Librations

Although UGLi Blog is no longer being updated, we do continue to collect analytics. I am extremely pleased to report the following:

ugli library smells

On Saturday, July 25, 2009, someone in Washtenaw County googled “ugli library smells.” Not sure if that person was trying to send the internet a message (via google search, of course), or if they just really wanted to determine the nature of the complex olfactory sensations at the University of Michigan’s Shapiro Libraries. Any Librators care to identify some UGLi smells for our patron? I’ll get you started: burnt bagels at Bert’s!

P.S. The googler ended up here: http://ugliblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/library-orientation-coolest-gig-in-town.html.

Last week I was browsing through the links provided by my friends on Facebook (impressed by the way we are all using these technologies to increasingly share and disseminate information) and I came across a snarky commented link by a former professor of mine from my college years. He had shared a link to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education  about  “teaching naked”. Whoa! Wait! What? No, it’s not an article about liberating your inner nudist, but actually about teaching without the comfort of certain computer technology (I know… not quite so exciting, huh?). You can read the article for yourself but it’s basically calling for college lecturers and professors to stop using their powerpoint presentations as a crutch and go back to lecturing and creative teaching. This article caught my attention on several levels: as a student who experienced the transition to powerpoint presentations from straight lectures in college, as a graduate student in a School of Information where digital information technology is pervasive and ever present, as a budding champion of information literacy. I personally think this article should be printed out, old-fashioned style, and put in every (SI) professor’s mailbox, but that’s another story. The article has a great point, that I hope I can carry with me as I move through my profession: to really reach people you have to be creative, innovative, and passionate about what you’re sharing. You can’t rely on your slides to push you through your “lesson”. You have to reach inside yourself and [insert cheesy imagery about self-esteem here, personally I see Bastion fighting the Nothing or the Goonies pooling their talents to beat the Fratellis and get the Rich Stuff]. I know this sounds quite idyllic and naive and I know that it can be hard to be “innovative” all the time but teaching and learning isn’t a solo project–it’s an iterative process through which students and teachers share and analyze information. (Right? At least I think it’s supposed to be that way). It’s a challenge to find or create, as we have all discussed, “teachable moments” in a daily professional setting. But the article cites some interesting evidence about how lectures are more memorable if taught in a dynamic way that includes discussion and two-way communication. The article reminded me that no matter how technologies change, the way we as human beings interact and bond with each other doesn’t necessarily change. We all want to be part of the conversation and feel like we have something personal to contribute or to gain from interactions (even in class). This is why I totally agree with the article’s premise: that profs (and any other teachers–librarians, project coordinators, whatever) need to be dynamic and inclusive when they are sharing their knowledge with others. I think we’ve all seen examples of using technology to extend the power of sharing (ahem, what are you reading right now?) and examples of how it can be used as a crutch with narcoleptic results (I will not name names). So as we move forward in our lives and try to share our experiences with others we have to remember not to let our technology control us, but to control our technology. Isn’t there a movie quote about that somewhere?

So I think I may have backed myself into a story-time corner here.  I’ve got a lovely group of about 25 babies (ages 0-24 months) and their caregivers who are going to show up and expect the normal routine.  The “Hello and How Are You” song, followed by the song where we review all of the past themes from the series.  I’m in the midst of jungle animals, and as I add the animal onto the felt jungle, we sing a song about what sound that animal makes, and we all make the sound together.  This was perfectly fine for monkeys, elephants, lions, parrots, and I even managed one for hippos.  But, I cannot for the life of me figure out what sound a zebra or a giraffe makes.  (They don’t teach you that in library school.)  If I make something up, will I be promoting misinformation?

Dear UGLi patron,

I appreciate that we all have bodies! And all of our bodies produce mucus, and sometimes we’ve got to expectorate and get that stuff out. I am glad that you feel safe enough in the library to do what you need to do with your body.

However, I kindly ask that in the future, you make sure to read the label marked PAPER RECYCLING before spitting directly into the narrow slot on the lid of the container.

Yours sincerely,

Anand

For those of you Social Media Junkies & Mavens, I wanted to share this fun post at Crain’s Detroit discussing Sam Riddle’s Twitter addiction.  I feel that library emerging technologists often neglect to point out the value of Twitter as a potential PR weapon for folks facing felony charges.  Who needs a spin doctor when you can just post things like:

“”Mmmm Damn DetNews.com Is Wrong -Again – I was Never Paid By Kay Everett- Didn’t Even Know Her When Her Actions Resulted In Fed Charges.”"

Or this:

“Haters Step Aside”

Amen to that!

On a related note, Riddle tweeted about his visit to the Art Fair here in Ann Arbor last week.  Who knows, maybe he picked up a piece of the free candy which was such a hot item at the Health Sciences Libraries tent.

Check it out:  http://twitter.com/samriddle

Dear Librations Team,

I am so incredibly geeked that we are all working to put our good librations out into the world. I think we discover and consider many interesting things over our days and weeks, but often don’t have a space to share and discuss exciting new finds or thoughts together (perhaps we have disparate places where we explore ideas, but I see something very compelling about a collaborative space for our ideas to live, breathe, and be nurtured). Librations seeks to be that place.

Ideally, librations could happen in first life all the time, but with our diaspora from graduate school and the lived-in spaces many of us shared in Ann Arbor, keeping in touch becomes something we must attend to more actively. As we create new ways to come together and new gathering places to inhabit, I hope that librations is just one of many meeting facilities we develop over the course of our careers. I would love for librations to be an open and welcoming place for anyone that thinks, laughs, and appreciates community.

This leads me to the #1 (and pretty much the only) rule of Librations: you can’t stress out about librations. Consider that rule your “Prime Directive,” if you need it put in Star Trek terms. The moment this multifaceted project ceases to be fun, I will stop putting my soul into it, and I will find other ways to fulfill my needs for beer and information science chatter.

Librations should feel as safe, supportive, and comforting as we can make it. We should work to make sure we are not unintentionally using exclusive language (this will manifest in our awareness and sensitivity to identity and diversity issues, our explanations of inside jokes when they arise, and our use of simple, clear language to represent our ideas), but we will also acknowledge and appreciate the times when the language we choose can be nothing but exclusive. Librations’ asset will be that it is most accessible and interesting to people who share our values — nerdy or geeky interests that might be best shared over a beer with friends.

Whenever a new contributor joins Librations, ze becomes an Editor or Administrator of the blog. This means that you are empowered to edit posts and play with librations’ structure. There will not be any policing of content here — I trust you; Librations is your library/bar as much as it is mine, and that is the only way this place and this idea can truly thrive. Thank you so much for becoming a member of the Librations community. You are more than welcome here, and I look forward to discovering more about what librations means through our conversations together. Keep those good librations coming and don’t forget to stay hydrated!

Yours,
Katie Dover-Taylor
[Co-Founder & Creative Director]
http://librations.us

Though I’m usually more interested/involved in libraries at their intersection with the visual arts, I’ve been thinking a lot about newspapers lately.  This Thursday marks the final issue of The Ann Arbor News, and as Annarbor.com moves toward its debut through a series of publicly executed fits and starts, I’ve begun to worry about what will happen to the record of local life as we go forward.  While it seems unnerving to watch the demise of an often disparaged but admittedly venerable news source at the hands of a product that seems so desperately eager to be successful that it makes me want to zip myself into my hoodie and hide, the bigger issue in the long run is what will happen to all the information this new organization is producing.

Preview of annarbor.com

Appropriately, I found a copy of Information Today in my mailbox at work this morning. I usually consider the tabloid-size publication so hideous and boring that I quickly skim through it before stuffing it into another colleague’s box (note: their website is even worse). The major headline caught my eye, however: “Where Have All the Archives Gone? Newspaper archive aggregators face the challenge of all-digital, no-paper publications.” I consume 99% of my news online, through news sites, blogs, and the occasional Facebook link. I certainly belong to the target audience of these new all-digital news publications, and I understand that newspaper publishers have found themselves in an untenable situation at the crossroads of social change, historical convention, convenience and, of course, money. Nevertheless, when viewed from a librarian’s preservation-of-information-centric perspective, it is worrisome to consider the future: will an eighth-grader in 2019 be able to research the history of the Ann Arbor Art Fair? What will she find after 2009? Are we allowing our collective story to disappear at the hands of opportunistic corporations?

Before I work myself into a frenzy, however, it is useful to inject some historical levity. I remind myself, for example, that though the newspaper seems a sturdy, timeless institution of lofty, noble aspirations, it, too, has long been the product of for-profit corporations. And, as a former employee of the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL), I can attest that for years the archiving of and access to old edtions of The Ann Arbor News was not performed by the paper, but rather by dutiful librarians at AADL, intent on preserving the local history of our community. I fondly recall sitting beside librarian Dietmar Wagner at the Reference Desk as he diligently paged through each day’s paper, indexing its contents in a primitive database. Given all this, it’s not really surprising that Annarbor.com is more concerned with selling ad space than it is with posterity.

So who will step up to preserve this new online content? Information Today, in its aforementioned article, states that ProQuest, a purveyor of databases and other content, adds born-digital content to its Historical Newspaper collection, unbelievably, by transferring it to microfilm and then digitizing the microfilm before using OCR technology to add searchability. Information Today calls the process “Byzantine.” It reminds me of Disney’s 1954 animated short parodying the redundancy of bureaucratic operations, Pigs is Pigs. These are the people who are not only in charge of what gets saved, but we’re paying them for it? Seriously?

Ooops. I seem to have reached frenzied state again. So I’ll stop to consider the built-in archives of blogs and their searchability. Annarbor.com appears to be set up to echo blogs in format, so perhaps finding an old article will be easier than it was before, when a librarian had to index the paper (I’m leaving out the intervening years, between AADL’s clipping and then digital indexing of The Ann Arbor News, when the paper finally became available online, but not indexed, through the NewsBank InfoWeb database). But how long will that persist? And what about the advertisements and comments/opinions that contribute so much to telling the story of a time and place? Are we transitioning into a society without a traceable record?

Big questions for a Tuesday and a local paper. Welcome, readers! What do you think?

This post is brought to you today by the letter A.

I was listening to Weekend All Things Considered on Sunday, and caught a wonderful, insightful interview with the creator of a new web 2.0 information-seeking application. It’s called Aardvark, and maybe you’ve already heard of it.

Here’s how it works: the Aardvark app taps your social network on facebook to figure out who you know (or who you don’t know you know, or who knows someone you know, or, oh this always makes me dizzy) who knows about something you wanna know. Get it?

It’s like this: I’m wondering, gee, does anybody know of a good holistic doctor in Southeast Michigan?

And I ask that question via IM or email to Aardvark. The friendly rodent then does some fancy algorithmics and sends the question to people who might know about things related to the words in my question. Then they have the opportunity to send an answer back through Aardvark, who sends it to me. They self-describe as a “hub”.

My thoughts:

1. This is really cool! However, it raises the age-old information literacy issue of source authority. Why should I trust my uncleji’s cousin without knowing the guy? The idea is that someone who cares about the subject will answer, and I don’t dispute that. I’m not suggesting people will just send made-up answers to troll around. However, everybody’s got an agenda, all the time, and I don’t think Aardvark gives me sufficient metadata about the responders for me to adequately assess the authority of my sources. It’s probably better for “factual” kinds of information, but we all know that facticity is itself a tool of hegemonic dominance.

2. One lady’s “hub” is another one’s “goddamn meddling middleman who can collect my goddamn data on the frigging internet”.

3. I was happily surprised with the All Things Considered interview, because for once it wasn’t a mainstream media outlet going, “OMG YOU GUYS CHECK OUT THIS FREAKY THING ON THE INTERNET. IT MIGHT ACTUALLY HAVE SOME SOCIAL UTILITY! STOP THE PRESSES! IT MIGHT KILL US ALL OR SAVE US ALL OR MAKE US ADDICTED TO THE SHINY COMPUTER BOX! I’M SO HIP RIGHT NOW.”

Anyway, so I was happily enjoying the interview until Guy Raz (the host) asked the annoying neoliberal question I suppose many people wanted to hear: why would anyone participate when they don’t “get anything” out of it?

Now, I was in the car listening to the radio, and I have a habit of talking back to it anyway. At the particular moment that I heard this, I was pulling into my driveway with all my windows down, and my strait-laced neighbors were out in their backyard (adjacent to the driveway) arguing about their grill.

And as I mentioned in my profile, I’m an angry librarian (I have my reasons). So, when Guy Raz pushed that “oh golly, isn’t money the only thing that matters in this world?” button, I blew a fuse, and yelled at a rather high fraction of my lungs: “IT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE LIBRARIANS, A$$H***!”

And there you have it, kids: A is for Anand, Adultery, Aardvark, and Asshole.

Bottom line: Aardvark gets an A for concept, but I have to play with it more to evaluate the execution.

This weekend, three Librations team members (Emily, Katie, and Hung) began the long process of preparing for the ideal future — that is, a future where libraries are dominated (and known for) Segway Reference. What, you ask, is a Segway Reference? I will do my best to describe the experience:

Imagine if you can a library with wide aisles and lots of room to maneuver. Now add in the obligatory patron or two, quietly or loudly studying, reading, or computing. Pepper in some high ceilings for good measure, and a pinch of natural light. Now, with your mind’s ear, sprinkle in a little humming — it’s coming closer. What is that noise? It sounds like… a floor being waxed in the next room over. Or maybe an electric mixer, bread-hook attachment confidently working through some particularly difficult dough. As the sound grows ever closer, you can’t help but raise your head expectantly, waiting for whatever it is to round the corner, while the book stacks in front of you don’t even tremble at its approach.

Suddenly she shoots out from behind the books, librarian goggles keeping the wind from her eyes, cape flapping behind her, and a giant questionmark emblazoned across her chest. She is laughing! She is zipping through the library, and you realize suddenly that this why you had to sign a liability release form as you entered the building — this is the fabled — the legendary — Segway Reference Librarian. Her steed is, of course — you should have known all along — a gyroscopic, battery-powered human transporter. She glides up to you and pauses, the forward-backward motion of the stop inherently comical. “May I help you?” she asks.

Segway Reference is my dream for the future of libraries. With basic training complete, at least three Masters of Science in Information (Information) are ready for the next step — recruitment.

Let us know what you think of this idea — is it in you?

We hope so.

Librations is learning. This might need to be hacked.