think yet – I just found it interesting to find this point of view being presented by a woman who is an Emerging Technologies Librarian and a self-admitted fan of social media.

I have just finished the readings for this week and I think they were a great introduction to the course.  I feel much more comfortable now that I know what Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 are and, more importantly, something about their potential in a library setting.  Potential, I guess, is the key work.  I feel that libraries are transitioning (sometimes smoothly, sometimes with some resistance) into exploring the possible benefits of these technologies and the philosophies behind them.  I found some of the ideas (central and peripheral) in the articles were intriguing, while some I was not sure I agreed with.  So… some random thoughts:

Letting Go of Control

Jack Maness says that Library 2.0 “is a user-centered virtual community. It is a socially rich, often egalitarian electronic space. While Librarian 2.0 might act as a facilitator and provide support, he or she is not necessarily primarily responsible for the creation of the content”.  This is not an idea unique to this article: it came up in a number of the readings (the Kroski article, for one).  While on the surface this is touted as a benefit of Library 2.0, I think it is a great challenge to many librarians to think about letting go of control.  We come from a profession that has catalogued and controlled access to all sorts of information for at least a hundred years (or more, depending on how you define librarianship).  Now we’re being asked to open the gates and let the library users in.  Not only in, but in so far that they are creating the content.  For those of us new graduates, whom I think many older librarians expect to be comfortable with these technologies and ideas, this is a challenge worth keeping in mind.  Tread softly but assertively through the potential resistance!

John Blyberg also tackles this idea in his article.  He says, “If we are going to play host to non-authoritative content (which it is when it comes from our patrons), then how do we designate that? L2 ushers in an era where this becomes something libraries need to do. There is a lot of fantastic non-authoritative data–we just need to get off our high horses and decide to make it available. The matter of how to mark it as non-authoritative is still pending, of course.”  He gets at the issue in a much more direct way than I did in the previous paragraph (the high horses reference), but he brings up an interesting point.  First, user-generated information is not the same as information generated through a peer-review process and librarians know that.  We are not being asked to equate the two.  Second, we haven’t found a way yet of marking this information as non-authoritative.  When we have, it will make its integration into our offerings much more palatable.

We are the Vanguard (or maybe we’re running just behind the vanguard)

Henry Jenkins believes there is a kind of hidden curriculum in participatory cultures which are “shaping which youth will succeed and which will be left behind as they enter school and the workplace.”  While I know he was talking about students much younger than us, I thought about it in a personal way.  Over the break I spoke to the head of Human Resources at a large academic library.  He believed that new library grads were expected by current librarians to be comfortable with technology and especially with the technology and ideas around Library 2.0.  It made me glad that I’m taking this course, but also a little daunted.  I never thought that I would have to be the one spearheading the implementation of new ideas and technologies with which I was only vaguely familiar a year ago.  But, isn’t that why we come back to school?  To be exposed to new ideas and new paradigms?

Making it Easier to Get to the Information

Rick Anderson made an interesting point when he said, “We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning.”  It seems so simple when he puts it like that!  We spend so much time and effort trying to figure out how we can teach users to access information through the maze of databases and interfaces, but we (ok, I) have never stopped to think that maybe it would be so much easier just to make the information more accessible.  I know that that isn’t easy – we have large and powerful vendors to deal with, but I like it as a goal.  Whenever possible and wherever you can influence these things – try to make the information easier to access.  I imagine that this isn’t a priority for some librarians because they think it might lose them their jobs.  I understand that fear, but isn’t our primary focus to connect our users with the information they need?  If we make that so easy that they don’t need us any more we will just make ourselves relevant in other ways.

The Library Routes Project is a wiki that should be of interest to most of us in library school.  It contains links to people who have blogged about “their library roots (how they got into the profession) and their library routes (the jobs they’ve had and how their career has been shaped)”.    So – it’s not only interesting because it demystifies how librarians got to where they are, but it may also introduce you to bloggers that you would like to follow.

If you’re setting up your blog aggregator and are interested in academic libraries but don’t know which blogs to follow, have I got a page for you.  100 Best Higher Education Blogs has a whole section on academic librarians and includes some blogs I already follow and would recommend: The Academic Librarian, Finding Contexts, the WorldCat Blog and the ACRLog.  Sift through them and see which ones catch your fancy.