Skip to content

Month: July 2009

The Ebb and Flow of My Online Communities

Published by Iris on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Online communities, like those in the face-to-face world, are fascinating to watch. They coalesce, wrap in on themselves, fray around the edges, unwrap a little, shift, possibly acquire new members or even glom onto a new core group of members, coalesce, wrap in on themselves, fray around the edges… and on and on.

Take my own history as an example. I started this blog and started reading other people’s blogs, and in the space of a few months found myself squarely in the middle of a vibrant community of librarian bloggers. A year or so later, Twitter and the LSW Meebo room started up. Conversations started in any of those places and bled over into our blogs, but there were also new people in the group — people who didn’t have blogs at all, or didn’t blog about libraries. And slowly the LSW Meebo room group became my center. A year or so later, the librarian Twitterati started shifting to FriendFeed, so I followed them (kicking and screaming, I might add — I had a bunch of problems with FriendFeed, some of which still bother me even though that’s become my social network of choice now). FriendFeed is slightly different in that conversations can happen within or across several “rooms,” and I’ve seen communities coalesce, wrap in on themselves, and then fray about the edges in several of these spaces within FriendFeed. Meanwhile, the blogging community had frayed about the edges (Meredith also just wrote about this).

Each time I’ve found myself in the midst of a new coalescing community I’ve met new people who inspire me, question me, encourage me, and generally be good friends to me. But each time it’s meant that people who used to represent the core of my network have shifted to peripheral status. Not unimportant, just less present.

And now I find myself on the fraying edges again. Almost certainly, this means that I’m about to find a new home, or re-find an old home, but at the moment things feel a little foundationless for me. Luckily, I have a couple of really interesting projects I’m working on (which I’ll probably write about soon-ish), so that should sustain me until my new center coalesces for me.

7 Comments

Citation Visualizations

Published by Iris on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

A couple of people here on campus asked if there were any tools out there that would allow them to visualize the relationships between citations that they gathered over time in the course of a research project. Turns out, the options are limited and not at all user friendly. Here they are (thanks to Christina!):

  • There is CiteSpace. The demo video that you get when you click “webstart” and then go to “help” and “demo video” makes the whole thing look rather intimidating. It seems to run off of the same exports that we’d use to get information out of databases and into EndNote. The trick is, it appears to only work if you import stuff from ISI. I don’t see any way to manually enter a citation, though I’m certainly no expert on the software yet, so it may be there, just hidden. Here’s the User Guide (you may have to click through some server security stuff to see it).
  • The other option is Sitkis. This involves downloading ISI citations (again) and importing them into MS Access. I’m on a Mac at work, so I’ll have to see how this works when I get home to a PC with Access on it. Anyway, here’s Christina’s blog post about it.

Pretty limited options, eh? I sure hope there are more out there, but the People Who Should Know generally agree that there aren’t, at least, not yet. You know what I’d really love? If Zotero would take this project on.

3 Comments

Midsummer

Published by Iris on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

I know it’s not technically midsummer. We passed that a while back. But here at work, it’s the middle of our institution’s summer. Whole weeks can pass with only one or two meetings scheduled. Whole days can pass without any student asking me anything (we don’t have summer sessions for our students, though we do have summer programs for other people’s students). Whole hours can pass while I concentrate on one project without interruption. Everything feels different.

One thing I’ve enjoyed about this summer at the library is that the various research assistants on campus seem to have decided to congregate every day and work side-by-side in the main computer area of the reference room. Each student works on his or her assigned projects, chatting occasionally with whomever is sitting at the next computer, and generally keeping each other company through the long hours of research. This may have happened in previous years, but I don’t remember it, and it warms my heart every time I see the group hard at work together.

People always ask me what I do all summer without students, and I rarely have a good answer. In fact, I usually just pick whichever project I’m working on at the moment and say, “well, right now I’m working on [whatever it is]” and hope they don’t say “but that won’t take all summer, will it?” Because it won’t. There are a million other projects to do, but very little that can be synthesized down to “in the summer I work on this kind of thing and that kind of thing” conversation snippet. For some reason, it’s rarely seems to be enough to say, like those students can say, that my colleagues and I gather every day to work in proximity on the various projects that can’t happen during the school year’s crush of interruptions, classes, consultations, and meetings.

So what am I working on during this week in the middle of our summer? Well, I need to get acquainted with our (brand new to us) instance of LibGuides (which we’ve been wanting for years and finally have). I’m putting together my piece of a presentation on learning-centric library instruction for a professional development day that’s coming up in a couple of weeks at Gustavus Adolphus. I’m figuring out what needs to change in EndNote to bring the MLA style up to date now that we have our 7th edition copies in hand (and I need to figure out how to handle their pesky restrictions surrounding the online version). I’m also trying to re-start the effort to make Metalib work the way we need it to work. And I’m drafting a proposal to assess our Research/IT service point.

Sometime soon (once I’ve figured out LibGuides) I need to embark on my summer schedule of updating all my departmental research guides. (This is when being the librarian for 10 departments becomes time consuming in the summer.) Then there are a couple of complicated course-specific guides I should start working on. I have some Moodle/eReserves documentation to overhaul, some instructional material to create and some projects to assess in my capacity as a member of the campus’ copyright committee, and some planning to do for a new project in which I will coordinate a continual environmental scan for our library.

At least, those are the bigger projects that I hope I’ll get to before the most active prepare-for-fall-term portion of summer arrives. I hope my brain and work life cooperate to make that possible.

Comments closed
Clinical Reader Train Wreck Just Keeps Going

Clinical Reader Train Wreck Just Keeps Going

Published by Iris on Monday, July 20th, 2009

Some day I’ll get bored of watching this train wreck in progress. But not yet. If you are, you can skip right over this post and rest in the knowledge that you’re more mature than I am.

Remember last week when Clinical Reader had only threatened a blogger, been exposed as having made up endorsements, started making up bogus Retweets, deleted incriminating tweets from their account, fired the pesky Canadians, and generally convinced thousands of people that they weren’t trustworthy? Since then, thing haven’t improved. Since then:

  • Whoever is trying to sanitize Clinical Reader’s online reputation (I assume it’s co-founder Allan Marks, but who knows) has been switching the original twitter account’s name at the speed of light. This breaks links that people had used in blog posts, but it unfortunately doesn’t erase the history from the deep dark recesses of the Internet, or delete people’s screenshots from their hard drives. Most of the good stuff is still live on the links in my previous post, and even more lives in this post on the Disruptive Library Technology Jester. (Moral of the story: Don’t be stupid online because the stupid never dies.) As of this writing the account has moved from @clinicalreader to @clinical_tweets to @amarks7 to @amarks14 to @amarks_ to @a_marks1 to @allan_marks (See below for explanation of the change in the first two names. And don’t expect @allan_marks to be valid for more than, say, an hour. As of 7pm, the name has changed 4 times since 9am today.)

  • Somebody took over the name @clinicalreader and posted a brief history of the debacle there.

  • Somebody else took over @clinical_tweets (they claim to be the fired Canadians) and started cockily claiming that they’d done the job they were hired to do because just look at how many people now know about Clinical Reader. Their claim in a nutshell: “You’ve All Been Used. Bwahahahah.” They’ve now killed the account.

  • A new twitter account went live: @clinical_reader. This had all sorts of tweets about how the real Clinical Reader wasn’t yet “officially” on Twitter but will let us all know when they are (this screencast from the Google Cache shows that if you hovered over an older version of the Clinical Reader site, it clearly linked to the original @clinicalreader twitter account). Then tweeted several rather official looking tweets about what a great service they are. Then denounced the other now-bogus accounts. And all of this while not officially tweeting! This morning, all their tweets had disappeared except for the ones saying that the tweets from @cliniclareader are not coming from the Clinical Reader service (which even whoever-it-is at @clinicalreader says, quite plainly).

  • Another new twitter account went live: @clinical_tweet. This seems to be the new, new, new official twitter account. Or something. We’ll see how long it lasts.

  • And now, the sockpuppetry really gets started. “Sally Jones” started a twitter account as @kensingtonlib in order to alternately level accusations at @lukelibrarian and laud Clinical Reader. I wonder who could possibly be using the name Sally Jones??

This is just too much fun. I’ll update this post if necessary (and add screenshots that I have on a different computer, later).

[Edit: 7pm on July 20th. I think I’m done now. If you haven’t had enough, search FriendFeed for “Clinical Reader” and see if more drama has surfaced. I’ll just add that I’ve been almost equally fascinated by the complexity of piecing together a coherent story when that story is playing out in so many social networks, by the flailing about of Clinical Reader, by the lessons this teaches about marketing online, and by the implications of this story in my own teaching. I think I’ll have to work some discussion of this parable into sessions I teach about evaluating web content.]

9 Comments