InfoSciPhi

But most of all, I suppose, I feel grateful for life itself, in all its rich, tawdry, shabby, wonderful, heartwarming and heartbreaking splendor, grateful to be a part of it, to be able to show up for the sorrows as well as the joys, to witness the way human beings rise to the occasion, be strong and take care of one another when logic might dictate they should be falling to pieces.

I do some of my best thinking of the day during my morning ablutions.  The stuff of my subconscious is still near the surface, and the day’s tasks that lie before me are fighting for priority in the queue.  This morning it went like this.  I started thinking about Kathryn Greenhill’s presentation at Darian Public Library yesterday as part of Library Camp East.  Kathryn is traveling on a grant to study Alternative Discovery Layers and Open Source Software in libraries.  I am happy to call her a friend and enjoyed the presentation that I watched online with a bunch of LSW members.

In the video chat feed several of us were discussing related and tangential issues as she presented.  Amy Buckland and I were talking about libraries as a “place” and the social aspect of having librarians on staff in a side discussion as Kathryn spoke about Pirate Bay as a file sharing service.

In my mind, the idea of libraries competing with web services keeps coming up as a theme we won’t soon be rid of.  But I’m not sure how well we are going to come out of this competition, if it is to be considered such.  It seems to me that when it is purely the issue of information delivery, we certainly are in competition with search engines, services like Amazon & Google Books, and the increasing amount of freely available e-books, music, and movies.

But, libraries have the added advantage of having a brick & mortar presence staffed by experts who are skilled in finding authoritative information.  In spite of how our patrons piss us off at times, we do live to serve and give away as much free information as possible.  Amy pointed out to me that the staff adds value as a service - adds a social aspect to the brick and mortar experience.

So, having all of this in my mind this morning, I started thinking about Blockbuster and how I decide what I want from them.  If I walk into a Blockbuster store, 75% of the time I have no idea what I want to watch - as far as having a specific movie in mind.  I may know I want comedy or sci-fi, but the specifics are settled as I browse, shelf by shelf, through the new releases.  This is also a primary discovery technique that I use when I visit a library.  Sure, I do the OPAC search, find a few things, but then I look at the subject headings, and go there and browse the shelves.  I ALWAYS find things I want, but had no idea were there.

I believe that when it comes to offering virtual services online, and at the same time trying to integrate, present, and circulate content from a physical collection, libraries are facing the same problems as Amazon, Blockbuster, Barnes & Noble, and even car dealers when it comes to what we have available as methods to allow the user to browse and discover.

We use LibraryThing, Syndetics Solutions, WorldCat, Google/Amazon API’s, and other services to enhance the metadata and rich content associated with our hard-copy and digital offerings.  But it still isn’t quite the same as being there.

I play a lot of First Person Shooter games.  In fact it’s about the only type of game I have the patience for besides playing a few Wii games with my kids.  I like the interactivity of the environment - walking around and looking at fantastic vistas, and well, there’s the whole blowing up zombies and aliens thing.

Librarians like Kathyrn have been experimenting for some time with how Second Life can be used by libraries, and, while I think SL is appropriate in some libraries, it won’t work everywhere.  However, the idea is sound and is likely not dissimilar to what we will be moving toward as a service model in the next 30 years.

I sit on the expert panel of TechCast, a technology forecasting think tank at George Washington University.  One of our forecasts mentions that the Metaverse, or a chain of  immersible 3D virtual realities linked together and communicating via the net, is on it’s way and will likely be available and actively in use between 2017 and 2020.

That’s a long time in libraryland.  We still have folks reeling from and railing against the advent of blogs, wiki’s, and chat reference. So, why think about that now?

We have to consider how we can stay on top of these trends and actively participate in formulating the strategies and tools that we will be using.  We cannot continue to be led down the garden path by vendors, corporations, and near-sighted library administrators.

My generation of librarians is coming to a library near you.  We are becoming Directors and Administrators. We will change the way things are done.  We will answer the evolving needs of our users. We will continue to be professionals who stay true to our principles.  But it won’t be the way it used to be.  Life is like that.  It keeps moving and often outpaces the ability of our minds and personalities to integrate it and adjust.  Deal with it.

So, with all of this in mind, wouldn’t it be nice if our online library portals could offer an interactive environment, customizable much like our OPACs (don’t laugh too hard), where the user could login, assume a first-person point of view, and walk around a representation of their library of choice.  I know that this is pretty much what Second Life is doing, but we need more than that.

Via this interactive service point the user should be able to walk into the stacks and browse them in exactly the same manner they would in the physical location.  The Books on the shelves would be able to be interacted with and the information from the catalog linked directly to each virtual book.

Users should be able to walk over to the Staff recommendations section where they will find items from the collection that match things they have previously looked at or borrowed.

The music collection would have 15 second samples and you could look at the CD liners and notes.  The videos will be On-Demand, with links to reviews and trailers.  The users could walk up to service desks, and interact with the library staff and other patrons if they choose, much like Second life.  Borrowing a hard-copy book will be as simple as putting in a hold request, and then either picking it up, or having it mailed to you (yes, I think this will eventually be an option).

The difference is going to be that real services will be heavily conducted in a virtual environment with a physical counterpart still thriving as a hub and community information center.  This model will be slow to adopt in small, underfunded libraries, but it is coming, and it will happen sooner than you think.

Change is damnably difficult - it takes effort, lots of money, - which may not show an immediate and direct ROI - and it takes people who are willing to consider that there may be more than one valid way to accomplish our goals, and that we may not like it until we try it.  It will also necessitate having reasons to adopt this new technology other than doing it because it’s new and somebody did a presentation on it.

How the hell are we going to get to this stage when we still can’t get our stupid Integrated Library Systems to function effectively?  Who is going to develop this?  Who will fund it?

In an article for TechCast titled “The Metaverse: Life in 3D Virtual Environments, Mateo Fernandez states the following:

“One of the most striking trends is the increased investment in these worlds from companies, such as IBM.  As part of its $100 million InnovationJam initiative, IBM is researching existing virtual worlds as well as creating its own version using open standards. IBM’s intent is to collaborate with clients and partners to find ways to solve business problems in a new and better way. As IBM’s chief technologist put it, “We view virtual worlds at a very early stage, both technically and culturally. The user experience will improve as we do more experimentation and figure out how to better apply them to solve real problems in business and society.”

IBM to fund “3-d Internet” project, vnunet.com, Nov. 13, 2006
IBM Research, http://domino.research.ibm.com, May 2, 2007

There are many questions and I do not know the answers yet, but, one thing that is certain is that libraries are going to have to adapt and adopt.  We have been doing this, but we need to pick up the pace while still keeping our core mission and user base at the forefront of our adoption of new services.

We will always lag somewhat behind the cutting edge because our patrons still use expiring technologies like VHS and cassettes, they like hard-copy, and we have to serve those needs.  However, those users are still only short-timers in the extended life of a library.

Those information mediums will pass and deprecate and we will soon have middle aged Millennials consuming digital content voraciously.  Will they still come to libraries when everything they regularly consume is downloadable, on demand, with as much metadata as they need and more?

Sure, they need guides, mediators, mentors, and professional assistance, but if there is money to be made in this regard, you can bet for-profit services will be offering it along with the other information and content services they sell.  “Ask your Blockbuster Service Rep how to find videos related to your search in this genre”

If the video stores and publishers ever decide that there is a market in providing the kind of video content that public and academic libraries offer, we will be in trouble if we don’t buy-in.  I can imagine Blockbuster (or whomever) selling a license to a university for an on-demand video library, with curriculum/collection based packages available, which can be accessed via their own DRM protected boxes in every classroom.

Impending Metaverse and first stage Second Life aside, a true first person, fully integrated, virtual library seems like a possibility if the right company or person started programming.  We need to recruit gamers and geeks into this profession.  We need more programmers and system architecture folks.  We need leaders with vision.  And dammit all, we need money to do it.  Come on Bill gates, pony up!

So, this is where my mind went in the shower this morning.  Sparked by ideas from my friends Kathyrn, Amy, David Rothman and Steve Lawson.  This is off-the-cuff thinking, and I’m sure you’ll find some flaws and holes in it, but it’s the way our profession needs to be thinking if we truly want to distinguish the library as a place AND service from the businesses who ARE our competition.

Oh yeah, I’d be amiss if I didn’t tell the Annoyed Librarian to bite it.  Tolly Ho!

Steven Bell wrote an intriguing article titled “The Library Website of the Future” which was published at Inside Higher Ed yesterday.  He describes what we have been seeing pop up in studies for some time - the dissatisfaction of our users with library websites.

Steven says:

“It is debatable that faculty and students ever perceived the library as the starting point for their research, but these indicators offer convincing evidence that the library’s web portal, more than ever, can make no such claim to that title. We may be fortunate when they go there at all. The future of the library Web site as information portal is bleak. But that’s good news. Libraries have grown too dependent on their Web sites as gateways to electronic scholarly content, and have invested too much time trying to fix what is broken.”

Bell makes strong arguments for changing the methods we use to provide access to content through our websites and rethinking the academic library’s concept of our websites as portals.

I’m sure you already know about this, but in case you missed it, the most anticipated issue in the history of the Journal of Access Services has finally hit the shelves. On the morning it went to press, Librarians were lined up around the block at Haworth Press in Philadelphia waiting for the hottest dish from the Annoyed Librarian to hit the street. Some of them had even been there since 4 AM with thermos’ of hot tea and reading lights.*

Head of Access Services for Pickadilly Technical College, Sally Readsalot, was gushing, “OMG, I can’t wait to see what AL has to say about remote storage. It’s not often that we get a celebrity blogger, with such a sterling reputation for quality content, to write an ENTIRE issue of a peer reviewed journal.”*

On it’s website, the Journal of Access Services describes itself as “the forum where seasoned access services practitioners share their expertise and hard-earned knowledge about this fundamental concern of librarianship”.

So, it totally makes sense that the editors and referees at Haworth have now published ten chapters of featured articles by the anonymous blogger The Annoyed Librarian in the 2008, Volume 5, Issue 4 edition of JAS.

In fact, the vetting process for article submissions includes the following requirement for consideration of submissions”:

“an introductory footnote with authors’ academic degrees, professional titles, affiliations, mailing and e-mail addresses, and any desired acknowledgment of research support or other credit;”

This has led some library paparazzi to speculate that either the AL has revealed his/her place of employment and job title or the Journal of Access Services will now accept fake credentials from anonymous bloggers and not only publish them, but give them an ENTIRE issue. Where is Michael Gorman when you need him? Isn’t this exactly what the Annoyed Librarian is railing about when “she” complains about the degradation of the profession?

Colleen Harris started an “Unofficial Librarian Bio” meme that came out of a FreindFeed conversation that Iris began. Basically it’s the professional bio you would like to use, but understand that it’s not what would get you the job. Here’s my contribution.

Chadwick Seagraves, aka InfoSciPhi, has been kicking around in libraries since he was a young child when he was known to spout answers to questions in MARC format. While he used libraries mostly for catching up on sleep in his undergrad years, he rediscovered them as a student worker where he ironed newspapers to prep them for transfer to microfilm. It’s been a busy eight years since those days spent in the library sweatshops, but nowadays he makes a living as an IT mercenary, selling his skillz to the highest bidder. Specializing in InfoSci black ops, he has garnered quite a reputation as a ruthlesssly efficient “cleaner”.

Is your content management service, giving you fits? Chadwick can make the problem disappear. Seriously. If you need a drive-by training session on using your ILS, he’s your man. Have a cantankerous patron that needs shushing? You won’t find a library grunt who does it like Chadwick. Want to orchestrate a coup in Tech Services? No one gets rowdy Catalogers in line like he does.

An expert in the ancient art of Biblio Fu, he has been known to service multiple patrons at once while resolving ILS errors with his amazing powers of telekinesis. His trained acquisitions attack robots provide a well oiled machine to address your library’s top secret collection development agendas. Working with the state of the art to perfect the best techniques of guerrilla librarianship, Chadwick has perfected his reference interview by applying advanced CIA psi techniques so that the patron doesn’t even have to ask the question. One unruly patron was overheard to say, “Who is that long-haired guy and what did he do to my library card?.

If you got a problem, yo, he’ll solve it, check out the link while Chadwick resolves it.

There has been a great discussion on FriendFeed that I have been following about whether it is pretentious to include the initials of your degree after your name. Christa Burns began the thread with this, “question for the twitterverse - putting MLS or MLIS after your name (like PHD). yes, no, pretentious, useless?”

The dabate has gone on and many folks on both sides have been making valid points, but I feel it is worth my time to quickly reiterate how I feel about this, based on my experiences as a librarian.

I always include M.S.L.S. in my email signatures, business cards, and on Power Points when I teach class. Librarians get less respect in some academic settings and those of us who are also IT get less respect from front-line librarians who sometimes think we’re “just IT”. Nurses, counselors, therapists of all types, etc. use their credentials with their name. I paid a lot of money for my degrees, I’m entitled to use them as I see fit.

I noticed that a few librarians in our consortium changed their attitudes toward me when I started working here. It almost seems that my opinions on library matters are of little worth because I’m now just tech support and am not involved with day-to-day library activities and administration.

Some folks have expressed opinions that they do not believe that degrees count for very much these days. Others have argued that using the degree initials furthers the “us versus them” divides that already exist.

I personally think that if degrees mean so little, then none of us would have paid what we did & put the work in to get a Masters degree so that we could get paid a higher wage than staff & para professionals. I realize that the Masters being the terminal degree means that it is part of the system and thus is necessary whether or not it is of inherent value in and of itself, but I DO believe that it has value.

There are skills and theory that I learned in library school that even staff who have worked in libraries their entire lives might not have picked up. Most people can learn a skill and how to do a set task after being given a process or some training. That does NOT mean that they will understand all of the theory and underlying intricacies and elements that make up the framework that supports that process or requires that the task they perform is necessary.

Here is an example from my current job:

I work on the server via shell access using a VI client, SecureCRT. I am NOT a UNIX admin. I do not understand the mechanics of the work that our sysadmins do. I have a good general understanding of how the server architecture is setup and I know the commands and directories that I need to use to do my job. I am learning about UNIX and some day may have had enough experience and training to feel comfortable that I know what is really happening when I take an action.

However, for right now, I am using a process I was taught to perform a set of tasks that I do not really need to understand in order to execute. We all do this as librarians every day. This is the work that an average library staff worker or paraprofessional does. Forgive me if this is an oversimplification, but I think that you understand the point I am making.

A degreed librarian has been trained in the theory and mechanics of the working library. We understand the big picture about how bibliographic records have authority and holding records attached to them and how the OPAC uses those records to display the collection to our patrons. But more than that, we have had entire classes dedicated to integrating the whole of library processes into a cohesive framework that incorporates the management, acquisition, development, preservation, and maintenance of our collections.

Furthermore, we have been trained to understand the fundamental processes of collating and cataloging those collections so that we are able to adeptly navigate the millions of records available to us and locate the most obscure items in our collections.

Additionally, we have been educated as to the best practices for identifying the most authoritative and valuable information resources for a given question by interviewing our patrons so that we can assist them in actually defining what it is that they are really asking and what they truly want.

Degreed librarians are not “better” people than staff or paras, any more than doctors are better than nurses. There are some degreed librarians who perform more poorly than the staff who work under them. Just like there are some nurses who have the practical experience and on the job skills to make them excellent medical practitioners, there are staff who could teach librarians how to better do their everyday jobs.

However, librarians have spent a significant amount of time, effort, and money to go to school to learn everything needed to run a library. We didn’t just learn a step-by-step process, but rather were given the fundamental concepts and ideas that make up everything that is involved in library science and running bricks & morter, as well as digital, libraries.

That is the core concept behind any degree, but it is also the rationale behind offering and requiring advanced degrees. The amount of specialized knowledge that is attained in graduate degrees and above is worthy of the respect that knowledge provides.

I get frustrated with the line of thought I hear often that states that an MLS is worthless or overvalued. I think we are doing the profession a disservice by undermining a degree in a field that already seems to be stereotyped and UNDERvalued. Our credentials make us the experts.

The skills are great, and the knowledge that underlies that is incremental, but the credentials establish our authority in a credential driven world. It’s not just our profession that recognizes a credential. It is the “system” or world in general. If we lose that hold on our expertise, then Google has won.

I also think that this is part of what Greg Schwartz often talks about regarding our profession’s general inability, discomfort, or aversion when it comes to marketing ourselves and taking credit for who we are and what we do.

I put blood, sweat, and tears into the 7 years I have spent at university. I went to grad school full time year round and finished my degree in 3 semesters and a summer session because i needed to get back in the job market as soon as possible. I earned every letter of that acronym.

I do not want to contribute to any divide between the degreed and non-degreed. I don’t want to seem pretentious. I do want to take credit for what I’ve earned and what I know. I do want to present an image of librarians as information professionals whose contribution to society is a result of their receiving a quality education from an accredited academic program in an advanced course of study.

Geez, am I sounding like AL today? Heaven forbid. I’m way too twopointopian for that….

Meredith Farkas accurately summarized this conversation by pointing out that “it’s very context-specific, and no one should feel like they’re being pretentious for putting it (degree initials - my note) on anything if there’s a good professional reason.”

A standard disclaimer here would include my mentioning that this is just my opinion. I am quite happy if you disagree with me for your own valid reasons.

Well, I’ve finally redirected my site to point here, so if you’re here now, thanks for stopping. I’ve been writing more recently than I have in 10 years and I don’t see why this shouldn’t extend into my professional musing and observations as well.

My problem is that I tend to either microblog, or “write a book”. I’m going to strive for the former in order to actually put something out there instead of the “all or nothing” apprach I have had for the past year. Stay tuned.

Chadwick

I am continually struck with the fellowship and friendships I’ve developed with so many kind and wonderful people all over the world. I am truly honored to know so many people I respect and care for. Some of them are folks I’ve never met in person, but with whom I share intimate details of my life, love, and happiness. In turn, they share their experiences with me.

The one thing that sticks out to me is that we all experience and share so many of the same sorrows, tragedies, regrets, as well as the happiness, satisfaction, and successes. It is this shared life experience that inspires the pathos that gets at the very root of what it means to be human, alive, and conscious.

I sent the following thoughts to a kind and compassionate soul who shared some of his life experiences with me today. I hope he won’t mind me reposting here.

Each time I mention the tragedies I encounter in my life, so many wonderful folks share their experiences with me and I know I (we) am (are) not alone in our sorrows and travails. I strive not to focus solely on the negative things that happen in my life, but they can’t help but come out at times.

The shared human experience is the bond that unites us when we are able to allow ourselves to care. There is so much pain and suffering in the world that it is impossible to feel empathy for ALL of the hurting folks without succumbing to anomie, misanthropy, and cynicism - the abyss that is the dark side of the human condition. So, in knowing the worth of your sympathy, I place great value in the empathy and commiseration you, and so many others care enough to give to me.

We do so much for family, but it’s often not enough or even the right thing they need.

Many of the sorrows we see our loved ones go through are the result of a long chain of bad choices, mixed with varying degrees of mental illness, unhealthy doses of plain old bad luck (karma?) and frequent evidences of Murphy’s Law. However, like the existentialists claim, we may not always be able to control what happens to us, but we control how we deal with it and what we place value on.

Not that saying this means that actually managing our value assignment is easy. No, far from it. The will power and fortitude required to be a truly authentic person eludes many of us a fair amount of the time. We do the best we can and hope to look back with as little regret as possible.

After my brother’s suicide, the great tragedy of my life, I spent a lot of time dealing with PTSD and contemplating anxiety, grief, and sorrow. One realization I had concerns fear. I’ve come to look at things this way:

Regret is Fear of the Past. Anxiety is Fear of the Present. Dread is Fear of the Future. I just want to eventually be able to live life with as little fear as possible.

My 7 year asked me what I am afraid of last week. He was holding a fake bat behind him, so I know the answer he wanted, but it made me think. I’m not afraid of snakes, spiders, heights, war etc.

The only real fear I could think of was this: I’m afraid of losing the people I love - the only thing that is inevitable in life if you let yourself feel love. After saying that, and telling him I loved him, I told him I was also afraid of bats and promptly had one thrust in my face. That’s the way life is, if you’re afraid of bats, you should expect them to be thrust in your face. It WILL happen.

Thank you for sharing your stories with me. It’s amazing how many of those tales run parallel to mine. I have sometimes thought that the average person, if they had the writing skill, could compose some of the best comedies and tragedies ever just by sharing a lifetime of the experiences we all go through at some point in our existence. Many talented artists, actors, dancers, and writers do this for a living.

The Dalai Lama said, “Basically we are all the same human beings with the same potential to be a good human being or a bad human being … The important thing is to realize the positive side and try to increase that; realize the negative side and try to reduce. That’s the way.”.

I have been ill all week and almost canceled my workshop because of it. My Doctor told me this morning that I have pneumonia. My wife and younger son have stomach flu. I’ll post the rest of my notes and thoughts as soon as I stop feeling like death. I’ll be posting my workshop notes and documents this week as well and will send them via email to the wonderful folks who attended. Thanks for your patience.

A good time was had by all…