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Author: Iris

Dispatches from Internet Librarian

Published by Iris on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

I now understand the cult of Internet Librarian. People have been telling me for years that I needed to come, and for years I’ve very prudently stayed away to tend my collection of panicky Fall Term students. But this year I was asked if I wanted to help lead a pre-conference workshop here with pretty much the best group of people ever, and so here I am, and it is wonderful.

I wake up every morning (far too early, I might add, due to the craziness that is the Pacific Time Zone) to the sound of the sea lions singing to each other. There’s good sea food. There’s good company. And there have been several really interesting sessions so far. I might even get around to blogging about a couple of them soon. For example, there was a great session on an ethnographic study that a team at George Washington University did to see how students used Facebook and how librarians might appropriately fit into that world. It’s always great when somebody backs up hunches about the way things work with actual research.

But more on that next time I have a good wireless signal.

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Dear EndNote

Published by Iris on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Dear EndNote,

I use your product to manage my ever-growing collection of PDFs and bibliographic references and, on occasion, to suck those references very handily into the writing I do. I teach your product to students and faculty and have spent quality time figuring out how to present it in a way that’s simple, memorable, and not overwhelming. I tweak custom filters and styles for anyone on campus who asks and even for some who didn’t think to ask. I boldly stand up for your product when people curse its steep learning curve, explaining that there are times when the cost-benefit analysis tips in favor of learning a massive piece of software like this. For those times, there’s EndNote.

I’ve got to say, though, that I’m finding this generally sanguine attitude toward EndNote more and more difficult to maintain. First, there’s the way you always put off releases for the Mac platform until quite some time after releases for the Windows platform. This is not an uncommon practice among software companies, I know, but it’s less and less tenable with each passing year. Have you been to a conference lately? Look around and notice all the Macbooks in the audience. Mac users are no longer a fringe user base.

Now, after years of proving to us that you think the Windows platform is at the top of your value scale, you’ve modified your implicit value system to favor the Windows XP version of your favorite platform. I know people love to complain about Vista, but it’s been out for 2 years now. I should not have to teach tedious work-arounds to my faculty and students who have happily used their Vista computers for years now. There was no excuse for allowing EndNote X1 to have been released last year without full compatibility with Vista. None. You had access to Vista. It was your job to make your software work with the platforms your user base were using, not for Vista to conform to your software. Imagine if I decided that my town should reorganize itself so that my favorite hang-outs were near my home rather than deciding that I should move to be nearer to the places I work and play? Absurd, right? The town was here before I was, and there’s nothing I can do to change it.

EndNote X2 is just out, and I hear that it’s doing better. That’s great, but late. Let me reiterate: if you proclaim your belief that the Windows platform is the platform of choice for EndNote users, you belie yourself by making that same user base wait 2 years for a software upgrade that makes EndNote work correctly. And since many campuses can’t upgrade EndNote until the school year after you release a new version (so that we can make it work with our lab builds, and so that we can have both PC and Mac users on the same version of EndNote without having to teach one version to half our patrons in the first month of Fall term and then suddenly switch all these Mac-using patrons to another version all of a sudden) we’re stuck using X1 for yet another year. My Vista-native computer will be due for replacement before I get an EndNote version that works well for me. I realize this is half our problem and half yours, but even so, none of the other software I use has inflicted this frustration on its customers.

But enough about platform compatibility. What about being a good citizen of the software community? A healthy response to competition is to capitalize on your unique benefit, not to pout that others can do the most basic part of what you do. (Yes, I’m talking about Zotero, here.) Your unique benefit is your vast array of output styles. I mean, really, 3600 citation styles is amazing! And the fact that I can instantly customize these styles to fit my needs or those of my patrons… that’s a unique benefit. When the German department here on campus requires its students to use the early 1970s version of MLA as the citation style for their senior theses, we can accommodate that. When the Music department makes up its own citation style, we can accommodate that. This is a Very Good Thing.

Simply collecting citations is no longer the coolest thing on the planet. Taking bibliographic information and spitting out a citation in one of the top citation styles is also no longer the coolest thing on the planet. These are not functions that set you apart from any number of other products that are now in existence or will be in existence soon.

So if your old kingdom is no longer new enough to be different by default, concentrate on making your unique benefits your selling point, and concentrate on making them even better. You might even take a page out of Zotero’s book and make the data-collection piece of EndNote easier on your users. But for heaven’s sake, whatever actions you take, stop doing things that make your long-time users ashamed of you. That’s no way to grow a user-base.

Yours,
Iris

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Nerves

Published by Iris on Monday, October 13th, 2008

I’ve been diligently getting ready for my part of the preconference workshop that Amanda Etches-Johnson, Jason Griffey, Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, Steve Lawson and I are doing at Internet Librarian. It’s been slow going. I’ve gotten so used to presenting in an instruction-like way, and that’s not what I’m going for with this presentation. I’ve also gotten use to sustaining a complex thought for about the length of a blog post. (Actually, no. I sustain a complex thought the length of a blog post on the good days. The rest of the time I think in one- or two-sentence bursts.) So here I am, trying to sustain a complex thought for an hour’s worth of speaking and trying to make it sound as simple as possible.

I realize this isn’t actually so hard. I’ve done it before. Which left me wondering why I’m rather obsessively going back over details, shuffling things around, thinking up better examples, and then reworking things over and over and over and over. And as odd as it seems, I think it’s because I’m nervous.

I’m not nervous about presenting to the workshop attendees. Goodness, I do that nearly every day. I’m not nervous about my content, though I do think it’s probably of a different tone than most people will be expecting. No, I’m nervous about my co-presenters seeing me present. These are people I’ve looked up to for years. These are people that I look to for inspiration, for clarity, for affirmation. These are people I’ve come to consider friends. Who wouldn’t be nervous revealing their public-speaking selves to such an audience?

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