DIY Librarian

The other day, one of our IT staff contacted me with an EndNote question. He told me a faculty member was having trouble importing references from “the CSA web site”.

I explained that the library provides access to several different databases through CSA, and that he needed to use the filter that matched both the database and the provider. So he looked through the filters list, and found the PsycINFO filters. Then he came back and wanted to know which one to use, and I told him to use the CSA one, trying once again to explain the relationship between CSA, EndNote, PsycINFO, and the library.

Now, all this confuses me a bit, and I’m a librarian who uses EndNote almost daily, so I can imagine how the IT person feels. And our faculty member, who is getting this explanation second-hand, is probably even more befuddled.

This kind of confusion is very common with library databases, but I think it extends to other online research as well. By the time they get to a university, most people understand the relationships between authors, publishers, and libraries when they use a book. These distinctions all get very blurry when we’re dealing with online resources.

Cheryl LaGuardia complains about this briefly in her December Library Journal column. I wonder if younger scholars will have an easier time with this, having grown up with online resources. The graduate students I work with seem to have a better understanding, but then they are also required to attend my workshop on bibliographic databases.

I have arrived and checked into my hotel for SLA 2006. So far I have activated my internet access, upgraded Firefox, deleted 82 spam comments from this blog, created a flickr account, and uploaded some photos from my camera. This is all so much more fun when I’m not using dial-up.

Before checking in and getting into conference mode, I got a taste of Baltimore. We started the day at Honfest in Hampden, which just has to be seen to be believed:

After we’d had enough kitsch, we headed over to the Maryland Zoo, which seems to be under a lot of construction, but had some nice exhibits, including an underwater view of the polar bears and three baby chimpanzees—plus, of course, the raven pictured above.

I’ll be doing most of my conference blogging over at the SLA 2006 Conference Blog.

tag: sla2006

The January 19 issue of the Christian Science Monitor has a nice article about RSS. The first paragraph would be a great introduction for anyone who doesn’t know what RSS is, because of focusing on the technology, it focuses on what it can do for you. Let’s face it—people don’t buy air conditioners because they’re fascinated by the cooling mechanism; they buy them because they want cool air. (An idea taken from Bill Buxton’s keynote at SLA 2005.) And that is exactly the point of the Monitor article:

In fact, if RSS really succeeds, you’ll forget you ever heard of the term. It’ll just be another part of the invisible “plumbing” that runs the Internet, says John Palfrey, executive director of The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass.

In his Chronicle of Higher Education column Saving Secondhand Bookstores, Thomas H. Benton laments the replacement of secondhand bookstores with online vendors:

Paradoxically, that means I now buy fewer books because I don’t feel the need to buy in anticipation of future needs. I know I can almost always get exactly what I want online within 48 hours.

Previously, Benton noted that online library catalogs and databases similarly take away from the serendipity of browsing a library collection.

I don’t necessarily agree that electronic sources prohibit browsing. Serendipitous discovery is different in the electronic world, to be sure, but it does exist. And I certainly don’t want to advocate for decreased availability; there is something to being able to get the information you need when you need it, and I imagine Benton is grateful for it. But, were it not for a chance encounter in a secondhand bookstore, I would not be reading the book I’m enjoying immensely right now.

Several years ago, my husband and I happened across a copy of Dave Marsh’s Louie Louie in a bargain bin at a bookstore near Pittsburgh. Yes, that’s right, an entire book about the song “Louie Louie”. We He thought it sounded weird, too, so one of us he bought it (probably my husband, but I couldn’t say for sure). For the last several years, and through two or three household moves, I forgot about the book. Then, recently, I was looking for a book to read and stumbled across it on our bookshelves. If, at the time, we he had thought to ourselves himself, “This is interesting, but we can always get it from Amazon later,” I would not be privy to the sordid story of “Louie Louie” (which, by the way, is a tale of intrigue, copyright, and censorship—perfect reading for librarians).

[update] Paragraph above edited after consultation with my husband, who actually has a memory.

librarian.net hit on one of my pet peeves yesterday: overly specific technology requirements. Actually, it’s hardly a pet peeve, because I think reliance on knowing any specific technology or software is the downfall of many a curriculum, job ad, and job candidate. If you can learn how to use one office suite, you can learn how to use any office suite. If, however, you have simply memorized a kajillion keyboard shortcuts to get a certificate, well, all I know is that I wouldn’t want to challenge you to a game of Memory.

Blake’s list on LISNews mentions one skill that is probably overlooked: learning a programming language. I wrote “learning” and not “knowing” on purpose. I learned Logo and later Lisp as a youngster and took a couple of courses in Pascal in college (the only two computer science courses offered at my college). I doubt I could write a program in any of them right now, but when I was helping a colleague edit the templates for our library’s fledgling WordPress blog, it was helpful that I could recognize if-then statements in the PHP code.

Probably the most valuable skill I have is the ability to learn software quickly, and I credit not just growing up with technology, but being actively encouraged by my parents to play with it.