The Screen is Flat

The advantage of podcasting and online hosted video is that these technologies enable Librarians to engage students using multiple learning styles: audio, visual, and print. Text based guides and materials, even when they are web based, are one dimensional. Video streaming expands the ways in which we can teach about information resources and search strategies. Learning is a dynamic and social process and video steaming is the closest replacement available for in person training and interactions. Whether we create stand alone videos, or utilize teleconferencing technology, audiovisual tools enable us to create better personal learning environments in the online world.

Librarians should try to create as many different learning opportunities and environments as possible in order to reach as many students as possible. This is not a technology issue for me as much as a teaching and learning issue: how do our students learn best? How can I make the instructional experience more personal, more approachable? What format will my students utilize and respond to? Creating online video is not another item on the to do list - it enhances everything that I have already been doing.

Information technology and online resources change rapidly. Tutorials and research guides have always had a short shelf life, regardless of whether they were born print or digital. So the excuse that video based instruction is more time consuming to update just doesn’t hold water. Right now, I can more quickly create a print based document than I can create a video. But with a little more practice, I bet I’ll be just as zippy at podcasting as I am with other software. I still have some stage jitters, but I’m ready for my closeup.

Speaking of streaming video, my favorite and inspirational video of the moment is a talk by Meredith Farkas, who is now is my new Library hero. Thank you Meredith!

Building Academic Library 2.0
“The Academic Library 2.0 conference will address the phenomenon of academic libraries taking affirmative steps to deploy technologies and services that facilitate users’ virtually instant connection to diverse sources of knowledge and information, as well as to help users directly contribute form and substance to those sources.”

1. We admitted we were powerless of our information needs and that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. We came to believe that a Librarian greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. We made a decision to turn our information needs over to the care of a Librarian.

4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and our information literacy skills.

5. We admitted to the Librarian, to ourselves, and our academic community the exact nature of our shortcomings as they relate to our information literacy skills.

6. We were entirely ready to have the Librarian remove all these defects.

7. We humbly asked the Librarian to remove our information literacy shortcomings.

8. We made a list of all search strategies we have harmed and became willing to make amends to the Librarian.

9. We made direct amends to the Librarian with either a Starbucks gift card, or a Nancy Pearl Librarian Action Figure.

10. We continued to take a personal inventory and  where we wrong with our search strategies, promptly admitted it.

11. We sought through prayer, RSS, and text messaging, to improve our conscious contact with the Librarian, seeking only for knowledge of their search expertise for us and the power to carry out these suggestions in our search processes .

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The best adage I ever heard to describe the Internet is that it is the “World’s Biggest Vanity Press.” Sure, the web has lots of useful information. I spend a good portion of my day utilizing online resources and tools for both my personal and professional life. But it still holds that anyone with a computer and a little bit of moxie can publish anything they want directly to the masses.

In the traditional scholarly publishing model, publishers and academics served as gatekeepers for the peer review process. And Librarians served as a second tier, acquiring those resources seemed best suited to their clientele’s needs. But now, all bets are off. The world of scholarly communication and public discourse is changing. I leave the discussion of the peer review process as it relates to publishing and tenure to my academic colleagues who are in the middle of this debate.  

Self publishing and the accompanying technologies that enhance our productivity and communication has proven to be a good thing overall. However, in the realm of scholarly communications, self publishing has raised two interesting questions: Who gets to be an an expert? and Who decides if that person really knows what they are talking about?

From a Librarian perspective, I think it’s an interesting challenge in terms of how to acquire and then process or catalog these new resource formats for library collections.

What to do we do with all the fabulous blogs, Wiki’s, and other web based content that doesn’t fit into old school scholarly communication categories? Should librarians continue to catalog the web, at least selectively? Everyone in libraryland seems pretty excited about using social software sites like delicious to manage our web content. Is this the answer? Whatever happened to our beloved old friend, the catalog? Until recent history the library catalog was the ultimate source for determining what a library owns, leases, or otherwise accepts as having scholarly relevance.

But the catalog started to lose its authority once Internet based resources clamored for so much attention, and our old friend didn’t quite seem up to the challenge. So, we tried to just make new web pages until social bookmarking utilities came to the rescue. But adding on these solutions only make further distinctions about format and function by dividing out some materials in the Library catalog, some on the library web space, and now increasingly on the various web 2.0 collaborate sites.

Web 2.0 is changing all the scholarly communication processes and poses new challenges in the classification, storage and retrieval of communication in all its various forms. I don’t know what it will all look like in the future. But just as the printing press changed the publishing and scholarly world in the 15th century, the Worlds Biggest Vanity Press is certainly bringing about another revolution in the way we think, write, communicate, and distribute our intellectual ideas around the globe.

I have been experimenting with social bookmarking this week, specifically on del.icio.us and I have to say, my brain is off in way too many directions when I think about the purpose and potential applications of these types of tools. So, if you’ll excuse the following post as just another ADD moment, I have the following thoughts thus far.

Libraries traditionally are viewed as places of order and stability. Library resources are organized using rules and hierarchies of terminology or numerology. I think we can all agree that when applied consistently, these rules of order are good both for librarians and for library users. As my mom was fond of saying “There’s a place for everything and everything in its place.”

I believe authoritative and consistent taxonomies will continue to be relevant in the future, particularly when you consider the astronomical rate at which information and data continues to be generated and published. In addition to the volume of data, the variety and types of digital tools and formats continue to change and evolve. Consistent rules and language will be needed in order to efficiently and effectively find all the stuff that’s out there. 

However, despite the benefits of authority control, based on my experience teaching people how to use digital information resources, I would agree with the old adage in libraryland which states that “people don’t care about searching, they care about finding.” Library users sometimes don’t seem to care what language or semantics or rules are utilized. This ambivalence can be frustrating for me as a Librarian, but I understand that not everyone loves MeSH as much as I do.

So, it’s with this background that I have been wondering lately how traditional library rules of order will be influenced in the future by social bookmarking and folksonomy.

On a personal level, when I found something worth saving in Web World 1.0, I might cut and paste the content of a website into a Word document and then save it locally. Or I would download the PDF into a folder. Then I would use a detailed filing system on my computer to arrange content, or utilize EndNote to manage my research findings. Who knew bibliographic management software was the precursor to social bookmarking?

In Web World 2.0, services like del.icio.us make my homegrown solution easier in many ways. Social bookmarking sites are a handy and fun way to approach personal productivity. It’s much easier to keep track of the items I want to squirrel away with tagging. User generated tags are generally similar to the vocabulary that I would select, and it’s a neat trick to follow the links of other enthusiasts to stumble upon similar areas of interest.

Of course, the assumption is that I will more easily find and retrieve content that I have saved. Even as a librarian, I will confess that I find it a challenge to keep the vocabulary simple and consistent when using social network sites. Too many terms and synonyms and I get lost in my own over-organization. Too few and my sites are lost in sea of generalizations. Social bookmarking and folksonomy reminds me that most people are probably meant to be catalogers and indexers.  Note to self: send a big “thank you” card out to all the professional cataloguers and indexers.

From a professional standpoint, I’m still thinking about the applications for social bookmarking sites as they related to library resources and services.

First, personal customization of library space is not a new concept. Allowing users to “tag” their own content and create personalized library portals has been accomplished already by some forward thinking libraries.

Assuming the web 2.0 generation would like to have more access and control over their experiences with the Digital Library, the challenge is how to incorporate folksonomy style social indexing with established Library systems of order. To what extent can or should the Library invite our users to enter “our” digital space and customize their research experience? Are we creating web content that is of such value that users want to tag them?

The most obvious use of del.icio.us that I can see is its use as a partial replacement for subject and research guides. Social Bookmarking allow for greater ease, speed, and flexibility in the creation of a reference or subject database.

However, while del.icio.us links to content well, these types of tools do not explain howto do use the conent once you find it.  Research guides, tutorials, and other instructional media will still be necessary to assist users with the research process. This is an important point. Social bookmarking tools are about organizing your data more efficiently and collaboratively. But you still need to know what you’re looking for, why you are looking for it, and then know what to do once you find it what your looking for. And as useful as del.icio.us is as a productivity tool, it still doesn’t solve the problem of broken links and migrating content.

Another concern I have relates to the differences between free vs. licensed content. I  am not sure how delicious helps with the problem of communicating to users that not everything is available for free. “Libraries are increasingly between a rock and a hard place: the publisher or search engine gets the credit, they just pick up the tab.” How do we best utilize social bookmarking sites to consolidate or segregate out free vs. fee content?

I also think these tools are another example of the format deconstruction. First, we had blogs and other web content to read. Then RSS enabled us to have content delivered to our desktops so we didn’t have to go out and retrieve it. Now we can use del.icio.us to save the bits we want and trash the rest. It reminds of me of other formats that we enjoy picking apart like Music and journals.  The original format of the content is not as important anymore.

ADD moment: Is anyone bothered by the aesthetic of del.icio.us? I find it really hard to look at visually. I know it’s supposed to be really clean and simple. But all the tags on the right remind me of code for some reason. Just asking.  New and Improved Updatesince original post: After using del.icio.us for a few weeks, I am not bothered by the aesthetics anymore. In fact, I love how del.icio.us integrates with my browser and that is so simple to use.

Final True confession: one of my guilty TV addictions is Law and Order. It’s very difficult to work from home and complete writing deadlines when you know that at any given time, some version of the show is on syndication on at least two different channels. I have a friend who actually gave up Law and Order for Lent this year.