Monthly Archives: March 2009

Basking in the Reflected Glow

By IRIS Posted on by

I was busy recruiting ACRL attendees for the Library Society of the World this past week, which involved several conversations about how it got started (a funny story that can be told with more or less snark depending on the situation… I love snark-flexible stories). My favorite part to tell, though, is the “you are here” part. If you decide to take up with this crew, you’ll find yourself surrounded by smart, thoughtful, innovative, energetic, inspiring, and just plain wonderful library people.

There have always been anecdotes of useful conversations and interesting ideas to share when trying to explain why I think the group does good work, but as the group and individuals within it continue to work hard to improve the profession, it’s getting easier and easier to point to things that non-LSW members will have heard of and say “Look at this, and this, and this. See? These people really are cool!” Take, for example, yesterday’s announcement of the Library Journal’s list of Movers and Shakers. That list includes so many people that I know from LSW: Dorothea Salo, Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, Jason Griffey, Karen Coombs, Michael Porter, Rachel Walden, Dave Pattern, Lauren Pressley. Then there are a few other people listed that I know but am not quite sure if they’ve declared themselves LSW members (one of the fun things about the LSW is that there is no comprehensive roster of members): Chad Boeninger, Melissa Rethlefsen, Sarah Houghton-Jan, and the “Dutch Boys” (Erik Boekesteijn, Jaap van de Geer, and Geert van den Boogaard). That’s a quarter of the LJ list, folks. That’s nothing to sneeze at!

On top of that, there are all the other cool things that LSW members play huge roles in, like LCOW, Library Camp Kansas, the ALA unconference, the Lib2.0 Unconference (in Australia, since this is “of the world,” remember), BIGWIG programming, setting up all kinds of conversation spaces online (the LSW Meebo room, the LSW forum, the LSW LinkedIn group, the LSW FriendFeed room)… the list goes on and on and on. And now, the LSW is coming up with a way to recognize all the amazing things that its members do day in and day out. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the Shover & Maker award site which appears to be gearing up for something big.

What started as a joke has become an actual force in the library world, and I, for one, am honored to bask in the glow of these truly inspiring people

Settling in for ACRL in Seattle

By IRIS Posted on by

I love Seattle. This is only my second time here, but it’s just such a pretty city. And seriously, the entire down-town area smells of coffee, which strikes me as the perfect smell for a city.

I’m sitting here listening to announcements before the opening keynote and hoping that this conference will strike that tricky balance of being both fun and informative. My last ACRL (which was also my first) wasn’t such a great experience, so I’m on a mission to make this one different. Last time I think I chose my sessions poorly, and I had no idea how to meet up with people, so I ended up feeling like the most anonymous person in a sea of potential friends. This time I hope to choose better sessions to attend, and I’m hoping that I’ll manage to connect with some great people and re-connect with previous acquaintances. Part of this depends on you! If you’re here and see me (mostly recognizable by my olive green back-pack, which complements my jeans nicely) please introduce yourself! As a hint, I’ll probably be near a power outlet, and yes, I’m happy to share my extension cord with you.

So here goes. Keynote, then dinner, then hanging out, then back to the hotel (which is right across the street from the Seattle Public Library!). Here’s hoping for a useful, engaging, and fun conference. See you there!

Digital Humanities and Digital Collections

By IRIS Posted on by

If you’ve been following the work and discussion that’s come out of Project Bamboo, you will have noticed a few sticking points: there are the IT folks, there are the humanities faculty, and there is the original proposal, and so far there is not a whole lot of fundamental consensus between the three about an ideal path for this project.

You’ll notice I didn’t include librarians in that list, because for the most part they’ve been marginalized or absent from the discussions I’ve heard. When librarianship does make an appearance, it has mostly been in the context of finding stuff or of bridging the gap between the IT folks and the faculty. (There could be another whole blog post about why I think librarians could play a much larger role and how we do more than find things, but I don’t think that’s actually the fundamental sticking point. At least not yet.) But I digress. As I was saying, I hear one of three distinct voices whenever I hear about Project Bamboo, and this was never more clear to me than yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday afternoon one of our three representatives to Project Bamboo, an art historian, explained to a small group of humanities faculty that she wanted to collect their research stories so that she could report back to her subgroup in the Project. She said the IT folks kept talking about building things, but her subgroup was sure that the people who wanted to build things didn’t understand the research practices of humanities faculty well enough to build anything that would suit these practices well. She pointed out that each humanities professor’s practice is quite different because each person’s area of research requires different kinds of evidence, and that she wasn’t sure that “a tool” would help a wide enough group of people to be worth it.

I agree, for the most part. I also agree with Dorothea who has pointed out that there are already good tools out there just waiting to be used. Several times in this meeting yesterday, faculty members would say that they wished for a tool that would do x or y, and I’d think “oh, you need del.icio.us” or “oh, you need a wiki.”

What I hadn’t anticipated, though, and what seemed to surprise most of the people in the room, was the amount of commonality between the research practices of every single faculty member in the room. To a person, they all talked about going somewhere to look at a bunch of related stuff and use this exploration to find connections and draw conclusions. One will go to archives in Italy, another to an art library in the Hague, another to TV broadcast stations in Lebanon, another to a specific library in France… and the list goes on. Each one talked about travel and working within the constraints of the place they visited as their major hurdles. But each and every one of them said that there was no way to know exactly what was there before they got there, no way to predict in advance what insights they would draw, and no way to conduct their better research without this process of going and looking at heaps and heaps of stuff. Each one said that it wouldn’t solve all their problems, but what they really wanted were digital collections from which to work, or comprehensive highly detailed finding aides at the very least.

When I first heard hints, way back before the first workshop last year, that this would be the direction of the project, I was kind of disappointed. “You have all the power and money of the Mellon foundation and these massive groups of skilled people, and you want digital collections?” I screamed silently to myself. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that building the perfect marriage between digital collections of this scope and intuitive interfaces could be a very good goal for this group. If these interfaces could be built on careful metadata and powerful yet flexible indexing, and if they could mimic the best parts of spreading a box of photographs out on a desk while stripping away the clumsiness… that would be a thing of wonder. Just because it’s a thing that people have been trying to build for years doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be a “new” project for by this amalgam of participants. And in fact, this amalgam could possibly move farther toward accomplishing such a goal than any other group I’ve seen.