Simon Chamberlain’s library weblog

Techdirt asks whether Twitter and other blogging services could replace partially traditional journalism, by enabling on-the-spot reporting by amateur eyewitnesses. The article suggests that “if mainstream news outlets can get better at tapping these kinds of decentralized news sources, they should be able to report more news with fewer reporters.” I can see the argument - news of the recent UK earthquake broke on Twitter long before any news site had a story. But on the other hand, real reporting requires thought, analysis, contextualisation. Those qualities (to me) are more important than getting the story a few minutes earlier. Newspapers, to me, are caught in a bind - they’re slower than the web, but don’t contain as much depth as magazine or journal articles. Which is why I don’t read print papers anymore, and my online news reading habits are highly omnivorous - newspapers are just one option.

Chris Anderson’s article in Wired discusses why free is the future for businesses. Guess who already gives stuff away for free? (Via several sources including Librarian In Black). He doesn’t write directly about libraries, but it’s worth a read for anyone who wants an insight into (one view of) a new economy.

Sarah Houghton-Jan posts an image showing 50 (bad) reasons not to change. Worth checking out to see how many of these you use. Although I can’t help feeling that some of them could be good reasons not to change. If you really don’t have enough money to introduce a new project, then that sounds legitimate to me. I guess it’s the difference between giving a reason and an excuse not to change.

Yesterday I discussed Susan Gibbons’ book on academic libraries and ‘net gen’ students, and briefly mentioned an innovative project run by her library (University of Rochester). The library hired an anthropologist to work with students, to understand exactly what their needs are, and how they go about studying and writing research papers.

Susan got in touch to tell me that the study had been published; available for purchase for $28, or for download for free, from here.

I’ve downloaded it, and I’m really looking forward to reading it. Obviously not everything will hold true for my students, but I’m sure I can learn something about how I can try to understand their needs.

Timothy shares his library orientation presentation, made on Google Docs with images from Flickr.

Meredith asks if any libraries are assessing their use of social technologies.

Annoyed Librarian on deprofessionalisation: “Many librarians want to turn libraries into community centers, but there’s one interesting thing about community centers that a lot of excitable librarians haven’t noticed. Community centers don’t need librarians. They don’t need people with “advanced” degrees in libraries or information or whatnot. They just need people to staff the cafes and plan stuff.”

Micheal Lorenzen on teaching with Wikipedia.

Jessica Hupp lists 25 useful social networking sites for librarians.

Lee LeBlanc on online vs offline education: “What I’m tired of is hearing outdated opinions about how horrible all online education is. That’s just not true.”

I’ve taken a couple of online courses, and I have to say I found them hard - I sometimes had problems hearing the lecturer or my classmates; we often spent time dealing with the technology instead of communicating; and the lack of visual cues made class discussion harder (face to face, you can see if someone wants to talk, and speak up if no-one does. Online we often sat politely in silence wondering if someone was going to speak). And yet: I enjoyed both courses more than most others I’ve taken, and I got my best grades in these courses. A product of the content/the lecturer? I don’t know. I still feel as though the online courses weren’t as good as the face-to-face, but my performance suggests that they may have been.

Nicole Engard on Brewster (Internet Archive) Kahle’s speech at Code4Lib.

Kyle at TameTheWeb on putting virtual reference in the user’s pocket (via cellphone): also a guest post by a librarian, Joe Murphy, who has done just that. I’m still not convinced of the value of 160-character reference transactions, but for short simple questions there’s clearly a role for SMS (me, I need more than 160 characters just to say hello).

Dorothea Salo on (among other things) why writing works better for her onscreen.

Connie Crosby on whether wikis belong in law firms.

Freakonomics on whether social networking is good for society. There’s an interesting suggestion that people might form more homogeneous friendships if they form them online, “cut[ting] themselves off from serendipitous encounters with those who are superficially different from them, ethnically, socio-economically, and even in terms of musical taste.” If anything, I’ve found the opposite: I’ve met people online who I could not (or would not) have become friends with in real life.

Infonatives on ten brainless things an online academic library can do.

Chris Wilson at Slate points out that most edits on social-media sites are actually performed by a small percentage of users. Yep. While it’s true that a large percentage of those who go online have participated in the read/write web, most of them haven’t done so to any large degree, in spite of the rhetoric.

Phil Bradley recently posted a list of Library 2.0/Web 2.0 books. There are a lot. I’ve recently read several of them,  and I’ve been left wanting more. Not because the writing was bad or the content was bad or wrong or anything like that, but because none of them really told me much that I don’t already know. Sure, I picked up a few things, but overall I’ve read four books that basically told me the same things (blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, gaming) in slightly different words, with slightly different emphasis.

Again, I want to stress that it’s not that the content was poor; more that I felt I knew 80-90% of it, and so would anyone who reads the same sort of blogs as I do. Clearly, then, the books are targeted at a different audience, one more comfortable offline, but (presumably) interested enough in learning about new technologies to read a book about them. A target audience of outsiders, not insiders.

So that’s my problem: I’d really like to read a book that was written for people who already have some basic knowledge, who don’t need to read a two-page explanation of what a blog is*.  Does anyone have any suggestions?

The books I’ve read would all make useful reading for your non-blog-reading colleagues/managers. I’m thinking they’d be good to pass to a busy manager, to give them a brief idea of what you’re talking about when you discuss these technologies.

The books:

 
Phil Bradley: How to use Web 2.0 in Your Library
Meredith Farkas: Social Software in Libraries
Michael Casey and Laura Savastinuk: Library 2.0
Susan Gibbons: The Academic Library and the Net Gen Student
The first three do a good job of summarising the state of play in the sort of subjects that the authors write about on their blogs. I found the third gave an interesting and clear summary of the authors’ model of Library 2.0, but I felt like I wanted more detail on how to do some of the things suggested.

Susan Gibbons has a fascinating book to write about ‘Net Gen’ students, but this isn’t it, unfortunately. Her library took the innovative step of hiring an anthropologist to study studetnt behavior, and inform planning. A book-length write-up of that project would have been incredibly interesting. What we have instead is a very good initial chapter which discusses the characteristics of ‘Net Gen’ students, followed by several more which discuss gaming, blogs, wikis, folksonomies etc - and unfortunately present little evidence that ‘Net Gen’ students specifically are using these technologies (the gaming chapter cites research from 2001, showing the average age of gamers as 26, which would make those gamers Gen X, not Net Gen).

I do want to stress that I found the first couple of chapters to be highly worth reading (Gibbons is making me want to read Howe and Strauss’s work, whereas I’d previously been turned off even by their supporters). I also liked the way Gibbons stressed that her arguments applied to American college-age library users only; too often there’s a tendency for American writers** to talk about “libraries” when they really mean “some American libraries” - not all of us worldwide are in the exact same situation.

So, if you’re reading this, my recommendations? Have a quick read through either Phil Bradley’s or Meredith Farkas’s book (or maybe both). Don’t read it word for word, but pick out the websites and the software and the examples and use them to inform your own work. Hand the book to your less tech-oriented colleagues for a more in-depth read. Read the first couple of chapters of the other two books, they contain a lot of food for thought.

For the authors? I’d love to see the sequels to these books, with advanced tips and tricks, and with lots of examples and case studies of libraries who’ve successfully implemented these technologies.

I’d also love to see more bloggers writing about the books they’ve read.

*I was amused to see that one book, quite by chance, had included text from this very blog - Phil Bradley’s illustration of a blog was a screenshot of The Shifted Librarian’s homepage, on which Jenny Levine was quoting me.

**Not necessarily the writers I’ve mentioned here.

Facebook past its peak? Techdirt reports that Bill Gates has deleted his profile, and points out that Facebook has followed a typical pattern for social networks - “a huge rush of growth…..a flat period where people… begin to question why [they are using it]…. Then people realize that…. there really isn’t that much to do there”. And via LibraryStuff, court cases where posts on social networks have been introduced as evidence.
Jenny Levine reports on some successful games nights in academic libraries - this time meaning geocaching and board games, not computer games.

Teaching information literacy through fantasy football.

A good future for librarians? So say Business Week and US News (via What I Learned Today and the Annoyed Librarian respectively; one of whom is more enthusiastic than the other - can you guess which is which?)

Michael Casey describes instances where professional/managerial/backroom staff have denigrated front-line staff, and says that we all share responsibility for this, if we don’t speak out against it. I’ve only worked in one big library (I’ve been sole-charge, or nearly, otherwise), so my experience is limited, but I have to say I haven’t seen any examples of this behaviour. I applaud Michael’s comments, anyway.

Using Greasemonky to put an “email us” form on the ‘no results’ page of a catalogue (The Shifted Librarian).

Annoyed Librarian takes on the hideous term ‘guybrarian‘. Just so you know; anyone who refers to me like that is no longer my friend

I’m starting to get excited, because in less than two months my girlfriend and I will be in London and looking for work! We’ve been accepted under the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme, meaning we get a two-year work permit, and we can easily extend it if we want.

We’ll be based in London, at least at first, though we’re considering looking at other cities.

Any words of advice or introductions to prospective employers would be gratefully received.

We’ve both already lived in London, in my case for four years from 1997-2001, so we don’t need too much information about the city. I’ve previously worked in a special library in London, and she worked in a public library, so we have some idea about how things work.

I’m looking for a reference position, possibly in a law firm or other corporate library, possibly in an academic library. Ideally, I’d like a position where I could follow my interests in new(ish) technologies and current awareness. I’m also interested in anything with a CI (Competitive Intelligence) element, where I’d be doing more analysis, not just information gathering or showing people how to use databases.

Wish us luck, anyway.

The National Library of NZ has launched Publications NZ, an online union catalogue of NZ material held in NZ libraries. It’s got a reasonably attractive interface and (yes!) allows users to create RSS feeds of searches. On the negative side, it’s limited to published material (so no theses), the list of the libraries that hold a given item is hard to navigate (why limit it to a small scrolling box?) and it only includes NZ material.

It’s great that users will find it easier to locate this material, but how often will they be searching solely for NZ material? We’ve already got the National Bibliographic Database, which allows subscribers to see any item held in any library in NZ; why not just expand that to the general public? I’m confused as to why we need a separate database, with less content than the NBD (albeit a much nicer interface).

Adults ‘encroach upon young people’s turf online‘, and aren’t necessarily welcome on sites like FaceBook and MySpace; and what happens when one’s different worlds collide in these networks (both Techdirt). The latter is something I’ve mentioned here before recently.

Social networking for law librarians (LLRX)

A virtual bookshelf for new books (The Shifted Librarian)

How to promote databases at your library (BlogJunction).