How I found librarianship

This post is part of the Library Routes Project.

I was never one much for reading books and stuff when I was a kid. My mom and sister were into science fiction. I tried reading some of their sci-fi books (Andre Norton, Lord of the Rings, etc.), but I found the stories to be contrived. When I had to do book reports for school, I found historical and sports-based books more to my liking.

In college, I had to get a job for my work-study so I figured the main library would be a good place to work. In my freshman year, I worked at the circulation desk for $3.50/hour processing and checking out books and reserve materials. I worked there about 8-10 hours/week. (In the next year, I got a raise to $3.55/hour!) I ended up working at the main library for four years during my undergraduate education. We also had a science library with a science librarian, but I never asked her how she came to work in the science library. I wish I would have.

For some strange reason, I remember seeing a flyer (late 1980's) about a library-based workshop at Mankato State University. At the time -- I thought to myself -- "Where the heck is Mankato State University?" and "Huh, I guess people who work as professionals in libraries go to seminars like this."

Anyway, I forgot all about that. I finished my undergraduate degree in 1989 with a BS in Physics. I got a job in optical manufacturing, moved out to the east coast to live with my girlfriend/now-wife, found a job in sales and then got married. I was not all that happy in my clerkish sales position. I searched my soul for a professional position, and I remembered that I liked working in libraries. I also liked programming and computers, and I thought maybe I could use my interests in a library position. In 1992/93, the Internet was starting to get some press, and I thought it would be a good time to jump onto the Internet bandwagon.

In 1993, I started course work at the University of Maryland, College Park. At first, I was thinking I would be a systems librarian. However, I remember reading an article about special librarianship in the sciences, and that just seemed perfect for me. (If only I could remember the article title or source.) I seem to remember that Liz Bryson from CFHT and Ellen Bouton from NRAO were quoted. Thus, I changed my focus from systems to public services pretty quickly. I graduated in 1995 and the rest is history.

What is the future of the book? LRS wants to know your opinion

This survey just came out from the Library Research Service.

Recently, news outlets and blogs have been busy deriding and celebrating the recent ascension of e-readers. The growing popularity of this new format has come with murmurs about the death of paper books and some even surmise that as technology advances libraries will cease to exist!

Taking notice of the chatter, Library Research Service has decided to survey librarians on the matter. This new 60-Second Survey asks your opinions on e-readers and how you think they will transform reading.

• Will e-readers be the demise of the paper book?
• What will libraries circulate?
• What is the future of the book?

Please let them know...

Keeping up with the discussion of #slaname

The vote is finally in -- 61% are in favor of keeping the name SLA. Now, there is lots of discussion concerning the process, the name, HQ, etc. Some of it is at:

• * http://tweetgrid.com/search?q=#slaname (This auto-refreshes when a new tweet comes in with the hashtag. Better than searching twitter.)
• * SLA Blog "SLA Name Will Stay: Alignment of Association to Continue"

Brick and Click Symposium Stuff

Last week, I went to the Brick and Click Symposium. Many months ago, they accepted a paper of mine (Comparing Bananas with Grapes: Ebook Use Data from a Bunch of Vendors), and I traveled there to give a presentation on the topic.

Enough about me. I learned a heck of a lot, and I tweeted a bunch of the sessions. Below are the major things I learned about (or had good demonstrations of) at the symposium.

1. Conduit might be a good service to create a library toolbar, in addition to our LibX installation.
2. Use Jing to create short screencast videos (with audio) to explain how to search particular databases.
3. "Informing Innovation: Tracking Student Interest in Emerging Library Technologies at Ohio University" by Char Booth.
4. One can use a LibGuide page as the base for a conference presentation, such as this.
5. Put in short poll quizes in LibGuides in order to get feedback from the students in real time.
6. View your bit.ly statistics to see who is clicking on the library twitter links or from your blog.
7. Promote your special collections. Put in external or reference links in wikipedia for the relevant encyclopedia entries.
8. If you have any YouTube videos, put them in a scroller on the front of the website.
9. SubjectsPlus could be used as an alternative to LibGuides.
10. A Virtual Librarian in Any Class (Co-presented by Elizabeth Fox and Laura Wight) had links to a bunch of great resources, such as the Stuck in the Social Web Pocket Reference guide.
11. Here is a plug for some of my LSW friends -- @webgoddess, @pigsinspace, @joshuamneff, @mstabbycat, and @roycekitts, @hbraum, @cclibrarian, and @gohomekiki. See the pics here, here and here.

Whole Earth Discipline mini quasi-review

I went to a book signing last week -- Tuesday, October the 20th to be exact. Stewart Brand was in town pushing his new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto at the Tattered Cover. The presentation was associated with the Rocky Mountain Land Series. (See also their library.) I last saw Stewart Brand speak at the 2003 SLA conference in NYC.

Anyway, the presentation was really good. I learned about some new types of small nuclear reactors that are being developed. The best part of the talk for me was his discussion of the recommended reading list. I am glad that my academic library already has most of these titles, and I plan to buy the two books we don't already have.

SLA Name Change: First Impressions

I am not quite so keen on the proposed name change for SLA. The leadership announced about a week ago that they would like to change the name of the organization to the Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals. This is all part of a strategic "alignment project". They say "this alignment project will not only help refine our current positioning in the marketplace, but provide a framework for discussing the inherent value in the profession and the Association in a clear, compelling and cohesive voice."

Some other relevant sites are the portal, research from Fleishman Hillard (ppt) and the SLA Name Change Info Center and the name change discussion forums. Many people have left comments on this post.

One of my first thoughts was that while the individual words strategic, knowledge and professional are all well and good, I was not sure if I liked the combination. It could be like throwing filet mignon, gourmet chocolate ice cream, and a nice dijon mustard into a blender. Yes, they are wonderful ingredients, but I am not so sure about the combination. Over the last week, the three word combination is starting to grow on me, a little bit.

However, I was a little perturbed when Stephen Abram wrote: "For those who don't read, discuss and absorb its insights and implications, then they're choosing to remain uninformed and unarmed. They're open to people lying to them that somehow this is against the librarian job title - which is so untrue and silly but apparently some people are easily lead. They're not real information professionals in my view since they're not informed and they're relying on their gut and experience instead of the fuller picture."

To say that librarians (or information professionals or knowledge professionals) who read, discuss and absorb the insights, and STILL disagree with the proposal are not "real information professionals" is ludicrious. That attitude will not win over many votes.

One of the aims of the proposed name change is to make it clearer to the decision makers in our organizations what the association does. I am not sure that the name change makes it any clearer.

The vote is NOT on the acronym, ASKPro. However, SLA leadership and the companies that helped in their research did consider the acronym when proposing the new name. Gloria Zamora noted that "we also eliminated names that did not have good acronyms or shortened versions associated with them." I do not like the acronym all that much for a variety of reasons, but since we are not voting on it, I won't go into any more detail.

I am also not pleased with the fact that only 25% of the survey population were librarians or information professionals. The rest were marketers, C-level execs, HR people, etc. Many of the librarians in SLA are academic librarians. I would guess that the majority of the STM librarians in SLA are academic. Where are the academic leader responders to the survey? They were not represented. As an STM academic librarian, why do I care what a C-level executive thinks of the word "library" or "strategy" or "knowledge" or whatever? Yes, I know that the majority of the members of SLA work in corporate libraries, but it seems like the survey ignored the academic, government and non-profit sectors. [10/20/09 changes. Two of those groups were represented in the naming survey, see slide 8 of the "PowerPoint summary of that research". More discussion is here. However, it is not clear if the survey was of academic and government librarians, or academic and government administrators, or a mix of the two. I also don't like the sentence on slide 9 -- "They are accountable for ensuring businesses have the right information to grow, succeed and benefit the bottom line." I don't work in a "business"; I work in a non-profit educational institution. A LOT of SLA librarians don't work for "businesses". This assumption is just plain wrong. All this talk about the bottom line, competetive advantage, and "having access to the right information for the best business decisions" is not relevant to me.]

Michael Fosmire brought up the point that the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE have no (or little) problems with their acronyms. As long as we have innovative people in the association that can attract more innovative people, then why bother with the name change? Will changing the name of the association really attract more innovative thinkers to become members?

Hilary Davis of NC State (and chair-elect of the ST Division) asked a small sample of people about the proposed name, and 9 out of 10 preferred the "Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals". However, one of her respondents said it "sounds more cerebral and formal, but I doubt anyone outside the librarian world would realize it had anything to do with libraries or librarians." Thus, does changing the name make it any clearer what we do as information or knowledge professionals?

Right now, I would vote for Information Professionals International if I could, but that train left the station years ago. I am leaning against the Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals. Who says they are a "strategic knowledge professional"? When I talk to strangers when they ask what I do, I say either librarian or an academic librarian, and they have a sense of what I do.

Yes, I know that the association wants to reach out and attract more members, particularly IT and other information workers, but is this the best way? If it passes, I will deal with it. I will continue to be active in an organization that houses innovative thinkers and knowledge workers. And librarians. And we can also be strategic. But the full phrase -- "strategic knowledge professionals" is a mouthful. Maybe I will get used to it if it passes.

New version of the Periodic Table

This MIT Technology Review blog post explains how a new graphical presentation of the periodic table of chemical elements was developed. For more background, take a look at the PDF of the research behind the idea.

Reasons why I like the APS

Gene Sprouse, Editor in Chief, from the American Physical Society (APS) displayed some data at the September 17th Publications Oversight Committee Meeting. His presentation was "A View from the Clouds". He gave me permission to publicly repost some of the slides from that presentation.


Data was derived from the Thomson/Reuters Science Citation Index and the "Physics" section. They have a high percentage of the citations while publishing a small number of journals.







Snapshot of top Physics Publishers. Data derived from Thomson/Reuters Science Citation Index and the Journal Citation Reports.

Average cost per article was derived from journalprices.com. The APS publishes their journals with very low cost per article.

Note: I am on a rolling position as a library adviser on the APS Publications Oversight Committee.

Poll for the Friday Noon OPAL unconference session.

This is for the OPAL unconference session on Friday at Noon eastern time. Here is the "Strand" room.

What I learned at the Handheld Librarian Conference

Here is the stuff I learned from the Handheld Librarian Conference.

The conference organizers set up http://www.flexyourinfo.com/track/hhlib2009/ for tracking images, delicious tags and tweets concerning the conference. During the course of the day, Guy and I learned about an even better real time twitter tracker -- http://tweetgrid.com/search?q=%23hhlib.

I Got to meet a lot of other really, really, really cool librarian tweeters, including two of the presenters. Val Forrestal's presentation is here. She posts many good articles (concerning twitter) at delicious, and she also wrote a followup to the conference.

I really liked the afternoon keynote by Tom Peters on "Mobility and Singularity: People, Communication, Information, Information Objects, and Information Services in Motion". I would "lug my guts" to meet Tom in person. In short, because of mobile communication technologies, people don't need to meet face to face to get work done, and people will travel less in the future for business purposes.

Joe Murphy did his session on "Sending out an SMS", but since I was not able to attend that hour, I could still get a sense of the session by following the tweets and comments. He also posted his slides at SlideShare.

From the twitter conversation, I also heard that the session on "Mobile Medical Information: View from the Medical Library" was very good. I will go back and listen (and/or look at the slides) to it sometime in the future.

It was a good, but long and productive day.