Edublog Award Nominations
By Meredith Farkas | November 24, 2009
In this post I’m just registering my nominations for the 2009 Edublog Awards.
My Nominations for The 2009 Edublog Awards are:
Best New Blog – In the Library with the Lead Pipe (just over 1 year old; hope that counts as new!)
Best resource sharing blog – The Distant Librarian
Best librarian / library blog – The Distant Librarian
Best elearning / corporate education blog – The Bamboo Project
I can’t think of another blogger who has more consistently brought things to my attention that I hadn’t seen before and that I found useful in my work as an academic librarian than Paul Pival. If you’re in an academic library or are interested in instructional technologies and you don’t read his blog, you should!
Topics: blogging | 3 Comments »
This is not my blogosphere
By Meredith Farkas | November 22, 2009
One of the things I always loved most about social media was the transparency it created. If a product, service, hotel, etc. was terrible, you could be sure that you’d hear about it from plenty of bloggers. On the other side of things, small companies and talented individuals were able to get noticed because of word-of-mouth marketing online. It used to be so easy to get really honest, unfiltered views of products, services, etc. on the web as people were writing reviews because they felt strongly about the product. Now the water has been muddied by PR folks and the people who feed at their swag-giving teat. Some people are writing reviews of things not because they bought a product and loved it or hated it, but because someone either paid them or gave them a freebie. And others aren’t reading to get honest reviews — they’re reading to get freebies from the manufacturer. It gives power back to the big corporations who can afford to spend the most on incentives, trips, etc. for bloggers. It’s such a sad perversion of what social media can offer.
I’m relatively new to the “mommy blogging” world. While my husband and I have a blog to keep family and friends up-to-date on Reed (which we’re terrible about actually updating), I don’t consider myself a “mommy blogger.” But I do read mommy/daddy/parenting blogs. Until this week, I was pretty well out of the loop regarding the brouhaha with compensated reviews and the chummy relationships between companies and bloggers, probably because the few blogs I read tend to be ones that don’t go for that sort of thing. Then, out of nowhere, the other day, on a blog that had never contained anything of the sort, I saw a disclaimer at the top of a post reading “This is a compensated review from BlogHer and x company.” Huh? So apparently, the bloggers were paid to try out a product (which they were also given for free) and write about it. And I should trust that review why? I noticed that there were about 60 comments on the post, so I assumed that their other readers were equally horrified by this post and were telling the writers about their disgust. Well, no. They were commenting in order to get a chance at a free sample of the product!
Little did I know how common this sort of thing was in the mommy-blogging world. Coming from a blog community where compensated reviews are anathema, I have a strong sense of disgust when I see people getting money or perks from a company whose product they are reviewing. It makes me not only not trust what they are writing about that product, but what they write about everything else becomes suspect. So it was surprising to me to see a post like this show up on an otherwise great blog without anyone batting an eyelash (other than to try and win some free stuff).
I started to look a little more into the world of mommy blogging. There are tons of bloggers out there who will write a positive review for pretty much anything they’re given for free (or are otherwise compensated for). Just do a Google search for the statement “compensated review from BlogHer” and you will find blogs that do nothing but review things in exchange for free products, gift certificates, and even trips to faraway places (I just read a bunch of blog posts from some mommy bloggers who got a free trip to visit the Smuckers headquarters and almost lost my lunch). And you’ll almost never find a negative review on any of them. What’s amazing is that some of these blogs have huge readerships. Maybe it’s for the freebies they often dole out from these companies, or maybe some mothers are still willing to trust a review from a blogger who is being compensated by the company whose product they’re reviewing. Scary thought.
I never looked much into BlogHer, though I thought it was an organization/community devoted to empowering and highlighting women in the blogopshere. I knew they had a conference, which sounded awesome. After seeing that “compensated review” statement, I checked out their site and found that they were not only about empowering women, but also connecting advertisers with female bloggers to review their products online. Maybe I just have an over-inflated sense of ethics, but this really bothers me. It feels like they’re taking advantage of their network to make money off the women who blog and read their blogs. Their Advertising kit (PDF) says “BlogHer’s unique relationship with its audience provides the ideal platform for marketers to reach and engage this valuable audience in this exciting new medium.” It’s one thing for companies to advertise on the BlogHer network, but they offer “Product Reviews and Custom Widgets – Our selected bloggers will review your products or web-site and provide a fair and balanced review which will be shared with the 15MM women in our network. A widget containing the reviews creates scale and immerses our audience in your brand through these reviews.” I’m not quite sure how promoting a company’s product for a quick buck is empowering to women.
Reading mommy blogs this past weekend, I found a lot to be disgusted by. Here’s a sampling of some choice statements from disclaimers and policies (sans names or links, as I’d rather not give these blogs any sort of promotion):
“This blog accepts various types of advertisements and is open to any suggestions. Payments are all to be made via PayPal.
Pricing are as follow:
Sponsored Post (minimum 200 words) $20.00
Product Review (send sample) $20.00
Product Giveaway (additional to the review rate) $30.00″“Products I cannot find anything positive to include in a review will not be included on this blog. Why? I’m not a negative person.”
“The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content.”
“I write a personal blogsite called ___, and somewhere along the way I realized that I could offer my opinions to others because I’m a visible entity on the web, who deals honestly with others. If I say it, you can trust that I mean it.”
“The owner(s) of this blog is compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner(s) of this blog receives compensation for our posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products.”
“If I feel that your product does not meet quality standards, I will contact you before posting any comments. I also reserve the right not to post a review if I feel in any way the product will not relate to my family nor my readers. To date, I have not received an item for review that I did not feel fit my website or readers.”
“I am married with three children in each of the core age ranges, 2, 10, and 16.”
“FULL DISCLOSURE: This is an uncompensated review. Warner Bros. sent a copy of this video game for me to review and has kindly offered to provide a giveaway prize. Thanks Warner Brothers!”
“Full Sponsorship:
- Passing out of any swag that you would like to send (not required) and business cards while at the conference
- A shirt will be made just prior to the conference with your logo placed nicely in view to wear for a full day of the event (logo must be approved by sponsor and by blogger)”“If during the testing process, we are not satisfied with your product – you will be contact to discuss matters privately. _____ does not publish negative reviews on companies and products. The purpose of this blog is to be a beneficial resource.’
Disgusted yet? I guess one could take from all of this that women are a powerful force in social media and that’s why the media is courting them so aggressively. What I take from it is that these women (certainly not all) are susceptible enough to compromise their ethics in order to get free stuff, make a few bucks, and/or get attention from big manufacturers.
I find this particularly frustrating because parents are often so anxious about finding the best and safest products for their children, and frequently rely on the social web to make purchasing decisions. I know I researched every product ad nauseum on the Web when I was pregnant with Reed. It scares me to think that people might actually make a purchasing decision based on what they read on one of these blogs.
I’m pleased to see that the FTC is starting to pay attention to the social media world. Starting December 1, 2009 –
the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.
Awesome! While I doubt this will be enforced, I’m glad the government is trying to impress on people the fact that blogs are influential media and bloggers should be held to the same ethical standards as journalists and other media personalities.
How long will it take for the IRS to get in on the game? I sincerely doubt that most of these people are claiming these freebies on their taxes. If a blogger receives a free stroller, they need to claim it on their tax return. For mommy bloggers who get products on an almost daily basis, that would end up being one heck of a tax burden (and not much fun to keep track of either).
All this “blogola” makes the blogosphere less about building community and sharing stories and more about getting freebies from companies (for the blogger and the blog readers). And while it might make bloggers feel special to get all this attention and/or compensation from big companies, these companies are using them for “word-of-mouth advertising” that costs significantly less than any sort of magazine advertising they do.
There are still some great parenting blogs out there. One I particularly value is Z Recommends, which is both a parenting and consumer advocacy blog. While they do get products to review — in an effort to provide advice about specific classes of products like sippy cups — they give away everything they receive. And most of their posts are devoted to child safety issues like BPA, lead, and other chemicals in products for children. They have broken a lot of big stories on their site and represent for me the best of investigative journalism and blogging.
As Z Recommends has shown, parenting blogs have the power to change things for the better. Just like in our little corner of the blogosphere, parenting blogs can be a space for parents to connect around shared experiences, to help people make informed decisions, and to create powerful change. And I know the parenting blogosphere isn’t all bad. I’ve seen strong communities built around the experience of having multiples, having miscarriages, and saving money/time (shoutout to Rachel!), and those blog networks are full of wonderful women and men who blog to connect, share with and support others. It’s not all disgusting, but sadly, the disgusting is so darn visible.
I just want to say how grateful I am to be part of a blog community where people contribute to share ideas, connect with others, and contribute to the profession. I know that I’m getting “the straight dope” from the library bloggers I read. Some people might be more diplomatic or politic than others, but they don’t write about or review things simply because a company asked them to. I can count on one hand the number of posts in my five years of blogging that were written by library bloggers because a company or individual gave them something. And I love that I can believe in the bloggers I follow and trust in their integrity. Thank you for being the ethical people you are.
I get lots of emails from publishers, authors, software developers, etc. asking me to review their products in exchange for a free copy. My answer is always no. Always. Because I don’t want to lose your trust over something so meaningless. These folks not trying to send me things because I’m cool or they like my writing, but because I have a good-sized audience and Google rank. Just like my negative posts about Pottery Barn were highly ranked in Google searches, a positive post about a technology or book would also end up towards the top of the Google results. I don’t see that as an opportunity to promote companies that give me stuff; I see it giving me a greater responsibility to be ethical, honest and always write things with my audience in mind. If people are going to find my writing on topics first, I need to do my best by them. I may not post as often as I should, but I promise you that I will always be an ethical blogger.
Topics: blogging | 8 Comments »
Constructive criticism
By Meredith Farkas | November 5, 2009
Let this be a lesson to you — never write a comment on a blog post while you have a baby on your lap who is simultaneously grabbing at your laptop and spitting up on your pants (yes, this really happened, I have the stained jeans to prove it). Trust me, what you write will never come out the way you wanted it to. I commented on a friend’s blog post about the Library 101 project and what I wrote came out really badly. So I hope to clear it up here, though while I may be more clear in my explanation, I may make an even bigger hash of things. Seriously, I should probably stop contributing to the web entirely until Reed is in kindergarten.
There was a big part of me that loved Library 101 (for those of you who don’t know, this is a video produced by Michael Porter and David Lee King — with a group of essays from others in the profession — designed to encourage people to keep up with new technologies). I love Michael and David’s enthusiasm and creativity — I think of them as the profession’s greatest cheerleaders. I was on a panel with them at ALA and I felt like a curmudgeon sitting there in the face of their true belief and optimism. The Library 101 video was really fun, though perhaps a bit long. I certainly appreciate the time and effort and passion that went into it and wish I had the video editing skills they have. I also love how many people in the profession love libraries and love Michael and David enough to photograph themselves for the project and how many really cool, smart people took the time to write essays for it. My contribution is less than stellar in my opinion because I dashed it off at a time when I was dealing with family illness and lack of sleep (pretty much the one constant in my life these days). I wish I could have written something better for the project. A lot of the other pieces are far better-written and more thought-provoking.
While I loved it as me, Meredith Farkas, friend and fan, I didn’t quite understand it when I tried to look at it through the lens of a library worker who is not that into technology. Or a library administrator. Would that inspire me to start learning about technology or to start a Learning 2.0-type program? Probably not. And when I commented that I didn’t understand the project, that’s what I meant. I don’t really understand who they’re doing it for. If it’s for people like me, they hit their mark. If it’s for a library administrator who doesn’t see the value of continuing technology education or a librarian who just doesn’t care about all this web 2.0 stuff, I don’t think this is going to reach those people. It just feels like preaching to the choir, because I think the people who are going to love the video are already drinking the kool-ade about the importance of continuous learning about technologies. I guess what I would have liked to see is something constructive coming from the Library 101 site — like a call to create a continuing education program like Learning 2.0 or Five Weeks to a Social Library, where the video could direct/inspire lots of people from all over the profession to share their knowledge of library technologies through creating educational content that anyone could benefit from. It just seems to be missing that “next step.”
While I’m all for criticism, and some people have leveled some very constructive criticisms of the project, I really hate how mean some people have been about Library 101. I know what it’s like to put your blood, sweat and tears into a project and then have people say mean things about it. Even when 90% of people are saying great stuff (or at least constructive stuff), it’s that 10% that you hear the most (at least I do). I’m not saying “don’t criticize people,” I’m just saying that when you do, you should think of how much effort that person put into their work and criticize in a constructive and humane way. Because the last thing we want to do is discourage creativity and risk-taking in this profession by beating people up for it.
My little guy just woke up from his nap, so I’d better run before I write something stupid again. 
Topics: hi, librarianship, our digital future, tech trends | 6 Comments »
Shades of gray
By Meredith Farkas | November 2, 2009
Ever since the news of LibLime’s enterprise version of Koha and whether or not their actions consisted a fork of the code, I’ve been thinking about how black and white some of us (me included, at times) tend to see library products and library vendors. Stephen Abram’s “position paper” on open source ILSes got me thinking about it again.
I’ve found it interesting how some vendors are vilified (sometimes fairly, sometimes not) while others get a free pass — to the point where we no longer even think of them as vendors. Open source vendor? You’re cool. Vendor who blogs and gives talks about 2.0 stuff (a la Paul Miller, Stephen Abram and Tim Spalding)? You’re cool too. Product manager, marketing dude or executive at a company like Ex Libris or EBSCO or Elsevier? Not so much. And why is that? They’re all trying to sell something to libraries, right? They all want to make money from us. But some of these people are seen as being good and having our best interests at heart while others of them are seen as being out to screw us.
Once upon a time, I was asked to speak on a panel. So was Tim Spalding. Because I was a member of this organization, I was not paid and had to pay for my travel to get to the conference. Tim got paid to come and be a part of this panel, in which he spoke about his product, LibraryThing. I mentioned it to the organizers because I thought it was odd that a vendor get paid for the opportunity to drum up free publicity for his product. The organizer said that she really hadn’t thought of Tim as a vendor. Interesting. Is Tim an awesome guy who most of us think a great deal of? Certainly. Is he a very entertaining speaker? Without question. Does he sell stuff to libraries? Yes. Does he sometimes exhibit at conferences? Yes. Does that make him a vendor? I’d say so!
And that’s not to say that vendors are bad. Most aren’t. But I really take issue with the way our profession tends to idealize some types of vendors and vilify others. I think a lot of people have started to see this black-and-white thinking as problematic in light of the whole LibLime Koha fork thing. Because suddenly you have this open source company — a company that is supposed to be good and out to benefit the larger open source community — doing something that benefits them and their customers at the expense of the community. But weren’t we just hoisting the LibLime folks on our shoulders last year? Weren’t many of us (me included) promoting them and weren’t we excited when we saw their client list growing and growing and growing? (Many of us may still be happy to see their client list grow as it’s a sign that the market share of open source software in libraries is growing.)
Folks at OCLC definitely used to get a pass in the same way the open source folks did, though that seems to be changing as public perception shifts towards viewing them as a vendor that wants to gobble up and control our data (which is also a simplification). It reminds me a lot of how some librarians felt about Google — how they went from loving Google to feeling totally betrayed by them. I guess my take is that if someone makes their money off a library without working in it, they are a vendor. Consultants are vendors. People who sell products are vendors. People who sell services, like maintaining open source systems, are vendors. And all of them will put the good of their company over the good of libraries. That doesn’t make them evil — it makes them good businesspeople.
And again, with the Stephen Abram thing. I didn’t like his paper because it lacked a level of quality and polish that I would expect from Stephen and a company like SirsiDynix. It was about at the level of professionalism of a poorly-researched blog post (hey, like this!). I take issue with anything that doesn’t cite where its information is coming from and uses phrases like “some companies”, “some software” “some argue.” There were lots of factual inaccuracies and opinion masquerading as fact (”Proprietary software has more features. Period. Proprietary software is much more user-friendly”). And what was up with the completely pointless chart on page 4? It was just an awful piece. The fact is, there are a lot of good arguments against open source and against choosing an open source ILS, but Stephen’s lack of good hard facts and citations made any point he made seem less credible.
Part of me started to wonder on Friday if someone from an open source company wrote a similar screed against proprietary systems, would it garner the same reaction from the Twittersphere/blogosphere? And I hate to say it, but I think the answer is no. If someone from Equinox went off on the weaknesses of proprietary systems in a way that was badly researched and perhaps contained some hyperbole, many folks would probably nod their head and say, “yeah, they do suck.” Some of us might send the link to our colleagues, writing that it contains a great distillation of why open source is the better option for the ILS. I’m not saying this to damn anyone or shame anyone, because I know I do it too sometimes without even thinking about the double-standard.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve been so sleep-deprived lately that I’ve been seeing everything through whatever the opposite of rose-tinted glasses are (green?). I guess what I’m trying to say is that we really can’t look at things as being so black and white. We can’t say open source=good, proprietary=bad. It’s not that simple. Stephen Abram is not a bad person because he wrote a crappy “position paper. OCLC isn’t necessarily evil. Open source vendors aren’t necessarily good. We shouldn’t assume that a vendor is out to take us to the cleaners and steal all our data, but neither should we assume that a vendor has our best interests at heart (no matter how cool they or their representatives are). Things are really, really gray, and require a much more critical eye than we sometimes have by default.
Updated: I just read Cindi Trainor’s The Sacred Cows of Library Technologists, which I think dovetails so nicely with my points and is far, far more eloquently written. Check it out!
Topics: assessment, librarianship, libraries, open source, our digital future, tech trends | 26 Comments »
Who should teach library instruction?
By Meredith Farkas | October 1, 2009
Don’t worry, Walt, I won’t apologize for being away and I won’t promise that I’m going to post more often (though I have a lot of ideas for posts, something has been preventing me from getting them out of my head and onto the screen).
Wayne Bivens-Tatum recently wrote a very interesting post questioning who should be teaching library instruction — librarians or faculty. This is an issue that I’ve been thinking about a great deal and while I don’t think an answer exists for every discipline or every school, I thought I’d share my own thinking on it.
We have been working on our report to our accrediting body, NEASC, since the Spring and one of the library goals that was originally written into it was for library instruction to be taught in every English 101 (AKA Freshman comp) class. Last Fall, we taught library instruction to 90% of the EN 101 classes as a result of aggressive marketing to instructors. We thought it a reasonable goal to say that we’d like library instruction to be in 100% of EN 101 courses so that the University would know that every Freshman has certain standard basic information literacy skills. It would create a baseline so that we wouldn’t have to teach the most basic aspects of library research in upper-level classes for the small number of students who didn’t have a library session in EN 101.
While this seemed innocuous enough to me and my colleagues, the English faculty asked us to strike it from the report. They objected 1) to the idea that we are the only ones who can teach information literacy and 2) to any mandate that faculty would have to have a library session as part of their class (which would interfere with academic freedom). We at the library certainly weren’t trying to say that we are the only unit teaching information literacy. Even when librarians do teach a one-shot (or even a few sessions), what students are learning in there is only a very small piece of the information literacy puzzle. The academic freedom issue is trickier and isn’t one that I have a difficult time speaking to. I assume that there must be certain standards, guidelines and requirements that instructors teaching 101 must adhere to already so that students can achieve a basic level of knowledge/skill. We always tailor our instruction sessions to what the instructor has assigned his or her students, so it’s not like anyone would be telling faculty what to teach. It’s the students who suffer because of this lack of standardization since it means that we either have to teach the same things again in upper-level classes or we skip teaching the basics in those classes and students who’d never had library instruction end up lost.
Wayne talks about a new model at Princeton in which the librarians are training the writing instructors to teach library research themselves. I can’t see that flying at many institutions where librarians are seen more as support staff than as fellow instructors with their own area of expertise. I can’t imagine most faculty here being willing to accept training from us on how to teach library resources to their students. But if they were, I certainly would be happy to let go of our instructional role in EN 101 if it meant that all students would get the same preparation.
I don’t think librarians should see the teaching of information literacy as our domain. Some faculty members are teaching information literacy and library research brilliantly in their discipline themselves and that doesn’t threaten me in the least. My Director wants us to be teaching at three levels in every discipline (for example, I teach at the 100, 300, and 400 level in the history program), but I don’t know if that is always necessary. For example, there is a criminal justice research methods class for majors. I do not teach in that class, but they still receive significant information literacy instruction from their professor. On the other hand, I have worked with a class of Junior psychology majors who had never used PSYCInfo or PSYCAbstracts. I think we (librarians AND faculty) need to worry less about what is our domain and more about ensuring that students have the skills they need to be successful in their major. It doesn’t matter who teaches it as long as it’s being taught.
But it needs to be taught well. There are some faculty members who are more knowledgeable about the library resources in their area of study than any librarian here. There are other faculty who have never used a database and still tell their students to use the New York Times in microfilm (we’ve had it online for years). The most unfortunate thing is that, in most cases, it’s the people who are very aware of our resources who request library instruction for their classes. Those who are not continue to assign their students to use only print journals and to find things we don’t even have anymore.
I struggle with how to reach those faculty members. When we get a “rogue assignment” we usually email the faculty member to either get clarification, describe the difficulty that their students are having with the assignment, or let them know that something they want their students to do is literally not possible. Sometimes that helps; sometimes we never hear back. I’ve been wanting to offer brown-bag lunch sessions on new resources in specific disciplines in an effort to get faculty up-to-speed with what we have available, but I suspect that the people I most want to reach will not be the ones who show up. I really want to provide outreach to these faculty — either to get them up-to-speed on our resources or to provide instruction in some of their classes — but I’m not sure how to reach them.
While I don’t really feel territorial about information literacy instruction, I do struggle with the knowledge that the library resources are our area of subject expertise. No matter how library-savvy the faculty member, we are always going to be more “up to date” on what we have. A history faculty member who uses our library all the time was surprised to learn in an instruction session the other day that you could create an account in JSTOR and save articles to your account. Faculty I work with frequently comment that they learned something new when I teach to their classes. I don’t know that all of us can teach it better (some of us are piss-poor instructors), but more often than not, we are going to be more knowledgeable about the library resources and their capabilities. This, of course, begs the question of whether deep knowledge of resources or teaching skills are more important, but that’s a question for another day.
Ideally, I’d like to see one of two things happen: 1) a faculty member who is very up-to-date on what is available through the library teaches his or her students about library research and information literacy or 2) a librarian teaches library research and information literacy in close partnership with the faculty member. Because what’s most important is that partnership. When a faculty member gives over sole responsibility for teaching research to the librarian, the students rarely see value in what is being taught. I’ve had faculty leave the room while I’m teaching and the students in those classes always become less engaged as soon as it happens. When the faculty member makes comments throughout the session and stays engaged in what I’m teaching, the students stay engaged, because the faculty member is indicating with his/her behavior that this is valuable and important. Ideally, I’d love to see classes team-taught, but just having the faculty member engaged in the class makes a huge difference for the students.
I must apologize for the twisted path this post has taken — it matches well my own muddled thoughts on the issue. I think so much of what the ideal is for library instruction depends on the university, the discipline, and the individual faculty members a librarian is dealing with. We can’t say “___ is the best way to do library instruction.” Even in the social sciences (my liaison area), I work very closely with one department and in another I’ve only taught one class session in two years. I don’t think there’s a perfect model that will work for every institution/department/class, but I do know that the more that we or academic faculty are territorial about our roles, the more likely it is that students will get very poor library instruction or none at all.
Like Wayne, I’m curious what your thoughts are on who should be teaching library instruction? Do you have similar power struggles at your institution? Do you have great partnerships with faculty in teaching library instruction? I’d love to hear about it. We all learn so much from hearing about the experiences of others.
And just to be totally gratuitous, here’s a picture of my biggest (and most wonderful) distraction from blogging.
Topics: instruction, librarianship, libraries | 14 Comments »
Roles and responsibilities for 2.0 technologies
By Meredith Farkas | August 30, 2009
I get asked a lot of things via email from librarians, but very few actually make it to this blog. This question was so interesting and probably better answered by the “hive” than just by little old me. I am also curious how others would respond.
I was wondering if you had any advice or links to websites or professional literature that deal with this issue. That issue is: how do libraries deal with the roles and responsibilities of 2.0 technology? Some of it crosses borders and/or job descriptions. Who is in charge or responsible for tweets on twitter, the library marketing director, the reference librarian, the library director, etc. I suspect this is something that we will just have to work out as an organization. I’m just wondering if anyone else has any wisdom they might share in this regard.
My take on this is that there probably isn’t much professional literature on this topic because how the roles and responsibilities are assigned depend very much on organizational size, organizational structure, and who is really interested in doing it. At a library with a very small staff (like the Luria Library at Santa Barbara City College) it may be an interested director who takes responsibility for these 2.0 initiatives. At libraries where the lines between tech and public service are very clearly delineated, it may be the tech folks who are in charge of the Twitter account, whereas, at a library (like mine) where tech librarians do reference shifts and public service librarians are well-trained in library technologies (and every line is extremely blurred), it may be a joint responsibility or the responsibility of the public services librarians. In some libraries (perhaps most?), people have taken this on because they’re simply the ones most into marketing and/or web 2.0 tools. In bigger libraries where there is a marketing director or an outreach librarian or a digital branch manager, that person may be in charge of these initiatives.
But I’m curious, what are your thoughts on this? Especially with regards to 2.0 tools that are created in an effort to reach out to patrons, who should be responsible? What makes the most sense? Should it be the person who has the most contact with the public? The most tech-savvy person? The person with the most authority (the Director)? This is one of those questions that has myriad answers, so I wanted to open it up to see how other libraries handle it (or how you think libraries should handle it).
Topics: libraries, our digital future, social software | 14 Comments »
It’s not about us (or more ramblings on possessiveness)
By Meredith Farkas | August 28, 2009
I know Jenica wondered if her blog post, Rambling about possessiveness, really had a point, but it was right in line with things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Jenica wrote about the fine line between taking ownership of a project/thing in terms of really being really invested in the success or failure of a project vs. taking ownership in a possessive sense. This is something I’ve been wondering about too, especially as we’re working on a lot of projects that will, to some extent, change the way students use the library online. When I work on a project, I get very invested in it, because I feel a passion for my work and want to make things great. But I think sometimes that passion (for me, for anyone) can border on possessiveness, and when we get to that place, we can forget who we’re actually doing these things for in the first place.
For years, we’ve used our catalog basically as it came out of the box, but we now have an awesome new Systems Librarian and a Head of Digital Initiatives who are really passionate about making the catalog more usable. I couldn’t be more excited about this. The other day, we met to talk about library annual goals and my colleagues discussed their unit’s goal for improving the catalog. They talked about customizations we as librarians might like to see, but never did they talk about finding out what our users want or need from the catalog or finding out how our users use the catalog. And my colleague who heads this unit is a very user-focused person, but “surveying the population” was not something he was saying in terms of improving the catalog. So, I brought it up, because I worry about us developing something that’s great for librarians and is sucky for the people it’s really there for. A day later, another colleague emailed everyone with some questions about the test catalog and described his preferences for searches. While his questions were certainly valuable, I had to say to myself “who cares how you like to search?” Or how I like to search? Is that how our users like to search? Can we assume that we know that? Yes, include the search options that allow us to do our job, but the catalog should be customized in order to meet the needs of our students and faculty. I think we sometimes get this tunnel vision where we start to think that it’s about us. And it really shouldn’t be, because our library wouldn’t exist without the patrons we’re here to serve. As Jenica said, the libraries aren’t ours. Then neither is the catalog/website/etc.
But even when we do usability studies or surveys, I sometimes wonder if we don’t design them in such a way that we get the results we want to see in the first place. When I did usability testing of our website four years ago, the results brought us to the same conclusions I had come to myself just by looking at it. And I wonder if in some way my own biases impacted the design and results. Maybe, maybe not. But I often get the sense that we’re sometimes doing assessments not to learn something new, but to confirm what we already think we know or how we want things to be. How often are you really surprised by the results of a survey or usability study you’ve done?
I’m happy the students are coming back this week, because it brings us back to reality. It reminds us of why we’re here. We’re here to support the academic work of students and faculty — not to create the coolest tools that only we think are cool or the best catalog for librarians. We so often take for granted that we know what our users want and need or we assume that because an article in Educause says that students are like ___ then our students must be like ___ as well. We need to get, as our University President (a military man) often says, “the ground truth.” We need to build things our users truly want and need and leave our egos and possessiveness and desire to only create something really cool at the door (which so many of us, me included, are guilty of once in a while). Because it’s not about us. It’s about them.
Topics: Work, libraries, our digital future | 7 Comments »
Help the Louisville Free Public Library!
By Meredith Farkas | August 5, 2009
I know a number of people in the Louisville area, so I’ve heard all about the horrible weather they’ve been having this year. But the flooding of the Louisville Free Public Library was the kicker. Check out some of fellow blogger Greg Schwartz’s pictures of the damage — it’s really bad. They’re estimating at least one million dollars in damage to their books, facility, computers, bookmobiles and more.
It’s times like this that I’m proud to be a librarian and am especially proud of the amazing generosity and come-togethery-ness (well it should be a word!) of my online friends. Steve Lawson has set up a Library Society of the World Fundraiser to collect money for the Louisville Free Public Library:
I have set up the email LSW.LFPL@google.com and linked it to my PayPal account. I intend to collect money at that address until September 1, at which point I’ll send a check in the name of the Library Society of the World to the LFPL Foundation. You can just send money to that email address using PayPal, or use the button [at Steve's original post]:
If you’d rather send a check, send it to the Library Society of the World Clubhouse, PO Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933. Make the check payable to Steve Lawson.
Don’t worry about how much you can afford to donate. My own contribution will be small-ish, between $20 and $50.
But there are about 300 members of the LSW room on FriendFeed. There are close to 1,000 members of the LSW group on Linkedin. I would like to think we can raise at least $5,000 for LFPL by September 1. That’s only $17 per FriendFeed member, or $5 per Linkedin member.
For this to work, you have to trust me. I promise that every dime that comes through PayPal or check will go to LFPL. (PayPal takes a small cut if your donation is charged to your credit card (rather than your bank account) and if you don’t choose the option to pay those fees yourself, so it’s possible that I won’t get the full amount of your donation. I’ll only be able to donate the money I actually receive after PayPal fees.)
On September 1, I’ll total up what we have raised and send it to the library. If you would rather give money yourself instead of sending it to me, here is the address and phone number given in the Louisville Courier-Journal:
The Library Foundation
Attn: Flood
301 York St.
Louisville, KY 40203
(502) 574-1709
Whether you’re a LSW member or not, please consider finding a way to donate to the library so that they can quickly get up and running again. Even just a few dollars from each reader of this blog would really add up. Greg and colleagues, you’re in my thoughts.
Topics: libraries | 1 Comment »
Why I participated in Library Day in the Life
By Meredith Farkas | August 3, 2009
Sarah Cohen wonders what motivated people to participate in Library Day in the Life and who we are writing these for. I can’t speak for everyone else, but I wanted to share my own reasons for doing it (and since this is a bit long, I thought it better to post it here than to Sarah’s blog).
I wasn’t one of those people who first worked in a library before going to library school. I started library school about a month after I started my first job in a library, so obviously I’d made the decision to pursue this career before I had the inside scoop on what library work was like. I’d read a number of articles about digital preservation and digitization of special collections materials and thought that librarianship seemed to be an exciting profession that allowed people to pursue all sorts of interesting and diverse work and would have a tremendous impact on the preservation of born digital materials. Also, coming from a helping profession (social work), I was looking to do work where I felt like I could make a difference in people’s lives. But did I have any idea what I’d be doing as a librarian on a day-to-day basis? Not a clue! I took a huge leap of faith and luckily it paid off. I would have loved to have had a better idea of what librarians do in their jobs, but, at the time, there weren’t really many resources that offered that sort of information.
Because of my blog, I get a lot of people emailing me for advice on whether or not they should become a librarian or asking me what librarians do (or what I do as if my experience is somehow representative). I never tell someone if they should or shouldn’t go to library school, but try to dispel some of the myths about librarianship (it’s not stressful, you read books all day, etc.) and point them to resources that give them a sense of the breadth of experiences in our profession. That, I think, is what Library Day in the Life offers. It paints a picture of the diverse work we do as librarians in a very real and unromanticized sense. If you’re interested in working in public services, you can visit the blogs of librarians who work in public services and see what their days are like. If you’re interested in working with library systems, you can see what sorts of projects those librarians are working on. It doesn’t romanticize, doesn’t cheer our work — it just lays out what we do in a way that people who are interested in our profession can learn from.
So, I guess I’d say that I was writing this for the “me” of seven years ago, or for people who, like me, have not worked in the profession but think librarianship sounds like a good match for their interests and might want to participate. And while it’s valuable for future librarians, I also found it interesting myself to see what people at other libraries do during their work days. It’s fascinating to me how different the work of instruction/information literacy librarians can be at different institutions. But, again, I think it’s less for us than for those people who are searching the web in an effort to get a sense of what this profession they’re thinking of joining is really like.
When someone emails me and tells me they’re considering becoming a librarian, I will tell them that before they make any sort of decision, they should look at librarians’ library day in the life posts and see what the work of a librarian is really like. It’s an awesome resource and I applaud Bobbi Newman for starting it all.
Topics: Work, free the information!, librarianship, librarydayinthelife | 8 Comments »
Day 3 in the life of a head of instructional initiatives
By Meredith Farkas | July 31, 2009
8:00 am – Checked my email. Checked reference email accounts. Answered a few reference questions, forwarded a database error on to our Head of Digital Initiatives and a Norwich history question to our Archives.
8:30 am – Director called me into her office to let me know that she’d heard back from the office that created the orientation schedule for the cadets. Apparently, we now have 35 minutes and 40 students to split between the library and the museum (last year we had 1 hour and 15 minutes and 20-25 students) since they are giving the Academic Achievement Center a period and a half. Given space constraints, there is no way that 40 students will fit, and given the time constraints, there’s almost nothing we can do. My Director and I agreed that under these circumstances, we’d rather just not do it and would rather just get the students when they come to the library for EN101. Ironically, the civilian tours, which were a disaster last year (every civilian student coming to the library over the course of an hour and a half on no set schedule), are now going to be great, with 8 groups of 20 coming for 40 minutes each. Nice!
8:50 am – Work on clues for the scavenger hunt for the civilians. Walk around the library thinking of tasks for them to do and wrote up new clues.
9:30 am – Worked on instructional goals for FY10. I met with most of the librarians who take part in instruction a few weeks ago and we decided that the two things we’d like to focus most on this year are increasing faculty awareness of library resources and services and improving our own instructional effectiveness through assessment/analysis and peer review. Last year I did so many instruction sessions that I didn’t have time to really focus on instructional program administration, so I am promising myself that I will delegate more to our other instruction librarians.
10:15 am – finally took some psychology books that I’d weeded a few weeks ago down to the cataloger to delete and ordered a new version of a neuropsychology book for which we had the 1976 edition (ouch!).
10:35 am – Looked over new employee orientation since my new employee will be starting in a couple of weeks.
10:50 am – filled out reimbursement paperwork for ALA Annual, which I keep forgetting to do.
11:10 am – pumped and caught up on feeds
11:35 am – started cleaning off my desk. Since I’ve been working so few hours this summer, I’ve been just letting things pile up on my desk and now it looks like a disaster area. Made some headway, but got distracted by pile of LIS journals.
12:30 pm – ate lunch and put many, many journals into my colleagues’ boxes.
1:00 pm – received an email asking for the key to the office I’ve been using to pump breastmilk in (since my office is actually the most fishbowl-iest in the building). Someone in the Academic Achievement Center is taking over that office on Monday and wants to move in tomorrow. That was the final straw for me. Yesterday, my boss had told me that someone was taking over that office on Monday (!) and asked if I’d be ok with going to his office and pumping while he went somewhere else during that time. She also said that they put in an order with facilities to have blinds put on the windows of my office. I said yes, because I didn’t really see another option, but honestly, I wasn’t really ok with it. How uncomfortable to have to ask a stranger to leave his office so that I can pump breastmilk in it. Yuck! The email asking for my key was the final straw that made me realize that no, I can’t do this. It’s been one thing after another since I came back to work. First, no one had a key for the office where I’d be pumping and the glass door had not been covered (though our Office Manager had asked Facilities to do it 2 or 3 months before). Then, I got a guilt trip from someone (not library staff) that I was taking up an office to do this and was asked “well how long are you planning on doing this for?” I can see why so many working women stop breastfeeding when they go to work, because even in a pretty supportive environment like mine, there can be so many barriers, inconveniences, and uncomfortable situations. I had a few moments where I actually felt guilty for inconveniencing people… but then I got over it.
1:45 pm – decided to ask Director if I could just use paper and cover all the windows in my office. She didn’t seem crazy about the idea from an aesthetic sense, but she understands what a difficult situation this has been for me, so she said yes. Good thing too, since apparently, facilities hasn’t even ORDERED the blinds for my office!!! Sigh…
2:00 pm – Cut craft paper and taped up the windows. Finished product is ugly, but it is private.
Friendly, no?
3:00 pm – Answered some emails.
3:30 pm – Pumped in my office for the first time and caught up on RSS feeds.
4:00 pm – Worked some more on clues for scavenger hunt.
4:30 pm – Headed home. Not coming back to work until next Thursday, so this will be it for now!
Topics: Work, librarianship, libraries, librarydayinthelife | 3 Comments »
Day 2 in the life of a head of instructional initiatives
By Meredith Farkas | July 29, 2009
With many of my colleagues on vacation and no students around, this isn’t the most exciting time to be recording my time at work. I will definitely do something similar during the Fall or Spring semester when I’m knee-deep in instruction.
8:00 am – arrived at work and checked email. Started creating a basic wire frame of what one of the program-specific landing pages might look like on our newly-designed Drupal website.
9:00 Talked to Director about our Freshman orientations. Normally, we have 1 hour and 15 minutes for each group to share between the library and museum and each group is usually 20-25 students. Now schedule is saying we have that amount of time to share between the library, museum and the Academic Achievement Center and we’ll have 40 students at a time. There’s no way we can do the active learning stuff we did last year (which students loved) under those conditions. Director has a call in to the office that created the schedule to discuss. Also showed Director my wire frame and she liked the idea of a landing page for each academic program.
9:15 Talked to Head of Reference about a distance learner who seems to not be understanding the instructions she’s trying to give her. Gave her some advice on handling the situation. Also talked about reference scheduling for Fall. Looks like I’ll just have an evening shift, which is good since I’ll be so heavily involved in instruction. Made the case for our Humanities librarian/Head of Digital Initiatives to have the same since he does at least as much instruction as I do.
9:40 Talked to our Office Manager about the Freshman tours and scheduled the Multipurpose Room for our civilian tours (which usually come in larger groups).
10:00 Emailed our soon-to-be distance learning librarian about the library website redesign to get her 2 cents on it. Even though she doesn’t start until August 17th, I want her to have as much input as possible.
10:30 Emailed the drupal web designer we found with my wire frame and some basic ideas.
11:00 pumped and caught up on feeds.
11:25 Started answering on emails missed since Friday.
11:30 Met with Head of Academic Computing and one of the instructional designers at Norwich who had some useful suggestions for our web portal redesign. While we were planning to make our portal visually consistent with the course management system, student feedback has shown that they want the CMS to be visually consistent with the norwich.edu website (they want to feel a part of the University). So it probably makes more sense to make the portal visually consistent with the norwich.edu site. They also let me know that new students no longer recognize the abbreviations for their academic programs (which are not being used much anymore), which completely screws up my idea for the site nav. Sigh… Still, a useful conversation, because I didn’t know all that.
12:00 Talked to Director and colleague about the meeting and my now total bewilderment regarding what the design of the site should look like. Got some ideas from talking about it out loud.
12:15 Wrote to Administrative Dean of the school of graduate studies to ask what her preference would be in terms of the design, since she’s the one holding the purse strings.
12:25 Ate lunch. Soup is a really bad idea on a hot day when you’re trapped in an un-air conditioned office. Very sticky!
12:50 Got email from Administrative Dean. She said that not only should it look like the regular norwich.edu website, but they are going to be redesigning the CMS to look like it as well. Well ok then.
1:00 Revised wire frame in light of changed look and need to spell out program names.
1:30 sent email with revised wireframe and revised information about the look to our designer.
1:50 Answered emails from faculty about journal cancellations, book purchases, and link problems.
2:00 Heard from head of Academic Achievement Center that the schedule for Freshman orientation is incorrect and we all have the same amount of time as last year. Still haven’t heard back from the office that created the schedule though, so I’m waiting for additional confirmation. Emailed the Museum Director to coordinate the civilian tours between our two facilities.
2:30 Watched Brett Bonfield’s adorable video promoting his library’s 5K race. Nice job!
2:35 Went around to colleagues to ascertain who would be around to help with library orientation week. We have 20 separate groups coming in for our orientation/scavenger hunt, so it’s going to be hectic.
2:45 Answered email from faculty member about instruction session for Fall. Continued email collaboration with Museum Director and Archivist about the Freshman orientations. Received email back from soon-to-be Distance Learning Librarian who had some excellent feedback on the library website redesign (that’s why we hired her!).
3:15 Pumped and caught up on RSS feeds.
3:40 Answered a few more emails.
4:00 Left early since hubby is leaving tomorrow for a business trip and needs to get ready (which means I need to take the munchkin). By this time it is so hot in my office that if I actually wore makeup, it would have melted off my face, so I’m relieved to be leaving early.
Not a particularly exciting day, but at least I made some headway on some important projects and didn’t die of heatstroke.
Topics: Work, librarydayinthelife | 1 Comment »
Day 1 in the life of a head of instructional initiatives
By Meredith Farkas | July 28, 2009
This is part of the Library Day in the Life meme going on this week. What an awesome idea!
I cheated on this a little — I wrote this up on Thursday since I’m not working until Wednesday. Until mid-August, I’m only working 2 days per week so that Reed can wait until he’s 4 months old to start daycare. I’ll also write up the days I work this week (Wednesday and Thursday).
So here’s a day in my life as a Head of Instructional Initiatives. I don’t think this is a particularly typical day since the students aren’t here so I’m not teaching, but I also don’t think I even have “typical days” during the school year.
8:00 – arrived at work with husband and Reed in tow since I can’t drive due to a sprained shoulder. Colleagues oohed and ahhed over Reed (who wouldn’t?) 
8:10 – Fed Reed while computer booted up and went through several updates
8:30 – Checked email and talked to colleague about redesigning our web portal for distance learners (which we just found out we got funding for – awesome!) . We’re going Drupal, baby!
9:00 – Engineering liaison and I met with Dean of the School of Engineering and Civil Engineering faculty member about information literacy instruction for engineering students. It was a great meeting because we all pretty much wanted the exact same thing (problem-based active learning, teaching students to critically evaluate sources, etc.). We’ll be teaching 6 3-hour classes in the Fall, reaching all of the Freshmen engineering majors. YAY! Also talked to them about getting library instruction in somewhere else in the curriculum, like when they have their big senior project and have to do all sorts of in-depth research. It was something they hadn’t considered, but they seemed open to the idea. I talked about what I’ve done with the senior History seminars.
10:00 – Checked reference email accounts and answered several reference questions that came in overnight.
10:30 – opened up spreadsheet of journals in the social sciences and continued to work on making cuts. Mulling over whether to cancel some journals that we get in EBSCO with a one year embargo, since we could get the articles for students and faculty through ILL. It drives me crazy to be paying $1000-$3000 for essentially one year’s worth of content.
10:45 – Emailed political science faculty member with a list of journals I’m considering cutting and requesting feedback. Put a few on the list that I doubt I’ll cancel, but I wanted his feedback as to whether it was an essential title or not.
11:00 – Pumped some milk for Reed (ah, the joys of being a working mom) – browsed RSS feeds during that time.
11:30 – Worked on a course guide for a senior seminar on the Civil War in which I’ll be providing library instruction in September. There are way too many resources on the Civil War and it can be hard to create a guide that includes only the best/essential resources.
11:45 – Spoke to a Drupal developer about the redesign of our library portal for distance learners. His company seems to be the Cadillac of Drupal web redesigns. Very impressive, but we don’t need all the bells and whistles and those bells and whistles come with a hefty price tag.
12:30 – Ate a quick lunch while going through the journal spreadsheet. Why is it that I love trimming the fat off our budget? It’s like spring cleaning. I’m hoping to cut enough that we can get some collections we really need that will likely get a lot of use. Students use databases much more than single title subscriptions.
1:00 – Worked on getting quotes and hourly rates from Drupal-experienced web designers. Hit up folks on Twitter and Friend Feed for suggestions. Got some crazy expensive quotes and some reasonable ones. Continued to check reference email accounts and answered a couple more email queries.
1:45 – D’oh! Forgot that I was supposed to be on Meebo. Quickly logged in.
2:00 – talked to colleague about cutting journals and making the difficult decisions. We both tend to not be as sentimental about the collection as some of our colleagues, so he’s always a good person to get advice from.
2:30 – Put in more work on the Civil War course guide.
3:30 – Asked colleague if we could get usage stats for political science journals I’m considering canceling as faculty member has requested them. Got click-through stats from Serials Solutions and sent them on. Ugh – only 5 hits in two years for one of the journals (and not a cheap one either).
3:45 – Emailed criminal justice faculty about journals I’m considering canceling. Got a quick response about a one that they consider essential and a few that they’d rather not lose if at all possible. Will really depend on how much the SAGE collection they want us to get costs.
4:00 – More milk making and RSS feed browsing
4:20 – Glanced at email and saw one about Freshman orientations (for which there is a library component). We did a fun activity last year, but it was a heck of a lot of work, so I’m a little nervous about prepping for it on my limited schedule.
4:30 – Shut down computer and ran outside to meet Adam.
6:00 – Checked email from home and emailed Criminal Justice faculty member back to reassure that I would not cut any journals considered essential by his faculty.
6:15 – Emailed Drupal designer that I’m considering hiring for the redesign. He seems to understand the scope and isn’t trying to up-sell us on stuff we don’t need right now. Draft email to the powers-that-be about getting the go-ahead to start working with him.
6:45 – Went through RSS feeds while watching Hell’s Kitchen in bed with Adam and Reed.
Topics: Work, about me, librarydayinthelife | 3 Comments »
W(h)ither blogging and the library blogosphere?
By Meredith Farkas | July 22, 2009
I remember the first OCLC Blog Salon at ALA very fondly. It was like fangirl overload for me. I have to laugh now when I remember that I begged Michael Stephens to introduce me to Roy Tennant because I was too nervous to introduce myself to someone so smart and awesome. There was such a great energy in the room — most of the people there had just started their blogs in the past year or two and were just discovering the community that the library blogosphere creates. Most of us had no idea when we started our blogs that these individual media would connect us to other like-minded individuals, giving us not only an outlet for our thoughts, but a distributed space in which to converse and (to an extent) socialize.
Just like previous years, there was a blog salon at this ALA Annual, but when I think about the ones I attended in 2005 and 2007, this event seems to pale in comparison. And I feel like it is symbolic of what’s happened to blogging in general. And I find that depressing.
Microblogging, what have you done to my beloved medium??? I remember joining Twitter reluctantly (since all my friends were there) more than two years ago and thinking that it was a fad that wouldn’t last. I mean, who would want to be online most of the day updating what they’re doing and reading about the minutiae of other people’s lives? What a time suck! Well, apparently a lot of people did, since Twitter and Friend Feed are wildly successful now. I thought, and still think, that microblogging is great for conferences — as a backchannel and to connect people to one another — but I still can’t commit to doing it enough to really feel a part of things. And I never would have guessed back then what a deleterious impact microblogging would have on longer-form blogging.
With Twitter (and even more easily in FriendFeed) you can have the sort of discussion one might have in the comments of a blog post, nearly in real time. And it’s really cool, because you can feel much closer to the people you’re conversing with since the conversation is happening so quickly and in a single space that everyone is on equal footing in. But that time element is also the problem. If a discussion went on during the work day and you find it in the evening, it’s yesterday’s news by then and there is often no point adding to the conversation. I can usually get to Twitter and Friend Feed late in the evening, on weekends, and very early in the morning. Unfortunately, most of my friends are not on there at those times, so I often feel like I’m broadcasting into the vacuum of space, since people usually only see the first page’s worth of Tweets or posts.
I used to spend hours a day on my RSS feeds, reading thoughtful blog posts by really, really smart librarians. Now, I can get through my feeds incredibly quickly since there’s rarely anything from the people whose blogs I used to love. It feels to me like microblogging is more about being clever than thoughtful. You’re only as good as your last quip, and everyone is trying to write something that’s poignant, provocative, and/or funny in the smallest number of words possible. You want to see someone write “Meredith Farkas FTW” (For The Win, for those not “in the know” — and for the record, there has never been a “Meredith Farkas FTW” comment in Friend Feed or Twitter since I’m just not that clever). It’s not a knock on microblogging, but I don’t think it can’t replace the longer, more thoughtful posts many of us love to read in the blogosphere.
Microblogging isn’t a bad thing though. I think it’s brought a lot of people even closer together. I can see it when I go into Friend Feed — the connections my friends have to one another, even though some of them haven’t even met in the physical world. And it’s given people who never blogged before a way to connect. But I actually feel less connected to my online friends than I used to simply because I don’t have the time to be there as much as I’d like. My job got very, very busy last Fall with teaching, and I wasn’t in front of my computer as much as I used to be during the day. Now, with the baby, I’d much rather play with him and stare into his ridiculously cute face than spend my time in Friend Feed or Twitter. And while you don’t have to be there all the time, you miss a lot if you’re not. I always feel like I’m coming in late to a party on Friend Feed and have missed out on all the “in jokes” that folks will be repeating for days. It’s great for the people who can be there a lot, but many can’t. And that’s something that I never saw in the blogosphere because people could be part of the community when it suited them and wouldn’t miss a beat. It was easy to catch up if you were on vacation for a few weeks.
It really depresses me when I hear from people that blogging is over and when I see some of my favorite bloggers (who are now Friend Feed and/or Twitter devotees) cut their blogging down significantly to a “wow, I can’t believe it’s been so long since I’ve blogged” post every once in a long while. If it weren’t for getting pregnant and having a baby, I’d still be posting a lot, so for me, it wasn’t microblogging that affected the quantity of posting.
I feel a bit like Michael Gorman complaining about blogging versus scholarly writing in the journal literature. “Given the quality of the writing in Friend Feed and Twitter, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts.” But it’s not about the quality of what goes on in microblogging platforms, but the barriers to becoming part of the community. Because so many of us just can’t be online enough to really feel a part of things in the easy way that people could write a blog post or comment asynchronously on a post. And maybe I’m just this sad little blogger bemoaning that progress has left her behind. Maybe this is the way communication is moving and I should just get over it and get on the train. But I really hope that both can exist (and thrive!) side-by-side. I hope people will find a balance between the two. But what I’ve seen over the past year makes me think that may not be possible and that most people are devoting the majority of their energies to one or the other.
It’s not like everyone has given up blogging or writing thoughtful posts. I still find some great material in my aggregator from some really great library bloggers. Maybe I’m feeling this more because I haven’t added enough newer librarianship-related blogs to my aggregator, blogs from people who are still bursting with enthusiasm about this awesome medium. I just recently added The Librarian’s Commute to my aggregator and was happy to see that there are still people blogging regularly and thoughtfully. What blogs are you enjoying these days? Please, save me from my funk and find me some good blogs to read!
Topics: blogging | 39 Comments »
Back from Chicago!
By Meredith Farkas | July 19, 2009
Adam, Reed and I have been back from Chicago for a few days, but it’s taken a while to recover, unpack, and get back into our routine. I’d been worried about traveling with an infant, and the irony was that traveling with Reed was much less a problem than traveling without the use of my dominant arm. On our first day in Chicago, I badly sprained my shoulder (you can read the whole story on my other blog) and I can barely use it even now. I can’t even lift up my son! But Reed was a great traveler and an absolute gentleman in spite of being stuck in O’Hare for many, many hours.
ALA with a baby is certainly different. I didn’t stay out late or go to as many events as I would have liked to. I felt really torn between librarian/speaker/blogger Meredith and mommy Meredith, and it felt kind of weird when those worlds collided in Chicago. There were some moments where I really felt socially awkward — especially when I got my award at the LITA reception. But it was still a lot of fun to learn things, take part in discussions, and see some people who are very dear to me. The programs I took part in all went really well and I was happy to see that I hadn’t lost my ability to give a presentation. I was on two panels about Library/Web 2.0 that both looked at the trend retrospectively in terms of what we’ve learned, what we’ve accomplished, and whether or not 2.0 has met its promise (whatever that promise was). This really meshed well with what I’ve been talking and writing about the past year (why 2.0 initiatives have failed at libraries, what institutions need to do to position themselves to implement 2.0 tools, etc.) so it was fun to take part in a discussion of these topics with some really smart people. It was obvious from the comments after both presentations that a lot of people have implemented 2.0 tools that have not had the ROI they’d hoped for, and others have implemented 2.0 tools without really considering whether they are a right fit for their intended population.
The Unconference on Friday went so well (in spite of the fact that it was planned by two women with babies)!!! Everything flowed nicely throughout the day and the discussions people had were really interesting and rich. Things just seemed to fall into place on their own and the people we had there were so interested, motivated, and fun! We got lots of positive feedback from the attendees. Jim Rettig even showed up at lunchtime to see how it was going and to say hi to the attendees. I feel grateful to have been given the chance to help blaze what will hopefully soon be a well-worn trail for ALA — it’s exciting to see the organization experimenting with new models for conference participation. Michelle and I will be doing a survey for the participants on their experience, so we’ll be sure to share those results later on. You can read coverage of the Unconference here, here and here and you can check out what was discussed in the backchannel and on Twitter here.
Other than destroying my shoulder, it was a really awesome conference, though I am definitely looking forward to putting my whole self into conferences when Reed is a bit less dependent on me. It was hard to balance the two.
And for those of you who want to see what you missed out on at the conference (whether you were there or not since no one can be everywhere!), check out this awesome project by Heather Devine at Flex Your Info. I had the pleasure of meeting her briefly on Monday and seeing a new LIS grad creating a valuable resource for the ALA Conference brings back memories of my own experience four years ago.
Topics: ALA, free the information!, librarianship | 3 Comments »
Great new books on my “to read” list
By Meredith Farkas | July 6, 2009
I must admit that the last time I read a non-baby-related book was probably last Fall. And now all these great books are coming out from the LIS presses that I’m absolutely dying to read! This is torture!
The one I’m probably most excited about is Chrystie Hill’s long-awaited Inside, Outside and Online which is all about library community-building. This isn’t just about how to build community online, but how libraries can build community using everything in our real-world and virtual-world toolboxes. Chrystie is an expert on community-building and has a very thoughtful and pragmatic perspective, so I’m sure this book is going to be one I’ll use frequently in my own work.
The Accidental Library Marketer is coming out this month and is a topic near and dear to my heart. Because, really, aren’t we all accidental library marketers? I certainly didn’t know in library school how much of my time and energy as a librarian would be devoted to marketing. Kathy Dempsey is a terrific writer and, like the other “Accidental” books, I’m sure this will be full of practical advice that any librarian can use to better market the library, it’s collections and services.
Another book on library marketing, focused more on our net-gen students, is Brian Matthews’ Marketing Today’s Academic Library: A Bold New Approach to Communicating with Students. Brian has incorporated many innovative techniques in reaching out to students at Georgia Tech (and I’m sure he’s doing the same now at UC Santa Barbara — congrats on the new gig, Brian!) and I’m sure the book is full of unique ideas for marketing the library to today’s students.
At a time when I am finding fewer and fewer interesting blog posts to read, when Char Booth writes something on her blog, I know it’s going to be thought-provoking. Char, like Chrystie, had a really pragmatic and thoughtful approach to everything, so I’m always interested in her take on technology and academic library issues. So when I saw that she’d come out with a report on the technology assessment work she’d done at Ohio University, I was really excited. Informing Innovation: Tracking Student Interest in Emerging Library Technologies at Ohio University is doubly awesome because you can actually read it for free online! While assessment isn’t sexy, it’s necessary, and when I read that 50% of ARLs using social software aren’t assessing it in any way (and ARLs are big on assessment), I know we have a problem. Char’s book fills a real void in this area and contains practical ideas for how to do a similar technology assessment at your library.
Another book I found while looking for the URLs for these books is Risk and Entrepreneurship in Libraries: Seizing Opportunities for Change. This is a topic near and dear to my heart and contains some really interesting chapters by librarians who are pushing the innovation envelope. One of particular interest to me (and perhaps you) is Jeffrey Trzeciak’s “McMaster University Libraries 2.0: Transforming Traditional Organizations.” I’m not sure why I hadn’t heard about this book before, but it looks awesome!
All right, y’all! Can you stop writing such interesting books until my son is in kindergarten? Sheesh!
Topics: assessment, librarianship, libraries, our digital future, social software, tech trends, writing | 2 Comments »
Chicago here I come!
By Meredith Farkas | July 5, 2009
I still don’t quite think it’s hit me that I’ll be leaving in a few days for ALA with my husband and baby. Not only is it Reed’s first flight ever (and I sure hope he likes airplanes!), but it’s my first time speaking at an in-person conference since October (I gave two talks online during the winter). Having only been back at work a total of 8 days, I feel like my head isn’t quite back in the game yet, but nevertheless, I’m on two panels and am helping to organize an all-day preconference. No pressure!
The thing I’m most excited about is seeing the ALA Unconference that Michelle and I dreamed up almost two years ago become a reality. A lot has changed for Michelle and myself in that time (like we both have babies now!), but our commitment to the development of new and unique learning opportunities hasn’t. It’s been exciting to create something like this within the structure of ALA and I’m grateful to Jim Rettig for allowing us to make this happen as part of his Presidential initiatives. We’ve got a great group of participants and some really interesting discussion topics that they suggested and voted for. I’ll definitely report back here on how it all went!
Here’s my schedule so far for my time in Chicago:
Thursday
Arrive with baby, husband and a lot of luggage. Collapse at my in-laws’ place in Lakeview and hope I wake up long enough to iron my clothes.
Friday, July 10
9:00 am – 5:00 pm – ALA Unconference, Hilton
6:30 pm – Dinner with some librarians I greatly admire
Saturday, July 11
1:30 – 3:00 pm – Life After 2.0 – A panel presentation with myself and some awesome folks like Helene Blowers and Lori Bell! McCormick Place West, Room W-190b
Other than that, I’ll be spending the rest of the day with my niece and nephew who are meeting their new cousin for the first time.
Sunday, July 12
Not quite sure yet what I’ll be doing in the morning
2:30 pm – LITA Awards Reception, Hotel Intercontinental (I’m getting an award! Eep!)
4:00 pm – LITA President’s Program
5:30 pm – Blog Salon – I’ll be there showing off my little bundle of joy
Monday, July 13
1:30 – 3:00 pm – The Ultimate Debate: Has Library 2.0 fulfilled its promise? – Another panel presentation, this time with myself, Michael Porter, David King and Cindi Trainor. McCormick Place West W-181
Dinner with my husband enjoying prime dry-aged beef and lobster mac and cheese. We don’t have stuff like that in Vermont.
Tuesday, July 14
Nothing planned — will probably walk around Wrigleyville with Reed and Adam.
Topics: ALA, speaking | 1 Comment »
2.0 or and bust
By Meredith Farkas | July 4, 2009
Since before my brain was hijacked by baby stuff, I’ve been thinking a lot about how many third party Web 2.0 vendors libraries are dependent upon (not to mention all the ones we’re dependent on personally!). I actually wrote a column for American Libraries on the subject, but 600 words could not reflect the whole of my concerns. Nor probably can this email since I will most certainly be interrupted a half dozen times by an adorable baby who I find even more fun than blogging (so give me the benefit of the doubt if I write something that doesn’t quite make sense).
In just the past few weeks, I’ve received two emails from companies whose services I’ve tried out who are now shutting their doors. Another one is changing its focus and will no longer be hosting the very thing I was using it for. Luckily these were tools/services that I’d tried out but wasn’t dependent on for providing services to my patrons. But what if I had been dependent? Would I have been able to move my content easily to another provider? Would I have had to find a way to host the content myself? Or would the content have simply gone up in smoke with no way to ever get it back?
While going with hosted solutions for one’s 2.0 services is cheap or free and is often the only option for a library with a tight budget, it’s not always the prudent way to go. Even if the service is free, the time library staff spend creating content on that service isn’t, and we don’t want all that effort (and content) going down the drain. We often put way too much trust in many of these services, having no backups for the content we’re putting on their servers. One great example of what can happen when you trust a company too much is Ma.gnolia, which was a very popular social bookmarking company that had a catastrophic server failure in January and lost everyone’s data. While they tried to restore the database, they failed, and now they’re going to start from scratch (though I can’t imagine who would trust them with their bookmarks now!). I don’t know if Ma.gnolia allowed people to back up their own bookmarks to their hard drive, but even if they did, I’d wager that a lot of people rarely, if ever, remembered to do it (she writes sheepishly, wondering when the last time was that she backed up her own del.icio.us bookmarks — done!).
My friend Stephen Francoeur created two of the best 2.0 tools for library staff that I’m aware of — an active and useful reference blog and reference wiki. For these tools which he created four years ago or so, he used Blogger and PBWiki. The blog and wiki are vital to their reference staff since they contain so much staff knowledge collected over many years. In his most recent blog post, Stephen describes how he decided that home is the safest place for all that data and how he had to move the blog from Blogger to a locally hosted version of Wordpress MU, and the wiki from PBWiki (now PBWorks) to a locally installed version of Confluence. He discussed how difficult the transition was, especially with the wiki since he had to literally copy and paste the content from the old wiki into the new. Had either of these companies gone bust before they could move that content to a local server, it might possibly have been gone forever. This just highlighted again to me how important it is that we gauge how vital the things we’ve created with these 2.0 tools are to our library (or to us personally if we use them outside of work) and take steps to protect that content or functionality accordingly. If the Google Custom Searches that I’ve created for several subject areas were to disappear, it wouldn’t be a grave tragedy. Were our subject guide wiki to disappear, we’d have lost content that is vital to our students and faculty and took us years to develop. That’s why our subject guide wiki lives on our own server.
We utilize the services of so many of these 2.0 companies because they provide services and space for free. However those services cost someone money, and if they aren’t making enough from pro accounts or ads, then they’re losing money on the bandwidth and server space it costs to run a successful site. Many of these companies lack any sort of a revenue model and while they may be funded by venture capitalists or big companies like Google and Yahoo! now, they may not be forever if they can’t find a way to make money for their benefactors. It scares me how dependent Iranians are on Twitter to get the word out about what the government is doing there when the company is losing money hand over fist. And many of the other big 2.0 companies we know and love are in the same boat.
There’s also the issue of their infrastructure. When I put things on our library’s server, I know that there are daily backups of the content. So if something goes kablooey, I can always roll it back to what it looked like the previous day. Not too bad. But do we know much about the server infrastructure of the companies we’re dependent on? Often we don’t know anything because that information isn’t provided to us. And this can even be a problem when you’re paying a company to run a service for you. Our Voyager ILS installation is hosted by Ex Libris, and a year or two ago they had too high a load on their servers and, as a result, we had a lot of problems with Voyager going down for a few months. It’s important, whether we’re paying or not, that when we’re trusting a mission critical service to a third party we know about their server infrastructure.
Another big issue is when a company decides to suddenly change how it operates, which may leave you high and dry or might at least force you to change the way you operate. A great case in point is PBWiki, now known as PBWorks. I really thought a great deal of PBWiki early on, so much so that I was on their Educational Advisory Board. Then they managed to alienate much of their original fanbase, me included. First they created a new version of their wiki software (PBWiki 2.0) which completely changed the way that authentication into the wiki worked. But you still had the choice of whether or not you wanted to create a 1.0 or 2.0 wiki. And in spite of a huge wave of negative feedback they received about PBWiki 2.0, they not only kept it the way it was, but forced people to switch their original PBWikis to 2.0. Now, they’re called PBWorks and I have no idea if the wikis (or workspaces) still look the same as the 2.0 wiki, because I wouldn’t touch a PBWiki at this point with a 10-foot pole. I don’t like companies that don’t listen to their users.
I don’t have a good solution for what libraries should do if they can’t afford to host their own content (or if the only technology providing that functionality is externally hosted), but I do think it’s critical that we should think critically about these companies with which we’re entrusting our content and whether our content is safe enough relative to its value. While your Twitter posts may not be super-valuable to you later on, your del.icio.us bookmarks or blog posts probably are. If your content is important to your library, consider whether or not you think that service that’s hosting your content is stable. Who hosts your content? A large, stable company that is making enough to at least cover its expenses, a start-up with venture funding and no revenue model, or some individual for whom this service is a hobby (though they hope to sell it to Google one day — and btw, it’s scary that “selling to Google” seems to have become a revenue model in itself)? Can you easily back up that content? Can you easily move it to another service? And do other services exist that provide the same or similar functionality? And equally important, what claims do these companies make on your content (always read their Terms of Service!). We need to consider all these things because I’d hate to see the hard work of librarians go up in smoke because it didn’t occur to them that these free 2.0 services might not be here forever.
Have any of you had disasters with hosted services? Have you moved your stuff from a hosted service to your own server and why? What do you consider before you put content on some third party’s servers? Do you feel like the your content is safe in all of the 2.0 services you use online?
My little guy is sick of beating up the animals hanging from his activity gym and seems to want some cuddle time now. Talk amongst yourselves.
Topics: RSS and Syndication, Wikis, blogging, libraries, screencasting, social bookmarking, social software, tech trends | 11 Comments »
Answers – and I thought that was our schtick!
By Meredith Farkas | June 26, 2009
As a new mother, I spend a a lot of time awake with Reed when most sensible people are asleep. Consequently, I’ve seen plenty of infomercials and commercials that are rarely if ever on television when sensible people are awake (my personal favorite is the Lee Majors Bionic Ear — “it won’t cost six million, but you’ll think it’s worth it”). The first time I saw a kgb commercial, though, I assumed that I was so sleepy I hadn’t heard it right. It took seeing a second one another night to make me realize that they’re offering for money what we’ve been offering for free forever.
Get this — kgb (short for Knowledge Generation Bureau) a “unique” service where people can get answers to their questions via text message:
Users who text 542542 (kgbkgb) receive real-time responses to questions any time, day or night, from any cell phone, for a cost of ninety-nine cents.
In one commercial I saw, a man was trying to remember the name of the Red Sox player who lost the Word Series for them in 1986 (Bill Buckner) and kgb gave him the answer. Users pay $.99, plus any fees they normally pay to send and receive text messages. Their questions are answered by “agents”, regular folks who are paid 10 cents per answer they give.
Now, what if there was a service where people could ask questions via text message, IM, phone and email for free, only their questions would be answered by individuals with specialized training in finding the most accurate and authoritative answers? If only such a thing existed!
What does this tell us? People don’t think of librarians when they want answers? Librarians aren’t available when people want answers? Librarians don’t get answers to people quickly enough? Many people would rather get answers via text than phone/IM/email? Or all of the above?
What can we learn from the service kgb provides?
Topics: librarianship, reference | 13 Comments »
Do you link to Harvard Business Review from EBSCO?
By Meredith Farkas | June 26, 2009
Paul Pival wrote today and yesterday about “mafia tactics by Harvard Business School Publishing”, wherein they are trying to charge libraries to link to articles from Harvard Business Review in EBSCO for online classroom use and then are turning off PURLs to HBR articles in Business Source products if the school refuses to pay.
I’ve known about this for almost a year as my library had its links shut off because we didn’t want to pay to be able to link to HBR in our online classes. Fortunately there weren’t any links to HBR in the course management system when our links were shut off, so it didn’t have any real impact on us. I’d assume that we were approached by Harvard because our online programs spend quite a bit of money on case studies from Harvard Business School Press, since we’re certainly not a big fish otherwise. When I was told by our rep about the new service where we could pay to link to HBR articles in EBSCO, I’d had no idea that we had previously been unable to link to them in the first place (how many of us have access to our contracts with our vendors?). The links to HBR articles are available in the same way as links to any other article in the Business Source products. If there’s a persistent link in the database to an article that a professor wants to use for their class, they’re going to use it. And apparently, I’m not the only one who was unaware of this.
These are the current use restrictions, which have changed since my school signed an agreement with EBSCO:
“Harvard Business Review Notice of Use Restrictions, May 2009 Harvard Business Review and Harvard Business Publishing Newsletter content on EBSCOhost is licensed for the private individual use of authorized EBSCOhost users. It is not intended for use as assigned course material in academic institutions nor as corporate learning or training materials in businesses. Academic licensees may not use this content in electronic reserves, electronic course packs, persistent linking from syllabi or by any other means of incorporating the content into course resources. Business licensees may not host this content on learning management systems or use persistent linking or other means to incorporate the content into learning management systems. Harvard Business Publishing will be pleased to grant permission to make this content available through such means. For rates and permission, contact permissions@harvardbusiness.org.”
One has to wonder what “any other means of incorporating the content into course resources” means. Does that mean one can’t tell students in a class to access a HBR article from Business Source Premier without providing a link? Absurd!
Personally, I find the whole thing really sleazy. We are already paying to access the content from Harvard Business Review in the EBSCO database, just like every other journal in there. We link to other journals in EBSCO databases in our course management system without incident. Why not this one? Why we would need to essentially double-pay just to have a direct link to the content? And, as Paul also asks, how does EBSCO know that a school is using links to HBR content in a course management system or e-reserve?
I guess HBSP can make whatever rules they want with regards to their content, since they’re big and basically essential to any MBA program. But I’m curious — are any of your libraries actually paying HBSP to be able to create permalinks? And have any of you had your EBSCO permalinks to HBR shut off because you wouldn’t pay?
Topics: free the information!, libraries | 2 Comments »
Do we need library ombudsmen?
By Meredith Farkas | June 17, 2009
I recently had a not-so-fun experience with our local hospital which reminded me of how important it is to ensure one’s front-line staff are empowered to question things.
During our childbirth class – which was sponsored by the hospital where I was going to be giving birth – we were told by our childbirth educator that circumcisions at the hospital cost approximately $500. As we were told this by a professional representing the hospital, we had no reason to believe it was not true.
After our son’s circumcision, we first received a bill for $423, which represented the pediatrician’s charge. This seemed a reasonable amount for her skilled services. Shortly thereafter, we received a bill from the hospital for $2150.80. The surgical procedure itself was billed out at $1907.67 This minor procedure required a local anesthetic and took 5 minutes, after which we spent 30 minutes alone with Reed before the nurse checked our son out and let us leave. I couldn’t fathom why it would be so expensive and assumed it must be a mistake. So last Monday, I marched over to the hospital to get the bill straightened out.
When I spoke to staff in the billing department (including their supervisor) I was told that indeed this was the charge for infant circumcision and that the charge was designed to match what other hospitals in the region charge. The supervisor said that it sounded awfully high, but that was the right price and was actually less than our major University hospital in the area. He offered to give me a 20% discount if I paid it in full right away. I said I wasn’t going to pay it period because I thought the price was absurd. I also contacted the billing departments at three hospitals in our area and found that what they’d claimed was far from the case. All of them charged significantly less for a circumcision and their charges included the physician’s fees. Including the physician’s fee, we were charged $2573.80, of which 16% was for the physician. I can’t imagine what services or facilities were provided by the hospital for this particular procedure that would warrant its fees being so much higher than that of the board certified physician.
So, armed with this information, I spoke again to that supervisor in Patient Financial Services, who said it was out of his hands since he has nothing to do with pricing, but that he would let staff in the relevant department know what I found. His response sounded rather noncommittal, so I emailed the CEO and CFO with my story. The CEO emailed back and wrote that the price sounded very high to her too and that they were looking into it and would get back to me ASAP. The next day, I received an email stating that yes, there had been an error and they’d been charging parents quadruple the price for a circumcision since January 1st. (Scary to think of how many may have made the decision not to circumcise their child solely based on the erroneous price they were quoted.) She said my bill would be adjusted and they’d be reimbursing all others who’d paid the incorrect fee almost $1500. This is when I did my happy dance around my office.
The CEO said she was grateful for my spotting this error and told me to stop by her office sometime for a free lunch voucher. This is what I asked her for instead:
Rather than a free lunch, what I’d really like is to see the folks in your financial services department be/feel empowered to question things. They are the first and often last stop when people have issues with their bill, and if they do not feel empowered to question what they see on their computer screen, patients will not receive the best service. Many patients would have been stopped in their tracks by the financial services staff’s insistence that this was the right price and would not have called other hospitals, especially when I was offered a 20% discount if I paid the bill immediately. I once worked in a public library where we were told that the system is always right; that patrons who claim they returned books that show as still being out are lying or wrong. However, this informal policy disregarded the fact that the library staff were as human as the patrons and sometimes made mistakes. Some of my colleagues wouldn’t even check to see if a book that a patron claimed to have returned was on the shelf; they’d just insist that the patron had to pay for it. I sometimes would find books on the shelf that patrons had been billed for, so I always operated under the assumption that the customer was right until proven otherwise. I think it’s the right way to operate any organization, even Patient Financial Services in a hospital. And sometimes it takes an error like this to remind staff that the computer isn’t always right.
I think it’s something we in libraries should remember. We must ensure that people at all levels in our organizations feel empowered to ask questions and advocate for the good of our patrons/customers. Patrons shouldn’t always have to go to the head honcho to get their issues resolved, because so many will give up after the first roadblock and will simply never use the library again. Hospitals often have an ombudsman who investigates and advocates on behalf of patients. Since that doesn’t exist in our profession, we need all of our front line staff to take on that role rather than blindly reciting policy to our patrons.
Topics: libraries, management | 7 Comments »
