DIY Librarian

At the SLA conference in Seattle, I got talked into signing up for SLA’s 23 Things. While I don’t consider myself on the forefront of Web 2.0 (I’m convinced that once I found Facebook, it instantly became yesterday’s news), I’m pretty comfortable with a good number of the tools (my library has been blogging for over 2 years now and this humble blog has been around in some form since 2003) and I’m not afraid to try new ones out. I thought 23 Things might get me out of my comfort zone and get me to try some new things - plus the organizers were pretty persuasive.

I haven’t blogged about the first few things (blogs and wikis), mainly because I was so familiar with them. I have more blogs than I can handle already, and I started using a wiki for SLA Social Science Division program planning last year. (This year I’ve invited more people to use the wiki, and am happy to see most of them at least reading the wiki and a good number contributing to it.)

Now we are on to tagging, which I’m not quite as comfortable with. Oh, sure, I tag things, but I’m never quite sure about it. Is this the right tag? Will I ever find this again?

Mostly I am good at coming up with my own special tags. For example, I tag books in Library Thing with currentreading and use that to display them on my blog. I tag posts on del.icio.us with staffpop and plug that feed into my intranet site for my staff. But actual meaningful tags? I’m a little behind on that.

Next up: Folksonomies and Technorati, where the current top story is “Dick Busted on Sex Charges Outside Chicken Joint”. You can’t make this stuff up.

At Information Wants To Be Free, Meredith Farkas asks:

I always come from conferences with great ideas, but it’s usually more from talking to people instead of from going to sessions. Is that something I really need to fly across the country for?

Having recently gotten back from the other side of the country (Seattle) where I was attending SLA 2008, I’ve been thinking about what made it worthwhile for me.

The people always come first for me, whether they are people I’ve known for years, people I’ve just met, or speakers. I love that we have all kinds of technology to keep in touch with each other now, but there is something about face-to-face meetings, and particularly in the conference atmosphere, that is different, and (to me, at least) worth traveling for.

Aside from the wonderful people I met and reconnected with, here is what are a few of the things that made SLA 2008 worthwhile for me. Pretty much all of this is Social Science Division programming - because I am the Social Science Division planner and so went to all of the division programs.

Ilda Carreiro King on teaching adults. I don’t do enough teaching to do much reading about it, so this session was perfect for me. King is a really engaging speaker and I got ideas I could go back and apply to my job right away. For example, I usually do individual instruction (or consulting) for faculty, but after King described the advantages of small group instruction, I decided to offer a small group consulting session for faculty here. And you know what? A small group signed up and came to the session, and I really think we all got more out of it for having a group.

Social Science and Museums, Arts, and Humanities poster session. I’d wanted the division to have a poster session for a while, and put a lot of work into adding posters to our usual joint division open house. The presenters seemed to enjoy having a place to showcase their work, and attendees seemed to like having an open house where they could learn something in addition to networking. I thought the posters were all terrific (I have been to poster sessions where people were pinning pages of 12-pt. text to the poster boards, so it was nice to see very professional, creative posters) and I was so happy and relieved when this was over that I think I ate all of the remaining chocolate on the dessert table for dinner.

Seattle. If I’m going to fly across the country, I like to be somewhere I can explore rather than trapped in a convention center. (Not that Nashville’s paradise-in-a-shopping-mall wasn’t an interesting experience, of course.) Seattle was perfect - mild weather, pedestrian-friendly streets, and a human-scale convention center. A small group of runners got together a few mornings during the conference and explored the waterfront, I visited the Pike Place Market several times, snuck in trips to the public library and the lovely Elliott Bay Book Company, and didn’t have a bad meal the whole time.

Jack Hamann, author of On American Soil. For a long time I didn’t read much nonfiction, and I doubt I would have picked this book up on my own. But since we invited the author to speak at our 85th anniversary luncheon, I decided to read it, and I’m glad I did. Not only was the book good, but so was Hamann’s talk. He updated us on events since the book was published, and described his research at the National Archives. I think it’s good to attend at least one conference session that doesn’t have a direct professional application, and this was the best one I’ve attended in that category since The Island of Lost Maps at the Peabody Library in Baltimore.

The other night I went to dinner with some colleagues, and discovered that one of my companions was a fellow University of Pittsburgh Information School alum. She asked me who my favorite professor was, and I told her that I was really inspired by an adjunct professor, Amy Knapp. She then told me that Amy had died just a couple of weeks ago. I was shocked. Amy was very young - only 46 - and had been battling cancer for the past year. (There is an obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.) I hadn’t kept in touch with her and had no idea she was sick.

I took two courses with Amy. One was on social science resources. I’m not sure what motivated me to take it at the time, since I wanted to be a humanities librarian, but since I ended up in a social science library it’s proven very useful. The other was a course on bibliographic instruction, and I remember a story she told the class which has inspired me ever since.

Amy worked at the University of Pittsburgh’s main library for a long time, and was eventually promoted to assistant director. But in this story, she was working at the reference desk. A returning student (that’s academic lingo for a student older than 18-21 who is returning to undergraduate education) came to the desk, looking flustered and near tears. She was double parked (the University of Pittsburgh is an urban campus), needed to be somewhere, and couldn’t figure out how to get there or how to park legally.

Amy could have told this woman she was a librarian, not a parking attendant. She could have told her that this was a library, not an information booth. But she didn’t. She picked up the phone, called the office the student needed to talk to, and put the student on the phone. The student got her issue resolved.

Amy’s point: now how does this student view the library? Probably as a welcoming and friendly place on campus. Is she likely to come back when she starts her classes? And how much trouble was this for Amy to do?

When you have the power to help someone, especially someone who is clearly reaching their breaking point, why go out of your way to say “no”? When you sit at a reference desk, you represent your library, your institution, and libraries and librarians everywhere. Make us proud.

I promise this isn’t becoming a Plone blog, but the coincidence is too much to pass up.

The same week I will be in Seattle attending SLA 2008, Joel Burton will be at the University of Washington holding a Plone Bootcamp. I’m not suggesting that anyone pass up SLA for the Bootcamp, just noting that a whole bunch of library and information folks will be in the same city with a (smaller) bunch of Plone folks.

One of the two presentations on Origami Image Tools at Plone Symposium East 2008 that I blogged about previously is now online. (Actually, it’s been up for a while, but I just noticed them as I have re-entered the world of Plone.)

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 looks very, very cool. It’s not the same as being there in person, but if you missed Jonathan Smith’s presentation (or if you were there and want to show it to someone): High Resolution Image Viewing and Annotation Tools for Plone by Jonathan A. Smith and Eric Carty-Fickes.

I am taking an informal class on Plone development. It’s a very different world from my usual library circles - I am surrounded by extra power outlets and Mac laptops and very tech-savvy people - and yet in some ways, it’s very similar. These web developers are very collaborative and helpful people. Yes, you have to know some of the language - but let’s face it, libraries have their own language too.

I have been tagged (I believe for the first time ever) in a meme by the Lipstick Librarian.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on this photo by Paul-W.

The idea of the meme is to select a photo (your own or one released under a Creative Commons license) and add a caption to summarize what you want the kids to learn about. Many of the responses seem to have forgotten the “about” (which is fine, interpret how you will) which has led to what the Free Range Librarian calls “Hallmarkian abstractions”.

The title is a quote I’ve seen attributed to an unknown trail runner. I like it because you can interpret it in many different ways - and that is what I’d like the kids to do. The photo brings to mind many things I would like kids to learn about (the environment, reading, self-sufficiency, and appropriate and functional clothing, to mention a few).

The meme:

1. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
2. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
3. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

I’m tagging: E-Tech, Libraryola, Rambling Librarian, TangognaT, Science Librarian at Penn State

I should note that I was in the process of marking a whole bunch of things in my feed reader as “read” because I am short on time, but I decided to actually read the LL’s post because of the title “Passion Quit” (emphasis mine).

If you’ve been wanting to check out comics, tomorrow is your chance. All you have to do is stop by your local comic book store (or library - some libraries are planning events) and get your free comics. Yes, they are free, no strings attached!

This year I’m excited about the Hellboy, Neotopia, IGNATZ, and Owly (and friends!) books.

I kept hearing people talking about ontologies, and was embarrassed that I, as a professional librarian, didn’t really know what they were. That all changed when I attended a program by Brandy King at SLA 2007. Not only does Brandy know ontologies inside and out (she developed one for a database at the Center on Media and Child Health) but she is really good at explaining the concept. In fact, she has a new book out. And now I can proudly explain that an ontology is a set of concepts and the relationship between those concepts, and can make for great search results (for example, in the CMCH database).

I’m really excited that Brandy will be teaching a continuing education course (Ontologies: What should librarians know?) at SLA 2008 in Seattle, and that my own Social Science Division is sponsoring it. There is still space in the class, so if you’re thinking about attending SLA 2008, sign up for the course. It will be on Sunday morning, before the main conference kicks off.

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).