Monthly Archives: November 2006

Freakishly Personalized

By IRIS Posted on by

We talk a lot about personalization, and about how personalization improves the user’s experiences, and about how personalization makes the user feel appreciated. Well, I’ve just found out that you can take personalization too far. My dad got a birthday card from the dealer that sold him his car several years ago. This is freaky.

It’s funny because we give dealers all sorts of information about ourselves when we apply for loans, but there’s a level of politeness which assumes that the dealer will a) only use the information for the purpose we intended when we handed over that information, and b) pretend not to know the information when they’re in situations outside of that originally intended information exchange.

I remember learning this lesson when working at a small, independent bookstore for several years. We were expected to watch what our regulars bought so that we could recommend books to them that they would like, but we had to pretend not to know that one regular was reading up on divorce after having spent a year or so buying “fix my relationship” books. And we were certainly never to know why that same person later bought the books on managing finances after divorce…

We also collected phone numbers of the customers who signed up for our charity program (buy a book and 1% of the sale goes to a charity of your choice). But we weren’t supposed to “know” their phone numbers even when, after years of ringing up purchases and entering the phone number which served as their account numbers, we could rattle off the names and numbers of several dozen of our regular customers.

There is decency in asking our patrons to provide us directly with information we use for their accounts, or let them know what information we collect about them. But I think there is even greater decency in “forgetting” even readily remembered personal information when we’re interacting with our patrons in contexts outside of the personalized services we provide.

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Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day

By IRIS Posted on by

Last night my car stopped shifting gears. It’s very hard to go places when you’re stuck in first or second gear. If I had a manual shift car, I’d think this was a slipping clutch. But I don’t have a clutch, just a mysterious box where gears float around in viscous fluid.

So this morning, bright and early, I got out my owners manual and figured out how to check the transmission fluid only to find that the fluid is fine. So I called my car guy only to hear that he thinks it’s electrical (which he doesn’t do) and he’s full anyway. But he gave me the name of another guy nearby whom he trusts and who will be able to do this type of thing. So I called the second guy and was able to drop off my car. Unfortunately, I was so stressed out and generally disheartened by this time that an hour long walk beside a highway seemed far preferable to asking for a ride. I’m not quite sure why that was… but there was no way I could force myself to ask for a ride.

So I set off on my highway adventure, thankful I’d worn comfy shoes. It’s funny what you notice about the outskirts of your own town when you take it at 4 miles per hour rather than 55. It forces you to stop and smell the roses that would be there if a highway weren’t belching exhaust fumes. I saw little shops that I’ve never noticed before, and I particularly noticed that the roofing and siding shops looked like they’re doing pretty well after the summer hail storm that tore up the town. I’ve never seen little shops look quite that well groomed before.

I also found a roll of art paper that must have flown out of a passing car and landed among the crushed beer cans, soda bottles, and cigarettes. Inside was printed with a reproduction of coastal scene originally done in pastels or colored pencils.

Trudging along, carrying my work bag, purse, and now a large roll of art paper, I also passed the veterans’ memorial that I’ve never walked through before. It was completed last year, but it’s in an out-of-the-way part of town. No sidewalks lead to it, and only the bike trail passes nearby.

Just before arriving at work I stopped in at the local coffee shop and got a large hot chocolate. Mmmmm.

So, it was actually a fairly pleasant morning, supremely peaceful and quiet. Now, if I can just hold on to the feeling of peace right through the moment where they tell me that my transmission is shot, it’ll cost a bazillion dollars to fix.

[Update: They called. It's shot. It costs a bazillion dollars. And they can't get it fixed for a week. No more peace is left.]

Reading and Vulnerability

By IRIS Posted on by

I used to read a lot. I lived for library trips when I was growing up and would read almost anything I could get my hands on. I was lucky in that my mom was also an avid reader and had a good sense of what I would enjoy, so she would stretch me to read books I wouldn’t otherwise have picked up on my own. Then I went to college, and reading “good” books became a chore that it had never been before. I still enjoyed it immensely, but didn’t often do it on my own (at least, not during the school year). I was majoring in literature, though, so it’s not like I was starved for reading material. This continued through grad school, but there, again, I was studying literature, so I didn’t really notice. But I did notice that after I graduated, I had to train myself to enjoy unassigned reading again.

Unfortunately, I had just finished my re-training when I moved here and suddenly found that I couldn’t sit down and read. I was too stressed, lonely, and generally unsettled to concentrate on the flow of language, to let my mind wander into the prose and see the scenes presented to me, or to open myself up to feel what the characters were feeling. Reducing my strict control over my imagination made me vulnerable to too much that I wished not to think and feel in my daily life.

But now I look back over the last year and a half and realize that I’ve only made it through a handful of books since I moved. 11, to be exact, 6 of which were required by my participation in campus activities. I don’t think I’ve ever read so little in my life, and I’ve never read so little fiction (my preferred pleasure reading). I’ve heard many more books than that because I listen to books on tape whenever I’m in the car, which is a lot. But this is an entirely different kind of reading experience. I have to listen to books that don’t require complex thought because, well, I’m supposed be concentrating on the road, and I also have to stop listening whenever I arrive at my destination.

But now that I’m more stable, I’m trying to retrain myself. I’ve started playing with Library Thing (which I’ve been avoiding because I’d heard it was addictive…. which it is), and in doing so I’ve come across all the books I’ve read and loved, and all the books I expect to love when I get around to reading them. I’ve reacquainted myself with the smell of books, the feel of their paper, and the taste of the air around me when they are open in my lap. Now I just have to convince myself that I won’t fall apart if I let go and let my imagination play over intricate scenes and in and out of people’s lives.

I’ll probably have to start easy, with a fast-paced thriller or mystery. No sense in making this hard. And I’ll definitely have to persuade my cat that he really doesn’t have to continue with his habit of putting one fang neatly through the upper right-hand corner of each page as I read.

Catalog Enhancement: The Struggle Continues

By IRIS Posted on by

I’m a member of the Public Access Working Group (PAWG, which rhymes with frog, tee hee hee) comprised of members from both Carleton and St. Olaf. We’re in charge of making decisions about our shared catalog, and among other things, PAWG has been working on two decisions this year: whether or not to upgrade to Innovative’s WebPac Pro catalog interface, and whether or not to include “record enhancement” in the form of book cover images from Amazon.

The WebPac Pro decision proved to be easier than we thought. Turns out, the ranking algorithm for it’s much-touted relevance ranking stinks. If any of you are making this decision right now, try searching for the keywords Global Warming. You should notice that even though there are some books that have this exact phrase as a subject heading, they get buried pages and pages down your result list unless the exact phrase “global warming” appears in the title. No kidding. Effectively, the default search is a keyword in title search. Now, you can get around this if you put quotation marks around each word (i.e. “global” “warming”), which deactivates the relevance ranking altogether, but there’s no way I’m going to start teaching that in my instruction sessions. So we’re not “upgrading.”

But the more interesting decision is yet to come. Will we include book cover images from Amazon in our catalog? I’ve heard a lot recently about the benefits of allowing one-click access to book reviews, and I’ve heard that our students are used to seeing images on web pages, and I’ve heard that we should do our best to make the experience of searching the catalog as enjoyable and visually interesting as we can. I agree with all of these arguments. Absolutely. After all, as librarians we’re supposed to aid in locating, collocating, and making decisions, right? And book reviews and book covers both move us in the direction of making decisions much more effectively than, say, the height of the book’s spine in centimeters.

But I think our students are used to much more than pretty pictures. They’re used to everything on a screen being clickable, and everything doing something meaningful and more or less useful. Imagine what you would think if you saw an image to the left of a title in a result list. You’d click on the image, right? I would. And I’d get sucked to Amazon. Talk about mixed signals.

Now, I would realize that this wasn’t what I wanted or what was expected of me, and I’d hit the nice little “back” button in the browser and click on titles from then on. But my co-workers and I have noticed a distinct trend among our students. Instead of using our A to Z list to see if we subscribe to a journal or magazine, they find the publisher’s web site. Then they come to us and ask, in all seriousness, if the library has a fund that will help them buy this article online. They’re usually very happy when we point out the A to Z list. But last week one poor kid came back to me after he’d verified that we did not, in fact, subscribe to his journal and wondered if now I’d help him pay for it from the publisher’s site. That lucky kid learned about the A to Z list and interlibrary loan all in one evening.

These students who expect to be able to do whatever it is that site they land on tells them to do. What’s more, they expect that we expect them to do these things. The web isn’t just about seeing things; it’s about doing things. And if we put something in front of our students that implies they should do something that we don’t actually want them to do, that’s a problem.

Of course, we could by images from places like Syndetic Solutions, but that’s expensive. Still, this would be a way to make our records look pretty without threatening mass confusion.

So the upshot of all of this is that I’m willing to be convinced, but I have grave reservations about the amazon solution to our boring catalog. If we’re really interested in providing what users are used to, we’d have to redesign everything, not just slap on some pretty pictures. And that “everything” would have to include all sorts of clickable and interactable options.

But in the spirit of being convinced, is anyone willing to share their experience with the amazon lipstick option? I’m particularly interested if you have any statistics to show how often those images get clicked on. Do your ILL stats change?

Just as a side note, we’re also pondering how best to configure our link resolver… To offer choices of electronic options or not to offer choices, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler to privilege one-click access to beauteous PDF full text or to deepen the understanding of young minds as they develop access preferences from among the panoply of database options. To learn, perchance to dream. To dream of other uses to which they can put databases that appear often in their list of options….

Sorry Will. You’re writing was a lot better, and certainly more moving.

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