librarian.net

1. I saw the Providence Public Library’s Twitter feed today and I like it. A mix of library information and links to their very amusing tech blog. I like it.
2. I just noticed Phil Bradley’s list reprinted over at Tame the Web. I’m in a weird position on Twitter because I’m followed by librarians, MetaFilter members and at least a good handful of real life friends and family. I follow maybe a ninth of the number of people who follow me. My feed is open so anyone can read it, but I can only follow so many people (and I do stay up to date on my Twitter feed pretty much always so this is important to me). Here is my version of Phil’s guidelines and there’s a sort of flow chart in effect here.
a) Do they Tweet in English (or possibly Romanian but I’ve never seen this happening yet)? If yes, go to b.
b) Are they spammers or hypesters (following over 5000 people? pushing a product?)? If not go to c.
c) Do they update more than ten times a day? If so, they’re too high traffic for me. If not, go to d.
d) Is their Twitterstream just an automated version of their RSS feed? If yes, subscribe. If no, go to e.
e) Do they @reply to people as the bulk portion of their tweets? If so, they’re likely not interesting to me (for me Twitter is like a news ticker, not a conversation). If not, go to f, g and h and choose one. If none of these apply, then don’t follow.
f) Do I know them or know why they’re following me?
g) Do I find them amusing, astute, informative or otherwise intriguing?
h) Do I want to direct message with them and find that I can’t because I’m not following them

In short, my sister’s Twitter feed is one of my favorites, followed sharply by a few bloggers I barely know and a few random librarians who amuse the heck out of me. Then there are 200 other people and all told I probably scan through 600-1000 tweets per day. This helps me feel less like I’m up here in the fortress of solitude when I’m in rural Vermont and helps me stay in touch with a lot of plugged in people in the profession. I send all of my Twitter-related “soandso added you as a contact” email to a special folder and scan through it weekly. If I’m not following you and you think maybe I might like to, please feel free to drop me a note and/or a comment. I’m not suggesting this approach for anyone else, but it works well for me.

US News and World Reports says being a librarian is one of the best careers, right up there with clergy, locksmith, veterinarian and 26 others. Unlike clergy, clocksmith and vet, the librarian article currently has 109 comments. [thanks mike]

I’m aware that accessing someone’s conference planner is not the same level of hackery as stealing their credit cards or breaking into their email account. However, I would just like to say that having an event planner where the password is not only the same for every user (until it’s changed) but also printed right there on the web page, turns the whole idea of having a password or any sort of security into a big joke. How do we teach librarians what good technology looks like if this is how we make them interact with us? For the record, using just the ALA Staff list, I was able to log in to someone else’s event planner in under a minute. The vendors get their password in an email, not much better.

I went to this page from Nicole’s post (I’m not going to the conference) just to see if it was really true that the page claims it is “best viewed in IE” which is yet another “tech don’t” in the world of 2008 browsers so much so that it calls into question all the rest of the site.

I don’t belong to ALA anymore. I did my time, paid my dues, donated a lot of service time to the organization and tried to be gentle and patient as they steered a big organization through the minefield of technological change. The Event Planner has been an outsourced, broken and insecure tool since they started using it. I’d like to see ALA do better, but my optimism that this will happen is flagging.

I’ve been working on keeping my inbox pretty well empty which has meant no linkhoarding this week. Here are a few things worth pointing out that I’ve kept around.

• Look what this library found in their bookdrop! [via unshelved]
• OPACs, Open Source and Patron Perceptions: a look at what happens (and what can happen) when open source software is a library’s public face. A student paper from Elyssa Kroski’s LIBR 287 class.
• Seeking chapters for a new edited collection entitled Beyond Article 19: Libraries and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Can you help out?
• The Effing Librarian has put together a book. Shopping season is over, but look at that sunny yellow cover!

I teach a bunch of little “Getting Started with X” night classes at the local vocational high school. They’re fun. I’ve been doing them for years now. They’re the sort of classes you’d teach at a library if you had a computer lab, but the libraries here don’t have computer labs. They’re usually 8-12 hours broken down into two hour classes. Given that, you might be surprised how little we cover, but we go slow, do a LOT of review, and do a lot of things together so that everyone can keep up.

I’m lucky to have access to the computers in the lab, so I can put documents and example spreadsheets on them ahead of time. One of the most important things in teaching novice users is that they’re often bad typists so saying “Type a few paragraphs and then we’ll edit them” is a recipe for disaster and frustration. I usually have them work from some standard text like The Gift of the Magi or something I’ve copied from Wikipedia. I’m also very clear about what sorts of things on the computers are customizeable and what are functions of how the computers work. For new users, they can’t tell what’s a setting — all those annoying pop-up warnings using Internet Explorer when you go to a secure site for example — and what’s something you can’t easily edit — how the cursor behaves. One of the biggest thigns I had to learn is that a lot of my students have no idea what the word “default” means, so when you say “Oh that’s just the way MS Word is set as a default…” that’s not a sense-making sentence to them. We spend half a class just adjusting the settings, turning off grammar-checker, adding and removing toolbars, so they know how to do that if they ever get a computer at home.

It’s fun work and I really enjoy it. Over the years people have emailed me asking for advice so I’ve zipped up my class handouts and sample documents and made them available here. Please feel free to use them in your classes in any way you’d like to. If you do, please remove my name and email address first :)

• Microsoft Word Classes (for the pre-2007 versions of Word)
• Microsoft Excel Classes (pre-2007)
• My First Webpage Classes (possibly out of date)

Enjoy!

Happy New Year to everyone. I actually took the holiday season pretty well off this year, for possibly the first time in the last decade. I still did a little work for MetaFilter and kept up with email, but my posting frequency went down to almost nothing which is okay by me. So, I hope you had a good holidaytime.

I have a few personal resolution-type things over on jessamyn.com but I’ve also got a few work-related ones. Last year all my assiduous recordkeeping was interrupted by a hard drive crash, so I was doing great on keeping receipts and tracking invoices until about August and it fell apart. This year I’ve already got a weekly backup system in place so I’m anticipating no similar three month setbacks. A non-librarian mailing list that I’m on has been talking about 2009 plans and one of the main bits of wisdom that came down the wire in the last month was this

Resolution: Don’t be good at things you hate.

For me, what this means is just because I’m good at solving technical problems, it doesn’t mean I need to always do it as a job (or hobby), or do it for people who aren’t decent about it (whether that means decently polite, decently paying or decently convenient). I did a good job last year limiting the amount I was teaching — I love teaching but working within the chaos of a school environment was difficult and frustrating for me — and I think that really added to the ease of the other things I did in my life that I loved.

So, for 2009 I have some work related goals

- Automate the Tunbridge Library
- Maintain the VLA site to a degree that people are happy with
- Give interesting well thought out talks to interested people in neat places
- Keep teaching classes and drop-in time at a level that’s not exhausting
- Be a better “social” and real life networker and library friend to people new in the profession
- Keep writing for Computers in Libraries and try to get them to call what I write a column and not a department.
- Maintain this blog and launch fun new project blog (details forthcoming, sorry to be a cryptic jerk)
- Share as much of my personal work content as possible (see next post)
- Make a little movie about my many jobs

What are you thinking about doing?

Dale Askey has written a great column on how libraries “share and fail to share open source software” and looks into some of the reasons that might be the case.

“Staff from the National Library of Australia performing Thriller at the 2008 staff Christmas party”

Sarah Houghton-Jan has written a great presentation that she gave as the keynote to the Arizona Library Association’s annual conference. It’s just a few MB pdf and you can get a lot of her points just by reading through it. It’s full of humor and good ideas. Go read: Sustainable Technology in a 2.0 World

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was recently awarded the Nobel prize for literature. His lecture (video) which is rich reading for bibliophiles generally, has a special mention of libraries. [thanks Kári]

Culture, as I have said, belongs to us all, to all humankind. But in order for this to be true, everyone must be given equal access to culture. The book, however old-fashioned it may be, is the ideal tool. It is practical, easy to handle, economical. It does not require any particular technological prowess, and keeps well in any climate. Its only flaw—and this is where I would like to address publishers in particular—is that in a great number of countries it is still very difficult to gain access to books. In Mauritius the price of a novel or a collection of poetry is equivalent to a sizeable portion of the family budget. In Africa, Southeast Asia, Mexico, or the South Sea Islands, books remain an inaccessible luxury. And yet remedies to this situation do exist. Joint publication with the developing countries, the establishment of funds for lending libraries and bookmobiles, and, overall, greater attention to requests from and works in so-called minority languages—which are often clearly in the majority—would enable literature to continue to be this wonderful tool for self-knowledge, for the discovery of others, and for listening to the concert of humankind, in all the rich variety of its themes and modulations.