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Month: January 2007

Possibly Impossible Idea

Published by Iris on Friday, January 19th, 2007

Walking in to work this morning, musing on staffing and service models for liaison librarians and fumbling for my keys with mitten-encased hands, I decided that our liaison model is doing just about precisely half of what it could do (time, money, and staffing aside). Currently, there is a liaison for each major on campus. Freshmen and Sophomores are encouraged to meet with the liaisons as well, but before they declare a major they may have to figure out new people for every class they take.

Now I’m not saying that it’s bad for students to go to the person most suited to answer their questions. Far from it. But I remember being too intimidated to figure out who the people were who could answer my basic questions when I was a pre-major, let alone re-figure for each class.

But what if each freshman were assigned a librarian at the same time that they’re assigned a faculty adviser. This librarian could be “their” librarian who could do anything from answer basic questions to directing them (and personally introducing them) to the liaison most suited to answer specific questions.

Here’s the major hitch in my plan: 500 freshmen… 7 librarians… Not a good ratio, especially if any of them still needed their personal library adviser by the time they got to sophomore year. We could end up with as many as 1000 students per librarian, plus our students who have already declared majors.

Of course, many students wouldn’t sit down with us more than once (and they’d only come that once if we required it). So it might not be that much more work. And it might be a nice way to personalize the library.

I just don’t know. It was an interesting thought, if nothing else.

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Blogger Line Breaks Broken

Published by Iris on Thursday, January 18th, 2007

At least now I’ve learned… If I ever include a blockquote, list, or picture in my posts I have to switch over to the HTML editor and insert nice little paragraph tags around all subsequent paragraphs before publishing. That stinks.

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Collaboration, Social Software, and My Strange Obsession With My Virtual Life

Published by Iris on Thursday, January 18th, 2007

I didn’t even get to turn on my computer until 3:00 today. Thank goodness I have pretty much permanent access to a laptop at work because I’ve been living off that today. (Heaven forbid I go for more than a few minutes without a softly glowing screen in front of me.) But in among reference desk shifts and meetings, I was asked to take stock of the collaborative technologies I use.

Here’s the backstory. Back in August people from the library and IT met to discuss collaboration: what we’d done together, what we’re planning to do, and how to enhance collaboration. You may remember that meeting from this post. Out of that meeting grew a new group on campus called the Info Services Forum. This group coordinates periodic (about twice-monthly) sessions at which staff (or interested faculty) can either present or discuss a topic of general interest. Anyone on campus is invited, and there’s free lunch to the first 40 or 50 who show up.

So far we’ve had a session on the planned reorganization of the campus web site (complete with discussions of usability and organization, as well as breakout focus groups on specific organizational ideas). Then there was a session on the new campus copyright policy at which Dan Donnelly from the University of Minnesota’s Copyright Information and Education group gave a really wonderful talk copyright for educational campuses.

Now we’ve had the first of two sessions dealing with collaborative tools, and for the second session they want to put up a slide listing what people here are using already. Here’s my list.

  • del.icio.us (for my own professional work, collaborating/sharing with my co-workers and other librarians, and building a curricular link library for students)
  • Google Docs & Spreadsheets
  • AIM/Google Talk/MSN Messenger/Meebo
  • Blogs (several, some for workplace collaboration, others to communicate with the outside world — a couple are Carleton-supported and a couple aren’t)
  • Shared Google Calendar
  • Moodle
  • Backpack (for shared To Do lists)
  • Bloglines (to share what I’ve found with others (most of my feeds are public), or to learn what others have found, as well as to keep up with my professional and personal blog/journal feeds. I can also keep up with things like updates to wikis or public google docs using RSS.)
  • Flickr
  • LibraryThing (share books, reviews, etc.)
  • I’ve also experimented with Wet Paint (a wiki) as a place to build a curricular resource wiki, though I haven’t had time to work on it for a while.

So, there you have it. Except for the wiki, these are things that I use at least weekly, and often multiple times per day. But just because the first thing I do in the morning is turn my computer on and the last thing I do at night is turn the computer off doesn’t mean anything. I could quit any time…

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Single Search Box: a rant in several statements

Published by Iris on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

Just because the single search box works for Google does not mean that it works for everything.

Even Google provides advanced search options, and they are often the only way to a) find what you need, b) see what search techniques are possible, and c) learn the search tags that you can later use when constructing complex searches in that hallowed single search box.

The only thing more frustrating than too much information is not enough information.

Searcher’s block is a common malady afflicting people faced with no guidance about what kinds of searching might be possible.

If you don’t believe me, just try finding your particular (pre-ISBN) version of the Agatha Christie mystery Curtain in LibraryThing. There’s a single search box for you… I love LibraryThing, but I HATE finding old books that don’t have ISBNs and that have common words for titles. It took me forever to learn that if I just put information in the right order (and separated by commas), I could replicate an advanced search. In the mean time I’d gone through gallons of tea in an attempt to keep myself from pulling out my hair or dropping the project altogether.

I’m inclined to believe that the popularity of Google’s single search box has more to do with the algorithm running behind the search than with the box itself. If my catalog could rank keyword results as well, I might be more inclined to go that route. But it can’t. So I’m in no way inclined.

Nuf said.

Good night.

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