Writer's Block & overcoming/brainstorming again.

I'm sort of stuck right now, have some vague ideas what I want to do with my power point presentation, but still haven't committed pen to paper, or pixels to processors yet. I know its my perfectionism flaw rearing its ugly head. I know what I need to do is just START, start & just say ANYTHING...just jump in and do it...it's always easier to edit and revise mercilessly later than it is to just get started. My mom the retired school librarian is anxious too and wants to help but usually ends up just making it worse. I'm craming a bit, doing some last minute research, devouring Michael Gorman's (2003) The Enduring Library, which is a damn good read, by the way, if your Library "faith" or inner fire is a dwindling down a bit. I also slogged through the cataloging sections of Whole Library Handbook 4, which I also recommend (the whole book, not just the cataloging chapter). I've also procrastinated by re-ordering my assorted Wish-Lists on Amazon.com; I think I'm up to four of them now. I used to have only one, but that got unwieldy. Then I created one for the stint at TAMUG, called "Maritime, Marine, and Naval Sciences", where I dumped all the collection development ideas in a common pot to stew over later. More on that in a bit. I also created a "Permaculture & Green-stuff" list, for all my ecology/permaculture related reading matter of interest. I also decided it was high time to create a separate LIS wish list, and so I did, to chuck all my directly-library related professional reading interests AND also any ancillary technology/social criticism books that are interwoven enough with LIS issues to be on the same list, like Theodore Roszack's The Cult of Information or Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet (about the rise of the telegraph and the hoopla that surrounded it, very reminiscent of the late 1990s Dot.Com era and our time as well).

While I was sorting through the Maritime, Marine & Naval Sciences list (mostly parsing out the permaculture stuff into its separate group), on a lark I jumped on OCLC's WorldCat to see how many of the books that I know I put in as suggested purchases actually DID get purchased and added to the collection after I got sacked. I was impressed that a fair number did actually make it into the collection. Not as many as I would've liked to see be added, but a goodly number, and I still think the collection is much better for it as a result of my singular efforts. Some of the areas of knowledge I added to hadn't been updated since the 1970s, for Pete's sake. I was disappointed more of my maritime heritage liberal arts selections didn't make it in, but I guess that was to be expected...it's such a sci-tech school anyway, you more or less should expect Liberal Arts to get the short end of the stick, even if it is falling within the narrow limits of their liberal arts vision down there, focused on seafaring cultures, etc. I had some really creative and interesting titles, few of which got selected, except for one on the history & culture of the societies bordering the Great Lakes of Africa, which DID get added, and I'm especially proud of that acquisition. There was a fascinating book on diaspora Jews in maritime port communities that I strongly felt SHOULD have been added, but wasn't. I'm sure that our Reference Librarian would've never thought of it in a million years. I still marvel at how often I got the impression that the print collection down there was outdated, neglected, etc. Not in all areas, no, but in many--indeed most areas on topics I knew a thing or two about. Their coverage of the modern Middle East, for example, was woefully inadequate for today's world. Fixing THAT oversight is I think my proudest achievement of all. Their library now has very up to date survey books on the UAE, Pakistan, Libya, and many other important Islamic/Middle Eastern countries, including guides to doing business in those countries. As we were ostensibly in the business of training Navy officers and Maritime businessmen, I thought it might be a good thing for them to--I dunno--know something about that part of the world--maybe? Call me crazy, but I think it was a good call.

Anyway, it was interesting also comparing the WorldCat bib records with Amazon's own item records. Amazon is starting (slowly) to incorporate seemingly more LCSH into their subject offerings--more so than when I first compiled my collection development list for TAMUG, that's for sure! It's not as robust as a well-done OPAC, but it's a surprising and welcome improvement over what they had before. Don't get me wrong, I freakin' LOVE Amazon.com, and sometimes their "if you liked this you might also like" is like a godsend when doing bibliography work. But when you're using Amazon for collection development in an obscure field like Maritime & Marine Sciences, well beyond my narrow expertise (ha!) in Naval Science, the usual features..."those who liked X also liked Y" and their already anemic "subject cataloging" starts to break down, and you are pretty much limited and stuck with hit-or-miss keyword searching, and it really starts to feel like you're panning for gold. Feels great when you find a nugget or two, but you have to sift through a lot of sand to get there after a time. Some of the books I selected were rare enough to pop up in WorldCat in only 4-5 libraries WORLDWIDE. So not likely to have made it on to anyone's LISTMANIA or anything, either, we can safely assume.

One of the talks at EndUser 2006 that impressed me the most was about "hacking the OPAC" to add some nifty "Amazon" features to plane-jane bib-records and really sex them up. It was actually pretty cool, what they were doing at this particular library in New Jersey, but I was shocked they DIDN'T incorporate what stands out to me as their PRIMO feature that is most valuable to libraries and library users....I refer specifically to their SIPs and CAPs program which is part and parcel of their "Look Inside" feature; it is basically automated indexing that parcels out Statistically Improbable Phrases (as compared to the rest of the books in the Look Inside program) and Capitalized Phrases. What I love about it is how this so readily captures bleeding-edge trendy buzzwords and current talking points that people are using in conversations about current issues today...and captures them and indexes them and makes them searchable and usable....terminology that it will take months, even YEARS to worm its way into controlled vocabularies like LCSH, if they ever do. This to me is valuable metadata worth purchasing for integrated library use, and I'm not sure Amazon quite fully appreciates just what a good thing they've got going, and what a valuable service this could be to libraries (and enhanced profit to them!), if they partnered with libraries to enhance bib record displays in OPACs in this way. I'm not enough of a tech head to know the ins and outs of how this would be done, but I know with Voyager it would mean tweaking WebVoyage at some level...I'm not technology savvy enough to do that myself, but there are plenty of IT/Systems people out there who are and can do this. The demonstrated Amazon "hacks" were cool, but they are also not sanctioned by Endeavor Information Systems; What I'm talking about would be a purchasable, fully supportable add-on to existing bib records, and obviously it would be limited to those items held by any library in particular that is also a participant in Amazon's Look Inside program, but considering the main objective is to nab up-to-date buzzwords and the like and make them searchable/indexable, etc, it's not a big deal that older records wouldn't have this feature the way many new books (though certainly not all) would have. Of course, in more obscure areas--like Maritime and Marine Sciences, for example, many of those books were new/contemporary but NOT in the Look Inside book program, so no SIPs and CAPs to be had either.

I've also been browsing/reading/re-reading LC Librarian Thomas Mann's most recent articles, more brain fodder for me. In the next day or two I'll need to sit down and really synthesize Gorman/Mann plus my own ideas and be able to talk at length (45 min) on a coherent theme in cataloging/metadata of interest to the search committee over at USC. Got my work cut out for me. Wish me luck.