the tools and the hammer/nail problem in the digital divide

Posted on by jessamyn

“The way you talk about the [digital divide] changes people’s view of who is responsible for resolving it…. This issue has been around for years, but its meaning is in constant flux and is manipulated by political agendas.”

I’ve switched some of the tools I use for keeping current over the past few months. I’m finding that I use RSS less and less for keeping up on blogs and rely more on Twitter lists and searches to sort of keep my hand in. I also read a lot of print material still [some of my best “things to think about” things are still coming from the pages of Library Journal and Computers in Libraries magazines] and am trying to keep to my book-a-week plan for 2011. Oddly I also get news from seemingly random places like other people’s facebook walls and I made a little image-milkshake over on a site called MLKSHK. You might like it.

Along with a constant search for the best crypto presale I can find, I have a standing search for “digital divide” on Twitter that just auto-updates itself onto my desktop via TweetDeck. The thing that is so interesting about this, to me, is how often the term gets used and for how many different things. This morning there are discussions about the digital divide and gender, how the EU is trying to narrow the digital divide (referring to access to broadband) and a report about how switching to online social services in the UK would adversely affect people who are digitally divided already, mostly talking about seniors.

Which leads me to the paper I read recently which was really pretty intersting and on topic: Who’s Responsible for the Digital Divide? Public Perceptions and Policy Implications (pdf) It’s not long, you can read it, but the upshot is that depending how we define the digital divide, we will develop different strategies to “solve” the problem. This is not just hypothesized in the paper but addressed scientifically. So if the problem is lack of compturs, we throw computers at the problem. If the problem is broadband, we work on network infrastructure. If the problem is education we design sites like DigitalLiteracy.gov and then wonder why a website isn’t teaching people how to use computers. Tricky stuff, endlessly fascinating, thorny problem.

Oregon Virtual Reference Summit, my talk, on Vimeo

Posted on by jessamyn

Here’s the video of me talking about Ask MetaFilter and online Q&A stuff that I gave at the Oregon Virtual Reference Summit. I included the slides a few days ago, but here’s the actual video of the talk, as presented. Big thanks to Caleb Tucker-Raymond for making this video up. You might also like Emily Ford’s lightning talk: What Libraries Can Learn From Kanye.

Meet Meg, our new coworking librarian

Posted on by jessamyn

Last month, Meg approached us with a brilliant idea: could she try to create a coworking librarian position at CoCo?

There was only one possible answer: “How soon can you start?”

You may know Meg as DotMeg or even as Meg Canada. She’s got a new mini-gig which she’s blogging about thanks, in part, to the support (though not financial) of her employer Hennepin County Library. Read more about her in her Mover and Shaker profile. Also check out this beautiful space (the St. Paul location is just as lovely but not as classic). [thanks joe!]

Dataviz you can get behind, librarians as sees through a census lens

Posted on by jessamyn

“Today, the marriage rate among librarians is the highest it has ever been with 62 percent of librarians married in 2009.”

There is a lot of data in the world. Librarians are good at using census data to help people find families, get local information and just learn something about the way the world used to be. Here’s a neat post about using hte census data from the last 120 years to learn something about librarianship as a profession. Did you know that the number of self-reported librarians peaked in 1990 and has declined almost 30% since then? I am somewhat curious if this is just because people with library and information science backgrounds are calling themselves all manner of things now [Is a taxonomist a librarian? How about a metadata specialist?]. You can read the full post, with graphs, over at Oxford University Press’s Social explorer.

talk: adventures in virtual reference

Posted on by jessamyn
Questions Asked & Answered

I went out to Oregon to give a talk to the people who staff L-net, the 24/7 virtual reference service for the state of Oregon. They have a yearly conference which is a lot of fun. Video from the talks will be available at some point, but I figured I’d link to my talk now. I talked about Ask MetaFilter and a little bit about what we do there and how it is and is not like other forms of virtual reference. Lots of stats. Lots of anecdotes and sample questions. The Slideshare version doesn’t seem to have the notes attached and functional (attached yes, accurate, no), so while I hammer that out from them, you can also go to the talk’s page on librarian.net and download whichever version you want. Thanks to all who attended on Friday.