Is tenure academic?

I really wanted to make the switch to an academic library where the librarians had faculty status, because I'm on a career path that includes publishing and presenting, and I wanted some credit for that. I'm noticing a scary trend though. Because it was not required in my old job, my scholarly projects were organic. If I did something I felt was interesting enough to share, I wrote about it or presented on it. Now that I'm at a school where librarians are faculty members, I see some of them (and this seems to be encouraged) coming up with half-cocked projects that are not of any real use to the library or the school, just so they can write them up and get articles on their CV.

This is just taking librarians away from their regular (and, in my opinion, more important) job of being useful to their local communities. And, if not that much thought is going into their written content, they're not adding much to their professional community either.

When all that debate was happening over whether or not librarians should have faculty status, I was firmly on the side of YES, because I don't want all my scholarly work to be done on my own time, and for nothing. But if we're just going to adopt all the problems of a crumbling tenure system, I'm less sure of where I stand.

LLLLLLIIIIIINNNNNNKKKKKKKKSSSSS!!!!!!

My dear friend and partner-in-crime, Lisa Rabey, commented the other day that I have been hot and heavy with the link-posting of late. Admittedly, I'm in an odd position here at my new job, as our director is on leave, and so I'm kind of on my own, so I've been filling in time (between new website mockups) with catching up on my RSS feeds. This is a good thing for me, since I've switched focus from reference/instruction/marketing to web services, so I feel like I need to get the lay of the land before doing anything major with the site. That being said, Lisa asked if I could do a post with all the links I've tweeted recently, in one place, and because she's my buddy (and because she is a WordPress guru, and I will need her help with that, as well as a little RSS project I'm working on) I am going to oblige her. Just this once.

Academia

The Researching Librarian: Web resources helpful for librarians doing research | http://researchinglibrarian.com/index.html | I'm tenure-track at my new job, so it's publish-or-perish for me! This site is a good place to get started, including grant sources and a list of LIS-related journals.

How bad research gets published (and promoted) | http://boingboing.net/2013/02/05/how-bad-research-gets-publishe.html | A 2010 groundbreaking article, with research sponsored by NASA, gets published in a highly-respected journal. Within days, it faces serious scrutiny and we now know that it was totally wrong. But the work was peer-reviewed. How do so many experts make such a big mistake?

Gaming Google Scholar Citations, Made Simple and Easy | http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/12/12/gaming-google-scholar-citations-made-simple-and-easy/ | In a recent paper uploaded to the arXiv, ”Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics: simple, easy and tempting,” researchers find that the effort required to radically alter citation counts to one’s papers (and thus increase one’s h-index) are open to anyone who can cut, paste, and post.

Amusing titles affect the perception of research in a negative way | http://rolfzwaan.blogspot.nl/2013/01/the-preliminary-results-are-in.html | Apparently trying to be funny with your research paper titles can lead to decreased confidence in your data. Or something like that. This article didn't have a very amusing title, so I just assumed it was all true. The author later tweeted a link to this article, which says that certain subject areas actually do enjoy a little "linguistic playfulness." I don't really want to know where library science falls on this spectrum, but I suspect it falls firmly in favor of puns.

Cool Tools

Bookish Uses Big Data and Real Editors to Help Pick Your Next Book | http://mashable.com/2013/02/05/bookish/

This GIF Search Engine Is Everything You've Ever Wanted | http://mashable.com/2013/02/01/gif-search-engine/ | Here ya go: http://giphy.com/#tags/sherlock. You're welcome.

Job/Internship Opportunities

NY Public Library internship: Timothy Leary Papers | http://boingboing.net/2013/02/05/ny-public-library-internship.html

The White House Is Looking for a Few Good Coders | http://mashable.com/2013/02/05/white-house-coders/

EdTech

Using technology to spark interaction in class | http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/02/new-teaching-tools.html

Brains!!!!

The psychology of the to-do list | http://mindhacks.com/2013/02/05/bbc-column-the-psychology-of-the-to-do-list/

The psychology of Tetris | http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121022-the-psychology-of-tetris

Bonus: 

Learn more about Black History Month with 12 free lecture clips from The Great Courses |
http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/BlackHistoryMonth2013.aspx?ai=81145&cm_mmc=email-_-FreeLectSNI20130204-_-body-_-WatchThese

The sociology of Sociology 101 (or "Psych 101" 101)

I just had a really great chat with a professor here, and it got me thinking. I've been pondering the idea of doing my PhD  at some point (I will be finishing my third masters this December, and I'm declaring a moratorium on masters degrees after that.) Having taken many of my classes for this past degree online, I'm fascinated by educational technology, but that doesn't quite cover what I want to research. What I'm *really* interested in is the sociology/psychology of learning behavior in college students.

In the last five years or so, I have gotten really passionate about learning. I want to learn. I need to learn. I take classes, and get degrees, not for a line on my CV, but to learn. This is a sharp about face from my undergraduate years, when skipping classes and bullshitting my way through classes was the norm. I'm not proud of it, and I'm sure my feminist card will be revoked for this, but I even cried my way into a passing grade once. OH THE SHAME!

::ahem:: Aaaaanyway. There came a time in my educational career, when the joy of learning hit me hard, and now, I finally *get* it. But that's not to say that I never have classes where it's just too easy to fall back into old habits. Multiple-choice quizzes, required forum posts with extremely restricted topics that are of no interest to me, slides that the professor has copy-pasted from another source, and formulaic group projects (especially when I can't pick the topic *or* my group members) send me reeling back into "just-get-it-the-fuck-over-with-with-a-passing-grade" mode.

So that's what lead to my discussion with the professor this afternoon. We talked about what factors could seemingly change a bright class into a dull one (time of day, class troublemakers, strict lesson plans created by a third party, unclear performance expectations, banning of technology, etc.)

Educational technology is powerful, but it's not a cure-all. You have to be very pragmatic about what tools you use to teach certain curricula, and you have to understand that it's all a work in progress, always. How your students use technology, and what kinds of technology they use are ever-changing things, and the most important aspect of any class is engaging them. Getting them interested, getting them involved in the learning process, getting past remembering and into *understanding*; that is the ultimate goal, and sometimes you have to sacrifice quantity for quality (that's just a fact of life, right?)

Does anyone know of anyone doing research in this area, or any pertinent books or articles on the topic of psychology in post-secondary education?

Getting our foot in the door to Moodle(Rooms)

My awesome co-worker and frequent co-conspirator Barbara Arnett has whipped up a little library resource search box that can be added to courses in our course management software (we just switched to Moodle.) We're currently working on convincing them to add it to the school's course shell template, so it will appear by default in every single course (where each prof will have the option to remove it, if they so desire.)

We're running into some trouble because we're using MoodleRooms to host the CMS, and apparently they charge extra for this sort of thing, but I have to imagine that this would really be useful for students. In the past, the course shells included a link to the library's homepage, with no explanation of how to use the site once they got there. We never really analyzed click-throughs from Blackboard (our old CMS), but the link was fairly buried (as opposed to having the search box prominently located on the side of every screen, as would be the case in Moodle.)

Is anyone else working on something like this? Did you have any trouble getting your school to add it to the template? Do you think it will increase online resource usage?

SCREENSHOTS (click to embiggen):

library link in Blackboard, located only under "Course Content"

library search box in Moodle, located in right-hand column of every page

Viewing e-books on an iPad

This month, my library purchased an iPad for the staff to try out. We were contemplating initiating an iPad lending program for students, and wanted to play around with one ourselves before committing to such a large purchase. A large part of the discussion about whether or not to invest in the program was if the device would work well as an e-reader for the electronic books in our collection.

With this in mind, the Web Services Librarian, Barbara Arnett, and I decided to make a little video demonstrating how various e-books in our collection display on the iPad. (This was also inspired by conversations with iPad owners on Twitter and Facebook, who did not seem to quite believe me that PDF files did not always display well within a browser.)

The following is the video we made. It's not fancy, and by no means comprehensive, but was just the best way we could find to truly convey an actual user experience with the device. Neither of us had ever used an iPad before this one, however Barbara had taken it home for the weekend, so she had a (very) little experience with it, and I have had an iPhone for over a year now, so I am familiar with Apple's touchscreen techniques.



Our findings: For most of the e-book databases, the books displayed fairly well, but the PDFs lost most, if not all, of their functionality. As far as we could tell, you could not search within them, jump to different sections or download them. For the Knovel and ProQuest databases, the PDFs did not work at all (they just opened the first page of the document, and you not view the rest of it...)

We found that you could get around this problem by going onto a regular computer or laptop, accessing the PDF through the database there, then downloading it and adding it to the Bookman app in iTunes. You then need to sync your iPad to iTunes on the computer, and you can access the full PDF through the iPad's Bookman app. This is a somewhat cumbersome process, especially since most of our e-book databases break the book into sections, so you would have to download multiple PDFs for each book (up to 20 or 30 for an entire book.)

The iPad's native e-reader app, iBooks, has a very nice display, but I'm not sure how practical it would be to build an academic e-book collection in a propriety, device-locked format...

So there you have it. I know that there's no love lost between Apple and Adobe, but it would seem to me that if you work at an academic library that licenses most of its electronic content through databases, where that content is available mainly as PDF files, Apple is going to have to work on a better browser-based PDF reader, or it pretty much kills it's usefulness for us. (Or, on the other hand, perhaps publishers will need to change how the make e-content available...)

Either way, we will not be making any large iPad purchases at this time...

Back in Business...

Well, I'm finally back from vacation, still freaking out about the upcoming semester and the new website... The new students arrived this week, so we've been pretty busy with orientation and outreach efforts.

On an entirely different note, did anyone see Andrew Keen on The Colbert Report? Is it just me, or is his entire persona pretty much pretentious and obnoxious? I mean, I definitely disagree with most of his viewpoints, but I had never actually seen an interview with him, and I didn't realize his whole personality and demeanor were so condescending in general. Ick-o-rama.

And seriously, what is his deal? Can he really believe the internet is killing culture, or is this all just a guy putting on a show to be controversial and sell a lot of books (which would make it kind of ironic that he was on the Colbert Report, no?) I mean, I can't seem to grasp his argument that the internet is putting "real" artists out of business.

What the heck is a "real" artist anyway? I would think the internet just allows all artists to put their work out there, and let the world decide what's good and what stinks. I see it as a great tool for discovering talent and a promoter of the arts. I just can't seem to wrap my head around his argument enough to really find all that much sense in it...

Panic, Setting In...

Well, it's already two weeks into August, and I'm officially starting to freak out. I can't believe the fall semester starts in two weeks! On top of planning our library instruction sessions for the term, as well as our outreach and promotion, we just found out that we are a go on the new website, but the person who will be designing the CMS template (and so basically, the site) will be leaving at the end of September, so we need to be ready to launch by the end of August.

Wait, what?!!! You'd think with all my complaining and scheming and daydreaming that I would be ready for this by now, but when you actually start to put your ideas in motion, all sorts of problems and issues arise. Suddenly we are getting very critical of our planned navigation, and how will we deal with third and fourth-level nav, and what about server stuff, and what are our online forms coded in?! Oh, and we want to overhaul the content too, so new pages have to be created for all the first and second-level links. Yikes!!!

Some issues we've already encountered:

• What to call that pesky database page? People obviously get confused by the term (and rightly so, in my eyes.) So far we've settled on Online Resources.
• What links should go down the left-hand side of the page? These will be our main navigation, and will stay consistent on all pages, so they need to be helpful and fairly self-explanatory. (Right now we're thinking of using Research Tools, Library Services, Special Collections, About the Library, FAQ, and Contact Us.
• What size screen/resolution to design for? Too big and there will be side-scrolling, too small and there's way too much white space. We're thinking 1024x768 might be a good middle ground...

The homepage will also feature a box that gets populated from our blog, and a MeeboMe widget for IM reference.

So, yeah, I'm definitely freaking out a bit here. But alas, my dream of a site redesign is finally being realized, so the scary deadline is also a sign that we will actually get the new site we were hoping for in the foreseeable future.

If anyone has any insight on good library website design, or sites they think are particularly well-done, please send them this way, I know for a fact that I am in over my head, and would be so thankful for any tips!

Desperately Seeking Direction

This summer, only my second as an "official" librarian, has been a tough one for me. As an academic librarian, summers are usually our slow season, and last summer afforded me plenty of time to unwind from the regular school year, and to work on my own little "projects" that got me all ramped up for the fall semester. But this year, unfortunately, we've been stuck working on our strategic plan, as necessary for the school's upcoming accreditation review, so I haven't had much time to work on my pet projects (read: new website new website please good god can we get a new website?!)

So with all the strategic planning sucking up the majority of my brain-power (and patience), I've been a little scattered in other areas. Mainly, I've had some trouble figuring out just what exactly I'm supposed to be doing with the rest of my day. Ok, that sounds bad, I know. But my job title is a bit vague, at best: I'm an information services librarian. Seriously, that's about as specific as my undergraduate degree (in mass communications. Heh.)

Now there are two parts of my job that are fairly self-explanatory, the instruction and the reference parts. When I'm performing those duties, I'm either in a training classroom teaching students how to use the library and its resources, or I'm sitting at the reference desk (usually reading my RSS feeds.)

The third part of my job is outreach, and over the summer, that is slow to say the least, seeing as no one is really around to reach out to.

So any free time I have falls into the tenebrous category of "professional development". I try really desperately to keep up with what's going on in the world of technology, and to find ways to apply relevant technologies to the world of library science. But given the broad interpretation of my job description that my library likes to take, it has become increasingly hard to focus. I like to think I'm generally on top of things concept-wise, but I'm having a lot of trouble finding ways to use that knowledge practically.

My library (like many others, I suspect), is sadly behind in terms of using technology to optimize itself, and I desperately long to re-establish our relevance on campus, but I have no idea where to start, and I am fast growing weary of trying to be the agent of change on a staff where half the people are just patiently waiting to retire, and really don't want to be bothered with all my upstart nonsense.

What to do, what to do?! No really, tell me, cuz I really am kinda clueless on this one. Any suggestions?

(Oh and mind you Blogger is not helping by acting so buggy today! Please, I am a girl with four blogs, this is the fastest way to drive me insane!)

On the Professional Advantages of Being a Slacker and a Librarian

One quick clarification on that title, note that I did not say "slacker librarian", but slacker AND librarian. I liked the sound of the first one better, but I think when you stay late at work just to finish reading all your library 2.0 feeds, and are kept up late at night envisioning all the ways you can optimize web 2.0 concepts in library contexts, you nullify your eligibility for the slacker librarian title. Aaaaaaaanyway...

This past weekend I met up with some college friends in Vegas (you can check out my pics here, if you feel so inclined...), and they expressed their continuing disbelief that I am actually a librarian. My obsessions with organization and technology (which no one actually associates with librarianship anyway, much to my constant chagrin) not withstanding, I think I actually stepped foot in my undergraduate library four, maybe five times tops in my four years there.

Now, at first this dirty little secret brought me much shame (along with the fact that I never actually took a reference or cataloguing class in grad school, shhhh! Don't tell!!! There were just so many fun tech classes I wanted to take more...) But on further thought, I think my college library neglect actually makes me a better academic librarian. Now THAT is going out on a limb, right?

But seriously, how many librarians do you know insist on sticking their head in the sand about the reality of how libraries are actually perceived? I think one of the great things about the library 2.0 movement is that we are truly aiming to reinvent the traditional library, and to once again make it a thriving, relevant presence in the lives of our users.

I know how undergraduates think, because I was a very, very typical one, and not all that long ago. So instead of fighting the same old battle of pushing the traditional vision of the library on them, I can imagine what would have actually gotten me to notice and use the library, and take it from there.

Why My Library Should Invest in Overhauling Its Online Presence

How is it that, in today's technological atmosphere, where users expect to be able to access virtually everything online (no pun intended, but a good one nonetheless, haha...) it is such a struggle to get the administration to realize the importance of our website? Why am I practically begging for them to at least provide me some support in my effort to streamline and enhance our digital presence, and to see our website as a branch of the library, offering all services the physical branch offers?

My justification to them for such an expense? Here goes...

First and foremost, the library’s website is long overdue for an update, ideally including a redesign. Although the redesign of any website inherently carries some risks, probably the most notable of which is making major changes to a resource that is already familiar to its users, the ever-evolving nature of the internet and the emergence of web 2.0[1] concepts makes an update desirable, if not necessary. Website success can often be traced back to several important concepts, including simplicity in design, logical organization and navigation, media richness, and interactivity[2]. In that vein, the new site should be more intuitive to navigate, and organized to facilitate ease of finding information for all levels of user experience. There should be a focus on technologies enabling communication and interactivity throughout the site, and access to resources and services should be seamless[3].

The chief goals of the new site would be:

- Optimize space on homepage
- Improve navigation
- Integrate web 2.0 technology (interactability)
- Clean up content
- Improve access to resources and services

These changes would make the site more intuitive to navigate, and support users of varying levels of expertise:

- Guided navigation for new users (on homepage only)
- Logical hierarchical navigation for normal users (on left-hand side of each page)
- Quicklinks – direct to resources – for expert users (on top right of every page)

The site would also make better use of web 2.0 technology, featuring a news blog to relay important information about the library and information resources in general. The blog would be updated regularly and be featured on the library’s homepage.

A library blog can be a very useful tool for reaching all of the academic community, not just regular library users. It can be used to draw attention to information about library services and resources that might otherwise be buried in the library’s regular website content. It will also act as a witness to how active and necessary the library is, and can promote the role of the library as an information source and guide even to those not currently using “traditional” library services, by also focusing on general web resources, services and applications. In other words, the blog will seek to make the library visible to faculty and students who have “forgotten” about it.

To better reach the students, care must be taken to keep current on what technologies they are currently using, and to integrate those technologies into library services. For example, instant messaging (IM) could be for reference, and social networking software (such as Facebook and Myspace) can be used for outreach and promotion.

Some guiding questions for integrating technology into library services:

- What technologies are the students and professors already using? Let’s bring the library to them (without investing in new technology just because it’s “new and cool”)…
- Can we find a way for professors to create course/subject pages with important links, or a way for professors to contribute to our “resources by discipline” (since they are the subject-specialists)
- Is there some way to allow users in general to identify relevant resources?

Another important issue is online access to library resources and services. The library currently uses a proxy server to authenticate off-campus users, and users also have to register with the library (with their student ID number) to receive a PIN to access certain services. Ideally, they could log in with their username and password and that would provide seamless access to all library resources and services.

[1] McFedries, P. (2006). The Web, Take Two. IEEE Spectrum, 43(6), 68-68. Retrieved April 2007 from the IEEE database.

[2] Palmer, J. (2002). Web Site Usability, Design, and Performance Metrics. Information Systems Research, 13(2), 151-167. Retrieved April 2007 from the Business Source Premier database.

[3] See ACRLog: Formula for Academic Library Success (http://acrlblog.org/2007/05/14/formula-for-academic-library-success/academic-library-success/academic-library-success/)

For my super-awesome powerpoint presentation for this proposal click here.

Designing for the New Web

Ok, I am officially going crazy. The other night I was up until 3am because I couldn't stop my brain... With my library's proposed website redesign (which I am somehow in charge of, simply because I suggested that perhaps an institute of technology should not have a library website that looked like it was done in 1993...) and also my obsession with optimizing web 2.0 concepts for the new site and for our library, I just couldn't make my damn internal voice shut up! Grrr... But thankfully, tonight I am heading off to Vegas for the weekend, and I am leaving all logical, library-related thought blissfully behind.

In my absense, I leave you this post from Ellyssa Kroski at InfoTangle on designing for the new web. It is from her CIL presentation on the topic, and it put into words a lot of what I have been considering for our new site design. I think I had been absorbing all that advice from playing with web 2.0 apps, but it's really great that she put it all down in words and organized it for me :) Anyway, I attended one of Ellyssa's workshops at METRO and I'm so glad I redescovered her blog through the Library2.0 network.

If You Build It, Maybe They Will Come...

http://acrlblog.org/2007/05/14/formula-for-academic-library-success/

My library has heretofore been focusing on outreach, but my position is this, we need a user-friendly, intuitive product to promote, or all the awareness in the world is not going to help us. Users have been known to simply ignore software and apps that they find difficult to use. And facing such popular rivals as Google and Wikipedia, we can't afford to send our students elsewhere for their information.

I Dreamed a Dream...

My coworker and I were discussing online services the other day, and we decided to get all wacky, and describe the attributes of our dream academic library website. So, here goes...

1.) Authentication through username and password, NOT a proxy server that requires you to configure your browser or a VPN. I know this is not a crazy wish, just a little beyond our over-worked IT department right now (and by that I mean the university's IT dept., we don't have our own, so you can see why they're so over-worked). Once logged in, the users would not only have accesses to all online resources, but also all features of the OPAC, instead of needing a separate PIN number, like they do now.

2.) One interface. Uno. Un. Solamente. Dream big, right? The interface would be Ebscohost-like, for no other reason than I like that particular interface. Through this interface, students can access our books, books elsewhere, e-books, journals, journal articles, newspapers/articles, etc. etc. They would be able to customize their search through a series of checkboxes that allowed them to choose which databases they wanted to search, and/or what kind of results they wanted (what format/media, that is).

The results would be sorted not by database (unless they wanted them that way), but by format (I'm sure most users don't care what database the journal article is contained in, so why not put all the journal articles together in the results, thereby allowing for sorting across all of them, and eliminating duplication?)

This interface would also contain links or buttons that allowed students to immediately request an item through ILL/DDS directly from the record (like in WorldCat). For requests that require a fee, students would be given an option to immediately charge their student account (or credit card or whatever...) In the case of requested articles, once the fee is paid, the PDF is immediately e-mailed to the user (one of the complaints we get most often is from users wanting immediate access to articles... No big surprise there.)

You'll note here that I am not a propronent of a simple, Google-like interface that searches everything. I know that such an interface as I propose would be very complicated, and have a steep learning curve, but it would be so much easier to teach only one interface in our library instruction sessions than 5, or 12, or 20... and it would be so much more useful if the user had control over what they were searching in, what they were searching for, and how they wanted their results displayed/sorted.

I'm definitely not techie enough to know just how much of this is currently possible, but I am internet-obsessed enough to know that this is what users will come to expect, and hopefully the direction we are going in.

Well Hello There, You!

My love of all things web 2.0 and my desire to play in the biblioblogosphere has given birth to yet another blog. I currently have a (very) personal blog, and also maintain a blog for my library, but this one seeks to merge the two me's- personal and professional- into a well-integrated, well-balanced (haha) whole.

When, exactly, I plan on finding time to maintain this blog, I have no idea, seeing as keeping up on the myriad of library/technology/design-related feeds I try to keep current with is fast becoming a full-time job on its own, but alas, I will, at least, try.

My interests in the world of libraries lie mainly in academic libraries, library technology, library 2.0, site design and usability, and supporting the distance student. I currently work as an information services (read: reference, outreach and instructional) librarian in an academic (engineering school) library.