This is a screencast that I did for my Information Policy seminar this summer to get people started using the class wiki.

Students Demand Change!

Once again the weak professor succumbs to overwhelming student pressure to push the limits of her technological expertise. I am adding a photo here so that the blidget I add on to our class wiki will be as cool as theirs. Here is the link to the wiki:
http://sliss554fa07.wikispaces.com/Links+to+blogs

Now is the Autumn of My DisContent

After deciding that I was not egocentric enough to blog habitually, I am drawn back to it in order to rant. Rant about computers and the like. My father died in November of 1999 and although he had been very comfortable with technology previously he was happy to sign off before Y2K. During the last months of his life he spoke about how technology was getting in the way of living. Tonight I couldn't agree with him more.

Laura, my daughter innocently approached me about printing photos for a geometry assignment. Now I have a new PC running Vista with a lot of preloaded software, including sales pitches from software vendors I have no interest in. Who knows what happened but it was no less than three hours after I began that I finally succeeded in printing said photos. In between the new PC refused to recognize my camera and demanded a driver that I did not have. I then tried printing directly from camera to fancy schmancy printer/scanner/copier/fax machine only to have it choke. Not to be deterred I took the camera to Laura's PC and downloaded the photos, then pulled out a thumb drive and tried to copy them onto it. The trial version of Corel said it was no longer valid (I didn't know I even had it) but I managed to get the photos on to it anyway. When I went back to my flashy new Vaio it refused to read the thumb drive and subseqently lost track of every USB device I had. Thumb drive directly in printer/scanner/copier/fax machine resulted in an error. Finally, frustrated MAB went back to Laura's machine, which by now had mysteriously lost all connectivity with the outside world. After rebooting it, I uploaded the photos to Flickr and then went back to said Sony and downloaded them and printed them. Did you follow all of that? Did I mention here that I am supposed to be comfortable with computers?!

Are you listening?

I was running errands today and had the radio tuned to NPR. Dick Gordon's The Story was on and he was interviewing this amazing couple, Scott and Tiffany Smiley. Scott is a Captain in the U.S. Army who lost his eyesight to a suicide bomber in Iraq. He has continued to serve in the military, is currently pursuing an MBA at Duke, after which he will teach at West Point, his alma mater.

Scott is not an average guy. Okay, he's extraordinary. It's a wonderful interview (I tuned in late but am listening to the whole thing as I type) and I encourage you all to listen to it at http://thestory.org/. At one point Scott was talking about how he has had not trouble keeping up in his classes and, in fact, seems to be able to get the required reading done more quickly than his classmates. Scott listens to his readings and has been able to speed them up to the point where most people wouldn't be able to comprehend the material but he can. Sort of the speed listening counterpart to speed reading. He demonstrates his technique (about forty minutes into the fifty minute interview) and I was astounded by it. Television would work but there are many more distractions with video than audio. I was struck by what he does in a way that would be impossible to appreciate simply by reading about it.

Not all librarians, but the majority, concentrate on printed content in spite of using materials in other forms on a daily basis. There is a comforting elitism about print that isn't there with radio or television, unless we're talking NPR, PBS, or the British equivalents. So now you can listen to me say the same thing I've written above and reflect on whether you respond differently.

Words, words, words

Blame it on the heat - I'll come right to the point. What effect does the format of information have on the manner in which it is absorbed? Certainly high school kids understand the different impact of breaking up with someone in person, over the phone, via a Dear John letter, or, as a last resort, an email message. Even when the words are exactly the same the person on the receiving end perceives them differently.

What is the difference then if we read a book, listen to an audio version of it, or watch the film version? Do we pay better attention to one format than to another? I've been listening to Wikinomics as I drive back and forth between Evanston and Indianapolis. I knew that I didn't like the narrator but I had no idea how much until I found that after touching my iPod in an unmentionable way I repeated almost an hour of the book. Every once in a while certain sections would strike me as familiar. After a few minutes I would think that I finally had made it to new material only to hear something old again. I know I am inattentive when watching television (maybe that is why I don't do it more often) but it got me to wondering about comprehension and multitasking and lack of focus... Here I sit having a conversation with my daughter while I type (please don't tell her she doesn't have my undivided attention). Guess I better sign off before I'm revealed. Maybe I'll go read a book.

I emphasize reflection in my classes because when I was working a standard 9 to 5 library systems job I rarely took time out to think about what I was doing. I was under a lot of pressure to accomplish a lot in a short amount of time. And yet it was those rare moments of reflection that were the most meaningful. It was during those times that I became concerned about equitable access to technology and information. As I think about it now, I think how straightforward life was in the early days of the Internet before the explosion of content. Now all of us, trained librarians and our patrons, are inundated by the quantity of information available to us and it's easy to lose track of what we are seeking. Fortunately, wise men like Stephen Harter remind us that when we're retrieving information the bottom line is that we want to capture the good stuff and weed out the rest.

For a long time, academics have viewed the good stuff as printed publications that have gone through the peer review process of scholarly communication. But at a time when much worthy content is created and disseminated outside this process is this a valid approach? Scholars around the world are experimenting with different forms of publication and finding that some of them engage new audiences. My blogging is an attempt to see how it works for me, to see if I can reflect on this process and emerge with a clearer understanding of where we might be heading so that I can be a better librarian and teacher of new librarians.

Moving outside our comfort zones

So what is the role of librarians in a highly but inequitably networked world? We traditionally have seen ourselves as closely tied to content, and our work as its protector, controller and disseminator. A key component of our professional identity is service to others. Still it often seems as if we only want to serve those who walk through our doors, people who already have bought into the allure of books. In a blog posting this week, Karen Coyle writes of the insularity of librarianship and “our tendency to only speak to each other.” It’s a valid point but one that probably could be made of any profession or group. The birds of a feather phenomenon…


This becomes problematic if we believe that the library plays a special role within society as an opportunity equalizer but are not actively involved in reaching out to those who could benefit most from its resources and services. What are we doing about all the people who never come into libraries and never read books? A number of my students are teen services librarians and even as they express their frustration with the limited success of their blogs, wikis, or gaming nights, I have been so proud of their courage in trying something new. It’s hard to be on the cutting edge and they are. But they are moving into this new and uncomfortable terrain because of their commitment to engage teens who normally would never come into the library; to engage teens who prefer a screen to a page.


Moving outside our comfort zone and revealing our technological shortcomings in front of others is not a strategy most people embrace. As a professor, I have had colleagues encourage me to maintain my distance and standing as an expert when in front of a class. Teaching technology, an area that undergoes continuous change, I think it would be disingenuous if not disastrous to do so. Certainly it would be transparent to my students when I did not have complete mastery of the latest tool. Again, the breakneck cycle of innovation in a Web 2.0 world would result in my regular humiliation. I find it much easier to confess my deficiencies while simultaneously accepting my students’. I try to model how to learn, how to move forward in spite of fear and discomfort. This may be the most important lesson I can teach them because it is one that they will have to repeat many times throughout their careers. It is also one that practicing librarians, even those with many years experience, must be mindful of if we are to move outside the familiar circle of traditional book lovers and library users to engage new communities and share the opportunities that our knowledge can enable.