"Are search engines making students dumber?"

While it is impressive that the concept of information literacy has hit the op-ed pages of the New York Times, the author of the piece discusses it rather clumsily, if you ask me. I'm not sure one can make the cause-and-effect claim that search engines are causing more students to be unprepared for college. Judge for yourself.

Invisible Man

The "new and improved" PATRIOT Act (okay, my tongue is firmly in cheek) hasn't made it any easier for John Doe to talk about the impact of the act. In fact, John can't collect his award for standing up for freedom of expression because standing up can get you arrested, that is if it means anyone can see who you are. Hmm, what if he wore a paper bag on his head? Or what if he came pre-pixilated, like these fashion staements?

Generation Stereotyped

Recent issues of American Libraries and College and Research Library News have both had articles on how to cope with the new generation of librarians. It sounds as if the old guard needs a guidebook. How can we understand these uppity young people? They're so odd. It must be all that multitasking, or is that they love technology?

Or is it that some librarians can't resist classification? By age.

Angel, the Gypsy Librarian, has a long and thoughtful post about all this (which is no surprise; all of his posts are thoughtful). Personally, I think it's time to drop this peculiar form of stereotyping and get on with simply being professionals who respect one another and don't stoop to ageism, e.g. you're young, so likely to rebel; I'm old, so likely to cling to protocol. Ah, baloney!

New Career Site

According to AL Direct, the new e-mail based weekly news service for American Library Association members, there's a new ALA Website on careers in the field. I'm not sure what to make of this one. It's intended for both paraprofessional and professional careers, which is fine, but the organization would confuse anyone who doesn't know the difference. One page says getting an associates degree is a good idea, then mentions later on the page "Assuming that you have decided a career as a librarian is probably not for you . . ." If you get to this page from the menu, you may in fact have not decided against a career as a librarian.

Seems more than a little confusing to me. The New Jersey site, Become a Librarian, has been around for a while and has quite a lot of good info. It doesn't offer anything for people who don't want to become a librarian, however.

Looking Ahead

There's a somewhat sobering essay in the current issue of American Libraries - on MLS graduates who are looking for work, or those who choose a paraprofessional career path to avoid being overqualified for the job market. The current information about the field in the Occupational Outlook Handbook offers the good news - there will be a lot of retirements - along with the bad news - with budget cuts, some of those positions will disappear.

One thing it's fair to say: it's going to remain an interesting field, full of change and challenges, rewarding for those who are looking for both.

Conventional wisdom about digital preservation upended?

Roy Tennant, in the lastest issue of Current Cites, highlights an interesting article I hope to read:

Rusbridge, Chris. "Excuse Me... Some Digital Preservation Fallacies?" Ariadne (46)(February 2006)(http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/rusbridge/). - In this tenth-anniversary issue, Rusbridge takes on some digital preservation assertions or assumptions that he believes underlies many of the preservation discussions happening today. They are: 1) digital preservation is very expensive, 2) file formats become obsolete very rapidly, 3) interventions must occur frequently, 4) digital preservation repositories should have very long timescale aspirations, 5) 'Internet-age' expectations are such that the preserved object must be easily and instantly accessible in the format de jour, and 6) the preserved object must be faithful to the original in all respects. After arguing with these assumptions, he restates them at the end of the piece as: 1) digital preservation is comparatively inexpensive, compared to preservation in the print world, 2) file formats become obsolete rather more slowly than we thought, 3) interventions can occur rather infrequently, ensuring that continuing costs remain containable, 4) digital preservation repositories should have timescale aspirations adjusted to their funding and business case, but should be prepared for their succession, 5) "Internet-age" expectations cannot be met by most digital repositories; and, 6) only desiccated versions of the preserved object need be easily and instantly accessible in the format de jour, although the original bit-stream and good preservation metadata or documentation should be available for those who wish to invest in extracting extra information or capability."

Tagging

Catalogablog is pointing to a new paper about "tagging," an issue which I have discussed previously in this blog.

Reliablility and authority

We've discussed the nature of authority and its relationship to information sources last year. It's been a rough year or so for traditionally "trusted" sources of information, as well as the processes for insuring authoritative, reliable information (e.g, peer review). First, the much heralded Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a traditional reference work, was discovered to be riddled with errors. Then a study showed that a sample of Wikipedia science articles had only a slightly higher average error rate than those same articles in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Now, The Scientist is running an article providing damning evidence that peer review may be (or always has been) broken.

News like this is important for both librarians and non-librarians to know. Librarians have traditionally taught that reference books like the EB and the DNB and scholarly journals are sources of reliable, authoritative information. Reference books, the conventional wisdom goes, are carefully edited and contain entries written by experts. Articles in scholarly journals go through a rigorous, blind review process to ensure the research is original, plausible, and useful. However, the above articles blow down the doors of these quaint, somewhat naive beliefs.

It is never enough to say, "This information is reliable, authoritative, and correct." I really liked Marc Meola's article, "Chucking the Checklist" (alternative link). While he is focusing on evaluation of Web sites, his method of evaluation works in other information contexts. It is essentially threefold method: promoting peer- and editorially-reviewed resources, comparison, and corroboration. While I have just criticized peer- and editorially-reviewed sources, they can be used in conjunction with comparing the information to other sources and finding evidence to back them up.

This week we had a friendly debate in the library about President's Day that nicely illustrates this method of evaluation. One librarian adamantly contended that President's Day was actually the celebration of Washington's birthday. I insisted it was both Lincoln AND Washington's birthdays. (After all, wasn't that what I was taught in elementary school? Had I been living a lie for a large part of my life?) We hit the reference collection. I found three reference books that supported my position. She found one the supported hers. We went online and located the relevant statutes for the State of Minnesota and the federal government. Minnesota's President's Day is a celebration of both; the federal holiday is a celebration of Washington's.

What's It Like to Work as a Librarian?

Jessamyn West describes her work week. Admittedly, her job is not the most typical for librarians, but it does show how varied the work can be.

Barbara

Keystone Kops, Legalistic Librarians

Here's a bizarre story from the Washington Post (that I found via Boing Boing). County employees hired to patrol public buildings, who happened to be wearing Homeland Security hats, ordered a library patron out of the library for allegedly viewing porn. Busting people for viewing porn wasn't in their job description and they've since been reassigned.

Guys hired to protect public buildings from terrost attacks shouldn't be intimidating library patrons. Good for the library for making that clear. But I find the idea that patrons must be allowed to view porn in a public library because librarians aren't legally empowered to determine obscentity more than a little bizarre. What is the library worried about, a lawsuit? Or are librarians just not trusted to make a call? I'm sure it's not pleasant to approach someone and say "that's not appropriate here," but I wouldn't go so far as to say that would be a violation of the first amendment. An awful lot of Internet porn is clearly porn, and it doesn't take a lawyer to make that determination.

Though I'm against mandated filters (because they don't work well enough to limit their filtering to unprotected obscene speech) I think this approach makes librarians' legitimate defense of free speech seem extremist and ridiculous. Not to mention fairly inconsiderate of the majority of library users.

Barbara

Raised by Wolves?

There's an essay in Library Journal by James G. Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University in New York entitled "Raised by Wolves: Integrating the New Generation of Feral Professionals into the Academic Library".

He worries that too many professional positions in libraries are being filled by those without an MLS or who earned the MLS in distance programs, which he feels fail to socialize students to the profession. But he also seems to think these ravenous, uncivilized, unconventional librarians will change things in ways that may be positive. He concludes:

Library professionals prepared and socialized outside the traditional MLS education channel have been “raised by wolves.” They may fit effectively or be creatively disruptive in the transformed libraries we are seeking to create. Either way, they are needed for their important contributions to academic library innovation and mutability. They will grow in their influence and relevance to the future academic library.

I'm not sure that traditional library science programs - which are often based on practical needs and are relatively short in duration (usually one year as opposed to, say, a three-year law school program) ever were that devoted to "taming" students, or that the new access to distance education is really going to bring in "feral" werewolf-like students who chew the furniture and demand to do things differently. To my mind the changes in the profession are more profoundly disruptive than the changes in the students or in who is drawn to the profession. And having earned a degree a couple of decades ago, I'm still learning - so however I was socialized to the profession has undergone a lot of changes.

Barbara

American Libraries Direct poll

In the current issue of American Libraries Direct, the survey question is,

Should librarians support the right of newspapers to publish commentary or images offensive to Muslims or other religions?

How should librarians respond, especially given the charged political and religious climate? Interestingly, the American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights states,

III. Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.

IV. Libraries should cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgement of free expression and free access to ideas.

Respondents seem to have voted accordingly. At last check, the ayes had it by a margin of 3 to 1.

The Crying Game

Michael Gorman, current president of the American Library Association comes in for a regular drubbing by bloggers (well, he did say some rude things about blogging in the past...) but he also has charged library schools with falling down on the job; in fact the ALA's Midwinter meeting had a three-hour meeting about it. I'd love to hear comments from anyone who was there.

Anrew Dillon and April Norris take issue with his stance, saying he's "crying wolf." Caveat Lector has a different take - he just thinks library school core courses are badly taught, especially those that introduce principles of cataloging. He and Jessamyn West think more schools should focus on recruiting and training librarians who can code.

Guess I was lucky. I liked most of my library school courses and even remember some of the assignments fondly - and this was several centuries ago, so those teachers must have been doing something right.

Barbara

Do (No) Evil

Annalee Newitz, Alternet's "surly media nerd," compares the evils of Microsoft and Google - and concludes they're both creepy. As we discussed here earlier, she believes their defense of privacy is more a protection of their own trade secrets. And she concludes, as many have, that the best way to defend privacy is to avoid collecting all that information about our search habits in the first place.

Barbara

Implementing an instant message (IM) reference service

After a lot of discussion, the library faculty at my institution decided to offer instant messenging (IM) reference. We started at the beginning of spring semester.

It began when I occasionally forwarded articles about IM and virtual reference to the other librarians. I also brought the topic up in meetings, and we had many a lively discussion about offering reference services through this medium. One issue we discussed was, are IM reference questions less important than in-person questions? I think we ultimately came to the understanding that we cannot judge our users' questions or the means they seek information, but that we should provide the "highest level of service to all library users" and "courteous responses to all requests."

Eventually, the library faculty decided to entertain a proposal for IM reference. We used RUSA's Guidelines for Implementing and Maintaining Virtual Reference as a model for the proposal. In our discussions and during the drafting of the proposal, I leaned heavily on statistics about IM usage (such as from the Pew Internet & American Life Project) and my own experiences in my previous position.

Since many of the librarians had never IMed before, we all installed Gaim (an IM client that can interface with multipe IM networks) on our computers and practiced IMing among each other for several weeks. I then developed and taught a three-hour IM reference training program for the reference librarians before we went live.

Our IM service is staffed by the reference librarian currently at the reference desk and during the desk's open hours. So far, service has been light, but I believe this is because we have not heavily marketed it. I think eventually it will be heavily used, as it was at the institution I came from.

Motivation

The glazed looks... The students IMing during your carefully prepared database demonstrations... An instruction librarian's worst nightmares! How can librarians motivate their students to actively engage instructional content? This issue has produced a flurry of e-mail as of late on the Information Literacy and Instruction listserv. (See, for example, these messages.) The answers have ranged from "give 'em chocolate" (an idea that a good friend of mine challenged) to "let the students teach the class." The consensus, though, seems to be that instructional content must be connected to course content (so students see the relevance of the material) and that sessions must include a healthy amount of active learning (so that students take responsibility for their own learning and "construct" their own knowledge).

In my first several months as an "instruction/reference" librarian, I have been experimenting. Like everyone else, I have had my successes and failures. Here's my general format: Each session includes some brief demonstrations. Then students are turned loose on an "assignment" that requires them to demonstrate their understanding of the material, as well as provide them with some initial sources for their research projects. The assignments are then submitted to me online, where I can provide each student with individual comments. Not only does this give me a chance to make an individual connection with each student, it also helps me assess the effectiveness of my teaching (ostensibly, if students successfully complete my assignments, they have mastered the objectives I set for the session). I also prepare course pages for each class I teach, so students can come back if they forget a resource or strategy I taught during the session. If any of you are interested in seeing my activities and course pages, please e-mail me.

Next week will be busy for me. I'll be teaching a session for the Eastern religions class on Monday, a session for the biblical interpretation course on Tuesday, and a session on finding secondary sources for a history course on Wednesday.

An online catalog revolution?

Librarian Karen Schneider of the Free Range Librarian and the Librarians' Internet Index has some interesting things to say about North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries' new online catalog. The catalog is fantastic. However, I don't agree with the idea of pitching the controlled vocabulary used in our online catalogs. Since our catalogs don't contain the full texts of books, there is no real way a Google-type search could work. Indeed, that is one of the faults of Karen's argument: the online library catalog is not the same thing as "Google, Amazon, A9, AskJeeves, Technorati, [or] Google Book Search." (Google indexes billions of Web pages; my library catalog contains descriptions of a relatively small number of books that sit on shelves.) The controlled vocabulary used in the catalog, in the form of Library of Congress Subject Headings, provides additional searchable metadata and a greater degree of precision to our searches. Sure, the "aboutness" of any information resource is disputable; but generally, LCSH has served me well. The revelation occurred to me when librarian Thomas Mann, in his book on library research, pointed out the problem of a catalog search without standardized subject metadata: Imagine performing a keyword search using the phrase "death penalty. Without controlled vocabulary, you would miss resources that use different terminology, such as "capital punishment."

Yes, catalogs aren't perfect, and I want NCSU's catalog at my library. Subject-level cataloging is horribly expensive. But in a world with varying terminology and catalogs that contain records that are meant to represent physical objects, I think subject cataloging is necessary and will always be with us.

Yes, I'm still here

Hi, all. Sorry for my long absence. Although, I do feel less guilty after reading in another blog several months ago that bloggers shouldn't feel guilty if they don't post in a while. (Sorry, I can't find the citation right now.) :-) Anyway, expect some posts from me soon about:

1) IM reference services. My library recently implemented an instant messaging reference service. Why and how did we do it? Stay tuned.

2) The American Library Association Mid-Winter conference. This was my first Mid-Winter. I'll describe the conference and how to get involved with ALA committee work. It's a great way to meet other professionals across the country and make a meaningful contribution to the profession.

Intellectual Freedom

Intellectual freedom is a major issue for librarians. My graduate school, the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, recently awarded its annual intellectual freedom award to John Doe, the individual "whose legal challenge to a National Security Letter requesting library patron records represents an important defense of intellectual freedom." Read more.

Google Defends Privacy (?!?)

The controversy over Google's refusal to comply with a federal subpoena that asks for information that will allegedly help them estimate the amount of porn on the Web and its imperviousness to filters has put information and privacy in the spotlight. Apparently a lot of people are shocked, shocked to realize how much personal information is gathered by Google and other search engines. (Google saves more information than any of its competitors.) I'm not sure if Google's stock price is falling because investors worry they'll lose in court (the government has filed a "motion to compel" - it's worth bearing in mind this is not a criminal investigation but a demand for information to build a better case for a law that has been struck down in the past) or if they're concerned Google's trade secrets will be revealed in the process.

One thing worth pondering: we'd never know about the government's request if Google hadn't said no. If the DoJ truly just wants to understand the extent of porn on the Web, why couldn't they have done the research in the open, rather than secretly with subpoenas?

At least libraries understand the risk of hanging onto personal information, even if tracking people's reading habits seems relatively benign. Yet they have to decide whether adding popular convenience features that suggest books a patron might like or that offer opportunities to share reading lists (a la Library Thing) trump that risk. Personally, I'm fairly knee-jerk about privacy, but I have a feeling that libraries may be growing less protective and more interested in adding the social networking features that are becoming so popular.

Barbara