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Pegasus Librarian Posts

Be Careful What You Wish For

Published by Iris on Monday, April 24th, 2006

So, remember when I said that our all-staff meeting to discuss the draft of our 10-year vision statement was so surprisingly un-horrible? Well, apparently I wasn’t the only one because now we’re all supposed to meet again this Wednesday to discuss a draft of our 3-year strategic plan. Meetings breed faster than rabbits.

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New Toys! (possibly)

Published by Iris on Friday, April 21st, 2006

I just got out of a two-hour brainstorming session with our web team, and WOW! We might be getting some new tools made specially for us (sometime in the next few years).

It all started at CIL 2006. Well, it started long before I started working here, but it had been back-burnered until last week when I mentioned that I’d like to explore the option of reorganizing our subject research guides to aid in resource discovery as well as resource location. I’d been inspired by Chad Boeninger’s Biz Wiki. He had everything that normally went into a subject page and more, and (and this was the kicker) it was all keyword searchable! Finally, a subject page that doesn’t require students to know what they’re looking for before they even start!

So last week at our department meeting I mentioned that I’d like to try the wiki thing, and suddenly everyone got very excited about transforming our research guides from glorified handouts into something more dynamic and useful. Then, the magic that can happen when you work with a knowledgeable, engaged, and explorative group of people began to happen. We wondered what we actually wanted this new thing to do, and this led to a suggestion to brainstorm with the campus web team about our ideal tool and see if they’d be able to build it for us. Then today we ran all of our disjointed goals and hopes and fears past the team, showed examples of web tools that do some of what we want, and talked through possible architectures, bits, pieces, metadata, and functions with people who do this sort of thing for a living. (They already developed the database-driven content management system that our college uses.)

So, here are some of what we said we want. We want the ability to:

  • collect URLs, web pages, etc when we see them in the course of the day, and save them somewhere were we can get back to them and describe them before publishing them.
  • have database URLs and uber-description blurbs in a central place so we don’t have to update multiple pages whenever databases change their location.
  • pull this database and other links into pages maintaining their uber-descriptions or changing the descriptions.
  • have pages keyword searchable or browsable by discipline or category
  • have easily modifiable metadata (which we’re calling “baby bibs”)
  • have the whole thing based on a relational database
  • have keyword searching return short “advice” pieces as well as lists of resources
  • be scalable, customizable, dynamic, yet controlled… think square circles.

Basically… a furl/evernote/wiki/blog/catalog. And wouldn’t RSS be nice? And what about user tagging?

After today, the librarians are going to analyze the existing guides to see what’s actually there and how we would explain to a computer program what we’d want, create profiles of possible uses and users and how they would need the tool to function, and get closer to a list of features and functions that we want.

SO EXCITING… so much work for the poor web team. I sure hope this pans out.

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Long day

Published by Iris on Thursday, April 20th, 2006

I’m not quite sure why it feels like today was three times as long as a normal day. It could have something to do with the fact that I only had 2, count-um, 2 reference questions while at my desk shift today. It could have something to do with the minor slogging away I did on some projects that have no end in sight, so there’s no sense of accomplishment. Or it could have something to do with my upcoming evening, which will be spent reading up for one meeting I’m having tomorrow and analyzing survey results for another meeting I’m having tomorrow. Nothing like a little blog-surfing to turn a three-hour prep period into a five- or six-hour prep period… So maybe I should remind myself how much I love my job and get back to it. I’ve got so much to get up here, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Pleasant dreams, all of you who will get to sleep tonight.

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Trust vs. Control: Continued questions about the future of the catalog

Published by Iris on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006

I’m torn. I love the idea of tagged catalogs and user comments, but I’m also still in my honeymoon period with controlled vocabulary (having only graduated from library school 11 months ago). I guess I’m stuck here in the middle on the vocabulary issue just like I’m suspended between genX and genY.

For me, it all comes down to control and trust. Well, it may also have something to do with the fact that I’m located at a four-year college, so trust becomes even more of an issue. I’ve seen the notes scribbled in the margins of used books I’ve bought (most notably the copy of Frankenstein I read in grad school in which some over-eager and under-informed student had wondered which child Shelley was pregnant with when she made reference to a “pregnant pause”). I’ve seen the chalk scribbles on the college walkways proclaiming that world peace can be achieved by … um … love — very, very explicit love.

I want to trust that tagging would be a powerful and vibrant addition to a catalog. If my library said they’d be instituting user tagging tomorrow, I’d go for it with good spirit and gusto. But I’d also have nagging doubts. A month ago, though, I also had nagging doubts about the usefulness of blogs….

Well, this has gotten a lot longer than I intended, but I was thinking a lot about this as I sat at the reference desk tonight. I’d gone back to look at a message I’d saved from the O’Reilly Radar about Wikipedia and the Future of Free Culture which contained this quote:

The secret of Wikipedia’s content-generating process, Wales explained, is the nurturing and shaping of trust, instead building everything around distrust.

I think nurturing and shaping of trust is the heart and soul of the library of the future. I also think that the “nurturing and shaping” of trust does not mean giving up all control (which, to be fair, has never been intimated by anyone I’ve heard talk about the subject). Plants don’t often flourish if they’re simply dumped on the ground. They require feeding, watering, weeding, and sometimes even training. I’m eager to see what my somewhat unruly users could do for resource discovery if given the proper environment and ideal amount of training and oversight (what ever that “ideal” amount might be).

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