I have been following these two blogs:
Free Range Librarian (
http://freerangelibrarian.com/) and Librarians Matter (
http://librariansmatter.com/blog/).
The Free Range Librarian is librarian and writer K.G. Schneider.
She is the director of the Cushing Library at Holy Names University in Oakland, California and she has published over 100 articles and 2 books.
Her books are ‘A Practical Guide to Internet Filters,’ Neal Schuman, 1997 and ‘The Internet Access Cookbook,’ Neal Schuman, 1996.
The Free Range Librarian blog “comprises the public, oft-daily mumblings and grumblings” of K.G. Schneider.
She has twenty years experience in every type of library except school, and prior to librarianship she had eight years experience in aircraft maintenance in the United States Air Force.
In addition to being a writer, she is also a speaker, presenter, and educator, and in 2000 was named by the PUBLIB as one of the top ten speakers in librarianship.
Her educational background includes degrees from Barnard College, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, and University of San Francisco.
The Librarians Matter blog is written by Kathryn Greenhill, an Australian author, presenter, and facilitator with twenty years of experience. She is an Associate Lecturer in Information and Library Studies at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia and has published numerous peer-reviewed conference papers, journal articles, influential blog posts that have become required readings in Learning 2.0 programs around the world, and a book chapter in Library 2.0 initiatives in academic libraries,(Association of College and Research Libraries, 2007). She has experience in several types of libraries and areas of librarianship, including emerging technology, systems, legal, cataloging, and management. Her Librarians Matter blog consists of “musing, enthusing, libraries, emerging technologies, balancing, being mum.” Her educational background includes degrees from University of Western Australia, Curtin University of Technology, and Curtin University. In 2009, she received the Jean Arnot Memorial Fellowship by the State Library of New South Wales, and she was also the recipient of the 2009 VALA: Libraries Technology and the Future Inc Travelling Scholarship, which allowed her to travel to research libraries that developed Open Source Software in the U.S.
I chose these blogs I felt they would help me to gain perspective on varying library and information science issues. I found that both blogs seemed to have new content added regularly and in the case of Mrs. Greenhill’s blog, Librarians Matter, I liked the idea of starting to remove the restrictions of country-specific content, and gain more of an international perspective. The following are summations and notes on what I’ve gleaned by following these blogs over the course of several weeks. Note: in the case of the Free Range Librarian blog, I had to go into earlier posts to have six for this project.
Week 1:
Free Range Librarian (3/2/11) “The Harper Collins Boycott And What 26 Checkouts Look Like”:
This blog post took me to the blog of another librarian—Kate, at “Loose Cannon Librarian” (
http://loosecannonlibrarian.net).
Apparently, there is a controversy over eBooks (I know, what a surprise).
These pose problems for librarians, obviously, because they are so different from traditional books.
For example, patrons check them out for a set period of time and then they expire—there are no overdue charges.
Although it’s obvious that this is a benefit to patrons, this deprives libraries that depend on fines for income.
Ebooks also can’t be sold as “gently used” in book sales, people can’t donate “old copies” to libraries, and they have compatibility issues with ILL and book groups.
This particular controversy, however, stems from HarperCollins imposing an annual fee on their ebook titles (i.e., 26 circulations at approximately two weeks each=about a year of use).
Note:
Kate at the “Loose Cannon Librarian” would prefer Harper Collins (HC) try tiered pricing instead.
So, there is now a boycott of HC because of this annual fee on eBooks (the boycott appears to include HC’s print books).
The purpose of the boycott is to open up conversations to find a new solution that would be better for all involved—HC, libraries, patrons, publishers, authors, other booksellers, librarians, et cetera.
As Kate states:
the boycott is an attempt to protect readers’ rights, not infringe upon them.
We are at the beginning of the ebook revolution, and it is important for all parties involved, that we tackle issues now.
After reading Kate’s blog, I was taken to YouTube where I viewed an equally informative video from the Pioneer Library System called “What 26 Checkouts Look Like,” (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je90XRRrruM).
Through this demonstration, I realized how expensive a “26 times” limit would be on the libraries, as popular titles may have to be re-purchased multiple times.
For example, the book (hard copy) of Janet Evanovich’s “Metro Girl” has been checked out 65 times from this library, so if it were an ebook, the library would already be on its third purchase of the text.
Schneider also mentions in this post other issues with HarperCollins, including HC’s resistance to consortial agreements and their “desire to begin meddling in library card policy.”
However, all seem very happy that this HC policy, and the resulting boycott, are opening up conversations and, hopefully, cooperative spirits.
Librarians Matter (Week of May 30, 2011) “Blog everyday of June 2011.
Let’s Go.”:
I learned that Kathryn Greenhill had joined an ambitious initiative from Libraries Interact (blog central for Australian libraries) to make one post each day on her blog during the month of June.
On June 3rd Greenhill blogged about YouTube’s creative commons licensing, which now gives users the ability to indicate during upload that they have licensed their movies under an Attribution 3.0 United States (CC BY 3.0) license.
Before this user-friendly addition, the only way to indicate such a license was to add a note to the credits.
On June 4th she posted about a very interesting competition at Libraryhack.
Libraryhack hosted a mashup and apps competition using data from Australian and New Zealand libraries.
I took a look at her favorite submissions to the competition:
the glorious image viewer, and Convictbook.
The former is a 3D interactive projection image viewer which pulls its pictures from the State Library of Queensland database and “aims to revitalise pictures from the library archive by morphing them with the physical environment in the library, hence making the archive more ambient and accessible to visitors.”
I highly recommend checking it out at
http://libraryhack.org/2011/06/01/glorious-image-viewer/.
The latter, Convictbook, is a Facebook-like interface of information and photos of more than 100,000 convicts from the State Library of Queensland’s Convict Transfer Register.
I also highly recommend looking into it at
http://libraryhack.org/2011/05/31/convictbook/.
Greenhill’s other posts for this week included ones on her migraines and auras, her cat’s inexplicable illness, how to pass units that she teaches at university, and general thoughts on the balancing act of being a professional and raising a family.
Week 2:
Free Range Librarian (4/10) “Thoroughly Modern Karen: A Response to Jeff Trzeciak”:
This blog post is K.G. Schneider’s response to controversial topics raised by University library director Jeff Trzeciak in his recent speech at Penn State University.
Trzeciak is the University Librarian at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Using the link on Schneider’s blog, I went to Penn State University Libraries’ podcast of Trzeciak’s speech and I viewed it in its entirety so that I would have an understanding of the context from which this controversial content stems.
One of the most alarming pieces of information in Trzeciak’s speech for Schneider, as well as many other librarians (whose blogs also attest to this), was his assertion that there’s really not a place for librarians in the library anymore.
He states that at McMaster’s, he has significantly reduced the number of professional librarians, and that new hires are unlikely to be librarians or traditional paraprofessionals.
He says that new hires are likely to come out of IT, including audio/video production, or are likely to be PhD’s, and he has made a move toward shared positions with other campus units, such as utilizing postdoctoral research fellows.
A result of this move is, of course, a move away from the information literacy role of librarians.
Trzeciak stated that he has also eliminated reference desks at McMasters and there are, therefore, no librarians on reference.
He stated that he has eliminated cataloging via outsourcing, and reassigned the former technical services personnel.
In her blog post response to Trzeciak, Schneider states several improvements she brought about when she came to her current director position (director of the Cushing Library at Holy Names University in Oakland, California).
The improvements were simple, and included things like renewed information literacy instruction and establishing walk up as well as chat/email reference services.
However, she writes:
“By the standards of the Gospel According to Jeff Trzeciak, I must seem like some misguided brontosaurus snuffling in the antediluvian biblioforest. I should be eliminating walk-up service and replacing practitioners with PhDs who will focus on highfalutin digital projects. I’m… boring. And small. Hardly the stuff of
Taiga Forum.”
Being that this was the first time I’d seen the name Taiga Forum, I followed the link provided, and found that it consists of Associate/Assistant University Librarians and Directors (AULs and ADs) who are “challenging the traditional boundaries in libraries.” They meet annually, and most recently have debated the “provocative statements” at the ALAs annual conference in New Orleans this year. These provocative statements are regarding future challenges to academic libraries, and include such alarming statements as #4: books as décor: “Within five years, graduate students and faculty will fill all their information needs online, never coming into the library, yet they will continue to idealize the library as a sacred place to commune with books. Libraries will respond by flipping their stacks into designer reading rooms that use books as decor.” However, it is statement #10 which most relates to Trzeciak’s controversial statements, and it reads: “Within five years, library programs will have overproduced MLSs at a rate greater even than humanities PhDs and glutted a permanently diminished market.”
Schneider makes strong, and I believe valid, points in support of keeping the librarian in the library, and thus keeping information literacy instruction a focal point. For example, she says that many of her University’s students arrive with poor research skills, and as she points out, have often graduated that way when there has been no direct instruction and assessment of information literacy. She also says that instructors “absorb skills themselves through our library-faculty instructional partnership,” thus perpetuating the instruction and acquisition of information literacy. I completely agree with Schneider that the library could (and should!) play a pivotal role in helping students become lifelong information consumers and in reinforcing the joys of reading and cultural literacy. I do not agree with Trzeciak that this is not a priority, and that PhDs and IT personnel could fill the shoes of a librarian. Instead, I see the need for highly qualified professional instructor-librarians who possess technology skills and subject expertise for the future (and present) of academic libraries.
Librarians Matter (Week of June 6, 2011) “Posting Request—Please Blow Your Trumpet! Bah-Bow”: This post arises from the question “What are you doing well professionally or in your library?” Greenhill cites notable contributions by fellow professionals in the field, and makes the statement “I will bet that something that you do well professionally that you think is rather ordinary actually would be mind-blowing to other library folk.”
She specifically mentions the very simple example of a couple of librarians at Batchelor College in Darwin, who managed the “transformation of a totally cramped and crowded tiny space into a flexible learning space that allowed culturally sensitive learning for some of their students who had never been exposed to books before, let alone a library.”
Then Greenhill gave an example from her own experience.
Her previous library utilized self-checkout PCs which gave a high pitched alert sound when the user did something wrong, such as try to check out an item already on loan to someone else.
The problem was that everyone, including staff, ignored that sound.
After a brainstorming session in a staff meeting, they replaced the sound with the “wrong answer” noise from Family Feud (available for free from the Internet Archive), and suddenly users paid attention.
In her post dated June 11th, Greenhill highly recommends readers check out the work of Dave Gray, who has a talent for visual thinking—to creatively approach familiar problems and concepts in new ways.
She recommends his latest book, Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, co-written with Sunni Brown and James Macanufo.
And she recommends his blog post “Q-Tools” at
http://www.davegrayinfo.com/2008/06/04/q-tools/.
Week 3:
Free Range Librarian (5/22) “Slowly, slowly run o horses of the night”: In this blog post, Schneider touches upon a few topics. I love how she describes the activities of the academic library, and in reading her description, realized she could be describing an elementary school media center, or nearly any library for that matter: “Whether it’s a book talk, a gaming night, a traditional “info lit” class, a Smartboard seminar for faculty, buying multiple copies of a “hot” title, training student workers, or making the facility more comfortable and attractive, our service suite fits together as a whole, all of it equally important: providing research help, training faculty on emerging technologies for instruction, making the library a welcoming second home to students, offering formal instruction in information literacy, and offering informal instruction through art and literary events that teach students that libraries are a life habit worth acquiring.” She then went on to describe how she turned the book budget over to the faculty this year, and the results of this experiment. It seems there was uneven participation in this change, but that the faculty most motivated to act, did. Interestingly, the majority of their selections were in DVD format for use in their classrooms. For the upcoming year, she intends to set aside more of the budget for multi-format popular-reading materials.
Librarians Matter (Week of June 13, 2011) “Tools for Teaching Coding to Kids”:
Greenhill makes substantive posts this week on teaching coding, must-reads for librarians, and what good online LIS education would look like.
To start, she addresses the topic of teaching kids to code—that is, to write and modify computer programs.
This is a topic she picked up after seeing an article entitled “Are children becoming digitally illiterate?” from BBC.
She offers some important aspects to consider in teaching coding, and gives some links, such as the language of coding and
http://www.mathplayground.com/mathprogramming.html, and the combination/manipulation of variables and
http://scratch.mit.edu/.
In Greenhill’s post on June 15th, she begins compiling a list of “100 articles every librarian should read.”
Her list ends up having about 40 titles so far, and leans toward:
equity of access to information and library resources, the impact on libraries of shared data on the internet, how library users find research information, format changes – the rise of online video, ebooks, transliteracy and DRM, and how librarians and libraries are preparing for the future.
I know her list has a distinctive Australia slant, in addition to being a work in progress, but I was surprised to see only one American Library Association article (it was on serving non-English speakers), and I was happy to discover two articles from author K.G. Schneider (the author of the other blog I’ve been following).
Greenhill also places a triple asterisk next to the articles she believes you should read right now (five of the articles receive this distinction, and so I intend to retrieve them today).
Finally, this week she posts about what good online LIS education should look like.
Her thoughts on this topic include the following:
teachers using online video, easy to use self-managed online content management systems for those who know how, more remote involvement by people with international and professional expertise, more self-marking exercises, better peer-marking systems, easier ways for students to share their discoveries with each other, and automatic assessment metrics (like Google analytics for course material usage).
In viewing her video on this, one comment she made really resounded with me.
She said that back when she went to university, she had a course in which it was said that “if the person who is finding out the bulk of the material and giving the bulk of critique about that material for the unit is the teacher, then the person who is learning the most in that unit is the teacher.”
I have always believed this to be true.
As a teacher myself, I have often felt that there needs to be better ways of learning, that it shouldn’t be as passive as it unfortunately is, and that the only real way to know a subject/topic is to teach it.
Week 4:
Free Range Librarian (6/19) “ALA: It’s Not Just an Adventure, It’s a Job”: In this post, Schneider offers veteran suggestions for attending, and surviving, the ALA Annual Conference. First, she says, don’t waste your time getting there. Avoid the slow shuttle. Rather, opt for splitting cab fare—it’s fastest and most economical in the long run. Secondly, plan well and plan in advance. The logistics of the conference are quite complicated, with concurrent events spread across dozens of venues. Be careful that you can actually get to your second destination in time to see its start. Again, she recommends setting aside cad fare. Third, utilize resources such as the ALA planner to line up what Schneider calls your “A plan” as well as a backup plan for activities/sessions. However, she states that she doesn’t rely solely on the ALA planner, but supplements it with information from other sources as well, such as related professional organizations and the ALA conference page itself. Four: follow the Annual Conference hashtag as early as possible and don’t be shy about tweeting for assistance if you get lost. Five: Carry a printed map, even if you have digital ones. Schneider recommends the maps in the printed schedule. Six: attend one of the orientation sessions for newcomers. Seven: Rotate your shoes—don’t wear the same ones two days in a row, and certainly don’t break in new ones at the conference. Eight: pack some first aid—even when you prepare ahead, you can’t foresee everything. Nine: attend sessions of particular import to your current position or areas in which you need to grow. Lastly: write a trip report on your return trip, and consider making it a visual report by using photographs to narrate. For this last suggestion, Schneider provides a link to an example of a visual trip report of her own, which she co-compiled on Flickr after a site visit to the library at CSU Channel Islands on 3/8/11.
Librarians Matter (Week of June 20, 2011) “New Gadget, Sad Gadget”: This week Greenhill posts about purchasing a mobile wifi hotspot, only to find that her iPad glass inexplicably shattered and she’ll have to have it replaced. In her next post, dated June 21st, she makes a YouTube post of a video of her pronouncing the names of common library tech tools, and points out that this could not be done with regular blogging (i.e., the required audio). Her post dated June 22nd is very interesting, as she utilizes Camtasia to create a screencast to show a tool (Tineye) that locates images on the web. She also mentions Shazam, a music app, and Snaptell for iPhone and Android, which is an image recognition and barcode scanning application.
Week 5:
Free Range Librarian (6/24) “My ALA 2011 Annual Schedule”: This post, obviously, is Schneider’s schedule for the ALA annual conference, held this year in New Orleans. On the first night, she attended (and marked high priority) a LITA (Library and Information Technology Association) happy hour event to catch up with LITA colleagues. The next morning (also marked high priority) was a GLBT RT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Round Table) steering committee for the transition plan for the changes to GLBTRT bylaws. Following the steering committee, she lists “OCLC Increase Your Digital Collection Visibility with WorldCat: A Roundtable for OAI-PMH Repository, Digital Collection and WorldCat Administrators” (low priority). Also at the same time as this roundtable, she lists “OCLC Join the Revolution: Library Management at Web Scale” (high priority), which she describes in this way: “Find out how moving traditional ILS functions to the Web has positively impacted library services, improved the bottom line, and increased global library visibility and collaboration.” A third simultaneous event, also listed as high priority, is “President’s Program: From Idea to Innovation to Implementation: How Teams Make it Happen (ACRL).” That’s just the morning of the first day! The rest of her prioritized schedule for the conference, includes such high priority events as: OCLC Perceptions of Libraries,
Blog and Wiki Interest Group, Top Technology Trends, Building the Future: Addressing Library Broadband Connectivity Issues in the 21st Century, and Next Generation Catalog Interest Group. She ends her conference schedule with a tour of the St. Charles Parish Library. Another very interesting event of her conference schedule was “Battledecks 2011.” It is listed as a presentation/session and a social event, and described in the following way: “Battledecks is not for the faint of heart. It is a nerve-wracking event where those competing must create a coherent presentation from a deck of slides that they have never seen before. This is truly the perfect way to end your conference experience as these courageous individuals compete for the glory of being crowned the next champ.” I could only image the creative, and probably at-times-hilarious, presentations that might result from such improvisation. I can image that such a “deck of slides” would likely have some special pictures, graphics, quotes, et cetera among its content, and I think I’d really like being a spectator at such an event. Battledecks seems as though it could be modified and used as an icebreaker, or culminating activity, for similar conferences or professional meetings at any level.
Librarians Matter (Week of June 27, 2011):
As Greenhill’s last blog post is dated June 23rd, and therefore leaves me no Week 5 or Week 6 blog summary, I decided I would like to take the opportunity to read her older blog posts that have been deemed influential.
One that particularly peaked my interest, was “20 reasons why learning about emerging technologies is part of every librarian’s job,” dated July 2007.
On her bio, this blog post is said to be regularly set as required reading for the first week of library Learning 2.0 programs around the world.
In this post, she addresses why it is so important to learn emerging technologies when there’s so many other demands on our time, when we don’t even have the technologies at our institution yet, and when 80% are not yet using them.
Her 20 points include our core business of linking information and people; productivity, i.e., making our tasks easier via emerging technologies; understanding all formats on our users’ behalf; watching trends to discover potent information sources; experimenting gains skills; being prepared, i.e., being proactive with emerging technologies, and not reactive; providing better service to our users by utilizing their preferred tools; gaining an international perspective by not limiting our network of interests to our own country; utilizing emergent technologies to find out what other libraries are doing; gaining flexibility with the changing standards; experimenting to be prepared for the future; and fostering better collaboration.
I highly recommend this post:
http://librariansmatter.com/blog/2007/07/06/20-reasons-learning-emerging-techologies-is-part-of-every-librarians-job/.
Week 6:
Free Range Librarian (7/10) “ALA Annual 2011:
The Trip Report”:
In this blog post, Schneider follows up her ALA schedule in her previous post with synopses of the events she attended at the ALA annual conference in New Orleans.
James Young, a workplace systems consultant and author, gave a presentation about peoples’ motivations and team building.
Battledecks, a previously mentioned improv presentation from a deck of PowerPoint slides, was hilarious, as expected.
It showcased some of the best and worst presenters in the profession.
LLAMA (Library Leadership and Management Association) sponsored a “Designing a Specialty Commons” workshop which Schneider attended.
She notes a few key things from this workshop:
1.
begin the process by identifying specific, local requirements for a library, key stakeholders, and the major question they’re trying to address, 2.
Adding technology increases the need for back-end support, 3.
Technology is rapidly changing, and many libraries are waiting until renovations of their spaces are complete in order to purchase technology.
In response to Schneider’s goal of building her library’s popular-reading collection this summer, she intentionally attended a Southern Writers presentation, and the Stonewall Book Awards.
At the Southern Writers event, she got to meet author Tayari Jones, who writes about the Southern-urban experience.
The Stonewall Book Awards was an event of the GLBT RT and there were dynamic speakers handling such topics as the differential treatment of lesbian authors by publishers and reviewers in the U.S. and UK.
Schneider was disappointed that LITA had sponsored Orson Scott Card to present because his statements about homosexuality are “out of sync with the positions on diversity shared by most libraries.”
Schneider moves on to other events, including the LITA “Awards Ceremony” for trendsters (her quotation marks).
She makes a point that she observes a growing tendency for technology trendsters to “present trends and technologies they would like to see happening (Drupal, developers in every library, etc.) versus actual trends.
Schneider goes on with “That said, Clifford Lynch was as always quite sage, talking both about the social-reading trends in the research community, computational photography, and the stratospheric rise in mobile tech. He also noted the huge rise in hardware-specific software and noted this was a return to a previous era that could “leave content more vulnerable to the ebb and flow of hardware.” For recommended reading (an audience question), Lynch pointed us to
Kurzweil’s newsletter.”
She expressed her disappointment in the non-festive ceremony hosted by LITA, something she notes writing the award sponsor and committee chair regarding, and noted that their fiscal problems may have had something to do with that.
Schneider attended both the Navigator and Camino user groups and enjoyed seeing the software roadmap for Navigator, and was excited to see that more libraries plan to join Camino, which is “dedicated to offering access to the widest possible range of resources” via WorldCat.
Schneider notes that GLBT RT unanimously adopted the proposed changes to the bylaws, and she has volunteered to chair a procedural review committee to create job descriptions for the officers under the new structure.
Schneider concluded her New Orleans visit with a tour of two lovely brand-new libraries in the local community: the East Regional and the Paradis branch of the St. Charles Parish Public Library. They were both designed to support personal technology, with both wifi and electrical support. Then Schneider spoke of the social gatherings she attended at such New Orleans hotspots as the Swizzle Stick bar, the Ruby Slipper, Muriel’s, and the Carousel. She spent most of the time she was in the convention center looking at furniture and interactive whiteboards. Finally, she highly recommends the hotel she stayed at, Chateau Le Moyne, and says that iPads were endemic, stating “It was almost as if they had been issued at the airport on arrival to MSY.”
Librarians Matter :
For this final summary, I watched Greenhill’s two-minute YouTube video about getting deeply local and using human skills to get to know our communities:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoPZwcXvAwE.
She says that libraries have a distinct advantage over Google, Amazon, or other one-size-fits-all databases, in that we can find out what type of information the user wants, how they prefer to get it, and ask them questions.
Libraries have a chance to occupy a central place in our communities by going deeply local and using human skills to get to know our communities.
This consists of five traits:
community, content, local linking (via local content, or content that meets their information needs), linking to the world (free and open access is essential), and knowing possibilities (knowing what’s available and bringing it back to our communities).
