library of primitive art

A Generation Joneser speaks

I tried to post a comment to Michael Stephen's Tame The Web, specifically in response to a guest post on Generation Jones written by Michael Colford. After muttering under my breath, I finally realized I can simply post the comment to my own blog and pray for trackbacks. So here goes:

Add me to those unfamiliar with the GenJones term, but who will gladly adopt it henceforward. Apart from being a librarian (and isn't that why I'm reading this anyway?), I'm at the bottom -- or rather, early -- end of the Gen, at a whiskered 50. Older than my fellow commenters, I believe I feel that sense of tween-ness even more strongly.

Some of my peers have no interest, in fact an outright fear of the new technology: they feel positively threatened by it.

I am looked upon by the younger, connected-since-birth generation as something slightly extraordinary: pretty hip for an oldster, or at any rate getting cred for wading into 2.0 with only modest trepidation.

 And I'm at the tail end of the more established Boomer set, the ones who wear suits and run libraries, the ones who let the youngsters fiddle around with the technology. I suspect they think my interest in the profession's technological future is a career killer (and time waster). Or maybe it's that they anticipate being safely retired when the future finally comes to pass.

 But being the youngest family member to older, 'true' Boomers, this sense of being between generations has been with me since childhood: The Boomers had all the fun we missed out on, whereas we had to come of age in the unenlightened Seventies.

So wot the hey, wot the hey! Best we just soldier on. What is it we Gen Jonesers can add in this multigenerational muddle? The experience that says that play is good -- and learning better -- but not every toy makes a good tool.

Heritage librarianship

As a mid-career librarian I was particularly struck the other day by David Lee King's post on the Library of Congress's efforts to trim its workforce by letting go of 'traditional' librarians unwilling or unable to adapt to new library technologies. (For both of us this came via Michael Casey's LibraryCrunch). I forwarded King's post to my junior library colleague, herself a newly enrolled library school student, suggesting that I felt as if I was but one step ahead of the library grim reaper.

To his credit King takes this news as a point of departure to emphasize the importance of honing ones core competencies, and on the obligation of both the employer to develop and provide and the employee to avail her/himself of such educational support.

I confess to having bristled slightly at having what I was taught in the dark ages (ca. 1984) called 'traditional librarianship'. My tongue firmly in cheek I suggested to David that we needed a new term to describe what came before whatever it is we have now -- much as the guitar became the 'acoustic guitar' once the electric guitar arrived on the scene. Taking a leaf from museum nomenclature, I humbly offer heritage librarianship as the new term of art for the old way of (library) life.

The same library colleague has also been working on assembling in a lower desk drawer what she calls 'The Museum of Library Science' from among all the discarded tools and equipment in our library. (Electric erasers, anyone?) I think she should consider taking this one step further, by providing interpretive displays of heritage librarianship in re-enactment. Of course, this will mean retro-educating the new librarians to play the parts ... or perhaps pressing newly idle senior librarians into service.

Photo source

Wiki while you work

An article on wikis entitled Veni, Vidi, Wiki recently posted on Wired  (at two in the morning?) by Ryan Singel  might just be a must-read for institutions wary of 2.0 technology and of librarians thinking about how to frame that technology to their administration. I've added the emphasis.

Wikis have also invaded the workplace. After programmers introduced wikis to large companies by sneaking them inside the firewall to manage software documentation, some large corporations adopted wikis for other purposes as well. From entire intranets to small group projects, enterprises are utilizing the power of wikis to enable simpler, clearer communication within a corporation ...

Wikis with the best technical features can still fail if the organization does not fully embrace their use. However, unlike open consumer wikis, in business they are likely to be used in the conduct of work, on specific projects, by people whose own interests are aligned with that of business. This is especially the case if, after the initial grassroots movement, management fully supports the wiki not as an optional, after-the-fact knowledge-sharing tool, but the primary facility to conduct work, eliminating alternate channels. The answer to almost any question has to be "It's on the wiki." Otherwise, depending on the culture, uninitiated employees may ignore this collaborative tool in favor of old habits.

Ironically at my own institution the catchphrase "It's on the Library Manual" has already taken hold with the library staff, and efforts to migrate the information from there to a wiki are already underway.

Sobering lessons from a business card

Christopher Harris's infomancy site contextualizes this brilliant observation from Hugh MacLeod's Gaping Void site, "a blog of cartoons drawn on the back of business cards - and reminds us that it isn’t about the technology, but about the end results".