DIY Librarian

Tomorrow I’ll be attending Plone Symposium East, hosted right here at Penn State. I’m looking forward to attending a conference outside my usual area–and not having to travel during a busy month is a nice bonus!

I’ll probably be twittering during the conference, but I’ll also try to blog about anything of interest to the library world.

You think books and libraries have it bad? Take a look at the state of our nation’s local newspapers.

Newspapers have always been a big part of my life. Wherever my family lived, we always got a local paper, and I still do. My father and husband were both newspaper reporters for a time, and I do some freelancing for my local paper now. I am an anomaly in my generation, and a complete weirdo to younger generations. (I know young people are getting their news from the internet, but I still don’t know what they line their birdcages and compost bins with, or how they pack fragile items, or quickly dry out their wet sneakers.)

Some would say we don’t need newspapers. We can get a lot of news from other sources. Citizen journalists, bloggers, and even libraries can fill some traditional newspaper roles.

I think there is a reason the founding fathers insisted on a free press, and it wasn’t just because blogging hadn’t been invented yet. We don’t just need newspapers for our daily Sudoku fix or to line our birdcages with – we need strong, independent, and diverse media.

Who else, besides a free press, is going to do investigative journalism? (as Leonard Pitts, Jr. asks in his column).

What else will force us to look outside our own worldview? (as Nicholas Kristof asks in his column).

It’s only preliminary, but a study conducted by scholars at Princeton showed that newspapers promote political and civic engagement.

Clearly, newspapers–like libraries–need to make some changes. They need to be where their readers are (I’m following my local paper on Facebook and Twitter). They need to become more interactive (my local paper has started publishing comments received via Twitter on the opinion page). They need to focus on their specialty (usually, their local community). They need to find new ways of supporting themselves. I just hope it’s not too late.

Inspired by a book pocket posting at librarian.net, I took a photo of the inside back cover of a book from my library. Because we still use a card checkout system, you can get quite a bit of information about the book, and about our library, from this photo.

You can tell that the library moved from one building to another. You can tell that we own (or owned at some point) multiple copies of this book. You can tell how many times it has circulated, and when. You can tell that we reuse book cards.

(We do have an online catalog and we track circulation in a database. We are not old-fashioned, just very small-scale and this system makes sense for us. I always tell new graduate students, “You just write your name on this card and drop it in the box, just like you probably did in elementary school.” I am waiting for the day when this description draws a blank stare from the student – it has not happened yet, but when it does, it will make me feel old.)

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.