Monthly Archives: April 2007

Best, Iris

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As a child, I remember writing letters to grandma, having them carefully proof-read by my mom, and then copying them onto “real” paper before sending them off. Each letter was signed “Love, Iris” in that wobbly block writing of mine. In fact, that’s how I signed all of my correspondence. And it worked pretty well when I was writing to my family and friends, though not so well when I was writing to a new friend who had just fallen in love with me. (The feeling was not entirely reciprocated, so let’s just say that there was some confusion about my intentions. But it only took us about ten years to get that one cleared up…)

But then I graduated and got a job. I remember staring in some consternation at my very first out-going email as a professional librarian and wondering how in the world to sign off. “Love” just didn’t seem right when I was explaining off-campus database access to a faculty member. I’d seen “Cheers,” so I typed that one in, just to get the feel of it.

It didn’t feel like me. I wasn’t even quite sure what it meant. “Thank you” didn’t seem to work when I was providing a service rather than receiving it, and “Sincerely” was way to formal for me, though I did try it out, just to see. And closing with only my name sounded far too abrupt.

I wanted to sound professional yet also approachable, cheery, un-stuffy, and maybe even a little bit fun. That’s a lot to ask of a word or phrase followed by a comma.

After spending far too long trying various closing lines and becoming equally frustrated with the lack of options and my own obsession over getting this right, I finally typed “Best, Iris” and hit Send. “Best?” What’s that? Best what? Probably derived from something along the lines of “Best wishes to you and your family,” it’s definitely on the stuffy side. It tries to be hip by cutting off all the descriptive stuff and leaving the reader to fill in whatever he or she pleases. It’s even less descriptive than its slightly longer cousin, “All the Best,” which at least sounds more generous, though not any more enlightening.

But I was so relieved to have sent the stupid email without encumbering myself with either more or less affection than I meant, or sounding too earnest or too abrupt, that this abbreviated and incomprehensible closer has become my standard. I type it without even thinking any more, and it has graced the ends of dozens of emails a day for the last two years, varying only on those rare occasions when a more descriptive closer is absolutely necessary.

So if you get an email from me, scroll down to the signature. Your odds are pretty good that you’ll see this habitual signal of my capitulation to ethos over expression.

Best,
Iris

Looking Back

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One of the most interesting things about going to two conferences in three weeks is that the contrasts between them become much more apparent. Take, for example, the dress codes. ACRL was definitely on the business casual side. We all looked exactly like what we were: 3200 librarians. At CIL, things were a little more casual and a little more hip all at the same time. We still looked like what we were, but there was a subtle difference.

Then there was the session envy… At ACRL, if you were sitting in a session that only you and about 10 other people decided to attend, you had a pretty good idea that everyone else at the conference knew something you didn’t and had decided to attend one of the 10 or so other sessions that would have been better. At CIL, if you attended a session that was only one third full, you knew that everyone else at the conference knew something you didn’t and had decided to attend the one REALLY hot session that period. (On the other hand, sitting in your un-full session you also had a seat and didn’t have to sit on the floor in the hall outside of the overflow room, so it wasn’t all bad.)

But no matter which conference, there are always library geeks. “Lunch 2.0,” for example, can only happen in a group of librarians. (In order to achieve Lunch 2.0, you must walk from your hotel and turn right toward many restaurants every day, lunch and dinner, until the last day. On that last day, you must turn left toward different restaurants even though “we’ve never done it that way before.”)

Looking back over these two conferences, I’ve met so many wonderful people, seen some truly cool stuff, and generally renewed my conviction that I’m in the best job ever, and I’m in it with the best companions around. It’s not without it’s frustrations (and after hearing many variations on the theme of “I could never do that at my library” I’m even more grateful for my co-workers and working environment than I was before), but it’s pretty darn amazing nonetheless.

Now, back in my “real world” of Sunday reference shifts, burgeoning to-do lists, classes, consultations, and meetings, everything seems just a little rosier than it did a few weeks ago. There’s no good reason for this. I have even more to do than I did before, and even less time in which to do it all. But at least for now, that doesn’t matter so much. I’m jealous of everyone who gets to go to Internet Librarian, but I’ll see you all at CIL next year. Just don’t have too much fun without me in Monterey, alright?

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Federated Search on Steroids – but Still Broken

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Ex Libris vendors showed me Primo while I was at CIL. It workes on top of Metalib and your catalog to function as a search of everything available through the library. Shiny. Probably the flashiest thing they showed was opening a video and a text version of the same title in two side-by-side windows. If it weren’t for one small problem, I’d say I’d seen the future of library discovery systems.

The problem? After 15 or 20 minutes of talking to these vendors, I finally got them to understand the problem of searching subject and generic databases at the same time. Subject databases never index their primary subject, right? So “psychology” would return gazillions of results from catalogs, Academic Search Premier, ProQuest, etc. But it wouldn’t return anything from PsychInfo. That’s a problem.

When I’d finally gotten them to understand what I was saying, they agreed. But here are their answers: create custom views or scopes for each subject (so yes, make students chose their subjects first and then do searches, which still won’t compute if they search for “psychology”), and tell PsychInfo to include “psychology” as a subject term. What? That’s about as likely as catalog vendors moving their products to wiki platforms.

Why doesn’t Metalib or any other federated search system allow us to tag databases and then add those tags to the results that get fed from the database to the search system? That way we could customize for our communities AND get our patrons the most relevant results possible.

Catalogs that are Both Useful and Fun

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[Update 4/27/2007: LibraryThing for Libraries tour available here.]

[Update 5/14/2007: The Danbury Library catalog has LTfL active in it's catalog (sample record here).]

I went to the exhibit hall the last morning of CIL, had a great time talking to Tim Spalding about Library Thing for Libraries (demo link coming soon to his blog, he promised). I want it. I need it. Gimme gimme gimme!

I almost always come out of vendor demos feeling a little like I need a shower. Stuff always looks great but there’s always the point when I ask a question and the vendors try to pretend they didn’t hear me, or understand me, or that I’m silly to think that would be an issue. Not so with this thing. There’s no downside. It doesn’t take anything away from the current functionality of our catalogs (and it’s “platform agnostic,” according to Tim, so it should work with any type of catalog out there), but it adds a whole lot of information and fun. You can see the most relevant tags (i.e. often used and cleaned up by a poor, overworked librarian at Library Thing) that Library Thing has for a particular work (not book). You can browse tags and retrieve your catalog’s holdings that match specific LT tags. And you can see related items! What’s not to love?

Anyway, when I’d finished drooling, I went back downstairs to sit around and wait for the next session to start: “Catalogs of the Future” starring Tim Spalding and Roy Tennant!!! (Did I have a good morning or what?) I sat down next to Jason and Michelle, who were also hoping to get good seats for that presentation, and was just about to blog about the coolness that is LTfL (I can acronymize ANYTHING) when Tim showed up and sat with us. Well, you can’t blog about somebody who’s sitting crosslegged on the floor four feet from where you’re sitting… And besides, that would have meant missing out on hearing how his colleague was speaking at the National Library of Australia that day, and how he was speaking at the Library of Congress the next day. Very cool.

This was one of those sessions that needed overflow rooms for the overflow room… but it was well worth the squeeze. Tim asserted that while we’ve been concentrated on fixing the three known problems of our catalogs (lack of usability, findability, and remixability), we haven’t paid much attention to increasing it’s funability. He argued that while the ILS may dis-integrate sometime in the future, we need to look toward making what we have NOW fun. Enter LTfL, stage left. LT increases by over 60,000 tags per day, and that’s enough to really DO stuff with. More is more when it comes to tags.

But even beyond that, our catalogs need a whole boatload of lipstick, blush, and mascara. Add pictures (and he is definitely still working on an open database of images, but he can’t say more than that just yet), allow inbound links (permalinks are essential), link out (Google, Amazon, you name it), and get your data out there.

These last two points were particularly interesting. He pointed out that we don’t want to be like big malls, were all the stairs lead to other places in the mall, and the exits are incredibly hard to find. “That’s how big corporate web sites work; the sites you want to leave immediately.” Instead, he said we’ll likely garner trust and become more useful if we are generous with our patrons’ attention.

Not only that, but if we’re generous with our data all the “bored programmers” out there who haven’t yet discovered library data would love to sink their teeth into our data and figure out ways of manipulating it. But they won’t struggle through MARC. We need mark, and our catalogs need MARC, but programmers don’t. So we need to figure out some way of opening our catalogs up and feeding our information out there in something other than MARC.

Then Roy spoke. His main theme? “Future? What Future? Catalogs ain’t got no stinkin’ future.” That’s not to say that we need to start over or throw out what we’ve got. We still need the ILS to do our work well. And contrary to what some people say, we still need good, detailed cataloging. But we don’t need to show this thing we use to the public. They need something different. They need a discovery system that manipulates our data for their benefit.

He also had a more is more theme. Maybe WorldCat is our future, and we should all sign on for WorldCat Local especially now that Open WorldCat has article-level records. (This would privilege the large libraries that actually submit their holdings information to OCLC.) This isn’t because they are the be all and end all of catalogs, but because they have enough aggregated information that they’re starting to be able to do really interesting things with all that data. (Things like WorldCat Identities, which I hadn’t played with before but which could be very useful.)

So I’m officially a Tim and Roy groupie. Can we start a fan club? I know a guy who can hook us up with T-shirts.

It was too bad that Tim was working on his presentation for LOC that night. We were all hanging out for our last evening together, and he worked. Too bad.

(This is a really bad picture of Tim working while we play.)

p.s. Did I mention that Meredith signed my copy of her book with Tim’s pen?!? I’ll allow visits to the book by appointment only, so call ahead if you want to see it. :)

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Blogging about Conference Blogging

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I’m so bad at napping that I nearly always give up the struggle, even when I’m completely exhausted. So here I am blogging rather than napping. And speaking of blogging, I was sitting there at Steven Cohen’s presentation (or rather, on the stairs outside of the overflowing overflow room), taking notes and using my wireless connection to show people around me the stuff Steven was showing but that none of us could see (thank goodness for Google). Oh, and it was a good set of tools, even if Fleck does kick CiteBite’s butt, no matter what Steven says. :-P

In fact, it was probably the intimacy of sitting on the floor together, hovering over a couple of laptop monitors, and getting all jazzed up over fun technology that led one of the other women near me to come up afterwards and ask how I manage to blog sessions. She said she’d seen me typing away at an earlier session, and she sounded more than a little skeptical that anyone could possibly type and listen all at the same time. So I showed her my raw notes (especially URLs for slides or other interesting sites), how I highlight in bold any portion of those notes that I think will make good inclusions in a blog post, and how I add parenthetical comments to remind me what questions or ideas the sessions sparked. Then I showed her how I take the notes and create posts around them whenever I get a minute (and some working wireless, which got pretty rare as the conference progressed).

“But you’re still typing,” she protested, “which seems like it’d make it harder for you to listen to what’s being said.” Thinking back, I only gave her one third of the whole answer to that issue. I explained that I can type a lot faster than I can write long-hand, so I actually hear more of the session than I would if I were writing on paper. But I didn’t explain that typing with an eye to synthesizing for a blog post helps me stay on task when I’m listening to presentations (as Nichole just blogged… it’s another inadvertent-blog-topic-convergence day). It forces me to look for the themes and primary points in the presentations. I don’t end up blogging every session, but I do end up taking blog-ready notes for almost every session.

And of course there’s the final third of the puzzle. When presenters end up explaining something I already understand, I can compose the actual blog posts while I keep an ear out for when the presentation moves on to topics or perspectives that are newer to me. The fact that I only posted a couple of times a day during this conference speaks to the general lack of such down-times for me, which is a good thing. But it did happen occasionally.

In the end, the skeptical woman walked away looking relieved that I wasn’t wasting my conference registration fee (or hotel costs, which was significantly more expensive). Maybe next year she’ll have a blogger banner on her name tag. :)

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