Multilitteratus Incognitus

Image by DawnOfHope2012 Over the past few weeks I've been knee deep in an initial literature review. This past summer, while vacationing, I met up with a colleague who teaches for my department as an adjunct, but he's got him own full post in Greece as well.  While having coffee and talking about life in general we spoke about my PhD prospects, and my current feeling on the subject is that I am interested in getting my hands dirty and working on a dissertation already.  I have already spent 2004 - 2010, full time (including summers) as a graduate student, having earned 4 masters degrees. Throughout those six years, I have taken 47 courses (138 credits). Thus, at this point, the prospect of spending late nights in class (another 14 of them minimum), plus qualifying papers before I get to have my dissertation proposal approved doesn't specifically appeal to me. If there were a PhD where I could just start working on my cool dissertation project, and fill in any gaps in my...

This week's topic, as I mentioned in my initial post, is learning in times of abundance. Eric Duval, in his definition of abundance, goes for the digital element, but I wanted to focus on something  a little more mundane - the "disconnected" world of the library.  The fact of the matter is that our abundance of information is no new thing. Some may go back as far back as the invention of the printing press, but I won't since buying books still costs money to the individual and thus, while there is an abundance in materials, it's not abundant to you because you've got limited money.  Instead I want to focus on something quaint - the library. The library has provided us with a lot of abundant information, for both learning and pleasure.  Through various consortia, if your own town library (or libraries) don't carry the item you want, they can get it for you, usually for no extra charge, so you can have access to whatever material you need. I...

This was a pretty interesting keynote presentation on the future of the profession. I guess it was great that a former boss called me a "loudmouth with big ideas"...even though he didn't know it at the time ;-)

The other day I made an observation on LinkedIn that 8 people had recently left the employment of UMass (LinkedIn told me so). The number seemed rather high, so I wanted, out of curiosity, to know who had left, was it someone I knew? It turns out that most of the people who "left" were teaching assistants, graduate assistants, or like me had added "student" to their profile under job. Back in the day LinkedIn didn't have a way to get recommendations for your student achievements which is why I added a Student "job" under employment, now of course they do so it's not that important. In any case, I remembered that I too had a "job position" as Graduate Student, and since I recently graduated I thought it would be time to update my profile and say that I no longer have that "job". I have to say that while I knew that I was a perpetual student, it really surprised me that I had been a Master's Level student for 7 years! I...

Welcome back to school!!!! I think today I may be channeling the Annoyed Librarian ;-) In any case, here is a response to a blog post on InsideHigherEd.com about Netflix and library collections. Now I have to say that I enjoy reading Josh's posts despite the fact that most of them induce a facepalm gesture. I guess the first thing that gets me about these blog posts is that no one bothers to read them before publication - either that, or people really don't know the difference between a SHOW and a SHOE. In any case this is a minor evil. The major facepalm moment comes from not really understanding the "making available" aspect of library collections. The question posed is this: Should [institutions of higher education] be in the business of purchasing videos for our collections? The Netflix value proposition was pretty compelling with over 100,000 titles, but has the iPhone and Touch app put Netflix over the edge? I can't really blame people for wanti...

I was recently reading these two articles on ProfHacker, one was on RSS & SMS integration in the (library) catalog , and the most recent one about mobile applications for libraries . This brought me back to my days as an MSIT student.  Back in those days I took many opportunities to work on homework/class projects that dealt directly with library systems - some examples are IT/Library mergers and integration, patron privacy and Project Wormhole - which is what these ProfHacker posts reminded me of! Project Wormhole* (yeah, I used imaginative names), was a project I worked on for an Object Oriented Programming course.  The main idea was that each patron would have a customized library homepage that they would log-onto and they would have a widgetized HUD of all of their information needs.  The patrons already have a library barcode and a student/staff ID number, so there isn't really a need to create yet another log-on! They just need to log on with information tha...

So here is a library related post :-) A while back (a long while back according the date!) I came across this article on LIS news - a short essay on the utility of the Dewey Decimal System in public libraries. For as long as I can remember there has been debate in the public library sphere as to whether to continue to use the Dewey Decimal System (henceforth: DDC) or if they should switch to something called BISAC. If you've ever walked into a bookstore in the US (and probably in Canada as well) the shelves are organized by the BISAC system. The argument for BISAC is that it's easy for people to find books, whereas in DDC (or in LC numberings) it's not as easy. Now don't get me wrong, I don't think that Dewey is infallible, it is after all a man-made system and as such it has flaws, however I could not really put my finger on why I would not like my public library to switch to BISAC. And then I read this: “Customers often comment that when they visit books...

Time to put on the librarian hat ;-) Sooooo, I was reading on Library Journal recently and article called "The Dewey Dilemma". For those of you how haven't stepped foot in a public library recently, most books are categorized according to the Dewey Decimal System ( see this wiki article for more info on the DDC ). Now many libraries are trying to make their collections more accessible to the public and they are thinking of either switching to the BISAC system (the one used in bookstores in the US), or having some sort of hybrid system between Dewey and BISAC. As I was reading this article, and as I have followed along with debates on listservs on the issue, I can say that this is not a Dewey system, it's not even a classification issue (how you organize books). Rather it's an issue of how your customers (or "patrons" in library speak) are looking for information. What is the purpose of the library? and How are are people going about their information ...

I was reading an article on Science Direct on Librarianship Education. I am surprised that there is such a fuss over a name - however in a profession that only accepts individuals who received their degree from an ALA-accredited institution, it makes sense. Personally I think that librarianship, for the purposes of working in a public or academic library, is something that you don't need a Masters degree in Library (or information!) Science. You probably need a degree of some other sort to make you a Subject Matter Expert in something, but things like reference and cataloguing don't require an MLIS. A recent exchange with an MLIS colleague shows this. The comment was that this individual did not want to catalogue because it was mindless - they should hire a paraprofessional for that. If you look at Masters level LIS work in Greece for instance you will see more theoretical work done. Work on international standards, work on theory, work on integrating non-LIS professions and ...

I came across this article a while back on Open Source Exile about the deficiencies of the MARC format. For those of you not in the library world, MARC is essentially a digital version of the information you found in the card catalog. The article echoes a lot of my thoughts on the subject from when I was reading about information organization and cataloging a few years back when I first started working for a library. It's nice to see that I am not the only one who's thought of the issue lol :-)

I came across this article on First Monday on Folksonomies a while back but I never really got around to reading it until now. It is an interesting article and if you have some time go and read it. It gives the uninitiated a brief look at organization of information in the past, and how folksonomies differ from what has come before them. It seems to me that the criticism of folksonomies are a little snooty given by this example: Yet not everyone was convinced that folksonomies would deliver on this promise. The absence of rules in assigning tags has been feared to lead to quality problems, including imprecision, overlap, duplication, ambiguity, and erroneous identification (Dotsika, 2007; Guy and Tonkin, 2006). Others expressed doubt that user–generated tags would ever “organically arrive at preferred terms for concepts, or even evolve synonymous clusters” (Rosenfeld, 2005). With no guidelines for tag production, what was there to prevent all that potentially useful information out th...

I was over at Library Journal a short while a go and I came across this article about the " debate " over the MLIS (Masters of Library and Information Science) at the most recent ACRL conference. Personally I didn't know there was an open debate among professionals - just those among us that don't want to get one but want to work in fields that are traditionally staffed by librarians. Apparently there is a debate. The person in favor of the MLIS for information professionals argued that the MLS was necessary because it fosters shared values—values essential to the transition to the future of the digital library. Library schools, Bishoff said, rightly “focus on educating rather than training.” Personally, from what I've seen, most MLIS programs fall short on both training and educating. Shared values can be fostered without plopping down $30k for another graduate degree (considering that most librarians already have a Masters degree). I think that the mo...

I came across this NERCOMP presentation a week or so ago, but I only got to go through it the other day. All I can say is that I wish that I had been able to attend the NERCOMP conference and this presentation in general because it's a project that I've been involved with at my campus. No, my campus still maintains a separate library and IT group, however as a Management student I've worked on proposals for the Merger of the IT and the Library group and I've been an advocate for this merger for the last three or four years. While I was doing my MBA, my team and I did an analysis of the (then) current conditions in our IT department and in our Library and we came up with a proposal to merge the two departments. The main idea was that it would: (1) Save money; (2) Make information services easier to access; (3) Better reallocate resources on campus. After all, both the IT department and the library deal with Information Resources . It doesn't matter if that informat...

OK, now that I've got your attention, I decided to create a complimentary post to this blog entry called instructional design is dead Much discussion has been had on publib recently about the downgrading of librarianship as a profession. One comment says: I certainly wouldn't suggest that we should make our cataloging systems deliberately arcane or complex simply to justify our existence(s). But there are libraries and library systems who are working hard to downgrade the profession and thinking about making libraries increasingly bookstore-like makes me wonder who, in this new model, will be at the Information Desk? Things change in life. So do libraries. If you do the same old thing decade after decade, your position will be downgraded as newer customer service models evolve, newer technologies come into the limelight and people expect more and different kinds of services. It's up to the library folk to provide a value added for their communities and maintain ...