Computer Woes

I'm having a bad week. My computer has a Something. I'm not sure if it's a virus, or spyware goop, or what. Being a mere user, I am not privy to the illness that has befallen my machine. I'm told it's not even my fault, that it came through the network, and is not a result of anything I did. But it's ill. It started with my calendar, which spread to other pieces of Outlook. My preferences and personal files are gone, at least for now. I've had a wonderful tech person here several times for the past few days, and she's referred my problem to another tech. So I wait, and suffer.

It's not unlike the Bad Old Days that we tried to explain to our daughter the other day, when a child in the family was dying, and the mother wasn't told what was wrong (it might upset her, which would upset the child and delay recovery.) The child wasn't told (the child would be upset and delay recovery.) So I know there's a Something on my computer, and that I get a System32 message when I log on that ends in a .dll. We tried looking up the particular error message on the web and couldn't find it. But now I feel better knowing that Wikipedia has an entire entry on DLL Hell (DLL means "dynamic link libraries," and is a Windows thing. Learn somethin' every day, don'tcha?) Now I know where I am. DLL Hell.

Meanwhile, I've learned that More Things on a Stick is coming, starting on January 20th! I hope I get out of DLL Hell before then.

What is Presearch?

One blog I like to scan on a regular basis is Karen Schneider's Free Range Librarian. Recently she had an interesting post on her Top Ten Words and Phrases for 2008, and the one that caught my attention was "presearch":

"Presearch: the informal Google/Wikipedia look-ups students do before digging into better resources (and yes, they do that!)"

That definition hasn't hit Wikipedia yet (maybe a good thing?), but I like it. Years ago I worked with some folks at our campus Writing Center, and I remember they emphasized "prewriting," the writing that goes on as you're just getting started. It doesn't have to be perfect, and it's not unlike brainstorming on paper. I think this is an intriguing idea, and it will be interesting to see if the term/definition catch on.

Musings on Web/Library 2.0 Reluctance

Recently I received an email from a student librarian asking for my thoughts on why folks are reluctant to use Web 2.0/Library 2.0 technologies. I hadn't thought conciously on this much, but my subsconscious must have, because I was able to distill several ideas into some coherent points. Here's what I came up with, from an academic library perspective:

• A feeling that it pulls us away from what’s been important in our profession: the personal contact with patrons, diminishing the human touch.
• The thinking that our patrons aren’t there yet. I’ve heard from some colleagues that students (particularly graduate students, but not limited to them) aren’t aware of these technologies, and students want things to be as simple as possible. And many faculty aren’t there either.
• The belief that making things too simple is not good pedagogy. Research is a process, and it’s work, which isn’t necessarily easy (at least at the college level.)
• An impression that faculty make assumptions about student use of technologies, that students know more than they do; this idea is in tension with library staff perceiving that students know less than they used to, and/or have more to deal with than they used to.
• It’s a fad, another “trend” that will be replaced with something else.
• Lack of time to learn new technologies.
• Lack of support, in training and in ability to acquire and use new tools, both hardware and software.

She also asked about how we might overcome these obstacles. I didn't have many ideas there: frankly, we haven't made a lot of progress at my institution. But here are my thoughts:

• 23 Things programs of various types are helping library staff get on board with new technologies. Here in Minnesota, we’ve had two rounds of 23 Things on a Stick, with new Things promised for 2009. (The joke is that at our Minnesota State Fair, which is one of the biggest in the country, you can buy almost anything on a stick, including turkey, ostrich, and alligator.
• Incentives, even small ones, can be helpful. The original 23 Things program, as you may have seen, offered a prize for completion, as well as a chance to win a laptop computer and other prizes.
• I think any kind of partnering, or teamwork, or mentoring can help. Working with someone else, or a group, can give you encouragement and someone to ask if you run into problems.

I hope we can make some progess in 2009!

Federated search: hats off to the U of Wisconsin!

I have great admiration for the University of Wisconsin Libraries, and their willingness to share information on their various projects (I should send them a fan letter sometime.) Their materials have helped me more than once. This time my hat (black fleece, since it's below zero) is off to their Metalib Assessment project. This year they've been assessing their federated search product, Metalib. And they're terrific enough to share their working bibliographies and other documents. We're thinking of assessing our federated search product (we have CentralSearch), and some of the conversations stray away from actual assessment of the product. The UW Libraries are providing a great example. Thanks to them!

End of term is in sight

I've been "away" at the Minnesota Library Association conference, and then the Thanksgiving holiday, so I haven't posted for awhile. When I got back to work after the holiday, I had several requests for student appointments. Aha! It's December now, so the semester is almost over, and the students need me (it's nice to be needed.) While it can be challenging to deal with this, juggling their schedules and yours (just coming in to find me may not be the best option), it IS great to be helpful to students. And it's nice in a way to have another marker in the turning of the year (so THAT assignment is here again.)

One way that I think I'm good as a reference librarian is that I can usually put myself in the place of the novice user (I've been confused by many web interfaces in my day, much less subject headings, etc.) While I've been through THAT assignment many times, I can understand what it must be like to a novice. I went to a very interesting presentation at MLA about what some of our high school students are and aren't learning about library research (I need to post on that in the near future), and I realize that for many first- and second-year college students, this whole idea of Subject Headings is a new thing. Knowing this helps me help them.

Generation Jones Goes to the White House

I'm one. President-Elect Obama and his wife both are. So is Alaka governor Sarah Palin. But have you heard of Generation Jones, aka "The Jonesers?"

I first heard about them in 2000, in the midst of "Baby Boomer this" and "Gen X" that. "You're a Boomer," said my coworkers and the pundits. "You were born between 1946 and 1964 - Woodstock, Vietnam." "Are you kidding?" I'd think. "I was just a kid then." I didn't know from Woodstock, except as a Peanuts character.

Then I read an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about Jonathan Pontell, who coined the term, and now has a Generation Jones website. Generation Jones are the people born between 1954 and 1965: the end of the Boomers and the beginning of Generation X. Why Jones? There are several definitions: it embodies the idea of a large, unknown, invisible generation, or a generation longing for its own identity (or "keeping up with the Joneses" and conspicuous consumption.) We are the generation of shag carpets, avocado appliances, the Brady Bunch, and Watergate. We are one quarter of the adult U.S. population. (Interestingly enough, the article disappeared from electronic sources for awhile after the Tasini court decision, so I was glad I'd printed it off.)

The president-elect will be the first Joneser in the White House. I heard Garrison Keillor last week on A Prairie Home Companion noting the end of the Booners in the White House, and I was intrigued to see on the Generation Jones website a section on its impact on the Presidential election. We've hit the big time, with coverage in Newseek, the Chicago Tribune, and YouTube. Obama's older daughter is the same age as my daughter, just as my brother and I were about the same ages as President Kennedy's kids. In my quiet, Midwestern way, I'm celebrating. My people have arrived.

Ups and Downs of the Long Tail

The Long Tail (in recent popular parlance) is the string of unique items, sold in small quantities, which are more "findable" in the online age. It's cool in a lot of ways, making all sorts of things float to the attention of possibly interested people ("if you like Doctor Who, maybe you'll like Diana Wynne Jones!") But for me, there's a downside. I keep finding all of these out-of-print, not-at-my-local-library, hardly-anyone-on-the-planet-seems-to-have THINGS that I get interested in. The local public radio station used to play a particular version of the Marseillaise (French national anthem) every July 14, Bastille Day. Out of print. One of my favorite writing blogs has a "what books do you read again and again?" posting, and someone mentions some intriguing books I've never heard of. Out of print, and copies of area public libraries are missing, withdrawn, or in storage.

Now back in the day (ah, my misspent youth), if something was out of print, that was it. My favorite author as a child was E. Nesbit, a British author from the early 1900s who wrote books about children and magic (magic cities, magical creatures, mermaids) and name-dropped some of her favorite authors in her works. E. Nesbit was born in 1858, and in the 1950s there was a British publisher who republished most of her books in a somewhat uniform edition, a few of which managed to make their way to the children's section of my downtown public library (while we lived in the suburbs, my parents worked downtown, so I was there a lot.) Of course I read and reread them, and wanted them for my own. But they were British books, and for some reason it was almost impossible back then to get a British book through an American bookstore. So I managed to get a few, found others in American editions, and hoped that some day, I could find them all.

Flash forward many years, and online bookstores make it possible for me to use my disposable income to find them used in various locations (I even found some at used booksales, which is a story in itself.) I have over the years picked up copies of nearly all of E. Nesbit's children's books (and ran out of shelf space in the process.) So I'm tempted to do the same when I want that recording of the Mareillaise, or those historical novels that the public libraries don't carry. You can even buy things online from British bookstores now - how cool is that? The Long Tail makes it so easy to spend our money, darn it. I have to reign in my desires and be fiscally prudent, especially these days. I make my little lists, and allow myself a few at a time.

But I do have to commend the Long Tail effect of that popular author, J. K. Rowling. With the popularity of Harry Potter, publishers looked around and said, "who else writes books about kids and magic? What do we have on our backlist?" So the great author Edward Eager comes back in print, the writer whose book Half Magic I found in fourth grade, which led me to E. Nesbit and so many other writers years ago. So I can flesh out my Edward Eager collection, and buy my daughter her own copies (in print!) I guess I can't complain too much.