Caveat Quaestor

That went rather well, actually

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:21:00 +0000

OK, for the time being, while I get all of this hosting stuff sorted out, I'm going to stick my blog on Wordpress. (This went shockingly well, actually.) If you regularly go to my site to see my blog, start pointing your browser here: http://caveatquaestor.wordpress.com. I apologize, but I'm not putting a lot of time into making it pretty. In 3-4 weeks, when the address changes again (sorry), it should be pretty.

And if you use an RSS reader, please update the feed address to this: http://caveatquaestor.wordpress.com/feed/. And, yeah, I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to update it one more time (sorry).

I figure, on balance, doing things this way is a little bit less annoying than putting ads on my site (which would, over a very long period of time, probably pay enough to allow me to double-host... but since I don't have ads, I can't justify that kind of cost--you see my logic).

So, all new posts are going there and NOT here.

Heads up!

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:26:00 +0000

I owe a million posts. I know. There's a lot going on, now, though, with ALA Midwinter coming up (see you there?) and getting ready for Dale to join me in Alaska and, you know, getting [legally] married [because the ceremonial part is going to wait a while, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that we promised it'd be on the east coast]. No excuse, particularly when I manage to update the other blog far more regularly, but I'm hoping you'll forgive.

And to give you more to forgive....

I'm moving domains. I hate making people change things in their RSS readers, and I acknowledge that this'll probably lose me half of my readership, but my name's changing (as is Dale's--we're all egalitarian like that), and as such, so is my domain. And I'm walking a line between "cheap" and "broke," so I'm not planning to pay for double hosting unless Dreamhost makes me.

So I'm going to try to do this in a series of steps. This will either break terribly or work wonderfully. Let's see. :D

Thoughts on Social Media

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:01:00 +0000

I know I owe some posts about learning the things a new librarian learns. I do. It turns out, being a new librarian takes up enough time that blogging about it seems excessive. (Go figure.) That said, I did find the time to write an article for NMRT Footnotes about settling in in a new place—I stand by my suggestions, though, if I'd written it a few weeks later I might have done a better job of acknowledging how tough it can be. It's weird to be in a place—and now I mean "place" metaphorically—where you have some new friends you like a lot and are pretty certain you can rely on, but you still feel kind of like you shouldn't, because you're just not sure you've earned the social capital. And you miss your old friends but feel like it's a slight on your new friends to admit it, while talking about how much you like your new friends also feels like a slight on the old ones ... I'm moving way out of librarianship, here, but I imagine any readers who have moved long distances probably have a sense of what I'm getting at. (And any friends no doubt think I'm being silly. I don't think any one of them, new or old, doubts the high regard in which I hold them.) I addressed how to meet those friends, in the article, but not how to really end up integrated, completely, into your new home and social groups. It wouldn't have been that interesting—I'm pretty certain the only thing for it is time.

Which continues to pass. ("Time is marching on, and time is still marching on. You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older....")

It doesn't help that I have two other blogs. The former is the Moving to Alaska blog, which I nominally share with Dale (he posted once), all about the trip up here and, well, all that stuff I was talking about in the first paragraph—becoming Alaskan, I guess. The second is very my-library-centric. I write it mostly for my coworkers. But if you were really interested in seeing what I'm up to, you'd be welcome to check those out. :D

Excuses aside, I have been thinking. I've composed a couple of blog posts in my head, some of them even about librarianship, but not followed through. I still owe a post about how I think scholarly communication will evolve—at least in the STEM fields—but I'm still rolling that one around.

The thing that brought me to the blog window today, though, was social media. A number of my coworkers seem interested in "this Web 2.0 thing," and I feel like most of them probably participate in some way or other. Some are on Facebook, a few have tried Twitter, nearly all of them read or write blogs... But the thing they lack—and the thing I keep trying to manage for myself—is a method for participating in multiple, but not all, of them sensibly, with as little repeat information as possible. For instance, if all of someone's tweets go to Facebook, why would I be their friend in both places? (Increasingly, the answer is, "I won't.") I continue to passionately hate the posting of piles of Twitter updates to a blog—it's not obviously inappropriate, I suppose, or nobody would do it, but I think it conflates the intended usage of each medium. Either I want to see what you're thinking as you think it—in which case, I will follow your tweets—or I want to see some [more or less] well thought out prose—in which case, I will follow your blog. If you do both well, I'll follow both. But it bugs me to see a bunch of outdated (by the time the harvester puts them on your blog) one- or two-sentence statements where I expect full paragraphs. Maybe I'm getting grumpy in my ... uh, not that old of age, actually. Either way, it's enough to make me unfollow your blog, if you are not in all other ways stunning. The same goes for those awful "feeds"—they may be useful in real time, though I personally just don't care that much about what any one person is doing online—but they are 100% pointless in a blog. If you want to archive that junk, open a blog just for it; don't torture your readers with that inanity, or you'll lose readers.

Wow, feeling a little ranty. Sorry.

I can't control what others do online, but I do have a measure of control of how I interact with it. If a blog becomes a Twitter/stream archive, or if its author is wrong all the time, I unfollow it. If a Twitter account doesn't have enough information or entertainment value, I eventually unfollow it. (I break this rule for friends. I have a couple of friends who post "I ate a sandwich" kinds of things, but I continue to follow them because I like them enough to overlook that.) Similarly, turnabout is fair play: unless you're awesome enough to be worth following with no reciprocation (I'm looking at you, Stephen Colbert), not following me back means, eventually, I'll stop following you.

I've taken to making groups in my Twitter readers, for keeping up with the people whose every tweet I feel like I should read, and I let the rest of it wash by, checking when I have time. I miss a lot—in all honesty, I feel like I'm kind of losing my grip on Twitter, not interacting with more than 10% or so of the people I follow—but I also still gain a fair bit of information, using it that way.

Facebook, I mostly catch up on 2-3 times a day. I try really hard not to send more than 2-3 Facebook updates a day, as well, because I don't want to be annoyingly "noisy" there, in the same way I might on Twitter. It's almost a Twitter "best of," for me.

Meanwhile, my Google Reader is assiduously sorted (though Future Feminist Librarian-Activist should go in "Libraries" half the time and "Social Issues" half the time—and would, if Reader had that kind of granularity in filtering); that is arguably where I'm the most heartless in unfollowing (blogs), because it's impossible to tell who is and is not following your blog; therefore, no hurt feelings. I'm only semi-heartless in unfollowing people who share with me—you have to post a whole lot of irrelevant stuff for me to unfollow you, there, given the ease of scrolling past boring stuff [and my uncertainty in telling whether it's possible to know who is following what you share]—but I'll do it, at need. (Given the number of lolcats I share, I don't feel like I'm justified in being overly judgmental about what others are sharing. ;))

But I'm not sure whether I have an overall "policy" about all of it. Or whether I need one, beyond wanting to be able to explain it, quickly and usefully, to others who want to manage their own social media floods. Frankly, I'm sure I'm not doing it as well as I could be, so I wonder if others have their own policies about all of it, or if everyone flies by the seats of their pants, the way I do. (My social media policy is as disjointed as this post, you could say...)

I'd love to compare notes on all of this, anyway. What do you folks do?

Really quickly

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:49:00 +0000

It turns out, I'm not the only one pondering the evanescence of today's information, though I was looking at it from a filter-the-input standpoint, while he's looking at it much more from a preservation standpoint.

Still, it's cool to see others thinking about the same sorts of things...

New Netiquette

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:33:00 +0000

These thoughts have been spinning around in my head—and not just mine; I admit, I'm probably repeating a few things I've read over the past six months, as well as adding my own spin—but have started to solidify into something almost blog-worthy.

Over the past few days I've been watching a mini-kerfuffle happening on LITA-L (arguably one of the more tech-savvy mailing lists in libraryland, which might be the source of my surprise), wherein a number of people wrote to the entire list to ask for Google Wave invites—and I won't pretend I didn't let out a tiny annoyed huff and eye-roll, myself, when I saw the flood of short "please give me Google Wave" messages—and a number more wrote back (with a new subject line!), expressing stern opinions about the decline of netiquette and the inappropriateness of sending "short 'me too'" messages out to a list. Then a number more replied to the stern ones, saying, in essence, "Use Gmail and get over it." Then that, too, got discussed, with the "use Gmail" mentality being boiled down, by the stern ones, to victim-blaming. I've seen this argument hashed out and rehashed on other, sometimes far less civil, mailing lists. And, I've found, my views on this subject have evolved from the stern to the, if you want to call it that, victim-blaming.

Now, like I said, I'm running the risk of repeating things others have already said, here. Looking back over my Reader feeds for the past few months, this is definitely one of the things that have affected my thinking on this. There are others. (Neal Stephenson may have had a bit of an effect, as well.) It's hard to say what all the influences in my thinking really are; I'm exposed to more information than I know what to do with, every single day. So, I hope, are you.

Which sort of brings me to my point. This isn't 1990, and to cling [and try to force others to cling] to the netiquette of 1990, in lieu of taking control of your own information influx, seems to me to be backwards-thinking. For the LITA-L list, specifically, people must know that the library field, the IT field, and the crossover between them are huge. Even if everyone follows all the old school rules of netiquette, sending only what's necessary to mailing lists, there's still so much there. And that's without Twitter and Facebook and RSS feeds and the like. Anyone who reads every message coming across every relevant list and RSS feed is clearly not getting any real work done.

What we need to be doing—and we, as librarians, should be helping to train our patrons/customers/users [that terminology is a fight for another blog post] to do—is intelligently filtering all of it, to get the very best of what's out there. There's no perfect system for doing this, yet, but we need to do what we can with the tools we have, even while keeping our eyes open for other tools. For a very easy start, nobody should be reading mailing list traffic without a mail client that supports threading. (Hint: pretty much all of them do, particularly since Gmail came on the scene. Odds are, you can have threading-by-subject in your email without ever giving over your private information to the Google Monster and without leaving your corporate Exchange server.) In this case, when a thread turns into a hundred "me toos," dump it. Easy.

Filtering in RSS readers, Facebook, and Twitter is harder. Certainly, Twitter is trying to help, with its new list functionality. And external tools like TweetDeck (and there are a million others, at this point, probably many I haven't heard of or looked at, hopefully some that do a more thorough job of filtering) can help you follow a conference (via hashtag), a set of users who consistently provide good information, or a particular word that interests you; you can even filter out any one word or phrase from the results. It's not perfect—you'll see junk, and you'll miss good stuff—but it's a start. Google Reader doesn't really seem to allow filtering, beyond which feeds you follow and what folders or tags you want to assign, but I feel fairly confident that it will, eventually, or some better tool will come along that does. I'll go a step further and say, actually, I'm fairly confident that there's already a tool that does this, though I admit I don't know what it is. Facebook is trying to intelligently filter for you, with its News Feed (instead of Live Feed), and it's doing a so-so job, at least for me; I still find that I see more of what interests me by following the Live Feed, turning off certain people, and skimming past anything that does not seem immediately useful, but the News Feed is not entirely useless, either.

This discussion goes beyond email, RSS, and social networking services, though: even if Google Wave supplants all of these, or if we all eventually end up only accessing the Internet through something like World of Warcraft or Second Life, instead of a browser, we're still facing a different information age than the one in which "netiquette" could save us all. As an information consumer in today's world, everyone has the responsibility to filter their own content; sometimes, yes, this means adding tools to their tools (here, I fight the meme urge). And, for the next few years, yeah, it's going to be patchy. We will all have to master the art of letting go; you will not see every message in your Twitter stream, either because you are a master filterer or because you have mastered the Zen necessary to read 20 messages here and 20 there, wherever you have time. Nor will you see every message on every mailing list, every post on every blog, etc. That's the world we live in.

What I'd like to see, instead of librarians arguing about netiquette, about listservs vs. fora, about blogs vs. Twitter, and the like, is librarians helping other librarians—and through them, all of the people we should all be helping—to get a handle on the tidal wave of information coming to all of us through all of these media every single day. Perhaps we should be building tools to do some of this filtering, even.

(If I hadn't exhausted myself, I would now be expanding this discussion to metasearch of libraries' collections and the sheer volume of material produced about pretty much every subject under the sun, nowadays. Thing is, if we can't all master this viewpoint for our own information needs, we're not going to implement it to help our users, are we?)

File-sharing: not just for kids

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:56:00 +0000

I'm still wrapping my head around this; it's a report about a bunch of medical professionals setting up a file-sharing forum for articles from non-open access (NOA) journals. Techdirt reports that the site had 100,000 users and that 83% of requested articles were shared—over 5000 articles in a 6-month period. I went to look at the original report and saw a lot of talk about OA vs. NOA journals, but, interestingly, no discussion of institutional repositories. I would love to see an analysis of how many of those articles, despite being published in NOA journals, were freely available online, to begin with.

More broadly, though, this seems like some sort of failure, on some level, by someone. Does the blame fall on publishers for charging too much? (Unsurprisingly, I'm inclined to suggest that's a piece of the problem, yes. The study gives the average "value"—I'm going to use the term "cost," instead—of an article as $30. Seems a bit steep, to me, given that the writing and editing were done for free, from the publisher's standpoint.) Does the fault lie with libraries for failing to make interlibrary loan into a faster, better-used, better-marketed service? Maybe, but, then again, with this kind of volume, mightn't libraries be running into cost and copyright pitfalls, anyway? I'll show some ignorance, here: perhaps public libraries don't offer article-level ILLs; I admit, I've never tried. On the other hand, it's hard to say how many of these researchers already had access to academic or medical libraries that could get these articles for them and opted to go this route, anyway; I would assume a very small percentage, but what if I'm wrong? Do we blame institutions—and, yeah, academic libraries—for failing to build repositories of their scholars' works? Maybe, a little, but a fair portion of the publishers in the biomedical fields seem (by my unscientific sampling) to insist on pre-print only archiving, as well as 6-month to 1-year embargoes. That's a non-ideal scenario, even with 100% participation in institutional repositories, which is, itself, a pipe dream.

I thought this quote, from the original study, was pretty fascinating: "From the participants’ comments made in the forums, however, there does not appear to be any vindictiveness on the part of the participants against the journals or holders of copyright, but a mood of togetherness, of openness and sharing, and communal assistance." So, scientists acting like scientists are supposed to, sharing information freely? The devil, you say!

I don't have any new solutions to offer—that I think social networking tools could make some of this discussion moot is probably no secret [though it may be worth its own post, later in the week]—so perhaps I shouldn't go so far as to say this: journal publishers are now, more and more obviously, getting in the way of scientific progress. Perhaps not as directly as stupid intellectual property policies—companies owning genes and chemical formulas and the like—but, certainly, it's happening. Scientific discussion should be open and accessible, and as libraries struggle with decreasing budgets, while publishers increase the price of journals, that discussion is getting more and more closed, forcing researchers to, in this case, build their own file-sharing networks, to get the information they need. This is a pressing issue for the library, scientific, and academic communities—which, I realize, overlap significantly, though I would argue that sometimes scientists-as-scientists are open to different solutions than scientists-as-academics: the bulk of my favored options require some changes in the tenure system, for instance.

At any rate, have a look at that study, and tell me what you think in the comments. (Maybe one day I'll get Google Wave working with this blog, and we can chat about all of this in real-time.)

FLIPpity doo dah

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:18:00 +0000

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.

Back in Library-land

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:55:00 +0000

Pittsburgh to Anchorage is a long trip—4202.6 miles, to be precise—and I spent pretty much that whole time and, to be honest, the bulk of my first couple of weeks in Alaska willfully ignorant of what was happening in the library world. I marked my RSS feeds "read," ignored my mailing lists, and did the bare minimum, as far as committee work went—though I have some extra to do, to make up for it, now. But I think that break between the overwhelmingness of a 1.5-year crash course in librarianship (I'm counting my pre-library-school information seeking, too, since I got so very wrapped up in it) and, you know, starting work as a librarian was good for me; I'd recommend it to anybody, financial details aside.

But now I'm back and busier than ever! My first day at work as a librarian was Monday, and although I was too tired to blog about it right away, it was excellent. I've learned quite a lot, both about the place where I work and about the technical details of maintaining and upgrading their (our!) Web presence. It's all been pleasantly overwhelming, if that phrasing makes any sense. There's still so much to learn and so much to be done once I have learned (by which I mean, as I am learning) it. But my department—and, honestly, the library as a whole—is so supportive and helpful and willing to answer questions (and, by and large, good at holding back from opening floodgates of things they need the new Web Services Librarian to do for them :)) that, intimidating as the learning curve is, I feel "challenged," rather than "freaked out" or even "stressed." Although it'll be hard work, I definitely feel up to it.

So, I have to say, on the whole, things are good. It may be a few weeks before I go back to exhorting folks to write to publishers, library school deans, or anyone else. ;) But I'll try to keep updating about my experience in starting out as a librarian, starting my work as a liaison to an academic department (and it does look like it'll be engineering, hopefully electrical and computer!), and starting to take on more and more of the technical stuff related to the website.

Sorry if my spelling is not up to par. The dictionary is clearly not installed with Firefox on my Acer...

On the road

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:01:00 +0000

As I've mentioned before, I'll soon be driving to Alaska to start my first post-MLIS job. That means very little blogging, here, for at least two weeks. (I'll try to blog every day or so at my blog about the move.) But if 1) I don't pull together the blog post summarizing my Pitt experience and 2) there's no great library-land drama that captures my imagination, I may not actually get around to posting again before I start work, the first full week of October. Then, I imagine, I'll have lots to say.

So, until I return, adieu.

Interviewing - Presentations

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 03:55:00 +0000

This is the fourth and final (unless I think of some genius thing while I'm on the road) installment of my Interviewing series. If you've missed the earlier parts, they discussed Cover Letters, Phone Interviews, and On-Site Interviews. Again--as is probably obvious by a whole post about the presentation--this is very academic-library-interview-focused. And, while I've interviewed people for hire in other fields, I've never been aught but the interviewee in academic library interviews, so I don't claim to know everything. My advice comes from my own experience, awesome mentor librarians' advice, and what I've read in other places (and tried to put into practice, myself). If you find any errors or have additional suggestions, please share what you know in the comments!

You'll be given a presentation topic shortly after you're invited to the on-site interview; in addition to, obviously, giving you a framework around which to design your presentation, this will also provide an excellent focus for your general interview research needs--for instance, has anyone at this institution written about this topic? How do they feel about it? More generally, what can you teach the library staff about this topic that not all of them will already know? Happily, it seems as though the "demonstrate a database use case" style of presentation has gone out of vogue. Presentation topics like "Suggest a technology we should consider using to enhance our Web presence," "Discuss emerging trends in [X area] in the 21st century," and "Prepare a learning module for students in [X class], that could plug in to Blackboard," seem to be more the norm. This is great news, because it leaves you room to show the audience something new--it doesn't have to be ground-breaking, but do try to make it worth their time to watch your talk. And do over-research your presentation topic; there will be 30 or more minutes for questions after your talk, and you'll want to be able to wow them with all the cool stuff you know.

In one case, I had to give a presentation near the end of the day; I admit, I wore myself out, a bit, with anticipation--also, a lot of my thunder was stolen in interviews earlier in the day, where I ended up talking about most of my main points, in part because they were relevant to the discussion and in part, no doubt, because they were on my mind. If this happens, roll with it; they understand. Still, when I have the power to decide candidates' interview schedules, I'm definitely scheduling all talks for first thing in the morning, both for the candidates' sakes and for the committees'.

Regardless of the timing, here are some things to consider:

Roughly how many people, from what departments, will be attending? (Getting numbers is hard, but they should be able to tell you whether it's just librarians or whether other faculty are invited--audience is the biggest factor in deciding what to say, so this is important to know.)
What kind of room is it? If you're teaching something, will everyone have a computer, to follow along? (Maps of the building are often helpful, but this is probably a fine question to ask, when your topic is sent to you, as well.)
How long do they have set aside for the talk, versus the Q&A? (Your search committee should communicate this of their own accord, but it's worth some thought. For instance, if you want to touch on something but don't have time during the presentation, you can always give a teaser and invite the audience to ask later.)
How long will you have to set up? (Your schedule will give some inkling of this.)

You can mitigate some unknowns by making sure to have your Powerpoint slides, should you choose to use them, in multiple places--your webmail, a USB key, maybe a backup version in Google docs. I've never done handouts; I give the audience a Web address they can go to, instead, but if you do, make sure you have enough. Some people don't even use Powerpoint for their presentation (*gasp*)! In one presentation, I worked from a Web page as my visual, with links for the audience to click on; I don't know if I can whole-heartedly suggest this for everyone, but it worked fine for me and felt more natural than the slide show format. Another cool thing you might want to consider, over Powerpoint, is something called Prezi, which is ... easier for you to go look at than for me to explain. It's very cool.

Some good advice a role model of mine once gave me: set up the presentation--slides, handouts, whatever--early (usually, this means skipping your scheduled pre-presentation break), and walk up and greet people as they enter. Shake their hands. Introduce yourself. Mingle. It leaves a good impression, which is nice, but it also humanizes your audience, which can really help with nerves.

And I feel like my advice from earlier is worth repeating in this context: these people want you to succeed, and they want to like you. The audience at your presentation will, most likely, be very well-disposed toward you; the search committee liked you enough to bring you in, right?, so you must be good. Besides, they've all had to go through this process themselves, some of them recently. They know you're nervous, and they're OK with it. Even if there are hostile-looking people in your audience (yes, it happens, but I suspect it's uncommon), there's going to be a friendly face or three; find them, and let them bolster your confidence. You know your topic. They are sympathetic. You'll be fine.

And be flexible about the Q&A time. Some of the questions I got were surprisingly wacky--it may just be that my talks have tended to focus on technology, either directly or tangentially, and I think some people find that off-putting. One person asked if I thought our eyes/brains will evolve to read computer screens better than paper--I'd been talking about ebook readers--and I was a little stunned. I just kind of had to think on my feet and give the best answer I could at the time. (In case you're curious, it was something along the lines of "No, I think screens will continue to evolve to look more like paper. Ebook readers already do. Eventually, so will laptop monitors." I stand by that, actually.) Some people can't attend other sessions and therefore use the Q&A session to find out about you, rather than your topic--one person pointed out something from my resume and asked for explanation of it. Some people will lob softball questions, and others will try to stretch you, to see what you do with something difficult. I don't think the latter is generally out of unfriendliness; it's just curiosity, and it's entirely appropriate, given all the kinds of questions patrons have. I felt, in the one Q&A session, like I was defending a proposal I had made to an attentive committee. And that made it kind of fun, honestly, because I got to play the part of salesperson and to really explain why my idea was a good one. It made for a nice dynamic.

If presentations aren't your thing, I suggest taking a course, joining ToastMasters, or otherwise finding a venue in which to practice. Maybe teach a course at your local library. I've definitely chilled out a lot, as far as giving presentations goes, over the last year, in part due to Pitt's course in Information Literacy and Library Instruction (I forget its proper name), and in part because I lucked into a few other talks. I still get nervous--if you don't, something's wrong--but as long as I know my topic and my audience, I no longer get physically shaky. If I got over my terrible presentation anxiety (or, well, most of it), I am confident that anyone can!

Thus ends this series. Let me know if there are other topics I should have addressed, or if you have any questions after reading this. ... I'm kind of excited to have it written, honestly, because I can go back, after my first couple of times working on a search committee, and see what interview behaviors have changed (because they will) and what I didn't address that I should have (hopefully nothing). In the meantime, I really hope it is helpful to library students and new librarians!

Interviewing - On-site

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:27:00 +0000

This is the third part of the series I'm writing about interviewing. The first was Interviewing - Cover Letter, and the second was Interviewing - Phone Interview. As I said in the other two topics, I'm not an expert, but I'd like to share what I know, gleaned from my own experience, stories and advice of mentor-librarians, blogs and articles I read before I went interviewing, and things I know from having interviewed people in the business/engineering world. As always, if you have quibbles, let's quibble them out in the comments. :)

The first thing that really distinguishes the on-site interview is that it's exhausting. Seriously. I've only done one-day on-site interviews, but I've heard tales of two-day marathons. I can only imagine how those must be. Regardless, do not schedule anything for the day after your on-site interview. At least, not anything really important (like another interview). I slept through almost a full day after mine. (I also caught a cold on the plane each time, so there you go.)

Sometimes, they'll give you a day to see the town/city, as well as the day(s) of interviewing. Sometimes, they won't. If you've got the time, definitely take advantage of it to look around, and prepare ahead of time for that, as well--one day to determine whether or not you'd like to live someplace? That's a tight schedule. So pick and choose what interests you ahead of time. Travel guides for most states, if you're in the US, should be available at your local library, or via ILL. Also, Wikitravel can be your friend.

Back to the business of it, though. The presentation is arguably the cornerstone of the day. (Maybe I just think so because that's the part I'm most nervous about and the part that takes the longest preparation time. But it's also the only time some of the library staff will have to meet you, which definitely adds to its importance.) I have quite a lot to say about presentations, though, so I'm going to save all of that for the final post of this series.

The same advice about doing lots of research--even more than you did in preparing for your phone interview--goes, here. Hopefully you found out things during the phone interview--and took notes, so you can look them back up--that will help you dig deeper and get better information. See what kinds of things your committee has written about, either by finding their CVs or by doing a search in Web of Science or other citation tool (even Google Scholar might do). Find their blogs, if they have them. Go through the same process as you did for the phone interview, but dig deeper. If you can avoid being surprised, do.

The interviewing day, aside from the presentation, feels like an exercise in endurance. There will always be several interviews, with several different groups, though the exact structure is different between institutions. You will be asked certain questions multiple times, sometimes with a few of the same people in the room for both. (If I had a nickel for every time someone asked "Why did you switch from engineering to librarianship?"... :)) I had something like three meetings with different iterations of my search committee, plus one with my would-be work unit (this could be reference, instruction, systems, cataloging, collection development, or liaison librarians--any group with job functions similar to the one you're interviewing for) and one with some administrator-level folks, at one interview; at another, I had a meeting with "whoever wants to come," a meeting with my search committee, a meeting with my would-be work unit, and a meeting with the dean.

There's usually a meeting with an HR person--they just want to tell you about benefits. Don't be unprofessional, but this is a low-pressure thing; they aren't interviewing you, just informing you. Note from the recently-employed: you should probably pay attention; I was too jittery to really take in much of the HR talk when I was interviewing for the job I eventually got, and I regret that. There's also usually a lunch--sometimes a lunch and dinner--with some potential future coworkers, and this tends to be more casual and fun; again, don't go crazy unprofessional, but it's not really an interview, either. You can get some fantastic off-the-record information at these lunches, which is nice, and, yes, they'll get some off-the-record information about you, too. It's a good time to find out how much you'll really enjoy working with these people. And don't kid yourself: you're interviewing them (and, thus, they are trying to impress you), too.

I don't know how true this is, but someone told me that the in-person interview is just about "fit"--would you and these people make good coworkers?--because the competencies and such have all been covered in the CV, calls to references, and phone interview. They already believe that you're capable of doing the job; they want to see if they want to work with you. ... Like I said, I don't know how true it is, but I thought I'd throw it out there. I did get a fairly high number of "technical" (that is, knowledge-of-librarianship and knowledge-of-technology) questions at one interview and very few at another, so maybe it depends on the institution. Be ready for either. Your committee could be convinced, but other librarians might need the assurance of asking you things themselves, as well.

And have a whole slew of questions ready. It's going to happen, no matter how many you prepare, but it's tough to say "Actually, all of my questions have been answered." It's tougher before noon, I bet. Maybe have some questions like "What is your favorite thing about working here?" or "What do you see as the challenges facing this position?" so that you can reuse them on new people you meet. And--this is key--don't just ask about benefits, parking, and the like; ask about the position and its responsibilities, about your coworkers' positions, about relationships between departments, etc. It annoys interviewers when all of your questions seem too shallow, and benefits questions all go to HR, anyway.

And, if you can, have fun. It's OK to make your interviewers smile. It's definitely OK to smile, yourself--one librarian I know says that's all she looks for in an interview: do they smile? This is about finding a match between yourself and a workplace, something neither side can do if there isn't at least a little of your and your interviewers' real personalities on display.

Interviewing - Phone Interviews

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 22:08:00 +0000

As I said in the last post, this was written while I was still interviewing. It's fairly academic library-centric, though there's advice here that should be more widely applicable, as well. I'm not an expert, but I hope people find this helpful.

I was surprised to learn that the first place to give me a phone interview actually only called six people. Somehow, I had been led to believe phone interviews were easier to get. It heartened me, not just to get one, but to realize that maybe other places, who had opted not to call, had been similarly selective. Some places have called larger numbers of applicants, but the phone interview pool has always (when they've told me the number) been reasonably small. I suppose this makes sense: the committee is made up of busy librarians.

I was also surprised that the entire committee was on the other end of the line. I'm not sure why, but I had been under the impression that the committee broke up the phone interviews, with standardized questions (that second part is true; they do have standardized questions that they ask all candidates), and reconvened to argue the case for or against any given candidate. But they were all there. That's fairer, but maybe a bit more intimidating. And it's been that way for every phone interview I've had, though some were conference calls between multiple lines and others were me on my cell on one end and a room full of people on a speakerphone on the other. Multiple lines means less worry that the committee is staring at one another in horror at your replies, though the pauses are awkward, regardless of the setup.

I hate to harp on advice everyone else gives, but do take the time to learn a little about the institution--by which I mean the college/university and the library itself. Having had some good, some bad, and one really wretched phone interview, at the time of this paragraph's writing, I can tell you, that makes a big difference. The ability to say "I see your institution is heavily into research," or "I see the institution is trying to meet X goal by Y year," impresses the committee. Having to ask, "What percentage of your students do X thing?" does not impress. Check their Carnegie classification for some good demographic information. Look for meeting minutes, to see what's on the library staff members' minds right now. Look for policy documents, so you can talk intelligently about tenure or lack thereof. Google the search committee, if you know their names--you can be sure they're Googling you. And use what you find to make good, in-depth questions for the committee, about the position, the institution, relationships between the library and stakeholders--whatever the data leads you to wonder.

One other thing that surprised me--like the two surprise points above, maybe it shouldn't have?--was the depth of the questions. They weren't so much "What are your strengths and weaknesses?" as "What is your philosophy on collection development?" "What tools would you need to do this job?" "Can you list a time when you managed a project/worked in a group/wrote a grant proposal/..., and how did it go? What did you learn from it?" (OK, I expected that third one.) But knowing about the institution isn't enough--you should have a really clear idea of exactly what the job would entail. Pump your network for information, if you know people who have similar jobs. If you don't have experience in one area of the job, find out enough to be able to discuss that area comfortably; it's OK to say "I haven't worked in that directly, but here's what I know...". Sometimes there are only six or seven questions, so you want to be sure you have something to give the committee for everything they might ask. The questions are direct and hard and surprisingly in-depth, in most phone interviews, so know your stuff.

Along those lines, knowing how long to go on with an answer is tricky. Try to answer thoroughly, but succinctly--you know, even to me, that advice sounds useless. Here's the thing, though: your goal is to demonstrate that you are knowledgeable, that you have thought about the topic, etc. But you need to give the committee room to say "That's a good answer. Next question." It's a tough balance. Honestly, I'm not sure I do it all that well--I try to make up for it by pausing and sometimes even asking for feedback. "Am I going down the right route, here, or did you mean the question in a different way?" "I can go into this further, if you're interested." Stuff like that. I imagine it's a skill one develops with practice.

Another bit of advice others will give you, but it bears repeating: set aside a quiet time and space, when you can really concentrate, to have the interview. In the case of my really desperately flubbed interview, I talked to them at 9am the day after flying back from an in-person interview--terrible idea. I was exhausted, I wasn't in the right frame of mind, I had skimped on research, and I wasn't focused enough on the mindset of their institution. (Admittedly, I learned on that call that the environment would not have been a great fit for me, anyway, but it was still embarrassing.) I have had both good and bad interviews on my mobile phone--one, which led to an engineering job, was done while I was stuck standing in a parking lot--but in general, I'm a big fan of having a landline connection, if you can get it, for interviewing. The sound quality of cell phones just isn't great. Also, don't pace around the house; sit at a desk. Do remove distractions: close instant messengers and Twitter, and keep friends, roommates, coworkers, and pets out of the room.

This is going to sound silly, but don't interview in your pajamas. Seriously, it wrecks your mental state. Dress nicely, so that you are confident, even though they can't see you.

Do not bring up other interviews, or the job search at large. This probably seems obvious, because it is. Nonetheless, during the Debacle Interview, I busted out with the genius line "I don't normally apply for X-type positions, but this one was interesting to me because of Y." I mean, yes, that was honest, but it was a stupid thing to say--less stupid, given that I was trying to express how awesome Y was, but it was still not the right thing to have said. It clearly put up a red flag; one committee member asked, somewhat tensely, "If you aren't interested in those positions, what positions do you usually apply for?" I immediately realized that the interview was, for all intents and purposes, over. So, you know, please, learn from my mistake.

If you can take notes without overly distracting yourself, do. If you can't, set aside some time after the call to write down at least the answers to the questions you asked, but really any pertinent information and impressions you get. If you get the in-person interview and haven't taken this step, trust me, you will regret it. Also, consider emailing a quick "Thank you for your time; I really enjoyed talking about X," sort of message to the chair of the committee. That sort of thing is definitely appreciated in library-land, as long as you keep down the self promotion. That is, it's OK to reiterate interest in the position (if it's true), but the thank-you note isn't the time to convince them of how awesome you are.

Other than this general advice--be prepared, avoid distractions, be sitting by the phone 5 minutes before the scheduled time, have questions for them, make sure the phone is charged--the only other advice I have is to realize that phone interviews are hard for everyone, interviewer and interviewee alike. And interviewers know this. They've been in your shoes, some of them more recently than you'd guess. Be professional, but also be yourself; the people on the other end of the phone want you to succeed; they want to like you; let them.

Interviewing - Cover Letters

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:54:00 +0000

This set of posts (there will be a whole series--at least three, though I'm thinking of splitting it out further) was written while I was applying and interviewing for positions. It seemed gauche and unwise to post information about my interviewing experiences and lessons learned, even as I was learning them, but I feel like it's probably reasonable to share now. Better to share than not, right? I wouldn't have bothered writing it up if I didn't think I had potentially beneficial advice to share, and, having been on the other side of the table, albeit in an entirely different field, I feel like I bring a different perspective to the discussion. Argue with me in the comments if you think I'm off base. :) But I hope this helps somebody.

Advice for any former engineers, consultants, or business people: librarians seem to take cover letters really seriously. I felt some culture shock at this revelation--I mean, I more or less believed the people who said so and really tried to do a good job on mine, but I've definitely had to learn the cover letter writing skill from scratch. I know when I was applying to engineering jobs, I always included one as a courtesy (so they could data-mine it and determine the best place to advertise positions, mostly), with proper grammar and everything, but I didn't expect it to be read by the hiring manager. When I was interviewing candidates for consulting jobs, there were rarely cover letters, and when they existed, I usually ignored them; they all said the same thing, anyway.

The library world isn't like that. I didn't get calls back on my first few applications, but, although I've changed very little in my vitae or references, I am getting some calls, now (not for every application--I'm no rockstar--but for an acceptable number of them, something I'll get back to momentarily); the only thing that's really changed/improved is my cover letter phrasing. Although I still try to address the bulk of the job requirements, I have definitely shortened it, on average, and gotten to the point much faster. In responding to the job advertisements with long lists of requirements, I still have a long letter, but I try to address multiple requirements in a single sentence, where I can. I do my best to find the one thing I can say, related to the job, that will most impress them or catch their eye, even if it means not addressing one of the less meaningful requirements (bad example: "If you like this letter, clearly I can communicate well in writing"). If I have a punchy one-line anecdote that sounds awesome, it goes in. "I wrote a paper on [a relevant topic], which I am considering submitting for publication," was one pretty successful statement--it told them, immediately, that I have ambition and that I know--or think I know--a fair bit about the topic at hand.

I say "my cover letter," but, although it follows the same general form, it is very different for each job I apply to. I reuse a little bit, job to job, especially in jobs that are similar--all the techy ones have similar requirements, all the referency ones have similar requirements, etc.--but I end up writing a fair bit from scratch, as well.

I have a really important piece of advice, here, which I think is the key to my not having received a truly demoralizing number* of pre-phone-interview rejections. I don't know whether this advice seems obvious or absurd to the general reader, but I stand by it: Don't apply to a job that you can't get excited about. I know we all have bills to pay, but if you aren't psyched about a job--if you know you'll hate the location, or it's not the kind of librarianship you want to go into--writing the cover letter is even harder. And even if you somehow manage to cobble together a good cover letter, the lack of enthusiasm will catch up with you on the phone interview. Interviewers know. And for every person who "just wants a job," there are so many who really want this job. Besides, having been through the interview process, I can tell you that the research you end up having to do and the time you end up having to put into each phone interview--let alone an in-person interview--is significant. If you aren't excited, the preparations will be torture.

The other important (and hopefully obvious) advice I have is to have someone look at your cover letter and CV. Mine went through several revisions, with the help of several kind and generous people. Each time, it came out better. If you don't know any librarians (ideally with hiring experience) whom you'd be comfortable asking, your school probably has an alumni group, and, definitely, the New Members' Round Table of ALA has a fantastic resume review service--I suspect they can be talked into looking at cover letters, as well.

*This is two-sided, right? I'm also sending out significantly fewer applications than most people I know, so there are also fewer rejections to receive.

(The next post is about Phone Interviews.)

Book Carts

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:38:00 +0000

I never really talked about Book Cart Drill Team, after ALA, did I? Truth be told, I was tired of all things Elvis and Book Cart. But we did win 3rd place, and that's something. Here's the video of our ALA performance:

Where is the outrage?

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 21:30:00 +0000

There was a tiny bit of hue and cry about the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, back when its shady underpinnings were exposed (early May of this year). Fingers were shaken in the general direction of Merck and Elsevier. We were later told that, OK, yes, Elsevier had actually published six of these "sponsored journals," all through one division, which was later closed down, but we shouldn't worry: the people responsible—whom, no, Elsevier wouldn't name—no longer worked with the company.

Only, actually, we came to find out even later (moving into June, at this point) that there were nine of these journals. Now, maybe I don't read enough library blogs—and I admit, STEM librarians are surprisingly underrepresented in my blogroll—but the outcry wasn't exactly deafening. I brought up this whole debacle in a talk to a room full of librarians in late May—after the "six journals" story had broken, but before we knew there were nine—and maybe half of them even knew what I was talking about. The Progressive Librarians Guild had issued a statement (also before my talk), but I didn't see it get much press, either.

We library types went to SLA Annual and ALA Annual and any number of other conferences this summer, and we blithely let Elsevier wine us and dine us, some out of ignorance (because those of us who knew didn't speak up loudly enough) and others out of ... apathy? fear? who can say?—I'm not proud to admit it, but, even knowing all this, I went to the Spy Museum on their dime and didn't once mention this whole controversy to any of their representatives. I do not mean to suggest that I think haranguing sales reps is the right route, but, clearly, neither is silence. I feel like I failed in my handling of this issue, and, if that is the case, I'm clearly not alone.

But it was over. Old news. What was I going to do, insist that academic and medical libraries all over the world boycott the largest STEM publisher—and Elsevier is almost three times larger than its nearest competitor in this market—based on one division full of bad eggs they claim to have let go four years ago? By myself, as a new librarian? It was over, I'd missed the boat, I'd screwed up, and, with any luck, Elsevier had learned from the Vioxx mess and truly cleaned up their act. Mostly. (They were trying to bribe their way into good textbook reviews on Barnes & Noble and Amazon. But they quickly stopped.)

Imagine my shock, though, when I saw this little gem (via Slashdot) crossing my RSS reader. "Shady dealings in medical journals?" I thought to myself. "Surely, this can't be yet another Elsevierian debacle?" But, indeed, it was. This time, instead of Merck shilling Vioxx by means of a fake medical journal, it was ghost writers playing up the benefits of hormone therapy on behalf of Wyeth in 26 articles, all published by Elsevier. Again, this was a few years ago, so maybe it goes under the pass they clearly got for the division creating the nine fake journals? On the other hand, it's not clear that this set of errors came out of that now-defunct division, is it? This could be an indicator of a systemic problem within Elsevier. And I do not believe it has been adequately addressed.

We could talk about the people hurt by Vioxx and hormone therapy and how the medical process was damaged, here, and what Elsevier's responsibility might be. I think somebody should. But I don't know that much about medicine, so I'm going to talk about the scientific record, a little bit. That's something I do know a thing or two about.

Let's go back to the Australasian journals. Just looking at the first six anyone found out about, and just looking at Google Scholar for a few minutes, I found that there was a citation trail. Let me show you:

I had no choice but to look at Google Scholar, in finding this out. These journals had all been expunged from Web of Science and other authoritative sources. Which seems to be, if not actively helping Elsevier push this under the rug, at least failing to make clear to researchers and librarians that these are tainted sources. It's deceptive. There should be a "retracted" flag in Web of Science and Ulrich's. Scholars, librarians, and scholar-librarians should be pushing—hard—for this.

What my Google Scholar findings really tell me is that there has been damage done to the scientific record—how many of those citations used "facts" from the original sponsored journal is hard to say, but the fact that the citation tree goes so deep is pretty disturbing, nonetheless. We trusted Elsevier, and our patrons continue to trust us. We owe it to them to force Elsevier to earn back that trust. We need to demand—and make sure they deliver—transparency in their operations. But how? Do we threaten a boycott? In these financial times, we have to cut somewhere—perhaps a policy to cut Elsevier titles/bundles before others would not be so very hard to implement. (I realize this has further implications for our patrons. I'm brainstorming, here, not making demands. But do give this some thought before dismissing it outright, eh?) Do we keep them out of our conferences, for the time being? What can we do? Because it's clear to me that we need to do something, or we will just see more of these stories popping up. We can't write them off as "old news," given how recently they came to light, or we'll see similar "old news" four years from now—and when that happens will we just keep making excuses for Elsevier, because it is convenient?

Almost a librarian!

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:16:00 +0000

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.

As promised...

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 03:08:00 +0000

I'm blogging the move to Alaska: http://movingtoalaska.wordpress.com

If you're more the RSS type, click here to go right to the feed. (You'll miss my cool map, though!)

Good news!

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:56:00 +0000

I have a job! (As in, I received and signed an official, printed, mailed job offer today, which I plan to photocopy and mail back tomorrow.) But it's not just any job—it's precisely the kind of job I wanted to be doing, at a dynamic library, in a beautiful city, with excellent coworkers.

I will be working at the University of Alaska Anchorage and Alaska Pacific University's Consortium Library, as a Web Services Librarian. Part of my job will be Web site stuff—making sure the library's home page is working and troubleshooting when electronic resources act up—part will be reference and liaison work, and part will be committee and working group activities. It sounds like there will be plenty of variety to the work, leaving room to fiddle with new and different technologies as time and interest allow. I like my coworkers—they're laid back and fun, but also pretty dedicated librarians, which is exactly the kind of people I want to be working with. And they know I'm not a total genius with all of the development languages in use on their site, yet, which is nice. (I still plan to get a lot closer to genius level before I start work, though.) Finally—and this might sound stupid—I will have a window office. That makes me so, so, so much happier in places like DC and Pennsylvania, so it'll be absolutely amazing in Alaska!

Now, when I tell people about this, I get one of two reactions: "Alaska? Awesome! (Can I come visit?)" or "Alaska? Really? (Bleh!)" Although I really am sad to leave friends and family so far behind, I'm still pretty excited about living in Anchorage: it's a a far sight warmer and lighter in winter than some other parts of the state, and it's a city in its own right—just a little smaller than Pittsburgh. Though moose are not an uncommon sight, even in town. :) And, seriously, I've never been anywhere prettier. There are mountains high enough to have glaciers even in summer, and there's water, and there are state and national parks and forests all around the city—so much to explore!

I've promised to blog the move. If you have a strong opinion about whether I should do that here or make a new blog for it, leave me a comment, but for now, I'm planning to make a new blog and just link it from here and the homepage—keep this blog about librarianship. I'll have some exciting things to write, this year! (You can reasonably expect another post or two about library school before I get to blogging about the new job.)

Chicago: There and back again

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:24:00 +0000

Instead of catching up with Google Reader (which is always the first social medium I let slide, particularly on my netbook, where it's annoying to navigate), I thought I'd write up a brief post about ALA. You know, to stuff up all of your Google Readers. ;)

I admit, I was a little less star-struck this year than last. Part of that might be the location—Chicago's more spread out, with a lot more noise and traffic, than Anaheim—and part might be that I had a miserable cold and therefore took it a lot slower than I normally would. (If I didn't have seven other people depending on me to show up to the Book Cart Drill Team championship, I would have bowed out. I was so very, very sick. I'm still not feeling great.) Alternately, it could be the fact that I am almost a librarian, myself, now, where last year I was a library assistant who hadn't begun the MLIS. Not to say library assistants don't have valid opinions! I was just, you know, unnecessarily timid.

At any rate, I did attend some sessions. The bright shining star out of the ones I attended was definitely LITA's Content Management Systems panel. I thought it was very educational and fairly practical. I wish I could have gone to more LITA events—I was too tired to make Friday's Open House and Happy Hour and too busy with prior commitments (mostly NMRT and Book Cart stuff) to make most of the others. I'll catch them virtually, though.

As far as other conference activities, I staffed the NMRT booth for an hour, which is definitely enjoyable! Upon further consideration, I should probably not have signed up for the morning after I arrived; I had to orient myself within the Exhibit Hall super fast, to help others get around. I definitely enjoyed it, though! How fun is that, staffing an information desk at a library conference?!

The NMRT Awards Ceremony and Networking Night went off without a hitch—though I was a little disappointed that so few Pitt students came. There were awards, there was networking, there were cute mini-fans and pinwheels—good times! In talking to the LITA rep (the fabulous Mike Bolam), I confirmed that, yes, I do need to join LITA, because it is both member-driven and welcoming. I'll get on that before studenthood and low prices fade away. And, finally, I made some new fun library friends and went out for a couple of drinks after the official festivities had died down—bad for the cold, good for the morale.

I also got to talk to a vendor for "real business" for the first time. Unfortunately, the Serials Solutions 360 preview—of the update that's coming out soon—coincided with our departure time from Chicago, but I got the rep's card, and they are apparently very good about hosting frequent webinars.

So, conference was good. I should have stayed home and visited Student Health (I'm calling them later today), but I definitely did learn and network and do all of those things that conference lets us do.

I'm pretty excited about my new committee appointments (NMRT switches around committees every year). I'll be either chairing or co-chairing NMRT's Student and Student Chapter Outreach (SASCO) committee, which, as a new grad, I guess I'm extra able to do. And I'll be on the NMRT Web committee, as well, which is pretty exciting!

I'll make another post, this week or next, with news!

The Past Few Weeks

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:01:00 +0000

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!

On balancing social networking tools and family

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:02:00 +0000

This isn't as library-related or engineering-related as I try to be, but it does address what I imagine is a fairly common problem. I'm curious about your thoughts.

I've been using social networking tools--and, here, I'm going to address mostly Facebook and Twitter--as catch-alls, adding friends, colleagues, and, increasingly, family, willy-nilly. I have a couple of privacy settings on my Facebook, keeping a few people from seeing my updates, though if they navigate to my page, they can still see it. (I'm fascinated that I could lock even my profile page away from the eyes of people I've friended. I find that really interesting.) I think I may have "all pictures of me" locked down, as well, though I always waffle on that one--the only embarrassment I expect ever to get, on that count, is that I'm wildly unphotogenic at times. I'm hardly a wild partier.

But my point is, up until now, it's worked. I have, at times, wished I had a locked-down Twitter account, where I could say some of the things I really don't want the whole world to see me say, to a select group of friends. But I don't, because, for the most part, I'm inclined to treat social network sites as inherently unstable and very hackable--if it goes up there, one way or the other, it'll be public, anyway. (E-mail and IM should also be treated that way--for reasons inherent to the technology--and to an extent, I kind of do.)

But I'm finding that social networking with my family isn't really working out the way I'd expected/hoped. I already self-censored, a little bit, because there are some professional colleagues I really respect on any given social networking site, and I don't want to offend or to seem "too weird," whatever that is. (Sometimes I still forget that it isn't just me and my college buddies, because I am not perfect, but I generally do an OK job of this, I think.)

However, I'm finding myself self-censoring--and, to my horror, censoring others by deleting their comments on my posts--more often, now that family members are there. Do I mind my high school-age cousin or Dale's college-age brother knowing I'm human and goofy? No, not really; I want them to know me well enough to trust me, to come to me with questions if they need to. But I'm finding I'm not really comfortable with the level of openness Facebook is forcing between, for instance, my mother and me. I've grown comfortable--as I think most of us do--with some distance, some lack of knowledge, about what is going on in our lives and our minds. Facebook wants to bridge that gap, but for a multitude of reasons, I'm just not sure that's a gap that should be bridged, in our or most other parent-child situations.

Also, I notice that some family members use these tools very differently than I do. They don't follow the same conventions. They don't even have the same definition of what constitutes "social networking." It could be a fascinating learning opportunity for me, if I could find the balance, and the distance, necessary to really observe them.

I guess when it was just two groups--friends and colleagues--I could balance the stack of dishes, or house of cards, or whatever metaphor best fits. But it seems to be crumbling, now that a third group has really come into the picture. I'm not sure whether the problem is "too many groups" or "one group is family," but I have definitely become aware that I've lost the balance I had maintained for so long.

Has anyone else had this experience? What did you do? I hate to scale back my involvement in these tools, or to lock out family (where I even can). But maybe therein lies the only answer--what do you think?

More CSS troubles

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Fri, 29 May 2009 19:34:00 +0000

It's just come to my attention--by my happening to look at it after posting to the CIT Library Blog--that my blog looks bad in IE. One problem with developing on a Mac is I can test with Firefox and, when I think about it, Safari, but IE is a whole other ball of wax. And given how well MS Office for Mac works, I'm not inclined to risk installing IE:Mac.

It's interesting that it would mess up like that, since I really just took one of Blogger's templates and modified it to my uses. I feel like, since the core of it is theirs, it should have stood up better against browser changes.

It kind of makes me want to rebuild my site in--and therefore export my blog to--Wordpress. There's some good information out there about Wordpress-as-CMS, and I'd kind of like to give it a try. Then again, my current page [with the exception of this blasted blog] does a good job of showcasing my XHTML/CSS development abilities. ... I'll have to think on this.

I'll fiddle with it this weekend, or as soon thereafter as I get a chance. In the meantime, my apologies if you're an IE user. (By the way, it's OK to contact me with stuff like that--even in the comments of unrelated blog posts. Feedback is always useful, even if it's "negative," or the way I see it, constructive.)

Twitter Howto

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:03:00 +0000

Last week SLA's Pittsburgh chapter had a "Reverse Mentoring" meeting, where library students showed professional librarians the Web 2.0 ropes, as it were. I was the designated Twitter person. We also had someone to cover blogging/RSS - Blogger and Google Reader, social networking sites - Facebook and LinkedIN, social tagging - del.icio.us and LibraryThing, collaborative workspaces - Google Docs and wikis, and a Kindle (not that that's very "Web 2.0," per se, but people were still really interested, and I feel like librarians should all get our hands on ebook readers if at all possible). It was very well-received, and I think everyone--including the presenters--learned a lot.

I thought I'd share my handout with you, in case you were curious about basic Twitterisms (e.g. retweeting, replying vs. direct messaging, hashtags) and applications (e.g. TweetDeck, TwitterGadget for Gmail, Digsby, and a couple you may not have heard of). There are a couple of links on there, to more information, as well.

I didn't talk as much about Twitter for job searching as I meant to, but overall, I think it went well.

Please, Take a Moment to Write an E-mail

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:39:00 +0000

(I drafted an email for you, available here. Add or remove content as you see fit. Send it to Rep. Dwight Evans, devans@hacd.net, Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations by May 26, 2009.)

The House Committee on Appropriations is currently holding public hearings in Harrisburg, and they want written testimony from taxpayers. In addition to writing to Rep. Evans, please contact your other state representatives. If you don't know who else to contact, look here for that information, and if you feel there's more you should say, visit CLP's advocacy page for information and talking points.

Libraries have never been busier. During this recession demand for library services across the Commonwealth are continually rising as more people search for jobs, families tighten their budgets, and retirees grapple with shrinking savings. We need libraries, and in this particular instance, libraries need us.

Send an e-mail, please. Right now. I did.

Thank you!

(Much of this text was adapted from CLP's "First Floor - New and Featured." Copy at will, both this post and my previous post. I don't mind, and I'm sure CLP doesn't mind.)

Ebook readers - a primer, a rant, and a call for pertinent discussion

noreply@blogger.com (Coral) — Sat, 09 May 2009 17:21:00 +0000

Getting the facts straight

Even now, a year and a half after the release of Kindle 1.0--not even the first or most innovative of ebook readers--I keep seeing bloggers and other Web folk (many of them librarians or engineers who should know better) spouting off opinions like "why not just buy a laptop and read on that?" or "screens hurt my eyes." And that bugs me. Clearly, there's a huge failure in marketing happening on Amazon's (and Sony's and iRex's) part. But I'm not sure what else they should be doing to educate consumers--nowadays, you can go a Target store and play with a Sony Reader in person; even some libraries have Kindles (link goes to my review of one of CMU's Libraries' two Kindle 1.0s), so trying one out isn't insurmountably difficult. Nearly every article about these readers points out that they use E Ink, though, yes, most reporters have started taking for granted that people know what that means. I just don't get how people who care enough to have an opinion on this don't also care enough to educate themselves a little bit. </rant>

In hopes of preventing my engineering and librarian colleagues from making similarly inane statements, I'd like to tell you something very important: ebook readers like the Kindle, Sony, iLliad, and upcoming Plastic Logic reader do not have bright backlit screens like monitors or iPhones. Instead, they have what looks like a printed page, pretty much. If you'd like a familiar comparison, it's a bit like reading a large scientific (or most any other) calculator, but with much better resolution and a far less shiny surface. It really looks like a printed page. E Ink is black-and-white, until probably 2010, when color devices should start coming out. And it has no backlight; you have to find a lamp if you want to read in the dark.

Other facts: the refresh rate on the newer devices is similar to the time lag of flipping a page--it was slower on Kindle 1.0. As you read, you can add bookmarks and annotations, stop at one page and start back at the same place, and in all other ways treat it like a book. On the Kindle, there's even a tiny status bar at the bottom of the screen that tells you how much of the way through the book you are. But it's a little bit better than a book, in that the font size can be changed, and you can run a search for a particular word or sentence you remember. I find it attractive that something the size of a large paperback or a magazine--depending whether you go Kindle 2.0 or Kindle DX, for instance--holds thousands of books.

In addition to books in various formats--and, no, the formats aren't currently all that interoperable between devices--Kindle DX and the upcoming Plastic Logic reader will both read PDFs natively. (For older Kindles, you first have to convert them to the Kindle file format, which may or may not cost $0.10, depending who you ask.) This alone makes me consider getting one, because I read an awful lot of academic articles, wasting an awful lot of paper (and carrying an awful lot of it around) in the process. Plastic Logic will also read Word docs, Excel files, and Powerpoints, and is said to have some touchscreen capabilities.

For most people, the really exciting thing about the Plastic Logic reader, due to come out in late 2009 or early 2010, is that it will be flexible. Holding it really will be just like holding a closed magazine, though I am not certain it will roll up as well as a magazine does. For 8.5x11" documents, you can hold it upright, and for books you can hold it sideways, just like the Kindle DX. It will have wireless capabilities, though perhaps not the same ones as the Kindle; both will allow for auto-downloading of the day's newspapers and blogs, for a fee.

For more information

For a comparison-and-contrast of several ereader technologies, circa December 2008 (so, before specs were released on Kindle 2.0), feel free to look at my LIS 2000 group's poster on the topic, here.

And to see what articles I'm reading (even weeks or months after I post this!) about ebook readers, feel free to check out my del.icio.us links on the topic: http://delicious.com/artificialinanity/ebooks - admittedly, a few of the links in there are about actual ebooks, rather than the readers, but it's pretty easy to tell the difference. If you want to follow the articles I read about just the Kindle or just the Plastic Logic reader, you can do that at these two links, respectively: http://delicious.com/artificialinanity/kindle and http://delicious.com/artificialinanity/plastic_logic.

The debate the library community, including users, should be having

I apologize for being all ranty, but I really think it's time we move on to the substantive part of the debate. "The aesthetic quality of reading a book" is not lost in any appreciable way with most of these devices--they feel like a book to hold and look like a book to read. You can spray them with book perfume if you miss "the smell of books." (I know I sound like I'm jeering here, but I just don't think this part of the debate is worth holding. I'm trying to lay it to rest.) And, inevitably, the prices will go down--they always do. The ebook is here; the ereader is coming; we will eventually stop printing books. Not now, but very possibly within our lifetimes. So, let's drop the sentimental arguments and move on to practical discussion.

Let's talk about how we will fight the restrictive DRM on ebooks (so that I can move my purchases from the Plastic Logic 1.0 to the Plastic Logic 5.0, given my rate of upgrading--or maybe to the Kindle 7.0, if I want to switch brands--and so, eventually, my library can buy one interoperable copy of a book, rather than four proprietary ones); let's decide whether it's worthwhile to lend out ebook readers in the near term; for the long term, let's figure out how to work with publishers to make the ebooks our patrons currently have to use monitors or printers to read accessible on their ereaders (perhaps for limited periods of time!); let's think about privacy and financial protection in the case of lost or stolen ereaders.

More broadly, let's decide on the library's role and what shape it will take when everything outside of archives is digital. Because that's where we're going, book-smell or no book-smell.