DIY Librarian

I follow so many blogs and feeds at this point that I don’t usually go out looking for more things to read, so I don’t usually go look for what’s hot on Technorati. I do, however, like that you can subscribe to a search (of course I have a vanity search set up … though it mostly returns hits on a designer who shares my name), I like being able to follow specific tags, and I often check it when I am composing a blog post to see if anyone else has commented on the same topic.

I don’t see myself using Technorati much for library services, simply because I need to focus on scholarly literature for my patrons. For me, Technorati and other blog search and ranking sites are definitely professional development and networking tools.

Next up: the Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 can of worms.

At the SLA conference in Seattle, I got talked into signing up for SLA’s 23 Things. While I don’t consider myself on the forefront of Web 2.0 (I’m convinced that once I found Facebook, it instantly became yesterday’s news), I’m pretty comfortable with a good number of the tools (my library has been blogging for over 2 years now and this humble blog has been around in some form since 2003) and I’m not afraid to try new ones out. I thought 23 Things might get me out of my comfort zone and get me to try some new things – plus the organizers were pretty persuasive.

I haven’t blogged about the first few things (blogs and wikis), mainly because I was so familiar with them. I have more blogs than I can handle already, and I started using a wiki for SLA Social Science Division program planning last year. (This year I’ve invited more people to use the wiki, and am happy to see most of them at least reading the wiki and a good number contributing to it.)

Now we are on to tagging, which I’m not quite as comfortable with. Oh, sure, I tag things, but I’m never quite sure about it. Is this the right tag? Will I ever find this again?

Mostly I am good at coming up with my own special tags. For example, I tag books in Library Thing with currentreading and use that to display them on my blog. I tag posts on del.icio.us with staffpop and plug that feed into my intranet site for my staff. But actual meaningful tags? I’m a little behind on that.

Next up: Folksonomies and Technorati, where the current top story is “Dick Busted on Sex Charges Outside Chicken Joint”. You can’t make this stuff up.

A communication scholar and his book editor are testing out a model for using blog comments as peer review, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the experiment, the book will be simultaneously reviewed by blog commenters and by a traditional peer review process.

Steven Bell, writing on ACRLog, says that static personal web sites are becoming less common among academic librarians as they are replaced by blogs, social networking profiles, and other interactive web tools. He argues, however, that a static site can still benefit librarians. Brock Read, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus, asks, “Should professors and librarians delete seldom-used personal pages, or keep them around for posterity?”

More important than whether your site runs on WordPress or Drupal or hand-coded HTML is whether visitors can find out about your professional accomplishments. (I’m assuming here that your blog is not anonymous or pseudonymous, and that you consider it part of your professional self.) Is there a link on your blog to your academic credentials? to awards and honors you’ve received? to your publications and presentations?

In my roles as a conference and program planner for professional associations, I often look at personal and staff pages of all varieties looking for information. And I do sometimes rely on web searches to help me identify potential speakers. I’m much more likely to give you a call if I can find that you’ve already presented on a topic I’m interested in. In this day and age, why not also add video of yourself speaking?

I think (though I’m not as immersed in the culture) that other academics benefit from enhanced personal sites as well. I regularly research potential speakers for lectures and symposia sponsored by my organization, as well as prospects for open faculty positions. I can give the committee a much more detailed profile if I can find a recently updated profile (or CV or resume or whatever you want to call it). If I can’t find a profile, I have to rely on what I can find through web searches and literature searches, which is probably not as complete, nor as focused.

The bottom line: a personal web site, of any variety, gives you some control over how people view you. Here’s mine, also linked from the sidebar of DIY Librarian, and from my employer’s web site. OK, the design won’t get me hired as a web designer, and it’s nothing revolutionary, but it is up-to-date.

Happy Blog Day 2007! I’m celebrating by sharing five blogs that are a little outside the usual content at DIY Librarian.

OK, I’m bending the rules a little bit, because these blogs aren’t new to me, but hopefully some of them are new to you.

Tumaini Kids! is a blog written by kids at the Tumaini Children’s Center in Nyeri, Kenya. The kids are part of the Hope Runs project, started by two Stanford University students to provide an understanding of personal health, social entrepreneurship, and technology to orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) through running. The kids write about running and other events in their lives—they are inspiring, hilarious, and will steal your heart.

Mazurland Blog is the product of one of my co-bloggers on my other blog, The Runaround, and his brothers. The content is very eclectic—just this week there have been posts about punctuation abuse, gun ownership, and learning to play the guitar. I don’t agree with everything, but that’s part of what gets me thinking and questioning my own beliefs.

The Comics Curmudgeon keeps me updated on the intense dramas unfolding in Mark Trail, Apartment 3G, Rex Morgan, M.D., and the like. I can’t read this at work because people will wonder why I’m laughing out loud in my office. (“Oh! the latest issue of Population Development Review is just too funny!” wasn’t convincing anyone.)

I started reading Bad Librarianship because I thought it would be about libraries. While it is written by a librarian, it is about comics and pop culture. Well, and occasionally about librarians.

The Rambling Librarian is actually about libraries. I mention it because it may not be on everyone’s radar since it is from Singapore. It does ramble—the current post, as I type this, is about the custom of burning Hell Bank Notes—but many of my favorite blogs do. Right now Ivan Chew is in the midst of blogging about his trip to Durban, South Africa for the IFLA conference.

I believe that gray literature—blogs, this ejournal, a few similar publications and some lists—represents the most compelling and worthwhile literature in the library field today. (Walt Crawford, Cites & Insights, August 2007)

Having just gotten a rejection from my first submission to a peer-reviewed journal, this statement immediately caught my attention.

In preparation for writing my article, I did a literature review and read some scholarly articles. I also read a lot of blog posts and online publications. Reviewing the journal literature was helpful for background, and uncovered some things (mainly having to do with special libraries) that hadn’t been reported elsewhere. But for the most part I found the journals to be seriously behind the curve.

By the time I revised my article and submitted it to another journal, and then waited for review and publication, it would really be old news. While the idea of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal is appealing, in part because I work in a research environment, it is neither required nor supported in my current position. My real motivation in writing this article is sharing a story with my colleagues, and most of them are probably more likely to read it on a blog or listen to it at a conference than they are to pick up a journal and read about it there.

Crawford goes on to question the value role of peer review in furthering discussion in library science (note: not of scholarly publishing):

Which would you pay more attention to, and which would you regard as more likely to move discussion forward in useful ways: An article in a third-tier print journal by someone you’ve never heard of, or an “unrefereed” blog post by, say, Lorcan Dempsey or Eric Schnell or Laura Cohen or Iris Jastram or, for that matter, Mark Lindner or Walt Crawford?

I think there is probably a place for all kinds of literature in our profession, but right now it’s all I can do to keep up with the gray literature, and it feels more relevant to me as a practicing librarian.

[Edited for accuracy]

The Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS) provides yet another example that you can make an open source ILS in-house. The December issue of Library Journal includes a nice article about their Evergreen project.

In doing a little research about the project, I discovered a few new things I’ll be keeping my eye on:

• Open Libraries, a blog written by Library Journal technology editor Jay Datema.
• LibLime, a complany providing open source ILS solutions for libraries large and small. They distribute both GPLS’ Evergreen and Koha, an open source ILS developed in New Zealand.
• The first Google result for a search on evergreen pines is not about trees.

All this makes me think about revisiting my own library’s ILS. We don’t so much have an ILS as some cobbled-together Access databases, using ColdFusion for the Web interface. We also don’t use MARC. These open source developments make me think we might be able to do something better, though. We don’t have much of a budget, our collection is small, and we would probably need a highly customized ILS, but we do have excellent IT support.

I’ve just started a blog for the SLA Central Pennsylvania Chapter. It’s nothing fancy—just a TypePad blog set up through SLA. It’s primary purpose is to make it easier for me to get new content on the chapter home page (using Feed2JS). I used to hand-code a news archive page and then copy the most recent content into the index page. Not a lot of work, but it gets tedious, especially when you have to squeeze it into free moments at work. I’ve already noticed I’m more likely to post things than I was before, and I think this will make things much easier for whoever succeeds me as chapter webmaster.

I don’t know whether SLA conferences are getting better, or I’m just getting better at attending them, but this was a great conference for me. I have been appointed program planning chair-elect for the Social Science Division, so I ended up attending planning meetings when I could have gone to more sessions. On the other hand, having some insight into the planning process makes me even better at navigating the conference, so I think it will be a good experience for me. I seem to be making a habit of this conference planning thing…

Things have been hopping over at the SLA 2006 Conference Blog (and we seem to have inspired SLA CEO Janice LaChance!). My SLA Blogger ribbon was a great conversation starter, and hopefully I inspired some more people to take a look at the blog. I’ve found that as a blogger I take more notes at the sessions I plan to blog, but fewer notes at things like the general sessions that I know other people will blog about. Way to share the workload!

If you followed the link to the APLIC-I conference program in the previous post, you may have seen a presentation authored by yours truly and two colleagues about my library’s blogging project, News from the PRI Library and Data Archive.

The blog may seem overwhelming at first—we have a lot of categories and a lot of posts—but we are primarily encouraging our users to subscribe to the particular categories that interest them and using the feeds to provide content for other web pages. For instance, we’ve included the feed for the library categories on my library’s home page.

We think the majority of our users are not currently using feed readers, so we’re introducing this gradually. We do already have a few people subscribed to our feeds, though, and all four of our staff members are posting regularly to the blog