A very fine letter in the Washington Post from incoming ALA President Loriene Roy. She mentions IM and wikis and still manages to tie it into traditional values. “Librarians provide more than facts. We provide the expertise and services that add meaning to those facts.”[resourceshelf]
Category: librarians
MassAnswers, a 24/7 ref project, answers my question sort of
Again, I say I feel odd commenting on the work of other librarians, so I’ll let this one mostly speak for itself. I had a friend who works in Boston who had a reference question “How many pre-1900 cemeteries are there in Massachusetts?” I thought I might be able to get this one with a quick Google but I was mistaken. So I decided to try out a service I was curious about: MassAnswers.
You know how Home Depot in every state says “[your state name]’s Home Improvement Warehouse”? MassAnswers is just a rebranded 24/7 Reference project. So while the main page strongly implies you’ll talk to someone local (and I did), they also note that your question “may very well be answered by one of these Massachusetts librarians, or it may be answered by a librarian from California, Florida, North Carolina or some other community who contributes to the 24/7 service.” I decided to try it out, and I went there from the main page of Boston Public Library, where I have a library card. I use chat all the time, every day, a lot. I was curious to see how chat reference worked in a 24/7 environment. MassAnswers says this on their how does it work page.
You will communicate with the librarian using chat software accessed using your internet browser. You will type in questions to the librarian, and read their responses. Chat combines the immediacy of the telephone with the preciseness of a written e-mail. As you get into this form of communication you will realize that the pace of a chat “conversation” is a bit different than you might expect. You will put in a question, and then go off and do something else on the computer while the librarian picks up and formulates a reply. There will follow periods of rapid interchange of messages interspersed with longer pauses. During the pauses it is best if you open a complete new browser window if you want to do other web-browsing. That way you will not inadvertently drop the 24/7 connection.
It’s an interesting way of explaining chat, and yet read in a really odd stilted way, don’t you think? Once you get to the login page, you also read this:
Please do not try to bookmark (add to favorites) or print anything during the session! At the end of the session, you will receive a list of live links, which will allow you to go back and visit all of the pages the librarian showed you. You can bookmark anything you want at that time. If you try to bookmark during the session, you may experience a disconnect.
So, I will be shown websites which relate to my query and yet I shouldn’t be bookmarking them, adding them to my favorites, or printing them? Wasn’t one of Ranganathan’s five laws “Don’t make the user’s computer act differently from the computer they are used to”? If not, perhaps it should have been. Sarah Houghton has talked a lot about what needs to be fixed in QuestionPoint new interface but I’m pretty sure I was using the old interface. Stephen Francoeur has also discussed what he’d like to see fixed or improved. I’ll briefly talk about my experience.
Here is my transcript from which you can glean a lot. An interesting thing to note is that while the librarian I was working with was designated by her location and her initials, the transcript I received merely called her “librarian.” Also interesting is that the realtime transcript I was seeing had no timestamps on it while the transcript that was emailed to me clearly did. My reference transaction took 37 minutes and at the end of it I had the name of a book to go look in and a number of a librarian to call. My question was not answered, though to be fair it may have been a tough one.
A few things to note from the transcript:
- the first link I was given was a) one that I had found in my own 5 minute google search and b) unhelpful because it had no date information. I’m sure there are many people who don’t know what the heck they want when they’re in this sort of situation, but I was not one of them. My question was clear. This web site did not answer it.
- There was clearly something wrong with either her software or her understanding of it (I am assuming this was a woman I was dealing with) if you’ll note the times I got an address or a book title pasted eight times (twice)
- The narrowness of the browser window — which is adjustable, but I used the default settings — means two things 1. all the cites she pasted for me were horribly formatted and hard to read 2. all of the websites we co-browsed were horribly formatted and hard to read
- At the end of it all, she looked up a book for me in an OPAC though she admitted that there might have been print resources that would be helpful. She was clearly not in a library. I understand this is how these systems work, but it seemed like if she had had the book in front of her that she might have had a chance at helping me with my question.
The MassAnswers site spends a lot of time saying “librarian … librarian … librarian…” over and over again like a mantra, but I think it’s a valid question “Just how useful is the librarian outside of their library?” I feel that I’m pretty useful on Ask MetFilter and on these silly IM reference hunts, but honestly when we tell people we’re providing them with librarians but what we give them are MLS-educated people with access to the Internet (same as the asker in this case), what are we providing? What are we telling them? I’m pleased that the person I worked with tried so hard to help me out, but what chance did she have? I answered the follow-up survey I got honestly, and OCLC swears “Your answers and comments will help us to better tailor the system to your needs.” but I doubt it, I really and truly doubt it.
Library Juice interview with LoC’s Barbara Tillett
I get mail from Sandy Berman almost once a week. In envelopes with interesting stamps and adorned with rubber stamped images, he sends a pile of photocopied news articles, printed out web pages and cc’ed letters that he’s sent to the Library of Congress, to Barbara Tillett specifically. In his ongoing quest for LCSH reform — continuing even after his forced retirement from Hennepin County Library system — Sandy keeps up a regular correspondence with Tillett, the chief of the LoC’s Cataloging Policy and Support Office. Some of these letters are amusing, all of them are good reading. Tillett writes back.
Rory Litwin of Library Juice has interviewed her for the Library Juice blog, where they discuss cataloging reform, God, Zionism and, of course, Sandy Berman.
Most of our correspondence contains helpful and constructive suggestions – what criticism we receive is simply not as he characterizes it. There is no onslaught of letters and emails and faxes from outraged librarians or researchers. For the most part, public criticism comes from Mr. Berman or other individuals he has urged to write to us. We’re more inclined to react favorably to constructive suggestions than to coercive techniques such as petitions, hostile articles in the library literature, emotional attacks, or letters of complaint to members of Congress. Methods such as these are almost always counterproductive, whereas more cooperative and positive approaches usually produce good results.
Michael Gorman podcast on InfoSpeak
A podcast from my old Alma Mater. The Conviction of Michael Gorman: “Michael Gorman is a cultured and accomplished man who dares to speak his mind. Are his views intolerable?”
on success
I read Seth Godin’s books when I see them around. It was fun to see this little blurb by him on Library Garden discussing what makes him successful: “I do things where I actually think I’m right, as opposed to where I think succeeding will make me successful. When you think you’re right, it’s more fun and your passion shows through.”
When I was speaking in Australia in 2004 about the USA PATRIOT Act and CIPA and HIPAA, someone asked the question “How do you keep going? How do you face each day with all these difficult tasks ahead of you?” And my answer was then, as it is now, that I think I’m right. I don’t kid myself that other people also think I’m right, but I enjoy talking to them just the same. It’s easy to be relaxed about your approach when you feel it deep in your bones and aren’t just talking about what people want you to talk about to make rent or get a promotion. We’re all motivated by different things, naturally, and I’d hate the world if it were filled with 6 billion Jessamyns, but it’s fun and inspiring to interact with people who are passionate about their work.