Next "Semester's" Courses

Summer counts as "a semester" at Pitt, so that we can make it in and out in a year. If I'd known everything I know now when I applied, I might have done this whole thing very differently, since, for instance, there was no option for continuing into a PhD (I didn't know enough to pick an adviser or a project in time for the application deadlines*) or for summer internships. It's just too squashed.

That said, I am where I am, and I'll be out with a degree all the faster (and more cheaply). So, perhaps it balances out well.

Anyway, the summer classes being offered this year are fantastic. There's been a bit of an outcry, because Humanities Resources isn't being offered until fall--too late for our cohort. I'd be mad, too, if I came from a humanities background. But I didn't, and Sci-Tech Resources is going to be offered**. As are Collection Development (which should really be a core course--also, here's hoping it gives plenty of time to books and digital collections!), Intellectual Property in the Digital Age, and Instruction. So is GIS, which I'd love to take; maybe I'll catch it in some sort of continuing education offering. That's my plan for the other course I wanted (through IS, not LIS), some kind of web engineering thing that covers some combination of PHP, SQL, and Javascript--three things sitting right at the top of my "to learn" queue. I figure I can learn new programming languages on my own, or through a cheap class, rather than taking up one of my designated library-specific (and very expensive) course slots. If anyone reading this finds themselves disagreeing, you know, tell me; there's time to make changes. (And having those skills would open up a couple of sweet metadata librarian jobs as possibilities, where they aren't so much now.)

Summer's going to be rough--what semester isn't?--because I've got four courses, I'm going to two conferences, and, hopefully, I will have some interviewing to do, on top of my job and volunteering. Also, I imagine we'll step up our practicing for Book Kart Drill Team. But summer's also short, and the 40 hour a week job I hope to start in August will seem like such a relief, after such a busy schedule! (Oddly, I'm also freaking out about moving logistics and transitioning power from summer to fall for the executive boards of SCALA and SLAPSG. It's weird to be worrying about that, even as I worry about the relative scarcity of entry-level librarian positions, isn't it?)

*As far as that goes, my current thinking is that I'd want to do a computer science-heavy IS degree, or an IS-heavy computer science degree--or more likely just take some courses, here and there, in programming, while I work--but I do know that I want to be involved in building the information tools of the future. Among other things, the Open Source ILS talk at ER&L really made me excited about it.

**Yeah, I will have been working Sci-Tech reference for a year by the time I graduate, but there's a pretty big difference between the structure of a course and the ad hoc lessons one gets at the reference desk. I think it will be valuable, assuming I end up working in reference, collection development, or anything else even remotely related to science or engineering.

Brewin' and visitin' DC

It's time, folks. I haven't run this by Dale, yet, but I'm proposing that brewing should happen on March 7. I won't have any homework due that week, since it's spring break, and I don't work that Saturday (I do work that Sunday night, though, bleh). Anyone want to come watch/help stir?

Also, about spring break... I would like to visit the DC area sometime that week (March 9-15). I'm going to see whether getting that Wednesday or that Friday off is possible. If you're in the DC area and want a visit, chime in with what times are good for you! If you're in Pittsburgh and want a ride down there, also chime in. I haven't asked around for crash space, yet, but once I have a rough schedule decided, I will. :)

I'll post about summer classes later this week.

ER&L - 3 of 3

It's been a couple of days, and while I'm maybe a bit jet-lagged and definitely a bit behind on my homework, clearly it's time to get this blog post written! Without further adieu, a brief sharing of my thoughts on the remainder of the sessions I attended:

Confronting eShock: Electronic Resource Management and Organizational Change - I was kind of hoping this talk would be about convincing one's organization that electronic resources are important, as are workflows to manage them. But that wasn't really the focus. It turns out, the UNM Libraries have had a rough time of things, with fire and floods and three new manager-level librarians coming in all at the same time, and the talk was about how they coped. There was some good information there, for sure, and I hope to hear that they are successful in meeting their goals in the near future--things aren't stacked up in their favor, but they seem to be a great team.

Just in Time in Difficult Times - Lessons for Librarians - I thought this might be a talk about collection development policies, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was really about [at its core] digital preservation. I was equally pleased to hear that the presenter was Vicky Reich, the head of the LOCKSS program. (I kept picking talks by their titles and, when I was in doubt about what to attend, their descriptions. So who was presenting any given talk was always a surprise to me.) She painted a pretty scary picture of what we stand to lose--something we all need to hear--but showed that all is not yet lost; there are people working on these problems.

The Problem of Where to Start - This was another surprise talk, for me; I don't recall what I was expecting, but I came out of the talk happy, for sure. It turns out, Serials Solutions has come up with an enterprise search, hosted [largely?] on their servers, built [largely?] with open source products, that will search all the holdings of a given library from one search box. It's like Google, populated only with approved content! Like Google Scholar, but books are included, and you can [optionally] turn off links that won't resolve due to licensing restrictions. I just can't even tell you how psyched I am about this. ... I hope it's affordable.

Electronic Resources To Go - I've gotta admit, I don't pay mobile devices the attention they deserve. My website and blog are probably terrible on an iPhone, and when NY Public Library came out with the iPhone app to search their catalog, I thought "well, that's neat, but don't they have better things to do?" I'm seeing the light, though, and I think we'll find that a greater percentage of patrons are trying to use library resources with mobile devices, as time goes on. I really liked the idea of a "text me the call number" feature in an OPAC, as well.

Managing freely available e-resource collections with today's vendor provided OpenURL knowledgebases: A challenge in quality control - So, it turns out that the open access (ish) offerings thrown in with paid-for offerings from vendors are a little spotty. The vendors do some quality control, but there are still problems. And libraries tend to turn these offerings on without any real thought as to whether they fit into their collections or anything else, because, well, they're free. (Even having heard the talk, I'd make the same decision.) Broken links aren't so good, though, because there's a real risk of decreasing patrons' trust in the library.

Anyway, that's all of them! If you were at one of these talks and think my summary missed an important point--or even if you thought it was spectacular--feel free to discuss in the comments!

I may do a summary with my thoughts about the conference as a whole, as I finish digesting all of the information and poke at a couple of the powerpoints for talks I missed. ... Also, you know, when I get my head above water, homework-wise. It was a great conference, and I am really pleased and grateful that I got to go.

ER&L - 2 of 3

I admit, I was totally wiped out by the end of the day yesterday (and the wonderful California wine offered at the Sponsors Reception did not make me more awake), so I failed to post about the sessions I attended. As such, I'll try to keep it brief and split up today's sessions, to write about some tomorrow.

Metadata Crosswalking, Data Quality, and Semantics: Repurposing MARC records for digital collections - A pretty illuminating overview of the troubles one project faced in converting their records from MARC to DC--a process I had always [wrongly] assumed must be straightforward. The number of errors in the MARC records: rather shocking. The workarounds the speaker put into his code were pretty smart. All his talk of clever scripting made me want to learn XSLT and work as a metadata librarian, honestly.

Shelflessness as a Virtue: Preserving serendipity in an electronic reference collection - Some folks at the University of Manitoba put together a really fantastic tool that shows the covers of reference e-books, broken up by subject, with the goal of reintroducing serendipity into electronic collections. I could see this being expanded for e-books in general. I want to borrow their code and try to reproduce this for CMU!

Beyond Federated Search: The Next Generation of Information Discovery - This was mostly about using enterprise search, instead of federated search, for a consortium of law libraries. They're on to something, and the policy implications are interesting; however, it wasn't the new technology I was hoping it'd be. (Great presentation; misleading title.)

Successful Institutional Repositories: Libraries that Provide Value-Added Publishing Services to Faculty and Campus Communities - I didn't know before I went in, but this was actually a talk by a representative of Bepress. So, that was kind of neat. To his credit, he definitely kept the discussion to digital publishing by libraries in general, not specifically on the Digital Commons platform (which seems to be pretty ideal for the purpose). I found it interesting and thought-provoking.

Open Source ILS Panel - I was a little late to this one, but the discussion was fantastic (including the Twitter conversation that happened at the same time). We need more libraries and librarians who are willing to be part of open source communities; I would love to work for one of these! Also, I read Karen Schneider's blog--and so does my cataloging professor--so shaking her hand was kind of neat for me, like meeting a celebrity.

The Seismology of Google Scholar: Does Google Scholar Rock Your world? - Sometimes, things that get talked about as if they are surprising ... aren't? I mean, parts of the data were really interesting, but I was surprised that they were surprised to learn that Google Scholar has become more popular every semester since 2006, eventually overtaking their most popular database in number of searches. Also, I am inclined to question their belief that librarians teaching Google Scholar is what made it popular, particularly given that I found it myself (or through grad student hearsay) when I was in engineering school. That said, the fact that their catalog and other databases did not see lower usage: that was really interesting!

2009's eBook Think Tank - Another interesting discussion. Not much to say about it, except I really didn't think that much about eBooks before now. (They don't seem all that useful to me, unless I can load them on my own device, you know?) But there are some pretty serious workflow considerations, where eBooks are concerned.

I'll talk about the rest of the sessions in another post, most likely tomorrow. Cheers!

ER&L - 1 of 3

So, here I am, sitting in a hotel room in Los Angeles (a pretty nice hotel room, actually--I even have a sliding door to a patio with flowering plants of some sort), gearing up for a very busy two and a half days. The Welcome Reception at the Fowler was very nice. Interestingly, people didn't seem to "mingle" much; that suits me fine, since, although I love meeting new people, I always feel weird hopping into others' conversations, or out of conversations I'm in. (I'm shy in weird ways, I guess.) The sort of "find a group and chat with them for an hour" thing was actually pretty perfect, in that sense. I met fewer people, maybe, but I learned a lot more from the ones I did meet.

From what I've seen so far, I'm even more psyched about this whole thing. It seems like a lot of the folks at this conference are newer to the electronic resources area, so there's a general inquisitiveness, even on top of the standard librarian's share. I think it's going to be a great experience, and I'm really grateful to be here.

It's kind of lucky I could make it, I think: I had set aside enough time to finish my all of my school work early (except for Retrieving, but I'm not stressing that yet), and it was a tough schedule, but doable. Then I got some horrible cold-with-a-fever (flu?) over Thursday night, Friday, and Saturday, and I was knocked almost entirely out of commission. Unwisely, I still went to work on Friday, and I think that just made it worse. Luckily, though, by Sunday afternoon I was well enough to fly, if not entirely comfortably. (My fever and the worst of the other symptoms were gone, and enough time had passed that I was pretty certain I wouldn't be making others sick by flying with them. I still have a cough and suspect I will when I get on the plane home, too; it's more or less manageable, though.)

And, hey, I made it. And then I did homework for most of the day, while listening to the rain. ... Yes, it's below 50 degrees and raining. I'll take it, though--the greenery here is gorgeous! There weren't nearly as many trees in Anaheim this summer, and they were more palmy, while these are all kinds of lovely deciduous, evergreen, and indeterminate (really!) trees. Also, I saw a hummingbird the size of a sparrow on the patio today, which thrilled me to no end (enough that I made an all-caps Twitter update, which is, you know, unheard of), and there was a hawk in front of the building. I walked around campus and just thought to myself "These kids don't even know how good they have it, I bet. How lucky!" It's such a pretty place. (Some of them, I'm not even kidding, had on winter coats for 50 degree weather. I smiled.)

So, all around good stuff. I'll try to update each day--we'll see how it goes.

On technology, generally

So, the IR software spazzed out for a couple of minutes, leaving me with some time on my hands. I could do some reading for class, but I've got a blog post burning to get out, so I figured, why not set it free, out into the Ether, so that others (all 7 of you :)) might share their thoughts with me.

I figure, it must be a late winter thing, with people cooped up indoors too long and getting cranky and nobody out making real news (OK, not that last one), but it seems like everybody is obsessing about technology and how scary it is. the.effing.librarian points to a study of questionable merit, suggesting that TV watching leads to depression, right around the same time that Techdirt points to an article about an even weaker study (and, by the way, the bulk of this author's recent studies have samples of 83 adolescent girls--does she just keep testing the same ones, or what?) suggesting that girls who co-ruminate [over social media?] are in danger of depression. (Note: t.e.l and Techdirt were making fun of these articles.) To the study author's credit, the issue of social media does not come up in the paper's abstract; maybe the article's author was stretching to get links?

On top of that, I was sent to look at an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education (who should be posting something more worthwhile, I think), talking about people coming to bad ends on Facebook. Sadly, the article was not written from the standpoint that should concern us--what they and all the various applications do with our personal data--but was, instead, yet another horror story about someone [forgive my casual tone, here] talking smack about their coworkers and getting called on it. It was just a very long way of saying "Use common sense." Does nobody remember these same articles about e-mail? (I'm not blaming the person who sent it out; reminders to set your privacy settings and keep in mind who might read your stuff are never a bad idea. But shame on the Chronicle for posting something so obvious!)

Folks, it isn't the technology. Teenagers will be teenagers; adolescence is not a fun or easy time for anyone, but I don't see how it is made significantly easier or harder by the advent of Web 2.0 technology. On the whole, I suspect it all balances out, being easier in many ways and harder in others. (I could talk a bit, here, about my troubles as a teenager, but you don't care. Suffice it to say, Web 1.0, such as it was at the time, was generally a positive thing for me--not always, but generally.)

Further, people will be people. I can only imagine, when cave painting was invented, someone drew the chieftain of their cave being chased by a mammoth, or something, and had to go live in another cave as a result. Ditto books--no doubt, there's a good reason why the book after Look Homeward, Angel was called You Can't Go Home Again. Seriously, we've been talking about people behind their backs since we've been able to speak--possibly longer--and while it's not a good policy, it's probably human nature. The only difference is, with social media, it gets back to people faster.

So, as always, if you're going to talk smack, be smart, and don't do your cave painting, or talking, or typing where it can get back to the person you're talking about. Better: don't talk smack about your coworkers, because it will get back to them eventually.