The Nascent Librarian

The Tompkins County Public Library has an amazing collection of graphic novels, including the entire run of the manga masterpiece Lone Wolf and Cub. Being able to get those books out, often five or six volumes at a time, was a phenomenal thing for me a few years back; the work truly lived up to its reputation.

Two weeks ago, I checked out Lone Wolf and Cub 2100 from the same library. This more recent, American work, adapted the tale into a shorter form, and temporally shifted the setting into a post-apocalyptic future. It was entertaining, but lacked the power and impact of the original. I also couldn’t help thinking that I’d read a better post-apocalyptic LW&C pastiche. Then I remembered: I had, years before, and was called Grendel: War Child. Unfortunately, I’d read borrowed copies of the original single issues, and the library didn’t own the compilation.

Thank goodness for interlibrary loan.

A week later, I was reading through said compilation and finding my memories of its quality were not unearned (though it may be the goriest of the three works cited here, which is something of an achievement). It was also interesting that it inverted a common element of American works that draw on Japanese inspirations: it was in many ways a samurai story with a cowboy ending, rather than the reverse.

This sort of thing is why I love libraries.

The project I’m working on for my library school internship involves setting up a single research portal for use by the faculty of an academic department (the very department which granted me my BS, in fact). I’m in the process of vetting both content and the system to manage that content, and it’s the latter that I’d like to pick folks’ brains about.

It doesn’t look like LibGuides is going to fit the bill for what we’re trying to do, and I’m not sure that Drupal will be within my capabilities given the time frame for this project. So right now I’m looking at other CMSs, as well as systems like wikis; this article by Edward M. Corrado and Kathryn A. Frederick was an excellent start, but now I’m hoping to hear from folks who have undertaken projects like this.

The department in question has around 25 faculty members, and is looking for a single website where they can find resources relevant to their research drawn from the Cornell University Library, the U.S. government, and other online and print sources. I’m looking for a system that is easy to set up, easy for the faculty to use, and easy to maintain (since I can only be dedicated to this project for six months, tops).

Any advice, warnings, recommendations or tall tales would be greatly appreciated!

This week I’m the editor-in-charge of the CUL Ask A Librarian reference blog. It’s a project I’ve been involved with for the last year; the blog’s been live for a while now, so these occasional weeks of being responsible for moderating comments and posting questions and answers sent in from the various campus unit libraries are my primary involvement these days. It’s a bit more work on my plate for the week, but it’s worth it: I still think this project’s just as keen as when I joined the working group last summer to help get it up and running.

So, if you’re interested, come by and see questions get answered!

First up: Is there a national association of education directors for unions?

By way of Bruce Baugh’s livejournal, I discovered Worldle: a fun little application that lets you turn texts into (visual) art. I was unable to resist the temptation to so transmogrify my massive planning, marketing, and assessment project from this past Spring:

Also, thanks to all the folks who suggested resources on Drupal! It is greatly appreciated.

Does anyone out there with experience using Drupal have advice on the best way to get started on learning to use it? I’m going to enact my usual game plan (”set up and account and play around”), but if others have better suggetions I’d definitely appreciate them.

Thanks!

(And a note for people who read my previous post: there is a subtle but important different between “narcissistic” and “selfish”.)

…but post infrequently.

The last two weeks have been very hectic, hence the dearth of posts. I’ve begun work on my internship for school, as well as undertaking the planning of a mission to New Jersey to collect a large collection of books that a friend of the library is kindly donating. The latter is turning out to be… logistically interesting. This is on top of my usual workload, by and large, rather than replacing it.

I’ve also found that my bi-weekly Google Calender posting reminders has transformed from a helpful spur to a crushing reminder of how remiss I’ve been. So, I’m gonna delete them all, start from scratch… and hopefully get back to posting stuff that’s a little less narcissistic than this post.

Last week I mentioned a conversation with David Lankes that touched upon folksonomies and the idea of tag decay. Folksonomies are a subject near and dear to my brain, and Dr. Lankes made me aware of a completely new dimension to them.

When I talk up the concept of user-created tags, I often tell folks that it’s a way for those within the libraries to get an idea of how the users are thinking. After all, when I’m on the ref desk showing a patron how to find items on a particular subject in a catalog or database, I’ll usually tell them to do keyword searches to track down a single item that meets their criteria, and then look at the subject headers. These headers will indicate how the database creators categorized the item, and those categories can then be used to quickly find other similar items.

So, it should work the same way in reverse, right? If librarians look at how users tag an item, it can give us a parallel insight into how users think!

Except, as Dr. Lankes pointed out, a user that places a tag on an item may not consider that tag appropriate a year later, as that user’s knowledge, experience, and relationship with the item change. So the picture tags give us gets blurred.

Enter the concept of tag decay*. Tags are no longer permanent, but fade over time; this could mean that its relevance slowly decreases to nothing, or maybe every tag gets a simple expiration date. Such a practice would raise other issues, such as users assuming their tags are permanent. For example, if I still think a resource should be marked “NYS government,” how will the system let me know that the tag I placed in 2007 is no longer valid? Is such a system even feasible without some kind of user authentication, and would such authentication prove too great a barrier to use?

User-created tagging is a technique that I think holds great potential for libraries who want to know more about their users (this is why I mention the Powerhouse Museum so frequently); even without something like tag decay, tagging is a powerful tool for users to customize their experience with resources and to communicate with those who maintain those resources. Addressing the disconnect between permanent tags and impermanent preferences would only help to better meet that potential.

* I found a researcher — Terrell Russell — who uses this term to refer to the growing staleness of tags over time. To clarify, in this post (and in the conversation it describes), the term is used instead to refer to a system that would allow older, obsolete tags to fade into irrelevance automatically. If I write on this again, I may follow Joshua Porter’s lead and refer to the the other phenomenon as “popularity decay”, for clarity.

Friday marked the end of CUL’s Professional Development Week, one in which my own participation was both less and more than I might’ve hoped. On the final day I sat on two panels and made a presentation, but the preparation needed meant I didn’t have time to go to many events during the rest of the week.

The first panel discussed the CUL Mentoring Program, which I’ve participated in since Fall of 2006. I’d only been invited to sit on the panel the previous week, but it was a fun opportunity to talk about a program I think highly of. My mentor, Jesse Koennecke, helped me get into library school and has provided great advice on navigating the ins and outs of CUL, so I was glad to get a chance to talk up the program.

The second panel was on Web 2.0, and consisted of the folks who taught hands-on training sessions for various 2.0 applications over the past year as a part of a program sponsored by the Committee for Professional Development. I taught a session on RSS back in November, and the panel led a great discussion on the application of stuff like blogs, wikis, Facebook, and del.icio.us within the library. However, going on about the potential for that sort of thing on a blog would be preaching to the choir, so I’ll just say it was good to share ideas, and move on.

My presentation was on Berkeley Electronic Press’s SelectedWorks, and the use it’s been getting at the Catherwood Library. The slides were sparser than usual for me, with more time spent on the SelectedWorks site itself. But the product speaks strongly to elements of Dr. Lankes’s keynote address, specifically in how it lets the library cast itself as a facilitator of faculty-to-faculty conversations. The level of use SelectedWorks has seen at Catherwood, and the fact that it was created specifically to fulfill requests from faculty, seemed to get people’s attention.

The case can be made that services like SelectedWorks are within the purview of the academic library, and represent a definitive service that such institutions can offer the academy going forward (which again ties into elements of Dr. Lankes’s keynote). The case I’m less sure of, and frankly one that I didn’t even touch upon, is that such a service likes within the purview of a librarian. I’d like to think that this sort of thing doesn’t just provide purpose to paraprofessionals, but my own lack of experience leaves me without the confidence necessary to claim otherwise. Hopefully, that will change as time goes on.

All things considered, PD Week was probably a good thing for me, in terms of discussing the work with others, learning about what librarians are working on, and getting my face in front of the people I hope to be working with for the foreseeable future.

So, Monday was the kickoff for the Cornell University Library’s Professional Development Week. Keynote speaker David Lankes spoke on “Library Science in the Ivy League,” a presentation he’s been kind enough to post to his blog, as well. I had the honor of escorting Dr. Lankes from his car to the hall wherein he spoke*, and with speaking him afterwards on subjects ranging from tag decay to the slide transitions he used in his presentation. Dr. Lankes’ speech dealt in part with the notion that libraries need to be flexible in order to establish their niche in a changing academic world, a point I think I’ll refer to in my own presentation on Friday.

Before and after Dr. Lanke’s presentation, I got the opportunity to check out posters from three excellent presenters: Pat Viele (”Information Fluency and Physics Graduate Students”), Somaly Kim-Wu (”Blackboard in Numbers”, which was co-produced by Baseema Krkoska), and Erin Dorney (”What is an Unconference, Anyway? Flexible Forms of Library Continuing Ed”). I enjoyed talking with all three presenters, and left with an even greater love of poster sessions in general. (Not to mention a strong desire to attend an unconference.)

2007’s PD Week really helped clarify what I needed to to do actively pursue librarianship. I hope that 2008’s will do the same, even if much of my brainspace this week is dedicated to preparing for my own presentation and panel participation on Friday. Of course, the fact that I’ve gone from audience member to presenter in a year may well say something for the program’s efficacy.

* Why, yes, I did make a joke about escort quests to several people. Yes, they did ask me if I got any blues as a reward; I told them no, I just got XP and rep with CUL and the Syracuse iSchool. It’s only fair, really: it’s not like we were set upon by brigands.

I spent this weekend with a part of my brain insisting I needed to check WebCT. Surely there was a discussion question I needed to respond to, or maybe an assignment I needed to turn in? Wasn’t I waiting on getting a grade back or something?

I’m guessing this will fade just in time for classes to resume in August.

So far, my morning has involved begging off of a campus-wide information competency initiative (a shame, but there’s no way my schedule will allow it right now) and helping several other staff members deal with what looked like a major leak in the ceiling above the stacks. I’ve been in for less than half an hour. This afternoon I’m in charge of getting the keynote speaker for Professional Development Week from his car to the venue for his speech.

I need some coffee.