I Stubbed My Toe On The Technology

Oh, I should forge on ahead and explore the next Thing--it's something really snazzy and techy: eFolios--online portfolios to be used as a career enhancer or some such thing. It had these action steps to take before starting:

Reflect: Reflect on what you’ve accomplished in school and in your career, and how it fits with your goals.
Collect: Collect the information for your electronic portfolio. To learn more about what to include, read below.
Select: Select those documents that are most pertinent to your goals and keep them handy as you work on your electronic portfolio.
Build: Build your site using the electronic portfolio tool. For ideas on what you can do with your electronic portfolio, see Gallery.
Publish: Publish your portfolio. You can let others read all, or parts of, your site. Targeting is helpful if you have multiple skills and are open to a number of different employment options.

Frankly, I read this and I became very sleepy. And I just had a mocha. That's a bad sign. I mean, I don't even want to think about action step 1. Does anyone out there really have an overwhelming desire to reflect on what they've accomplished in their careers? Apart from the masochists, I mean. And the show-offs. Don't get me wrong--I'm actually quite happy with my quote unquote career, I just don't have a desire to dwell on it, the way I lately have a desire to dwell on the logistics of homeschooling, the gathering of fiddleheads, the winning of lotteries and the cuteness of my children.

The other thing that made me sleepy, or I should say lethargic, is my library bud's blog http://23sticketc.blogspot.com/. It was so cool. She makes it look so effortless, this Stick stuff. So I looked at her blog and thought: what the hell is a screed? Am I supposed to know that? Did I skip that part? Did I miss something? Could I possibly be more fuzzy brained? And I became very tired.

Ditto my virtual bud (can I call her that? I feel like we're friends, although I have no idea who she is or where she is or even what her name is--funny, isn't it, the nature of these virtual relationships...) Anyway, my virtual bud Cara Mama http://caramamamia.blogspot.com/ who writes these really sweet and sharp entries about her daughter and here I am and you'd hardly even know I have kids, truthfully, I threw in the reference above about their cuteness just so I wouldn't feel like a horrible mother. A mother who has a blog and never even talks about her kids. How messed up is that?

Topping it all off is the ever-brilliant Well Dressed Librarian http://welldressedlibrarian.blogspot.com/ and his ridiculously over-the-top funny post which slyly compares reference assistance to unspeakable sex acts and/or prostitution (it's funnier than it sounds) and I should just crawl into bed, pull the covers over my head, and call it a day. Wake me up in the next millenium.

Wow! Have you heard of this thing called "The Internet"?

I'm not so jazzed about the next of the 23 Things--IMing. Are people still doing that? It seems IM reference services were what everyone (if everyone is a librarian) was talking about three years ago. To my jaundiced eye it appears that--obviously--we need to offer IM reference along with all the other ways we need to offer reference assistance. Which is to say, if people are out there using [blank] as a way to communicate, then we need to be figuring it out. Any resistance is soooo 2003.

Does anyone else remember the very first time they accessed the Internet? I sure do. It was through the Gopher service run by the University of Minnesota, way back in 1994. And it wasn't even "the Internet" as we now know it, that's for sure. The first thing I saw was, I believe, a precursor to a Word doc, and it was some government communication (looked like a text file) out of Israel. And it Blew. My. Mind.

Nowadays, everything in the online world is so pliable, and the interface is so friendly. I'm fascinated, for example, by the layout capabilities of this blog. There are so many bells and whistles available and--most amazing--they can be utilized by a person like me with absolutely no programming experience.

You know, we talk and talk about how the relationship between people and information has changed--that there is this infinite amount of information out there and where do librarians fit in, do they at all, and oh my goodness what if people no longer need us? Of course they do. They do now, they did then, and they always will. People don't just need information, they need useful information. The University of Buffalo YouTube bit (which I will try to locate and post here) where they demonstrate their IM reference service is a perfect example: "Hey, overwhelmed undergrad--let me know what your paper is on and I will show you the way." Any student with an ounce of common sense will immediately see the value here. So you can place me in the camp of people who think this "information revolution" is all for the good in terms of librarianship.

I'm very impressed that I somehow managed to yank the content of this post somehow back to IMing.

Stick-y thing 6: Online Image Generators

To your left, check out a trading card I created at Big Huge Labs (http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/). Now, this, I can see the potential of. Or is that: Of this, I can see potential? In any case, this website rocks with tons of fun ways to manipulate your digital images. Now, I'm sad to say it's a well-known secret that librarians are horrible horrible horrible at marketing. It's just not a skill-set that comes with the job. Librarians are great at doing. They are not so great at telling people what it is, exactly, that they do. Case in point: years ago I worked on a family literacy project collaboration between my library school and a local branch. Oh, we were amazing. We had Head Start involved, ECFE, crafts, themes, in-depth analysis of the targeted demographic--the pedagological stars were all aligned. I was dazzled by our program. Session arrives and we're all beyond excited. And what happened? No one came. That's right, friends. We had forgotten, for the most part, to tell anyone about it. Oh, there were other issues there--a last minute change of venue and such, but in all our excitement we had left out marketing. And this is how I learned that all library schools should include a "Marketing Your Library Services" among its core curriculum. My point, in retelling this sad little tale, is that Big Huge Labs makes marketing SO easy for graphic design-challenged librarians, of which there are many. There are no longer any excuses. I created this trading card in 5 minutes. Imagine one for each of your staff (like Carleton College, bless their hearts). Imagine one for each of your work-study. Oh! You could do trading cards for staff picks of books. At the site you can also make movie posters (I'm definitely going to fool around with that), mosiacs, magazine covers. Tons of fun stuff. And, unlike Flickr, which I saw as only useful for certain types of libraries, I see image generating tools as being useful for all libraries, regardless of type. They make it easy. It's really fun! Go on, try it. I double-dog dare you.

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Another thing librarians are horrible at, apparently, is creating really catchy titles for their blog posts.

Flickr'd

Very cool possibilities with Flickr. What immediately strikes me is its potential as a storage space for images--we recently bought a secondary hard drive for this purpose, but in the case of a fire we'd still need to rescue THAT. Using Flickr, the images really are "safe". And we can upload in batches, which would make the process pretty fast. As for the sharing--I think we're going to see a theme here--I think that's cool for people that are computerheads, i.e., people who are online ALL THE TIME. Me, I have two little kids and where I'm at in my life, I'm not going to spend hours--or even minutes, truthfully--randomly surfing Flickr images. On the other hand, if I did need to find an image of penguins or something, I think I would go to Flickr.

I'm not entirely sure how a library would use Flickr. The Clemens & Alcuin Libraries' example--that's cool and all, but do they get a lot of circulation that way? It's seems like a long and winding road to the library and its materials to me.

I feel like I'm coming across as a naysayer, and that's not my intent. I guess I do just fear that--as was discussed in the initial Library 2.0 subject--that we sacrifice something real and good for the mere idea of the usefulness of technology. I may accept a business case for the use of Flickr in a high school or academic library (because of the user demographic) but no way for a public library. I just don't think the average public library user is at that level. No offense to the average public library user--but when I think of one of my favorite branches, the Rondo Community Outreach library of St. Paul, I feel fairly sure that their service to the local Somali and Hmong populations needs to be a little more direct than posting images of their collection on a Web 2.0 tool like Flickr.

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Off topic, and on the subject of RSS feeds, I suddenly recalled the other day that a couple of years ago I was using a service that was clearly a precursor to RSS--the service I used, I'm sure there were others, but the service I used was Furl. You marked your websites and then the URLs were stored at the Furl site. It was like storing your bookmarks at that location, so that no matter what computer you were on you had access to all your favorite sites. It was cool, and convenient. It was lacking the update feature--just held the static URL--but I can see that it was a similar concept. I think I need to go back to Google Reader and fool around with that some more. Maybe it was just the interface that was turning me off.

RSS feeds serve lazy bloggers like me

Of course, now that I'm offically on the blogger side of things, I can see the usefulness of a RSS feed--it would alert my legions of devoted readers to my sporadic posts.

Coming up: more Things On A Stick.

RSS feeds

Is there something I'm not getting?

I've set up RSS feeds for some of my often visited sites, and, yeah, I get that now I can go to Google Reader and see if there's new postings from there but it never seemed that difficult or time consuming to check out my favorite sites using the favorites function. Plus, blog content as displayed at Google Reader seems stripped of context. Sure, the entries now "come to me" but considering the whole concept of ambient findability, isn't everything, everywhere, immediately accessible anyway? I.e., I'm already plugged into the hive brain by virtue of being online. And I still have to go to the Google Reader site.

Admittedly, I'm not a hardcore user. There's only a handful of sites to which I'm truly devoted. And I suppose I could see how this could be very useful to someone whose job requires them to be monitoring a large number of sites. So that English teacher who gives her students the assignment of starting a blog and then needs to be checking all of them--for her, a good thing indeed.

For me, a little baffling. But I will keep fooling around with it and update here if my initial impression changes.

Reflections on Library 2.0

First off, I'm a big fan of Stephen Abram. I've seen him speak a few times and even had a coffee klatch with him after he spoke at my workplace (this is the equivalent of librarian name-dropping). He's an exciting, excited guy. So I love his schtick on Library 2.0 and his enthusiasm for Millenials. His message is that librarians need to be engaged in life and excited about life, which should then naturally translate into being jazzed about these new Web 2.0 technologies. And he has also straight out said that foot-dragging librarians should do the rest of us a favor and get the heck out of the profession. He doesn't mince words, this guy, and I admire that. And there's John Blyberg http://www.blyberg.net/2006/01/09/11-reasons-why-library-20-exists-and-matters/ who claims it's out-and-out revolutionary. Unlike Blyberg, I hesitate to refer to the concept of Library 2.0 as "a movement". That just seems grandiose to me.

Then you have the backlash against Library 2.0. A contingent that grumbles that this is just fancy-pants wordsmithing of what we've always done. That just throwing tech at a library doesn't make it better. And who has the time for this anyway?

I'm choosing to take what I think is the pragmatic view. I don't think the Library 2.0 vision is revolutionary. It's simply evolutionary. It's the logical next step. It IS exciting, but I don't think all librarians should automatically be forced to wear those cool space suits from the movie Tron just yet. (Does anyone else remember that movie?) Clearly (and to his credit, Blyberg addresses this) if your library serves, say, a largely rural population that does not use or have access to computers then it is nonsensical to dump a lot of time and resources into a Library 2.0 initiative. You need be able to afford to put gas into the bookmobile, after all. Common sense, people. But, increasingly, people are using these technologies and it behooves us, as a profession, to be early adopters. It is just a fact of life that we need to learn the stuff. Lead, follow, or get the heck out of the way.