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Category: Random Thoughts

Metadata as Content

Published by Iris on Thursday, May 13th, 2010

This morning my fellow instruction librarians and I launched into one of our animated discussions about the different instructional values of disciplinary databases and Google, when we start students out in one, when we start students out in another, how the two are changing, how our uses of both are changing, and student responses to each. It was a long discussion with many tangents, but here are the bits that keep rattling around in my head.

  • We’re in the odd position of accomplishing two goals with every student: teaching them how to think like scholarly researchers in their chosen fields, and teaching them how to get access to the material they need. Depending on the student and the situation, we have to make snap judgments about which of these to privilege, and this often determines what kinds of tools we use with the students. Google (and Google Scholar and Google Books) is often mostly about access — disciplinary databases can be about that, but they are often mostly about epistemology and terminology. Google is a far more effective access tool if you know the epistemology and terminology of the field not only because you can search it more effectively but also because whereas the disciplinary databases do much of the selection and evaluation for you, Google requires that you be savvy enough to weed through gazillions of results (or change your strategy so that your results end up on the first couple of pages). While it’s not always needed, privileging the metadata over the text can sometimes be highly educational.
  • Sometimes, metadata is content. The longitude and latitude fields in GeoRef, the historical period fields in Historical Abstracts, these bits of metadata allow researchers to do searches that are fundamentally impossible in other databases. You couldn’t get that stuff from free text searching. So I guess the indexing we pay for is even more fundamentally part of our collection than I’d thought of it before.

This wasn’t part of our discussion, but I’ve realized that while I don’t specialize in knowing the full disciplinary context of my students’ questions, I do specialize in knowing the metadata structures in the various tools at my disposal, and I guess a large part of what I do is choose between matching the metadata structure to the student or teaching the student a new metadata structure so that they can grow as a scholar. Content is usually accessible through more than one tool, so the trick becomes finding the most useful tool for the job.

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Not Just an Amenity

Not Just an Amenity

Published by Iris on Friday, April 30th, 2010

We’ve been hearing about the slow wireless in the library for months, if not years. It feels like half the feedback in our suggestion box is about the wireless. (The other half is about printing, so yeah, I think we’re a normal library.) And as I look at the dozens of laptops and netbooks in use around the reference room right now, I feel for the poor wireless router blinking its little electronic heart out over my head.

Photo by animalvegetable http://www.flickr.com/photos/animalvegetable/2299711952/

The problem is probably a familiar one. The infrastructure was set up back when wireless internet access was kind of a bonus service — back when we were mostly creating capacity for what we anticipated would be a high-demand amenity. Well, “high-demand” was right on the money. We have three computer labs in our library, but even so there aren’t nearly enough public machines here to support the academic work that goes on in this building. And as it turns out, an internet connection is becoming a requirement for whole swaths of academic work, not to mention whole swaths of our library’s collection. And then there’s all the other stuff people do online, and that all needs bandwidth, too.

And you know that twitchy feeling you get when you go to a conference and there’s no wireless, or the wireless keeps dropping you? That feeling like you can’t really get a deep breath? That feeling that prevents you from hearing a word the speaker is saying while you frantically try different wireless networks and start muttering about cheapskate conference organizers under your breath? Yeah. Imagine something like that every day. It would interfere with my learning, let me tell you.

We’ve started hearing that some students use this as incentive not to multitask while they’re studying here, or that they’ve started doing more of their studying in their dorm rooms where the internet connection is more reliable.

There’s a fix in the works here, but unfortunately it requires a pretty extensive infrastructure overhaul, so it can’t happen until the summer. Meanwhile, ponder the plight of our poor wireless router, the hidden costs of moving toward electronic collections, the fact that I still love electronic resources even though they’ve got many hidden costs and quite a few hidden challenges, how much I live and breathe the internet, and how much I wish we could just hide the suggestion box until we finally get this thing fixed.

So yes. Having wireless is like having tables — students need the infrastructure to open their readings and do their writing and generally hold all their implements. *I* need the infrastructure to open my reading, do my writing, and generally hold all my implements.

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Huh. Missed That.

Huh. Missed That.

Published by Iris on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010


Yesterday, my blog turned four.

It’s nice to be in my own space this year, and in many ways it’s nice that blogging isn’t the sole source of communication in my corner of library land any more. (It’s easier to follow discussions on FriendFeed than it was when you had to read everyone’s blogs separately.) But I also miss constantly thinking “Ooh, I should blog that thought.” I loved having that spontaneity happen in a space that I could back up more easily than I can back up FriendFeed.

That’s a little more bittersweet sounding than I’d intended, but oh well. Hopefully soon I’ll have more energy to devote to blogging again. But until that time, I’ll keep happily watching librarianly conversations unfold on the internet.

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