A Wandering Eyre

With the flurry of posts, you may have realized that I have reached the end of the tunnel! Yes, gentle readers, the light is now upon my face. The birds are singing and the air is cool.

This weekend most of my college friends will be in town for a wedding. Aggie football is on TV early enough for us to watch the game before the wedding so all is right with the world. The two previous sentences mean we will be acting, not like responsible adults (a questionable statement in any case), but like crazy college kids, at least for a couple of days. Bring on the beer games and make sure the Bloody Marys are nice and strong in the morning.

Beat the Hell Outta Texas Tech, Whoop!

–Jane, in love with Fridays

Seriously Apple. Are you kidding?

In the future, I would like everyone to stop using the word awesome because I would not want anyone else to be associated with a word that obviously only defines me. (Thank you LiB for the link)
–Jane, it is all about ME

(Say the title with the correct techno beat in your head and it makes more sense)

Do you know a Mover and Shaker? A librarian who challenges you and the profession to be better, stand a little taller, learn something new everyday, and helps others? Of course you do! Library Journal has the submission form ready to go, so make your favorite hardworking librarian smile and recognize them for all they do.

–Jane, ya like to, Move It!

The official wiki is up for Seattle. Go add your info and be sure to put your blog on the list if you are going to blog. I am so glad ALA has started doing the wiki thing.

–Jane, shiny

I need a handler that follows me everywhere with duct tape. The duct tape, of course, would be for my mouth.

Today, in a meeting, we were informed that one of our publishers (a university press no less!) is increasing their journal package 120% over last year’s cost. One Hundred and Twenty Percent. Are you kidding me? Our options are to pay the same amount but only have one concurrent user, which is completely unacceptable, or pay their outrageous cost increase. It was generally acknowledged that the publisher more than likely waited until our renewals were in and gave us a limited time to come back with an answer to force us to give in.

Now I am not naïve enough to believe that this does not happen often. I know that it does, but as I sat there I became incensed at the ridiculousness with which libraries are forced to deal with this kind of shit all the time. From publishers, from vendors. Over and over it is the same sad story and I am tired of having it sung to me.

I raised my hand to speak and the following words came out of my mouth in no certain order: ridiculous, dicking us around, hacks me off, and I then I said, “ …and if they think we are just going to continue to ben… I mean stand around and take this forever, they are wrong.” It is a good thing I did not finish my origianal thought.

Yes, Jane has a problem watching her mouth sometimes. This was one of those times. As a profession, we need to come up with some sort of something to deal with this because this is going to be an increasing problem. The price of journals has continued to rise and we have continued to do nothing and pay or cancel subscriptions.

I do not have a solution. I just know that I am angry at the rock and a hard place this puts us in years after year.

–Jane, grr arg

p.s. Hilariously, “dicking” is not in the Word spell check.

Updated to correct poor typing due to anger. 

Today, I received my first ever comment spam in Flickr. Awesome!

–Jane, best site I see

According to The Chronicle of Higher Ed, the Chicago Manual of Style is movin’ on up and online. As a fan of MLA, I hope they follow the cluetrain soon. Scholars and librarians rejoice!

–Jane, still loves MLA the best

I have not seen anyone write about this yet and my library has created quite an interesting conundrum that I am positive is not unique unto us.

MPOW has some very nice subject blogs maintained by subject librarians. We put all kinds of useful and interesting things on them. Users can subscribe to their content using RSS. Everything is lovely and the birds are twittering.

Some of our library departments also have internal blogs. These blogs live on our intranet and thus are not accessible to the public. If we need to read them from outside our offices, we have to enter the password for the intranet before gaining access. This sounds fine until one tries to subscribe to the RSS feed of the blog.

It can not be done. The intranet is password protected and thus so is the feed. I have set up feeds for other password protected projects with RSS, Basecamp for example. It worked fine, but as far as I, and my other frustrated colleagues have found, there is no work around. This has resulted in many of us not reading the blogs at all. The only one I see regularly is the blog maintained by the reference staff because it is the active desktop on our reference desk computers. When I sat regularly, what I really mean is “ever.”

I know why the blogs are not viewable to the public. If they were we could not write posts like, “Professor Q has yet again sent his students to find Item X which we do not own. Please inform the students that they really should be looking for B.” I get this. I do.

However, if many of us are not reading the blogs because they are hidden away and we can not get RSS feeds in our readers, is there a point to maintaining them? I think they still have value; it is just diminished from its potential.

If your library uses blogs for internal communication, have you solved this problem? Ignored it? Used it as a way to humiliate frequent offenders into behaving?

–Jane, needs the feeds

I am woefully behind on so very many things that I have lost count. Actually, I am doing fine. Great as a matter of fact. I recieved a double serving a wonderful news Friday, which I will share with you when I am “officially” able.

Saturday, I spoke with a class of bright-eyed SLIS students. I talked about social software in libraries, getting buy-in, and DOPA. It was fun, though I completely geeked out a bit. I realized that I miss being able to talk about technology and teach people new things, even if it is a very quick summary of hot items in Library 2.0 Land.

One of the students mentioned a new product that i had not heard of but which popped up on Caveat Lector today: Zotero. I peered around a bit on Saturday and was intrigued. I have been considering something to keep citations, but have not been entirely pleased with the current offerings. After reading Dorothea’s rave, I am awash with excitement to see this program. I can not wait to see the beta.
–Jane, Monday is almost over, thank Jeebus

A Review of Social Software

This post is part of a presentation for UNT’s SLIS 5330: Academic Libraries course. In this space, I will dump some key themes and my URL examples so that the students can have an electronic copy of the sites mentioned. This will also provide a place to give feedback or discuss issues we were not able to explore in class. This is an outline only.

Introduction 2.0
What is Web 2.0? This article, from O’Reilly, originator of the phrase, explains why Web 2.0 is different from the internet as it was in the beginning.

Library 2.0
The white paper that started a movement: (this link opens a pdf)

The Talis Paper gave wings to the discussion which continues today in the Biblioblogosphere. Some key examples might be, but are not limited to:

John Blygerg’s Library 2.0 tagged posts
Michael Stephens’ Tame the Web Technology, ride the cluetrain
Michael Casey, all L2, all the time
Walt Crawford in Cites and Insights 6:2, offers a very good roundup of the debate as of Midwinter 2006

Why does L2 matter?
For me, Library 2.0 is about realizing that the library does not belong to us. It never has and we must let our patrons, the real owners, guide the services of the library. L2 asks libraries to place services where our users already are with tools they are already using. Michael Habib created this diagram which is the best and most detailed I have seen.

Not everyone believes in the existence of Library 2.0, though I think that the discourse surrounding this debate has been amiable.

Below are links to the social software, with their respective examples, that I (will) use in the class.

Blogs
Platforms: Blogger, WordPress, MoveableType, LiveJournal
Lampson Library’s WPopac by Casey Bisson (Updated: Sorry for the original mistake. I must have been typing with my brain off.)

Wikis
Platforms: PMWiki, MediaWiki, PBWiki
Ohio University Libraries Biz Wiki By Chad Boeninger

Tagging/Social Bookmarking
Platforms: Del.icio.us and Furl
Not an academic library, but a truly librarian use of Del.icio.us
San Mateo Public Library’s Del.icio.us page, used mostly for staff

Flickr
South Carolina State Library
The Librarians and Libraries Pool, where you won’t need floaties

Social Networking
Platforms: MySpace and Facebook
Helene Blowers is compiling a list of libraries on MySpace. The links to the post at the bottom are very good reading as well.

Summary, Library 2.0 is all about building community, participating in a meaningful discussion, and being beta!

–Jane, not the fish