Tag: tek

PALS talks in Illinois

Posted on by jessamyn

I just got finished doing my two training/talks for PALS in Shorewood Illinois. It was the first talk I’ve done which was videoconferenced or streamed someplace else. It was very odd trying to remember to look into the camera at least somewhat [there was a live audience too, if that’s the right word for it] and not walk to far afield. Both talks went well and both were ALL NEW. It’s been a while since I gave a talk that I made up totally from scratch and this month I’ve given three of them, very exciting. Here are the direct links, thanks to everyone who turned out and made me feel welcome.

Even moreso than my last talks, you’ll need to scoot to the end and click the “printable” link to see my notes for the talk. I’m trying very hard to not just read off the screen if I can help it.

Skills for the 21st Century Librarian

Posted on by jessamyn

Meredith Farkas spells it out. Cogent, readable and clear. The tech stuff we need to know isn’t how to make a blockquote in HTML, we have buttons and software for that. The tech stuff we need is big picture stuff, how to solve the problems that are different than the problems that came before them.

So what skills should new librarians have in this first part of the 21st century? At first, I was thinking about specific tech skills like HTML, network administration, PHP and MySQL, etc. While those are certainly important, what I really think library schools aren’t teaching students is the “big picture” topics; how to really be able to keep up with technology, make good decisions about its implementation, use it and sell it to others. Here are a few of the things I came up with.

asking the right questions, when to be simple, when to be complex

Posted on by jessamyn

Dan Chudnov has a blog called One Big Library where he talks about the programmming and social issues invovled in helping people build their own libraries, or making library data so that it’s accessible and usable and repurposable by others, or rather everyone else. I like the site because while some of it verges into the “blah blah programming blah blah” realm, he is always thinking about the human side of why our systems work and don’t work. This post about building simple systems and why that’s so darned complicated really helps me get my head around some of the technology hurdles we as a profession are facing in the age of interoperability and openness, assuming we’re even interested in moving in that direction.

If you’re a librarian like me and you take this example and turn it toward your own work to help people build their own libraries, it hits you… it is not simple to build a library of one’s own. And if you’re a librarian like me, you have a ready list of why not:

  • Metadata is complicated
  • People in libraries don’t all use the same items the same way
  • Maybe 20% of the collection is responsible for 80% of the use but that other 80% includes some really important stuff
  • Attempts to use new tools works great for new data but can be exceedingly hard for old stuff. Like, anything predating 1960. Which we have a *lot* of, and which is often *really* important.
  • Did I mention metadata being complicated?

truer words have rarely been spoken

Posted on by jessamyn

Why is it so hard to say that some things simply suck? I’ll quote Casey Bisson, quoting himself.

Please, stand with me now and repeat:

“When something sucks I will say so. When vendors spout crap I will call them on it. My staff deserve good tools, my users need good tools, and I can’t afford to buy stuff that sucks.”

Together, we’ll fix the world one product at a time.

Related story: State of our ILS

“It’s a new world and building onto a system that is more than 15 years old isn’t going to cut it anymore – there needs to be a new system, one that allows for more freedom, and it has to come soon, because more and more libraries are going to turn to open-source.“

the black box of computer trouble paired with the bright light of radical trust

Posted on by jessamyn

It’s easy to morning-after quarterback big computer disasters, but eleven days seems awfully long for an OPAC outage that was caused by a disk drive failure. When my ISP has a disk drive failure, they’re back up in an hour or two and restoring the data in the background over the rest of the day. It would have been really interesting to have been able to read a library blog about this outage and get updates on how the restoration was going, wouldn’t it? Instead we can peek at the Google cache to see what the library web site looked like, and see how it looks now. That sort of potential transparency is scary, but ultimately builds patron/customer/funder confidence, and helps with messes like this one. Michael Stephens has been discussing Darlene Fichter’s idea of radical trust, or put more simply “trusting the community.” and I think it’s something we’ll all be hearing more about, if not actually talking about. Trust me.