Several weeks ago, I helped a student at the reference desk with a particularly difficult question. We started chatting, and she identified herself as a McNair Scholar. She asked if the library had a liaison to the McNair program, and I offered to find out for her. Long story short, I am now the liaison to the McNair program.

This brief story illustrates an important lesson: If you express interest in something, there’s a strong chance you’ll be asked to be in charge of it.

As a new librarian, how can you use this organizational quirk to your advantage? Well, if you see something that you think needs to be changed, or might just need the attention of a dedicated individual to make it work better, don’t be afraid to speak up. Make sure folks around you (boss, colleagues, etc.) know what you’re truly passionate about. And don’t forget to be strategic about your interests! As a tenure-track librarian here at CU-Boulder, a focus of my developing research agenda has been working with underrepresented students. Serving as the liaison to the McNair program helps me unite the “librarianship” and “research” pieces of my librarianship/research/service puzzle.

So what do YOU want to be in charge of?  :)

We anticipated that the new spaces would be popular with students, but the response has been even better than we expected.  The library is busier than anyone has ever seen it (especially for this early in the term), and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

But in the midst of our excitement, there is concern.  If the library is full of students and faculty now, what will it look like during midterms and finals?  Will we be able to handle the increased traffic?  Will quality of service suffer?  And how do we spin all of this to our advantage (convincing administration that we need more space, funds, staff, and resources)?  It’s really the kind of problem you wish for, which has caught us a bit off guard.

Is your organization facing a similar challenge?  Maybe you’ve recently introduced a new collection or service, and are overwhelmed by the response you’ve received.  I’m interested in hearing other stories about what to do when things go well, rather than just when they flop.

[This post originally appeared on ArLiSNAP.org]

The cottage was advertised in the local paper with very little detail–just a price, a neighborhood, and a phone number.  The price and location matched what I was looking for, so I called the owner to find out more about the property.  He described it as a “rustic” one bedroom, single-family home, and warned that a tenant had just moved out, so it probably needed a good cleaning before anyone else could move in.  I made an appointment to see it later that morning.  I had a very what-the-hell attitude since it was the first day of my housing search, and I figured that it couldn’t hurt to just take a look.  It wouldn’t waste much time, and I had other apartments to look at later in that same neighborhood.

I arrived at the cottage to find that it was an in-law building built behind another home and accessible only from an alley, not the street on which its address implied it sat.  It was surrounded by overflowing dumpsters and recycling bins.  The entire house was no more than 250 square feet, and it smelled of dead mice and mold.  It appeared (and smelled!) as if it had been vacant for some time.  There were no interior walls, and the ceilings were only about six feet high.  There were holes and cracks in the wood flooring that appeared to be open to a crawl space below.  There was no overhead lighting.  A previous tenant had been heating the building with a space heater.  The refrigerator was mid-1950s vintage–and not in a good way.  I’ll spare you a description of the bathroom.

Basically, this place was a nightmare.  The punchline to this story?  The landlord wanted $900 a month plus utilities.

So why am I posting this on Librations?  What does it have to do with libraries, or beer for that matter?  First, I really wanted a drink after seeing this place.  And second, this is a great example of how I could have applied my super-librarian powers of information literacy skillz to a real-life situation.

Even though the cottage was advertised in an actual newspaper (this wasn’t some shady Craigslist posting), and the owner paid money (albeit a small amount) for the ad, this doesn’t mean that any of the implied authority that comes with such a source should be automatically associated with the product being advertised.  As librarians, we deal with this sort of thing all the time.  Venerated publishers can do sleazy things (like Elsevier publishing fake journals to sell pharmaceuticals).  And Wikipedia (the anti-Elsevier?) has a large number of well written, clearly cited, and authoritative articles, particularly on topics related to popular culture and technology.

The owner’s use of the term “rustic” probably should have set off alarm bells in my head.  In a similar vein, pseudo-research about controversial topics can often be spotted based on the language and style used to discuss an issue.

And finally, sometimes you just have to dive into something to figure out if its credible, relevant to your research, and appropriate for the task at hand.  Man cannot survive on abstracts alone.  It was in the owner’s interest not to tell me too much about the cottage over the phone, so I had to see it for myself and experience the horror first hand.

Seeing this terrifying building wasn’t a failure, just as coming across an article or a book you end up not needing isn’t a failure, either.  It’s just part of the process.  Research (and house hunting), isn’t always clean, linear, quick, or easy.  Sometimes it involves dead ends, wrong turns, and readjustments.

And what’s a good house hunt without at least one horror story, right?

As an author, lover of literature, and a man concerned with the aesthetic qualities of books, Baker provides a detailed review of his experience using the Kindle 2 and Kindle DX.  Highlights include:

The lack of contrast on its screen:
“The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.”

An elegant and effective description of the rights you have (and the ones you sign away) to your digital content:
“Here’s what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon. …Kindle books aren’t transferrable. You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.”

And a hilarious accounting of the ecological ramifications of the device:
“Yes, it’s made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the world’s oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate and air-conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it’s fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes, it’s difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years. But no tree farms are harvested to make a Kindle book; no ten-ton presses turn, no ink is spilled.”

Ultimately, Baker concludes that while Amazon “is very good at selling things,” it hasn’t yet designed an ebook reader that can truly replace the utility and aesthetic joy of books and newspapers.  For books, Baker recommends reading on an iPod Touch or an iPhone over the Kindle.

As a book lover, librarian, and student of art and design, I’m stuck ruminating on Baker’s descriptions of the Kindle’s many failings when it comes to replicating the aesthetic experience of books and newspapers.  But I get paid to care about books, to understand and evaluate their properties as both objects and containers for information.  Will the average reader care about any of this?  Will he or she notice the lack of contrast between creamy paper and crisp, black letters in a beautiful and (readable!) font?  What about the lack of typographical design, illustrations, color, or other features? At first, no, they might not.  But I think they will eventually.

Beautiful and functional design often has the ability to be transparent if not invisible, especially to those unfamiliar with kerning, gutters, serifs, paper quality, binding methods, or other features of the books that occupy our shelves, coffee tables, and nightstands.  But I’m confident that readers will eventually notice they’re being sold an inferior product, and I look forward to widespread demand for higher-quality ebooks and readers.  If the Kindle is a terrible device, then the solution isn’t to reject the whole idea of ebooks and machines for reading.  Instead, I believe that readers, librarians, book lovers, and everyone else should be making lots of noise about the kind of ebooks and devices we’d like to see–their features, licensing and rights schemes, and overall user experience.

What do you think?