DIY Librarian

To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Google has made its 2001 search index available. [via E-Tech]

In 2001, I started my current job, which resulted my my first real web presence, courtesy of a profile page in our staff directory. (I tried to see what my profile looked like in 2001, but it isn’t accessible via the Wayback Machine. We do have a long-standing web presence, dating back to the pre-Google era.) A 2001 search on my name doesn’t find me on the first page (though with a little more searching I was able to find a mention of me); searching now reveals several pages about or by me, as well as a lot of other Tara Murrays.

I was just starting to think about a blog in 2001. (DIY Librarian made its debut in 2003.) I was probably starting to search on DIY Librarian to see if it was taken yet.

While I was indulging my internet nostalgia, I came across a newsletter my center produced in 1999. It has a section about the library. What were we doing back then? Showing off our catalog. Discussing the pros and cons of distributing working papers online. Teaching an introduction to online literature searching.

What did I do today? Demo our catalog. Encourage people to submit working papers. Teach an introduction to literature searching.

The more things change…

Around this time last year, I wrote about how getting cable internet service at home changed my habits. At the time, I was using a desktop computer in a corner of my office/guest bedroom/sewing room, so while my connection was much faster, it was still rooted to one spot in the house, and only one person could use it at a time.

Now, we have made the next big step of setting up a wireless network, which it seems has made just as big a change in our computer habits. First, we can both be online at the same time, which means we aren’t rushing to finish up whatever we’re doing as quickly as possible. Second, the connection is portable, so I use it for different things. For example, if I’m cooking and need to look up a recipe I found online, I just set the laptop up on the dining room table. (I won’t bring the laptop in the kitchen because I’m a messy cook.) Third, I keep my laptop in a corner downstairs, where I spend more time, so I’m more likely to turn it on and chat with my brother while watching TV, or blog about something I read in the paper while I’m eating breakfast. (Obviously this isn’t happening much with this blog, but more so with the blog I contribute to for my local newspaper’s web site.)

And perhaps most importantly, we have become those people who log on to sports web sites while watching the game. I’ve always wondered who those people were, and now I know. They are us.

I thought we would just use it to monitor games we weren’t getting on TV, but yesterday during Superbowl 41.5, we had the game on TV and the stats on the laptop.

The Wired Campus reports that a judge has ordered a student to stay off the internet after he harassed another student via e-mail. This seems to me like banning someone from the telephone.

Commenters point out that banning the student from the internet will make it difficult if not impossible for him to complete his coursework. One suggests he could “use the library,” but as so many library resources are online, that’s not really a solution.

It’s conference season again, and I’ll bet that most conferences will include a session where attendees can work on their elevator speeches.

I worked on mine at the SLA Leadership Summit in January, but it hasn’t gotten much use since our elevator’s been on the fritz. (It’s difficult to talk about much of anything when you’re climbing 6 flights of stairs.) I’ve decided that instead I will work on my plane speech.

After the last few conferences I’ve attended, I’ve sat next to a talker on the plane. The talker invariably asks lots of questions upon learning that I’ve been at a library conference.

Aren’t libraries obsolete? Isn’t everything on the internet? What do I think of Google? What do librarians talk about at library conferences?

This is a perfect opportunity to talk about why libraries are important, the good and the bad of Google, and dispel a few librarian myths (why yes, I do have a master’s in that). I have a captive and interested audience. I’ve just been at a conference talking about all of these issues.

After attending the APLIC-I conference this year, I sat next to a man who was curious about Google. Having just heard Siva Vaidhyanathan talk about the Google book scanning project, I was prepared to talk about the pros and cons.

If you sit next to me on the plane coming back from SLA, watch out! If you don’t want to know about libraries, you might want to bring a book, or break out the crossword from the in-flight magazine.

Previously, I argued that Library 2.0 applications (e.g., those that encourage social interaction) should not necessarily use the same privacy standards as traditional library services.

A recent news story about the nastiness of anonymous commenters has further solidified my opinion. (The story is about vicious comments posted to the Orange County Register’s Web site in response to news about a woman who had given birth only 2 weeks after learning she was pregnant.) Anyone who has used anonymous or semi-anonymous message boards is probably familiar with this phenomenon. I’ve personally witnessed it on wedding-planning and running boards.

I’ve done a little searching to find other people’s opinions about this, and I came across a blog post about Library 2.0 and privacy issues by Rory Litwin on Library Juice. The post is very thoughtful and well worth visiting (or re-visiting). While I still think that libraries are not under obligation to preserve absolute confidentiality when offering inherently social applications, Rory brings up many related issues that librarians should be thinking about as they implement 2.0 ideas.

I was listening to my local public radio station this morning (a new habit I’ve picked up since I started commuting to work) and heard a story about paying for college. At the end of the story, the host urged parents and students to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). She said, “It’s on the Web—just Google ‘FAFSA’.” Not, “Go to www.fafsa.ed.gov,” not “Search for FAFSA.” Further proof that Google has become a genericized trademark—and perhaps proof that your site’s Google ranking is just as important, if not more so, than your URL.

I’ve noticed that I tend not to bookmark many sites anymore, assuming that I can find them again by searching. When I bookmark something, it’s usually because I think I might forget about it altogether, not that I’m afraid I won’t find it again.

I never set a very high standard for posting frequency on this blog, but I also did not intend to go over a month without posting.

It turns out that while you can decide to buy a house on a whim, carrying out the purchase and relocation does take a significant amount of work. So for the past two months, I’ve been doing fun things like applying for a mortgage, packing boxes, and getting to know every aisle of my local home improvement stores. In the end, it will all be worth it, and in the meantime I have at least unpacked my computer and gotten a high-speed internet connection.

I had been a dial-up holdout up until now. While everyone else I knew was simultaneously chatting on the phone, IMing their friends, downloading music, and shopping for discount airfares, I was making a cup of coffee while waiting for my email to load, hoping that no one was trying to call me.

It had its advantages. I didn’t spend much time at home in front of the computer. And I knew instantly when a web page I had designed was taking too long to load.

It also had its disadvantages, so I have finally taken the plunge into the land of high-speed. And wondering what took me so long!

Now that life is a little calmer and I am more connected, you can expect more frequent postings from DIY Librarian.

In “Hustle and Flow”, his March 15, 2006 column for Library Journal, Roy Tennant makes some comments about blogs that I’ve taken the liberty of tweaking:

Blogs Newspapers are tailored to maximize the power of flow. The only blogs newspapers that are read are those that post publish new content regularly. This new content is streamed seamlessly to the reader’s favorite current awareness tool subscriber’s doorstep.

Users tend to focus solely on the new, and although blogging software the newspaper format makes it easy to assign posts articles to topical categories of the blogger’s editor’s own invention, it’s not clear that readers use those categories for much of anything old business sections for anything other than birdcage lining.

Tennant’s conclusion still holds true, however:

Current awareness is a useful goal. But being able to locate something you’ve seen before can be important as well. So we must collect, organize, provide access to, and preserve the best of this information and content flow.

Really, we’ve been doing this for a long time. The only problem is that with the ease of publishing on the Internet, there is so much more information flowing past us. And, as we’ve seen with newspaper indexing and preservation efforts, it’s not always easy to know what will be useful to the scholars of the future.

Walt Crawford writes about the appeal of bargain DVD “megapacks” and what makes them possible—namely, the combination of movies that are in the public domain or can be licensed cheaply, and minimal production costs. Before the advent of DVD, we had a cheap mono VCR and a few videotapes, plus a collection of MST3K taped from television. We resisted buying a DVD player for a long time, because most of the time we’d rather watch a bad movie on MST3K than any of the stuff that Hollywood puts out these days. When we finally succumbed, however, we realized that we had started developing a massive collection of DVDs. These are mainly things that were never available on VHS, like foreign movies, underappreciated movies, movies of questionable quality, and old TV series. As Walt writes:

They’re great cheap fodder for film studies, understanding the culture, and—well—making fun of the bad’uns.

CD has already done this for less mainstream music. And what about books? The (paper) format is already perfect—I expect electronic formats will make rare books and special collections more accessible, but I don’t want to do my reading for pleasure on a screen. The big bookstores don’t typically stock things that they don’t expect to sell, but libraries keep them. Amazon and other online booksellers can stock all kinds of bizarre titles, and online used booksellers have made tracking down out-of-print titles much easier.

Truly, life is getting better for those who appreciate the cultural fringes.

I’m pretty selective about jumping on new technologies. I caught on to email very quickly, because it’s usefulness was immediately apparent to me. I held out on getting a cell phone for a long time, though, and I still don’t use it that often. While I do blog, I haven’t really explored social bookmarking or wikis yet. When I discovered Open WorldCat, though, I immediately had an “Aha!” moment. I think it was because I discovered it by accident while doing a web search.

I discovered something odd, though, when I searched for a book that I know Penn State’s library owns and entered the zip code for Penn State. The first library that shows up is the Mercer County Library in Lawrenceville, NJ, which is probably about a 5 hour drive from Penn State. ricklibrarian writes about how Open WorldCat may be failing rural America. I’m not sure it’s just rural America, though, because while this area is rural, Penn State is no small library. In fact, Open WorldCat recognizes that I am on a Penn State network, and displays a link that will search the Penn State catalog for my book. I wonder if the problem is that Penn State has libraries on multiple campuses, and so it isn’t associated with any single zip code?