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Pegasus Librarian Posts

When the Social Gets Personal

Published by Iris on Thursday, January 10th, 2008

We in library land spend a lot of time talking about the “social” web. We create Facebook profiles, MySpace pages, sign up for Twitter, and let people know what we’re thinking by writing blog entries, commenting on blog entries, and IMing each other… and that’s just scratching the surface. There are more social spaces online than any one person could possibly keep up with in a lifetime. And they serve several distinct (and sometimes conflicting) roles. We talk about wanting to seem more relevant and approachable, inserting ourselves were our patrons are, “personalizing” the library. We also use these tools to build our own professional networks, exchange professional wisdom, troubleshoot problems, give encouragement, and just plain hang out with each other. Beyond that, I’m sure lots of librarians have a personal space or two online where they can connect with friends and family on a less-library-related footing.

I don’t know why it continues to surprise me, given the shear volume of interaction, that the social web is more than just social. It’s personal. I don’t mean “bare the hidden secrets of your family” or “gossip about people” personal. That’s almost never advisable. No, I mean “act kind of like an extended family” personal. For someone who’s never had boatloads of friends (being content with a few really good ones), I hadn’t expected to develop such close ties with people I’d never seen in real life. I still marvel that several of my very best friends don’t know what my voice sounds like when I’m excited, or have never decoded the set of my jaw and realized that I’m concentrating.

Even so, some of these people know me better than my extended family does (and mine is a fairly close-knit extended family). They know when I’m bursting with good news, when I’ve had a rough day, and when Pippin has snuggled in for a good cuddle-n-purr session. And what really gets me is this: they actually care to hear these things, just like I care to hear about similar things from them. Personally, I can’t imagine most of my cousins being interested in that kind of information.

This kind of personal affection and interest was highlighted this week when somebody in one of these social circles was killed in a car accident. I didn’t know this person at all. Our two circles overlapped, but we’d never “met.” And yet, the ripples of the tragedy spread quickly as the woman’s friends expressed shock and disbelief and spread this to their friends, who spread it to their friends, and so on. Very quickly, an entire social network seemed to have slowed to a crawl as everyone lost the will to share trivial thoughts in the face of such events. (The woman was young… my age, in fact, with very young children.)

And that’s when I realized that the social web is more than social. It’s personal. It’s intimate. And it is immensely powerful, though not necessarily in the way I’d thought before. It’s not enough just to “be where the patrons are.” I’ve never thought that sounded right, somehow. I’d hear that phrase and imagine it being like standing in the lobby of a dorm feeling foolish and not doing anyone any good. No, being involved with an online social network more than that. And if we don’t admit that to ourselves, I think we set ourselves up for stress, anxiety, and disappointment.

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Class: Citation as a Lens for Interdesciplinarity

Published by Iris on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

By popular request from my twitterish friends, here is the basic gist of the class I taught today.

Context:
One of the amazing professors here (I have to say that, she’s reading this :P ) teaches a class which, being interdisciplinary and being a lower level course, often ends up introducing students to the world of interdisciplinarity. So this professor and I have decided to prime the students’ brains early in the term for two concepts: there are different disciplines out there and they each have their own conventions for good reason, and you’ll have to follow one of these conventions soon, so here are the basics.

Class (PPT):

  • Citation has many goals, and avoiding plagiarism is only one of these goals (and frankly, the least interesting of the bunch, in my opinion… see my opinion). These goals have to do with the fact that writing is enherently communicative, and communication happens primarily within a community of inquiry. As you read throughout this term, see if you can determine a little bit about each authors’ relationship to research and to his/her community of inquiry simply based on the citations included in each piece of writing. Citation…
    • Shows respect for your community
    • Communicates clearly within a community (like jargon)
    • Reveals what kinds of evidence are most important to a community
    • Builds context for your argument
    • Gives credit where credit is due
  • There are three interlinked rules that all citation styles strive for:
    • Rule of Least Confusion (get your readers to exactly what you want them to see)
    • Rule of Brevity (Accomplish the first rule as succinctly as possible)
    • Rule of Readability (I know… doesn’t seem like any style accomplishes this one)
  • EXERCISE: Working in groups, look at these three journal articles and build your own citation style that fulfills the three rules of citation and that reflects the values of the “community of inquiry” that is your class. Report back what you decided to include, exclude, and why.
  • Comparing MLA, APA, and Chicago (show citation to the same work, three different ways)
    • MLA is designed specifically for the “softer” humanities, such as languages, literature, and the like. This style foregrounds authors and their works and chooses to mention but not highlight dates, since most of these disciplines don’t do as much time-sensitive research (works of literature rarely become “obsolete”). The important evidence in this field is often the words that particular authors wrote, so the author and title are the two most salient pieces of information.
    • APA highlights authors and dates. It serves many of the harder sciences, and information in these disciplines can quickly become obsolete. What would you think if a person gave you computer instructions based on a manual from 1992? Most of the information in that book would be out of date and therefore not useable.
    • Chicago Manual of Style is somewhere in between MLA and APA. It is especially useful for interdisciplinary work, which is as likely to use time-sensitive material as it is to use material that is not time-sensitive. It foregrounds the author and the work, but it acknowledges that the date and the publication itself may also be important to the author’s argument. Footnotes bring this information to the reader’s attention at the point when the author quotes or makes reference to another author. The bibliography provides a summary of all the works cited in the document, allowing the reader to go out and easily find all the author’s sources.
  • Basic Elements of Chicago, and examples of citations for the primary kinds of works (this is the nitty-gritty details bit)

So there you have it. That’s what I was up to today. Since I wasn’t actually teaching the mechanics of Chicago style and was concentrating on how to read its citations and what the citations could tell you about how useful the works themselves would be, I didn’t spend long on the nitty gritty bits. In all, this was a 40-minute session.

Since we’re talking citation, I should mention that I out-n-out stole many of my views on citation as a function of disciplinary priorities from one of my esteemed co-workers. But I was really excited to see how that kind of thinking could help me move this class toward a richer understanding of interdisciplinarity.

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Strategically Planning for Library Technology

Published by Iris on Friday, January 4th, 2008

Here’s a not-so-hypothetical question for you: What key technologies or kinds of technological trends should go into a three-year strategic plan for library technology?

Just brainstorming here, some of these are in the works and some of them may not be appropriate… but hey, I’m brainstorming.

  • Get a new catalog (boy, do I ever wish!)
  • Better platform for research guides (more interactive, less massive-block-of-text-ish, etc)
  • Clickers for classrooms?
  • Better space for assistive technology in the library
  • Evaluate space in terms of increased laptop usage and make printing from laptops possible
  • What about making the library mobile-computing friendlier?
  • Do we know what technology will be needed as we plan and implement a data service?
  • Implement federated search
  • Continue with the on-going project of evaluating/tweaking the library site
  • Continue to explore ways of integrating library services into Moodle
  • Continue to collaborate with the IT department as much as possible
  • Create better space for the manipulation/creation of multi-media projects
  • Here’s a vague one: keep thinking about how to make stuff easier to get to online.
  • I don’t remember where we are on our digitization initiatives, but I’m sure that’ll be part of this.
  • Continue to look for ways to put help at point of need…. that’s another vague one.

I don’t know what other departments will want or need, but luckily, I’m not the only one thinking of stuff to add to this plan.

I enjoy taking time to think about this kind of thing, but at the same time it feels weird. I already feel like if I want to try something, I can, and if our department needs to use or implement new technology, we get the support we need. So I guess I need to stop thinking of it as a “here’s what we wish we could do” document and more of a “here’s what we’re likely to want to try” document.

But I know I haven’t thought of everything. In fact, I feel a little less kept-up on emerging trends right now than I have before because I had to put other priorities ahead of that one last term. So what am I missing?

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