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.

Museum object-based reference tool

Above: An example of a rollover for a single object in an installation photograph. Read below to see what I mean.

Not that anyone would suspect it, but the prolonged silence at this space hasn't been for lack of something to say. Okay, maybe a lack of something to say, but not a lack of activity. Much of my activity has been concentrated on local project planning -- offsite storage, WiFi, and a few stray efforts at improving reference tools.

One of the latter projects was an idea I came up with to use flickr! to assist in object-based reference questions. One of the most frequent questions asked at MPOW is: "Can you help me to find out more about an object in your galleries?" There are nearly 1,200 objects on display in our galleries. Keeping track of them in your head is impossible. In the best of all worlds our patrons would arrive with most of the information we needed to identify the object. Sadly and predictably, this is seldom the case. Absent that there has never been a practical way for us to match these often vague object references (“It’s in the case on the right as you come in, about halfway down, on a stand”) with the specific citation in the library's reference resources. Right now our only recourse is to send them back down to the galleries to copy down the pertinent information – an option I’ve never particularly liked: I worry that they’ll simply never come back again.

What if we had a way to share installation photos with our patrons to identify object they want to know about? And what if the photo had rudimentary information about the objects in the photo, enough to launch a fuller research effort?

While walking through the galleries one afternoon it struck me that I could tailor some of the existing features of flickr! to suit my needs. By using the ‘Add Note’ feature over an installation photo, I could create rollovers for each element in an installation photo, and presto!

I proposed a pilot project to the head of my department, who suggested that I start with objects I knew cropped up often with our walk-in patrons. She also informed me that our department’s segment of the museum-wide collection management database (TMS) already includes many installation shots, stored on the department’s shared drive, that are associated with specific objects.

For my initial effort I picked a wall of Benin brass plaques. I located the relevant installation photo in TMS, downloaded it to my PC and uploaded it to flickr! I created four sample rollover notes with only each object’s unique accession number and the object title. I created a mock flickr! set for it and future photos from the specific gallery in which it resides.

I tagged the photo with some boilerplate terms common to all the objects in the installation photo. I have my colleague Dan to thank for suggesting that I could tag the accession numbers as well as put them in the notes. As I subsequently discovered, tagging in flickr! is an imprecise art. Unlike our collection management system, there's no truncation, for one thing, making a search across accession numbers impossible.

I intend to use the 'Comments' section as a feedback mechanism to solicit suggestions and answer questions from the (for now) closed community with access to the project in vitro.

As is so often the case with projects employing museum photography, I’m waiting for the powers that be to determine if this use of the images complies with museum policies. I don’t know which of several real or imagined aspects of their use that might be giving our administration pause. Fortunately flickr!’s image options allow us to limit access as narrowly as library staff only if called upon. Naturally I’d prefer the resource was available to a much larger audience.

The project is still in development at this writing, pending approval from the administration and a lot more tinkering with the specific features of the tool. I had considered keeping this quick-and-easy DIY application of flickr! to myself until I could showcase a more finished project. But I'd rather put this out there now and see if it might have an application with other museum collections.

Keeping busy for fun and non-profit

FOR THOSE FEW BUT DEDICATED READERS: My apologies for not posting here sooner. Though I've had little to show for it in this space, I haven't been idle.

Props to Garrett Hungerford of Library Zen for introducing me to Google Co-Op, one of those many Google spin-offs (or outright purchase? Dunno, my back was turned), now with Create Your Own Search Engine. (Sounds like laundry product ads from my childhood.) Garrett's adaptation to compile a search engine for LIS bogs, LISZEN, is a masterful case of killer app -- the very sort of thing that at its best sets one to thinking.

One of my less whiz-bang responsibilities at work (until now) has been selecting titles for the library. We have few vendors who can match our narrow and specialized scope and broad spectrum of publishing venues with their approval plans. That puts a premium on finding titles on your own in order to guarantee the fullest coverage. Over time I have compiled a monster bookmark with the url's of all the publishers, trade and academic, putting out titles in our subject areas. A great start, but a pretty dull to plow through. Each publisher insists on designing its web site differently, providing for different search strategies (if any), arrangement and groupings of products, file formats (including the ever frustrating pdf), and page displays. (I feel that by now I could give an excellent presentation on how not to design a publisher's web site.)

Along comes Google Co-Op, and 'twas then the penny dropped. If I gathered all the root url's from the publishers' web sites, I could search across all their pages for keywords as I would any Google search. It's no substitute for hunting down the new titles one by one, but it could certainly cover most of the pages I'd need on a regular basis.

The mechanics of working in GC-O were surprisingly easy (with a few blunders along the way). I was even able to strip out the annoying advertising by attesting to being a 501(c)(3) institution. A few more deft taps and I could drop my test search engine into this blog. (That's it under SEARCH ENGINES at the bottom of the left column.) For now I've only managed an engine for the academic presses; I may still do one for trade publishers (if I sense a need for different keyword strategies) or fold it into the existing one.

It is worth pointing out that GC-O defaults to root url's (i.e., www.site.com). Web sites with subsites (subsite.site.com) need to be individually specified. At this early stage I haven't yet taken advantage of Google Marker, a handy way to gather url's to populate your search engines.

This particular application will probably spend most of its time behind the scenes. What's cool is that this also comes at the very moment that we are dismantling our Intranet pages and fashioning wiki pages for the same information. My colleague is working to transfer a key reference page featuring the web addresses for art and ethnography museums worldwide. The logical next step is a publicly-available search engine crossing all these museum web sites. That should find its way into the Goldwater Blog -- stay tuned.

Lest you think I spent all my time with my nose to the grindstone, I also took time out for Hallowe'en (left) and to visit a cemetery, but that's the stuff of another post on another blog.

WILT (collective wisdom)

What I learned today (or more accurately, this week) continues the dizzying ascent up my personal learning curve on all things two-point-Oh:

It's all well and good to learn by doing it by yourself, but it's quite another thing to learn by doing it with others.

Following an unusually productive meeting of librarians at my shop, those attending all agreed to heed the siren song of Library 2.0 and dive into it head first. In the first day, nay, the first few hours, we had created a blog site (in-house, and therefore password protected), a del.icio.us account, a Bloglines account, and a flickr! site. It's taking a little time for everyone to get comfortable with these new tools, let alone take advantage of them, and making them a regular stop on ones daily rounds may still be a little ways off. One of my colleagues had the foresight to showcase these new developments in his own blog. [Bravo! and why didn't I think of that? ;) ]

What has been a learning experience is discovering how these tools are used collectively. Working alone with your own 'babies', you are free to tinker around, make mistakes, figure out how to correct them, all without a great concern that anybody's taking much notice. (I am coming to understand with this and other blogs that there is always a lurking and hidden community that will happen upon what you've done; they may just not have much interest in acknowledging it.) While I was busy patting myself on the back for what I already knew, I was nevertheless tossed immediately into a different blog provider than my own ... where I proceeding to start all over, comparing notes one with the other, and even making some minor gaffes. But having already worked with one (for what, three weeks?) meant that I was at least aware of what I thought I could do, whether or not they are actually possible. (Unlike here, I can't change font size or color, not paste in images that aren't hosted on the Internet.)

More important, perhaps, is that I now could watch others struggling with the same issues, and finding their own solutions. Imagine that! And what's more, they had some pretty creative ideas about how to address them.

It's too early to see the full effects of this new libraries-wide cooperation. And maybe I'll just have to settle sometimes with some of the choices made collectively. ("Wouldn't it look better in purple?") But I'm definitely going to enjoy the stimulation and inspiration (and even the exasperation) that comes from this new learning paradigm.

Scaling Library 2.0

Live and learn. I have been wrestling with this post for days, tweeking and editing and expanding it far beyond its original germ of an idea. TIme to take the blue pencil to it and get it out there.

The title of this post can be read in two ways, and I mean both of them: Not only scale in the sense of 'ascend', but also 'scale' as in 'adjust the size'.

What started my thinking was a post by David Lee King entitled Making Time for 2.0, a must-read for library staff who want to know: How can I possibly have time for this stuff? (Shout out to the omni-web-present videoblographer Michael Stephens' Tame the Web for the reblog.)King answers both library administrators and managers unsure of how to "provide time, equipment, and training in order to successfully implement these new tools into the library's digital space" 2.0; and library line-staff, who may be reluctant to invest the time learning new library techniques.

In the Comments Jenny Levine makes the excellent point that in the final analysis time spent learning 2.0 is fungible: "I also think it’s important to point out ways to get BACK time that can then be devoted to tracking and playing with emerging technologies ... Doing seemingly small things ... can help you regain time, which is almost unheard of anymore."

One of the things that has confounded me about implementing Library 2.0 in our libraries has been a question of scale—both the size of the staff and the size of the audience. Michael Stephens’ delightful video reminds me that his library can loose a good-sized staff on exploiting the new social software. David Lee King answers the flip side of the coin smartly with his example of the solo librarian who still “has time for a library blog and console gaming nights.”

Both strike me as examples of libraries, big and small, that can depend on a large and diverse audience. But what of the small library with the small audience— due either to the narrowness of the subject focus, the library’s small core mission audience, or it’s restricted access policies?

Until recently my library has tended to operate under the Field of Dreams fallacy: It you build it, they will come. The collection itself will generate its 'natural' audience--whatever that is. There’s frequently little incentive to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ in special libraries, and therefore little incentive to innovate.

"You cover such esoteric topics that you either have to do it really well or not at all." This aphorism was uttered some time ago by my wife to describe the challenges and pitfalls of running a special library. When we launched our blog we knew that its subject matter—art, archaeology and material culture of much of the ‘non-Western’ world—would appeal to a fairly small audience. We also knew that the web audience was potentially far larger than our walk-in audience ever was ... or will be. We saw right away that the blog offered the opportunity to expand our patron base by reaching out to the audience beyond the walls. Would it draw more people into the library? Perhaps, but that wasn't really either realistic nor even the primary objective.

It suggests to me a third dimension of Library 2.0, namely depth: Our library can capitalize on its traditional strengths of subject knowledge but provide it to a wider audience. In the end, it's not so much a question of scaling down what Library 2.0 has to offer in deference to your narrow audience, yet taking advantage of Library 2.0 to discover and address an untapped and potentially much larger audience with the same economies of scale.

Embracing risk (sort of)

Thanks to Amy of Library Garden for putting her two cents into the most recent edition of Carnival of the InfoSciences by bringing our attention to the recent post by Alan Kirk Gray at Last Clear Chance, Good News. Your Place of Work is Risk-Free!

Library Garden calls it

a really nice discussion of how many libraries have arrived at making decisions based on trying avoid the worst thing happening. The result, according to this post, is that we miss out on possible successful actions because we are afraid of the possibility of some bad outcomes.

For me it comes right on the heels of the Wired news entry on the complementary need for companies to be flexible enough to embrace technological innovations over which they don't have complete control. And not-so-on-the-heels of my accumulated experience in a remarkably risk-averse corporate style, often known as "traditional". (Okay, so maybe it is called 'traditional' after all.)

There is also a pernicious corollary I was introduced to early in my library/museum education: "We tried it once and it didn't work." This was meant to prevent ones 'repeating the same mistake' but never took into account changing circumstances (technology, audience acceptance, staffing). I regret not having pressed the point a few times in the past when making changes could have had a significant impact on the present. This also dovetails nicely with the discussion last month on promoting a 'Culture of Maybe' in the workplace.

   Q.:  Newbie wants to know, At what point does one stop referring graciously to all the links in the chain of referral that let to the ultimate blog post (so-and-so mentioned here a post by whoosie, &c.), and simply cite directly? Is this ultimately a question of blogiquette?

Q: And who's got the best library management blog out there? There's pleny of chatter on the wire about the implementation of 2.0, but what about managing it? I'm fielding your recommendations.

Ostrich photo (what else) by gravitywave via flickr!

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.