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Author: Iris

What a Day

Published by Iris on Thursday, May 25th, 2006

There’ve been some highs and some lows today, and now I’m completely drained. It all started with a first-thing-in-the-morning dentist appointment (I clench my teeth so hard at night that I chip my teeth). That’s always fun. Then there was work, which was fine, but I was tired because last night (my night shift) a student caught me just as I was leaving at 10:00. I finally actually left at 10:40. Not long before leaving work today my best friend wrote to tell me that her boyfriend is missing (so she’s just a little stressed about that, as you can imagine), and then a co-worker and I got into a big discussion about privacy. (I don’t think she would have liked my recent post, but I’m so glad to work with people who actually discuss this kind of thing.)

So by the time I got home from work, I was pretty fried, and I still had to call my friend (who as of this writing still hasn’t heard anything about her missing boyfriend). So what do I do when I’m fried? I go blog surfing. And I’m always rewarded. Tonight’s prize for most interesting post goes to … (drum role please) … The Ubiquitous Librarian for his post about free document delivery. I absolutely think this is important for libraries to think about and implement if time and staffing allow. And if time and staffing don’t allow, we should be thinking about why that is and trying to remedy it. (I think there’s still a place for LC in libraries, but he wasn’t actually arguing for abolishing it, just for interrogating our uses of it.)

At one point he asks, “So the question is — do we want to be Blockbuster or Netflix?” My answer: we want to be both. We want to be Blockbuster to the people who want or need Blockbuster, and Netflix to the people who want or need Netflix.

Well, back to my semi-doldrums. If it weren’t getting so hot here, maybe I’d have more energy and pep. Or maybe I’m just tired and need about a month of sleep.

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College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources

Published by Iris on Thursday, May 25th, 2006

OCLC has re-examined the famous perceptions report data in order to find out what college students think.

Overall, respondents have positive, if outdated, views of the ““Library.”” Younger respondents, teenagers and young adults, do not express positive associations as frequently. These findings, and more, are valuable insights for anyone seeking to know more about the library usage and perceptions of college students and young people.

You can download the 100-page PDF report here, or go to the information page for more access options.

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Privacy Please?

Published by Iris on Wednesday, May 24th, 2006

Privacy. In theory, I’m all for it. In theory I would like to think that people shouldn’t be keeping tabs on me. In theory I would think I shouldn’t be keeping tabs on other people. And there are a lot of librarians who have adopted privacy as one of the primary concerns of their services. (There’s rather a thought-provoking piece over at Library Juice on the topic.) But please don’t lynch me when I confess that there are some aspects of privacy that I just can’t get worked up about.

For example, this morning I heard a piece on NPR that basically said that if you’re driving a car built in the last 5 years there’s a really good chance that it has a tracking device or an “event recorder” built into it. As I listened to the interviewer and interviewee discuss how this violates personal privacy, I found myself unable to care whether people knew what speed I’d been going when I crashed, or how many miles my average trip was. “But that’s just aggregate data,” I told myself, “What if I knew that they could plot my trips, or pinpoint my location at any time.” Just then, the reporter said that in some cases, this would be possible. And still, I had a hard time caring. I mean, I care. And I think people should know when they are transmitting this type of information. And I think they should be able to opt out. But in my head, those are slightly different issues.

Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten used to the idea that cookies, IP address tracking, and referrers online can pretty much guarantee that whoever wants to can figure out exactly what I do online at all times. Maybe it’s because I’m too young and naive to realize what evil could be done to me if people know where my car has gone, or (to bring this to the library) what books I check out, or articles I read.

But with all this privacy talk circulating, it was really good to read Paul Miller’s take on it. Up until that point, I’d thought I really must be stupid because everybody else knew privacy was the most important thing about libraries.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that privacy isn’t important. I think it’s very important. But I think that we need to stop assuming that our users would run screaming from the idea that we could track how often they stop in to the library, or log in to our databases from off campus, or search for books rather than articles, or anything like that. Some of them, many perhaps, wouldn’t care. And we could learn a lot from them. What if we had varying levels of privacy and let the users choose? What if we could use this type of tracking to build recommender systems into our databases? The possibilities are endless. And as long as we provided an easy opt-out option, I don’t see the harm.

But then, I don’t see the harm of a transmitter in my car (if I ever buy a new enough one). So maybe I’m not a good judge.

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Planning the World From My Shower

Published by Iris on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006


While showering (which is when most of my wild ideas get hatched) I wondered about integrating the catalog and other library resources into my students’ workflow. If we ever get our research portal up and running I’d love to have a firefox extension built into the lab computers that would put “Search the Libe” or “Libe It” (here on campus our library is referred to as “The Libe”) into the Firefox browser search box. I’d like to get “Libe It” into right-click menus all over the place!

Wouldn’t it be great if you could “Libe It” from a document you’re authoring, and a little application would run to analyze your document and suggest search terms? And maybe it could even presearch some databases to point you toward those databases that might be fruitful?

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