DIY Librarian

On the latest episode of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Tech Therapy, Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast discuss the future of library buildings. They begin the discussion talking about Goucher College’s new library building, which will include a restaurant, art gallery, and treadmills. They talk about the library as a social place, the academic symbolism of books, and the possibility of the bookless library.

I always find it amusing that a library building that includes nourishment for the body and the spirit as well as the mind is seen as something new. I used to work in one of the original Carnegie libraries near Pittsburgh, and the building includes an athletic club and a concert hall. The athletic club includes a pool, and formerly a bowling alley too. The library opened in 1898.

Part of what has always appealed to me about libraries is their role as community spaces. It seems particularly easy to use public libraries as examples, but good corporate, academic, and other libraries play community roles as well.

The best quote from the Tech Therapy discussion, I think, was: “So long as there’s a librarian in it, it’s a library.”

Adam Holland, writing in Library Journal (The Stat Factor, Aug. 15, 2008), wonders if “there is any alternative that would allow librarians to care a little less about statistics while still providing high-quality services in a fiscally responsible manner?”

I work in a very quantitative field (demography) and make annual reports to a federal funding agency. So statistics are pretty important in my work. But my library statistics are almost meaningless because of the size and nature of my library. My “gate count” (if I had a gate) might be anywhere from 0 to 5 on a typical day. So if I walk in and out of the library a few times during the day, I’m seriously inflating my stats. Similarly, circulation counts for most of our books are 0 or 1, so if someone uses a book but doesn’t check it out, we’re missing a lot of information.

We keep circulation statistics because it’s easy enough to do in our system, but I don’t worry about much else. Going into the library once or twice and chatting with any students there gives a much better picture of our usage than any statistic ever could. I have gotten questions about whether we still need a physical library space many, many times over the7 years I’ve been here – and my entirely qualitative argument has yet to meet substantial resistance.

A medical librarian recently discovered that POPLINE, a reproductive health database administered by Johns Hopkins, had made “abortion” a stop word. I blogged about this at work, and NPR and the Baltimore Sun have good articles, but thought I’d offer some of my personal comments here.

I’m sure most readers of this blog know that stop words are typically things like “a” and “the” – not nouns like “abortion”. Indeed, “abortion” is a POPLINE keyword.

Apparently, the whole mess started when USAID, POPLINE’s funder, objected to a few articles it deemed “abortion advocacy”. By law, USAID is prohibited from promoting abortion and “places high priority on preventing abortions.” However, information about abortion is important to preventing it.

Johns Hopkins has since restored the search term. Kudos to them for a speedy reaction, but I don’t understand why the offending articles weren’t dealt with on an individual level to begin with.

Update (April 10): A commenter at librarian.net has an interesting possible explanation.

Update (April 11): Ipas, the nonprofit organization that published the magazine USAID objected to, has issued a press release.

The Ipas publication affirms women’s access to safe abortion as a human right. It does not promote abortion, maintaining that a woman’s decision to have an abortion is hers to make in accordance with her right to life, health, bodily integrity, nondiscrimination, privacy, liberty, and religious freedom.

On last night’s episode of Ghosthunters, TAPS investigated the Clapp Memorial Library in Belchertown, Massachusetts. If you missed it, you can watch it online (you’ll have to enable pop-up windows).

Last week I attended Plone Symposium East, which was held here at Penn State. Plone is an open source content management system, and should be of interest to library folks for a number of reasons.

The Oregon State Library uses Plone to power Plinkit, which provides public libraries with free web sites that they can maintain and update themselves. Darci Hanning was honored as one of Library Journal’s Movers & Shakers for her work on Plinkit.

A number of other libraries use Plone to power their web sites, including the Rosetta Project, an online linguistic archive. [Thanks to Karl Horak for pointing that one out to me.]

At the symposium, Jonathan Smith presented a Plone product called Origami Image Tools which I think has tremendous potential for special collections and digitization projects. I really hope that a video of his talk will appear on the Plone site soon, because it made everyone in the room ooh and aah, but there is no public site using this product that I can link to.

One of the biggest projects using it is Northwestern University’s Imag(n)ing Shuilu’an, which documents a Chinese temple. Unfortunately for us, the Chinese government does not want the site to be public. (Jon Fernandez demonstrated the site at the symposium, to more oohs and aahs from the audience.) The good news is that since Plone is open source, the university has a commitment to release the Origami Image View and Image Annotator.

Origami enables the display of very large high-resolution images – at least up to 3 GB – and includes an image tiler and an annotation tool. It has been used for other projects, including Brave New Worlds, an image collection created by three humanities professors, who then used Plone’s discussion tools to create a social environment, and an art history class where students took photographs of public art in Chicago to document its condition.

You can see the Origami Flash image viewer in action at the Encyclopedia of Chicago (which is not itself a Plone site). Watch what happens when you zoom in on sections of the maps!

Update: You can also see the Origami Image Viewer on its project page. [thanks Jeanne!]

A community group in the town of Millvale, just outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, wants to bring a library to the town, and they’re holding a benefit concert called BOOK’N Bands. Rock on, Millvale.

science is so very specialized now, that anyone outside of the exact area needs a popularized view

Popularization of science is not merely a dumbing down of scientific ideas for a lay audience, but an essential part of scholarly communication, writes Christina Pikas at Christina’s LIS Rant.

My library serves an interdisciplinary research institute, and this kind of popularization is essential. We have a brown bag seminar series where our researchers essentially popularize their research for their colleagues in other departments. I produce a feature highlighting a recent article by one of our researchers that appears on our bulletin board and our web site. I regularly scan news feeds looking for items of interest to our researchers in the popular press – and researchers have responded asking for a citation to the original source so often that I now include citations and links along with the news snippets.

I’m not sure if my library collection includes popularizations on the “sciencey end of the continuum,” though, and if it does I’m sure we don’t market them enough.

Part of the reason we don’t purchase these popularizations is that they are probably already owned by the main university library system. We are not part of that system, but we try not to duplicate their holdings except for heavily-used items. I’ve often thought that we should do more to make our patrons aware of materials in the main library system that are related to population. They are well-served by their subject liaisons, but there are probably materials of interest in other subject areas, especially if they are collaborating with researchers from other departments.

Twelve students at St. Lawrence University in New York are living in the wilderness of the Adirondack Park as part of the “Adirondack Semester” program (NY Times). Every other week, they make an excursion to a nearby town for supplies. According to the Times article, necessities included doing laundry, visiting the library, and for some, a visit to a yarn store. [via The Kept-Up Academic Librarian]

It’s kind of ironic that my last post was about a very different kind of unplugging, and yet I find the concept of abstaining from modern life quite appealing.

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.

UPDATE: The Carnival has been extended!

Welcome to the Carnival of the Infosciences #78!

We might as well get started with a little action. Ryan Deschamps submitted the Annoyed Librarian’s The Cult of Twopointopia. Don’t miss the comments for some cult analysis and lively discussion.

AL is not the only one questioning Library 2.0. In another submission, Second Life Hype vs. Human Needs on the ALA Social Responsibilities Round Table Hunger, Homelessness & Poverty Task Force blog, John Gehner writes, “it’s disappointing at times to think that some of the best and brightest information professionals are devoting their substantial talents to the denizens of a virtual world founded on leisure time rather than a real world with millions of people struggling for a Better Life every day.”

Now don’t get too comfortable with that cotton candy, because next we have a report from John Dupuis at Confessions of a Science Librarian, The PRISM Coalition: Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine. It’s not just big publishers against Open Access—non-profits and society publishers are joining with the bigger commercial publishers.

Also from John Dupius we have Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting, in which he reports on a movement among academic bloggers to differentiate their “serious” writing from other blog posts.

On a related note, submitted by your editor, LibrarianInBlack Sarah Houghton-Jan asks Library literature: academic and generally useless? Several bloggers have noted that blog posts can generate more attention and be more immediately useful to others in the field than articles in refereed journals. Again, don’t miss the comments for further discussion.

One more editor’s pick before we pack up and move on: John Miedema asks Have you ever reached a blog impasse? Is that a good thing? Miedema closes his post with the questions “Have you ever reached a blog impasse? How did it resolve itself?” Walt Crawford comments succinctly:

1. Of course. Frequently.
2. I stopped blogging until I had something to blog about.

Well, that’s it for this carnival, folks! The next stop is September 17 at Libraryola. Submit blog posts to the next edition of Carnival of the Infosciences using the carnival submission form, or use the del.icio.us tag carninfo to submit your favorites. Make sure to use the “Notes” field to state why you tagged it and sign your name. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival index page.

Using del.icio.us to submit entries seems to work well. I didn’t get any email submissions—they all came from del.icio.us. My only problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to read the whole “Notes” in del.icio.us, so I didn’t know who to attribute the “Second Life Hype vs. Human Needs” submission to.

Photo: Neptune (Hudson Maxim), Miss America (Margaret Gorman) at Atlantic City Carnival, Sept. 7, 1922 / photo by Bain News Service, 225 Canal St., New York. Library of Congress via pingnews.

* * *

September 4, 2007. Folks, looks like the Carnival of the Infosciences is in town for one more day. Turns out there were submissions from the form, but they got caught in a spam filter and didn’t make it to the carnival in time.

Joshua Neff submitted a post of his at goblin in the library inspired by the recent revisits to the Library 2.0 topic: Library 2.0.0.3. Turns out the secret ingredient to Library 2.0 is ice cream. Go figure—and we’ve got plenty of ice cream at the carnival!

Kathryn Greenhill submitted her post, Why libraries should care about mobile phones, from Librarians Matter. Greenhill asks, “What do your library users use more often, their PC connected to broadband or their mobile phone? What do more of them own? What do more young people have exclusively for their own use – a mobile phone or a PC?”

Chris Zammarelli submitted Jenica Rogers-Urbanek’s Keep it secret, keep it safe, about anonymity in professional blogging and whether to put your blog on your resume. Zammarelli added, “Personally, I do mention it since my potential employers will find it by Googling me anyway.”

Heather Leask Armstrong submitted Volkswagons and Road Trips I Have Known and Loved from BookScribeBlog.com, about cars and road trips and books. Hopefully reading this will make up for the road trips I didn’t take this summer.

OK, I think this carnival is finally moving on now! It’s been fun, and I’ll see you in 2 weeks at Libraryola!

Photo: Cotton Carnival, Memphis, Tennessee / photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF33-030905-MD DLC.