what do people do all day – my version of the refgrunt

Posted on by jessamyn

And, on the continuing thread of “no one wants my job but me” here’s another exciting installment of what my week was like.

Monday – Got up and spent a few hours doing admin work for the online community I moderate – edit/delete comments, moderate disputes, answer emails, mostly via IM and email. I helped Michael Stephens get his Blog People pages set up on his website, with some custom sidebar information and templates. Headed to the Calef Library where we get the wireless network hooked up in half an hour. My new motto “Wireless for $30 and 30 minutes!” I also configured the librarian’s laptop to get on the wireless network, freeing up one more computer for patron use. Now they have two. When I walked in and said “I’m here to install the wireless” the other patron in the library said, and I quote, “I love you!” She is taking classes at the technical college. They have wireless broadband. She has dial-up at home. She has a lot of online assignments that are pretty difficult for her to do over dial-up but the campus is 30 miles away. This solves a big problem for her.

We copied some of Boston Public Library’s instruction sheets because they’re really simple to use. While I was there I also made a sign for their bathroom to tell people not to drink the water because of coliform contamination. Their previous sign just wasn’t cutting it. On the way home I tried to stop by the Tunbridge Library to set up some evening computer classes, but they weren’t open yet.

Tuesday – Today started with figuring out how to do a screengrab of a playing DVD so I could bring this funny librarian sighting to all of you. I stopped by RTCC, the vocational school where I work, to give my boss some flyers that I made for some of the adult education classes she is offering, then I headed up to Roxbury. In Roxbury I talked to the librarian about broadband, wireless and ADA options. The library is an adorable little box of a building, with no running water or bathroom.

The town has about 500 people and getting money to build on a bathroom seems like a tough job. I said I’d look into community grants for this sort of thing, and talked about what it would take to build the library a website. I said I could make a placeholder site by the end of the day [and did] and then we could talk about specifics of a larger site. We ate cookies and string cheese and talked about rural library services and the Department of Libraries and ALA. On my way out, I checked out a video about local beekeepers showing how they track honeybees to their “bee trees.” I headed back to RTCC where I staffed a PC lab during “drop in time” The weather was pretty good, so I mostly got GED students stopping by needing help with printing and opening documents.

Right before I closed up for the day a 75 year old woman dropped by and said she’d be interested in my computer class. The whole notion of having an open lab is a little new here so I told her that while we could get her started with projects, it was mostly practice time, not class time. She lives with her nephew and his wife and they have set her up with a Mac but she doesn’t like bothering them with questions about it. I said she should come back anytime. I wrapped up the day with Michael’s good news.

Wednesday I swam early in the day and stopped by the coffee shop in town that recently added wireless to their list of offerings. I caught up on paperwork and put up a few flyers for my drop in time. As I was leaving this gal came up to me and asked what the drop-in was for and I gave a rough outline. She said she had a document on her laptop that she wanted to print and asked if we had a printer. In the area I live, there are no Kinko’s or other printing places, so you either get your own printer, go to the library, or get it printed by a friend who has a job with a printer. I told her to swing by which she did later. Turns out that she has an old Mac laptop with no disk drive. Because of security issues at the lab, we can’t put unknown machines on the network, so I told her to go back to the coffee shop and email it to me and we’d print it tomorrow. The letter was a recommendation for a kid who had worked with her who was either going to college or getting a job. The woman lives in a house with no electricity (and no Internet access) so did all of her work at the cafe or other places with wifi. We got the letter printed out on her letterhead and put it in the mail.

In the evening I talked to the Texas Library Association and the Ohio Library Council about upcoming talks I’ll be doing for them. I received a reply email from Bill McKibben — an author whose work I admire — about helping him learn to update the lecture listings on his website. He said it sounded interesting, now I need to figure out how to actually DO that.

Thursday – More swimming in the morning. While I was in the shower, an older lady asked me about my computer classes and I gave her a flyer for the Adult Ed classes as well as the drop-in time. She asked if I’d read On Our Backs magazine, and I said I had sometimes but not recently. She said she thought I might like it and offered to bring it in next time we were both going to be at the pool at the same time. I made more flyers for Adult Ed, for the gardening classes and the mother/daughter automotive repair classes. I helped the school guidance counselor put the newsletter for the school on the school’s website.

I was hoping the older woman who stopped by earlier would come by, but she didn’t. However, a local therapist who was trying to set up Excel spreadhseets and forms for her business brought her laptop by and we looked at some of the things Excel could do for her. While we were there, her husband stopped by. He is a teacher at the high school and also has a website for his business that he wanted to update with new logos. I said I could do it but I’d need some information and we talked about how website changes work. Finished up the Excel spreadsheets, talked a little bit more about Excel, headed home.

Friday – Did some community moderating in the morning and replied to a lot of emails and worked on my A List post for a while which is what happened when I tried to write this post yesterday. Headed to the Ainsworth Library in Williamstown where we dug through boxes of Gates Foundation literature and software trying to figure out if it was really worth it to install the hardware security “solution” they provided the librarian with. We did a lot of talking about technology, discussing the PC/Mac divide, appropriate secuirity for public computers, wireless options and how to work with the OPAC software they use, and get it networked on all three computers.

The librarian there also had her 14 year old son who is being homeschooled so he would pop in and out as we were talking. I fixed her computer’s speakers, we tossed out some old documentation that was out of date. She told me about a job she had interviewed for where the job was 25 hours a week, salaried, no benefits. She said the job sounded interesting, but a part-time salaried position really wasn’t likely to cut it for her. From what she had heard, the previous librarian had worked all the time and the library was unlikely to be able to find a new librarian without making the job significantly different, raising pay or lowering workload expectations.

While I was there a patron came in who had a friend’s resume and letter she wanted to print. However it was in WordPerfect format and she couldn’t open it on the library computers. I showed the librarian how to install the conversion filters into her copy of Office (why they don’t come installed, I’ll never know) and we were able to print out this woman’s resume and cover letter. When we were done, I offered to email her the converted Word documents so that she could put them on her thumb drive at home and have a printable copy. After I left the library Greg and I grabbed a cup of coffee at a cafe in Montpelier before a friend’s birthday party. I did some more community moderation stuff — someone had posted an anonymous question and needed to add a follow-up, my co-moderator had gotten back from a trip and we caught each other up on the site — drank my coffee, worked more on my A List post and went to have pizza and cake.

So it’s Saturday morning now. My partner has a shift blogging for JURIST and I’m writing this. My sister is coming to visit and I think we’ll go take some pictures, maybe go to the roast turkey supper down the road to help them raise money to put a new roof on the Catholic church. Usually I put these sorts of posts over on my other blog but since this one was all librarylibrarylibrary I thought it might work out okay here as well.

on the “A List”

Posted on by jessamyn

If you look at my tag cloud at the bottom of this site, you’ll notice that the me tag is pretty popular with… me. Since I started this site in 1999, I’ve had a series of usual and unusual jobs and I often write about what I do at them. Some bloggers do a lot of this, some don’t. I also report back on my ALA activities since I’m nominally the representative of the folks who elected me. There are a few other Councilor bloggers, at least four that I know of. I also visit libraries and write about that, though I could be better about keeping up on it.

Some of the discussion about “A-listers” lately (hi Chris!) has gotten me thinking about popularity and purpose. We’re all, all of us, clearly telling our stories for our own reasons. Some of us would like to get better jobs, some of us would like to make more friends or more money, some of us would like to establish reputations in our field for the things we say and the quality of our ideas. Some of us want a place where we can complain and vent frustrations, some of us want to learn about the web and learn best by doing, some of us want to keep our writing chops fresh in between paying gigs, some of us want to make our online writing into our paying gigs. Some of us want to make our jobs more interesting or more interactive, and some of us want to blog our way into new jobs.

There are a lot of reasons, and to me the whole “A List” idea seems to imply that the reasons are more tightly linked, that to achieve in one arena is to achieve in all, that we all share the same goal. Most library bloggers, if they make any money at all, make more money writing online than I do. Most library bloggers, if they are employed at all, have better-paying higher-status jobs than I do. I believe in multiple intelligences and I believe in multiple “A Lists” which may be an easy way to be blasé about a site with a high Technorati ranking, but I do believe it. When I was more a part of a general blogging community, back in 1999-2000, there was also talk of an A List with the concommitant grousing and denial and whatnot. People designated as A Listers wouldn’t talk much about it, or would claim it wasn’t important, or just get frustrated at people’s continual harping about it. Many of those people run or work at some of the big tech companies you’ve heard of: Flickr, Technorati, Adaptive Path, Blogger, Movable Type, Gawker, Creative Commons, Google. They’ve written books. You know their names. It’s a cart/horse question to be sure — are they A Listers because of their drive, or did their A Listish status get them these advantages? — but five or six years later, it’s interesting to see what people are doing. I suspect that in our library niche of the blogosphere, we’ll see some of the same effects, if indeed we already haven’t.

So, back to me. On the one hand, I’d like to spend some time talking about what I think I did — besides starting early which was a pretty important part of all this — to make this website well-read and usually well-received. On the other hand, it’s always seemed to me sort of big-headed to say “This is why people like me.” when many people do not and, let’s be honest, most people have never heard of me, or you either. So, with the caveat that I’m just some over-educated and over-thinking sometimes librarian with a popular website, this is what has worked for me in the past, and I’m sorry if I sound like a snob by saying so.

  • be gracious with everyone
  • be consistent
  • lead by example
  • encourage, nurture, read and link to newer bloggers
  • meet bloggers in person whenever possible
  • keep pissing matches and whining off your blog, take grudges offline
  • read constantly, offline and online
  • know what you are talking about and admit when you don’t
  • make your content presentable and accessible and findable
  • don’t turn down other opportunities to get your message out and make a good impression
  • accept the power and the responsibility that comes with where you are, and use it for good

Most of it is common sense, and I think the consistency thing has really worked the best for me over the long run. I’ve taken few long vacations. I’ve rarely broken the site for more than a weekend. I’ve been interested in similar sets of topics for years. I’ve taken lots of advice and suggestions, and I’ve tried very hard to keep my personality conflicts off of the site. I try to highlight new stuff that I read, and I never pass up an opportunity to meet readers, other bloggers, or other librarians in general. I’m not saying it’s a recipe for success — I think few people would seriously want my job or my life besides me — but it’s worked so far, is easy to maintain, and has brought me a lot of enjoyment over the past seven years or so.

google book search, info from the source

Posted on by jessamyn

James Jacobs — the guy from diglet who had been writing to Google to try to get “find in a library” added to ALL Google Book Search results — went to see Daniel Clancy, the Engineering Director for the Google Book Search Project speak at Stanford. While the talk wasn’t to librarians and wasn’t really about the social implications of the book search, James did learn a few things.

– Clancy mentioned that Google was NOT going for archival quality (indeed COULD not) in their scans and were ok with skipped pages, missing content and less than perfect OCR — he mentioned that the OCR process AVERAGED one word error per page of every book scanned
– about 70% of the book project use was coming from India.
– 92% of the world’s books are not generating revenues for copyright holders or publishers

If Googl Book Search really interests you, you might also like to read The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story [pdf, today’s library link o’ the day] which discusses some of the misinformation and lawsuits surrounding the Google Library porject and comes down on the side of Google’s fair use position.

EPA libraries slated to close under new budget proposal

Posted on by jessamyn

Big ugly news in the Government/Special libraries sector. The proposed US Budget includes slashing the EPA library budget by 80% which means no more library and no more electronic catalog.

The size of the cuts will force the Headquarters library and most of the regional libraries to shut their doors and cease operations. Each year, the EPA libraries

  • Handle more than 134,000 research requests from its own scientific and enforcement staff
  • House and catalog an estimated 50,000 “unique” documents that are available nowhere else
  • Operate public reading rooms and provide the public with access to EPA databases.

“Access to information is one of the best tools we have for protecting the environment,” added Ruch, calling the cuts the “epitome of penny wise and pound foolish.” “By contrast, closing the Environmental Protection Agency libraries actually threatens to subtract from the sum total of human knowledge.”

Add to this the proposed elimination of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science by rolling it into the Institute of Museum and Library Services and you have to wonder what sort of price we’re paying for the deep budgetary hole the country has been falling in to.