Karen Munro, Learning Librarian

From the 08/15/2007 Library Journal interview with Brewster Kahle, founder of the Open Content Alliance:

LJ: Do you think librarians are prepared to face [the challenges of large-scale corporate digitization projects]?

Kahle: If we stick to our original principles of preservation and access, I think we’re in good shape….I think it can be the librarians’ day if we more boldly step into the world of digital resources. In large part, the librarian community hasn’t done this yet. In some ways, yes, by putting Internet terminals in or negotiating contracts with Elsevier for commercial services. But let’s do something more interesting. Let’s build services in the digital world analogous to the services we perform in the analog world.

LJ: How do librarians who want to go digital and open with their collections and services get started?

Kahle: It starts with a passion, it starts with a focus. Take a content set or a user need that you see and start producing services on your own. If you’re in a public library, it might be town history. If you’re a university librarian, it might be a subject specialty. Get those materials online in a way that you have control of them….We have to recognize that it’s not only possible but it is our responsibility to bring digital services to the world. If we can build this next generation in the open, the same way the open network and the open software infrastructure of the Internet developed, it will be the librarians’ day. Media companies, the Googles and Microsofts, they will play their roles. They’ll bring things to hundreds of millions. But they will never bring things to our patrons the way we can as librarians.

I sometimes wonder whether we might be better off if we could separate our curiosity and invention from our need for speed.  This seems a bit weird, given that I’m often frustrated with how slowly things work in academic libraries–so often, I’m the one agitating for jumping in with both feet, trying something out, and just seeing whether it works.  I do think there’s a need for that, in our field.  But I also think that academic librarians are a cautious, methodical subset of the larger population, and that most people are, in fact, in a much bigger hurry to do things than we are.

That’s part of a larger conversation and I’m going to cheat and not support it right now–I’m just going to let it hang there, because I’m really more interested in a slightly different topic.  Which is:  why are we so good at inventing things, and so bad at using them?

I wonder this all the time, as I read about the millions we’re spending on technology in higher education, and the billions we’re pouring into science and technology outside of academe.  I don’t think spending money on technology and research is bad.  Far from it, I love my computer(s), and by now I can’t imagine life without wireless, or my cell phone. But I do wonder why we’re always racing forward to build the next gadget, before we’ve even begun to tackle the issues created by the ones we have.

Writ large, it seems to me that there’s a serious gap in our culture, between the innovators and the users.  In practical terms, Qantas is now offering in-flight WiFi and laptop power.  That sounds great, until you think about the global digital divide, the huge environmental cost of air travel, and the differences between working online for an 8-hour flight versus reading a book or sleeping or talking to another human being, or otherwise protecting some portion of your life from the constant feed.  Then it starts to look a little more complicated.

Writ small, it seems to me that in academic libraries, there’s a gap between technology evangelists and…everyone else.  In practical terms, we have some very forward-looking people moving us in the direction of wikis, texting, blogs, Second Life, Facebook, digital archives, iPods,  chat, open-source CMS software, YouTube…you name it.  We have many more people who use some of these things but at a very basic or passive level, or who don’t use any of them at all.  Conversations between these two groups can get stilted, sometimes.

It seems to me that there’s a disconnect between the vanguard and the rest of the troops–there’s a need for a cohort of people who are comfortable with, and curious about, technology, who even have a certain percentage of their job devoted to technology work–but who still have one foot firmly planted in the traditional world of libraries.  In practice, I think of my job this way.  I’m not an evangelist–on that bell curve of adoption rates, I’m somewhere in the middle.  I’ve been using Google Docs to collaborate for months now, but I’m still hanging onto my old flip phone.  (The battery’s dying; I have to replace it.)  I use Picnik.com to edit photos online, but I’m ambivalent about Twitter.

I try to listen with both ears–one for the evangelists, one for the traditionals.  Technology, removed from context and meaning, is no good to us.  Turning our backs on technology is also a bad idea.  Human beings are smart, but as anyone who’s ever taught a freshman research class knows, we like simple answers and absolutes.  There’s a need in our libraries and in our society for people who can help pave a middle way…and then get everyone walking down it, headed in the same direction.

The holidays were restful, and we’re still in a bit of a lull here at Berkeley–the students don’t come back until the 16th.  This leaves us some time for catching up on the many, many things left undone at the end of the fall.

I’ve spent some time this week reading for the paper I’m writing for the Townsend Fellowship program.  I’m looking at how writers, teachers, and scholars of literature have responded to technological changes in writing and publishing over time.  This comes out of my prior experience as a literature librarian at the University of Oregon, where I noticed that literature faculty seemed to shy away from anything computer-related.  It’s interesting to me that physicists, who historically have no particular relation to the study of printing or publication, have adopted electronic publishing so readily (arxiv.org is a key publication and communication tool for physicists), while literature scholars, who have an obvious vested interest in means of publication, are still struggling with the paradigm shift.

Anyway, it’s been a pleasure to spend time in the stacks, reading about Virginia Woolf obsessively sorting fonts and Mark Twain swearing at his typewriter.  Every age has its baffling, complicated, occasionally maddening new technology.

Well, as soon as I decided to post weekly, things got complicated.  Berkeley has just released blog software for librarians–we’re using b2evolution, which is fine, but which poses a question to those of us who already have blogs elsewhere.  Move, or stay?  So far I’m staying, because I’m in a pre-Thanksgiving morass of trying to get other work done.  In future it may be smart for me to move over to the library blog, in which case I’ll redirect from here and pick up over there.

There may be a brief hiatus while I reorient during the holidays.  Your patience is appreciated!

I’ve been catching up on some reading about online tutorials lately.  I’m glad to see there’s some work being done on assessment of library tutorials, and a conversation on ILI-L about how we determine who uses these things and how.  Obviously, this is important stuff to know, and there’s not a lot of research on the “back end” of library tutorials, to my knowledge.  The recent piece in C&RL, “If you build it, will they learn? Assessing online information literacy tutorials,” was a welcome start to the conversation.  I’m also reading a piece from portal, “Testing the effectiveness of interactive multimedia for library-user education.”  ‘Interactive multimedia’ being basically another word for online tutorials.  Clearly, controlled vocabulary is an issue here.

Anyway, one of the points in that latter article that’s stayed with me is that so many librarians who participated in the LUMENS project to create interactive multimedia projects either dropped out because of overload or gave feedback that they couldn’t reproduce their projects later, because they just didn’t have enough time.  This makes sense.  Librarians are already pulled in fourteen directions, especially in smaller institutions, where one person can be responsible for five subject areas, an instructional load, a reference area, a bunch of committee work, and her own tenure and promotion clock.  Everyone’s overworked–asking librarians to learn how to use Flash on top of everything else they do is hardly fair.  But research is also showing that online tutorials (when used right) are popular and helpful for users.  Enter the e-learning librarian, whose job it is to create online tutorials and (with luck) an efficient process or template for making more tutorials.

Sounds great, but there are still logistical and organizational hurdles.  I’ve been working on making online tutorials here since the start of the year, and due to various obstacles, competing obligations, and possibly my own obtuseness, it’s taken me this long to make one that I think is actually worthwhile.  Tutorial software is often marketed with pull quotes claiming that you can go from zero to “finished tutorial, live on the website” in a matter of a few hours.  In my experience, that’s true–but the tutorial you’ll have made is likely to be bad.  And as was recently pointed out on ILI-L, a bad tutorial is worse than no tutorial, since it’s consumed a lot of time and energy and will probably go unused.

So there’s an elephant in the room with e-learning in libraries–the issue of time.  “Regular” librarians don’t have time to make online tutorials; “e-learning” librarians do, but they’re thin on the ground and may also be saddled with more than one priority.  In my case, I came from a “regular” librarian background, so part of my year has also been spent figuring out exactly what my new job is supposed to be.

A separate but related issue is that of the gulf between “regular” and “techie” librarians, which is readily apparent just from the discussion lists I’m on.  On the tech lists, people talk comfortably about their APIs and CMSs.  On the regular lists, they don’t.  There’s a knowledge gap, and I fear we’re reproducing the schism we see in larger structures outside librarianship.  Campus tech experts often don’t know how to explain to laypeople what’s wrong with their computer system.  For that matter, scientists may not be able to communicate with humanists.  We live in a culture of specialization, and few people are capable of getting their heads “above water” enough to talk intelligibly to folks who live on other islands.  And yet I think that’s a crucial part of what I should be doing, and probably of what we all should be doing, as librarians talking to faculty and students.
I’m straying, but these are issues I find coming up over and over.  Time, resources, and communication.  Big issues.  So far, I have no answers.

In an effort to keep this blog going and current, I’m going to start a project to post at least once a week.  I.e., regularly.  Posting in the blog should keep me tied to some of the parts of my job that can otherwise become sort of vague and diffuse–the parts that have to do with keeping current in social technologies, library tech trends, etc.  I’m putting the posting date in my Calagenda and everything.  And when the semester slows down a little I’m going to take another look at my website and see if I can clean it up a little.  RSS to JavaScript is being a pain in the neck in terms of formatting, and I need to go back and review my CSS.  Okay.  It’s on the to-do list!

Testing a second post to see what happens in the website feed.

Content!

Content!

I was standing in line in the library cafe today, thinking about how I spent my morning futzing with blogs and blogreaders and other social software, then most of my desk hours futzing with my del.icio.us account. I was thinking that this isn't library work by any traditional standard, and that if I were one of my colleagues looking over my shoulder, I might think I was just wasting company time. That got me thinking about the schisms I see threatening to open between so-called "traditional" librarians and so-called "NextGen" librarians…and that got me thinking about ways to head some misunderstandings off at the pass.

I'm setting up this WordPress blog (free and easy!) to talk about what I do as an e-learning librarian. I'd like to do this as one of several ways of opening communication lines with my co-workers, none of whom have my job description and some of whom may wonder what I'm doing all day. It may be interesting or helpful for them to be able to check in from time to time to see what I'm up to. It'll probably also help me to have a record of what I've been doing from week to week.

I'm going to try to use a free Feed2JS script to feed this blog into my web page, to get the information out to folks who don't use a newsreader or care to subscribe to this blog's feed. Let's see how that goes…more content soon.