Articles by josephsmorgan

Well, now that it’s summer, I’ve lost my assistant meaning I’ve been spending a lot of time doing the boring ‘gate-keeping’ style work that I hate (manually adding entries to the catalog, putting those little bar code stickers on books). As a result, there has not been a lot of fun at the ol’ library lately.

However, there has been some nice meta-fun analysis. So I thought I’d throw out a couple of articles that I constantly refer back to when I’m working on a project or thinking on career stuff. They both are computer oriented, but I think they summarize how work and life should be approached.

The first is the Hacker Attitude. The two points the author, an open-source evangelist, makes that I like are. .

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved. This is a nice remainder to always approach every situation fresh, to enjoy the act of investigating, planning, and creating something new and better.
2. Boredom and Drudgery are Evil. Maybe this one appeals to me more now that I am doing a lot of boring work. But it’s a good chance to reevaluate processes and to make them more efficient so, at the very least, people who come after me won’t be bored and grumpy.

Which leads to the first virtue of a programmer .

1. Laziness. Boredom and laziness go together and both are bad. Furthermore, it helps to remember that the virtue of laziness frees up more time to look creatively at problems, to make a place better.

Than, of course, there’s the of . . .

2. Hubris. Making something so well the first time that no one can bad talk it later. As someone who has had to clean up others messes and poor planning, this one appeals to me greatly.

How do these relate to libraries?
Well, in short, these are just good elements of project planning and human resources. A friend of mine that does consulting work for international non-profits, has noted that it is important to give all employees — young, old, new, experience — opportunities to lead and create. We sit an enormous amount of potential when we do not allow all employees to try something new and instead relegate them to boring mindless circulation tasks (not that those aren’t important). Still, why waste any potential idea.

I won’t say that he caught me from the start (mostly because I was 5 minutes late for class. Thank you very much flat tire), but Leonard Kniffel editor of American Libraries, did grab my attention very early in his talk on the Googlization of the library when he noted that parading celebrities and high profile people sharing cutesy memories of libraries when they were children may be entertaining, but it can be also be damaging. Why? Because it feeds nostalgia. And viewing libraries as quaint is a short step to viewing them as unnecessary. Yes.

The majority of Mr. Kniffel’s talk focused on what he called the “Googlization of Libraries,” the fate of libraries in an age of global information. The impact of google in particular and the web in general is a favorite topic among the hand wringers of the library world. It’s been addressed (fearfully) by Robert Darton in the New York Review of Books. And positively by those in library blogging world. Mr. Kniffel, though, takes a similar but slightly different path.

Throughout his lecture, he repeatedly describes the alleged conflict between the web and libraries to be a false dichotomy. His lecture was filled with a parade of statistics, anecdotes and quotes from an impressive list of individuals he’s interviewed during his time at American Libraries. Now normally I’m not a big fan of statistics, they tend to obfuscate more than the illuminate. . .But I’m only human, so here are a few that I will probably repeat to my family over Thanksgiving:

• 60%(!) of adults have library cards
• Librarians answer 7.2 million questions per week
• It costs about $34 per person per year to run a library
• Bill Gates said that if given the choice between books and computers, he’d chose books

I like that quote about Bill Gates specifically. I think we tend to forget that even the most computer savvy individuals enjoy a good book. Linus Torvalds of Linux fame himself just the other day said that reading is his only hobby. But, wait, I’m being sucked back into the false dichotomy.

Mr. Kniffel like many advocates for libraries in the age of google notes that books themselves are a form of technology and libraries have been engaged in technology since the beginning. Even now, in the age of google, libraries are a haven for those seeking technologies. To throw out another stat, libraries are the #1 point of access for people without internet at home. An assumption underlying much of Mr. Kniffel’s talk is that libraries are more than their contents. Libraries are an idea, a place, a service. He noted that libraries should see themselves first and foremost as educators. I’ll admit, I’m sympathetic to this idea. However, I do not exactly like the semi-enlightened image that comes with someone who is seen as an educator. I’d like to think of us more as facilitators. After all, the newspapers have been tripping over themselves with stories of how libraries are a haven in these hard economic time. And we all like to commend ourselves for creating access to differing points of view so others can make decisions. So whether we are facilitating the writing of resumes, the debates of politics, or the renting of old seasons of Seinfeld, we are playing a specific and important role.

Mr. Kniffel ends his talk with a few points about technology. One is that it’s important to remain cautious while looking ahead. Microfilms, as he pointed at, have been found to be very deficient when compared with hard copies (they don’t preserve color, they can digitize a fold. . .forever), but they save on space and thus allow more information to be stored longer. So it is important to ask why are we implementing technology, what do we hope to preserve, what do we want to enhance. Next he answered the statement question of why libraries if it is all on the internet with another question, with all medical information on the web, why doctors. The answer followed shortly when he explained how it’s been found that though children are able to find information and utilize technology quickly, they still, not to surprisingly, act their age when evaluating sources. Bring on the educators. (I’m sorry, facilitators).

Well, things have been cooking in the last few weeks. First, there’s been a lot of buzz about wolfram alpha . Sadly, this one of the situations where the buzz is so incredibly excessive and over the top (I can’t even count the number of times when I read that this is the next google/replace google/eat google wolf-style) that I’m afraid that what looks to be a very good service could actually be ignored. It’s strong at aggregating lots of information, presenting it in a clear and uncluttered environment (and god knows we could always use less clutter on webpages). But it is that, a stop for statistics, referable stats, and such. It reminds me of something but what. . .

Speaking of one stop shops. Much more exciting and much less discussed is the new US government data site. I’ll admit that I started salivating at the mere mention of it. Maybe if the government gave us access to data like it should then we wouldn’t have to have vigilante honorary-librarians take it for us. Now, if only we can take it a step further and mandate sharing data when a grant is government sponsored NIH-pubmed style. Not likely. But at least a librarian can dream.

Well, the end of semester is here and now it’s time for fun in  the sun, relaxing, and independent learning (groan). So while I should be spending my time relaxing, the busy body in me just can’t let that happen, so I’ll be spending the next couple of months pouring over books on PHP and Python.

Wedding’s coming up, though. That’s pretty exciting.

I’ll admit, I’m fairly skeptical of the attempts to turn libraries into community centers. They are not the same thing.

Nevertheless, if we can check out books, and we can use our space for group meetings, why can’t we check out tools and create a space for people to learn and apply new skills.

This isn’t my idea, sadly, but a good one nonetheless. Read the article at PC World

Or read a summary from MAKE magazine

Well, I had a simple thrill yesterday. I needed to make a nested directory, something along the lines of 1000-1999/1100-1199/1110-119. . .etc, so this would have been an unbearable task by hand. Create folder, name folder. . .

Fortunately, as a faithful adherent of the virtues of a programmer #1, laziness. I knew there had to be a fairly simple way. Well, I’m sure there is another way out their to make this work, but this was the best I could find. I ran this on my mac, but it should work in any *nix set up. Essentially you are defining elements and then adding those as place holders for the mkdir command. Be sure to add the -p option, this will make any parent folders which do not exist.

This example works to make directories for 700000-799999 that are nested down to the tens.


for tt in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
do
for th in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
do
for hun in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
do
for ten in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
do mkdir -p new/7"$tt"0000-7"$tt"9999/7"$tt""$th"000-7"$tt""$th"999/7"$tt""$th""$hun"00-7"$tt""$th""$hun"99/7"$tt""$th""$hun""$ten"0-7"$tt""$th""$hun""$ten"9
done
done
done
done


Well, I finished presenting my poster at the WAAL conference yesterday. It was pretty fun. It’s nice to chit chat and exchange ideas with other librarians. (Especially when wine and beer are served).

The poster was about a mock training blog I created. As a student worker/low level employee of libraries for many years, I’m always frustrated by the poor communication from full time employees.

There’s no point in quantifying, but here I go anyway. I’d say after every staff level 75% of information is lost. So if something happens in the ref. department, I’d have a small chance of hearing about it. If something happens at the admin level, well, ref has a 25% chance of hearing about it, and I’d have 6% chance of hearing about it.

This I don’t mind too much. But everyone always assumes that what they know, you know. And that is where the problem comes in.

So here’s a humble attempt to address the situation. Blogs are nice, lots of places have them. Through on some video tutorials about new databases, make them easy to navigate so we can refer back to them (we are librarians after all) and you have a tool that can be used. Listservs are not tools. Collected information is.

Anyway, I’ve been building one of these for my position at the limnology library. We have high staff turnover (100% every two years), so high level documentation is always important.

Well, operators of the largest bit torrent tracker Pirate Bay have been found guilty of violating copyright.

David Lane at the Linux Journal argues that by providing a search interface, they’ve just been proven guilty of. . .indexing. Could Lexis/Nexis follow? Probably not, but never doubt that the mere organization and access of information has ramifications that are larger than we thought.

An interesting take on a complicated matter.

Well, I had my first library committee meeting. I can’t say it went exactly how I expected. There was some confusion at first and as I was explaining the digital library I was able to successfully bore the computer savvy members while confusing the non-savvy members.

I guess it worked out in the end. Looking back I received some good feedback and people seemed very interested in one particular set up. Here’s a look at the presentation.
[slideshare id=1352907&doc=librarycommitteemeeting-090427132320-phpapp01]

As I’ve been researching and writing about “born-digital” items for one of my classes. I have to say I’m most struck at the reluctance of researchers to use more electronic tools. Now at least at journals like Science or Nature (which try to pack in piles of articles) there is a way for readers to access “supplementary material” usually this is graphs, tables, data sources that are too big to fit in print.

That’s great. But why, I wonder, isn’t this more present. Why aren’t there more links to large data sets or more complex and interconnected graphs and demonstrations. I’m sure most of this has to do with they way scholars are used to presenting information; highly distilled and packaged, protective of sources and information. This is starting to change with the increase of “escience” especially among the young uns. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to scholarly communication.