I had a thought a while back about what librarians teach and how they teach it. For the most part it’s “searching”, and typically includes lots of information about how to refine your hits and get better results. This is probably standard practice for most people who teach library courses — myself included. The only problem with this approach is that I find myself increasingly not refining searches, and actually wanting the noise caused by this.

If I were looking for all of the English studies masters theses in our library system, I could provide the command-line instructions to retrieve these, I could do the same in our OPAC with CQL. The thing is that this kind of specialist knowledge is not the kind of thing that there is any real point to trying to teach; if people need to do this kind of thing — and let’s face it: who does? — then ask a librarian. In the specific instance I’ve chosen, the search would involve restricting the search to the local database and searching for a local classification number with a wildcard. This sounds nice and easy, but getting to this solution involves a lot of presupposed knowledge, namely that you know that local classification for masters theses are delimited by subject and are serialized. It also assumes that you’re smart enough to remember that searching for local classification only works when a locale is set. Does a user really need to know any of this?

The user approach would be to set the locale to the local database, search for masters theses (an option in the OPAC) with the keyword “English”. This would return enough hits; actually it would return too many hits. The user approach would be to skim through the hits to find what they were after. Sure, if there are a few hundred hits, then the user might give up — if the information is important enough they will persevere. They might find exactly what they want, or they might find something that is more interesting. Telling the user how to trick the OPAC into showing 1000 hits at a time instead of ten or a hundred is probably a good idea at this juncture.

This kind of reality is where I find myself; I trawl through masses of information every day; not because I’m too lazy to learn how to search properly, but because I find that my ability to skim and evaluate large quantities of data are more effective tools than clumsy boolean searching. I think that this is the case for many young people; search isn’t relevant. The point is that users are getting more and more used to filtering, they’re getting more and more used to being presented quasi rubbish with their search results.

The difference is that I don’t do the searches manually, I’m fed the data and I use tools to help me get to the core of the matter before I even start filtering stuff out. The tools I use, like Bloglines, I use in association with feed searches, technorati, del.icio.us, etc., and these I simply skim every day. Users need to know about these tools and how to make their work more effective — they have the key skills, but they don’t necessarily know about the tools.

The big idea is that information management is where the game is at; I see this everywhere, I see publishers publishing catalogues, but not RSS feeds for new literature, and thus not getting customers. The publishers do provide email alerts, but this isn’t exactly going to ring the bell of anyone who is under forty. If the data isn’t easily transformable into a format where it can be compressed and viewed in the way the user wants it presented, it gets forgotten. I rarely visit the sites I’m interested in, I read most stuff syndicated. I appreciate the work done by recommenders and stream-of-news sites (bibliobabl in Norway), and this saves me having to set up custom searches for this kind of information. I look forward to being able to work with a proper implementation of APML.

All of this isn’t to say that searching is irrelevant, but most of the hardcore stuff will remain — as it always has been — well within the domain of the librarian. This isn’t a bad thing, and it affirms the usefulness of a much-maligned profession. Actually, one notable exception to the “search-for-nothing” paradigm springs to mind, and that is source code. Working with source code requires search skills, and these need to be honed. The fact that tools like Google’s Codesearch implement (albeit rudimentary) support for regular expressions is testament to this. On the other hand, this is again special interest stuff that appeals only to the hardcore user (librarian); for the average mortal there’s the information management concept.

Following a user request, the team at UBiT 2010 has produced a weather widget for Mac OS X 10.4.3 and later using data from the Norwegian weather site yr.no. This application admittedly has little to do with the library, but it has everything to do with new technologies…so expect to see library widgets built using the same techniques in the very near future.

SAGE obviously doesn’t want you to publish with them, so feel free not to. [via BibloBabl]

The Norwegian blogger Plinius wrote an interesting piece on information literacy the other day, much of what is said here, I really agree with. I’ll translate a bit of it for non-Norwegian readers:

I’m deeply skeptical towards the concept “information literacy” as it is commonly used.

This doesn’t mean that [I think] that librarians are surplus to requirement; both schoolchildren, university students, knowledge workers and people generally should be able to get help finding information when they need it, as well as help using the information where necessary. In these cases, both courses and supervision have their obvious place.

[...]

But, what we’re talking about is information used for a concrete purpose: a biology test, a poetry analysis, a population prognosis, an inheritance claim. I have been teaching information searching for thirty years, but never general information literacy.

A belief in “information literacy” as a general skill hinders our ability to understand what librarians need to learn. The profession firstly needs to cope with the change from an industrial to a digital universe of knowledge. And then we need to look at what is happening with our users.

• Then: people were prepared to build their workflows around library services.
• Now: the library must be prepared to build its services around people’s workflows.
• Kilde: Lorcan Dempsey. Workflow is an intermediate consumer

Information literacy - citing ABM-utvikling (The Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority) -

is a collection of skills that make a person able to identify when information is necessary, and make the individual capable of localizing, evaluating and using this information effectively.

[Though] these are doubtless practical skills, they have very little to do with librarianship. Every experienced skilled worker from lumberjacks to dental technicians manages to decide when they need information. Skilled workers that can’t manage to localize, evaluate and use this information are either totally green in their trade, or numbskulls that should leave their trade or profession as soon as possible.

[...]

Previously, libraries provided skills related to their specialization: practical use of large catalogue and retrieval systems. Our acute problem was disintermediation in two different forms:

1. When the library first became digital and then searchable online, users became far more independent of the help provided by librarians.
2. In addition, much in-demand information is now available outside the traditional systems through academic webpages, open access sources, Wikipedia, etc.

Librarians’ traditional knowledge, which was based on a short period of study and a lot of experience, thus becomes less sought after.

This does not mean that the profession stands before the abyss; in key development environments, there’s a remediation going on: developing new systems for search and retrieval, evaluation and use of digital texts.

In the old days, we provided user training. We had a monopoly on search and retrieval and users had to politely learn to user our systems, Today, the monopoly is broken; if we want to provide something that is meaningful, then we have to both understand, master and go beyond users normal practice in a digital information environment.

The profession’s most important task in the next ten year — I think — is to develop new services, to acquire new skills and to actively participate in the new ways of doing library work. We’re not starting from nothing. Skilled people are already at work building the profession’s new foundations in countries like the USA, the UK, Denmark…and Norway.

But, what is being created by the innovators has to betaken up by the practicians. This will require a lot of learning, development and collaboration with other professions and institutions. Before we begin teaching, we need to learn.

[...]

Information literacy in its widest sense is basically a necessary and integrated part of any area of expertise. The skills we’re talking about belong to the field itself.

I dare to venture that the public library’s old role within reference — answering a broad spectrum of everyday questions from common people — is growing less and less important. The Net is mainly taking over this role; thereby, the industrial or “Gutenbergian” information literacy from the previous century is devalued.

The digital Net invites new ways of working. What librarians — and all other skilled workers — need to master is that transition to digital working methodologies. This learning process has only just begun, and we need to pace ourselves and not promise more than we can deliver.

[...]

Library education cannot, of course, provide a general background in every subject, but the conceptualization of information literacy as a general, overarching, generic subject leads nowhere either. The attempts at defining information literacy — often inspired by thinking from the USA — rapidly becomes so all-inclusive that it begins to encroach on the subjects themselves.

[...]

Librarianship is practical. Librarians in the field need to gather their own digital working skills before they teach the many possibilities of the Net…

I’ve noticed that everything I own is driven and limited by a single power source: batteries. I suppose that this makes me quite typical for my generation, but like the electric car, my range is limited to how long I can go between charges.

Libraries are digital whether we like it or not; you’re not going to get far these days without the help of the OPAC, unless you’re not very discerning. Academic libraries are even more digitally dependent; a lot of our content is online, and we offer a lot of “services” online. That said, none of this negates the value of a paper book, CD, DVD or any other thinkable medium that a good library would deliver (it’s all about delivering the right content to the right person — think of content delivery as a service), it’s just that we’re totally dependent on computer systems and IT in order to make the content available to customers.

Now, any good library will provide services in a variety of ways because not all customers are created in the same mould; hence, you need a variety of search options, information sources and a good way of deploying these. And this is where the problems start. The rhetorical questions are: to what extent are IT people interested in library IT, and to what extent do they “know” enough about library IT? The answers to these questions in all cases except those where the IT people in question are dedicated library IT people will be…null. That’s right, not nil, but null — no value for “level of interest and knowledge” will even be registered. That’s a big problem when you only have outsourced IT services.

Libraries are IT heavy, they use specialized protocols and software and the staff that use these systems are experts within their fields — they will invariably know a lot more about what they’re doing and why than the IT people who support them. Again, it takes a library IT person to get this fact. The experience gained from outsourcing everything is that IT becomes inflexible, exhausting and ultimately works against progress.

My advice? Keep your IT department, hell increase its size by employing people who know about AJAX, FRBR, SRU, SNS, whatever, just don’t outsource library IT.

I’ve been working on a short report with some colleagues about widgets, what they are, do, etc. The report is currently in draft, but the main points are:

• Widgets can be many things
• Widgets add functionality
• Widgets have a threshold for take-up
• Smart people make widgets that can be deployed on different platforms with the minimum of fuss

Anyway, it’s nice to have some prototype to view, so here’s a ten-minute widget based on an old widget: BIBSYS Ask search for Mac OS X 10.4.3 and later.

Another updated widget: Ordnett for Mac OS X 10.4.3 and later (it will only work for those who have an ordnett.no subcription/VPN from NTNU).

I recently tried another take on widgets I made years ago, which is a Cocoa Service written in Objective-C for Mac OS X. The funny thing was that it was compiled for use with OS X 10.2.8 on PowerPC, while I installed it on an Intel-based Mac with OS X 10.5.3 and it still works more or less.

Lorcan Dempsey wrote an interesting piece recently on the place of the academic library in organization structure, he points out that it is common for UK university libraries to be placed in the same department as IT. Lorcan thinks that this is wrong, and states:

It seems to me that it now makes more sense to associate the library with emerging support for e-learning and e-research, creating a set of capacities aligned around academic systems and services, and the management of research and learning data.

While I won’t be commenting on Lorcan’s ideas directly because I can’t really apply them to my library’s specific instance, I’d like to mention one thing: unless I’m much mistaken — and having been actively involved in several e-learning projects, I hope that I’m not — in the real world, “support” for e-learning comprises what I’d term administrative tasks associated with problems specific to distance and digital learning. In fact, aside from teaching — physically or using digital media — most of the tasks performed by “learning/teaching” departments are in fact administrative in nature. That Lorcan is aware of this comes very across in the quoted paragraph, but I’d question is whether or not this kind of focus is the one academic libraries should have. (Note by the way that I’m not talking about e-research here, because I reckon that most research based on resources from an academic library will be characterized by a certain e-ness.)

Back to the plot: I work in a library that has been positioned in the university organization under the Prorector of learning and learning quality. This is fine from the perspective of an academic/research/subject librarian, because we do teach (but this isn’t all they do), and it is fine for the customer services people because our library has a bit of a “learning centre” thing going on, but for all other library staff it is a bit weird. A lot of the staff perform typical library and resource management and infrastructure stuff, some interact directly with the academic communities we serve, while others work with IT and e-service provision. The tasks performed by each individual can cover one or all of these areas and include yet others.

What draws all of these tasks together is the purpose of the academic library; each task from answering questions at the help desk to managing the federated search platform revolves around one core task: providing a service to the academic community. The library exists because of a supply and demand chain initiated by the customers; this service-based approach puts the library in a concrete relation to the rest of the organization, it delimits what we do and why we do it.

Departments associated with learning can also be viewed as service-based, if you accept that administration of learning tasks is a service to students and teachers. Taking a quick look at the position of NTNU Library in the organization reveals that the library is placed alongside departments that provide the following services:

• User support for IT systems associated with learning and studies
• Student administration
• Studies administration
• Development and tools for practical provision of distance and e-learning courses
• International students department
• Student recruitment

The difference is that the library provides services for the whole organization, whereas the different departments under learning and learning quality will typically provide services to students or staff (though again, a broad definition of “service” might state that student recruitment is a service for the organization as a whole, this definition requires that “service” moves from being a “non-material” provided to individual to one provided to an institution, which isn’t exactly what I’m talking about).

It’s probably trendier for a library — given the information literacy/learning centre focus of the past few years — to be a part of a “learning” department, but it ignores the fact that a lot of the stuff we do is unfortunately plain old library work, and has little to do with tangible “learning” or “research”. This kind of conceptual dislocation can have dire organizational consequences, reducing staff morale and providing ever less efficient and lower quality service to library customers. A direct connection with a general “service” concept however provides the all necessary a tangible task that drives people who work in libraries on — the gods know we’re not in it for the money.

Seeing the meaning in what we do is very important, making sure that people know that they do something of value — helping people, providing that service — is key to job satisfaction. Placing libraries organizationally in a department where an understanding of “service for the organization as a whole” is key can never be a bad idea, because this is exactly what we do. Whether or not we have anything else in common with the other members of the department is less important, as long as the service focus is in place.

It’s interesting to note that IT services aren’t necessarily perceived as models of service-mindedness, and perhaps close co-operation with the library can rectify this. Ha ha.

Firefox 3 is here, and it’s well past time to evaluate what the damage is as regards the NTNU Library Toolbar. As far as I can see, the core functionality is in place as all of the basic functions (except sessions support) work as intended. The problem areas are:

• Changes in DOM support
• Changes in Javascript 1.8

In view of the fact that the NTNU Library Toolbar was originally implemented for Firefox 1.5, there are also some deprecation issues.

On the background of these issues and the fact that Firefox 3 supports a whole host of new methods that will make the toolbar even more streamlined, version the next version of the toolbar will be available for Firefox 3-only.

This shouldn’t negatively affect most users, but it will mean that they will have to upgrade to the newest version of Firefox (which is a good idea anyway). The existing version of the toolbar 0.2.1b will continue to be available, though with no upgrade path.

L^AT_EX er et dokumentforberedelsesprogram som brukes til å utforme dokumenter opp på T_EX oppsettingsprogrammet. Programmet brukes innen flere fag (som f.eks, lingvistikk og matematikk) for å produsere dokumenter som har komplekse layout-er og tegnsetting.

Få tak i L^AT_EX

Linux — Se din distribusjons programvarekilder, eller ta evt. kontakt med NTNU IT/Orakeltjenesten.

Mac — MacTeX

Windows — proTeXt

Generelle lenker

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