Advice for newish librarians to be

On Saturday, I wanted to help LIS students with advice on how to interview and get a job, but the interviewing workshop got cancelled.  Bummer.  Anyway, I thought it would be good to put down some of my thoughts about how to get a job in this mixed-up crazy library world that we live in.

1) Take the advice of Jenica when building an online identity or presence. She had this presentation way back in 2009. "Yes, You Are Speaking In Public: Some Implications of Building a Personal and Professional Online Presence." (PDF).  Go out there and create a blog or two, and write about what you are interested in.  Write up some book reviews and stick them on the web. If a blog is not your thing, create a nice looking portfolio page for yourself.

2) Post some of your better class papers online.  Put them into E-LIS or something similar.  Submit some of them for journal articles.  Really, many library journals are hungry for content--even from grad students.

3) Learn about why you should license your work with a creative commons license.

4) Follow other librarians or library organizations on Twitter to see what they are discussing.

5) Take a look at the advice from others such as this and this and this and this.

6) Once you interview for jobs, think of the process as you interviewing them.  You want to see how well their culture will fit with your personality.

7) Remember that once you get a job, the learning ain't done.  You will need to continue learning stuff, so keep reading and going to conferences and meeting people with new perspectives.

Added 4/18:

8) Here are some other semi-random articles/blog posts on nailing the interview for a library job, what not to do at an interview, and networking.

This Internet thing is just a fad...

Maybe someday people will put music and their home movies on the net.  Nah.

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for the link.

Some videos of the e-G8 conference in France

What is the e-G8? This was a major conference looking at international policies concerning the control of the Internet and Intellectual Property.

Here are some good videos of some of my favorite speakers talking about the need to keep innovation on the Internet open to new advances and new types of publishers.




Keynote - e-G8 from lessig on Vimeo.

Video of John Perry Barlow—EFF co-founder. He starts around minute 29:30.

The Internet and higher ed.

A couple of days ago, I listed to this February "On the Media" Podcast concerning the Internet.  It was good.

On another note... Philo A. Hutcheson, associate professor of educational-policy studies at Georgia State University, said

“As the breadth and volume of search engines’ results increase, providing a source of certainty for those building an argument,” he writes, “… the validity of academics’ knowledge, the fundamental assumption of academic freedom, becomes problematic.”

I don't buy it.  Professors and faculty can help their students learn how to filter out and synthesize the good stuff from the Internet.  There is a lot of crap out there.  Some people may think that all of knowledge is on the Internet, but it isn't.

More on the book, Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

Here are some interesting passages...

Chris Anderson, "The Rediscovery of Fire."
"Before Gutenberg, we had a different technology for communicating ideas and information. It was called talking."  And then, "Read a Martin Luther King Jr. speech and you may nod in agreement.  But then track down a video of the man in action, delivering those same words in from of an energized crowd.  It's a wholly different experience."  I think this is part of the reason that YouTube is so popular.  Seeing a presentation or a demonstration is much more powerful than just trying to read about how to do something.

Eric Drexler, "The Web Helps Us See What Isn't There."
This deals with absence detection.  This "could help societies blunder toward somewhat better decisions about those questions."  Identifying what is absent by observation is much more difficult than identifying what is there.  Reference librarians get these kinds of questions every once in a while.  A student wants to see if anyone has done research on a niche topic.  One could search and search and search and search and not find anything.  This is what the person wants, because he or she wants to identify a unique area where the person can perform novel research.

Martin Rees, "A Level Playing Field."
He discusses the arXiv.org as the preferred mechanism for reading research in physics.  He notes that "far fewer people today read traditional journals.  These have so far survived as guarantors of quality."  He sees that other less formal methods of publication will survive, such as blogs, and that quality control will be controlled by mechanisms of restaurant-like grading or Amazon style reviews.

Seth Lloyd, "Move Aside, Sex."
Why trek over to the library, when Wikipedia is 99.44% correct?  The 0.56% can burn you.  In mathematics, "an approximate theorem is typically an untrue theorem."  What is the sex part?  He goes on to explain that sex is a good way to share DNA information with others, and yadda, yadda, yadda.

John Tooby, "RIvaling Gutenberg."
He talks about the huge impact that Gutenberg had on the transmission of information and knowledge.  Not really new news here.  But, I like his note about William Tyndale who dared to translate the Bible into English, because that is what, you know, everybody read in England. He wanted lowly farmers to be able to read the scriptures and the supposed word of God. He was executed for doing such a foolish thing.

More to come.

Thoughts on Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

I am a very slow reader.  I got this book (HarperCollins, Ha) several weeks ago, but I haven't read much of it.  In the past, I would do whole book reviews on here, but in this case, I think I will chunk it out, and do reviews of sections of the book.  It is derived from an edge.org project.  They have about 150 2-4 page essays from prominent scientists and artists.  The book is an edited version of the essays on the edge.org site.  For example, Clay Shirky talks about the invisible college. 

Concerning the old publishing and mass media system:

The beneficiaries of the system in which making things public was a privileged activity--academics, politicians, reporters, doctors--will compain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake: The change they are protesting is already in the past.  The real action is elsewhere. [Preprint of the essay is here.]

I hear some things like this from my faculty.  I need them to wake up and see that the old publishing system is dying, and that they need to support new methods of publishing and peer-review. The Administrators need to figure out new ways to award tenure based on the different publishing systems. The architecture of access to scientific knowledge is just plain messed up.  We can't go back to the good ol' days.


Hopefully, I will be able to blog about many more sections of this book.

Article that explains why I named the blog this...

This is a great article in the Guardian. "In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here are the nine key steps to understanding the most powerful tool of our age – and where it's taking us."

I think that we are just at the cusp of the information age. Wait another 1,000, 10,000 years or 65,000,000 years, and you will see what I mean.

Thanks to Hutch for the link.

First Post

This is the first post. I just want to see what it looks like.