Caveat Quaestor

The semester begins

2009-01-05T10:50:00.002-05:00

My first class of the spring semester happens today. It is not 12pm-3pm, as I had mistakenly remembered, but 3pm-6pm. (So, in order to leave myself one weekday for doing homework, I think I may move my internship hours from Tuesdays to Mondays.) I have a cold and am considering napping for a couple of hours before I go, because, wow, do I feel cruddy. What a terrible way to start a semester!

For anyone who is planning to go to ALA Annual this year, a reminder: registration opened today. The early bird price is significantly lower than the full price, so sign up now!

Looking back at 2008 and forward to 2009

2008-12-30T13:42:00.003-05:00

This year started out really awfully, to be honest, right down to a nasty stomach flu on New Year's Eve. There was all kinds of badness. I think the extra hole punched in my ear was the high point of my January. Anyway, here's a fairly complete rundown of the failures and successes of the year, with some added commentary at the end.

Tried and failed (in roughly chronological order):

Getting a graduate assistantship at Pitt - their website lies; there is no such thing for Master's students
Keeping my wisdom teeth
Studying for (and eventually taking) the CCNA - I got through maybe half of the book before quitting Booz Allen and thus the study group I'd set up.
Taking an American Sign Language class - work got in the way, and I had to drop out
Talking sense into a group of more than five people who were doing something damaging
Not hurting my knee severely enough that I couldn't use it all summer
Having a nice beach vacation
Getting people to come play in my parlor larps
Making a blanket in time to give it to people for late-Christmas
Unpacking

Tried and succeeded:

Getting into library school
Getting a Pitt Partners placement doing what I [thought I] would want to do after graduating
Playing with a penguin at the Aviary
Buying a Mac and an iPod
Getting a summer job as a library assistant before library school started
Building a website on my very own domain, for the first time ever (I've Tripoded and my-school-paged it up in the past, which just isn't the same)
Rescuing four baby ducks from a drain
Attending first ALA conference and making some library friends
Getting good grades in my first semester of library school
Finding an excellent field placement
Getting a volunteer position at the Aviary
Getting a scholarship to attend a conference

On the whole, I think it's been a reasonably successful year, despite the poor start.

Looking ahead, I know I am changing careers at a bad time, economically speaking, but I've got high hopes that I'll get a reasonable job before this time next year. (I also have not-entirely-plausible hopes about what that job might be. :)) More immediately, spring semester is going to be rough, but I think I'm ready for it.

I am still working on my resolutions and goals. So far, the only one I've really set is that I am going to stop eating factory farmed meat, except for 1) what's already in my freezer right now and 2) when I'm at someone's house and they've cooked. I'll still eat grass-fed beef and free-range chicken, though obviously less often since they cost more. I'll also eat fish, though I need to find the little card I have that lists "ethical" fish to eat. (Some are really environmentally unsound, right now, it turns out.) This is part of a larger goal of living more sustainably. Also, I think a goal of straight A's through the rest of library school is obvious, even if it's a tad unreasonable, given my schedule.

Since the bulk of my year is taken up with school, and I can't know whether I'll be in Pittsburgh or elsewhere afterwards, goal-making is a little tricky.

One down, two-ish to go

2008-12-29T14:26:00.003-05:00

I've started a few posts in my head, but only today did I realize that I didn't, you know, post any of them. It turned out that I didn't have the kind of down-time I expected to have during the break: classes (and projects) ran until the 11th, work kept going right up until the 19th, and I started both my field placement and volunteer position in work's "off" days, in addition to trying (and, it seems, failing) to knit a blanket, making Christmas presents, and just generally preparing for two back-to-back multi-state treks. I didn't actually get more than one Sunday at home, and I think I wasted most of it sleeping, instead of doing all of those cleaning/organizing projects I was hoping to do; so, I'm going into next semester with a still-messy apartment, some CSS glitches on my homepage, and just generally less stuff accomplished than I'd hoped...

Moving on to news and starting with the largest first, I decided not to apply to PhD programs. As much as I'd like to continue my education, I'm just not certain enough, one semester in, what specific things I want to work on. Also, as much as I want to work on pie-in-the-sky research--and, wow, would I--I am awfully tired of being a student: the undergraduate feel of my MLIS program has worn me down far more than I would have expected, going in. And while I know a PhD program wouldn't have the same kind of atmosphere to it, I still find my motivation to continue being a student is pretty much gone, for the time being. I want to go out in the world and do stuff.

On that note, I'll be attending the Electronic Resources & Libraries conference in February. I applied for a scholarship, and to my utter surprise and delight, I won. I think it will be a tremendous help to me, as that's the area of the field I'm looking at... but I don't feel like I fully understand what the current state of the art is, or where I would best fit in. I'll learn a lot and hopefully make some good contacts, there.

I'm still signed up for four classes and a field placement, in addition to my 13-hour-a-week internship and the most exciting volunteer position ever. Yep, it turned out my meeting was just a meeting, not an interview, and he actually had me start that afternoon. So, officially, I am a volunteer at the National Aviary, helping to put their library together. They have a small but solid collection of books and journals, which I will help to put in order. For now, their "catalog" will be an Excel spreadsheet; perhaps once I've got a handle on what's there and how much time it will take to get everything together I can talk them into an open-source OPAC of some sort. But there's plenty to keep me busy now.

The field placement is also going well. I didn't get enough hours in December to finish by the end of the spring semester, but I can take an incomplete and finish early in the summer. It's going to be a good experience: I should come out of it pretty knowledgeable about institutional repositories and open access.

It's going to be an incredibly busy semester, but I am excited.

Next Semester - It'll be a crazy ride!

2008-12-06T13:21:00.001-05:00

I made a schedule change, folks. See, my backup plan, should I end up hating academia in five years (look, I know I would like to be some flavor of academic librarian, certainly, but I'm also aware that I have yet to fight my way through real-life academic politics; Masters students--even research-based ones--are shielded from all that, particularly if they're lucky enough to have the least dramatastic advisor of all time), is to be a Young Adult Librarian. So I figured it wouldn't hurt to take one class in that, particularly since the one semi-high-workload class I thought I'd take was likely to have some repeat content in it, for me. Analyzing massive amounts of data and presenting it coherently? Yeah, been there.

Here's my new schedule:
Monday 3-6: Academic Librarianship
Tuesday 6-9: Resources for Young Adults
Wednesday 11-3: Work, 6-9: Retrieving Information
Rotating/Online: Introduction to Cataloging and Classification
Friday 11-4: Work
Alternating Saturday 1-5 and Sunday 4-8: Work
Hopefully one day a week (Thursday, if possible): Volunteering
5 hours a week, somewhere in there: Field Placement at CMU
One Saturday a month, 7:30-10:30am: Volunteering at Planned Parenthood

I have trouble believing that the [first] volunteer position I mention above is actually going to work out, because it's just too good to be true. You see, if you said to me, "Coral, if there were any place in Pittsburgh--any place at all, and forget what your degrees are in--where you could work, where would it be?", I would name this place. I'm e-mailing back and forth with their acting librarian (he has fantastic credentials, but none of them are specifically library-related, other than his caring for their collection up until now), and we have a meeting set up for the week after next. He makes it sound like he's not so much interviewing me as showing me what I would be working on and letting me decide whether or not I'm up to it. To which, of course, the response is "Hell yes!" ... Only, you know, more professionally phrased. I am unbelievably psyched about this position. But I really shouldn't even say as much as I have, until I'm really sure it'll happen. I really, really, really want for it to happen. When/If it's for sure, I'll post with more details... like the name of the place.

The CMU Field Placement is also, I guess, not 100% definite? It's likely. My would- or will-be boss has collected my demographic information and described the project at a high level, and I have the ideal faculty advisor for the project, as well. ... I'll wait and describe that better when I have a clearer handle on what I would/will be doing. But it's digital library (repository) stuff, and there's an intellectual property/copyright aspect to it. It's exciting.

I'm seriously psyched about next semester. Nervous, too, because wow will I be busy. (Then again, I won't be hopped up on Ny-/Dayquil, or running on decreased oxygen, we hope, so my capacity for work will be higher. Also, I don't think any of my classes require weekly essays on multiple books and articles, like my one class this semester did. So that's a win.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

2008-11-27T10:43:00.003-05:00

I know I use this blog a lot more to talk about what's wrong than what's right; maybe that's human nature, or maybe it's just mine. I tend to belong to the "if nobody points out it's broken, how can we fix it?" school of thought, which can be very useful. But too much focus on the negatives can bring you down and make you lose track of what's going right.

And, really, there's an awful lot that's going right. Most on my mind: I'm poised to enter a profession that is dynamic and interesting and has so much going on that it's hard to choose where to focus. ("It's hard to choose" looks a little complainy, but I really don't think having four or five totally separate areas I'd be thrilled to work on is a bad thing.)

I also live in a great city-town (Pittsburgh is this hybrid thing that's neither city nor town), and when I sit back and take the time to reflect, my little heart is warmed thinking about the new and old friends I have here. I really like these people and am happy to have them in my life. My farther-away friends make me both sad and happy to think about; I miss them, but I'm so proud and happy to call them my friends. And for all the time spent separated, the reunions are all the more joyous.

I have a partner who loves me and whom I love back, three mischievous pets (and two frogs--no mischief there), a warm and comfortable place to live, a cup of coffee in front of me, and a Thanksgiving dinner at my friends' warm and inviting house to look forward to this afternoon. I also have a pretty good shot at straight A's (or at least A-minuses) this semester, a part-time job that I like and that will help me get full-time employment before long, a fully-functional computer with all the bells and whistles I need, new vanilla-smelling soap for my shower, and several different types of purple pens.

And my bronchitis is mostly gone. I can breathe, and it is wonderful.

It's kind of a nice feeling, making lists of what's right in one's world. (This list isn't comprehensive. I've got a couple of chickens I choose not to count out loud yet.) I encourage you all to do the same, to yourself or in your blog or wherever seems best. And have a happy Thanksgiving!

[2670] Last reading & muddy point

2008-11-25T23:41:00.003-05:00

So, this "keeping my [assigned] notes in my real blog (instead of starting a new blog just for that purpose)" thing has been an experiment, and it's not going to happen again. Should I have another instructor who makes the same kind of assignment--keep reading notes and questions about the course in a blog--I'll probably make a new blog just for that. Probably. I mean, it's been good to have my notes up and to be able to see and comment on others' notes; it's a good idea, a useful thing, and something more professors should do. I just kind of think I've bored the few regular readers I have with these commentaries. Separating it out would have been the right way to go.

That said, here are some thoughts on the readings for week 13. I'm glad to have a term for something that's come up so much in discussions this semester: "patent thickets--the fear that some advance will tread on pre-existing patents, of which the innovator may not even be aware." (Joseph E. Stiglitz, Intellectual Property Rights and Wrongs)

Stiglitz made several good points, including that open source shows IP protection is not necessarily a prerequisite for the creation of valuable products. And his point about giving someone a monopoly, even temporarily, leading to a lack of innovation is clearly worth examining. I didn't know about the Wright brothers and Curtis brothers and their forced patent pool, but I'm probably going to bring that up whenever I want to fight about copyright, in the future.

Moving on to Clifford Lynch's "Where Do We Go From Here? The Next Decade for Digital Libraries," I don't know about this idea of the future of libraries being "too important to be left to librarians." That's nonsense. Librarians are precisely the right people to handle this--if you can get ones who are in it for the public good over their own job security, anyway.

I'm interested that he thinks we're out of interesting research topics, with respect to digital libraries. Really?

Muddiest Point: I don't have one this week.

Management -- Level up!

2008-11-24T11:41:00.003-05:00

I am, for all intents and purposes (give or take a moderated post to a discussion board or three), done with LIS 2700, Pitt's not-so-briefly-named "Managing Libraries & Information Systems & Services." I have a "management portfolio" to show for it--an environmental scan, needs assessment, budget, staffing plan, and business plan, done as part of a group of five people--as well as a grant proposal. Neither's going on my webspace, because I ganked and modified a real university's logo to make the portfolio beautiful, and the grant proposal is for a real, live library. But if you're an employer who'd like to see whether or not I can produce a professional-looking document, send me an e-mail or leave a comment with your contact information, and I will happily provide you with one or both (pending permission, on the grant proposal).

I'm also pretty much entirely finished with LIS 2001, Organizing Information. I'm awfully sad to see that class go; it's been truly enjoyable. I don't have much I'm inclined to display from that class (I was very conversational in my writing style for those assignments), but I'll happily tell you all about the differences between MODS and Dublin Core, if you're interested in hearing about that. I even have a presentation, with image macros and a crosswalk.

(Yes, I used the word "ganked" in something an employer might see. This is, first and foremost, a blog. I imagine employers keep that in mind.)

[2670] Muddiest Point & Reading Commentary

2008-11-21T01:05:00.005-05:00

Muddy Point: You didn't seem to believe that having a single, unified interface to the digital libraries of the world would be a good thing. I'm curious about that and wonder if you could talk more about why not.

Reading: I really just skimmed briefly this week, I'll be honest. Which is sad: security has always been something that's interested me. And the problem of access versus ownership is extremely interesting--it's something I feel pretty strongly about. Economics, on the other hand, bores me to tears.

A little essay I cooked up

2008-11-20T18:00:00.003-05:00

I've been pretty bad about posting my class essays up here, for a number of reasons. One of the big ones is that they are so specific to the questions, and I make kind of lazy references to books that I don't expect everyone on my blogroll to have read. (Let's be honest--I haven't read all of them. Four books in a week? Really? With a full course schedule and a part-time job? Hah, right.)

In this case, I just use articles, most of which are worth your time to check out, and for good measure [and because I refer directly to it], I am going to post the question, as well. It's still a little cramped, I think, because I had to get it in under 275 words (it's 271). Anyway, enjoy. And comment. And let's discuss. (And sorry for a second post in a day!) And, yes, you could argue that I ignored half the question, but I am actually pretty comfortable with that; knowing my professor, I suspect most of the question was a red herring.

Question:
In the United States, copyright law promotes the public good and protects the exclusive limited rights of copyright holders, in that order. If the copyright law fails to protect the rights of copyright holders adequately, how is the public good affected? Would it be better or worse if the United States adopted the standard for copyright protection in the rest of the industrialized world, whereby the primary purpose of such statutes is to protect the rights and interests of copyright holders?

Answer:
I believe the change referred to in the last sentence is already occurring--and has been for twenty years. Copyright law was written to prevent corporations from reproducing works without permission--something they had the tools to do--in the interest of encouraging innovation by making it profitable. However, the advent of consumer technologies that could make copies, then the Internet, has effectively put the same tools into the hands of individuals, making copyright law into a seriously flawed and poorly patched joke (Lessig). In 1982 Jack Valenti, a lobbyist for the film industry, compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler in front of Congress (Frel and michael). Clearly, this comparison is overblown; in fact, the film industry saw gains from this technology; it makes over $25 billion per year from videotapes and DVDs now (Frel).

Nevertheless, the same logic continues to stream out from their lobbyists, leading most recently to the PRO-IP Act, which "relaxes the standards under which extended prison terms of up to ten years can be given to repeat felony copyright infringers" (Ehmke). Just for comparison, the minimum prison term for rape in Pennsylvania is 4 years (McGill); yes, one could serve more time for copying a CD than for brutally attacking another person. I fail to see how this is "in the public interest."

I'm out of words but have much more to say. So, I would like to point you to an article by Cory Doctorow, which claims that what is at stake in the fight against draconian IP laws is nothing less than our culture itself: http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/11/cory-doctorow-why-i-copyfight.html. Please give it a read. He's right.

Works cited:

Ehmke, A. "Pro-IP Act Signed into Law." Haynes and Boone's News Room. Posted October 15, 2008. Available online: http://www.haynesboone.com/pro-ip-act-signed-into-law-10-15-2008/ Accessed November 20, 2008.

Frel, J. "The Revolution Will Be Downloaded." AlterNet. Posted April 20, 2005. Available online: http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21817/. Accessed Nov 20, 2008.

Lessig, Lawrence. Speech: "The Internet at the Crossroads." The Politics of Code - Shaping the Future of the Next Internet, Oxford Internet Institute, 2003.

McGill, A. "Cluck sentenced to four years in prison." The Daily Collegian Online. Posted August 23, 2007. Available online: http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2007/08/23/cluck_sentenced_to_four_years.aspx Accessed November 20, 2008.

michael. "Valenti's "Boston Strangler" Testimony." Slashdot. Posted on Fri May 31, 2002 03:12 PM. Available online: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/31/1622232.

West, J. "little pieces of things that might interest you." librarian.net. Posted November 20, 2008. Available online: http://www.librarian.net/stax/2561/little-pieces-of-things-that-might-interest-you/

A quote I ran into while I was looking for best practices on citing Slashdot (which is something I do tend to avoid): "... citing slashdot on patent issues is like citing Soviet propaganda to find out about the US Constitution." --FallLine, , posted to Slashdot on Monday January 15 2007.

Oh noes!

2008-11-20T13:46:00.003-05:00

I've discovered a real problem, folks: most of the people I really want to work with--whose books, ideas, blogs, and podcasts have most influenced my thinking over this semester and who I think have the greatest chance of effecting real change in technology policies and practices (if anybody would just listen to them)--are pretty much all lawyers. (Why are lawyers the ones writing all of these books? Why isn't it librarians? I think this is something worth discussing and would love to hear from some library-related folk why they think we're falling so short on this stuff!)

I just don't know that they want an engineer-turned-librarian following them around all the time, no matter how smart or devoted to their various causes I might be, since they all work in law-related organizations--with quite a lot of overlap between them, if you look at the whole timeline. I also don't think I've got the wherewithal to go to school for three more years, at $100k+ a year, to then end up working with them and the EFF and never paying off my loans. It took some soul-searching to go from engineering to library science and to take on the loans I have. Also, I am really kind of pondering a PhD in LIS, instead, though the question of "now or later?" is still very up in the air--and very dependent on who has the coolest/best/most socially relevant projects for me to work on next year.

(A post to come soon: I identify people within the library field who are also working on interesting and relevant things, of similar importance, in a very different way. I've got a couple, already.)

Stopping the OCLC Power Grab

2008-11-15T13:51:00.002-05:00

I found out about this by way of librarian.net and want to pass it along to anyone who might be interested.

By way of explanation: OCLC, the not-for-profit that provides library services around the world, has gone too far. Originally, it was a library collaborative -- one library could catalog a book, upload it to OCLC, and then other libraries could save time by reusing the catalog information. But as the price of such technology has fallen, its prices have risen. It charges membership fees, record retrieval fees, user support fees, and fees for all sorts of additional services. But now it wants to set the terms of use for every library record ever retrieved through OCLC, so that it can maintain its monopoly in the field. In a very real sense, they're trying to steal our libraries. We have to make them stop -- please join me in signing the petition "Stop the OCLC powergrab!" You can do so right now at http://watchdog.net/c/stop-oclc

For more information, see this wiki page: OCLC Policy Change.

[2670] Week 11 Reading & Muddiest Point

2008-11-12T18:19:00.002-05:00

Arms is at it again. (It seems like the Digital Library World has between three and five really prolific authors and then a bunch of people who wrote one or two articles.) For the most part, his article rung the "Duh" bell: of course users would prefer to have one interface and see "searching" as a thing they should be able to do from one place, namely their desks. Even I figured this out, and I'm just starting out studying this stuff. It bothers me that individual publishers put "branding" above ease of use, in terms of database subscriptions, and if digital library creators are doing the same thing, then shame on them. OAI-PMH/Z39.50 (yes, I know they're different) is imperfect, and we all clearly must use different metadata standards (I'm only half sarcastic, I guess), but we still need to think a lot more about the larger user community and a lot less about making things "our own."

One more point about Arms, specifically. He says "Google Scholar shows somewhat the same myopic viewpoint." What now? I'm not feigning ignorance, here; I'm honestly unclear what he's talking about.

As far as the topic of this week's readings goes, generally, I know that communities are a big part of the definition of Digital Libraries. I think maybe that gets expanded too far, though. I think there needs to be a community interested in a particular subject, in order to make the work of making the digital library worthwhile, but I also think that you need to keep an eye on the grander picture. Once you've justified building the library, and once you've designed it so that the people whose use justifies its existence can, you know, use it, you then need to make it available to the broader community of potential users. Your individual community might dry up, but the library is already there and potentially usable by millions of people. So do it right.

Muddiest Point: I, too, would support the use of some class time to teach us how to use Greenstone. I figured out how to install it on my computer, but its interface isn't exactly intuitive.

I still hate Greenstone, but I got it to run

2008-11-10T13:46:00.006-05:00

For folks in 2670, I hope this helps. For folks outside of 2670, I recommend against using Greenstone Digital Library software, but if you find that you have to, I hope this helps you install it, at least for local use.

If I find any good tricks for using Greenstone, after it's installed, I'll share those, as well. I hope my classmates will do the same. :)

Assuming the moon's alignment with Venus was not what did it, here's how I got Greenstone to run:

1) I installed VMWare Fusion on my Mac. (This is unnecessary if you already have Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2. Skip to step 3 in that case.)

2) I installed Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2. No, XP x64 won't do it; I tried.

(Steps 1 and 2 were necessary because, to be blunt, I refuse to put this buggy software on the native operating system of my only computer. If something goes horribly wrong in my VM, I can just blow it away, without losing important data.) Please note: I did the rest of these steps before installing anything else on my Windows VM, including Firefox or Office or anything; I can't promise that this will work with anything other than IE 6, or in any order other than the one I give below; given how many times I went through failed installs, I've developed a little bit of irrational superstition about the order of operations...

3) I downloaded and installed Java Virtual Machine on my computer.

4) I downloaded and installed Java JDK, specifically JDK 6 Update 10 with Java EE. There's some weirdness with Java's download manager software, but don't worry overmuch. Just do what it tells you to do.

5) I downloaded and installed ActivePerl. I did what it told me to do and was rewarded with cute lizard icons and a properly-defined Perl PATH.

6) I downloaded and installed ImageMagick, specifically ImageMagick-6.4.5-5-Q16-windows-dll.exe. Choose only the default options; don't add more. Seriously.

7) I installed Greenstone, Windows Distribution (Latest). I went with all the defaults, including "Local" rather than "Web."

8) Here's where it gets a little tricky. Perl correctly sets its own path to what Greenstone Librarian Interface expects, but Java does not, for some reason. (I guess first try running Greenstone Librarian Interface. If it works, you don't have to do this step. It didn't work for me, so here's what I did to fix it.)

Go to C:\Program Files\Greenstone\gli, and right-click on gli.bat (it is an icon that looks like a window with a cog in it). Choose Edit. Scroll down to the three lines that look like this:

:findJava
:: ---- Check Java Exists ----
set JAVAPATH=

Now, go find java.exe. On my computer, it's in C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin. Paste that path in (yours, not mine, though they are probably the same); on my machine, the above now says

:findJava
:: ---- Check Java Exists ----
set JAVAPATH=C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin

Close the file, and click "Yes" when it asks if you want to save. Now Greenstone should run just fine. Ideally.

Musings on Next Semester

2008-11-07T18:47:00.003-05:00

So, I picked my classes:

LIS 2002: Retrieving Information (required core course, blended format)
LIS 2405: Intro to Cataloging and Classification (online only course)
LIS 2690: Information Visualization (blended format)
LIS 2879: Academic Librarianship (blended format)

You'll notice two things about them. One, it's a pretty fun and interesting set of things to study. Two, everything is online, or at the very least, blended.

I'll be honest: this upsets me. I dropped everything to move to Pittsburgh for this degree. More than that, Dale dropped everything and took a job he doesn't like as much as the job he had in Virginia, to move to Pittsburgh, so I could get this degree. Which is made up almost entirely of online courses. I am paying through the nose for this degree, and yet, I am looking at another semester of fighting the discussion boards in our sub-par distance education software to have artificial "conversations" for the sole purpose of making the off-campus students feel that they're part of the community--a misguided effort, to be sure, as they are no more fans of the discussion boards than we are. ... I hope I'm wrong and all of next semester's professors will understand that the enforced-online-discussion model wastes students' time, brings down the level and the sincerity of discourse, and ultimately decreases the value of the degree we are earning.

I was going to muse/rant some more, but I have some digital library software I am trying desperately to learn to use (getting it to run would be a start--curse you, Greenstone!), before I go to bed tonight. Tomorrow and Sunday, I'll be on the road, attending a wedding. (Yay, weddings!)

Hope

2008-11-05T15:07:00.005-05:00

I know we're all just about ready to stop talking about the election (for various reasons), but history was made in more than one way last night, and I'm glad to know that for every African American child who now knows that the highest office in the US could one day be his (the post that's linked there is beautiful), there is also a little girl who is that much closer to serving as a Senator or Representative. That's right, a the new US Senate and House of Representatives will both have record-breaking numbers of women serving (link goes to PDF report).

It's a good day to be an American.

[2670] Week 10 Reading & Muddiest Point

2008-11-04T13:05:00.001-05:00

While Kling's paper brings up some good points, its obvious datedness (seriously, Mosaic? information superhighway?) gets distracting. I think it does a better job of showing where we were than where we ought to be going--unless Dr. He's point in giving us this to read is to say "we really haven't made much progress." That would be unfortunate.

Saracevic raises the point that not much is being done, as far as evaluation of digital libraries goes. Or, more to the point, a lot of work is being done on how digital libraries might be evaluated, but the few people who are (or were, as of 2004) doing the evaluation are not really utilizing that work. The field of digital library evaluation sounds kind of scattered and hapless.

As far as the other articles/chapters (which I can't link, either because the link to what we were supposed to read is broken, or because the resources are on Courseweb only), they seem to discuss usability in terms I'm more familiar with (and, I'll be honest, more interested in). They point to websites and operating systems and say "See, this is well-done," and "See, this isn't." As a particularly grumpy web user, I appreciate any effort to improve usability in websites.

Muddiest Point: I didn't have one from last lecture, which I think I've already said. I do want to check and make sure I heard Dr. He right: we get midterm grades in two weeks? (Not trying to rush anyone, just to make sure my hearing's good. :)) Thanks!

My Grad School Life

2008-10-31T12:53:00.003-04:00

I feel like I'm neglecting this blog--SNL videos and class assignments aside--but there hasn't been much to say: I've been sick for about a month (bronchitis and a never-ending cold), which has left me completely drained and not really feeling up to the time, energy, and brainpower requirements of my classes. I kind of just want to take a weekend to sleep and eat soup and drink hot tea, you know? But being behind on most of my projects (by my own estimation, not in any official capacity) leaves me no time for that kind of nonsense.

But, you know, such is the life of a grad student. It was the same in engineering grad school, only I didn't enjoy the reading. (I really do enjoy what I get a chance to read. I wish my professors had been a little more realistic in assigning books for the semester--seriously, there were students complaining about 100 pages a week per class, in some online forum, and I kind of wanted to smack them--but if I get around to finishing the books I've merely skimmed [or less], I will be a better librarian for the effort. They are really fantastic.)

One interesting point: I learned that specializations other than Archives actually do matter at Pitt. I couldn't register for the Academic Libraries class without being in the Academic Libraries track, which vexed me, the self-declared generalist, mightily. But it looks like it will not be a big deal to jump into the specialization--the paperwork was easy, anyway! Financially, I might have lucked into something: the only Academic Libraries "course" I had planned not to take was the field placement (3 credits, 150 hours working with a local library under the supervision of someone who has their MLIS--and, as far as I can tell, I can't get the 3 credits for my internship, because it is a separate program that pays a portion of my tuition per semester), which I could sign up for in the spring and finish in the summer. Since summer is pay-per-credit, having five classes in the spring and three in the summer would save me a few thousand dollars--SCORE!

As an added bonus, I found someone at CMU who may be willing to take on an intern. (I found him by asking "Do you need an intern?" out of nowhere, when he told me what he's working on. It was opportunistic, if not downright rude, but it may have worked out OK.) The project I'd be working on would be kind of ideal, in that it would fill in a gap in my goals and interests that my [awesome] Engineering & Science Library internship doesn't quite fill. It's some digital stuff; I'll explain more if this whole thing pans out--which looks promising, but maybe I shouldn't count my chickens prematurely.

So, there's good, and there's bad, and, as always, there's up-in-the-air. I'm excited about the stuff I get to do and worried about the group projects that need to get done and grumpy about the class on Halloween night (I'm not even joking, 5:30-8:30pm, the first Halloween in years I've lived where trick-or-treaters might show up, I'm going to be in a classroom) and tired from not being able to breathe for a month.

Also, I have a midterm on Monday. I'm stressing about it, mostly because that's just how I am. I hate midterms. Knowing what I do now about the structure of library school, I will immediately drop any other midterm-containing elective as soon as the syllabus finds its way to my hot little hands. (Unless it's the Intellectual Property class; not even a midterm could keep me from taking that!)

[2670] Muddiest Point

2008-10-23T21:48:00.001-04:00

I have no muddiest point.

Is anybody dying to meet up and discuss digital library-y goodness, the day before our midterm?

I like it. (That's the real one, not Tina Fey.)

2008-10-19T16:59:00.001-04:00

Coral waxes philosophical on Week 8 Readings for 2670 (and Muddiest Point)

2008-10-16T21:12:00.006-04:00

I loved the following quote (from our Week 8 Readings):

Google has taught us, quite powerfully, that the user just wants a search box. Arguments as to whether or not this is "best" for the user are moot—it doesn't matter if it's best if nobody uses it. Moreover, as both Google and Amazon have demonstrated, users have a funny way of determining for themselves what is best for them. --Todd Miller

Right on! I mean, I love highbrow, ivory tower discussion as much as the next girl, but what it really needs to come down to is, "How can we engage the user? What will they use?" And, not to get too far off topic, but this is an issue that's really been on my mind a lot lately. You see, before I started seriously considering librarianship as a profession--and admitting this out here in the open is a little weird for me--I didn't go to the public library. At all. (There's this whole thing about how the library in my hometown was my favorite place in the world until I turned 12 or 13, and then suddenly I realized the librarians were looking at me with ... some negative emotion I didn't bother defining, at the time. Having worked in a public library, myself, and having thought about it a bit, I realize it was probably dread. Teenagers are scary, because they're hard to relate to. We remember being teenagers, but we also remember what we thought of adults. You know what I mean?) I dearly loved the library at my university, but I retained my fear of librarians. How sad! I had absorbed that common misperception of librarians as cranky, bespectacled old ladies with book carts and stern expressions, and it didn't occur to me to ask them questions--even the obviously not old, not bespectacled, sometimes not even female librarians at UVA. Then I went to graduate school, where the Engineering & Science Library (where I work now!) was good as a silent study space, between classes, on days when I could deal with the oppressiveness of it all--something the students who wanted silence exuded, not something inherent to the library itself. (That part of it is still a problem for me. I hate walking past the study carrels. Though as time goes on, I become more sure of myself, and I imagine to myself that they realize I have work to do, to keep the library running.) I didn't know the librarians were super friendly and wanted to answer my questions! I wouldn't have dreamed of bothering them! I did all my searches online, in a combination of Google Scholar and IEEE Explore (which, admittedly, did pretty much encompass my research).

This is all a very long-winded lead-up to the question: how do we deal with potential patrons like I was? I was too shy to ask for help. Frankly, I was too shy to venture into the library, except to study. I was intimidated by the catalog and by the shelves upon shelves of books. ... I guess therein lies a lot of the benefit of digital libraries; if shy patrons can find us online, at least they'll have access to some of our resources. But I'd like to address the bigger question, as it relates to brick-and-mortar libraries, at some point in the future. I'll keep thinking on it. Your comments are welcome!

Now to the much more relevant idea of federated search. I am interested in this. I was considering applying to PhD programs and trying to get funding to build a search utility that would go through a library's catalog and all of its databases, because <rant>the current way we do things is so backward and involved and frustrating. Why, after 8 weeks of doing reference for at least a few hours a week, am I still feeling less than confident in my ability to find absolutely everything in our system? That's absurd. There's no excuse for it. Sure, if you know the name of the journal you want to search, I can help you. And I have a passing familiarity with a growing subset of our journal offerings--and the databases that house them--so that I can find certain types of articles pretty well. But why should I have to know what every journal/database contains, in order to help a patron find the answer to a question I understand? [I get why I have to understand their questions.] Why can't I just type something in a search box?</rant> (I realize I'm proposing something that might end up putting some of us out of jobs, if ever implemented well. I think this is a noble goal, really. We're smart people; we'll find something to do. What's important is that information can be retrieved--ideally by everyone--right?)

It seems to me this is what federated search is out to solve (slowly, and with great limitations). I'm a little embarrassed that I thought nobody else had tried to solve this problem, admittedly, but I guess such is the dilemma of a grad student. Better that I'm thinking of solutions, even if they're already implemented (in some form or another) than that I ... don't? Eh.

There are still, clearly, significant hurdles to be overcome in all of this.

The D-Lib article was published in 2004; I wonder what academic libraries have done, since then, to respond to this problem--for those who don't feel like clicking, the problem is a lack of acknowledgment, on the part of academic libraries, of the tremendous amount of academic resources on the Web. My guess: not much. (I love academia, but I acknowledge its imperfections, slowness being a major one.)

Muddiest Point: Does the Greenstone installation on the lab computers do anything besides show us the demo library? Can we build libraries and burn them to CD at the lab? (This is of great importance, since Greenstone isn't installing properly on Dreamhost, and I have a Mac. Also, an unwillingness to install Apache on my Mac.)

[2670] Week ... 7, actually

2008-10-10T17:14:00.003-04:00

Muddiest Point: My muddiest point from last week didn't get answered. Since it directly impacts the homework that's due on Monday, I'd be really grateful if somebody could help me out: I'm not sure I understand what an attribute is in XML. We saw a schema and how to set an attribute up in it, but not how it would look in the XML that fit the schema. (Apologies for imprecise terminology.)

Reading Response: I hadn't thought all that hard about how beefy a web crawler would have to be, given the volume of information the Big Three search engines index. Those are some mighty big numbers. And, you know, now that I'm thinking about it, of course they could shut down an entire domain if they did not have politeness algorithms in place. That they could shut down an entire country, I am still wrapping my head around. (To be fair, I still picture them as little spiders that "grab" links and report back information to big servers.)

I didn't see any mention of ill-mannered search engines, who ignore robots.txt files; I'm curious how search engines other than Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft work. Probably similarly, but with lower ethical standards (due to less public attention ... or the need to get more of it?).

It seems as though there's quite a lot of research going on in the digital information retrieval area, particularly in multimedia. I wish I were a better programmer; it sounds really interesting.

Really, I just wish everyone would just use metadata and be honest about it.

In support of Honest Metadata, I present to you Eleanor Rubidium Chinchillington (who just goes by "Ella"):

Further Musings

2008-10-10T10:56:00.004-04:00

I feel like I was unnecessarily harsh in my post yesterday. Looking at it, there's nothing I consider untrue or really feel a need to change, but the whole thing kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I think what bothers me is that I came off sounding as though I'm unhappy, and, on the whole, I'm really not. Yes, I think there are some serious problems with Pitt's program--problems that may lead to a drop in our rank, honestly--but, you know, I'm still there, and I plan to finish my degree. I'm looking forward to next semester's classes, which I've mostly chosen, even though the official schedule isn't up yet. (An unofficial schedule is available to anyone who bothers Googling for it.) The student groups--something I haven't discussed, thus far, but ought to--are great; SLAPSG is a little late getting off the ground, but there's a lot of interest on the part of the student body, and I know the [super active and awesome] local chapter will help us out. SCALA is fabulous: we're planning on putting together a Book Kart Drill Team (it's spelled with a "K," yes) for ALA Annual 2009--I'm heading that up, because I'm involved in ALA already and because I'm Treasurer--a Technology Petting Zoo for students who want to learn about and play with various kinds of technology, and a t-shirt sale. And there's a new student group, centered around community outreach, called SISCO (which bothers me every time I hear it, because I think about network hardware, but there you go). These are excellent and all make me very happy.

As for my internship at CMU's Engineering and Science Library, I am really enjoying it and learning a lot. Every time I get really confident about my reference skills, someone comes along with a hard chemistry or math question (why is it never electrical engineering? or even computer science?), which reminds me what a beginner I really am. But that's really not a bad thing; it just means I am constantly learning. I'm signed up to help give a talk on RSS and Google Reader, in the near future, which I find pretty exciting (and terrifying), and I will be helping at least one of my coworkers redesign her portion of the library web site. I am super excited about these projects. Slightly less exciting--but certainly useful to the library and still a learning opportunity--is a set of ongoing projects, going through a large collection of materials science books donated by a retiring professor and a smaller, but much older, collection of books that belonged to Roberts' (of Roberts Hall) mentor. A large portion of my time goes, of course, to "other projects as assigned"; earlier this week, I went through some tech reports, to determine whether or not each one was redundant or new to the collection, and last week I picked up some journals from a professor. That kind of thing. I'm hoping for some collection development (spendin' money!) and more instruction experience, before too long.

So, you know, things are actually pretty good.

On a more personal note, I've finally gotten together the bravery and momentum to go out and volunteer for a cause that I think is important (in all that free time I don't have). That makes me feel pretty good about myself, even if it means I go to bed earlier than I otherwise might on some Friday nights.

And, as I predicted, my schedule is changing: I'll be working Saturday afternoons, starting in a few weeks, because the other Information Assistant, who used to do the Saturday shift, got a job. (Yay for enjobination!) I'll have to drop an hour, somewhere in the week (personally, I'm hoping to start at 11am instead of 10am on either Tuesday or Friday morning ;)), to stay on the right side of CMU's rules, but it will be a good experience; back-up is a phone call away, instead of a short walk away, on weekends. Self reliance and all that!

Also, I have a purple iPod Nano. I love it. It holds all of my music, a bunch of podcasts, and a couple of TV shows. I've already used it to listen to supplemental class material that I otherwise wouldn't. (Because I have very little self control when faced with a computer monitor, I have a very limited amount of time I can spend paying attention/not reading random stuff on the Internet, if I'm at my computer--limited by how many photos I have to sort, actually--and the Panopto-only lectures are going to soak that up; no time for the supplemental material on top of it! But with an iPod, I can listen while I wait for the bus, while I walk out to get tasty Indian food for lunch, etc.) It will make the 5 hour trip to Detroit and back, in early November, into usable time, which will decrease my guilt at going (instead of doing homework). This is a win.

Long Delayed Musings

2008-10-09T21:20:00.004-04:00

I've been meaning to post a "State of the Schooling" kind of thing for quite a while, as the six week mark of the semester neared and then swooped past--it's funny how "six weeks" still has meaning to me, nearly ten years removed from high school as I am. Having a report card might not be such a bad thing; there are several post-graduation job openings with deadlines in the next few weeks. What, precisely, should I show them, in lieu of a degree, or even a transcript? (A cover letter and curriculum vitae, I suppose. Speaking of, if anyone would like to do a CV review for me or give me some academic library-specific tips for cover letters, I would be most grateful. I still don't feel like I know what goes in either.)

It isn't that I don't have work to do tonight, by the way; I had reserved today to work on a grant proposal for my Management class, but I was tackled to the ground by a cold. I'd like that to be more metaphorical than it is, but I think I've spent 18 of the last 24 hours asleep on an air mattress, where I collapsed last night and again this afternoon. My head is achy and stuffy, and I'm just kind of vaguely miserable and totally wiped out. Fortunately, though I don't have the wherewithal to work, I have it to blog. And blog I will!

There are some really fantastic things going on, schooling-wise, and some really not fantastic ones. Let's start with the good before we move on to complaining, shall we?

I love my Organizing Information class. It's one of the five "core" courses people in the general, academic, or digital track are required to take before graduating, and the professor who teaches it is just so great. She obviously cares very much about the subject, but she doesn't take it so seriously as to take the fun out of it. Actually, it isn't even just that she cares about the subject: she cares that we understand it. After every assignment she asks us if we learned from it and thought it was worthwhile, and she seems to really listen to our feedback. I think I will take the Cataloguing class next semester because her class has been so good; honestly, I'm really thinking about going into metadata librarianship (of the "data wrangling" variety, as Mike Bolam put it in his guest lecture, not the really hardcore cataloguing). ... Which sounds so flakey, as I re-read it. But it isn't just that I like the professor; I really find the subject interesting. I liked English classes because I liked grammar. The structure--diagramming sentences--really pleased me. I think engineering and computer programming--and sorting through data with Matlab (which, inexplicably, I miss very much)--appealed to me for the same kind of reason. There's just something very comforting about hierarchies and trees and structure. (Not that I apply any organizational acumen to my own life, but I imagine that's part of what appeals to me about studying the subject.)

My Digital Libraries class is also pretty good; I'm frustrated with trying to use the poorly-documented digital library software (I admit, Dreamhost's CGI support page is above my level), and I'm kind of nervous about the midterm, but there's a lot of good content in the class. Some of the topics are a review, but even that isn't a bad thing. I wish I had time to sit down with Lesk's book (Understanding Digital Libraries), to just read it cover-to-cover. Honestly, I'd settle for the time to really do the assigned readings in depth, rather than skimming through them in a hurry. (I'll get to that in a minute; honestly, the time requirement for this class is very reasonable, and I'm selling it shorter, in the time I give to it, than I would like.) But our professor encourages us to ask questions, lets us use blogs (instead of horrible, horrid, nasty Blackboard) to communicate with one another (as you know), and is just generally very understanding and accommodating. It's a good class.

My Management class ... isn't bad. I mean, I've never liked fuzzy business speak. It brings my hackles up and evokes a feeling of distrust in me (yes, even after a couple of years of consulting in the DC area... especially after that, actually). The assignments are kind of poorly defined, which I found frustrating until I started seeing the grades (both mine and the averages); I think perhaps the expectations for the assignments are also poorly defined, so the grading is fairly lenient. On the up side, two of the three group projects we're doing for the class are really relevant and useful to us in a real-world way; we will be writing a "management portfolio"--with a needs assessment, mission statement, vision statement, staffing plan, budget, and business plan--and a grant proposal (which the professor keeps referring to as though it is part of the other assignment, but very few of us joined up with partners who are in our management portfolio groups; also, most of the class seems to have gone out and found real-world grants to write up, whereas our management portfolios are all fictional). The irrelevant project is a slide show put together with a group of 5-6 people, to share with our "virtual groups" of 15 people chosen randomly from the in-person and online students. We're supposed to discuss these slides in the group discussion boards, but nobody cares; most of my group logged in, made a token comment, and never checked back again, the week my slideshow went up. (My feelings weren't hurt.)

The big downside of the Management class, other than the vague hand wavyness of it (that's a management class for you) and the fact that most of it is repetition from my two-day Project Management class at BAH, is the fact that the management portfolio and grant proposal are to be done in groups of five and two, respectively, on very different topics (which, again, the professor doesn't seem to realize?), and turned in on the same day. The five-person group is deliberately chosen so that on-campus and online students are grouped together--one physical meeting will happen, less than a month before the project is due, for no more than an hour, and everything else is to be done online. I know the professor thinks this is a beneficial look into real-world working conditions, but I've done real-world distance collaboration, and there's usually a little more in-person, or at least teleconferenced, interaction. So that's frustrating. But group work in school is always frustrating; I've gone through worse.

Aaaand... I saved the class I like the least for last. (Say that five times fast.) It's required of every single person who enters the program, regardless of their "specialization." This semester, as an "experiment," they have something like 250 people in the class, half of them online. There are roughly ten professors running it, and as nearly as I can tell, each one was allowed to pick a book or two that they'd like us to read. They didn't, you know, whittle it down after that discussion, either, or choose a set of topics to really focus on: we are expected to read 15 books, on various subjects, clumped together in a sometimes arbitrary fashion. We are asked to write 400 word essays about these sometimes arbitrary clumps of books, citing outside reviews, roughly every other week, and to post them in our randomly-chosen "group"'s discussion board. This week, we wrote about two books; next week (actually next week, not two weeks hence), we write about four. Roughly zero percent of the class [I've asked something like thirty people] reads every book, or even half the books, before "winging it," as I say, and it kind of shows in reading their essays... (Sorry, my group! I am sure you're very smart people, and I'm sure my essays also leave something to be desired.) Anyway, on the off weeks, we're given big lists of articles and asked giant questions ("How has the WWW influenced the way in which ideas, information, and knowledge are exchanged? .. blah blah, Semantic Web"), which we are to answer in 250 word essays. Every Thursday, we turn in the "big" essay, and every Monday, we are expected to write a response agreeing with one of our colleagues' points and disagreeing with another. And then there are various other discussions we're supposed to participate in, on Blackboard, as well. I think they also expect us to go to lecture, though I'm not sure how many people still do that. (Which is a shame. I actually really like the one professor's lectures, but because of the class size, they had to move it to the far side of Oakland, near nothing else that interests me and up a smoker-filled hill from the closest bus stop. I'm not kidding; half the nurses at UPMC seem to smoke, and they all do it between the bus stop and class. The two times I went, I was miserable with asthma for half of the two-hour lecture. So, I decided to watch them online. But the online software is buggy, so the times I've tried, it's often frozen on me part-way through. So I'm sporadic in watching it, now.) This kind of workload isn't really conducive to, you know, having multiple classes and a job, and I find their lack of selectivity and realism--and particularly their lack of flexibility in the face of students' complaints--deeply frustrating.

My big complaint about the program overall is that it feels very undergraduate. No kidding: we have to have our advisors' signatures on our class signup forms--1) we have forms, rather than doing it online, and 2) I didn't have to have an advisor's signature even as an undergrad, that I remember. (I think I had to certify that I'd met with him, but he didn't sign anything.) There are no research assistantships available--internships, most of them outside of Pitt, yes, but those are only allowed to provide up to half our tuition--and we are stuck into a 250-person lecture, then graded on our participation in discussion boards. I realize the program lets in pretty much everyone who applies, so they have to do a certain amount of hand-holding, but couldn't there be, I don't know, an "advanced class," for people who've worked in the real world and don't need to be condescended to?

My second biggest complaint is that the focus--at least this semester, in the particular classes that are taking up the bulk of my time--seems to be on technology, rather than on library skills. Now, it isn't that I don't care what effect Google is having on libraries, or what we should expect the future of the printed word to be, but those things will be different in five years. Also, you know, I already understand technology fairly well. I think it's fantastic that my colleagues with less technical backgrounds are getting this kind of exposure--we need more technical knowledge in the field!--but it is really frustrating to me: I learn technology in my free time; I want to learn about libraries while I'm at school.

My third complaint is about Blackboard. I'll tag this post with the "Blackboard" tag so you can click it and go read all about that, if you care to. Part of that, which I did not cover in the previous post, has to do with changing our in-person classes around and making the bulk of our class discussion happen, as they like to say, virtually. This bothers me. I just don't see the same candor, or quality, in the discussions we have on Blackboard, possibly in part because the professors are watching and grading us on our comments; people are hesitant to criticize or make mistakes. I really think the quality of online classes is lower than the quality of on-campus classes because of it.

Next up: how's the internship going? (Far less complaining in that post. Spoiler: I am enjoying it and learning a lot.)

[2670] Interesting article

2008-10-06T17:33:00.002-04:00

LibraryJournal covers some of the controversy around Google Books:

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6601209.html?nid=3285

[2670] Week 5 Reading Responses & Muddiest Point

2008-10-04T15:20:00.002-04:00

Muddy point: I'm not sure I understand what an attribute is in XML. We saw a schema and how to set an attribute up in it, but not how it would look in the XML that fit the schema. (Apologies for imprecise terminology.)

Reading response (digital preservation - list below):

I don't know a lot about physical archiving, but it seems surprising to me that archivers didn't figure out immediately, when beginning digital projects, that of course the rules would be different, and different strategies would have to be employed. (Hindsight is 20/20, yes.)

I keep thinking that the problem of digital preservation shouldn't be so hard. We still have tape drives, after all--which are not so good for on-the-fly access, but do very well at storing large amounts of data for a long time. Why should 160GB hard drives, perhaps arranged RAID-style, not work out for a similarly large amount of time? Do we predict that we will move away from hard drives so soon? (We might! But it isn't as though we'd magically lose the ability to access them right away.) When you migrate to a new technology, migrate your archives, too; it seems logical. I don't think the cost of memory is going to skyrocket, any time soon. I wonder if maybe some kind of networked storage service is going to be the way to go--one institution does all the work for a bunch of others? (I'm thinking of a colloquium of universities more than a corporation, here.)

http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~dlwkshop/paper_hedstrom.pdf
http://www.dpconline.org/docs/lavoie_OAIS.pdf
http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/handbook/index.html
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july07/littman/07littman.html