The Distant Librarian

You think newspapers have it bad?

The other week I pointed to a graphic showing newspaper circulation over the last two decades.  Stephen Abram has uncovered a similar graphic showing circulation revenue for a few of the big general news magazines.  Theme song: Free Falling, by Tom Petty.

Guest Post - What's in a (SLA) name?

This is a guest post written by two librarians at the U of Calgary about the proposed name change for the Special Libraries Association.  In November the membership will be voting whether to change the name of their organization to ASKPro (Association of Strategic Knowledge Professionals).  I have no stake in the matter, but Justine Wheeler and John Wright are heavily invested as the Directory of the Business Library and the Head of the Military Museums Library here at the UofC.

Justine writes:

I’ve been reading the discussion about the SLA proposed name change with great interest. I must admit when I first heard Association of Strategic Knowledge Professionals (ASKPro), I was hesitant. My main reservation being that the moniker “librarian” is a strong, identifiable brand that is working quite well in academic special libraries – at least in my opinion. Nonetheless, the profession is moving and *needs* to move to a more inclusive understanding of knowledge work.

I thought I’d ask a student assistant in our library what she thought of the name. She thought it sounded “haughty”. Hmmm. Are we trying to put on ‘airs’ or over value ourselves, or is this yet another perfect example of how we and others devalue and misunderstand our work?

As I’ve been mulling this over, I keep coming back to an experience I had at the beginning of the semester. I was asked to present at a PhD orientation. I was given a short amount of time to discuss the library services and resources available to help PhDs conduct their research. When the Associate Dean Research introduced me she said something pretty close to: “the people at the Business Library are so great, we think of them as colleagues not librarians”.  Hmmm. At the end of the session one of the PhD students asked me: “what is your background, you seem to know so much about business”? Hmmm again. I had after all been speaking on the topic of business research not business theory. Was it that surprising a business librarian could speak authoritatively on researching business topics? Whatever marketing plan we as a profession have had, it just doesn’t seem to be working.  There remains a disconnect between what we do and how we are perceived.

So where am I now? I love the title librarian and I love being a librarian but I believe we do have to take a different approach to promoting our value and what we do. By encouraging those with different skill sets into our association we can expand our own skills, gain exposure to new ideas and create much needed collaboration in the information and knowledge field.  By aligning ourselves with those who are, or should be, our colleagues and collaborators we might even be able to raise our profile and change how we are perceived - thereby strengthening, not weakening, our "brand". Doesn’t sound too bad…think I'll vote yes.

John counters with:

I disagree completely - I think being a librarian engenders tremendous goodwill and political capital that can be leveraged.  Changing the name just seems to be running from a series of identity issues without resolving them.  If anything it makes things more nebulous and waters down who we are as a profession (with standards) and as a function for an organization even more.  I think of what happened in the Canadian and US public services and think this would accelerate a diminishing of the profession by a major employment group. The UK Charter model would be a better step, IMHO.  I think we need to own librarianship and update the word, and in that I agree with the underlying motives for the name change, if not agreeing either with the name or the imperative to change the name. In short, we do need to own what we do differently - I completely agree with you; I just don't think this is the way.

Want to chime in?  Please do!

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

An emerging list of the top 100 tools for learning in 2009, as picked by 202 learning professionals (and possibly you!).  Pleased to note that I was aware of 87 of them, with most of the new-to-me ones being related to animation and course authoring systems.  I found it particularly interesting to note the changes between 2007-2009, with some obvious risers like Twitter and Slideshare, but some interesting fallers, such as Facebook drifting from 17 in 2007, to 24 last year, to 33 this year, Microsoft Word dropping from 10 to 22 to 42 this year, and Bloglines falling from 12 to 30 to 73 this year!

Well worth a few minutes to look over the list to see what might be useful to you.

Support a publishing innovator by watching TV

I've mentioned MCM before.  He's the author of The Pig and the Box, and a true innovator in the world of independent publishing.  I've been fascinated reading his blog posts over the past year as he explores one interesting idea after another for publishing via crowd sourcing, PDF, print, epub, donations, sponsorship, releasing work under Creative Commons, etc.

And now's he's back for season two of his excellent cartoon, Rollbots.  Rollbots has been available in Canada for about a year (viewing season), and now it's about to debut in the US on Saturdays at 8 AM on CW4Kids.

So what?  You don't watch cartoons?  But check out what will happen if you do!  If enough of you watch it, MCM will donate nearly $10,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  Go read the post, and watch the cartoon on Saturday, it's for a good cause!

BTW, this is not a sponsored post; I love the guy's work, and really enjoy the cartoon too!

Post-holiday link dump

Some miscellaneous links you may find of interest:

• Co-Browsing Tools: Guide To The Best Online Services
• Five Best Video-Sharing Sites
• Newswire Opinion: Libraries Clash with Harvard Business Publishing on Deep-Linking
• The undiscussed danger to libraries in the Google Books Settlement: A warning from library law expert Peter Hirtle
• Sony to link Readers with libraries, allow e-book borrowing
• Facebook Privacy Update: Here’s What’s Changing

JISC Academic Database Assessment Tool (ADAT)

I recently learned through a colleague of this wonderful database comparison tool from JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) in the UK - the Academic Database Assessment Tool (ADAT).  "This site from JISC Collections aims to help libraries to make informed decisions about future subscriptions to bibliographic and full text databases."  You can use it to compare Journal Title Lists (with Venn diagrams!), features of different database platforms and eBook platforms.  The information's not all perfectly up to date, but JISC lets you know exactly how old the data is.  When you drill in to the "dashboard" for a given database you'll learn all sorts of interesting information about the content it covers, including total number of titles, publication types (trade, scholarly, magazine, etc), worldwide distribution of the title list's countries of publication, top 10 languages occuring in the database, and top 10 occuring publishers.  Neat site - check it out.

RenewBot vs Library Elf

Fight!  (I looked, but couldn't find a picture of a robot fighting an elf)  I just discovered RenewBot, which will automatically renew your library books X # of days before they come due, where X is set by you.  First two months are free, then if you want to continue it'll cost $2.99 per year for each library card you run through the system.  How many days would your book have to be overdue to pay for that?!?  I was impressed at how quickly they added Calgary Public Library and the University of Calgary to their system after I requested those additions (less than 24 hours).  Turns out RenewBot also does pretty much everything my longtime fav Library Elf does too; after logging in you can see which books are checked out on that card, and which holds are still in the queue.  Here's the RenewBot privacy policy, and here's the policy for Library Elf.

ACRL/DLS Haworth Press Distance Learning Librarian Conference Sponsorship Award

If you're going to ALA in Chicago this year, here's a session you may want to attend:

ACRL Distance Learning Section
ALA Annual Conference Meeting Invitation

Please join us in Chicago for the presentation of the ACRL/DLS Haworth Press Distance Learning Librarian Conference Sponsorship Award to this year's recipient Jack Fritts, immediately followed by a lively open discussion on Future Distance Learning Section Programs, Poster Sessions and Research

Date:           Sunday, July 12, 2009
Time:          10:00 am - Noon
Location:       Hilton, Northwest 2

The Google Wave Highlight Reel

Gina Trapani at Smarterware has a great post where she's chopped out the highlights of an 80-minute presentation showcasing Google Wave.  Now you can see what's particularly cool with this future tool in less than 8 minutes.

Digi-Man and Interrobangs

Another winning episode of the CBC Spark podcast.  Episode 79 talks with Seamus Ross, Dean of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto about digital preservation, and I also learned about the interrobang (‽).

Here's a goofy non-library example of the importance of digital preservation:

NRC Research Press soon no longer free for Canadians

The National Research Council of Canada has decided to privatize their journals and services.

"Specifically for our Canadian clients and subscribers, since 2001 our journals have been provided electronically, free to all Canadians. This has been available due to the generous support of the Federal Depository Services Program. This availability will continue to be in place for the calendar subscription year 2009.

However, the Depository Services Program is not mandated to provide funding for publishing operations outside of the Federal Government of Canada. As the exact date of the transfer of NRC Research Press to a new legal entity in 2010 is still in question, we are unable at this time to inform you of the termination date of the free electronic access. We are attempting to persuade the Depository Services Program to provide this access through the remainder of calendar subscription year 2010. We will keep you informed as soon as we know the situation for 2010. It can be assumed that the support for free electronic access will cease for the calendar subscription year 2011."

Here's a list of the journals that will no longer be free: http://pubs.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/rp-ps/journals.jsp?lang=eng

(Thanks for the pointer, Dani)

ebook pricing stuff

A couple of quick things to note.  Teleread points to an ebook price comparison website: http://www.ebookprice.info/.  Doesn't look terribly comprehensive, and it's only US sources, but a good idea.  Couldn't find Outliers, for example.  But the second thing to note is that I did notice Outliers is now selling for only $4.88 on Shortcovers, vs $19.09 when the site launched a month ago!

Archive Collapse Disaster for Historians

Holy Crap - back up your data!

The collapse of the Historical Archive of Cologne on Tuesday buried more than a millenium's worth of documents under tons of rubble. Archivists and historians hope something can be salvaged, but the future of the city's past is grim.

Thanks for the link, Rosvita.

Value added with social media

One of the things I really like about Rollbots is that the creator (author?), MCM, each week posts a behind-the-scenes recap of the show, explaining some of what was supposed to happen in the episode, or why what did happen happened the way it did.  It's neat to learn extra little tidbits about a piece of media you care about.

That reminded me of how social media, specifically blogs, podcasts and twitter, can be used effectively as marketing tools by libraries, and of course any other business.  I'm thinking of other media examples like the podcasts produced by Lost and Battlestar Galactica, where you can learn more about the shows you love.  I don't follow the twitter feeds of many libraries, but Vancouver Public Library is one that I really like, because they take the opportunity to talk about a little more than the type of stuff that would appear on the regular blog. 

Is anyone aware of libraries that are letting folks know WHY things are happening at their library?  Maybe not quite as mundane as why a book was catalogued with a specific subject heading, but surely there are behind-the-scenes tidbits the public would care about that would make us seem more human?

Serenity Now! - Library Lullaby

"iSerenity offers a relaxing web-based experience that delivers soothing sounds and images designed to reduce stress and calm nerves. Use iSerenity while at work or at home. You can even leave it running in the background while you work on your computer."

I just found Library Lullaby, which will provide background noise of, well, a library.  Does your library sound like this?  Nice pictures too!  There are other environments such as waterfalls, rain, and purring too!