An isolated anecdote

I have a number of what I hope will be substantive posts in the works, though I worry their subject matter has grown stale as the final weeks of my semester have consumed my attentions. However, something occurred tonight that I thought was germane to this blog.

As I drove home from a ska concert, I heard a radio interview with an up-and-coming hip hop artist, who was bemoaning people’s tendency to try to fit everything in the world into set categories.

Naturally, my first thought was, “Wow, he really doesn’t care for controlled vocabularies. I wonder if he’d be happier with a folksonomy?”

I think my synapses have been broken in.

Issues of Institutional Repositories

This article on the Digital Curation Blog got me to thinking, yet again, about long-term digital preservation. (Which, I suppose, was kind of the point.) I spend a great deal of my work week maintaining and uploading content to DigitalCommons@ILR, the institutional repository for Cornell’s ILR School. It’s a project that was started long before I arrived at Catherwood, and so I’m not trying to take any credit when I say that it’s a major success. We’ve got a majority of the school’s faculty represented in the repository, not to mention tons of workplace documents and collective bargaining agreements that, often, can’t be found anywhere else online.

Thing is, just about everything in DC@ILR is in .pdf format. Day to day, that’s not really a problem: just about everyone with a web browser’s got Acrobat Reader kicking around on their system, if not some other glorious add-on or extension that does the same job in a manner that particular user considers superior. But thinking long-term, it’s an issue that needs to be considered.

Several months ago, I got to chat about this with a gentleman from Cornell’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. He noted some of the issues facing digital preservation, such as the inexorable advance of software and hardware: we love our .pdf’s now, but what happens if they go the way of the 5.25″ floppy? It’s an issue that isn’t fully addressed by archiving documents in their original format; someday, people will stop using those formats, too.

When we discussed this situation in my digital libraries class this semester, an agreement seemed to be reached that keeping abreast of the current trends in file formats and updating your collection accordingly was vital for the long-term viability of an institutional repository. Of course, the cost of such an effort would be terrifying to behold.

So, as someone who’s excited by the work being done at my library, and hoping to be a part of it for a while to come, I’m going to be watching the Digital Curation Blog for a continuation of this discussion. I’ll also be looking for additional research done on this issue. Because while it’s impossible for me to look at the thousands of contracts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the New York State Public Employment Relations Board and not feel pride… I also can’t escape the tiny voice that wonders what’ll happen once people start asking, “Wait, they still use .pdfs?”

Millennial mythology and users in the wild

One of the most interesting sessions I attended at Computers in Libraries 2008 (and that’s a tough prize to take) was “What Do Users Really Do in Their Native Habitat?” Half of the presentation was by Pascal Lupien and Randy Oldham of the University of Guelph, and the other by John Law of ProQuest. Both halves described large-scale studies done to assess web resources’ usability for and impact on college students. It’s a subject near and dear to my heart, and I look forward to the full reports for use on projects like DigitalCommons@ILR and LibGuides.

As tempted as I am to summarize the results here, Jenica Rogers-Urbanek has already done a better job of it than I could. A lot of the data came as little surprise to the audience: the presenters from Guelph polled the audience about students’ use (academic and otherwise) of PDAs, chat applications, virtual worlds, etc., and the revealed stats matched the audience estimates quite well. But more surprising was that student respondents frequently noted that they wanted to use the library’s web sites because that was where the good information could be found, but were often rebuffed by usability issues. The students knew that Google and Wikipedia and so forth weren’t the best places to research, and they knew that the library had the information needed… but they found themselves frustrated by the interfaces standing between them and that information.

Law (who has, let us be frank, an awesome name) also found users who wanted the library’s information but found it difficult to get to. His study further indicated that many of these students were sold on using library sites by the outreach efforts of librarians. Once students became aware of a resource, either through their instructor or a visit from a librarian, they wanted to use it.

I found these presentations so useful that they went into the literature review for the Assessment Plan I handed in for LibGuides the day I got back from the conference. (An assignment written almost entirely in hotel rooms and airports, which was a first for me. Probably not a last, sadly.) This is great stuff, and honestly the kind of studies that need to be done if we really want to understand how all these electronic resources we buy and build and link to actually get used. Which is, I think, supposed to be the point.

Computers in Libraries 2008

I’m sitting in the overflow space for the Washington Room at CiL2008. It’s a lovely space, with wide, outlet-filled tables perfect for laptops, and quiet while most attendees are off grabbing lunch at the free reception. Me, I grabbed food quickly and ran; things can get ugly when library folks line up. I mean, I started bringing this laptop after I almost caught a shiv in the kidney because someone thought I was trying to cut in the public computer line.*

I’ve enjoyed this, my first real library conference. I think I’ll try to dedicate a few posts to some of the more interesting seminars. I’m going to try to push out two or three posts a week on this thing, so it’ll be nice to start off with a good supply of fodder.

And with that inspirational metaphor for the future quality of this blog’s content, I shall retire to someplace with cell phone reception.

* This statement is a total lie. I’m still in the process of “finding my voice,” as they say in the blogosphere (or at least, in the blogging workshop I attended on Monday). It remains to be seen whether or not “mendacious hyperbole” will remain a characteristic of this voice.

Hey hey

So, this is where I’ll blog about my experiences attending library school online and working as a library paraprofessional who’s trying to make the jump into official librarianship. I’ve been considering doing this for a while, but my experience at Computers in Libraries 2008 inspired me to get started.

Of course, since I’m sitting in a session at said conference as I write, I’ll keep this short.

More to come!