Skip to content

Category: Random Thoughts

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.

Comments closed

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.

1 Comment

More on the Future of the Catalog

Published by Iris on Monday, May 22nd, 2006


Scream if you’re tired of this subject, but I’m studying hard for my presentation and thought as long as I was keeping notes and collecting URLs I might as well share them with anyone else who’s studying this topic.

First of all, here are some links to catalogs that are doing cool things:

(I’m still trying to find examples of AJAX-enhansed searches, but the only one that I know of is not, I think, public. You can see examples of LiveSearch by OCLC on Lorcan Dempsey’s PowerPoint slides.) [Update: Thom from OCLC Research has pointed me toward Phoenix Live, which uses AJAX to pre-search as you type. Thanks Thom!]

I’ve also just stumbled across Karen Schneider’s three part discussion on what we need to change in our catalogs over on ALA TechSource (found via Panlibus). Food for thought.

Oh, and I’ve decided to try del.icio.us out (been a furl user so far), so I’m collecting these catalog examples there. Collections of blog postings and other research are (so far) only here on my blog.

4 Comments

If Only I Knew What I Think

Published by Iris on Sunday, May 21st, 2006

Thomas, over on TechEssence.Info, has a great post about the problem of forcing users to learn to use the catalog. He poses one of the central questions about the catalog:

And this was the comment that I keep chewing on: ““Students are in college to learn, so what’s so bad about forcing them to learn the catalog?”” I’’m still not sure how best to respond to this (although, “”Isn’’t that what we do now? And why we’re having day-long conferences on why our users are migrating to Google?”” is high on the list).

And like Thomas, I’m anything but sure what a good answer to that comment might be. On the one hand, I’m a firm believer in having catalogs serve users. Who isn’t? But in an academic library, where we get must meet the entire range of research needs, how important is it to have more complicated systems that can perform more complicated searches? I know that I tend to be able to manipulate a system to better advantage when I’ve been forced to figure out it’s inner workings. But then, that’s how I learn. That’s not how everybody learns. And quite frequently, my students only have enough time to work on their assignments, let alone familiarize themselves with an arguably arcane web application that provides very little in the way of automated help.

On the other hand, perhaps we’re finally to the point where technology is good enough that people don’t have to know how a program works in order to use it well. Maybe we can simplify things now without sacrificing valuable knowledge.

2 Comments