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.

Conference on Pacific Island Material Culture Documentation

Reblogged from goldwaterlibrary.org:

This conference seeks to bring attention to Pacific collection materials that are not well known but that have special value to Pacific communities and to the general public. It also seeks to focus attention on issues and developments regarding access to these materials, as well as to digitizing projects underway. An international group of Pacific librarians will share information about their collections and discuss common concerns.

The keynote speaker for the conference is award-winning poet, author, and former librarian Robert Sullivan, a UHM assistant professor of English. Other featured speakers include David Kukutai Jones, Maori specialist at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand; and Ewan Maidment, Executive Officer of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, Canberra, Australia. The conference convener is Dr Karen Peacock, UHM Pacific curator and head of Special Collections.

Conference registration information is on the Web. Registration is $20 general and $5 students. The registration deadline is 1 March 2007.

The conference is sponsored by the UHM Center for Pacific Islands Studies through a US DOE Title VI National Resource Center Grant. It is also supported by the UHM library system.

For more information, contact CPIS outreach coordinator, Tisha Hickson, at [email protected]. For program information, contact Karen Peacock, at [email protected].

Posted on goldwaterlibrary.org by Ross Day on February 13, 2007 at 10:29 AM in Archives, Conferences, Libraries, Pacific, Research, Ross Day | Permalink |  

This conference seeks to bring attention to Pacific collection materials that are not well known but that have special value to Pacific communities and to the general public. It also seeks to focus attention on issues and developments regarding access to these materials, as well as to digitizing projects underway. An international group of Pacific librarians will share information about their collections and discuss common concerns.

The keynote speaker for the conference is award-winning poet, author, and former librarian Robert Sullivan, a UHM assistant professor of English. Other featured speakers include David Kukutai Jones, Maori specialist at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand; and Ewan Maidment, Executive Officer of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, Canberra, Australia. The conference convener is Dr Karen Peacock, UHM Pacific curator and head of Special Collections.

Conference registration information is on the Web. Registration is $20 general and $5 students. The registration deadline is 1 March 2007.

The conference is sponsored by the UHM Center for Pacific Islands Studies through a US DOE Title VI National Resource Center Grant. It is also supported by the UHM library system.

For more information, contact CPIS outreach coordinator, Tisha Hickson, at [email protected]. For program information, contact Karen Peacock, at [email protected].

This conference seeks to bring attention to Pacific collection materials that are not well known but that have special value to Pacific communities and to the general public. It also seeks to focus attention on issues and developments regarding access to these materials, as well as to digitizing projects underway. An international group of Pacific librarians will share information about their collections and discuss common concerns.

The keynote speaker for the conference is award-winning poet, author, and former librarian Robert Sullivan, a UHM assistant professor of English. Other featured speakers include David Kukutai Jones, Maori specialist at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand; and Ewan Maidment, Executive Officer of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, Canberra, Australia. The conference convener is Dr Karen Peacock, UHM Pacific curator and head of Special Collections.

Conference registration information is on the Web. Registration is $20 general and $5 students. The registration deadline is 1 March 2007.

The conference is sponsored by the UHM Center for Pacific Islands Studies through a US DOE Title VI National Resource Center Grant. It is also supported by the UHM library system.

For more information, contact CPIS outreach coordinator, Tisha Hickson, at [email protected]. For program information, contact Karen Peacock, at [email protected].

Digital Asset Management at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Even though RLG does a fine job of publicizing its own efforts, it never hurts to highlight important articles -- particularly when they come out of your own 'shop'. The most recent issue of their RLG DigiNews (Dec. 2006) features Why Digital Asset Management? A Case Study, by Susan Chen and Michael Jenkins, both of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The article is a comprehensive overview of the decision making that surrounded the establishment of a museum-wide Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, now christened Met Images, and the concomitant reorganization of museum resources required to implement and sustain such a system. Of particular interest for an insider is learning what steps were necessary to get institutional buy-in from all the parties affected -- senior management, curatorial and research staff, and the image support staff.

One intriguing assertion appears in a box-out two-thirds of the way down the article, reproduced here on the left, in a section headed Cataloguing. (Evidently the image community clings fast to that interstitial 'u'.) When I first read it I thought the suggestion was that cataloging works of art was significantly different from cataloging 'sneakers or pickup trucks'. On its face this seems eminently arguable. Some institutions have wasted much time and energy in developing elaborate and idiosyncratic DIY systems that try to mimic pre-existing cataloging paradigms (with all their inherent flaws) rather than taking advantage of systems that employ industry-standard input and output.

But in the context of this section of the article, the statement is only meant as a caution: The complexity of cataloging works of art may not be sufficiently recognized by DAM vendors in the design of their products. The authors seem optimistic that "tools will be developed that are more appropriate to the needs of museums, libraries, and archives." From my perspective I hope that the tools are both appropriate to the museum's needs and practically implementable.

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!