Tag Archives: author

Looking forward to Spring

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Generally I love the four seasons that we experience here in the U.S. Midwest. I even love winter and snow. But I am getting a little bit tired of the dreariness of winter, and I’m looking forward to Spring. Maybe it’s because I’ve been fighting sickness for too long. I wonder what on earth is wrong with my immune system, because it seems like I get sick quite easily.  Part of that may be due to the fact that I need to get off of my rear end and start exercising.  The hardest part of that is just getting started!  I’m sure that if I exercised on a regular basis, I’d feel a lot better and have more energy.

One of the things that keeps me occupied is an ongoing interest in technology.  For example, I am fascinated with the way in which Facebook has become a sort of standard in my daily life.  Recently I’ve reconnected with a dozen or more high school classmates.  These are people I have not seen or heard from for about 25 years.  I hated high school and I have mixed feelings at times about reconnecting with classmates, but I’ve found that the effort is very worthwhile.  I’ve discovered that out of a class size of about 65 people from a small country town in east central Illinois, my former classmates lead distinguished and interesting lives.  Just to give a sampling, one is a highly successful thoroughbred horse trainer; another is a curator for a famous author’s home, now a museum and a place that’s on the National Register of Historic Places. One of my former classmates worked fulltime while raising a child as a single mom AND earned her bachelor’s degree. Another person is an assistant principal, while yet another person is a vice president for a health care company. One classmate is pursuing the same graduate program that I went through, at the same institution.  Two former classmates  are in the military.  These people are spread all over the United States and in some cases live outside the U.S.  And the list goes on…I’ve even reconnected with former neighbors of the subdivision in the small town I grew up in and we are planning to have a neighborhood reunion soon!

I also continue to be fascinated with the development of applications for the iPhone.  I’m biased of course, but I think the iPhone is, by far, the best mobile computing platform out there.  And it keeps getting better.  For example, one of the upcoming applications will allow me to store, manage, and peruse scientific journal articles.  This app will be called Papers and although its purpose seems rather simple at first, the concept and its implications are huge in terms of the way in which researchers and scientists can interact with scholarly literature.

Even my use of Twitter (it’s a love it or hate it kind of thing) has developed and changed over time.  I’ve come to appreciate its benefits and figured out how I can use it in a way that doesn’t drive me crazy.

Anyway, back to the initial point about looking forward to Spring.  On this Valentine’s Day I woke up to a coating of snow that makes everything look clean and bright once more. I hope though that it melts quickly and that warmer weather, green grass, and Spring flowers will arrive soon.

Extreme focus on user experience in the context of the web

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A recent post from the Publishing 2.0 blog really got me thinking. Somewhat provocatively titled, “If Your Users Fail, Your Website Fails, Regardless Of Intent Or Design,” the author shares his views on the extreme importance of user experience in the context of the web. He holds up Google as the gold standard and frankly, I think he has a great point. He says that Google succeeds, and deservedly so, because of its intense focus on the user experience. One statement of his captures this view:

“Google is obsessed with making sure its users never fail, no matter how “stupid” they are. Google makes users feel smart. That’s why they keep coming back.”

Wow. All I can say is, read this post and think it through very carefully and you will gain some insight into the problems we who work in libraries face when it comes to user experience. This model or viewpoint — making users “feel” smart — is so radically different from what many libraries have tried to do in the past. I’m encouraged by the noticeable proliferation of job announcements or library initiatives that contain tasks relating to user interface design. See here and here for examples.

Upcoming book on e-resource management in libraries

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I was interested to read Organization Monkey’s post today about getting her author’s copy of a book with a chapter written by her. The book sounds very similar to the one to which I contributed some time ago but still hasn’t seen the light of day (sigh): Electronic Resource Management in Libraries: Research and Practice, Holly Yu and Scott Breivold, eds. (ISBN 9781599048918). Congratulations to her on that!

Here is a table of contents list for the book to which I contributed (E-journals Access and Management, Wayne Jones, ed. and published by Haworth, ISBN 9780789033857):

Electronic resources : the new frontier for academic libraries / Kathleen Shearer

Copyright, ejournals, and libraries : points of intersection / Brett Waytuck

Open access journals : the global movement and local publishing / Wayne Johnston

Preserving the outputs of scholarly communication for the long term : a review of recent developments in digital preservation for electronic journal content / Michael Day

Current challenges in licensing negotiation : an academic library perspective / Joy Kirchner

Developing a model license : a Canadian consortium’s experience / Scott Gillies, Tony Horava

Ejournals, budgets, and collection policies : managing the serials / Will Wakeling

Redefining service roles in the e-environment / Rollo Turner

Decline of print journals / Tinker Massey

The collaborative journey from print to electronic / Karen Pifher

When print doesn’t fade / Christa Easton

Access revolution : the birth, growth, and supremacy of electronic journals as an information medium / Norm Medeiros

RDA and ejournals / Chris Oliver

The need for electronic resource management systems in libraries / Stephanie H. Wical

Shopping in the ERM aisle : vendor and open source offerings and hints for the busy shopper / Andrew Waller, Helen Clarke

Knowledgebase maintenance and its impact on electronic access tools / Peter McCracken

Electronic resource management using a vendor product / Janet Chisman, John Webb

A homegrown contract database / Charlene N. Simser

Ejournal workflow, staffing, and collaboration in technical services : a taste for coffee, a tolerance for ambiguity, and a happy ending / Ladd Brown

Ejournal management in the small academic library / Krista M. Reichard, Brent Alan Mai, Judy Anderson

Thoughts on the future of ejournal management and access / Steve Oberg.

Faster is better

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When it comes to the Internet, faster is better, just about always. I have been thinking a lot about this since reading a post about this issue in the Official Google Mobile Blog a few weeks ago. In that post the author wrote about how Google used analysis of their search logs to see the dramatic effect of improving search response time for mobile users. If things are slow, they lose users. If things are fast, users want to use their service more.This one simple reality has so many big implications for me and for library technology. In an environment in which I feel constantly unable to satisfy user demands, where there is so much work that needs to happen in order to create a good user experience, it behooves me to focus more on this one thing. Make things go faster for users. Faster = happier users.I have spent time thinking about how true this is in my own experience. I am a bit of a new technology gadfly, willing to try new things and jumping from one to the other. Take for instance my web browser habits. I have used just about every web browser there has ever been, and also just about every version or iteration of them there ever has been. Overall I am most satisfied with Firefox and that has been my main browser of choice for a very long time. But I have tried Flock, Opera, and of course Internet Explorer. I know that IE is my absolute least favorite. So, OK: Firefox is mostly my favorite, IE is my least favorite. Sounds simple. But it isn’t. I can’t stop myself from jumping around to try others or different iterations of all of the above. For example I have used all different kinds of browsers on my mobile devices, different ones on my home computers, and still others on my work laptop. I am not 100% satisfied for long with any of them. Why? Well, there are a variety of reasons but one constant issue I have is speed. I want lightning-fast response time. Period. No matter what. Any delay is frustrating.This is why I have always played around with Safari, both for Mac and Windows. The earlier iterations of Safari for Windows were just awful. But even so, it was lightning fast, faster than anything else I’ve ever tried. I hate that I can’t customize it like I can Firefox. But I’m at the point now where speed trumps “like to haves”. Last night after reading some good reviews of the latest version of Safari for Windows (3.1), I decided to once again take the plunge and try. I am really happy with it so far. It’s early days yet and perhaps my fickle heart will eventually tire of it. But it is stable, and lightning fast, and that really counts for a tremendous amount in my book.So…I do believe faster is better, even with some caveats. It’s like the time back in the late ’90s when I moved away from dial-up to cable Internet access. I have never looked back nor wanted anything else but the fastest connection. I can’t imagine going back.We who work in libraries, especially with technology, would do well to simply try to make things work faster for our users. I bet we’d have a lot more happy ones if we emphasized this aspect of our online services more.

BI, oh my

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I’m still getting used to corporate lingo and ways of doing things. Frankly I often try to suppress the instinct to roll my eyes with a lot of it because there is quite a bit of nonsense in it. Or else corporate types run around looking earnest and thinking they’re inventive by using buzzwords that mean exactly the same thing as something that’s been around for years. (Think ‘taxonomy’ vs. ‘cataloging.’ Yeah I know, technically they aren’t equivalent but they are kissing cousins and principles they use are much the same. It’s like cataloging for dummies.)

Today I was reading a post published in the Forrester Information and Knowledge Management Blog that talks about BI. Now as a longtime librarian, my immediate reaction was, huh?! BI? Oh my, are they talking about library BI (bibliographic instruction)? Nope. BI = business intelligence. Ok, I say to myself, just go with it. Actually the post is well worth reading, lingo aside. The author mentions the fact that the most commonly used BI tool is Microsoft Excel. I found that interesting. I use Excel quite a lot. So I’m doing BI too, just not the kind I thought he was talking about at first ;-) He also mentions that Google has added pivot table functionality to its Google Spreadsheets tool. To me that’s a big deal because I find pivot tables one of the most useful if little understood or used parts of Excel. I’ll have to go try it out. I know that those in “the enterprise” quite often turn up their noses at what Google is doing in terms of appealing to “enterprise users” with its web-based tools. But I think Google is really onto something here. Anything that breaks the stranglehold of Microsoft on such office tools is a good thing, in my opinion.

I’ve been using Excel quite a bit lately to track issues and problems reported to me or discovered by me or my team relating to the systems and services I manage in my library. This is something new for me even though the work itself isn’t. I’ve been told that “we need more metrics, metrics, metrics” so by gum, I’m going to provide metrics up the whazzoo. A friend and colleague in my library had already started using Excel in this way last year for a similar purpose. Even though it’s all a bit crude, you know what? It works. So I decided to copy what she did and modify it for my needs. It takes some getting used to and sometimes I wonder if the time spent on keeping it up to date is worth it. (E.g. should I track how much time I spend just on keeping it current?!) I started it with high hopes and kept it going for a few days, then came a huge influx of severe problems from all sides, I got overwhelmed just trying to address them, and neglected the issue log. In the last week or so I finally was able to get caught up.

One of the lessons I’m learning about doing this is that it’s only as good a tool as the amount of time you invest in it. I also am learning that although it might seem crude and surely there are more elegant solutions out there somewhere, it works for me and makes use of an existing tool. There’s more. As the evidence gets built up in the issue log, I am getting excited about the possibilities it provides for providing concrete facts and figures about what me and my team are doing, day in and day out. This becomes a record that helps demonstrate our value to our organization in new ways. I have very little staff or other resources at my disposal. I know we are doing a great job and that we can always improve. But our efforts aren’t recognized or valued a whole lot. Looking at trends and patterns in the issue log will help me combat the myopia.

Some NASIG conference impressions

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It’s no secret that NASIG is my favorite professional organization and that I enjoy NASIG conferences more than any other. Why? One reason is that there is nowhere I feel more at home than at NASIG. People are friendly, warm, supportive, thought-provoking, and do very interesting things both in their personal lives and professionally. The NASIG organization is all about relationships. Funny, that is exactly what serials are like, too. I remember my former professor and mentor, Kathryn Luther Henderson, writing about serials in a Serials Librarian article a long time ago and comparing serials to families.1

Aside from the many warm hugs I received from longstanding friends, here is a smattering of what I remember most about this year’s conference, in no particular order of importance:

  • My friend and fellow “way past it” NASIG president, Susan Davis, jokingly remarking that I had peaked early (referring to when I was NASIG president eight years ago) and it was all downhill from there.
  • My friend and another “way past it” NASIG president, Anne McKee, mistakenly using the word obituary when referring to me in her introduction of a session I took part in.
  • Listening in amusement (and sometimes, amazement) at the open mic session Saturday night as various attendees stood up in front of a supportive audience to tell funny stories, read poetry, or sing acapella. I laughed ’til I cried at the story told by friend Gail Patrick of Depauw University that involved a motorcycle trip, snakes, and a visit to a place known as “The Garden of Eden.” Then there was a hilarious story from one woman that involved her mother’s false teeth. One first-time attendee worked up the courage to sing a solo. The whole event was great!
  • Wonderful food and great conversations at the dine-arounds Friday and Saturday evenings. Saturday night especially featured fantastic food at a restaurant in downtown Louisville named Saffron that featured simple yet elegant Persian-inspired food. I had an incredible rack of lamb on a bed of basmati rice, accompanied by a wonderful old vine Zinfandel whose name I can’t recall. I also remember one morning when we sat down with someone I had known for many years who is a cataloger at a state institution in the Washington, D.C. area. She was there with her husband and in the course of conversing with them I was floored to learn that they are avid thoroughbred horse-racing buffs and that they own several racehorses! Even more amazing was the fact that her husband knew of someone with whom I grew up in east central Illinois who is now a highly successful trainer based at Arlington Racetrack. His comment about my classmate, whose name is Chris Block, was simply “Money in the bank; money in the bank.” I told them how much I was fascinated with thoroughbred horse-racing when I was growing up and how Chris planned to grow up to be a trainer and I was going to be his jockey. He has reached his dream but somehow I grew out of any jockey aspirations :-) They even invited me to go with them to one of the nearby stables where they were going to check on the status of one of the brood mares they own. Unfortunately I couldn’t do that because I needed to leave for home immediately after the conference.
  • Many stimulating conversations on personal and professional topics with Mark Lindner, who shared the car trip and conference hotel room with me. I really enjoyed getting to know him and was glad to spend time with him. One of his many strengths is that he is unabashedly open and frank about what he thinks and about his life.
  • Talking with Sanjeet-Singh Mann, a student grant award winner from UCLA’s Department of Information Studies, about the importance of values and ethics in librarianship, among other things.
  • Meeting and talking with Steve Black from the College of St. Rose about the serials course he teaches at SUNY Albany, and also learning about a podcast program he founded for his institution called Periodical Radio, which focuses on interviewing editors and publishers of magazines and periodicals. Steve is also the author of a recently published book on serials management from Libraries Unlimited entitled Serials in Libraries: Issues and Practices.

There was of course much more to the three days. I haven’t even mentioned anything about the sessions I attended. I’ll try to mention some things about that in a different post.

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    1Henderson, Kathryn Luther. “Personalities of Their Own: Some Informal Thoughts on Serials and Teaching About How to Catalog Them.” Serials Librarian 22, no. 1/2 (1992): 3-16.

Google as a vast online storage library

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I just came across an insightful article by Michael Calore of Wired News that describes his attempt to transition away from desktop-based office applications in favor of Google’s web-based applications. Mainly this involved switching from tools like Microsoft Word in favor of Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets web application. See the link at the bottom of this post to read the article in full.

One snippet of Calore’s that particularly caught my eye was that he “began to use Google as a vast online storage library”.

I highly recommend reading this article because it highlights many of the issues that those who try Google’s approach need to grapple with, especially in the workplace. There is a lot of discussion, for instance, about the issues of privacy, security, and accessibility, and of how our experiences with Google’s approach are colored by decades of using desktop PC-based software like Microsoft Office. I was intrigued with the point that we need to re-program ourselves in some ways in order to make effective use of Docs & Spreadsheets. It’s very much like how I felt when I first started using GMail. I was so used to spending time sorting through emails, conscientiously deleting those I no longer needed, filing others into folders, etc., that GMail’s totally opposite approach (store everything, delete nothing) was quite disconcerting at first, so much so that I was reluctant to make the switch. After a while, though, I became used to it and I realized how liberating Google’s approach to email really is.

Similarly, I have played around with Docs & Spreadsheets every once in a while and I have not quite gotten over the hump in terms of adopting it as a replacement for Word and Excel. I have run into many of the same problems that Calore describes in his article. Calore mentions the announcement from Google earlier this week about adding in a Powerpoint-like application to the mix in the near future. I think I will have to concentrate some time like the author did on making a cold turkey switch.

Many people feel distrust when it comes to Google and the storage of their email and other personal information. I think such distrust is well founded and healthy, not just with Google but with just about all online, web-based applications. There was mention made in the article about how people inherently trust their email systems without understanding how very insecure email is, by its very nature. This point helps to put such fears about Google into perspective.

Link to Livin’ la Vida Google: A Month-Long Dive Into Web-Based Apps -

This is not who I am, really

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One of the aspects to blogging for several years now that interests me most is the constant reminder that this blog is out there in the public domain, and that it represents me, who I am, at least to some extent. The audience for FML is pretty small but even still, I know that there are dozens of people whom I have never met, and probably never will, who know quite a bit about me and my family by reading what I’ve written here.

But this is not who I am, really. By this I mean, FML gives only a small and rather slanted view of me. I censor myself all the time; I constantly think when I am writing something here, “Should I say that, or say it that way? Am I revealing too much personal information? What would people think if they knew what I really thought about topic x? Is the perspective I convey balanced, fair? Am I truly adding something to “the conversation” about topic x, or only blathering?” And so on.

I know that I am not alone in contemplating these issues. To some extent, a personal blog is a facade (some might even call it a sham), only presenting to the world what the author wants others to see. The real me is much more complex, conflicted, and complicated than what is conveyed here. Does that mean I am being dishonest? Does it mean that I am not transparent? No, I don’t think so.

There are any number of reasons for me to think very carefully about what I reveal about myself in FML. People can quickly and easily find out more personal information about someone these days than ever before. I have had people ask me, for instance, why I would post pictures of my family on a public space, because that might be putting them in danger somehow, or make them targets of someone’s evil intentions. I realize that is a possibility. Another reason to be very careful about what I write here is that like it or not, complete strangers read this blog every day and some of them, at some point or another, will make judgments about me that might affect my future job prospects or whether I will have other kinds of opportunities available to me. This point was forcibly driven home to me when I was interviewed somewhere and one of the people interviewing me mentioned finding this blog and how she was able to learn more about me than she could possibly ask, legally, in the interview.

I don’t have any complete answers to these questions of how much or how little I should really reveal about myself. Personal blogs are a new means of communication and often their value is in the platform they can provide for someone’s thoughts and opinions to be disseminated. Some people in the really small realm of library bloggers have lamented the fact that bloggers are becoming noticeably more reticent about sharing or stating what they really think. I lament this, too, but I also know that there are very good reasons for this trend (if it could even be deemed a trend).

Ok, enough navel-gazing for now.

A quick conference trip to Washington, D.C.

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For the past few days I’ve been on a quick conference trip to a meeting in the Washington, D.C. area. The meeting was organized by NISO and was entitled “From Discovery to Delivery: Solutions to Put Your Content Where the Users Are.”

While there was nothing new or startlingly different about the content of the meeting, for me, at least, I think it was a worthwhile trip overall. The best part of the whole workshop was attending Dan Chudnov’s presentation on “COinS, unAPI, and a Plan for Zero Configuration Service Discovery.” Dan is a great speaker; humorous yet thorough, with an ability to easily explain some pretty technical stuff in a way that most people can understand. I was not surprised to see that he uses a Mac (way to go Mac lovers!) and I liked his use of Keynote for his presentation. The transition theme he used seemed to bother a few people and one person loudly remarked with a sneer, “Looks like a Mac application.” (Get a life, Windows lovers.) What I particularly liked about the approach Dan took with his talk was that he made it Lego-like, that is, piece built upon piece built upon piece, until he reached the (pardon the pun) piece-de-resistance, zero configuration service discovery. His vision for making things completely simple for users, with no configuration necessary for them and no need for them to know about the technical magic that lies behind the user experience, is truly invigorating. The basic focus he had was on using OpenURL and combining it with several other “off-the-shelf” standards to make it dead easy for users to navigate to resources they need. One of the technologies he highlighted was Apple’s excellent Bonjour application for auto-discovery of networked resources such as websites or printers. He also brought up the example of Apple’s iTunes and how it easily allows users on the same network to discover and then play shared music libraries. Overall, this was a great presentation and I am very thankful we have someone of Dan’s caliber to push the technological boundaries in our profession. I wanted to introduce myself to him but didn’t get to do that before the end of the meeting.

Andrew Pace of the Technically Speaking column in American Libraries and author of the Hectic Pace blog, was also in attendance and it was the first time I had seen him in person and heard his by now well-travelled talk about what NCSU has done with its Endeca-powered online catalog. Andrew also is an engaging speaker. I didn’t learn much that I didn’t already know about the work he and others have done but it was interesting to have it presented in person anyway. I wish that I could have spoken with him and others there about the work I am involved in regarding integration of my library’s online catalog with another commercial search engine, work that I think might be interesting to others because it makes new uses of library data that are different than what I have heard is being done anywhere else.

A third highlight of the event was a presentation from someone from the National Academies Press who talked about the challenges and changes they have implemented in providing improved resource discovery for materials they publish. Michael Jon Jensen gave the presentation and he is their Director of Web Communications for the National Academies and Director of Publishing Technologies for National Academies Press. Under his direction this entity has done some really interesting experimentation and development of ways to improve access to the 3,600 books they publish, including development of their own clustering results. One of the things he said that most stood out to me was that National Academies Press provides their books for free in HTML form but they charge for PDF versions. The reason for charging for PDF is that, as he put it, our society still values and treasures the framework and “ethos” of the printed book. Those aren’t his exact words but I think it captures the idea he put forward. He said that a printed book is worth more than the individual pieces, it is bigger and better as a whole collection contained in one package. I thought this to be a very interesting perspective that has important ramifications for how we present and deliver information in an increasingly e-only world.

Jane Burke, former CEO at Endeavor and someone with whom I have always gotten along, was also there as a presenter and it was nice to chat with her for a while and to hear how she is doing in her job leading Serials Solutions.

Finally what made the trip special was the chance to catch up with old friends, Janet Lee-Smeltzer and Tom Wilson. Janet works at UMBC and Tom worked until recently at University of Maryland, College Park. Each night they picked me up from my hotel and we had dinner together and talked far into the evening about librarianship, Web/Library 2.0, library politics, and many other topics.

Capacity for evil

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The capacity for evil in this world continually astounds me. The violence against innocent girls in an Amish country school yesterday haunts me, as does the killing of a girl in a school in Colorado and the murder of a school principal in rural Wisconsin. Another incident that I can’t get out of my mind is the gruesome slaughter of a woman and her unborn child, along with her three older children, in East St. Louis. Early last month several little kids died here in the Chicago area in an apartment fire while neighbors and family watched helplessly. When I read about killings day after day in Iraq and other areas of the Middle East, I am numbed by the sheer volume of violence.

I haven’t felt this way — highly concerned and anxious about the state of affairs around me — since September 11, 2001. I know who is the author and promoter of evil: Satan. I know that his power is great and that his weapons include fear, doubt, and destruction. But I also know that his power is in no way comparable to God’s; that his efforts are ultimately fruitless; that the only sure thing I have in this world is the promise that God will never leave me or forsake me. Jesus said to his followers: “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)