Tales of a Librarian

Last night’s gadget show had an interesting feature where one of the presenters had to go 24 hours without technology i.e. mobile phones, PDA, email, computers etc. As part of his normal day he was required to do some research for a piece he was working on without the use of technology, i.e. the ‘old fashioned way’ - and to where did he turn??? Yup, you guessed it, the library. I’m not sure whether I am pleased that we are considered to be ‘above’ such things as the computer or whether to be slightly put out that the library was stereotyped as being somewhere without technology!! I’m thinking the latter…

But all was not bad, there was in fact a brief mention of how even libraries today are becoming more technologically advanced (a shock revelation it would seem) and there was a shot with a couple of unused computers sitting idle in the background. Hmmm.

No sign of a card catalogue however! And in case you are wondering, he got his research completed not by searching the online opac but by asking the librarian, who conveniently knew off the top of her head exactly which book contained the answer to his question (stats on internet access in households in the UK). Again, I am not sure whether this presents the image of us being all-knowing and great, or musty old computer-phobes.

In addition to this, it is worth noting just how much time it took him to organise the simplest things and conduct the simplest of tasks, which made me want to go over to my fantastic new computer and give it a really big hug. Bliss!

A post in the UKeiG weblog discusses a report released by XiTi, which has compiled usage figures for the firefox browser across different European countries, and averages across different continents. It finds that Finland has the highest percent of users using the firefox browser, with 38.39% preferring it to other browsers. The United Kingdom on the other hand, has a measly 11%, which after having used the browser for a whole year myself and being completely in love with it, is something of a disappointment.

Europe has the highest use (20.11%), with Australia behind (18.6%) then America (15.8%).

Figures from the visitors to the Information Research journal shows that 27.1% use the firefox browser, which they state is a big jump, so I guess there is still hope!! I think that it is probably an awareness issue, so if you haven’t already, click on the button in the right-hand margin and get yourself a brilliant new browser. And if you’re a member of UKeiG, you can find fact sheets about the advantage of the browser over others here.

Well, today I finalised my PPDP (personal professional development plan - if i remember correctly) which has to be sent off to CILIP so that I can register as a chartership candidate and work towards this over the next year. It is all quite exciting and I am lucky to be able to do this so quickly after graduation. My manager is my mentor, and she has been helping me put together a whole range of activities which I can do over the next year or so in order to develop my skills as an information professional. I’ll try to use this blog to discuss what I have been getting up to as well as the usual commentry and discussion on current events/research/news that I have been doing so far.

We have a placement student with us from the ILS course at the moment - i can hardly believe that it has been a whole year since that was me!!! How time flies…

I am also waiting to hear whether or not my dissertation will be published. It’s looking hopeful so far, and I am really excited about seeing my name in print (okay, so it’s not lights, but it’s still exciting!!!). I’ll let you know as soon as I do about that one!

Reading Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog and I came across an interesting post about a pdf presentation by Geoff Harder about RSS feeds/readers.

It’s really interesting, particularly his description of NADD (Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder) and RII (Repetitive Information Injury). I’m sure there are a few of us who identify with these conditions!! I spend a lot of time looking through my rss feeds in newsgator - Lorcan himself reports subscribing to around 150 feeds - and admits that it is impossible to keep up with them all. I myself currently subscribe to around 25, which seems piddly in comparison - and even then I feel hard pushed to read everything that comes through it.

Anyways, both the post and the presentation are well worth a nosy…

Business Week Online has rated social software, and in particular that owned by Yahoo, as one of eight tech trends for 2006.

The article raises some interesting points about whether social search can be used to ‘fill in the gaps’ created by traditional search methods, e.g. complex algorithms based around link structure. It has been argued that social search allows users to define the communities from which the search results come from, i.e. reviews of restaurants from their own area, people in similar occupations, studying similar things etc. rather than looking at results from the whole internet.

There are of course critics to this approach, and doubts about it’s usefulness, with the CEO of Vivisimo commenting that ‘the best description of the document is the document itself’, which as a librarian, I feel that I must agree with to a certain extent, for example, in order to allow for completeness of description and results returned, consistency, and describing relationships between similar documents. There is much similar debate occurring surrounding the usefulness of ‘folksonomies’, which you may or may not have already heard of (I will return to this later).

Google, it is reported, has not committed itself to creating social communities to the same extent as Yahoo, and has instead decided to focus upon personalisation, i.e. ‘using its mammoth horse-power to sort through data and better discern what users are thinking’ as the article reports.

Walt Crawford has devoted an entire issue of his self-written journal Cites & Insights to offering an overview (for overview, read devilish critique) of the Library 2.0 phenomenon. It really is brilliant reading. Very entertaining. Nothing beats a healthy dose of scholarly criticism!

ALA president Michael Gorman accuses digitisation as being a waste of money and has attacked librarians for being ‘too interested in technology’ says an article from Information World Review (issue 220, pg.7)

He was talking, of course, about the google digitisation project in particular, a project which has met with both support and hositility from a wide range of people and organisations. He claimed that there is a danger in reducing whole books down into ‘a bunch of paragraphs’ and reading information out of context. (I wonder what he makes of Amazon’s intentions to do something similar? - see my other blog entry on ‘Amazon in the Academic Library‘)

A spokesman for Google refuted his criticisms and suggested that people were turning to Google because library catalogues, even those available online, did not contain enough bibliographic information, as is quoted as saying ‘we need catalogue enrichment with links, table and abstracts and we need more sophisticated systems that are multi-lingual and intelligent’.

I have to admit I agree. More bibliographic information is becoming more important to users, particular as increasing sources of information become available to the reader. I personally would have loved it if books from my own academic library had abstracts of content, or even contents pages, available to browse in the catalogue, as much time is wasted locating and browsing through texts and books that are irrelevant. Perhaps the practicality of this is not great - imagine having to abstract every book that came into the library and every book that was already available?? I can see how this could cause problems. But in my work that is exactly what we have to do, and we add nearly 200 items to stock each week, so it does take up a considerable amount of our time. I couldn’t imagine how our library would function without this however, as it is essential for our users to be able to evaluate the content of documents/books. I’m sure there are plenty of libraries that are also already doing this, although I don’t honestly know. However, a (very) quick survey of the main university library catalogues in Scotland shows that there is only one that provides this options to students - Glasgow Caledonian University Library.

There have even been suggestions from those involved in the Library 2.0. discussions (more on this later) about including user comments, people who read this also read…., etc. just making the system more interactive for users generallly (I forget who mentioned this so I hope they will excuse this). I think that it is a mistake to rule out the possibilities that technology creates for us to improve and add to the library service, and it seems as senseless as resisting the first automation of libraries would have been…

I thought that I might take some time to talk about the Spoken Word Project that I was involved with for five weeks at the beginning of 2005. The are a JISC funded project set up to digitise relevant items from the BBC’s archives (relevant at present being political and economic based materials). This material is being integrated into undergraduate teaching and a number of software applications have been developed to enhance this. It really is a very interesting project, and in a number of ways transgresses from the typical debates surrounding electronic resources in the library and teaching environment (which typically focus on electonic access to text or image based material) and opens up a whole new way of teaching undergraduates (and in theory, absolutely anyone…).

There is also a strong focus within the project upon social software and encouraging students to collaborate and use the resources provided by the internet (e.g. blogs, collaborative software etc.) to enhance their learning. Indeed, it also allows students to study just about anywhere as audio clips can be downloaded onto mp3 players such as the iPod. The access granted to them by the BBC is ground-breaking as this has never been allowed to an outside party before. I recall also that the BBC have recently provided access to their archives of news footage.

If you are interested in reading about my experiences of working with the Spoken Word team during my project placement from Strathclyde University Information and Library Studies Masters course, you can visit my blog that I kept whilst there.

Indeed, I do believe that it was back then when I was first learned about blogging, rss feeds and a whole range of other technological developments which are of relevance to the library and information profession. I have to admit that this was not mentioned in any of my university teachings, so it was a real bonus to me. Indeed, they have become a virtually indispensable part of my continued professional development as an information professional (albeit, a fledgling one ).

Google are reported to be considering creating an online ebook store, subject to copyright permissions being granted, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt who told reporters at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (see article from BBC). The renewed interest in selling ebooks seems to be occurring at the same time as Sony trying to push ebooks and their new ebook reader device - the Sony Reader - as being the new ipod of text. I will be very interested to see how this takes off, will people eventually turn to reading books electronically? Evidence has shown that people generally do not like to read longer texts such as novels onscreen, as it is uncomfortable on the eyes, and generally less comfortable than reading a printed version. Indeed, evidence from some medical libraries has shown that access to ebooks is generally short - reinforcing the view that people do not like to spend long amounts of time reading electronic texts. (IWR, 219, pg.11) Will the new e-ink technology be good enough to counter this?

Can you imagine taking your entire bookshelf with you on the train, or on holiday?? There are clearly advantages to this technology. Some publishers of ebooks are now trying to provide more than just electronic versions of the printed book, e.g. by including extra content. But drawing once again from my own experience, readings and research, although many people love accessing things such as electronic journals online, even the most enthusiastic of users still tend to print out electronic copies of documents for reading. I tend to spend longer looking over a printed document than I do an electronic one, where the tendency is to just skim over it. The electronic medium is perfect for shorter, to-the-point pieces of information such as blogs, news pieces, abstracts etc. or even academic journals (although my preference would be to print these too - but saving paper is always an issue!!). However, I could not imagine myself settling down at my desk to read Wuthering Heights, for example.

The book reader is portable enough to counter this argument to some extent, and perhaps advances in screen technology such as e-ink will make it just as comfortable to read books electronically, but as I have mentioned before, there is still something that seems to be missing from the ebook equation - the aesthetics of the book!! And although there would be much less space, my house would be far less interesting without my wonderfully diverse bookcase…

A survey by Information World Review (yes, I’m just in the process of reading it as you probably guessed!), has found that when readers were asked to rate six named blogs with relevance to information professionals the vast majority of readers viewed them with indifference. When asked if they read the following blogs, each blog’s readership was only around 20% of the respondents. (Blogs included were: Lorcan Dempsey’s Libraries; Martin De Saulles Reuse of Public Sector Information; K G Schneider Free Range Librarian; Peter Scott’s Library; Peter Suber’s Open Access; and Steve Wood’s Freedom of Information Act) . (From Information World Review, Issue 219, pg.15)

They claim that if this is representative of the UK as a whole, then 4 out of every 5 information professionals are not tuning into the ‘blogging phenomenon’. I have to admit that I am sceptical of these results, as I have for the past few weeks been scanning the net for various library/information related blogs and newsfeeds, and in that time I have only come across two of the six blogs mentioned above. I have, however, encountered numerous others, as well as a great number of interesting and relevant newsfeeds which I am keeping up to date with. Perhaps choosing only six blogs as representing the vast numbers of those available was a mistake in this instance, and not entirely representative of the profession as a whole. It also suggests that there may very well be a problem with ensuring that relevant blogs reach the desired target audiences - how exactly do you find these blogs if they are not listed by search services such as technorati or google blog search??