libraria miscellanea

My best friend recently recommended that I read, Surprise:  Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected  by Tania Luna and Leeann Renniger, PhD.  At first, I thought, hmm, I am pretty good at surprise and finding interesting things in everyday, but okay, I'll try it.  The design of the book is modern, attractive, cute.  The idea is pretty intriguing.  The best part, however, are the last two chapters:  "Cultivate Relationships," and "Surprise Yourself."  These ladies offer REAL advice in the form of specific exercises you can do to transform your day, your outlook, even, they boast, your world.  The authors are surprisingly candid, sharing personal journeys from depression to joy and surprise, which validates their claims, and makes me, a real person, be able to connect to the ideas and suggestions they posit. "When we are surprised we feel deeply connected and thoroughly alive.  Surprising ourselves every day is a vital p...

When you think of a library, do you typically think that food and drinks are permitted?  I suppose this depends on your age; when I was a kid, you were not permitted to speak above a whisper, let alone bring in something to eat or drink; but, these times they are a changin.'  Our library has a policy forbidding food and drink, unless it is otherwise approved by library staff.  [raised eyebrow] We serve snacks at book club meetings, author visits, and other programs.  People subversively bring their snacks, thinking we don't notice.  I try to walk the line between upholding the rules and graciousness, but if somebody comes in with a cup of coffee or a Route 44, I have to draw the line:  you spill that on the computer and it's done-zo.  Think again, buddy. But, what's really neat about today's library as third place is that you can transform it into anything you want:  painting studio, lego crafting faire, ice cream party, or cake decorating st...

We have a library garden.  As a master gardener who got her training from Oklahoma, I am accustomed to red clay and extreme temperatures.  My current experience in the Piedmont of North Carolina has taught me that nothing I know can be trusted.  Even though the Carolina clay is much like our Okie clay, the climate is much milder, wetter, and different things grow better and longer.  I have gardened in the Kalahari desert, both with school kids and for myself, and that was kind of easy:  sand instead of clay.  Water conservation, keeping the water in, instead of busting up the surface, providing drainage:  opposite gardening. I have hijacked the landscaping (complete with a foot of topsoil) and planted cilantro, tomatoes, mustard greens, basil, green peppers, peas, radishes, gourds, and cucumbers.  Oh yes, and loofah. A great piece of conversation this summer and fall with my patrons has been the loofah.  Our neighbor donated two loofah spr...

Leaving the library to realize potential   Working in a small library is a unique and special experience.   Our community is small, but nestled between two larger towns, and an interstate jaunt of less than 50 miles to Charlotte, a large metropolitan area.   We are near Lake Norman and the State Park, and some of our patrons are quite wealthy; however many of the residents are in the lower middle and poorer income brackets.   There are business people, some of whom commute to work, and some farmers and teachers.   Some of our patrons are elderly, quite a few school aged children frequent the library, some teens, and some young adults; their needs range from readers’ advisory for fiction series, troubleshooting school laptops, job and resume help, basic computer skills, storytime and most important of all, the need for a third place to enjoy and interact with others. My previous library experience had been both in a rural, empoverished village in Sou...

It’s weird to grow up “white” but be part-Native American.   I always longed for a rich, fully involved cultural heritage and known family lineage.   Some of my girlfriends went to frequent pow-wows, had grandmothers with homemade frybread recipes, and who won Indian Princess contests with their beads and homemade dresses year after year.   By contrast, my grandfather’s father, who was a full-blood Cherokee, converted to become a Southern Baptist at some point in his young life.   He was awarded a scholarship to study seminary at Haskell College (now Haskell Indian Nations University), and proceeded to convert Cherokees on the Reservation to become Baptist Christians, too.   He did not teach his children anything of their native customs, heritage or language, but showed them how to assimilate, as best they could, into small town, white Oklahoman culture.   My grandfather was in the Army Reserve and married a white woman (my grandmother).   Wh...

When I was in graduate school, the web was a different place than it is today.  Some new technologies and concepts were cloud computing, RSS, and social networking.  Wikis had been around for years, but wikipedia had only just become popular.  It was a time of shifting paradigms and new toys.  Facebook had just gone public, previously only available to college students.  Much of the details were still a mystery to me, but I caught on quickly and wanted to learn more.  It seemed to me that all the new media sharing could only serve to make life easier and more fun; it was certainly helping me, anyway. Another subject that really interested me was cataloging and indexing.  As an emerging information professional, I felt it my duty to understand how knowledge and information has been organized up to this point.  Librarians had been responsible for organizing and disseminating information for the general public, and they had done a great job. ...

Oh, what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day!  My outlook sharply contrasts with the dreary, cloudy day, because I have hope.  After 9 months of unfruitful job searching, I have finally been granted an interview.  Even though this is only a first interview via Skype, it represents much more than that; it represents hope of a promise of personal fulfillment.  It means I am not wasting my time.  It means my MLIS degree was not a waste, but a fruit from a tree which has been tended.  Well, sort of... I waver between chomping at the bit to get back to work, and putting more efforts into my bakery endeavors.  Coupled with my other responsibilities, these two dreams cannot exist simultaneously.  I feel like I'm an undergraduate again, torn between academia and my art studios.  So many general education classes are required, but a focus is also necessary.  Each discipline demands your full attention and devotion, yet leaves you sort...

I intended my Jenneffer in Africa blog to be targeted to the non-library audience, i.e. general readership comprised of friends, family, lurkers, etc. However, I see that my work here is a lot of 'libraria miscellanea' now, so I may need to cross-list posts from time to time. This Friday, I am hosting a workshop at my school in Logaganeng for all interested Peace Corps Volunteers serving in the Northern Cape, along with their principals and/or community counterparts. The workshop is inteded to let my librarian and principal tell the story of how they started their library. I also invited the librarian from Kuruman, the Northern Cape Provincial Library Services, and the Moshaweng Municipality; all were instrumental in helping start and keep running Logaganeng Library. Each should have a turn to describe how they operate, then I will fill in any gaps and be the ringleader of the show. For truly, all events in South Africa function much like a circus; this one should be no ...

January. Another new year. New resolutions, new projects, back to the grindstone. I didn't actually make any resolutions this year, just resolved to continue the positive path I started last year regarding health: physical, emotional, and spiritual. This also means updating my outlook about life, including my work. Part of my job as a part-time librarian is teaching computer literacy classes every Tuesday. I teach two classes each day, each lasting 1.5 hours in the subjects of mousing and basic computer skills, Microsoft Word, Internet and web-based e-mail. People take four classes total, one each week. I used to dread teaching them at first (my very first librarian/supervisory position), but now can honestly say I enjoy doing it. Sometimes, I teach mentally handicapped folks, those who have never touched a computer before in their lives, seniors and people my parent's age. Many times, people want to take the classes again, and sometimes more than twice. This is okay,...

There are very few things I really dislike doing at work- one of them is usually helping people find genealogical information. However, today was quite different. For some reason, things were super busy at work as soon as I clocked in at 5pm. One patron was visiting from out of town to search for a grave of a family member, and needed some help with microfilm and cemetary stuff. This person was very grateful for the help, and I learned a lot along our quick journey. We jetted from microfilm to internet pass to map of Payne County to cemetery index, to finding a map of the townships. Phew! I did forget that we have a gigantic map of Payne county, including townships, mounted in the main library by the bathrooms, but we also had a pocket sized map in the locked case. (Locked case is for rare or really old items we want to keep. Overflow for this stuff is called the "reference closet.") Anyhow, sometimes I have to tell people to come back on Tuesday or Thursday from 12-4...

When will the madness end? Now the myspace buzz is out, facebook is in. I even saw a mashup [can't find it again!] that proclaimed facebook the genius brainchild of social networking systems, and myspace the red-headed step-child who scrubs the floors. Okay, maybe it wasn't really that bad, but it was pretty brutal. And I'm supposed to give a conference presentation about how helpful myspace can be for libraries? I'm going to have to dig pretty hard for that one. Yikes!

It seems that our MySpace page is becoming a success! Just the other day, I got an actual instant message from someone asking about our teen programming. Hurray! We started out getting a few friend requests per week, but now we are almost up to 100! Some of these are book authors, or musicians, folks soliciting business, but mostly they are real people. Using social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace, have been really helpful means of getting information. For example, Stillwater Public Library is friends with local businesses, like Vault Video, a video store that is owned by a Stillwater community member and specializes in older titles. They post bulletins about upcoming sales and specials, which can then be passed on to other friends, and they pass it on, you get the idea. So, the passing of ideas on MySpace is a lot like word of mouth, which seems to be the way more and more people are getting information. At least that I have observed.

I created a generic myspace page for a public library as my final project in Doc Martens' LIS web class in Fall 2006. I also work as a reference librarian at a public library. My fellow librarian and comrade liked it, and thought he would show it to our library director, who also liked it, and asked me to tailor it to our library, Stillwater Public. I no longer have the beta-version available, but here is what the "finished" product looks like. Luckily for our library, we do not receive e-rate funding, so we do not have to block social networking and blogging websites, like other schools and libraries do. Patrons come to our library to access the internet and www.myspace.com, more specifically, because it's banned in so many places. I put up signs last week advertising that our library is now on myspace, and got a few extra friends requests. Hopefully, as word spreads, more people will be interested in joining our friends' list and getting all sorts of up ...

I really like the term "invisible web." It implies super powers, or something mystical. Certainly not what it really means, just parts of the internet that are not "publicly indexable," according to Ru and Horowitz in Indexing the Invisible Web . Information that is hidden, either because you have to pay to subscribe to it (from databases or journals) or url s that contain a ? (Ru and Horiwitz 250). So people who work on indexing and categorizing this hidden web- are they considered web 2.0 people, or is that encroaching on 2.5....or even 3.0? Library 2.o is a buzz word that has recently created a lot of hype on wikipedia; someone suggested getting rid of the term altogether. Why doesn't it deserve an entry, I wonder? Just because someone doesn't like it? Isn't that called censorship ? Most libraries are working to combat censorhip, so censoring the very term library 2.0 is pretty ironic, I think. According to Casey and Savastinuk in Library 2.0 , libra...

No, not Dr. Carter . According to Scott Nicholson in "Digital Library Archaeology: a conceptual framework for understanding library use through artifact-based evaluation" librarians have a thing or two to learn from archaeologists. I think all of us in the information field have a thing or two to learn about the way people search, and looking at another fields' examples certainly can't hurt. "Everyday people" don't go into a library thinking...now what keyword terms can I use to access this item...and oh, yes, I see a "see also" link here, so let me follow that to narrow down my search query... They can go to google and type in anything they want and get information online. AKA using natural language queries. So why can't library catalogs function this way? I understand we are working toward that, but it doesn't seem to me like information professionals are paying attention to what their users are telling them, either verbally or throug...

Reading electronic documents has been quite a challenge for me. I thought I had "issues" ...until I read the research from Ziming Liu, and it seems I am not in the minority. I had always used the internet for browsing, social networking, and searching, but not reading. Reading a book is a beloved activity, something you can do anywhere, from the comfort of your bed, curled up on the couch, sitting in a coffee shop, on a plane, with technology nigh required. In "Reading Behavior in the Digital Enviornment," Liu found that, over the last ten years, there is almost a 50% decrease in readers' attention span, and around 45% decrease for both in-depth reading and concentrated reading (p706, 2005). ! What? Is there a support group I can join? Joking aside, without the discipline that came with enrolling in a program that leans heavily on technology, I may never have really been comfortable reading much at all in an electronic format. And what a scary thing, to be le...

Is this librarian part of the Library 2.0 environment? I certainly don't see why not. According to Casey and Savastinuk, "even older, traditional services can be Library 2.0 if criteria are met" in their "Library 2.0" article from Library Journal in the September 1, 2006 issue . What is Library 2.0? "User centered-change" (2006). So that can include any services that help "create a customer-driven...enviornment" (2006). So, aside from a webpage, adding blogs, wikis, and even a myspace page could help get customers more involved in their community library would qualify. However, one challenge libraries are facing right now deals with censorship from the U.S. Government, and that challenge is legislation such as CIPA and DOPA . These bills, particularly DOPA, which is still awaiting approval to become law, would restrict libraries and schools that receive e-rate funding , to block any websites that allow chats, blogs, wikis, etc., targeted at...

Metadata is commonly defined as "data about data." This seemed like an esoteric term to me until I read two articles that helped clear things up a bit. Metadata is used in library settings as surrogate records, of sorts, so people can pull up the item in the catalog and view information about it without looking at the actual item. Very helpful! Electronic articles have metadata created for them so they can be searched for and downloaded using Ebsco or a similar database. Also very helpful! Internet information has Google to rank the information for us, using algorithms , not metadata. The algorithms search the entire piece of information, not just metadata tags, according to Dawson and Hamilton. They remind the reader that Lynch (2001) states that it is really easy to "manipulate the behavior of retrieval systems that use it, rather than simply describing the documents or other digital objects it may be associated with." Trolls are everywhere! I always wond...

Guinea pigs and digital libraries I love being a guinea pig for other people’s experiments. Especially the helpful ones. I have an on-again-off-again fascination with doing personality assessments, such as the Briggs-Meyers or the Kiersey temperament sorter (by the way, I’m an ENFJ and Counselor Idealist, respectively). (about five minutes later, I am back to writing and have just re-taken the Kiersey Temperament Sorter…) I just finished reading two articles about studying users in the digital library by Judy Jeng, and Ferreria and Pithan. Both state that user satisfaction is key to success in searching for information, ala Carol Kuhlthau , who was innovative in her research on this topic. Satisfaction in anything a person does plays a huge role in whether or not said tasks are accomplished, with what level of success, and what toll it takes on said person. But heck, this principle should be applied to all areas of life! I shall take this research to my boss...

I like Wikipedia ; "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," claims as listed on the homepage. If I have no idea what someone is talking about, such as a new "buzzword," I go immediately to wikipedia.org. Why? If it is happening now, especially if it's popular, there will be a wikipedia entry. Do I view it as the absolute source for information? Of course not. My seven-year-old neighbor could have written the entry. Or a tenured professor from Rutgers or Yale. I have no idea, but I do know that many people have checked it out, edited it, re-edited it, etc. and I will get a rough idea about what I need to know. According to Jaron Lanier, Edge writer and "digital visionary," this web entity is dangerous, just like Facism or "Maoism" (as the article title suggests, "Digital Maosim") because of the concept of what he calls the "hive mind." Think of bees, right? All these people out there in digital land are anony...