I was thrilled to walk into a departmental lounge today and see my handout on key resources for discipline pinned prominently to the lounge’s cork board. Goodness, I’m glad I took the time to make it visually pleasing and to put a colorful header on it that branded it as coming from the library!
Monthly Archives: February 2008
Musings on Periodicals
We’re in the midst of our biennial print periodicals review at the moment, and it’s gotten me thinking about how to be a good steward of our periodicals collection. Personally, I love electronic journals better than print journals in most cases. There’s just so much more you can do with them, none of which involve photocopying. (Photocopying is a sore topic with me, right now, for completely separate reasons, none of them interesting.) So faced with a list of journals and the choice to continue with the print subscription, flag them as candidates for e-access only, or cancel them entirely, I’d go with the electronic version in a heartbeat for many, many titles.
However (you knew there was a “however” coming), there are a couple of categories of things that I will not give up in print if I have anything to say about it. (And remember, I’m the librarian for Languages and Literature, so my views are biased in that direction.)
- Periodicals that include ads or images that aren’t indexed or included in the electronic version. I spend enough time with my American Studies students (and my colleague spends even more time with her History students) finding ads and images that being forced to give up basically our only accessible copies of these ephemera makes me weep for the students of 20-years-from-now who will be basically prevented from pursuing whole swaths of research topics.
- Periodicals that include or are primarily composed of fiction, poetry, or art. These genres are used in many ways, some of which is enhanced by electronic access, and some of which are decidedly NOT. I want to leave the door open for the later cases.
- Periodicals that are routed and that a) don’t have good alerts built into the electronic version or b) are routed to people who don’t care for alerts because they and their workflows are set up to need the thing itself sitting and staring at them before they’ll be reminded that they actually did want to sit down and read for a while. I’m that way, myself, with somethings. Not with my professional journals, but with somethings, so I can entirely sympathize.
Assuming I’m looking at a periodical that doesn’t fall into one of these categories, the next things I’d want to know before jumping for the e-access-only option are:
- Does the e-access include PDF full text? This is especially important if foreign characters (such as Greek, Russian, or Asian characters) are important, or graphs, or images, or really anything other than the text itself. It’s also easier for students to cite exact and original page numbers.
- Do we get to retain perpetual access to the issues we’ve paid for? (This is a biggie, and possible from some vendors.)
- Is the eJournal’s interface easily usable? Are the result lists for searches understandable?
- Are there RSS and email alert options for searches and new issues?
- It sure would be nice if we could still send articles to other libraries via Interlibrary Loan. (I still worry about the world’s libraries going e-only and cutting each other off from sharing their collections with each other and with smaller libraries.)
These are the things that run through my head as I page through the periodicals on my list. What other criteria should I be thinking about?
Learning Japanese
Some people have expressed an interest in looking over my shoulder while I learn Japanese via Rosetta Stone. With that in mind (and because I really didn’t have enough blogs yet, it seems), I’ve started a new blog just for that. That way, those of you who find it amusing or interesting can follow along, but the rest of you can stay here with my more library-centric musings.
Here’s the first post from the new blog, and the last one that will be posted here.
On Sunday, I cracked open my brand new goody box of Rosetta Stone materials and got ready to learn Japanese. Of course, first I had to figure out which of the two CDs needed installing first, and how not to blow my ear drums out with the headphone volume, and how to make Vista play nice with the Rosetta Stone application. I also thought I might read the user manual, since I want to do this right, but I realized that I’m just not a manual reader at heart and gave up after flipping past most of the first 10 pages.
Finally, everything was in tip top shape, I’d regained my hearing after an initial misunderstanding with my volume controls, and it was time to begin. Only I didn’t. I cleaned up my kitchen instead, wondering all the while why I was nervous about this. That done I… no, I didn’t get started. I called home and caught up with family news for a while instead. But by this time the sun had set and I was in serious danger of not meeting my own goal of getting started over the weekend, so I screwed up my courage, sat down at the computer, and began lesson one.
I quickly realized I’d have to get over my analytical “must know why things work” mentality. Presented with “Teeburu no shita ni ira otokonoko” there were just so many questions! Why is the “boy” at the end of the sentence, when I’m pretty sure the picture meant that the boy is under the table (and no, the boy was not drunk, he was playing under the table)? Are there cases in this language like there are in French? What if he “was” under the table? Is “to be” irregular in Japanese just like it is in other languages? Do nouns decline? If “to be” is irregular, how am I ever going to learn it based on these pictures? What if I forget these vocabulary words?
Clearly I’m having trouble sitting back and trusting Rosetta Stone to do it’s thing. I will work on trusting it. When it gets to be too much, I’ll reach for my dictionary and look up a couple of the words to see what they mean in a dictionary-type way, but every once in a while I’ll try to just let things flow. After all, this program has a pretty good reputation. Maybe I shouldn’t second-guess it too much.
Reason #2974 that I’m glad I’m a librarian and not an IT professional…
When I schedule a library session with a class, spend time preparing a coherent and useful session, and then head into the classroom, my audience generally shows up. (They may not want to, but they do, which is something.)
When the IT department schedules training workshops, they may or may not put hours and hours of work into preparing a coherent and useful training session only to have four walls and a bunch of computers stare back at them while they wait and wait for a participant, any participant, to show up. Talk about your thankless efforts.
Why I’m a Librarian
Rudy answered Barbara Fister’s call and then tagged me to be the next explain why I am a librarian. I’ve been putting off responding for a few of reasons. First, I was preoccupied this weekend with the beginnings of my Adventures in Japanese. (I now know how to say several random phrases that will never be useful in real life, but that thrill me to no end.) But even when I popped out the language CD and took up my laptop to think about this, I still couldn’t quite compose anything coherent. But I’ve come to realize that this is because I don’t have a coherent answer. So, setting coherence aside, here are some of the bits and pieces of my answer that form the framework on which my professional life hangs.
I stumbled into librarianship rather accidentally, and made it through to graduation by virtue of my rather entrenched stubbornness. I’d been working my way through a Ph.D in Literary Studies and even passed that crucial step of passing my masters thesis defense and being accepted as a full-fledged Ph.D student. What a point to reach only to find out you’re not very excited about the prospect entering the over-full ranks of semi-talented lit professors, and not talented enough to join the illustrious ranks of truly engaging and inspired lit professors.
Unfortunately, after casting about for a new calling for a while, I began to worry that I wasn’t cut out for anything else. That’s when my mom suggested librarianship. I remember the moment she suggested it. She was doing dishes in the kitchen, and I was lying on the family room floor with one hand buried deep in the family dog’s neck fur. I remember asking, “What? It takes a masters degree to be a librarian? Really?” And I remember thinking that this might be the perfect job to give me plenty of free time to pursue my other interests (this memory makes me giggle, now). What I don’t remember is how that suggestion blossomed into a grad school application, especially since I’d never worked in a library and never even asked a librarian a question. But it did.
So that’s the “why I became a librarian” part of the story. The next chapter, “Why I am still a librarian,” is almost as grounded in sheer luck. It started when my current director called me to offer me a job, and when I was introduced to a set of librarians that taught and continue to teach me what this job can become. And while there are all sorts of joys in my job (my friend, Boolean… the thrill of the hunt… thesauri… the way that everything from LC to citation styles grows out of a time, a place, and an ideology… the freedom I have to try almost anything I think might be beneficial to the library or my students… the MLA International Bibliography)… while these keep me happy in my current position, they aren’t my driving inspiration. No, what drives me to actually be a librarian is much more fundamental and much less specific. You see, I love helping students make sense of the mess that is our information universe. I love it when learning the language of research helps students think more clearly about the questions they confront, and present their ideas in a way that resonates with their audiences. That is why I’m still a librarian, and why I don’t foresee a future when I will no longer be a librarian.