The Krafty Librarian

The Krafty Librarian comments on the recent announcement of $21 million in IMLS projects to recruit new librarians.

I have been waiting for people to get back from ALA and start screaming about this, especially those NextGens who keep talking about the complete lack of entry-level library jobs.

The point that the NextGens, and that Krafty herself, miss is this: the grants are intended to "offset a current shortage of school library media specialists, library school faculty, and librarians working in underserved communities, as well a looming shortage of library directors and other senior librarians who are expected to retire in the next 20 years."

Read that again: school media specialists. Library school faculty. Librarians working in underserved communities. Library directors and senior librarians. Not, I repeat NOT entry-level librarians working in already oversaturated markets, or medical librarians who only want to work in a quiet hospital library where their main job is to check in journals and process interlibrary loans (clerical work, by the way, but that's a rant for another day).

We can't find school librarians willing to work in western Kansas, or in the inner cities. There aren't enough libsci PhDs who want to teach, or enough who want to be directors. We can't get black or Hispanic folks to become librarians. So, the fact is, there is a shortage in library science--a shortage of tough, dedicated people willing to make the hard choices to get ahead in their chosen field.

I feel little empathy for those who go into library school and expect to come out on the other side with an automatic ticket to a cushy professional job in an academic library. I know several very sucessful, very young librarians. We all took the same path:

Entered library school with little experience.
Worked at technology jobs while in school.
Interned while in school.
Worked at a small, rural library for almost no money to gain experience.
Moved at least once to advance career.
Moved into administration early.
Found "dream job" with decent pay and good benefits after being out of school between 24 and 36 months.

One of the main complaints is that library schools need to tell applicants the truth about the job market. I agree. I think every interview should have a disclaimer: if you want to be a french literature bibliographer at an ACRL library, you will have to WORK to get there. You will probably have to MOVE to get there. It may take YEARS. If, on the other hand, you have a commitment to the concept that knowledge is power and a willingness to implement that concept wherever you may be, you will be successful and happy in librarianship, no matter where you are.

ViaVideo, My Foot

I love videoconferencing. I think it improves communication over phone or email and provides a way for people to get together no matter where they are.

However, I have to live with the contrary thoughts: I love videoconferencing, AND it is an absolute pain to do it 99% of the time.

Today I have a meeting to join where I thought I could just pop on our Polycom Camera, which ordinarily works like a dream. However, after almost four hours of tinkering, it looks like I'm going to have to mooch Karen's QuickCam and use it instead. It turns out that the conferencing system we'll be using doesn't like my Polycom camera. Arg!

If it's not the camera, it's the firewall, or the lack of RAM on the PC, or something. Whenever I do video, I'm so enthused about the promise and then so annoyed at the process of getting it to work.

I just want to wail, "Why can't we all just get along?"

Do You Blog? Take the MIT Blogger Survey

I did, and it was very interesting. I will be excited to see their results!

Summer Vacation

I'm pleased to say that there's just five more working days until my summer vacation. I usually take the first week of July off each year (Bill and I were married on the 4th, and it's nice to be off around our anniversary), but this year I am taking Wed-Thursday-Friday each week for the rest of the month as well. We're only sending Trixie to daycare two days a week this summer, and so it's my turn to soak up some Trixie sun. Bill's had all the fun during June; as marching band ramps up, I get to take over.

The point is, posting will probably be a little sparse through the month, unless you want to read things like, "Went to the pool today. Splash! SPLASH! SPLASH! Had much fun. Night-night."

"Information is Becoming a Conversation"

Karen Schneider is one of the speakers at the perennial "Top Technology Trends" panel sponsored by LITA at the ALA Annual Meeting. This year, the top trendy people are posting their comments on the LITA blog, and Karen's post is outstanding.

A clip:

"Information is becoming a conversation. Information is no longer asynchronous received wisdom disseminated in formal publications to a passive and largely unexamining community. Instead, increasingly, information is increasingly synchronous."

What does this mean? It means that there's no longer a single record of authority; there's a path or trail of community-created authority.

Taken together with The Krafty Librarian's post on outstanding impact factors of open-access journals, we can begin to see where the concept of "synchonous information" leads. Open, freely available information becomes available for comment, and people WILL comment on it.

Unfortunately, impact factors don't and can't measure how many times an article has ben emailed, posted to a discussion list, blogged about, or otherwise commented on. I imagine if this added feature were available, open access titles would blow anything under subscription away.

Librarians are heavily invested in the concept of a single record of authority. There are good sources, and there are bad sources, and we decide which are which, don't we? In the synchronous information world that Karen Schneider posits, the river of information will just flow around us if we try to be any kind of barricade or block.

No News Today!

WDT

Soft Money Gives Life an Edge

Since coming to KUMC in 2002, I have been funded entirely by grant money, and I've found that it's a way I like to live. The RML funds were almost like hard dollars; it's a five-year project with virtual guarantee of renewal, but I still found that the flexibility of grant funding (and the possibility of increases at contract renewal time) made me a little more entrepreneurial.

Now that am no longer with the RML, my salary comes from the Office of Medical Education and from a grant funding digital library development. The digital library money is available through July '06, so I've got to find some replacement for that along the way, and although the MedEd money is a little firmer, they could still choose to pull it at any point.

In a conversation this morning, Karen (my boss) said something to the effect of, "I'd like to get you onto hard dollars for next year," but I don't know if that's something I want. Soft money gives life a bit of an edge and makes service (see my last post) a survival tactic. What I really prefer to do is to be the innovator and then create space for someone to come along and replace me. If my plan works, in twelve to 24 months, we should be able to have two new people, or half of two new people, to work with OME and to do metadata management. That would leave me free to do...whatever it is I'll be doing.

Soft money essentially guarantees that I won't be doing the same thing in two years, because my funding will drive my focus. It's a little scary, but exciting and--frankly--a relief. I have a short attention span, and I'd rather change the job I have in order to stay interested and engaged instead of just changing jobs when things get stale. I've been here for 3.5 years, but my job has changed three times (Kansas and Technology Liaison, Technology Liaison only, Digital Projects Specialist).

What could be next?

WDT

"[A]n idea, a vision--a something that inspires the MLS/MLIS masses to greatness"

The Lipstick Librarian has a rare rant posted about the current and ongoing state of librarianship. The profession is stuck in never-ending "minutiae" and "[w]e talk endlessly amongst ourselves about the details--in short, focusing on the information trees while missing the forest. Maybe we're just plain too tired and overwhelmed to come up with the Grand Unified Theory of Librarianship."

I think the Lipstick Librarian is completely correct in her assessment of the profession and completely incorrect in her proposed solution. Librarianship is stuck on a spinning rodent exercise wheel of keeping up with a changing patron base, changing technologies, and journal prices. We do a lot of communal hand-wringing when what we need to be doing is creating change.

However, TLL's call for "an idea, a vision--a something that inspires the MLS/MLIS masses to greatness," and specifically suggesting the need for a single savior to lead us from the wilderness is, in my opinion, far off the mark, for two reasons.

First, we're, um, librarians. A lot of the commentary of the type that TLL is doing seems to me to contain a fundamental desire for respect and validation, a kind of societal acknowledgement that the work we do is as important as that of doctors, or lawyers, or computer programmers.

The work we do is important, but the sad fact is that very little of the essential work that goes on in the world gets the societal respect and validation that it deserves. It's not fair, and it's not right, but that's the way it is. And for whatever reason--because it is a feminized field, because we're all such geeks, or because we really are going to be obsolete in 20 years--it's unlikely that librarianship is going to get the respect and validation that TLL seems to want.

We must be able to validate ourselves--we have to acknowledge to ourselves personally and to society as a whole that what we do is imporatant. Perhaps it's not 'important' in a "we're-action-heroines-on-TV" kind of way, but it's important to the people we serve.

Which leads me to my second point. No Dewey, no Bill Gates, no Steve Jobs, and no Whitney Davison-Turley is going to be able to single-handedly lead librarianship out of this perceived crisis. A cheesy movie with a good message, Bruce Almighty tells the viewer to "Be the Miracle." If we're important to the people we serve, truly important to them, then what we do becomes important. We begin to get (limited) monetary compensation, and the more vital validation that everyone so desperately needs. One by one, we transform ourselves and the profession. We become the miracle.

"Coolness," embodied in a single visionary, won't save librarianship. Service, embedded into each and every one of us, will.

Go forth, Librarian, and humble yourself. Seek to serve, and you will lead.

Oh, and ask for more money while you're at it.

WDT

Including My Address in a Blog Post

My husband Bill reads my blog, which makes me very happy. Yesterday, he commented that it probably wasn't safe to have a link to the Google map of our address right there for everyone to click.

I actually considered this before I made the link, but decided to go ahead and do it because there's so much one can find out about a person just from a simple Google search (especially with a name like mine--there's only one "Whitney Davison-Turley" who comes up).

On reflection, though, I think Bill is right. Yes, anyone can find my address easily enough, and then check out my house on the satellite image, but at least any wannbe stalkers should have to make the extra effort.

Cleaning House

OK, so I'm not actually cleaning my house, I'm cleaning up my online-information-gathering house. Since I recently tidied up my feeds in Bloglines, I decided I also needed to clean out the 40+ items that I had marked "new" just because I didn't want to lose them.

Once upon a time, I had a process where I looked at something in Bloglines and if I wanted to keep it, I Furled it for futher reference. After the hard drive on my laptop died a while back, I never managed to get my Furl button reinstalled and so things have just been backing up on me in Bloglines--a ton of online-info-clutter.

So, I just cleaned it all out. I moved it all into Furl. Now, I didn't tag anything there, but tidying my Furl archive is way less vital because it's keyword searchable. That's something for a slow Firday afternoon, but getting that backlog of Bloglines items swept away feels like absolute freedom.

WDT

Feed me!

After just whining about not having anything to talk about, I now have blog post topics backing up on me.

First, and as promised, here's my weeded list of feeds. I'm not going to say who got cut; I only managed to delete about five entries from my list. They were good blogs, but they did a lot of pointing to other blogs and saying "me, too." I just don't have the time for that.

Also, I'm not saying my list is in any way exhaustive or authoritative or anything. That's the great thing about getting your news via RSS--it's what you want, when you want it! I highly recommend developing a mix that meets your needs.

Drumroll, please!

************************
:30 Librarian (vanity made me add this, so I'd have at least one Bloglines subscriber, although now I have a whopping total of three)

Amazon.com (Updates me when books by a particular author become available)

BHIC (Bringing Health Information to the Community, Siobhan Champ-Blackwell-the-Mover-and-Shaker's blog)

EdTechPost (Content management system news)

The Informatics Review (Health Policy and Management journal)

Medical Informatics Insider (More information for HPM)

ResourceShelf's DocuTicker (Very high-traffic, covers a lot of social issues good for HPM)

Free Range Librarian (I would call this the librarian's ur-blog)

A Library Writer's Blog (Publishing and presenting opportunities to help fluff my CV)

blogwithoutalibrary.net (Usually unique content)

C&I Updates (Walt Crawford's alerting service, although I almost never get to read Cites & Insights these days)

Catalogablog (All the news on metadata and AACR that you could ever want)

The Days & Nights of the Lipstick Librarian! (She's just sassy, so I read her)

The Handheld Librarian (PDA schtuff for the library set)

Hospital library advocacy (Needs no explanation, not a lot of posts)

The Krafty Librarian (Techno-hospital librarian who posts great material)

librarian.net (Quality librarian blog)

LibrarianInBlack (Count on the LiB to comment on all the important library news/drivel of the day)

ResourceShelf (Professional reading updates)

The Shifted Librarian (Quality librarian blog)

TechnoBiblio (Yet another quality librarian blog)

User Education Resources for Librarians (Teri Hartman's edu-biblio blog, unique entries)

AL Online News (American Libraries news)

Librarians' Index to the Internet (Great links)

Library Link of the Day (Great links as well)

LISNews.com (All the biblio news that's fit to blog)

Open Access News (All the open access news that's fit to blog, plus some)

Pew Internet and American Life Project: Front Page (What are those Pew people studying now?)

ResearchBuzz (The #1 source for news about search and our friend Google)

Techdirt ("Easily digestible technology news")

Wired News ('Cuz I never get to read the mag)

LIS PhD discussion

A short item: a link to this discussion came up in my feeds (sorry, no attribution as I clicked and moved on).

A very interesting discussion on the lack of online LIS PhD programs; many of you know that I was not accepted to the UNT "distance-independent" program (it is intended for public librarians and school media specialists, after all), and I've been trying to decide what to do ever since. So, the Library Juice discussion is of great interest.

The Burden of Blogging

The burden of blogging is posting, even though it only takes a minute. Thursday I was out of the office most of the day, and when I was here I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I spent Friday morning in a "Medical Education Retreat" before I took the afternoon off to spend with Bill and Trix.

Today I am back into chicken-with-head-cut-off mode, but hope to have something intelligent to say tomorrow.

BTW--If you are a MCMLA member and haven't yet sent in your ballot, vote Whitney!

Bloglines bugaboo

I use Bloglines to track a variety of RSS feeds, mostly because I like being able to get to my feed list from any Internet-enabled device I happen to have at my disposal.

However, I've noticed recently that a lot of my feeds are not updating as they should, so I am unsubscribing and resubscribing and that seems to help. I guess there's more than one way to spend a semi-slow reference shift.

One possible cause of this is that some of my feeds have moved to RSS2, but this doesn't seem to be a consistent issue (?). Hmm.

I am having some trouble balancing my feeds; there's a lot of techno-biblio stuff out there, and much of it is good, but a lot of it is really redundant, too. I'm also tracking some content management/teaching and learning technology blogs and a few feeds that relate more or less to Health Policy and Management, and it is just getting a little out of hand. I think the answer is to pick my top 10 techno-biblio feeds and let the rest go. I'll post what I keep when I get a chance.

Patience is a virtue

I'm having a little trouble being patient these days. This has never been one of my strong suits, and I am finding myself especially taxed now. Everything seems to be at a dead stop or else in some kind of waiting-mode neverland.

One of the main issues that I am banging my head against is my dream of one-box, cross-curricular searching. The easiest thing to do is to index items on upload (into the testing system, into the content management system, etc.), but this requires substantial effort on the part of faculty, even to just add one or two keys, and I understand why they don't want to do it.

I've been kicking this problem around and have recently thought that maybe I am going about it in the wrong way: as I have mentioned before, "quality cataloging makes up for bad search capabilities, but good search [almost] makes up for little or no cataloging." Maybe one way to move out of this impass is to work on the other side--improving search instead of continuing to insist on indexing.

Also, as an update: Blackboard wanted an insane amount of $$ to implement their content management system, so we're looking at other options.

Also II: The toric lenses work great and did not in fact fry my brain.

Adware, spyware, SCUMWARE

Last Thursday, someone in my household (hint: not me, and Trixie doesn't use the computer) accidentally stepped into an adware trap and infected our home PC. As I tried to deal with the problem, the image that came to mind was poison ivy: barely brush up against it, and it can make your life miserable.

I installed Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, and CW Shredder and Hijack This, all in addition to my usual anti-virus software. The protective software found most of the nasties, but not all, and every time I would reboot, we would be back to sqaure one.

I posted my Hijack This log to the Tom Coyote Forums but did not receive a reply before I became too frustrated and just decided to reinstall Windows. Fortunately, Bill and I don't have a lot of files and were able to back up everything we needed pretty easily.

Now that the reinstall is done, everything seems to be working as it should, and a valuable lesson has been learned.

For a great read on a similar topic, check out the article From Honeypot to Bot: Unprotected PCs Can be Hijacked in Minutes.

Finally, I do want to say that I was only moments away from blasting away the entire OS and installing Linux. The main reason I did not is that Bill composes on Finale, and I didn't want to have to buy a decent Windows emulator to get Finale to work. Someday, though, I dream of a Windows-free household.

Top Five Things to Do With Faculty [Revised]

I'm sure this sounds like some kind of gag post (e.g., "#1: Put them in the trash"), but it's not. We've got a nascent faculty liaison program here, and this is what I've been doing. We'll see how it all works out.

1. Ask them to let you teach a separate information resources class.
2. Find a grant project appropriate to their area and ask them to help you with it.
3. Ask them to write information resources into their own grants.
4. Ask them for money. Nothing says "love" like a dedicated budget stream.
5. Most important: listen to them, what they do, what they know. If someone is faculty in an area, they're an expert in SOMETHING. Explore their expertise. It's fascinating.

I am fortunate to be assigned to these people. They're a really terrific group.

Wacky Wiki, day 1

Brief thoughts on the wiki: pretty good so far. Wireless connection is squiffy in the conference room which makes updating on-the-fly not as useful as it could be. Also, it took me three tries to get my meeting minutes up from yesterday, but now that they're there, I'm pretty pleased.

Bill is done with school tomorrow. Hooray for summer!