Tag: tek

library 2.0, bang for buck

Posted on by jessamyn

As I’ve said before, I don’t have much of a desire to become a library 2.0 pundit. I don’t have a strong opinion on the loose idea and I like the players on both sides of the argument. What I care about is the libraries I work with and how technology and the “outside world” affects them and how I can help them deal with that. Michael Golrick is a library administrator in Bridgeport, Connecticut which has its share of have-not patrons and he has a thoughtful post on how the Library 2.0 idea trickles down to patrons like his (and, by extension, like mine).

Michael is also running for Council, don’t forget, and has written the most amazing beginner’s guide to the American Library Association. Meredith Farkas has split out all the individual posts into one set, and I’m reprinting that list here:
ALA 101 Introduction
Part 1: Overview
Part 2: Divisions
Part 3: Round Tables
Part 4: Offices
Part 5: Committees
Part 6: Buildings and Conferences
Part 7: Governance (this means ALA Council)

fifty ways to lose your techie librarians…

Posted on by jessamyn

I am sorry I was busy with houseguests this weekend while a lot of these posts hit the blogosphere but I have to say I’ve found myself nodding in agreement to a lot of them. The topic is tech staff and the loosely phrased question was: how do I lose my tech staff at the library? Here are some answers

Ten Ways to Lose Your Techie Librarians from Michael Stephens
How to Lose your Tech People by Karen Schneider
Ten Ways to Lose Your Techie Librarians by Sarah Houghton
Fifty Ways to Lose Your Techies (actually six) by Dorothea Salo

I have a few more for my own personal list. Yes I used to be a semi-technical person in a non-technical library.

  • Make sure you never give them any sort of real ownership of tech projects; once everyone signs off, it’s as if everyone built it.
  • Involve them only tangentially in your technology plan as a “special guest” and not someone who should be driving the technology directions.
  • Criticize them for not training up everyone to wizard-level skills in the new item. Make sure that you blame any failure of staff to use and learn technology on the tech librarian directly.
  • Refuse to learn the new tools, not directly, but indirectly by simply ignoring them.
  • Let them build the technological tools inside the library but continue to make all the technology purchasing decisions elsewhere in the hierarchy without consulting them.
  • When they have a new web-based tool to roll-out make sure you test them on the computers in the basement that are running seven year old browsers and then make “tut tut” noises if the web content doesn’t look identical to how it looks upstairs. Ignore their explanations.
  • Call the Gates Foundation just to check if it’s okay if they install Firefox on the Gates computers.
  • Give them a workstation that is shared with other staff members in a room where they are frequently interrupted. Stare at their screen often and try to puzzle out what they are working on, or comment that it doesn’t look like work.
  • Don’t give frontline staff the password to do basic maintenance and troubleshooting of public computers and insist that they call the tech staff to reboot or log in to computers. If tech staff is on vacation or otherwise unavailable, hang an Out of Order sign on the computer and be surly when the tech staff returns. If the tech librarian wants to give the passwords out to more people, thwart them. If they want to train staff on maintenance of the computers, disallow it.
  • Disallow computerization of any forms or tallysheets (though you might want to straighten out your skewed and fuzzy photocopies of last decades ILL forms so they’ll stop trying)
  • Don’t let them buy any books. Don’t let them teach any classes. Don’t let the patrons get attached to them. Don’t let them give you the old “best practices” flimflam.

This is only sort of intended to be amusing.

why johnny librarian can’t code

Posted on by jessamyn

A thoughtful and amusing post from Caveat Lector. It’s not just that librarians can’t code, it’s that they can’t even agree that coding is what (some) librarians ought to be doing.

Librarians can’t code because too many librarians and library schools have their noses so far up in the air about computers that they are neither recruiting coders (which is purest, sheerest madness—why are we not using the exodus of women from comp sci to our advantage?) nor creating them.

librarians do and do not need to be coders.

Posted on by jessamyn

When I said “librarians need to be coders” I mostly meant that they need to involve themselves in their technology. Science Library Pad has gone further and explicated this idea with a fancy diagram and some smart talk. Go read librarians 2.0 don’t need to be coders 2.0

Don’t try to build big complex systems. Live in the beta world. Get some chunk of functionality out quickly so that people can play with it. The hardest part is having the initial idea, and the good news is I see lots of great ideas out in the library blogosphere. I can understand the frustrations in the gap between the idea and running code, but I hope I’ve presented a bunch of areas above in which you can work to turn the idea into the next hot beta, without necessarily needing to code it yourself.

The systems world is not just buy/build. It’s buy, build, transform, collaborate, extend, transform, inspire, lead…

Library 2.0 with Librarian 1.0?

Posted on by jessamyn

Rochelle reflects a lot of my feelings about the Library 2.0 Future-is-Now vibe. I get it, I grok it, I want more of it. However, it’s a slow sell some places and a tough slow sell in other places. I spend a lot of time just trying to drop 2.0 words into conversations I have with the librarians on my route just so they’ll have some familiarity with them when they make their technology plans, or when the local wireless salesman knocks on their door. Even thinking about some of Michael’s great suggestions for an “easy” 2.0 upgrade requires paradigm shifts in the way many of the librarians I work with were trained to think. Does this mean it’s impossible? Surely not. Does it mean that baby steps may be in order, or more groundwork needs to be laid? Absolutely.

Folks who know me know I’m not a naysayer, but talking about sending a librarian to a Gaming Symposium when staff do not get time off, funding, or even dues reimbursement for ALA or even VLA is somewhat more optimistic and futuristic than it may seem from an urban or suburban library system perspective. When change happens, it will happen fast, no doubt about it, and it will be useful to have people alread “on the ground” to greet it when it arrives, but let’s work on the all boats part of the “rising tide lifts all boats” aphorism and make sure we’re not all heading to 2.0 when some of us are still in 0.98 beta.