FLIPpity doo dah

I'm fortunate enough to work in a library that has a pretty active new-, future-, and experienced-but-interested-in-new-librarians' issues group (was that a parallelism win or fail? who can say?), Future Librarians and Information science Professionals, or FLIP, which was definitely one of the things that I found attractive about the job, when I interviewed. I just attended my first meeting today, where we talked about one member's move into a new job on campus—it sounds like a great opportunity—and how that relates to our library and the campus at large. People also asked how I was settling in, which was nice. And we talked at some length about various library schools' approaches to distance education, the shortage of cataloging professors, and the recent LJ Placements & Salaries Survey results (more analysis and discussion here and, to go ahead and expose my feelings on the matter, here). It was definitely good to have that dedicated time to sit with a group of coworkers I don't necessarily see every day (some I do, some I don't) and discuss issues, both close to home and about the profession at large.

As far as the Salaries & Placements thing goes, I really feel like I've beaten the subject to death, already, though that was based on pre-economic-crash data, which may or may not have been all that compelling. Given LJ's recent findings, I feel validated in my anger (if not in my wording)—though I would honestly rather have been wrong, in this case. My point: the ethical argument for keeping so many library schools open, accepting absurdly high numbers of applicants, and pumping out graduates, when there are so few jobs, continues to elude me. There's the argument that this is just a pendulum swing, that it'll be fine in a few years, but that argument is rarely backed up with any data; meanwhile, libraries are closing and laying off people left and right, filling the marketplace with a bunch of experienced librarians, on top of all the new graduates (and we're supposed to believe they'll be reopening as soon as the economy starts an upswing?); retirement funds aren't exactly up (30 percent losses take a while to fix, even in a great economy); there's a frightening trend toward part-time, rather than full-time, positions; and there continue to be vague potential future threats to the field (which, if one is to believe Tim Spalding, are dire—see his discussion of ebooks today). (Not sure I agree with Mr. Spalding, but there are plenty of very real threats out there, in addition to the possible threat ebooks might pose.) Even if everything does right itself in a few years, what are this year's and next year's and the following year's graduates supposed to do? Why is the survival of 60+ library schools considered more important than the survival of the profession and its newest members? How, I ask again, do the faculty and leadership of these schools live with themselves?

I don't understand the lack of anger. Are we all just so consumed by the business of keeping our libraries running that we don't have time to worry about the 5000+ kids being duped into $30k of debt for, essentially, nothing? (That's assuming 2000 or so do find jobs that pay some portion of their debts—not a wild assumption, but not a given, either.) I get the lack of action—none of these schools will be shutting down or shrinking their program any time soon. That would cut into their bottom line, and schools were hit hard by the economic downturn, too. Library programs are a great source of cash. So, no action, sure—upsetting, but understandable. But why so little outcry?

I got sidetracked. That was going to be half a paragraph. But it turns out the degree-in-hand (or, well, in-the-mail) and the job don't suddenly make me comfortable with my own library school experience, with the general employment rate for new librarians, or with the continuation of the cycle for current and future library students. Who knew.

I feel sort of guilty talking about it, now that I've ranted about the joblessness problem, but my own job really is going well. I've had a cold all week, which kind of set back my learning schedule a bit, but even through the haze of cold medicine, I feel like I'm getting a grip on a lot of the things I need to know, both technically and interpersonally (?). I've got the bulk of the committee I'm supposed to put together, I went to the first meeting of a committee I'm supposed to join (and, truth be told, it's a pretty cool committee—all about eLearning), I have a list of tasks for the next year, I have a huge to-do list (both things given to me and things I came up with and have to run by that first committee I mentioned), I have a plant in my office, and I haven't been stopped when trying to leave through the back door, behind the circulation desk, in over a week. :) In short, this is starting to feel like "my job," rather than, say, someone else's job that I'm just trying to cover.

Almost a librarian!

One project stands between me and full librarian status! (Unless you're one of those sticklers who thinks you have to have some number of years in the field, first. But my title, once I start work, will be both Assistant Professor of Library Science and Web Services Librarian--I hope I can put both on my business card :)--so I feel pretty good about going ahead and using the L word.) And I have enough of it done that I could probably turn it in now and graduate. At this point, I'm just trying for the "A."

I have a couple of posts planned--one requires me to steel myself and read the technophobic rantings of the anti-Kindle pro-death-of-trees fringe (I tell myself they're the fringe, but I honestly don't know), and the other is kind of a review of the Pitt library school experience. I'll try to stick to the positive and the constructive, because I see no point in discussing any problems to which I can't offer solutions. Apparently, each graduating student has the right to an exit interview with the Dean of the school; I'm tempted to take him up on that. I have a lot to say.

Anyway, I feel like being finished with classes and within sight of finishing all of my projects is a mile marker, something worth posting about in its own right. I wish I could say I feel jubilant and proud, but all I really feel is exhausted, in debt, and anxious to move on to the next thing. ... Not that that's so very bad a feeling, honestly, because I am so excited about the work I'll get to do, the library I'll work at, the coworkers I'll work with, and the town I'll live in! But there's an awful lot of logistics (and driving!) between me and the start of that job.

The Past Few Weeks

I make no secret of my loathing for summer classes. It isn't the standard "I'd rather have a break," though I suppose that factors in. Rather, it's the inherent lack of balance. The summer semester at Pitt is 3-4 weeks (depending how you count) shorter than the other two, and like everywhere, the professors who are stuck teaching summer classes have to decide whether to try to fit an entire semester's worth of material in--or short-change students who are paying as much for these classes as they would for classes in real semesters.

This summer's professors seem to be trying to find a balance--definitely, they are packing in more than fits in 12 weeks, but I don't think it's quite as much as they'd hit in 15. That's probably the fairest approach, in this situation.

I really believe Pitt's LIS program would be better if they would not run by the rest of the school's semester system during the year--they already run more people through summer classes than the university is designed to handle, which implies, to me, that they are not unduly concerned with "how the rest of Pitt does it." Instead, they should cut a week out of fall and a week out of spring, in order to make summer two weeks longer (since most things are pretty much closed in the summer, students are used to not having the services they need). It would not remove the imbalance entirely, but it would be a good step toward eliminating it.

Other than summer classes--and at some point I'll talk about what I'm taking and what I think of it--I have been busy with conferences and interviews--not that many of the latter, but enough to be noticeable in the scheme of my semester, certainly. (I could write up SLA, but the time has passed. I will try to blog about ALA, though.) I'm composing a series of posts about interviews--dos and don'ts, mostly--but I think I'm going to wait until I have a job to really discuss any of it in depth. My desire to help others who are about to be--or who are currently--in my shoes wars, somewhat, with my desire not to damage my own prospects. I was a little surprised--and pleased, with a tiny bit of heartburn, wondering "what else did I say?"--when a recent interviewer mentioned something I'd said months ago in my blog. (Mostly, I was pleased. Sometimes I wonder whether what I say is even a little bit interesting.) So, that's one bit of advice: people do read what you put out there. I still have few enough followers that maybe Google Analytics will show spikes when search committees decide I'm worth looking into. :)

On the being-busy-and-conference-preparation front, please do come see the Book Cart Drill Team's Pittsburgh Performance, this Thursday, 4pm, Posvar Hall. We'll still be selling raffle tickets, and the final drawing will take place after the performance!



Other posts in the hopper: comparison/contrast of the MLIS program with engineering graduate school (a coworker asked for that, verbally, and it got me thinking); some thoughts on library school in general and Pitt specifically; hopefully an announcement of a Book Cart Drill Team win at ALA :); other ALA posts, including possibly some discussion of the MLIS program accreditation discussions going on there; hopefully an announcement that I got a job, followed by discussion of the moving process; and maybe some musings on the transition from engineering to library work--I should see if I can get a guest blogger in for that one, since he's gone a different path than I plan to. :) After that, here's hoping I'm changing the focus of the blog, somewhat, from library school to librarianship!

Two down, one to go

I'm officially finished with my second semester of library school. It was an inauspicious ending, with my final project for the reference class cut short by travel to my partner's grandmother's funeral. (Family comes first, even at the end of the semester.) I got fine grades in my other two classes, but, yeah, I'll be a bit short of a 4.0 GPA; I hear employers don't look, anyway. While at the funeral, we both caught some kind of terrible cold (nothing porcine, I'm sure), so that's eaten up the bulk of this week. I'm trying to get a little bit of cleaning done, at least, and I'll hopefully spend the bulk of next week on the institutional repository. I'd like to be about done with those hours before the semester starts.

I'll be back to classes the following week. Between three classes, my Aviary independent study, final Book Kart Drill Team preparations, two conferences, and hopefully interviewing, I'll be busy. But three months really isn't a lot, and after that, I'll have an MLIS! And hopefully some cool Perl/PHP/JavaScript stuff on my website.

Waffling and indecision

I've changed my summer course schedule twice, now. On the bright side, all of this fiddling has left me with courses I'm excited to be taking!

• INFSCI 2955: Special Topics: Systems – “Web Engineering” (Monday nights)
• LIS 2850: Library’s Role in Teaching and Learning, aka Library Instruction (Four weekends, Friday nights and Saturdays)
• LIS 2184: Legal Issues in Information Handling: Copyright & Fair Use in the Digital Age (Wednesday afternoons)

I also have approval to count my Aviary work as an independent study, which is pretty fantastic. I'm setting aside a day a week for that--maybe more, if I can compress my work schedule enough to allow for it--as well as some time to finish my current field placement, which will extend into the summer.

I'm still in the process of scheduling the Book Kart Drill Team practices. And I'm going to the annual conferences of both ALA and SLA, which will be a great opportunity, though I know from ER&L what conference attendance does to one's schedule, during school. I'll also run for a spot on the executive board of SCALA again; that's been pretty rewarding, and I want to see the group into the fall.

I should probably leave some room in my schedule for doing homework. Hmm.

Anyway, it's a busy and exciting summer. I think I'll learn a lot.

Retreading old ground

The argument over whether the MLIS is useful/relevant/necessary to library work, particularly in academic libraries, has raged on for years. I admit, having been through roughly 2/3 of an MLIS program myself, now, I'm a little more on the "no" side than the "yes." I'm centrist enough to see both sides, and, certainly, I've learned things in my classes. I don't think the degree, sans professional experience, is worth anything at all, but, on the flip side, I'm not prepared to claim that professional experience alone is enough.

I've been exposed to high-falutin' ideals in coursework and seen the truth of their applicability (or lack thereof) in real library situations; similarly, I've heard of technologies in my digital libraries class that I then got to talk about with real library professionals at a conference. Would I have bothered noticing the larger issues under debate in my workplace, or bothered discussing these technologies at the conference, if I hadn't had the in-class exposure to them? Hard to say. There's always been a feeling of kismet to my intellectual life--different experiences happen in different areas of my life around the same time and build on each other. I've always felt great wonder about this process, but maybe that's just how we all learn (see "experimental bias"). It isn't as though the process started with coursework: I read every blog and news feed I could, over the spring and summer before school started, and a lot of what I read has been talked about [sometimes ad nauseam] in my coursework or has shown up in my library jobs, both public and academic.

So maybe all that's needed is intellectual curiosity combined with experience? I don't know; I'm not here to make a proclamation either way. I'm not all that experienced, myself, and I'm sure my view will continue to change over time.

To the point, though: apparently, ACRL thought this whole thing would be worthwhile to debate, and LJ thought the debate was worth covering.

I was a little unimpressed by some of the arguments presented--whether this is poor summary by LJ or whether the argument is just too stale to interest the debaters, I'm not sure. The MLS "fosters shared values"? (I'm quoting LJ, not Liz Bishoff, here.) I am not convinced that a year--or even two--of courses that are, for financial reasons, stuffed to the brim with students, or worse, taken only online, will change one's values dramatically. The full phrase LJ used was "it fosters shared values--values essential to the transition to the future of the digital library." I think I've made my feelings clear, re: the amount of preparation the average library student receives, as far as "the transition to the future of the digital library" (awkward phrasing). I just don't see it.

But the other side wasn't wildly impressive, either. The argument that--and this is a quote, according to LJ, of Arnold Hirsholn--the library Master's is “devoid of anything unique to librarianship" seemed strange to me. What, really, is unique to librarianship? Like MBAs, we should learn to manage. (I don't know about them, but we don't, really.) Like teachers, we should learn to present thoughts and ideas coherently. Like anyone in the entire world, we should learn to conduct ourselves professionally--and it deeply frustrates and saddens and, honestly, scares me that we waste course time on this, where other Masters programs do not. Like anyone in customer service ... we don't really need a Master's degree for that, though, do we?

Putting aside anti-censorship ethics, the only thing really unique to librarianship is a certain facility with data--an ability to find things other people can't find--and I don't really feel like my coursework has given me that at all. I came in with better-than-average search skills, both in books and in Google, and most of the really library-specific search skills I've gained have been gained on the job. Even the one course dedicated to teaching us those skills just kind of points out that there are things called "bibliographic resources" and "encyclopedias," then sets us loose to find the answers to some contrived reference questions, each week.

This whole discussion has given me an idea. Perhaps we should require some professional experience, in libraries or elsewhere, (like an MBA program does) before we allow anyone into library school. Similarly, a certain ability with computers should be demonstrated. That would allow us to drop most of the really time-wasting aspects, the portion of the program devoted to bringing undergraduates and technophobes up to speed, and focus on the important theoretical and ethical issues.

I mean, it's just a thought. But I think it's clear that some kind of change should be made. Given that the MLS is still a requirement for many jobs--and that most librarians agree there should be some kind of formal educational experience--I'd prefer to see the discussion revolve around fixing the clear problems with the MLS. Better, I'd like to see the schools make some real effort in that direction.

Calmer in the morning

I was in a bit of a tizzy last night, and cooler heads have reminded me that sometimes rebuttals happen. Still, the rebuttal (which made a few sweeping statements of its own, I thought) was pre-economic-downturn. The special libraries that decreased the size of the applicant pool are no longer as numerous, or as well funded. (While I realize that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data," something like three special libraries have closed in Pittsburgh, recently.)

I still believe that continuing to allow enrollment increases--or even keeping enrollment steady--would be short-sighted and unethical. I still think there are too many library schools. I still think 90% acceptance rates are a crime. But I am no longer going to storm my dean's office, I think.

Anger and frustration

Did you know there are roughly 5000 MLS/MLIS graduates per year? And if the 2-month sample of job openings discussed in this article in Library Journal is representative, there are roughly 400 full-time entry-level jobs being offered per year (this was circa 2005--imagine what it is now).

Yet, Pitt's iSchool is hiring five new faculty members (to replace others--no new positions that I'm aware of) and making no noises about decreasing admissions. I have no reason to believe the other 61 ALA-accredited library programs are much different.

How is this ethical? How do the deans of these schools sleep at night? Also, why are people still applying? (It might be that story that keeps going around about all of the librarians who are going to retire any moment now. Magically, despite the losses everyone's sustained in retirement funds. And of course people retiring from a lifetime of library work will leave entry-level positions open in their wake.)

My concern a few months ago, upon hearing that the acceptance rate in our program exceeds 90%, was that it was "watering down" the profession (I'm not trying to demean myself or my classmates, but even if we were a truly exceptional bunch of applicants, numbers like that shouldn't happen). Given Pitt's high ranking, I assume we aren't some crazy outlier; there must be other programs with comparable numbers. And that is a serious problem.

But then to learn that the bulk of the graduates in our school and others will not be finding full-time professional positions, on top of that? It frustrates and angers me. (Full disclosure: I'm one of the lucky ones; I can go back to my previous field if no library offers me a position before my loans come due. But I no longer see the MLIS I'm earning as the valuable asset--the clear gateway to a profession in which I could really improve the world--that I thought it would be. I am disenchanted, I guess, on top of my frustration and anger.)

Am I the only one? No, you know what? I know I'm not the only one. But why aren't we doing something? Why aren't library students picketing in the streets--or at least our deans' offices? Why aren't we writing to our schools' chancellors/presidents, to the ALA Council, to local and regional newspapers, to anyone who will listen, to prevent yet another crop of students from making the same mistakes we did--such as believing the ALA's over-optimistic job predictions? (Maybe we just don't know where to send our correspondence. Who listens to library students? I mean, there are 5000 of us graduating each year; individually, we're expendable.) Why aren't we demanding answers from our professors? Why do we let advice seeker after advice seeker on blogs and forums and listservs wander happily off, thinking their BA in history and semester of shelving books will be sufficient background to get a job in the library profession, if they just get that MLIS?

What's wrong with us?

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.

A reflection on distance education (part two)

(A continuation from here.)

So, the solution? First, retool online courses: convince your video software provider to offer real-time streaming (ideally with a text chat function, though that could be obtained elsewhere and kludged in), or move to a different vendor. I understand that this removes some of the benefit of a distance course--namely, the flexibility of timing--and, yes, I would support a recording feature for students with exceptional circumstances. But I believe that attending school--particularly graduate school--should require some tradeoffs in one's schedule. Frankly, recording a course for students to watch later is not even remotely comparable to teaching them interactively, and to treat a distance education provided in this manner as equivalent to an in-person education is dishonest.

With classes held in real-time, the professor can stop to address comments coming in via the text stream. (Specifically, I would support a plan whereby the text stream shows up on the screen with the Powerpoint slides, by the way. That seems to be the best way to do it: no need for repetition of the question, and I believe that knowing everyone could see their comment would encourage students to treat it similarly to in-person questions.) The feedback of facial expressions is still lost, in the case of online-only courses, but when they are given the opportunity to do so, students can be trusted to ask, if they really need further elaboration. In "blended" courses, where there is a video camera in a classroom full of students, any school that is serious about providing distance education needs to find the money, somewhere, to purchase microphones for the student seating area. In the meantime, at least for Pitt, the text stream and a handheld mic could be treated as a stopgap measure; online students can remind those who are there in person that they can't be heard and to use the microphone.

As for course discussion, I think the signal-to-noise ratio is going to stay low in the electronic realm. I think it's a feature of the medium, and while it might be combated in any individual course, if a professor cares enough to enact a strict "commenting culture," no easy global solution presents itself. I figure more-comments-than-sense is probably a given, but whether it is or not, I still support mailing lists or multi-contributor blogs, rather than discussion boards--yes, my opinion on this hasn't changed since last semester. If anything, my classes with monolithic discussion board structure, this semester, have cemented this opinion. I follow AUTOCAT and ten other mailing lists, and I follow more than 60 RSS feeds; I could certainly handle the amount of traffic my classmates would generate, if it came in an easily digestible format, such as e-mail or RSS. But it is overwhelming when it occurs in an interface like Blackboard's (slow, poorly threaded, not customizable [for students], with notifications of updates turned off by default).

I am beginning to like the idea of wikis, when professors want students to see one another's work in a way that is not e-mail or blog friendly. I'm thinking of our most recent cataloging assignment, where each group turned in one or two answers, and we were asked to compare and examine them in light of some really finicky punctuation rules (you'd be surprised at how different they were). It is impossible, in a Blackboard discussion board, to hold two submissions up against one another without opening up multiple tabs. Far better would be for each group to add their answer to a single page on a collective wiki, or even a collective blog, so that any two answers are an easy scroll away from one another.

Anyway, now that I have started to lay out what I think is an implementable solution, I'm curious what others think. Any ideas? Additions or deletions to my ideas?

A reflection on distance education (part one)

Now, folks, I'm pretty clearly in the technophile camp in most discussions. I still hold the (naive?) belief that it's possible to write an interface that library users could actually use to harvest articles, or at least citations, from all of a library's various books and databases, without needing librarians' intervention or hours of training in syntax. I have a laptop that runs OSX and Windows, an iPod, a cell phone, and a digital camera, and I know how to use them all. I spend significant time playing on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us, and a good four or more other Web 2.0(ish) applications. I live by Google Reader and Google calendar, and five different e-mail accounts all filtering into my Gmail (invisibly to the people who e-mail me). I've built a digital library, I add content to a digital repository every week, and I contribute to four blogs. I am very good with technology. I like technology. I think technology can fix many of our problems.

Furthermore, I have successfully coordinated documentation and scheduling for a team of 60+ people spread over multiple organizations spanning four timezones. I have also designed a wireless system with colleagues in Michigan and California (I was in Virginia), and I worked almost as much from home as I did from the office. I am beginning to think digital reference is the single most important service an academic library can offer, and I truly enjoy my weekly one-hour IM reference session, as well as my coverage of e-mail reference. I'm good at distance work.

So when I tell you that distance education, as it is currently done, is not a good alternative to on-campus education, believe me, I'm not being a short-sighted technophobe or a touchy-feely "communication has to happen in person" drip. I'm serious, and I'm probably correct. Better: I've got a suggestion for how to begin to solve the problem (because I'm also not stupid--I know distance education is not going away). Let me tell you about my coursework now, and then I'll begin to lay out a solution in my next post.

Two of my classes have serious online components, this semester; one is online-only and is taught by one of the best professors I've ever had the opportunity to study with. I know, from taking her class last semester, that she's fantastic. This semester, though, I've found that I get very little from her lectures, or, in fact, her class, and I think I've put my finger on why: it is not sufficiently interactive; she talks into a microphone, and there are Powerpoint slides, but there's no way for me to raise my hand in real time and ask a question or make a comment as it occurs to me. I can't walk up to her after class and comment on something she said. She can't tell when half of the class is staring at her, dumbfounded by what she is saying, and we can't go off track into those wonderful side discussions where, in most courses (and my course with her last semester was much more the rule than the exception), the real learning occurs. We listen to the lecture, and there are discussion boards where we can post comments and questions after the fact. Our assignments are given to us over Blackboard, returned to the professor via Blackboard or e-mail, and presumably graded in Blackboard. Sometimes, our assignments require that we post to Blackboard, so we can see what other students are doing, if we care to read through 40+ other students' comments.*

My other class is also taught by an excellent professor--admittedly, I have less experience with her classes, but from the semester so far, I have to say, I like her style. I always get something out of her class. Except for that one time when I was too sick to go in and watched the course on Panopto. That was terrible, because, like any good professor, she is interactive in her teaching style and tries to engage her students. She asks questions and encourages students to ask questions of her. It works excellently for people who are there in person, but for someone watching the recorded version, it is terrible. You can't hear the in-person students' comments, so you're getting half-conversations, which is actually worse than if the professor just stood up there and lectured. She could repeat everything the students say, perhaps, but I suspect that would wind up annoying everyone involved. And there is still a Blackboard discussion component to the class, which is non-ideal, as well.

Perhaps online courses are the great equalizer: fantastic professors are brought down nearly to the level of their most sub-par colleagues (I had a couple of worse in-person experiences in engineering school than these online courses, I admit), and even the most excellent students are reduced to passively watching the lecture and waiting anywhere from an hour to a few days for any comment they might make or question they might be asked to be acknowledged and given a response. Their active engagement in the content is not encouraged, and so they do not provide it to the extent that they could.

*A sidebar: I love the democratic nature of the Web, the fact that we all have a voice and can all post our thoughts and opinions. I believe that some of the other students have things to teach the class, and perhaps, for in-person courses, it's a shame when only the people who are brave enough to speak up in class have that opportunity. On the other hand, people only speak up in class when they have something they feel is worthwhile to say, and discussions in Blackboard do not work that way. We are encouraged to post--in fact, our participation grades count on it--and although we are told "do not post unless you have something meaningful to say," there still seems to be an awful lot of noise to it all. The quality level is definitely lower, and the benefits of the "discussion" are dubious at best.

(Continued here.)

Current courses and other topics of interest (to me, at least)

I've been meaning to give an updated run-down of the classes I'm taking and my general opinions of them, but school and life and bronchitis (yeah, again, but I'm on the mend) got in the way, like they do. To make it up to you--and because I am waiting for my wonderful SO to come pick me up so I don't have to stand in the cold and watch full buses go by--I'll talk about extra-curriculars and such, as well.

Retrieving Information: I should have taken this course last semester. (I really mean this course; I can't speak to whether or not I should have taken the version of this course that was actually offered. It had a slightly different teaching staff and some different assignments.) The textbook is pretty good and kind of surprisingly useful to me, specifically: I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I don't know the difference between certain kinds of library resources, and I'll be learning that very basic knowledge through this course. Had I known this stuff, going into my internship at the Engineering & Science library, I think I would have done a better job last semester. (Not that I did poorly. But there's always room for improvement.) Just generally, I think it will make me a better librarian. I also like that it's taught by a practitioner--if any course should be, it's this one.

Introduction to Cataloging and Classification: No surprise that I like this class. I liked grammar in high school, too. Also, it's taught by a really fantastic professor. Now, from recent discussions off AUTOCAT, I'm kind of in a tizzy over the oldness of FRBR and RDA and the relative lack of implementation--or alternatives--put forth by the library community. And so I am studying this not just for the nitty-gritty rules of cataloging, which interest and intimidate me, but perhaps even more for the sociological understanding of how catalogers think and why change is so hard for the cataloging--and library--community at large. Also, you know, I kind of still want the title "Metadata Librarian." I liked scripting, in limited quantities, and would be interested in doing some serious data wrangling; this class will bring me one step closer to being really qualified to do that.

Issues in Academic Librarianship: Another fantastic course, exploring various ... well, issues faced by academic librarians and academic libraries. The professor is great--she actually treats us like graduate students, which left a few of us in mild shock and will require readjustment, after last semester's freshman seminar. (Yeah, still bitter.) Her co-instructor and TA will bring some excellent insight to the class, as well. There's a lot of reading, a fair bit of discussion, and a complete split between the in-person and online versions of the class. I cannot begin to tell you how grateful I am that she decided to run the course that way.

Resources for Young Adults: Dropped. Would have been a really good course and almost* entirely worth my time, if I had it to give, but the amount of work required was all out of proportion to the likelihood that I'd ever get to use what I learned. I'm probably going to be an academic librarian, and, furthermore, I'm probably never going to be a parent; there's very little reason I need to read 20+ YA books and discuss, in depth, the issues facing today's youth. Though, yeah, the 20+ books would have been fun. ... Also, I've just got too much else going on to be able to give my full attention to four courses.

Field Placement: (Institutional Repository at CMU.) This is going well, although I feel like I'm moving very slowly and taking up a lot of my site supervisor's time. I've uploaded 15+ documents, all but the first 5 without supervision, as well as harvesting a few more than that, some with supervision and some without. I think I pretty much understand the whole workflow and can really begin to contribute, now. So that's exciting.

As for the Aviary, which is not actually a course (though I do hope I can make it count as a field placement for the summer), that's going pretty well, too. I have the bulk of the journals organized and inventoried, and I've been comparing the collections against Worldcat and Science Direct, to see where the gaps are. There are a surprising number of older ornithological publications available online, which is pretty nice. I'm sad that I won't get to see the library reach its full potential: the construction work for the Aviary's expansion won't be done until 2010, so my library will continue to be scattered across multiple rooms. I did have a pretty heartening thought: probably not that many librarians can say with certainty, "I have touched every single book in my library." Although I'll never be formally employed by the Aviary, so it is not in all senses "my library," I will still be able to say that, at least until the quarter after I leave, when the new journals come.

Other general news: 1) I'm VP of SCALA and am co-directing the Book Kart Drill Team. We're still picking songs and putting together a routine, not to mention thinking of funding options. We aren't much past square one-point-five, I think, right now. Lots of work to be done. 2) I'm still Membership Coordinator of SLAPSG. We'll be doing a special tour at the Aviary on Monday, which is pretty exciting--and has pretty much nothing to do with my volunteering there, except I happened to ask about both at the same time. 3) I'm trying to do a little bit of crafting, to help maintain my sanity. I'm going to have a separate blog for that and other not-at-all-library-or-engineering-related things, but it's not up yet. 4) I'll send you a gift and sing your praises in my blog and, if you want, answer a hard reference question for you if you can figure out why my CSS doesn't work with Blogger and how to fix it. (I don't care whether it's a javascript workaround that you write me or whether it's a Blogger setting I tweak or whether it's just some added CSS; I just want it fixed, without breaking the rest of my site.) The class I call "content" is the problem; everywhere else, it auto-sizes properly, but it just won't auto-size through Blogger. (It did, for a while, briefly, and then it just stopped.) I've got a number hardcoded into my template, which is not just inelegant but actually causes problems (say when someone resizes my text, or views a single entry on its own, or I forget to update the number after I write a longer- or shorter-than-average post). If you're up for the challenge, I will happily send you my Blogger template, and you can probably find my CSS file yourself.

*It did have several essays-in-300-words-posted-to-Blackboard, with required responses of 150 words, the latter of which is only a small step above "utterly useless," in my experience.

One down, two-ish to go

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.

Management -- Level up!

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.)

Musings on Next Semester

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!)

My Grad School Life

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!)

Further Musings

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

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.)

Digital Scholarship and Libraries - Essay

(This isn't part of my essay, but I like to state my biases: I work in an engineering and science library, and the journal costs are debilitating. I also signed away rights to papers I wrote as an engineer and regret it.)

Changes in scholarly communication--particularly in scholarly publishing--are challenging libraries in unprecedented ways. In the past libraries bought books or subscribed to journals and kept physical copies on the shelves in perpetuity. With the advent of electronic journals and researchers' demand for 24/7 access, libraries are moving away from an ownership model and are now effectively leasing access to electronic content, with indexing and preservation done by the publishers (Borgman 68). Unfortunately, because publishers own the content, libraries are forced to pay ever-increasing subscription fees to maintain access, sometimes paying multiple times for the same content, due to “bundling” (Borgman 112).

This is particularly concerning in the sciences: to gain tenure, one must be published in established journals, but to do so, one must give the publishers all rights to her content; campus libraries then pay dearly for the right to provide that content to other faculty and students. Aaronson describes the economic side of the problem both briefly and bitingly, claiming that most of the writing, typesetting, reviewing, editing, and even archiving and distribution of papers is done by academics with no charge to the publishers, while a single journal subscription might cost a library as much as $3000 a year (2007). Willinsky, addressing the greater picture, refers to this closed access to scientific findings as “human research capacity ... being wasted or going unrealized because of ... unnecessarily restricted access to the circulation of knowledge” (34).

Happily, the open access movement is gaining ground outside of the library community: last year's ruling requiring that NIH-funded research be made public within a year of first publication (Albanese 9/5)--to give the public access to research their tax dollars had funded--was slated to be challenged in Congress this month. The issue proved more contentious than expected, with “33 Nobel Prize-winning scientists” and “47 copyright experts and professors of law” writing in support of last year's ruling, while representatives of certain publishers continued pushing Congress to overrule it (Albanese 9/19). Ultimately, Congress postponed making a decision (Albanese 9/18). The publicity given to cases like this will help publicize and gain support for the open access movement.

As Lesk points out, governmental protection of intellectual property was intended to foster innovation but has often stifled it (294). Unfortunately, a clear path out of this morass eludes us; academics are reticent to change their methods (Aaronson), despite the success of over 1500 open access journals (Willinsky 26) and various “open science” initiatives. Journal publishers add some value, but the question of how much--and whether we are willing to continue trading away open scientific dialog--is difficult to answer.

Aaronson, S. (2007, December). “Review of The Access Principle by John Willinsky," MIT press, 2005. SIGACT News 38 (4), 19-23.

Albanese, A. “After Hearing, Sweeping Anti-NIH Bill To Be Shelved—for Now,” Library Journal, 9/18/2008. Available online: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6597267.html?nid=3285

Albanese, A. “In Blunt Terms, Copyright Lawyers, Researchers, Librarians Blast Anti-NIH Bill,” Library Journal, 9/19/2008 Available online: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6597446.html?nid=3603

Albanese, A. “NIH Public Access Policy To Face Copyright Challenge in Congress?” Library Journal, 9/5/2008 Available online: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6593398.html?nid=3310

Borgman, Christine. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. MIT Press, 2007. # ISBN-10: 0262026198; ISBN-13: 978-0262026192.

Lesk, Michael. Understanding Digital Libraries . Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 2004. 2nd Edition, ISBN: 1-55860-924-5.

Willinsky, John. The Access Principle: the Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. MIT Press, 2005, ISBN: 0262232421.

Libraries and the Internet

Q: Historically, librarians have served as custodians of recorded knowledge and gatekeepers to information resources. To what extent has the rise of networked information services begun to change the roles that librarians play? What other factors, if any, are contributing to changes in the roles of librarians?

A1: Before the rise of networked information services, the library was the only place to find certain kinds of information; as Elizabeth Mahoney pointed out in lecture, librarians in the past were expected to possess a great deal of knowledge, and, much like they do today, they knew their collections and could guide patrons to the right resource to answer their questions. Today, there is discussion of brick-and-mortar libraries facing "competition" from the Internet, especially Google, and there is some belief that librarians might be supplanted (Borgman p. 39). This concern is largely unwarranted: "Almost everything that is best about a library catalog is done badly by a web search service" (Arms). Put another way, someone with training and expertise is needed to choose and catalog information if it is to be retrieved in a meaningful way. Certainly, for many uses, Google and Wikipedia are probably sufficient, but as anyone who has tried doing real research with Google knows, there is a great deal of irrelevant and incorrect information available. This is where librarians come in: we provide authoritative and relevant information, both in the physical spaces of our libraries and in digital collections. Our job, as described by John MacColl of Edinburgh University, is "running pleasant study environments, containing expert staff, providing havens on our campus which are well respected, and building and running high-quality Web-based services" (MacColl). [Word count: 227.]

(A few days pass. I read everyone's responses to the question, and I formulate a response to their responses.)

A2: As several people's essays correctly pointed out, many users do not know how to use library resources or the Internet to get the information they need. Neal Stephenson, an author and technology expert, recently commented on the informational divide: he pointed out that, while many of us have "a sixth sense" about what is a credible source and what is not, many simply do not, and he believes the gap is increasing. Remedying this problem, I believe, is the key goal of the modern information professional, but to do so effectively, our efforts must extend beyond our libraries' physical and virtual walls; we must find ways to reach out to those in our communities who are being left behind.

Of course, that is not our only job. As one of my colleagues pointed out, to serve as effective gatekeepers, we must choose our libraries' electronic resources wisely; if we filter digital content, we should do so just as cautiously as we would when filtering books.

I disagree with the implication some people are making, perhaps unintentionally, that the problem of authority originated with the rise of the Internet. Certainly, the ease of "publication" on the Internet has deepened the problem, but books have long been published more for their potential sales value than for their factual content; choosing authoritative sources has never been trivial. Even Encyclopedia Britannica fails to impress, when compared to Wikipedia (Giles). [Word count: 235. I'm cutting out roughly 80 words and posting what I get after that, to get into the ballpark of the 150 word limit, but it will sound stilted and sad. I share my real thoughts with you, readers!]


Arms, William Y. “Automated Digital Libraries, How Effectively Can Computers Be Used for the Skilled Tasks of Professional Librarianship?” D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2000. 6(7/8). Available online: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july00/arms/07arms.html.

Borgman, Christine L. From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World. MIT Press, 2001. ISBN: 0-262-52345-0.

Giles, J. "Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head." Nature, 438, Dec 2005. pp. 900–901.

GoodReads Author Interview, Neal Stephenson. Available online: http://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/14.Neal_Stephenson?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Sep_newsletter. Retrieved Sept 21, 2008.

MacColl, J. "Google Challenges for Academic Libraries." Ariadne, Issue 46. Feb 2006. Available online: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/maccoll/

Review of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Bit of a preface: I hated this book. It contains some really good ideas, which are totally worth discussing, but the whole thing is so much wordier and denser than it needs to be (this, coming from me!); seriously, the ideas put forth in this 200-page monstrosity would have been better shared in a 5-10 page article. Still, we were assigned to read it for LIS 2000, Understanding Information, and asked to write a 400-word review, describing "how the content of this book relates to the information professions. Why do you think this is assigned reading?" followed by a 250-word addendum today, restating our opinion and describing how it had changed in reading the other students' essays, so I tried my best to get through it. Although I'm a little embarrassed to post this--and nervous that people who already took the class will say "No! You are so wrong! You'll see!"--I still think it might be useful to do so. I can't change my answer now (or, well, not after 11pm--but I promise not to, now that I've made this public), so I'm curious what people who've been through this hazing ritualbook have to say.

When we were assigned Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and asked to define its relevance to the information professions, I falsely assumed my professors were implying that our field is undergoing a "paradigm shift." Certainly, that argument can be made: With the Internet making information simultaneously more plentiful and harder to find, the effectiveness of distributed tagging and its effects on discussion of cataloguing, and the popularity of digital libraries and plans for automation thereof, nobody would seriously assert that our field is in any way stagnant or unchanging. On the other hand, paradigms point to fundamental thought patterns, and to suggest that our "paradigm" is in flux seems questionable: We still believe that information should be freely available to all, and we still strive to provide it in the best way available to us; that, I claim, is our true paradigm. That we have one at all shows the applicability of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; certainly, we make assumptions about the world and about information, and we consider questions relevant or irrelevant based on those assumptions. Just as scientists are not the impartial observers that we are told they should be, we are not the impartial information providers that we would like to be.

Although Kuhn has many interesting and widely applicable ideas, I do not agree that his is the best way to think about science and progress. Certainly, the book has its fans (London 2008), but I was pleased to see that I was not its only doubter: Weinberg (1998), for instance, disagrees with nearly all of Kuhn's central assertions. I do not go quite so far. As a scientist*, I believe that science, taken as a whole, does progress with time--to argue that our understanding of the universe today is not fuller than it was 200 years ago seems ludicrous--but we should be cautious in treating any one scientific finding or theory as "progress," in and of itself: First, a scientist's paradigm and her puzzle-solving nature restrict what questions she considers asking (p. 37), and second, the explanations provided by a new theory or paradigm may not be any closer to truth than those of its predecessor (see discussion of opium, p. 104). I think the latter point also applies to the information professions: We may find that any one of the "advancements" we make is really a step back, hampering access to information.

------

With the help of my colleagues' reviews and Dr. Tomer's lecture, my views about Kuhn have changed over the last week. While I stand by my assertion that the information professions, like every field, have sets of accepted viewpoints ("paradigms") at their foundation, I no longer contend that that is Kuhn's sole applicability. Information Science is, after all, not really a science.

Rather, I believe that Kuhn's description of incremental advances--and of new paradigms overwriting, if you will, previous work--is relevant to us in our capacity as guardians and gatekeepers of knowledge. A Kuhnian view of progress requires us to remain both vigilant and flexible in our maintenance of the scientific knowledge base; we must catalog the day-to-day work of "normal" knowledge accumulation in every field, particularly science, but we must also be aware that the rules and accepted facts are subject to change. As such, we must struggle to provide the information that daily practitioners of the field will deem relevant, perhaps in addition to previous "advances," or perhaps instead of them.

I would add that I do not think we can expect to determine, entirely on our own, precisely which scientific information is worth keeping; as Kuhn says, people outside of a sub-field stand little chance of understanding the literature, and even people inside a field cannot predict with certainty which research direction will lead to a paradigm change. Rather, we should maintain a dialog with the experts and seek to improve our collections in collaboration with them.



Kuhn, T.S. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

London, S. (2008). Book Review. Retrieved September 9, 2008, from http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/kuhn.html

Weinberg, S. (1998, October 8). The Revolution That Didn't Happen [Review of the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions], The New York Review of Books, pp. 48-52.



*As a post-script, separate from my review, I feel it necessary to point out that Kuhn would disagree with my assertion that I am a scientist. My formal training was in engineering (p. 30), and I am female. Both seem to count strongly against me, in his estimation.

[2670] Week 3 - Digital Object Identifiers

I am a cynic and a skeptic and a pessimist, and I'm aware of it. So it's no surprise to me--and if you've been reading for long, probably not to you, either--that I have very little hope for the URN or DOI idea ever really working out. (That is, the idea of giving every digital object a unique identifier, along the same lines as an ISBN/ISSN, instead of relying on URLs, which are subject to change. An important point about these identifiers: they wouldn't necessarily specify where to go to get any given Digital Object; they might just make one clearly discernible from another. Or a URN might resolve to multiple URLs.) I think managing something on that scale--a scale greater than that of DNS/URLs, since each object would be identified, not just each server--is going to be, to put it very plainly, more trouble than it's worth. There would be benefits to such a system, if it were ever fully deployed, sure, but how could it be done meaningfully?

Is this blog post a Digital Object (in the sense of having its own identifier or URN, in the hypothetical scenario where there is such a scheme)? And if I change it a year from now because I think my writing style is embarrassingly informal, has it become a different Digital Object? If you copy it down and put it into your blog--hopefully with attribution--is it the same Digital Object or a different one? (By my reading, it's the same, at least in the URN scheme. But when I go back and change my wording, it won't change the wording of the copy on your blog.)

As the authors of this article say, near the end, there's an awful lot left unresolved about this whole set of ideas. I think it's very pie-in-the-sky, a bit like Semantic Web. (Yeah, i went there.)

Loving this weather

I probably have nothing deep or thought-provoking to say today. It's lovely out here, on the Mall or the Cut--whatever CMU calls the area between the UC and Purnell--and the drama students are providing me with immense entertainment. I like this almost autumn-like weather; my energy level is highest at this time of year, when it isn't yet dark most of the time but the air is cool enough that it's pleasant to wear long sleeves. (I'm looking into job opportunities in Seattle and Vancouver when I get out of here.)

I'm behind on all the things I want and need to get done, but I'm also getting used to that and becoming a lot more Zen/it-will-get-done-somehow on the whole thing. Maybe this is finally my chance to take the laid back approach to schooling that I wish I'd taken as an engineer: maybe I will finally learn to chill out and enjoy the learning process, instead of constantly worrying about having the very highest of grades, at the expense of sanity, health, and a life outside of school and work. (Am I where I am in life because I worked so perfectionistically, as if that were a word, in my previous education? In a manner of speaking, yes. But maybe if I'd slowed down and chilled out, I would still have found this path, or an equally rewarding and socially productive one.)

Out of curiosity, readers, would you say it might be an interesting and useful thing to do, if I were to go to another country and teach English for most of a year, after graduation? My logic is, at its core, "internationalization! and teaching experience!" (I'm deathly afraid of groups of more than ten people. I hate giving presentations. I love one-on-one teaching and fear the classroom. And academic libraries are all about the teaching.) I'm considering it. It would also give Dale more time to really dig into the work he's doing for his current job, you know? But perhaps taking a year to do something more or less entirely unrelated to libraries isn't the right choice, right now.

Anyway, I guess I should eat some of the lunch I bought. I work 2-5 this afternoon and then may retire to a coffee-serving establishment for some quality writing time. I hope the weather's still as pretty when I get out of the library.

Not All Ponies and Roses

So, I set out to chronicle my experiences in library school, with an eye to my background in engineering, because, you know, there aren't a million blogs about that out there already. (Maybe not the engineering part!) Having that goal, I feel like I should make some effort to write things up as they occur, good or bad.

The good: our reading list for LIS 2000, Understanding Information (which is a class with 120+ people in person and at least as many online, taught by more than half of the faculty), is still full of awesome books. Seriously, I'd like to read everything on it, at some point.

The bad: I've gone through and figured out the due dates for the largest assignments in all of my classes. Most of my classes are pretty reasonable, with a few small things due throughout the semester and a large project right near the end--nothing unexpected. As I mentioned, I only have one midterm. It's all... you know, busy, but reasonable.

And then there's 2000. This week, we have a 400-word review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I have managed to convince myself that it is, at least on the surface, relevant to Library and Information Science, and I will be able to write my essay saying as much, with my tongue only slightly in cheek. (I may "treat" my blog readers to what I really think after I've written up my formal review, perhaps in point/counterpoint format.) Next week, we have a short essay to answer some discussion questions, based on some articles we're supposed to read, and the following week we have a 400-word review of two or three books. (What one can say that is meaningful about three books in 400 words, I'm not sure. I suppose I'll find out.) This seems like a bit much to me, honestly. However, as the semester progresses, we will find that there are two two-week periods when we are expected to read and review six books.

I never thought I'd complain about having to read for classes. I would have loved to have reading and a book review as an assignment in engineering school, just to break up the monotony of problem sets. I loved reading in high school, even the lame stuff. But I'm no prodigy. I'm not even much of a skimmer. Two books one week, followed by four the next, is not something I can do, at least not while working part time in addition to school. I was pretty freaked out after I examined my schedule in this light.

Today, though, I've talked to large numbers of my classmates, both people who are taking the class with me and people who have taken it in the past. Maybe this isn't the sort of thing one should say in a blog post that her professors might see, but every student I've talked to is in agreement that our professors are not actually expecting us to do all of this reading. At best, they must expect skimming. (This is not a skill I've acquired, but I should work on remedying that.) Most likely, they're aware that we'll read perhaps one of these books out of each bunch and look at reviews and summaries of the others. In fact, since we are expected to cite others' reviews, I tend to agree with my classmates that this must be the plan, and my general level of freaked outness has decreased significantly.

I still wish--and will express as much on my course evaluation--that the faculty had showed greater selectivity and restraint in choosing our reading list. I am sincerely interested in reading these books, but I wonder if skimming most of them over the course of this semester is going to prevent me from working up the motivation to read them fully later. I wonder if I am the only one who feels that throwing such a large pile of books at us is actually doing us all a disservice.

[2670] Week 2 Reading Responses

Overall themes: interoperability, modularity.

A Framework for Building Open Digital Libraries has me totally sold on the ODL concept and on the extension of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI_PMH) to build every future Digital Library ever. I think it's a great idea; interoperability is a desirable thing. My one critique is that their very simple mock-up and animated gif detracted, a little bit, from the picture they were painting. Perhaps I am unnecessarily picky.

Architecture for Information in Digital Libraries is interesting enough, but I'd love to know what they've done in the last decade. As I was reading, I found myself wondering if the meta-object to object link worked in the opposite direction; that is, whether pulling up an object would pull up a link to its meta-object (for instance, if the object is part of a larger collection). I would think it would come up on the catalog page when a search is done, but I was just surprised not to see them point that out explicitly.

I smiled when I saw that they based RAP on CORBA. That was the big thing, back then. And it stayed big for quite a while; I imagine it's still fairly widely used nowadays, even. (Though I admit, I really don't know. I hear something [neither a protocol nor a language] called "SOA" is in vogue, now, but I don't delve into specifics.)

As I read through Interoperability for Digital Objects and Repositories, I begin to be grateful that our reading list was put in the order it was. They just whip through those acronyms. But I like the structure of their experiment, and I admit, I was holding my breath, a little bit, wondering whether they would find their systems interoperable--even after extending them (if that's the right conjugation of the verb that goes with "extensibility"). Again, I began to get worried, until, finally, in their last paragraph, they mentioned their plan to add access management. (I know if I were curating a DL or DA, I wouldn't want to grant remote locations the ability to add digital objects except in very specific ways.)

I decided that the broken link in Blackboard must have meant to refer to this particular description of the Internet.

I'm pretty familiar with web technology, so I didn't find too much to say about this article. I think he's a little bit overzealous in his defense of Internet-as-proto-DL; the truth lies somewhere between his statements and the statements he derides. There's hope for the 'net, but I could definitely see it going either way, at this point.

(A lighthearted aside: "Recently, attempts have been made to rewrite the history of the Internet ... and for individuals to claim responsibility for achievements that many shared." Hey, now! That quote was taken out of context! He was joking!)

I have another aside, not strictly relevant to this article, but the discussion of Los Alamos brought it to mind. I've seen several articles--including a required reading for Understanding Information--that suggest that the sciences are all progressive, all sharing their information immediately and collaboratively over the Web, but I just don't see it. At least in engineering, which, despite Kuhn's disparagement in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is a subset of "the sciences" (seriously, ask me about my research), we tended to hold our papers--and with it our most recent research results--until a conference accepted them. And then the conferences (really, the IEEE) required that we not post the papers anywhere else. (That's what I recall, anyway.) With conference deadlines being six months or more before the conferences, themselves, I really feel that this "real-time collaboration" people talk about it is not particularly widespread.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm in favor of it. But the current methods of determining tenure, hooding, and so on would have to change significantly before a "share and share alike" system will really become tenable.

On Blackboard and Blogs

I'm going to be honest: I don't love Blackboard (Bb). Certainly, it fills a niche, and I agree that something like it should be used. But I'm just not sure Bb is the be-all, end-all solution for every problem, in every class, in every university. Honestly, course webpages are, in many ways, an improvement. Let me break it down:

Bb Pros:

• It's a great place for storing course-related files and assignments, that students and professors can access 24/7 (mostly).


• It is customizable, within certain parameters.


• It is 508 compliant.


• It is massively improved since 1999.


• The professor does not need to learn HTML or gain access to web design software (or a TA who knows HTML) to build a course page.

Bb Cons

• The discussion boards are painfully slow, at least from off campus.


• There is no way to set content to "push" instead of "pull." More plainly, it is a waste of the student's time to have to go to each and every course's (sometimes multiple) discussion board(s), read all the new posts (which, I reiterate, do not load all that quickly), comment where they choose to, rinse, and repeat. And to check it constantly. Whether there is new data or not. Because catching up on it, if you get behind, is a nightmare. RSS is not new technology; fixing this should be trivial.


• I'm harping, now, but, for that matter, how difficult would it be to implement e-mail functionality in the discussion boards? We'd have a better discussion with Google Groups than we do with Bb, and it would be equally easy for our instructors to watch--easier, I imagine, since they must get the same headaches as we do, using the boards.


• The organization of each course's Bb page is completely different from that of each other course. In one of my courses, I click the tiny "Communications" link at the bottom of the page to get to the Discussion Board. In another, I click the "Discussion Board" button on the sidebar. In one other, that button goes to course-wide questions, so to get to the Discussion Board I'm usually interested in, I click "Groups," in the side bar, click my group number, and then click "Discussion Board." When we're put in groups for projects, as I understand it, there will be other Discussion Boards opened up to us. It's a little confusing, when I'm going class-to-class, keeping it all straight. Honestly, I'm pretty worried that I'm going to ignore one Discussion Board altogether and lose 10% of my grade, or something, for "not participating."


• Presumably, the university paid money for this clunky monstrosity. I wonder whether it was more or less than site-wide license of HTML creation software (spoiler: that link goes to a list of free products) and a web site for each faculty member (this is already in place, although storage space usage would go up; then again, if we dumped Bb, that would free up some server space, I bet!).
  

In short, I'm thoroughly convinced that the old-school[ish] way of dealing with course administrivia--making a webpage for the course, with the syllabus, assignments, and so on all there--is in most ways equal, if not superior. (Robots.txt it and password protect it, if you want to keep outsiders out of it. It worked great for many of my classes, undergrad, so I know the technology is there. 508 compliance isn't hard; just don't make the site stupid fancy and colorful, or use frames, and that will more or less cover it.) And I really feel that we are not well served, using Bb as a discussion platform: a Google Group for each sub-group of the class would lead to--I am certain--better communication between the students than pull-only discussion boards.

I really, really like what we're doing in 2670, where each student has to keep a blog and post the feed link to the Discussion Boards. We're doing all of our "virtual" discussion of the readings that way. (As I understand it, we'll also discuss in class.) I put all of the feeds in a folder in Google Reader, and I see the updates that other students and the professor make as soon as I sit down at my computer. It's fantastic. I wish all my classes would do something like this, really. I'll do my part and post my writing assignments here, as well as in Blackboard (I'm aware that it'll turn up a hit if they're using automated anti-plagiarism software--you wouldn't believe how quickly Google indexes my blog posts--but I trust my professors to investigate and realize that this blog belongs to me). This is a little nerve-wracking, honestly, because I don't have a lot of faith in my writing skills. (Brevity, for one thing, seems to be completely beyond me. I know.) It took me three years to get up the guts to let CMU post the full text of my Master's thesis; I still haven't had the wherewithal to go look at it. But I assume that I'll have some ideas worth sharing, once in a while (I mean, most people do), so I'd like to start putting my thoughts out there, even the naive ones that mean I just haven't learned enough, yet. This blog will grow with me, and hopefully my writing ability will grow with it.

First Week of Classes, Complete!

Now that I've been to all of my classes once--and work a few times--I have some thoughts to post.

First off, let me just say, for the sake of any engineers who come to this blog wanting to find out about switching into Library Science, it is wonderful to know, for every class I go to, that the lecture will consist of concepts and ideas, instead of equations and derivations. It was always a toss-up, in E School, which it would be. No such problem, here; there are facts and figures, of course, but far more time is spent discussing goals and ideas. And looking at my various syllabi, I don't feel that sense of overwhelming dread that always pervaded my engineering education. (I know it wasn't just me! But I also get the sense that it wasn't everyone...) I am actually looking forward to a few of these readings and papers, which is just totally unprecedented in my education to date. (Just some of them. Some of the deadlines, at least, are a tiny bit dread-inducing; seriously, 50% of my grade in one class is due on November 24. I'm a student, still, not a machine.)

I also want to reiterate how overjoyed I am that midterms and exams aren't emphasized in this program. I have one midterm, total, between my four classes. I always felt that one of the biggest failings of my engineering education--and I'm self-aware enough to realize it was a failing of my own, at least as much as of the programs I was in--was the tendency to cram for exams and forget most of it immediately thereafter. For those of you outside of engineering, it's worth mentioning that that's kind of how E School is set up, in a lot of places: you're learning more than two/four years' worth of information in two/four years (grad/undergrad), and as such, everything is just too crammed together. You don't have time to study properly and do your homework, so you do your homework as best you can, usually with friends' and TAs' help (which is allowed, no problem), and when the exam comes, you pretty much drop all your other classes for a day and cram for that one test. There's project work, but it nearly always feels more like an add-on to the homework and tests than anything, or it did to me, at least. (The one class where that wasn't the case left me with scars that still make me cringe when I hear the term "group work.") ... I claim that setup is not conducive to long-term retention; I've long felt that engineering school should last five years, not four, and the focus should be shifted, somewhat, to help students retain material. I'm sure people have heard me say, since graduating, that I "have forgotten more than I ever really learned." It's hyperbolic, but not nearly as far off as I'm sure employers hiring young engineers would like.

I digress, a bit, but my point is that I think the hands-on approach--reading the relevant literature and writing about it and making business plans and writing papers and creating posters and so on--is so much more beneficial than the "take notes in lecture, read the course work, do some problem sets, and cram for exams" approach.

Anyway, as for my specific classes, they all seem like they'll be good. There are crazy amounts of reading--I posted my book list earlier this evening, and now that I think about it, I missed a couple of books--but it all seems pretty relevant and interesting.

I'm not kidding myself: it's going to be rough going, getting all of my school work and internship work done this semester. I'm not going to have gobs of free time to do with as I please. I won't be traveling anywhere to speak of. (I'm going to take a little time out to play Rock Band, though, yes.) Class, work, reading, and sleep, in some order, will be the bulk of my life. But I'm more OK with that than I had expected to be. I'm really pretty psyched about this whole thing.

[2670] Week 1 Reading Responses

For this week, I'm commenting informally and responding to things as I read them. Not "First I will read the article, and then I will post my fully processed thoughts," but "Hey, that sentence seems worth commenting on. Here's what I think." I see some benefit to both approaches, and I hope to try both throughout the semester. For that matter, when I get Understanding Digital Libraries (Lesk), I may do that with Chapter 1. (Yes, this will be posted without thoughts on Chapter 1. If I have thoughts worth posting, I'll come back and edit this post, though.)

If this seems far too informal, please feel free to drop me a note (coral dot hess at gmail dot com), and I'll cut it out and keep my posts more to the point.

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I take issue with the author of Digital Libraries and the Problem of Purpose's attitude about what a public library is. It seems like he waves away precisely the roles I would say the library fills, "an all-purpose information center, ... a community center, ... a center for adult education, [and] ... the guardian of free speech," to make a claim I take real issue with: "... public libraries finally began to come to terms with their more limited but realistic purpose: to be suppliers of books to the middle class and a symbol of culture in the community." (He was, in turn, citing a private communication, something that perhaps wasn't intended to be cited or taken as speaking for every public library, to such a large audience.) I don't think that's a fair description, at all. Libraries are far more than a symbol; in many places, they very much serve as the anchors and educators of their communities. To refer to them as "symbol[s] of culture" is, I think, the tiniest bit condescending. Further, I read something mildly disparaging in the use of the term "middle class," as though a library ought only to cater to some other group, instead. And, if it were the case that the middle class were the only users of the library, I could see where he might be coming from. It's my experience, though, that public libraries serve a more diverse set of economic groups than "the middle class."

His over-arching point, that we should think a bit about what digital libraries are and should be--what we should try to make them--I have no issue with. He's probably right. My suggested approach to dealing with digital libraries, "Grow all collections, including digital ones, based on user needs/demands and technological innovation, organically--but also intelligently," is no doubt naive. Or at least lacking in detail. I understand that. And I'm looking forward to refining that viewpoint throughout the semester and the next few (many?) years.

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I love that Automated Digital Libraries discusses the Internet Archive, or Wayback Machine.

"Disintermediation" is an interesting term; I think it has an unnecessarily negative sound to it, as though it is the librarian's right to serve as the gateway between a patron and the information they seek. That doesn't seem right to me. I, for one, am not offended by patrons who can find information without a librarian's help, although I am always happy to step in and help when I can.

I'm going to have to think a bit about the observation that most of the successful automated digital library projects--at least, the ones he deems worth mention--were made outside of and separate from established libraries. That interests and concerns me. But I wonder how much it really should concern me...

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In Dewey Meets Turing, I found the following quote intriguing: "librarians who involved themselves in the Initiative understood that information technologies were indeed important to ensure libraries' continued impact on scholarly work." If this article has it right, the concern was that libraries would be left out in the cold, so to speak. "We have to upgrade and innovate, or else we will be left behind and no longer have an impact," it seems to say. There is, perhaps, some worry about job security implied. I guess it stood out so much to me, because the previous article discussed automated digital libraries, with no need for librarians. So we build digital libraries to secure the jobs that will be replaced by very large computers? (I know I'm oversimplifying, but that's what went through my head as I read it.)

I'm only about 2/3 of the way through, as I make this comment, but I wonder: am I reading too much into this article, or is it kind of painting CS types as heroes and LIS types as traditionalists? I've got some background in CS, and I can't find any one comment I disagree with. It's just a tonal thing, possibly imaginary.

"The notion of collections is spontaneously re-emerging in the form of what computer scientists have named information 'hubs.'" Really? I'm having trouble thinking of an example of a "hub." (And, I confess, not having an ACM account or the patience to go through Pitt's or CMU's VPN, I didn't read the article linked to the word "hub.") Do any readers have an example? I feel like there's probably some obvious thing, but all that's coming to mind is Wikipedia--something that certainly is not curated in any meaningful way.

I like the authors' hopeful tone.

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From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure, I think, missed out on a real opportunity. s/Infrastructure/Grid/, and you get a far better-sounding title. (I kid.)

I have to admit, this "sniping" between CS people and LIS people keeps coming up, and even though it makes perfect sense, I am a little surprised to learn about it. I can easily see how it comes about, now that I have occasion to think about it; I just hadn't thought about it before, I suppose.

Note to self: check out http://memory.loc.gov.

This seemed important enough to call out: "Griffiths (1998) confronts the question of 'why the web is not a library.' Her rea-
sons include incompleteness of content, lack of standards and validation, minimal cataloging, and ineffective information retrieval. To this I add that the World Wide Web is not an institution and is not organized on behalf of a specifiable user community." Indeed. This is a very good answer.

I admit, this whole reading (Chapter 2, for those following along at home) was a bit of a blur for me. It is focused pretty much entirely on definitions and semantics, something I have really limited interest in. I do realize the importance of the discussion (as the author himself says, "Words do matter, however, and they will influence the success of our ventures"). But I'm going to have to look over this reading again, at a later date, if I really want to absorb it all.

Still, I feel like the whole point is captured very well in this summary (copied from the book): "From a research perspective, digital libraries are content collected and organized on behalf of user communities. From a library-practice perspective, digital libraries are institutions or organizations that provide information services in digital forms. Definitions are formulated to serve specific purposes. The research community's definitions serve to identify and focus attention on research problems and to expand the community of interest around those problems. The library community's definitions focus on practical challenges involved in transforming library institutions and services. Databases available on the Internet, on proprietary services, and on CD-ROMs fall into a gray area."

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Before I get too far into Setting the Foundations of Digital Libraries, I have to admit, I have a warm spot in my heart for Manifestos. Or, at least, I smile when I read the word, for no good reason I can name.

I like that this paper presents the different ideologies not as CS vs. LIS, but as having "shifted" from one to the other.

Ha: "this terminological imprecision has produced a plethora of heterogeneous entities..." (They're absolutely right, of course. But you've gotta love that phrasing.)

I like that they are trying to structure the conversation about digital libraries and standardize the terms that are used. I don't feel as though their diagrams convey all that much extra information, to be honest, and their text could more or less stand alone.

I think internalizing all of their terminology and using it consistently would be a good idea. (Dr. He, it's been over a year since this paper came out--and longer since the Manifesto--does it seem as though the DL community at large is using this terminology? Do American and European papers differ, much, in their adherence to this vocabulary?) That would take me, at least, some time. But having structured language is important and worthwhile.

[2670] Muddiest Point

In lecture, Dr. He mentioned that we should post the "Muddiest Point" from each of [at least ten of] his lectures. With 14 or so weeks of class, there is room for us not to post it each week.

The first lecture seemed very accessible, and I found very little to ask questions about. That's pretty fantastic, except it makes me worry that maybe not everyone will be able to come up with a Muddiest Point for 10 out of 14 lectures (give or take). Maybe some subset of us will find everything as understandable as Lecture 1, in which case... what should we do? Should we maybe come up with a question related to, but not really covered in, that lecture? Or should we perhaps just point out what we thought was the most important topic covered in that lecture? Or do we just not post a Muddiest Point at all, that week?

(Is this too meta to count as a Muddiest Point? I admit, I'm probably worrying unnecessarily about this. Surely, we'll wander into the weeds and find confusion, soon enough. :))

A real, honest-to-goodness use for this blog

A word of warning: scattered in amongst my other posts will be some assignment-fulfilling text--responses to assigned readings and requests for clarifications of lecture material in my Digital Libraries course, LIS 2670. I'll try to provide enough context that my normal readers aren't lost and can find something interesting in it, but I thought maybe you'd appreciate knowing it's going to happen. To make those posts easy to recognize (and easy for the professor and other students to filter), I'll add the tag "2670," in addition to any other relevant tags/labels.

My first day of classes went pretty well. I think both will be challenging and enjoyable. I like that there's not a big focus on midterms and exams; it seems like they're more interested in giving us hands-on experience than they are in assessing how well we cram, which makes me feel like I'll probably internalize it all better than I did in engineering school.

More warning: it's going to be best to just avoid me in mid-to-late November, when all of my projects come due, most likely on the same week. But, hey, it may free me up for Thanksgiving.

Amusement of the day: the color scheme of the classrooms very nearly matches the color scheme of my homepage...

First Day of School

I used to love the first day of school, as a kid. Not really the second day or onward, mind, but the first was always pretty fun. There I was, with some brand new school gear, meeting up with a bunch of people I hadn't seen since the end of school last year--and hadn't yet remembered that I didn't much like--with everyone's energy levels pretty high, the teachers both optimistic and in no big hurry, and knowing autumn and Halloween were coming up. It was a good time.

Somehow, though, I think my professors this week will jump right in (which is for the best). And I don't have a lot of cool new school supplies--I didn't even buy myself pens--though I do kind of like my backpack. And it's 80+ degrees. Also, I'd been looking forward to taking notes on my laptop, but I found out during orientation that we have desks a little bit like the one in the photo--only without the cool rockstar quote. (Link goes to the page where I found it.) Barely enough space for a notebook and coffee, let alone a 17" laptop, which might fit, but there's a real danger of it being knocked off, the first time anyone nearby moves. So I'm not entirely sure what to do about that. I'll take my laptop, but I don't have very high hopes of being able to use it. Maybe I should get one of those pens Target sells, that record what you write with auto-OCR? (Sorry to be so negative about this. I'm grumpy and feeling let down, as far as the desk situation goes. Knowing it's a technology-heavy program, what I pay in tuition, and that there are 200+ other people paying the same amount, just among the library graduate students, I expect more tech-friendly facilities.)

On the bright side, my schedule is pretty doable, with Monday being the one "bad" day (two classes right in a row). I'll post a combination of work and class schedule when I know it.

For now, assuming I'm not working that evening, I'm thinking of going to this. (Thursday evenings are still in flux.)

Anyway, I'd better start getting ready to go!

Ends and beginnings

I've changed around my class schedule. I think it's pretty solid, though I may still want to change sections for one class. 

LIS 2000: Understanding Information

LIS 2001: Organizing Information
LIS 2670: Digital Libraries 
LIS 2700: Managing Libraries (the real name is longer)

You'll notice there are only four classes there. I mean, that's a pretty heavy load for grad classes, anyway, but I had resolved to take five, so that I wouldn't be stuck taking four during the summer. (I hate summer classes. A semester seems a little short, for some topics, but trying to finish a class during the summer is just insane. I already know one of my summer classes will take up a few weekends, for instance; it says so on the course schedule.) I found, as I was trying to schedule things out, that the only way I could possibly take five classes was to force myself to attend nine hours of class, in a row, and I know myself and my attention span better than that. I'm worried about six hours, honestly. (I'm buying a coffee pot and cleaning out my thermos.) Or I could take a class I didn't want as much, which seems like a waste, in its own way. So, I lamented, it will just have to be four classes, this semester, and I'll make up for it in the spring.  Ah, well; it'll be an easier transition, this way, and having the extra time to do everything well, the semester before PhD applications are due, isn't the worst thing in the world...

Having my schedule decided, having my Pitt digital ID and login information reportedly on its way to me, having met several of my new coworkers at CMU, having watched one very cool coworker leave Brentwood already, and having seen the post made to the internal blog at Brentwood, saying I'm leaving, I'm kind of in a different mindset, now. I no longer feel entirely like I'm part of the Brentwood staff; I'm sad to be leaving them--in, you know, two weeks--and I'm excited about starting my new job and my studies. (It's very funny that I only just got my status changed to "Staff" yesterday, in Millenium. :)) Again, I find myself just feeling kind of liminal and floaty. 

This post was originally just going to be about how much I like the Brentwood folks and will miss working with them and also how excited I am to work with the folks at CMU, who also seem pretty excellent. I just kind of wandered off into logistics, though, instead. But I can't understate what a good experience I've had, or how excited I am about working with the folks at CMU (which I expect to be a better education, in a lot of ways, than my classes themselves). It's a pretty fantastic time to be me. 

Back to scheduling, for a second: not to seem like a dork--which you know I am--or like someone with a bad set of priorities--which you know I am not--but I did check with everyone to make sure my bi-weekly Exalted game could be moved to Wednesdays, instead of Tuesdays, if needed. Obviously, school and work come first, but I'd like to be able to fit that into my schedule, if at all possible. It's good to have regularly scheduled "play" time, you know? It keeps a person sane ... ish. And Josh is a very good ST. And I think I finally have my character set up so she'll be fun to play, within that group. So I'm extra pleased that everything seems to be falling into place, with respect to scheduling.

Less than a month!

A month from today, I'll be completing my first week of school. Assuming my schedule doesn't change when I meet with my advisor, Thursday is going to be my roughest day--actually, you could say it'll be my only regularly scheduled rough day--with six straight hours of class. This seems unavoidable, if I'm going to take the five classes I really want to take this semester. 

Those of you who do math in your head are probably thinking I'm supremely bad (or supremely good) at scheduling, if I have a six-hour block on Thursdays, with only five classes, but you're assuming I'll have the same on Tuesdays. That's not the case. The University of Pittsburgh's Information School, or at least their Library and Information Science program, seems to have a philosophy of "compression." People I've talked to in the library community have been surprised to learn that we have a one year program--and even more surprised that we still require the same number of credits as any two year program. The second part surprised me, too. I was also surprised to learn that we compress a three credit-hour class--something I'd expect to happen on a MWF or TR schedule--down into a single meeting per week. Now you see. So, without further adieu, here is my proposed schedule:

Monday 12-3pm LIS 2700 Managing Libraries and Information Systems & Services in Changing Environments
Monday 6-9pm LIS 2002 Retrieving Information 
Wednesday 3-6pm LIS 2970 Special Topics: Digital Citizenship
Thursday 12-3pm LIS 2000 Understanding Information 
Thursday 3-6pm LIS 2001 Organizing Information 

On the up side, this covers 4/5 of my "core" classes, leaving me almost completely free to take electives such as Digital Libraries, The Library's Role in Teaching and Learning, and Special Topics courses for the remainder of my time in school. On the down side, there weren't that many electives offered this semester that I really wanted to take--I wonder if I'll have trouble finding four and three classes, respectively, for the next two semesters. I mean, I would really have liked to have taken San Jose's distance course, Seminar in Contemporary Issues: Digital Copyright, but there are only two slots for Pitt students, and already someone is on the wait list. I guess I'll have to rely on my [usually] unnecessary impatience to register for classes to get me into some of those, in the future. And I'll have to assume that, if Pitt goes to the trouble to include something in their course directory, it is offered consistently at least once a year. In which case, I'll be flooded with courses that interest me in the spring and summer!