Rolling 2008 librarian/library assistant thread

2008 shall be the year I apply to library school... I'll be posting more in a few months probably

shit, meng! i forgot about the year change.

that being said, ALA midwinter. i don't even know who's the grand poobah speaker. i don't think it could beat anderson cooper. he was great, and all the ladies and gays (who made up most of the audience) loved him.

all the ladies and gays (who made up most of the audience)

Funny because true.

i think the head of his internet fansite was there (!!!). also, he (fanboy) was close to shaking with joy.

i don't blame him. anderson cooper had eyes so blue, i'm convinced he cries sapphire tears.

2008 shall be the year I apply to library school... I'll be posting more in a few months probably

-- Mark Clemente, Friday, January 4, 2008 9:28 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

^^^

that being said, ALA midwinter. i don't even know who's the grand poobah speaker.
kareem abdul-jabbar
i only know this because my hubs (librarian) works for ALA and made this lovely video about k a-j to promote the midwinter conference

Oh fun!

(also, thank god it's not Laura Bush again)

A new thread! God help me, the teenagers are driving me crazy. Why must they IM in teams? i.e. two girls to discuss, and jointly compose on one machine, laugh riotously at the response, and together create an answer. And Myspace: Myspace will be the death of me.

Hey did you ya'll know that Mr. Que was promoted from library assistant to assistant librarian! Amazing what changing around the order of words means in a law firm library.

Any of you library types want to help me? I'm teaching a unit in a library class next month - my choice to some extent - but the professor(?) wants me to teach about how social/internet tools are being used (or can be used) by librarians - and I'm trying to lean more toward how these tools can be used by librarians to help them in their jobs, rather than how to reach patrons (but will hit on some of that too..)

I thought this was a pretty tired (& tried) subject, but I taught it to a class in September and none of the students knew anything about the subject ... So I want to give them the basics if they know nothing but also want to be prepared to go deep into cool stuff if they're already hip.

So (besides ILX.com) what tools are you using in an interesting way? Or what do you know of other library staffers who are doing cool things? (I went to Internet Librarian (dull, actually) and read blogs, etc .. but ILXors are always a step ahead, it seems.
/ass-kissing

btw, I'm not a librarian.

The $64,000 question. (It's been a big subject lately at my library.) That said, I'm honestly not sure of the best possible answer here...

.. just looking for suggestions.. I have ideas already, but looking for other interesting ways librarians are connecting/discussing/learning ...

Facebook is the obvious one- you can create pages for your library, then people can become "fans" of the library. A good way of interacting with your users, the example below requires Facebook membership:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=19878188104

At our law school library, we use Pageflakes start pages, blogging, del.icio.us URL saving. One of the big things at the moment is instant messaging to provide reference services.

A good book on this (so old school, I know!) is Phil Bradley's "How to use Web 2.0 in your library". Well written, with lots of examples of how libraries are using web2 stuff.

Hi Dave!

Yeah, Facebook is a big one. We all were encourage to sign up, but now it's turned into "You've received a teddy bear from someone who used to be in your dept."

We've (er, I did, after much protesting from the old guard) set up a departmental blog to post links, meeting minutes and other points of interest. If you want to see a link for that, let me know. It's nothing fancy. I also gave a crash course for everyone on how to post on a blog, edit your entries, etc. (i.e. stuff that seems completely easy for me, but befuddles everyone who isn't so familiar with that sort of "high technology"). Other departments in our library have set up blogs too, but a lot have fallen to the wayside, once the bright shiny newness wears off.

We've used wikis, but everyone (except our IT folks) thinks they're clunky as hell (myself included).

If you're interested in what we've done to solicit comments from new services and tools we've developed for our patrons, you can click here.

/end shameless self-promotion.

also, i'm not trying to sound snarky about "the old guard." they just haven't experienced it yet, which is no fault of their own. i only get snarky when they become uber-suspicious and resist minor changes (like learning how to post on a blog - this isn't earth shattering stuff, dudes).

Our blog is to communicate with users- we host it on Wordpress and have entries fed through to our VLE. It works as a news service, really.

Our dept. blog is just for us. I'm not sure that the general public would want to talk to a bunch of catalogers.

For the entire library, we have an RSS news feed, which may or may not work, depending on the day.

MISS MUMMENSCHANZ IN COMPUTERZ IN LIBRARIES JAN 08

http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/jan08/Battles_Combs.shtml

Fame! Fortune!

Bah! That didn't even get mentioned in the Staff RSS News Feed.

I like the sound of a cataloguing blog, Molly!

Here it is, if you want to have a look! It's not the most exciting thing ever.

Thanks! Molly, that article in Info Today is really helpful .. (the blog is a cool thing too - I've been doing a similar thing & found that only 10% of my team reads it, but it's useful to me, anyway...)

What about facebook APPS? (or other Firefox plugins) or Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, delicious, +RSS etc as methods of disseminating & aggregating info? I see potential there and I know libraries are doing it, but I don't have any really good examples ...

Question #2 (and maybe a more fun topic to talk about):
How do you feel about patron-contributed content withing the library? Such as tagging by users to categorize by subject (and eventually replacing Dewey?) Or user-contributed book reviews? Non-authoritative metadata .. I guess my question is, ' how valuable is user-contributed content and does it need to be kept separate from authoritative content?' .. (feel free to talk about wikipedia, google, etc as threats or opportunities to the library profession ...)

withing=within, maybe obviously. maybe not.

OH GOD. NOT USER TAGS.

I'm sure there's a time and place for everything, but I can safely say (NB I'm such a cataloger) that non-authoritative metadata is a really bad idea in a library catalog setting. I'm sure I've whinged about this before, but controlled vocabulary is a good thing, for descriptive purposes. We're toying with mixing the 2 right now, with our big honkin' federated search engine, Primo, and the user tags already created range from the esoteric to just flat-out wrong. Who's going to police them to make sure they're legit? If they were given any level of importance, they incorrect tags jeopardize the quality of the catalog, therefore jeopardizing the quality of patrons' research.

I'm sure some users can create fine tags. It's the morons on Lastfm that tag Tom Waits with "brazilian" that have me concerned.

This being said, I'm not saying LCSH is the way to go. It's got its fair share of problems, but I think leaving description to those who are anal retentive enough to care is a good thing. As if you couldn't already guess, I think keeping user tags away from the authoritative content is imperative.

This was the subject of that article. It's got links to our version of Primo, if you're interested.

I was wondering when Molly would re-unleash her indexing ire. (Did I mention I've joined LibraryThing? Tags galore!)

I am happy I did not disappoint, Ned!

re: Apps - We had a LibX Firefox plug in that was pretty neat! (It's probably still on that page, somewhere). But, that was mainly for searching our catalog.

http://www.libx.org/

I've tried Twitter, and talked about it with coworkers, and the general consensus is: no one needs to know, nor do they care that much about what we do. The "Molly is..." function of Facebook seems to do enough of that already.

We are getting some positive feedback about our big search engine, so people are in fact looking at our blogs, and our library's website (for more than just going straight to the catalog). We set up a SQL database with some .php magic for that.

"our version of Primo"

I'm still sad that it's not called "Cornelius."

>I'm sure some users can create fine tags. It's the morons on Lastfm that tag Tom Waits with "brazilian" that have me concerned.

I agree. But if the search engine ranked based on tag clouds, those "incorrect" tags would fall to the bottom .. and if you share tags globally and not just inside your library, the democratic nature of the web community would in effect overrule incorrect tags by pushing them WAY down in the results ... but in the case where someone tags something with an esoteric tag, the whole 'long tail' value comes in, at least as a possibility for search results on a subject that would otherwise return very little.

So I agree that mixing authoritative & non may be trouble, but also sort of disagree and wonder what your opinion is in the larger scheme...

RE: Twitter - I read about a library that was announcing additions to its holdings via twitter. I can't imagine anyone wanting that service & RSS makes more sense to me, but I could see it for announcing events at the library, etc .. so more of an institutional tweet, than individual ...

I see what you're saying, and agree to a degree. I'm just speaking from my own experience and how programs we've dealt with have performed. Ideally, yeah, it would be great if you could get the search algorithms to take everything into account as it should (more popular user tags + authorized subject headings), but I have yet to see a product that does that successfully.

So, the larger scheme: show a product that does this perfectly, and then I may change my tune. Thus far, I don't think we're there yet.

re: Twitter - I really have no idea how many of our patrons actually use Twitter. We add hundreds of volumes a day, so I'm not sure how we'd go about successfully doing that. Perhaps if someone indicated what they're interested in, we could send out msgs for them, but that may be too labor intensive for something with so few benefits.

Folksonomies can be useful in addition to formal metdata, I think, but the former shouldn't replace the latter. A very good library project in Sweden is using tagging and folksonomies to enhance the feeling of community amongst its users.

We use delicious at our place, if anyone's interested.: http://del.icio.us/bpp_law_library

I use delicious for my own purposes, but as far as I know, our library isn't using it. It would be a good idea for the librarians that do bibliographic instruction!

The new and improved pathfinder! Take that, library school!

Thanks, Neil - that's a good example too - I hope you don't mind if I share that with the class ... (I won't publish it in course materials, but I may display it as an example ...)

By the way, I had not intention of making a plug, and this isn't my product, but I just saw a news release for this 2 minutes ago & think it fits:
Searching Library Collections in Facebook

Yes, no probs dave, this stuff's there to be shared after all!

Worldcat through Facebook, nice.

I am currently cataloging some dude's published blog. Yeah. He published his blog in book form. My mind is blown. (I'm totally using ǂv Blogs)

Every entry, including spam comments?

I wish! No, just his written entries.

Which publisher fell for that, I wonder?

Alfaguara (Spaniards!)

So - this is old news by now, but pretty cool-
http://flickr.com/people/library_of_congress/
they want to see how people tag stuff ....

exciting librarian video game!

looks like i'll be starting school for the MLS in the fall, if i can scrape together the $$$

congrats!

Our newest guybrarian! Oh wait. (Slug anyone who calls you that in all seriousness.)

gross

Clearly the correct approach.

school starts on monday

I wanna be a library assistant while I'm studying for my Masters, but I don't even get interviews despite my wild enthusiasm and excellent qualifications. I'll just quietly leave this forbidden thread and go back to my place now...

which of these possible MLS tracks would be the smart ones to look at based on jobs that are actually out there? any ideas? these are all unofficial tracks, it wouldn't actually say anything on my degree or resume, but i could brag about it in interviews or whatever:

* Information organization and knowledge representation
* Information resources, uses, and users
* Information systems
* History, economics, policy
* Management and evaluation
* Social, community, and organizational informatics
* Youth literature and services

actually thinking about "management and evaluation" even though i'm worried it might turn me into a creep

I'm vaguely thinking about going into the Library Sciences thing after my undergrad. Should I? Do you guys like it? Any potential deal breakers I should be aware of?

Would definitely recommend it as a career, I didn't find the MA great personally.

x-post It depends on what you're planning to do afterwards. If you're going into local libraries, either of the latter two; if you're thinking academic, then any of the others. Personally, interest wise, the Info Organization sounds bes to me.

There are a billion worse career/degree choices!

I haven't come across anyone who's ever said "I wish I hadn't become a librarian"...

definitely thinking more academic at this point

I really want to do something academic, or, more broadly, something where knowledge is valuable and important and rewarded, but the idea of getting in front of people and talking every day seems nightmarish to me, and that's what always leads me to the library thing. I hear library people bitching a lot about obnoxious moron patrons, though, and it gets me kinda worried that it's gonna be just a glorified version of my record store job, which seemed so exciting until day 4000 of "Have you ever heard of that song Disco Inferno? Who does that?" and "Where are all your Hinder CDs? I've looked everywhere."

lolundergrad, though, I guess. Thanks for the advice so far!

the idea of getting in front of people and talking every day seems nightmarish to me, and that's what always leads me to the library thing.

You might end up doing this anyway, if you end up at an academic library.

Yeah I regularly teach, sometimes up to 200 people. Patrons are generally just about okay though.

Info org, info sys quite useful and potentially quite profitable, especially if you know some programming/DBA stuff.

If, however, you hate that stuff, nevahmind.

"Information organization and knowledge representation" sounds like the most generally useable pathway to me NA.

"knowledge is valuable and important and rewarded" - hmmm, be careful, like a lot of jobs there's a fair degree of drudgery involved in libraries. I would recommend medical libraries because you might get to do literature searches, teaching users how to use databases etc. In academic libraries the job at junior level seemed to involve a lot of photocopying - well, when I was looking for jobs 10 years ago...I guess now it'd be a lot of downloading/scanning.

Law libraries are similar in that respect.

good info folks, thanks

"knowledge is valuable and important and rewarded" - hmmm, be careful, like a lot of jobs there's a fair degree of drudgery involved in libraries. I would recommend medical libraries because you might get to do literature searches, teaching users how to use databases etc. In academic libraries the job at junior level seemed to involve a lot of photocopying - well, when I was looking for jobs 10 years ago...I guess now it'd be a lot of downloading/scanning.

Law libraries are similar in that respect.

Not sure if this refers to the scanning part of the post or the research part, but it all depends on the job. If you have an MLS or are a "librarian", then no I doubt a law library would waste that person's time making them scan stuff all day. It's a lot of training and searching on databases. BUT, yeah, if you're looking for an entry level job then yeah, there's gonna be lots of photocopying/scanning, sure.

My two cents:

* Information organization and knowledge representation
* Information resources, uses, and users

Sorry, yeah, I meant that for qualified law librarians there is the scope for plenty of research, training, etc. I'm a Britisher too so things may be different in the States (if that's where you guys in fact are).

yeah, it's a britisher thing...you usually get a library assistant job before you do the MA/Msc, well, that's the way it often works (basing this on other librarians I know!). And sometimes after that you have to get chartered if you want the more high-powered jobs (which, I don't particularly).

I'm not sure it matters: I'd pick whichever is most interesting to you. Here's how I interpret the following,
career-wise.

* Information organization and knowledge representation>>cataloging
* Information resources, uses, and users>>adult reference
* Information systems>>database developer
* History, economics, policy>>??
* Management and evaluation>>management
* Social, community, and organizational informatics>>special libraries?
* Youth literature and services>>youth and young adult reference

i don't think i'm going to do the info organization track. i'd like to get paid but not if i'm going to hate my life, and i'm pretty sure i don't want to be specializing in cataloging all day every day. i'm thinking about taking the "metadata" course just so i have that knowledge, but it looks scary.

leaning back towards the management track actually

I guess it depends on the program, but I didn't feel that the management courses were particularly helpful to me when I actually had to start managing a library. If I had to do it over again I probably would have just skipped them in favor of some additional collection development and reference courses. The only thing I learned from the management track courses that I ended up using was the grant writing, because so much else of what I was taught was based on public library management.

I'm in a Kaplan GRE prep course right now, I'm confident that this will get me over the GRE hurdle so I can get into the MLS program and do that part-time while continuing to work as an assistant in the Monographs Acquisitions dept full time. In the end, I'll have my MLS and 9 years of experience on the Acquisitions staff.

I'd really love to curate a popular recorded sound collection at a community library someday. I don't have any formal music education, though.

haha a prof. said to us last week that "data ABOUT metadata is still metadata"

i'm in a class devoted to the topic and it's a bit intense. i have no idea to what extent we're supposed to memorize all the various kinds of metadata retrieval systems and such

i don't think i'm going to do the info organization track. i'd like to get paid but not if i'm going to hate my life, and i'm pretty sure i don't want to be specializing in cataloging all day every day. i'm thinking about taking the "metadata" course just so i have that knowledge, but it looks scary.

― metametadata (n/a), Tuesday, October 14, 2008 12:42 PM (4 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

SO GLAD I'M NOT DOING INFO ORGANIZATION, I HATE THIS CATALOGING & CLASSIFICATION CLASS SO FUCKING MUCH

to be fair it's mainly because the professor is totally disorganized and incompetent

And cataloging kind of sucks, too.

Cataloguing rules!

I just came home from my part time "assistant library technician" job. I spent the last half hour building myself into a fort made out of boxes.

i think it could be cool for people with a certain kind of brain who are not me and who have a much better professor

x-post welcome to the world of librarianship!

I kind of liked cataloging class. though my professor was barely there and spent a significant amount of class time talking about his cats and/or slovenia. But I kind of think cataloging is cool, but if I had to do it as a full-time job I would end up gouging my eyes out.

i think cataloging sounds like fun. tho i never finished my assignment.

I was hoping to go into cataloguing, but I'm not really sure anymore. I can't help think it'd probably be better to look into digital publishing stuff, if I ever get around to applying to do a Masters. If I pull my finger out I can start a distance learning one next March.

Oh yeah, I meant to bump this when it happened a couple of weeks ago, but has anyone else had the boxes of free Scientology books? Every library in the world, they reckon. I work in a medical/university library. Fun ideas for disposal please 'cos I don't think my original plan of hoping they'll dissolve or someone will steal them is working.

The only reason I hated my cataloging class is because there were these two vacuous bitches that sat behind me and they would talk about the affair one of them was having and other inane stuff. It was really distracting. The worst part of it was that both of them were teachers that were there to get media specialist certification. You'd think they'd show a little more respect for the instructor.

Every story I hear from friend Stripey in re: cataloging and other fun stuff, in combination with her MLS work, reconfirms my happiness at just being an assistant! Mind you, I am loving all the further knowledge I'm gaining about copyright these days.

hahaha every cataloger i've ever met is weird, even weirder than a regular librarian, and most catalogers will admit to their weirdness

I could see how a person could get obsessed by it, it really appeals to the ocd part of my brain.

As spotted by a friend of a friend in Vegas:

http://photos-e.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-snc1/v782/147/72/716860976/n716860976_2121380_6802.jpg

one of my halloween costume ideas for this year was sexy male librarian

then i realized it was redundant

lol

every day is halloween for me

I've applied to do the Masters. Part-time, distance learning. In Sweden, 'cos it's free and I can get free lodging if I need to go over there. I'm mildly terrified.