NT23: Still to be done...Things 20, 22, and 23.

Still on my agenda to complete in the NT23 are Thing 20 on YouTube, Thing 22 on Developing your own 23 Things for Your Library, and Thing 23, Reflections on NT23.

Thing 20 on YouTube I will probably try to work on this evening, when I'm more at liberty to peruse YouTube on my own free time. I've watched a scant few library-related YouTube videos in the past, but it will be interesting to see how much the YouTube universe has expanded for libraries and librarians over the past several months and years.

For me anymore, I sometimes have more fun spending an evening watching YouTube videos than I do watching Cable TV, especially if there's nothing but re-runs on, and I've run out of rental Anime DVDs for the time being. I'm a subscriber to several prominent "YouTube Atheists" including dprjones, AronRa, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, etc, and watch with interest their trials and tribulations and ongoing culture wars with YouTubers who are hard-core creationist and/or homophobic Christians. It makes for very entertaining theater, I must say. I even take potshots in the culture war by uploading some animations from Xtranormal.com; Take a wild guess which side I'm on. I'm far too camera shy to appear on camera myself using my own face/voice...at least not without heavy special effects to obscure my face; I wish MovieMaker had a way to distort and alter voiceovers beyond simply speeding them up to x2 as fast or slowing them down to x2 as slow. If it can do this, I haven't yet discovered that special effect yet. Maybe it's available as an add on. Or maybe there is OpenSource video editing software out there that I need to check out and use instead of Windows MovieMaker. I don't know.

This isn't related to anything and is completely random, but I'm very annoyed that it's become increasingly complicated to create and play picture DVD slideshows on a standard DVD player. I recall when my girlfriend and I once bought a basic DVD player back in 2002 or 2003, and it was very easy to simply pop in a DVD-R or DVD-RW with only .jpeg files on it, and the DVD player would instantly play them as a slide show on the TV screen. That was the coolest damn thing we'd seen that whole year.

I have subsequently never been able to reproduce that. I even recently burned a picture CD at home using special software; it's supposed to play in DVD players but it doesn't--neither on my new DVD player or in my PS2. It only plays on my computer, which is like, big freakin' whup. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I suspect it's beyond the capability of a PS2 to do that, but I was really hoping my new DVD player (which is built-in to my new small-screen HDTV LCD 19") would be capable of handling it, but nope, no dice. My aunt and uncle have produced workable picture DVDs with edited music and credits that have pretty great production values, nice transitions, etc. If they can do it, so can I...but I just lack the time and motivational drive and funds to do it properly, I guess, plus all I have to work with are my photo album(s) on Flickr. I haven't taken any trips recently I'd like to showcase or anything else notable like that.

Anyway, it's getting about time to clock out for the day. More postings about Thing 20, on YouTube, a bit later on perhaps.

NT23: Thing 21, Podcasting.

I may do more than one posting on this topic, depending on how in-depth I want to go. I myself listen to several podcasts each week. My experience with Library-related podcasts are very limited however.

I found I really enjoyed the LibVibe podcast when it was still around; LibVibe was a brief, 15-30 minute weekly podcast devoted to breaking news in the world of Libraries and Information Science. I actually liked it better than the podcast associated with the blog "LIS News" which I follow periodically. I have an RSS live-bookmark in Firefox devoted to the RSS feed for LIS News, actually. The podcast for LIS NEWS is called LISTen; it's pretty good, but often pretty tech-y, too, and if you're a non-tech person it can sometimes be a little overwhelming. Sometimes I agree with them, sometimes I don't.

I even at one point downloaded the Audacity software and the MP3 extension mentioned. I had at one time considered becoming a guest contributor to a gun rights podcast that I followed out of Indiana with some frequency. I really only wanted to do one guest podcast on gun rights in Canada, something I had by that point acquired more than just a passing knowledge of, and thought might be of interest to other listeners of the podcast. I gave it a few dry runs, but found it was a lot trickier than it looks. Turns out I'm a bit of a perfectionist (go figure) and really REALLY dislike the sound of my own voice, and also, it probably helps to write a script and learn it until you can deliver from the script like a real voice actor and not SOUND like you're just reading from a script. So anyway, I still have the software loaded onto my desktop computer, but I haven't touched it in many months.

I can see how there might be good potential in doing library podcasts, but I would think a library would probably want to keep it pretty brief. Also, you would have to update often enough to hold the interest of listeners, give them a reason to devote space to your podcast on their podcatcher hardware/software as opposed to another MP3 of music or whatever. I like the idea of a down-loadable walking tour of the library. It is also possible to do video podcasting, though this is more complicated, since not all podcatcher hardware screens are capable of replaying video; only the more advanced iPods (8 gig and up) are capable of doing so, for example. And even then I can't always load video content onto my 8G iPod. Some of the formats are incompatible. I can watch them in iTunes, on my PC, but not on my iPod, for example.

I also like the idea of recording book talks and releasing them on podcast, but of course, this would require the written permission of the author; you wouldn't want to surreptitiously record a book talk and then release it on the library podcast without first securing permission from the author featured in the book talk.

Librarians could also interview students with digital voice recorders, compiling audio content containing students' frequently asked questions and complaints, followed by a voice-over of the library director or a reference librarian later addressing these questions and concerns. It should not take the place of a physical Q&A board in the library, but rather, it should augment such an existing feedback system already in place.

Podcasting is another Web 2.0 technology that *could* potentially impact and enhance library services, but it would depend on librarians providing quality content on an ongoing basis, along with a responsive patron base who comes to value such content from the library on a recurring basis. Library podcast content must be not only of high quality but also actively promoted to students, competing for their time and attention in an increasingly hectic academic work/study environment. As with other Web 2.0 applications, what a library can get out of Podcasting depends very much on what librarians are willing to put into it.

I think that's all I can think of to say on the intersection of Podcasting and Libraries.

As far as generic podcasts go, my favorites are German-language news media podcasts (usually actual excerpted re-broadcasts from radio & tv), which I tend to listen to of a morning while getting dressed for work, and also a select number of interrelated atheist, humanist, skeptic types of podcasts, including Chariots of Iron, the Non-Prophets, American Freethought, Dogma Free America, FFRF's Freethought Radio, CFI's Point of Inquiry with D.J. Grothe (who is also a Facebook friend of mine), and Reasonable Doubts, just to name a few. I will listen to these podcasts while doing chores (such as folding clothes after taking them out of the dryer, or washing dishes), or while just lounging around on my couch playing Playstation2 or doing nothing in particular. I also have a cassette adapter that lets me plug my iPod into my car's tape deck (hey, it's a 2002, so cut the lulz) and listen to podcasts while I drive around town running errands (grocery store run, post office trip, etc). I even sometimes listen to my favorite podcasts when going out to eat (though sometimes I prefer to read).

To my knowledge, there aren't too many general interest library podcasts besides LISTen these days. There are a few others, but I'm still missing LibVibe, which was by far my favorite.

NT23: Thing 19, GoogleDocs

Ok so this is an experiment with GoogleDocs. I've watched the instructional YouTube videos and I can definitely see the advantages for online collaboration and the reduction of email clutter, which is always a good thing. In library applications, I would imagine this being of greater use to large libraries with large numbers of staff members, while work in a relatively small academic library. Still, we have branch campuses in Dallas and Houston, so GoogleDocs might offer us advantages for communicating and collaborating with our librarians at those campuses in ways we have not considered previously. It is an exciting time to be involved in Librarianship, and workshops like NT23 show us these kinds of Web 2.0 tools that we can use to help us do our jobs as LIS professionals better.

It would also be a handy way to inexpensively keep a resume online instead of constructing one as a webpage and paying money to a ISP.

You could also save your PowerPoint style presentations online and free yourself from the worry of loosing your jump drive en route to your next presentation event, etc. You could also embed the presentation in a web page or blog later; Kind of cool, eh? As long as you had a computer you could use with internet access, and as long as you had your username and password memorized (or written down), you're home free.

GoogleDocs is definitely thinking outside the box; a good way to reintroduce a fairer division of labor, etc, especially with spreadsheet questionnaires, which was the coolest thing by far that I saw in the intro videos.

Could potentially be helpful in sharing circulation statistics as well as cataloging statistics across the library.

Also helpful for those who can't afford MS Office on their home computer and aren't tech savvy enough to download open source alternatives like OpenOffice from Sun Microsystems.

Those are my tentative thoughts on GoogleDocs and its potential for work in the LIS world ahead.

NT23: Thing 17 - LibWorm

Well, it's certainly better than using Google. Nice way to tightly focus search results to get a gist of the current chatter in LIS circles on topics of interest to library and information professionals. I even saw results from this blog pop up, which was frankly a little embarrassing, but I'm very self-conscious in that way.
I guess I should think "hey, neat!". But on the other hand, I update so infrequently, I was a little surprised that I turned up in the first page of results on some queries, as high as result number 3 in one query. Odd.

I'd probably still use Databases and peer-reviewed journals for "serious" research and publication (such as, say, for tenure requirements, if I had that here, which I don't).
But still, as a quick way for measuring the "pulse" of the LIS world, LibWorm delivers the goods, I'd say. Nifty tool. Thanks, NT23, for introducing me to it.

NT23 : Thing 18, Wikis, an addendum.

Completed Thing 18 on Wikis.

My sample wiki page here.

It also has 2 "sub-pages". It was a little tricky because I had to pick a name for the sub-pages that noone else had used or else it wouldn't "take" (I tried multiple times before figuring this out). Maybe just a hiccup with the pages, who knows.

We also use a Departmental Wiki at work, and I have fooled around on the LIS Wiki and in Wikipedia itself. Wikis can be good for collaborative efforts, but for example a library Wiki would need to be restricted to staff members only, or at least certain parts of it would need to be walled off from patrons. Most staff wikis tend to be internal documents, not intended for public display and consumption, much less editing.

Wikis are based on the logic of the "wisdom of the crowds", or more simply, "two heads are better than one".

NT23: Thing 16: LT, part 2

Ok, found the upper limit for Library Thing; freebie members are limited to 200 books. If you want to add beyond that to your personal profile, you have to pay for it. So rather limited compared to Amazon.com in that respect. LT pulls their info from LoC and Amazon, after all. It costs them money, so naturally they have to have a subscription model to absorb beyond 200+ items, to pull paying members in, because once you start adding books you find it hard to stop.

The site is a little buggy at times, especially shuffling books between collections, etc. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, even after repeated attempts.

I next went to join groups of possible interest, though as yet I have not encountered an upper limit on those, but I suspect it also probably exists on Freebie accounts.

It does seem like it would be a valuable tool for reference librarians, acquisitions and collection development librarians...again more so than someone in Cataloging like me.

I have my Freebie account and will have to mull over if I think it is worth my upgrading to a paid account; Will it really enhance my professional skills enough to justify the investment? Hard to say.

I won't be upgrading anytime soon, though I'll consider it again maybe come Fall semester.

NT23: Thing 16, Library Thing

Ok, so in truth I already had a LibraryThing account long before I started the North Texas 23 Things, but also true is the fact I did next to nothing with it. I did have a dust-up with the LibraryThing head honcho when he dissed the Dewey Decimal System, and he came on and joined AUTOCAT and promptly got his *ss handed to him by the more experienced catalogers there, IMHO. Fun was had by all.

But yes, LT is fun to play around with and certainly easier to manage than "Wish Lists" on Amazon.com, which is where I have been storing my "for future reading" book lists; This has worked as a crutch, but over time this becomes unwieldy as the lists become increasingly huge and difficult to navigate easily.

LT offers a way out of this conundrum, at least in theory. I'll have to play around with it more, but it seems like a fun, harmless diversion for bibliophiles. It will never replace rigorous cataloging standards as practiced in libraries, however.

Will publish more later on LT if anything inspires me further.

NT23: Thing 15 - Digg / Dugg

So anyway, I gave Digg.com a try; It was easy enough to set up a Digg account via Facebook, actually, which was awfully convenient & painless.

I poked around on Digg, "dug" a few stories, which then appeared on my Facebook 'wall'. I even found a story I had read earlier on Inside Higher Ed this morning which I decided to "dig" as well. It had only 1 Digg, but at least it was there, and I added my Digg as well.

It seems to be inspired by the whole "wisdom of the crowds" Meme that's going around these days, and seems to have some validity too it. The most active users are apt to be the most techno-savvy and for bleeding edge technology news, Digg is probably very useful. Ditto stuff that is all around "Cool". But I can't say that it's necessarily more interesting than, say, BoingBoing.net, for example. I bet the editors at BoingBoing.net probably use Digg.com as a research tool, among many others, but for the end user, unless you have a home built PC running on Linux, or have similar levels of techno-moxy, I don't know if the lay user will find much that is appealing about Digg. It's like a massive web-wide popularity contest. Sometimes it pays to heed the word of the Vox Populi Digitalis, other times, less so.

As a lay user looking for "cool stuff", I'll let the editors at BoingBoing do their work on my behalf and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Regularly perusing BoingBoing keeps me hip and cool. A nice antidote to BoingBoing on the other hand is the blog Stuff White People Like, which holds up a fun mirror to my own existence and lets me laugh at myself. It's scary how much SWPL pegs me, deflates my ego, undermines my hip pretensions, nearly every time.

Reference librarians will probably find Digg.com more useful than I do as a cataloger, since they deal with the public much more directly. No doubt it can be helpful at the reference desk as a jumping off point.

Anyway, on to the next "thing". Digg/Dug/done.

On my agenda for later, Things 15-17

I will get to things 15-17 a bit later on. Right now the library staff are all pitching in to go count volumes on the shelves so we can compile accurate statistics. Everybody has to pitch in, including Tech Services, so I've got to be signing off here and lending a hand the rest of the day. Toodles!

Thing 14, Delicious

Been there, done that. Broke down and set up my Delicious account not long after Texas Library Association annual conference 2009, user name "Aggiememenon". It was convenient to consolidate my bookmarks from all my home PCs, and from my Work PC. But I don't tote my laptop around very much, so I really don't have a huge use for Delicious, but I could see where it would be handy for people who move around a lot for their jobs (Consultants, etc) or Reference staff who don't have assigned terminals, etc.

I do have my own Desk in Tech Services that I sit in every day, so it's really not that much of an issue for me. I didn't even bother to bring my laptop to TLA this year, too much hassle to tote around. While a few lucky people had iPhones and iPod Touches, most did not. I'm envious of the people who have the smaller notebooks, those seem more portable and handy/useful.

So again my reaction to Delicious is mostly "meh". I see how it could be useful to some people, but as a practical matter it has little to offer me.

Thing 13, Tagging

Yes, I use Flickr, and yes, I use tagging on my photos. I also add tags to other people's photos to aid in their being found by other users. I have mixed feelings about allowing user tags into the catalog. I guess I'd be okay with them if they were indexed separately from LCSH and could be excluded from searches at the user's discretion. Those that want to find "something, anything" will be happy, and more serious researchers will appreciate being able to tune out the "noise".

Slightly OT, but I recently offered some Metadata consultation for our Special Collections, who host various Digital Image collections. They typically use the Thesaurus for Graphical Materials (TGM?) controlled vocabulary but expressed some dissatisfaction with it when it came to one of their newer collections. I showed them what traditional LCSH had to offer via LC's ClassWeb, and they were impressed with the expanded range of descriptors that they could put to good use.

I'm also learning more about "tag clouds" and how to interpret them, but I confess I still don't really use them all that much.

I still like the old OPAC default display and I hate it when libraries install new "Discovery tools" that either bury or remove the default OPAC. I hate OPACs and Discovery Tools that don't index subject string searches to make them list browsable but only generate and re-generate such searches as keywords; I don't care if that's how "most" users prefer or if most users "don't care", *I do*.

For sites like Flickr, tagging is admittedly fun to play around with. I think LibraryThing sort of gets into that as well, but I haven't played around with that site. The advantage of tagging is that the terminology is up-to-date, while LCSH always lags behind a little, of necessity. I've also floated the idea in the past of Amazon marketing their SIPs and CAPs Metadata to libraries, or making it available for free in exchange for an Amazon link; I suppose a clever programmer could just mine the data from Amazon.com outright, but I'd rather get their permission and acknowledgment first. SIPs = Statistically improbable phrases and CAPs = Capitalized phrases/words. These give you good "snapshot" metadata that convey more of the "aboutness" of a book. This metadata is much more valuable than the anemic, vague "subject cataloging" provided by Amazon.com itself. Amazon.com also allows user tagging, besides the SIPs and CAPs generated from the actual text of the book proper (provided to Amazon by the publishers). Amazon also allows "user images" of their products, which is especially useful for non-book items like toys and tools. User interactivity is definitely a sign of the times. Some libraries also link in Amazon.com book reviews straight into the display for bib records in their OPAC. With enough clever programming, this is easily done, though it is frequently a "hack" rather than a vendor-supplied feature. The only vendors flexible enough to permit this are the Open Source pioneers like Evergreen and LibLime (Koha). Before you "hack the OPAC", you do definitely need to know what you are doing, because you could stand to really royally screw things up, too.

Tagging has its place, but it is no replacement for professionally chosen Controlled vocabulary; it is an augmentation of existing Metadata schemes.

Thing 12, Twitter

So I signed up for Twitter and started "Following" a few people. A bit later on, some people started "following" me. I don't Tweet much, or very often. Neither do they, though sometimes I get an annoying flurry of email alerts from Twitter, but mostly not.
My user name over there is Aggiememenon. Twitter seems like Facebook for people with chronically short attention spans. It's like the ADHD sufferer's social network tool.

As if said before in the past, it might serve limited useful purposes in limited contexts, like live-blogging an event in real time, or using it to communicate at an event where simply calling the person would be a breach of etiquette (such as both of you attending separate sessions at an academic conference, yet needing to relay important information to each other in a quick burst of text).

But day to day, I just can't be bothered to fool with Twitter much. I don't even log into Facebook nearly as much as I used to, and only once in a blue moon will you catch me online at MySpace. I've been adding more stuff to my YouTube channel lately, mainly unused NJROTC footage that I can add new music audio tracks to, and that sort of thing. I don't even bother to upload the unedited footage to Facebook, since it's utterly boring without the music soundtrack.

I've also been having fun with the animation site Xtranormal.com and finally broke down and bought a premium account, so that I can create more diverse animations, which I also upload to YouTube as well as the Xtranormal site itself, where these animations are "born". I could see a library doing an Xtranormal video animation explaining library services, for example. You can sign up to have your Xtranormal animatons "tweeted" on Twitter (and YouTube allows the same thing), but I don't bother. I don't have enough "followers" to care.

To those who "get" Twitter and use it effectively, my hat's off to you. I suppose a library could sent out "Tweets" advising about new books arriving from cataloging, or when books are returned that were on hold, etc. I'm not gaga for Twitter, but in limited doses I suppose it has its uses.

An Historian's Conscience

As I make my way through our re-cataloging project, I know I'm handling a lot of mundane materials that are probably candidates for weeding (like many books on the sport of Golf from the 1940s through the 1960s); but every now and then I uncover a gem that we've been hiding from the world, such as two multi-volume sets of Documentary History of the American Labor Movement, one published in the Nineteen-teens, the second edition published in the late 1950s. Both sat in our online catalog for years with very minimal records and the generic subject heading (651) of "United States."; Holdings were NOT attached in OCLC, so WorldCat did not reflect our ownership of this item. I have brought in the full catalog records from OCLC and attached our holdings, so now the world knows we own these sets, and also, our patrons have better bibliographic access to these two multi-volume sets.

Basically, I helped to recover a fragment of American memory. These are the kind of things that keep me going, that affirm to me, yes, this project is worth seeing through to the end. Recovering buried history. It is my conscience as a historian, more so than merely as a librarian, that drives me forward in this endeavor. If I did not have my background in History, I question whether I would be as relentless and zealous in finishing this re-cataloging project. There were other catalogers before me who saw fit to ignore the problem or felt it was too overwhelming to tackle, or just didn't care, or most likely, some combination thereof.

In a related vein, yesterday at Recycled Books, I bought an old used NRA publication from 1969, written by the then National Rifle Association president, titled To Keep and Bear Arms. I bought it not that I expect any particularly new or useful insights for the ongoing debate today necessarily (though sometimes this is the case, by serendipity) but as a record of American intellectual history, the history of ideas. Published in 1969, this book would have come out in the wake of the Gun Control Act of 1968. It also notes that the author's grandmother once broke up a KKK rally by firing her .22 LR pistol in the air. The book also bemoans the decline in basic marksmanship in the U.S. military and it's alleged toll on the Vietnam battlefield as a result. While that probably overstates the case, it's an interesting wrinkle in military history, too. The book is important to me for the way it captures a snapshot of the American Zeitgeist, circa 1969. While no library would collect this book if they didn't already have it, and while a Public library would be right to weed it, an Academic institution by contrast would be well advised to retain it. The book may no longer serve its original practical purpose, but it serves as a snapshot preserving human culture and history from the time it was produced, like a fossil stuck in amber. It has become a cultural artifact. I am also re-cataloging old nutrition and hygiene manuals published by British and U.S. government agencies. While virtually useless for their original intended purposes today, again, these anachronisms serve as a window to the past, reveal the way the medical profession once thought about things, and serves as a contrast to present practices.

Recorded History is no less than the Foundation upon which Civilization is built. The good librarian must also be a conscientious Historian.