Wiki as Management Tool

Thanks to the Free Range Librarian for the idea of using a wiki as a project management space. She's using it for her creative writing projects, but there's really not a lot of difference in managing writing projects and managing any other kind of project, is there? It's all content and deadlines.

It meets a lot of my needs: available anywhere, including from my wireless-enabled PDA; easily available to others; I can include meeting minutes, notes, and files; it's indexable with titles and tags; and I should be able to add the site to my search file search them with Google Desktop if I want to do so. We'll see how it works.

My main concern is that it's publicly available, so I'll have to keep an eye on what I'm putting out there. I personally believe that information wants to be free and so am tempted to do a total download to the space, but I have to remember that in some cases (especially with the School of Medicine projects), I am working with other people's intellectual property and they may not have such liberal ideas.

Oh, would you like to see the madness unfold? Send me comments if you have thoughts.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Looking for something else, I encountered this pictoral representation of Friday afternoon librarian malaise.

Blogging in the Golden Land of El Dorado!

Micaela Ayers down El Dorado way has a lovely little blog (with a lovely little post about yours truly) at http://livelibrary.blogspot.com/.

I love the concept of "...my library, which lives as much in my mind as in the L.W.Nixon Library of Butler Community College." Aren't we all really reaching for that "library of the mind"? Our imaginary public library meets the needs of every child, teen, adult, and senior; our imaginary academic library is full of active, engaged students and in contact with all our distance students; our imaginary hospital library is a vital information center for the institution.

Cheers to Micaela, and here's to getting our real libraries closer to the libraries in our minds.

Project planning and management

Along with my grandiose dreams of unified search for curriculum content, I also long for a personal information management system that meets my exacting standards. I'm looking for something that works both at my desk and on the road (i.e., via PDA) and that will index all of my personal content: documents, emails, meeting minutes (technically covered under documents, I know), etc., etc.

I've been looking at the Google Desktop appliance as it does almost what I want it to, with two exceptions. First, it's not mobile (unless I finally get that tablet I've been promised). Second, and I know this is a psycho-librarian-pickypants thing, but I want this fictional tool to create a browsable index of my documents by tag as well as being able to search.

Basically, I want some combo of Furl and the Google Desktop search.

Back in the day, I was a devoted Franklin Planner user; I hole-punched meeting minutes, indexed all my content each month, and so on. Wanting to recreate this feeling of control, I tried to get back into the Franklin groove recently, but I'm too married to electronic data entry. Their handheld product doesn't do much more as a calendar and notes feature than that which is included with any PDA, so you're paying a lot of extra money for the personal motivation part of the software. Not good.

Anyway, if you have thoughts on this subject or tools you would like to recommend, add a comment or send me an email. I'm dying to find something that works.

"I hope it doesn't fry your brain!"

This morning, I went to see Rich Wilson, my optometrist and fellow band-director spouse (his wife, Janie, taught at Grain Valley High while Bill was teaching elementary in that district), and I got a fun new contact lens to try out. It's one of the toric lenses for astigmatism, and once I put it in, I knew my vision was better than it had been with the standard spherical lens.

There's a catch, though: I only have correction in my left eye. My right eye is fine, and when I have both eyes open I have just a touch of astigmatism and almost 20/20 vision. However, the left eye has to be corrected or else it will go lazy.

The problem with correcting my left eye so completely is that my brain has rewired itself to compensate for the difference in my vision. I see things up close with my left eye, and things at a distance with my right eye. Even if I have both eyes open and am looking directly at something, my brain basically only processes the view from one eye.

With the toric lens, my left eye can work on an equal footing with my right eye, while with a spherical lens my brain still thinks my right eye is better for distance work because the astigmatism remains uncorrected on the left. Rich handed me a week's worth of the toric lenses to try out, and sent me on my way saying, "I hope it doesn't fry your brain! I guess we'll know in a week."

Blackboard, Schmackboard

I'll be spending most of today with sales reps from Blackboard as they try to sell us the content component of their system. For my part, I only care about two things:

1. There must be a system to force users entering content items to select certain identifying tags for their content (in our case, things like: name of school, item type, and a few keywords from a structed taxonomy). And, we the library have to be able to determine what those tags are--that is, just having a few keyword fields won't cut it. Really, what's the point of putting material into a system if you can't get it back out?

And, as I mused in yesterday's post (not gonna link it as you can just scan down, really, you can), vendor search leaves a lot to be desired. Until Endeavor contracts with Google (Elsevier and Google together? Oh, dear, oh dear!), we've got to tag the content to make up for the lack.

As a side note, I almost never say "index" or "catalog" anymore because peoples' eyes glaze over, but "tagging" is all the rage. Whatever--the terms all map to the same concept. (That's a little cataloging joke for those of you who missed it.)

2. If we go with this system, then we also have to purchase the Endeavor/enCompass addon product that would make the content available through our federated search service. Federated search of useful local content is frankly a pipe dream right now, but it is one I nonetheless keep having.

So, we'll see what the sales reps have to say. Our head of Teaching and Learning Technology is also interested in Angel Learning as well as some other things, so the BlackBoard reps had best be on their game.

Catalog searching

I've been thinking a lot about search recently, in response to the recent article on Stupid Users in Library Journal. I think pretty much everyone is aware of my cataloger tendencies, but what I'm thinking about these days is something else: quality cataloging makes up for bad search capabilities, but good search makes up for little or no cataloging.

I know this isn't a new idea. Heck, Our Friend Google is making a lot of people very happy and very rich. However, libraries don't seem to be catching the drift. ILS vendors especially don't seem to be catching the drift, because ultimately we can only search with the tools they provide us.

Of course, the next step is, "What can I/we do about the issue of search?" and I just don't have any good ideas on that right at the moment.

WDT

What's in a blog title?

I must admit to feeling some pressure to be creative when coming up with a title for my new blog. When I thought about what I wanted to represent, though, a few things became clear:

• Being young, but not NextGen, says a lot about who I am (and I should probably post sometime about why that's true).
• There's never enough time.
• I intend to mostly talk about library topics.

Thus, the :30 Librarian (thirty-second librarian). I guarantee it will change to the :31 Librarian on Novemeber 14.

The :30 Librarian

If you're reading, then you're here, so welcome!

Since I'm no longer with the Regional Medical Library, I've abandoned the Library Leaders/Technology Leaders blog I was keeping in Bloglines in favor of something more personal .

If you liked the techno-medico-biblio content I used to post, I would recommend that you check out the Krafty Librarian. Krafty has a great eye for technology items of interest to medical librarians, with an added emphasis on hospital libraries. Very nice, and definitely a feed to watch!

I am not sure what I plan to do with this space, but I am going to try to add at least one item a day. Stick with me for a week or two, and if I bore you, then axe the feed.

Thanks, and have a super day.