May 7, 2008
Has anyone tried Page2RSS yet? It creates RSS feeds for pages that don’t have them.
Only heard about it recently and am trying it with the C&RL preprints page (which is open access now — shiny!) but it hasn’t been updated since I started the feed so I’ve yet to see whether it actually works.
I know, I know: Patience, young Skywalker.
May 6, 2008
Comps are June 27, so now that the spring semester is over it’s time to get to studying. Well, sort of. Gotta take a little vacation first!
But once back I’ll be meeting with a friend on Saturdays to review, covering one core class per week as well as any current events that might go along with the topics at hand.
Here’s the schedule:
May 17 = The Basics (5033). Includes ethics and values; data, information, and knowledge; Ranganathan; information society (economics, policy, security).
May 24 = Management (5023). Includes planning and goals; organizational culture; human resources; communication; leadership; budgets; evaluation.
May 31 = Organization of Information (5043). Includes standards and standardization; access and authority control; vocabulary control; metadata; classification and categorization; intellectual property and copyright.
June 7 = Information Users (5053). Includes information behavior models and theories; learning styles; cultural perspectives and communities; information design and display.
June 14 = Research Methods (5713). Includes experimental design; ethics and IRB; assessment and evaluation.
June 21 = General Review.
Anyone else taking comps this summer and who wants to join us in Norman at noon on these Saturdays, please email me or leave a comment and I’ll let you know the location.
(PS to Linda: given what gas prices are doing I may not bop up to Tulsa after all, but let me know what study schedule y’all come up with just in case.)
May 2, 2008
Y’all have probably heard about the copyright fight going on between the Oregon Legislative Counsel and Justia, which posted the full content of the Oregon Revised Statutes, apparently without permission. (For those who are unfamiliar with this, you can catch up at the Washington Times, the Citizen Media Law Project, and ars technica.)
As others have pointed out, we don’t know the whole story yet, which makes it difficult to say much (see also their post on the difference between session law and statutes, and further updates here and here).
That being said, I consider myself to be on the side of open access, and if the revised statutes weren’t available online at all, I’d most likely come down on the side of Justia. But they are available (here). Ok, so the site needs some work, but there it is. Full content and freely available.
And, more importantly in my book, it’s direct from the source. I’m always a little wary of looking up laws, legal cases, and the like online because there’s no way of knowing what changes — whether necessary, accidental, or malicious — might have been made. Even though online sources aren’t the legal sources (the printed versions are), if it’s on the site of the originating body I at least have some confidence that someone’s at least making the necessary updates.
(Full disclosure: I worked for the Oregon Office of the Legislative Counsel almost ten years ago.)
April 17, 2008
At work we recently conducted a user survey of the students (the faculty and staff one will happen later). The response rate was low but acceptable. While I’m still pondering the results, it seems we got some useful information.
For example, I was rather surprised at the number of folks who said that they use the library for pleasure reading. Since we’re an academic library, I would have expected the “nevers” to outweigh the “mostly” and “sometimes” responses, but that wasn’t the case. This makes me feel a bit better about having recently pushed for us to pay more attention to the various literature awards. Our English department is big enough that we need to do this anyway, but that others might find such titles of interest is nice to know.
There were some strange things, too, of course. We had two questions about the service points at which users can receive assistance: one for comfort level, and one for satisfaction. For both questions there was a “have not asked” response option, but the numbers didn’t match. They’re lower under the comfort level question than they are for the satisfaction question. My guess is that people were marking their level of comfort with the possibility of asking a question, but maybe there’s some other explanation?
And then there were the comments. I never quite know what to do with comments, especially the suggestions. A very few — like the fact that the computer keyboards aren’t as clean as they could be — are easily addressed, but the majority — more computers, more periodicals, more books, open longer hours, comfy chairs — would take a good bit of money. Which we don’t have. But we asked, which means we need to act on these things somehow.
At least this was our survey (one person even commented on how nice and short it was!). Recently a survey went out to OU students that was about the library, but the library didn’t send it and the questions were either really awful or just plain weird. It was sent by the Public Opinion Learning Laboratory (though it isn’t listed in their current projects). I wish I’d printed the thing out so I could give examples.
Another one I wish I’d printed out came through my inbox the very next day, from two sociology professors who are interested in college students’ racial attitudes. Only the questions were so loaded that I skipped most of them and ended up wondering about the racial attitudes of the professors. Turns out that one of them teaches research methods, which has me a little worried.
Anyway, it seems that surveys are in the air as there’s been a discussion regarding them going on all morning on collib-L. Happily, there seems to be consensus that folks are willing to answer surveys from library school students. As long as they aren’t too long. Or annoying. Or poorly worded.
In class last night we talked a bit about the two surveys that were sent to the OU population, and Dr. Van Fleet ended by saying that doing a survey is easy. It’s doing one well that’s difficult and time-consuming. Despite the lengthy, sometimes hair-pulling, process we went through at work in order to create our survey, I’m very glad we did.
April 8, 2008
This weekend Linda was awarded the Tomberlin Scholarship — congratulations again, Linda! Here’s her winning essay, which I said in a comment is far better than mine. And it is, for the simple reason that it was what the committee wanted. Well, that and she didn’t climb up on a soapbox. Something about short deadlines seems to induce in me a need to rant.
Anyway, just so Linda can see what I meant about the relative quality of our essays, here’s mine:
“Thank you for considering me for the Irma Rayne Tomberlin Scholarship Award. It was a pleasure to be nominated
“A converted dorm room full of dog-eared paperbacks was the setting for my first library job. Serving 600 liberal arts students looking for an escape from their studies, we specialized in genre fiction and lax due dates. Ten years later, after a small side-track into teaching, copy editing, and bookselling, I returned to libraries — this time in the active atmosphere of a well-used small town public library. I owe my decision to become a librarian to the people there, both patrons and staff.
“Soon after applying for library school I was given the opportunity to begin working in acquisitions at a medium-sized academic library and quickly realized that my niche had found me. Prior experience with vendors and invoices, budgets and databases gave me the grounding necessary to not just do the job, but to consider it in the wider context of the library. What I discovered was simple: we facilitate access to information. No matter what the format or who the patron, whatever larger institution of which we’re a part, people who work in libraries do their best to ensure that information gets into the hands of those who require it.
“Why did I not say ‘librarians do their best…’? Because it takes every library employee to ensure that information is accessible. From the copy cataloger to the students at the circulation desk to the IT guy sitting across campus, ensuring that the proxy server and the firewall continue to play nice, it takes us all. And I wanted to get that statement down on paper now, before my professional career officially starts, while I’m still clearly remembering the realities of the day-to-day life of a paraprofessional library employee, because one day I will read a job ad with the word ‘director’ or ‘dean’ in the title and think that it could conceivably apply to me. I don’t want to reach that point having forgotten what it’s like to be the acquisitions assistant.
“There is still a lot for me to learn before I will be a capable library director. I am a generalist at heart. That’s why my bachelor’s degree is from a liberal arts university; I didn’t really want to pick a major. That’s why I love the smaller academic libraries; I’ll get to wear multiple hats, no matter what the actual job description says. That’s also why it is tempting to just leave the administration to someone else. But if I truly believe that what we do is important — and I do — then I cannot be content to watch our administrative positions be given to people who may or may not understand the importance of our basic function: facilitating access to information.”
April 4, 2008
Several hours after the fact, it’s just hit me that I’ve enrolled in my final class for this degree (collection development, in case you’re wondering). Granted there’s still lots to do before this semester is put to bed, but time-wise it’s only one month. Then the summer semester starts June 2, and comps are June 27.
That’s not all that far away. Linda has already started studying a little each day — I love her idea of writing the core values on her mirror, so she’ll see them every day. Eventually my apartment is sure to become a shrine to comps, but spring cleaning has to happen first.
I have, however, scrounged some unused catalog cards and a ring clip to keep the stack together. They’ll make great flash cards.
April 1, 2008
Saturday morning my archives class got a behind-the-scenes look at the archive of the Oklahoma City Memorial. From an archival perspective, it was very interesting because so a large part of what they’re preserving is atypical — items from the fence (stuffed animals, rosaries, memorial wreathes,etc.), shovels used in the recovery effort, the playhouse from the daycare.
As long as I was able to focus on what the archivist was saying, I mostly managed to keep in an analytical mindset. Even seeing some of the evidence from McVeigh’s trial in Denver wasn’t too bad. But it did get a bit overwhelming when I started reading the labels on the boxes I was standing near, which happened to be of small items — such as Mardi Gras beads and WWJD bracelets — taken from the fence and, on the next shelf down, of unclaimed personal effects from the building itself.
That’s when I started thinking about my trip to the Holocaust Museum and the cumulative effect of spending three hours there one day. How do people work in places like these? It seems like the sort of work that would either follow one home or become completely numbing. The archivist who showed us around said that you get used to it, but I wonder if a certain sense of mission would also be necessary.
Horrific acts can potentially be part of most archival collections, but working in a place dedicated to such a thing would be beyond my abilities. I am very glad, however, that there are people who are capable of it.
March 26, 2008
As y’all know, sometimes being a student is all about the procrastination. And sometimes, it’s all about the procrastination coming back to bite you in the rear. Such has been my last two weeks. So here are a few of the things I’ve been thinking about when not neck-deep in various papers:
Well, back to those papers.
March 12, 2008
Needed a mental break from all the assessment stuff I’ve been working on, so I reached into my “to read” pile and pulled out a paper on incentives in social computing (pdf) that looks, in part, at how people use del.icio.us in information discovery.
The thing that stood out to me was this: People are much more likely to find information through a user than through a tag. Although tags get used to find pages bookmarked by oneself, finding pages bookmarked by others is usually done by subscribing to others’ feeds (here’s my network) or by clicking on the “saved by X others” link (an example).
First off, this is exactly how I use del.icio.us. On the rare occasions I’ve tried to do a search of the site as a whole it’s been worse than useless, and I’ve had the same difficulties with subscribing to tags as the authors describe.
However, they do seem to downplay the importance of tags for the social aspect of the site — something which does not conform to my own use. When I browse through the bookmarks in my network, I use the tags to help decide whether it’s something in which I’m interested. Since site titles can be misleading or uninformative, and most people do not regularly add user notes for their bookmarks, tags are often the only way I have of judging the usefulness of a site without clicking through.
I also use tags when deciding whether to add someone to my network if I don’t know them in real life or through their blog. For example, go back to the last link above and look at the list of people who have bookmarked the site. See all the ones with “system: unfiled” next to the user name? That means the user didn’t bother to add tags. No point in looking at their bookmarks if I’m not going to be able to tell what they’re about! Also, I’m more likely to add someone to my network if they have their tags organized into folders — this makes it much easier for me to see how much overlap there is in our interests.
So even though tags aren’t helpful when I’m searching other people’s bookmarks, they are a big part of how I make judgment calls when browsing. But maybe that’s just the librarian in me?
March 3, 2008
Saturday was the third of six meetings for the archives class I’m taking this semester. Despite the massive hand cramp incurred by the mid term, it was by far the most enjoyable class yet, largely because we got to do some hands-on work with the collections. Well, hands-mediated-by-white-gloves, anyway.
Ok, so wading through yellowed newspaper clippings on the off chance of finding some interesting ephemera is not most folks’ idea of a good time. But I had a blast, and found a photo of an Oklahoma City women’s choir for my trouble. By their clothes I’d guess the picture was taken in the late 1920’s or early 1930’s, but it was a little difficult to see details because of the size of the picture and the lack of a magnifier.
The other particularly neat things in the box I went through were programs to two traveling theater productions: Wagner’s Parcifal and the stage version of Ben-Hur. The former was in pretty bad shape — very brown, and the cover was crumbling — but the latter was beautiful: the cover still white, the colors bright, and the ribbon binding still in good shape.
Oh, and those gloves? The instructor had this to say about them:
We launder these until they become holey, and then they become part of the religious collection.
