Month: August 2005

Carnival of the Infosciences #4

Summer is ending, school is starting, and, like me, many of you may be wishing to spend these last few dog days sitting around and watching the river flow. But time stops for no one, and neither does the Carnival of the Infosciences, although it may this week be showing a few signs of wear and tear. The rides are still running, though, so step right up, grab yourself something from the concession stand, and enjoy the ride.

This week’s carnival is small but meaty. Our first stop takes many of us far afield, or perhaps more accurately, far out to sea. Von Totanes, the Filipino Librarian, weighs in on the great digital divide debate in “Digital Divide: The Other Side.” I’ve noted before that the world is not flat, and I hope we see more international voices in the Carnival to give us an idea of just how varied a world we live in.

Just in time for those of us who are going back to school, Joy Weese Moll of Wanderings of a Student Librarian comes out with some advice on “How to read a journal article“.

Joy’s advice is so good that it was recommended by Mark and followed up on by Angel. Mark also points us to another just in time for back to school post from Angel, the Gypsy Librarian. “What does Generation Y Want?” is a review of an article from portal: Libraries and the Academy which suggests that what Generation Y needs are just the kind of skills that Joy recommends. (Oh, the synchronicity!) Mark notes “it is one of the few things I have read that takes a pragmatic approach to serving this group versus just wanting to hand over the keys to the asylum to them.”

And now for a few added Editor’s Picks:

Since I’ve already stretched the rules of the Carnival a little by posting a day late, I’m going to stretch them just a tiny bit more so I can include “Codex Seriphanianus,” by Nichole of nichole’s auxiliary storage. It’s a fascinating and beautifully illustrated piece about a librarian’s worst nightmare: unwittingly buying a stolen book.

I am not a cataloger, but I live in awe of them, and two cataloging blogs this week have items of note. The first, “Lafof zobac (Ĉu vi parolas Dewey? 2.0, with added religious fervor),” comes from Jonathan Furner of the Dewey Blog and picks up on the international theme with a discussion of the Dewey Translators Meeting at IFLA’s World Library and Information Congress. One important discussion dealt with the options in the 200s (where, as you may recall, Christianity takes up a bit more than its fair share of numbers in the world of religion).

In “Trackbacks,” a post on Catalogablog, David Bigwood considers the possibilities of trackbacks, tagging, and other Internet classification tricks for libraries and library catalogs. The folksonomy vs. the taxonomy seems to be another one of those subjects where people tend to freak out and zealously guard their ground. There will be no tagging of our carefully controlled vocabulary! say the taxonomy people, while the folksonomy folks rant that taxonomies are dead, wooden, lifeless things (rather like taxidermy, which perhaps explains why I often have difficulty keeping the two terms straight). David points out that there’s room for both.

Finally, Christine Borne, NexGen Librarian extraordinaire, has reemerged from a dormant period with several thoughtful posts about being a librarian, including this one, “More introspection.” I like old people, too.

That’s it for this week’s carnival. I’ll pack up the bags and send them on over to Christina’s LIS Rant, the next stop on our virtual tour. Here are the general submission guidelines. And if you’ve missed any of the previous stops of this extravaganza, check them out:

Carnival of the Infosciences #1
Carnival of the Infosciences #2
Carnival of the Infosciences #3

updates, carnival and otherwise

Greetings from Iowa City, my hometown. I’m currently sitting downtown on the pedestrian mall, using wireless courtesy of the Iowa City Public Library. I took a last minute trip here this weekend and will be headed back today.

Due to the nature of traveling (lots of time spent with friends, not so much time spent online), I’ve only just now learned that a number of e-mails to me have been bouncing. My apologies.

Due to various crises, I also have a rich full day today, and so–with apologies to Greg if this violates the laws of the carnival–I’m going to extend submissions to 6 pm tonight, and I’ll get the carnival up tomorrow morning. So, if you haven’t been able to reach me, send a submission of a blog post (yours or one you admire, or both) from last week to lauracrossett [at ] hailmail [dot] net (which should work–and if that bounces, try laurapalooza [at] sbcglobal [dot] net). Of course, if you’ve written something this week (since 6 pm last night) that you’re especially proud of, you should save it for next week’s carnival, at Christina’s LIS Rant.

Again, my apologies for the technological snafu and the delay. I promise a carnival, due penance, and (special added bonus!) some pictures from my trip when I get back.

bricks and wireless

There was a little tidbit on NPR’s “Morning Edition” this morning:

Real estate company RE/MAX says it will create a Web site listing homes for sale across the country. Some observers say the growing availability of Internet listings will increase competition in the real estate industry and that could lead to lower commissions. [audio of full story]

Realtors, meanwhile, are tripping over themselves to tell you about all the things that a real estate agent can provide that a web site can’t. Realtors know about houses before they go on the market; they know the quirks and ins and outs of their terrain; they know how to operate; they know, in short, more information than you will ever find out by surfing the web.

Sound familiar? Try replacing the word “Realtor” with “librarian,” make a few other minor adjustments of lingo, and you’ll see where I’m going.

The most fascinating thing, though, was that apparently people who look for houses on the web are actually more likely to use Realtors than those who forgo the internet altogether. Is that true when it comes to librarians? I doubt it.

I am not generally taken with the notion that we must hasten to be as much like the market-driven world as possible: I think you lose some of your essence when you try to be too much like a thing you are not. But the library is a fundamentally socialist institution in a society and an economy that are fundamentally hostile toward socialist projects (except, of course, when it comes to government subsidizing of the oil industry and other corporate welfare), and we have to figure out ways to trick the system into supporting us anyway. Wifi in your library is one way to do that–it’s pretty cheap to install and run; it makes the people with wireless devices think the library is a happening place and thus, one hopes, makes them more willing to support the library the next time a referendum comes around, thus making it possible for you to buy more books and computers and dedicate more staff to helping out the folks on the other side of the infamous (but in no way imaginary) digital divide.

The library needs to be an information source for those who don’t have access to the internet, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t also be an information source for those who do.

roll up for the mystery tour

The Carnival of the Infosciences #3 is here, hosted by Joy, of Wanderings of a Student Librarian fame! Meredith notes the brilliance of the whole carnival idea:

[I]t highlights bloggers who are writing great stuff and who may not yet be on people’s radar screen (probably because they haven’t been at it too long). Second, it physically brings people to different blogs every week that they might not otherwise visit, also expanding their biblioblog repetoire. Third, it’s a great reader’s digest version of the best material of the week for those of us who don’t have the time to read everything. Finally, it motivates some people to write thoughtful, interesting posts so that they can be submitted for the carnival. What a cool idea!

And, not entirely incidentally, I’ll be hosting the Carnival #4. How do you get on board? Check out the original submission guidelines, and then send your submissions to me at laura [at] newrambler [dot] net (incidentally, if you have another e-mail address for me, it will probably work too–most of them lead to the same place eventually) by 6 pm on Sunday. I’ll say 6 pm central time, since that’s where I live, but if you east coasters don’t get to it till 7, I don’t imagine it will be a problem. And if you’re submitting from outside the continental U.S. (you never know), send it on in by 0000 Greenwich mean time (or coordinated universal time, as one is apparently now supposed to call it).

And might I add that if you’ve been thinking to yourself, gee, I should start a blog, why not do so now and join the carnival? The blogging community–and the biblioblogosphere in particular–may be one of the few places where more are always welcome–at least, I have yet to hear anyone say, “@#$%!, not another goddam library blogger!” We’ve got room for all kinds of sideshows here on the virtual carnival grounds, so come join the fun!

the world is not flat

I hate to break it to you, but, despite recent rumors to the contrary, the world is not flat.

The world is not flat at all: it is filled with dizzying heights that fall off into the deep, with shifting sands and fiery eruptions, with water and wind constantly carving the land into new shapes, and with vast expanses which a great many people perceive to be full of nothing. The world is bumpy, messy, variegated to the extreme, and it is bumpy not only in its physical terrain but also in the lives of its inhabitants, in all the sorts and conditions of humans who live on it.

Recently Celvio Derbi Casal, a library student from Brazil who has a blog, wrote to tell me a little about the public libraries there:

We have a very sad field here!! In my city (Porto Alegre, you may know because the World Social Forum was made here 3 times) and its a big city, the capital of the state, the Municipal Public Library has no computers, even for the staff, and the catolog is a card catalog (the old 7.5 x 12.5 cards!). There’s no money for acquisitions, and there’s only one librarian in charge. You can project this picture to the small towns, where there are no libraries sometimes.

So when I read the US blogs about virtual reference or online resources for public libraries, I live a wonderfull but distant dream, and wonder about when our libraries will pass to this condition.

We have wonderfull libraries here too, and very good eletronic information resources, but they are developed and shared only in the college, academic and specialized libraries. Be a public or school librarian here sometimes is an adventure like be an archaeologist, crossing tons of old stuff, searching for something with value.

Contrast that with some of the statistics on computers and the internet in US libraries, as reported at BlogJunction (see the full study from Florida State University)

  • 99.6% of public library outlets in the United States are connected to the Internet
  • 98.9% of public library outlets with a connection to the Internet provide public access to the Internet

Sounds good–but that’s still not the full story:

  • Only 14.1% of public library outlets report that there are always sufficient terminals to meet patron needs. Of the other outlets, 70.2% have insufficient terminals to meet patrons’ needs at certain times of the day, while 15.7% have insufficient terminals to meet patrons’ needs on a consistent basis
  • Most libraries do not have plans for keeping systems running. Nearly 70% of libraries have no set upgrade schedule for hardware, 77.4% have no set schedule for software, and 96.4% have no set schedule for connection speed
  • and, as Jessamyn noted recently, there are still libraries out there who don’t have any computer at all

I don’t think of the digital divide as a tired old cliche, but I also don’t think of it as a single thing. There is not one digital divide, there are many–as many divides as there are lines on a contour map of our bumpy, crazy world. People come into the library where I work every day to use our computers because they do not have computers (or internet connections) of their own at home. For these people, the divide is not ability but access. But othepeoplele come in each day who do not know how to use computers at all, who, if we were to plop them down in front of one of our machines, would not even know where to begin. And many people, of course, never come in to the library at all. Some of them, like many of the undergraduates I used to teach at the University of Iowa, have all the access to technology they could want but are remarkably lacking when it comes to interpreting and evaluating the information they find. Others are among the 21-23% of American adults who cannot read well enough to fill out a job application or read a picture book to their kids.

All of those people need things, often very different things. Some need computers; some need to learn how to use computers; some need help learning to interpret the things they find; most need some combination of all these things. If you stay in your own contour of the map and spend your time talking to other people who live at that same level, it may well appear to you that the world is flat, but it’s just not true.

When I was in junior high, I was taught that the United States was the world’s largest oil producer but also the world’s biggest oil importer and that the Soviet Union was the world’s biggest wheat producer but also the world’s biggest wheat importer. The world situation has changed since then, but the insane way in which its resources are distributed has not. The people with the greatest access to technology are also those who constantly seek more of it and who benefit most from many of the decisions that get made about technology. (A municipal wireless system is kind of neat, but it doesn’t do you a damned bit of good if you don’t have a wireless device, and I haven’t noticed Philadelphia running around handing out laptops to the poor). Libraries are one of the few places in the world where you can hope to have some flattening effect, but you can only do that if you are fully aware of thheightshs and the depths that surround you, and of all the gradations in between.

survey madness

Meredith has put up her survey of the biblioblogosphere, which I just took. A number of people have commented on it already; while I would have probably asked some slightly different questions and asked some questions slightly differently, since I did not go to the work of putting the survey together, I am not going to complain. Anyway, if you are in any way a library person and you have a blog, head on over and fill it out. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, and the more respondents it gets the more interesting the results will be.

After that, I was on a roll, so I tried taking the Blogger survey that they’ve been advertising on the page you get when you log in to post to your blog, but sadly, it was closed. Ah well.

Now that I’m all in a surveying mood, I’m thinking about following through on my idea of a survey of blogger linking habits, which would consider questions such as

Do you link chiefly to other LIS blogs, to other non-LIS blogs, to outside news sources, to studies? And (this is the hard part) why do you link? To back up your argument? To position your argument? Because you admire the post you’re linking to? Because you’re trying to get your blog noticed? Do you link more to short, “hey look at this neat thing!” type posts or more to longer, more reflective ones?

I have never designed a survey at all (except for this very short survey that I did many years ago), so I’ll have to give it some thought, but stay tuned. . . .

better late than never: the Carnival’s next stops

That last post was mostly by way of whining and partly by way of explaining the paucity of posts of late, or at least of posts containing much in the way of original content.

One of the things that happens when people say incredibly nice things about your writing (thanks, Meredith, Greg, Mark, and my mom’s friends) is that on the one hand you think, Dude, I’m a rock star! and on the other hand you think, Cripes, I’m never going to be able to write anything again because it’s not going to live up to people’s expectations. That’s my other excuse for not writing much recently.

I have no excuse, however, for not having pointed you to the Carnival of the Infosciences #2, where you can read all kinds of great stuff from the biblioblogosphere. And I have no excuse for not pointing out that the Carnival will be moving over to Wanderings of a Student Librarian next week. You’ve still got till Sunday at 6 pm to get your submissions [here are the guidelines] in to Joy [write her at joy [at] mollprojects [dot] com], who has some great suggested topics, in case you’re looking for one. And don’t be afraid to jump on board–as Mark says, it is a friendly crowd here.

yesterday

  • 6:30 am get up, eat breakfast
  • 8 am walk big dog
  • 9 am see doctor
  • 10:30 am bump into brand-new car en route to work [NB no one was hurt; the other car got a small scratch on the left rear fender, mine might have a scratch near its front right bumper, but I can’t really tell]
  • 11 am-2 pm walk dogs in pouring rain
  • 2:30 pm go to Berwyn Police station to fill out accident report
  • 3:30 pm get back home, eat lunch, shower, call insurance company, explain accident for nth time
  • 4:30 pm get in car again
  • 5-9 pm work at library
  • 9:30 pm get home, eat dinner
  • 10 pm watch Daily Show
  • 10:30 pm read about 3 paragraphs of An American Childhood
  • 11 pm sleep

Wash, rinse, repeat–except for the car accident. I’m hoping I don’t repeat that.