Reference and the New Library

You know some say reference is dead. They should come sit at the reference desk with me. Not that every second is busy, but people still need to discover resources. That is my job when I sit at the desk!

I show them ways to find what they are hunting. Sometimes I show them the library databases and the library catalog. I show them how to search to find “on topic” information. I show them subject searching in the library catalog. For example, if someone needs a book about William Shakespeare, they need to use the name as a subject, otherwise they will get all the books that contain his writings. If we use his name as a subject, then they get what other people had to say about his writing.

How is this related to digital resources? Some of the methods that I use to teach people lead them to digital resources. Databases contain digital resources. Library catalogs do, too.

I think we over-estimate people’s abilities to locate what they need. Most of the time, they do a quick look at Google and then think that is all there is. Google works for its purpose, but not to find specific information for a topic.

Oh yes, Wikipedia! It is a great starting point for many topics. Besides the encyclopedic materials, there are citations that can get people started toward the “right stuff.”

Reference is not dead, but those who want to kill it don’t appreciate what reference is all about! They do not understand or want to understand the “information needs” of the people who come into the library.

2011 It’s a new school year!!

Hooray, the new school year has begun. We marched in our regalia for Convocation and watched as new faculty and staff were introduced. Looking at the faces filled with anticipation and hope is always uplifting.
Working in the library right now is more about helping people log on to the network, finding “the stacks”, and dispensing general information.
I am still without an assistant. I have been using student workers to help fill the gap until the status of my assistant can be determined. It is difficult to plan when you don’t know for sure the resources that will be available. Yet, I think I will proceed along the lines that all will work out.
My task, that I have assigned to me, is ERM. Electronic Resource Management. I hope to get our resources whipped into shape so that I can get on with other projects in the library.

Trying to remember things from “Library School”

Sometimes I get busy with routine library work and need some tidbit that I know I learned in grad school. Now, I know I could go hunt it up, but sometimes it doesn’t seem important enough to go to the trouble to seek it out.
Yes, it is laziness on my part and I see evidence in our OPAC that I am not the only one who suffers from this condition. So, what should I do? I think that sometimes a person needs to decide whether doing everything “correctly” is worth the trouble of the pesky details, when most people don’t know the difference. Getting the information out and available is more important than dotting all the “i’s” and crossing all the “t’s”.

Country Driving

A brief diversion to recommend a book, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler. It is a non-fiction book. Hessler lived in China for a number of years and is a writer for The New Yorker and for National Geographic.

The book is arranged into 3 books, or sections. The first section is devoted to his travels around the Great Wall. He talks to people every where he goes and finds out a lot of the history of the Great Wall. The only historians for the wall are self-educated peasants who value the history of the Wall(s).

In the second section, he lives part-time in a village and gets to know the people there. Some valuable insights evolve about Chinese people as he tells us about his friends (and some who are not friends) in the village. He becomes observes and becomes involved in the village life. I learned a lot about education, culture, etc. in this section.

The third section is about the factories and the people in the Development Zone. He befriends some of the workers in the factory and the factory owners. While I didn’t think this section would be as good as the other 2, it held some surprises for me. The Chinese attitudes toward work and business were interesting.

I found some of my conceptions about China to be confirmed, but yet my impressions changed as I became acquainted with the characters in this book.

It is a fascinating read. I highly recommend it.

Digital projects

Since I started this blog, I have been adding digital records to our library catalog (OPAC for all you librarians out there). When I was a library assistant, or technical worker, I added batches of e-documents that I got from Dataminer. I would filter records that were created in a previous month and then process them into our OPAC.

In our department, we tried several methods to upload them. Student workers checked to see if they were already cataloged and adding 856 fields with URLs. We tried dumping in the entire batch filtered for our library. We tried variations on the same idea. We still weren’t satisfied.

When I got to be in charge of the department, I experimented some more and now have a different variation. I filter the records at Dataminer by our depository number and then download the batch. Since some of the links include records to the GPO catalog, but not to the digital item, I don’t want to include those records. I use MarcEdit to make batch changes to the entire bunch and then upload them into our OPAC. It is not quite that simple, but it is not that difficult either. It takes some tweeking of the records and of the holdings codes, and I am done.

I used a similar process to batch load e-journals and ERIC records. I may write about them another day. Hope this jogs someone into thinking about a better way than I am now using and that they let me know. Until then, it is the best that I have come up with.

It’s June and what to do??

Every summer it seems there are so many things that I would like to accomplish, like emptying 2 file cabinets full of old unused materials. Yet it is so hard to get to my projects. It is not for lack of trying. Sometimes it is the lack of time and resources, i.e. available workers, and sometimes it is other people’s priorities. You know the type, they dream up stuff for me to do because I have all this available time. They often are my peers, who convince the right people that this is something that “we” should do. Funny, the “we” is usually me, and my projects get to take a back seat. So far I am waiting on that to happen as it always does, every summer.

So back to the other issue, having the resources to get to my projects. I came back after Memorial Day and my week vacation to discover that I had virtually no workers at all. One worker who had agreed to work found the opportunity to more hours in her home department. That left me with one worker who wanted to work one hour a day! So I dug through the very few applications. Most of the applicants had another campus job and only wanted another hour or so, here or there. No real help for me there! I did see one promising applicant, who informed me that she had just decided to take a job at a summer camp. Lucky me, I now had one worker could give me one hour per day. Since my assistant is out having major surgery, not enough workers!

Fortunately, things have a way of turning out OK. The original worker didn’t get the expected hours, after all, so I now have some excellent help. Wish I could steal her, but that’s not likely.

As I said, things have a way of righting themselves, today one of my academic school year workers walked in wanting to have some hours to work! YEA!! A trained worker!! So now we can, at least, climb out from under the never ending mail! I actually started thinking about emptying those 2 file cabinets again!

Yes, I really am back!

Today I am working on rewriting the work processes for student workers. I have 2 new students beginning work today. Both are library workers who need more summer hours. They work during of the school year in other departments.

If you have never worked in Serials, you will not realize the differences from other departments in processing, shelving, etc. in this ongoing, continuing environment. Part of the reason I love it! Serials never stop coming as long as we subscribe. It is not like a book that you order and boom, it’s here. That’s about it. Well not really, but my point being that if you get a weekly serial, you get it every week, whether you are there or not! If the publisher forgets to send, if the mail doesn’t deliver, if it gets sent to the wrong department, we try to figure out how come! We claim issues that don’t show up on schedule. We place them on the shelves and then go pick them up when people use them. It is an ongoing cycle.

The fun of serials is that they do change from time to time. That weekly periodical may decide to save money and only publish every other week. It may decide to change size, by that I mean taller, shorter, etc. It may change to a new name or simply add something to its name. For example, Businessweek, a long time standard added the words Bloomberg to the beginning of their masthead and title. Fun times in the serials world. Do we reshelve? Does it need new records? How do we explain it to our novice workers.

Seems I went off in another direction from whence I started. I think I am working in the right area, Serials. Once you think everything is going one direction, off we go! Yes, there is a lot more to talk about.

Break time is over!!

Hi everyone–I decided to re-awaken my blog. I have been enjoying too much of a respite since I finished “library school.”
I have some thoughts that have been smoldering about libraries, processes, technology & more. So I think it’s time!!

I have been on vacation and tomorrow is back to work again. The Spring semester is over and Graduation is finished. My assistant is off due to surgery and I am not sure if I will have a student helper when I get back. (It was up in the air last week–student was trying for a better paying job! Can’t say that I blame her, but we do have some unofficial perks that the “private sector” does not, like understanding when there are exams to be taken or that a visit home is past due.)
Why am I writing about all this? Because it is a good time to review procedures and to identify what needs to be done and how it should be done. One of those steps we forget about as we slog along every day and don’t consider there might be better, or more efficient ways to accomplish our tasks. Also, maybe some of the tasks we are doing, don’t need to be done. Hmmmm….

I think more of the work flow can be accomplished by student workers and I intend to point more of the work their direction. We have bright students and they are capable of doing more than we sometimes expect them to do. So, tomorrow, I intend to begin rewriting the procedures!

Snow and more snow

The library stayed open even after the campus closed. Why? When the campus is closed, so should be the library. Most students thought we were closed and it endangered those who needed to stay.

A new school year–a new time!

It’s been forever since I have written to this blog, or so it seems. It was another world when I was a student and a library worker (soon to be a “real librarian”). Now, I am one and it is funny how it looks from the other side. I thought I knew, but it is not quite the same. I enjoy helping students find resources. Thank you, Dr. Van Fleet for the reference class. It should be mandatory for all future librarians.

It’s funny how each SLIS class has impacted me. It truly was a growth experience. I don’t intend to stop growing! Right now, I am experimenting with Twitter for library promotion. This summer, I worked on our library web page. I made some progress. It is good to have access again to the materials that are posted. I wish that I could upload the finished pages to the website, instead of having to edit them through the CMS (Content Management System). It is tedious to recreate html links and to have to explain to non-librarians where changes need to be made, and why. If your library allows more access to the finished product, you are lucky indeed. Unfortunately, those who are in control, do not realize that libraries have changed and “are not their father’s libraries.” Digital management is so important to library success!

I am back playing with Facebook, but it is more a personal project, much like my genealogy work. Yet nothing is a stand alone product. We are all products of all our efforts and insights. We don’t always realize it, but it is better when we do.

Information Communication and Technology–It’s what the Internet is all about.

The Internet and Communication. Our readings for our class this week discuss how it all works together, using such things as TCP/IP, packets and connectedness. What I liked about reading Joseph Miller, is that he explains the terminology, rather than just talking about it.

It seems impossible with billions of IP numbers available, yet we are using up the available IPs. Yet Miller explains that not all of these IP addresses are available for all to use. Additionally, offices and homes are using up multiple IP addresses for printers, networked peripherals, with more items being added all the time. I looked around my office at work and realize that every computer and most of the printers have IP addresses. Additionally, the computers that the library patrons enjoy have IP addresses. Furthermore, I recently read about household appliances becoming connected to the Internet, but it didn’t seem significant until I read Miller that each of these appliances would need an IP address. So if my refrigerator needs “to phone home” or tell me that we need to buy milk, then it would need to connect to our home network, or to the Internet directly. Amazing!

Other facts that I found interesting, included the connections to the Internet, some I have used over the years and others I knew were being used. Miller kindly explained the differences, rather than using jargon to talk about them. I think that is what I like about Miller the most. Years ago, computer experts would not share their information readily, for a variety of reasons. Yet today, with information all around us, it seems that there is a gap between the very basic knowledge available about technology and the jargon filled expert knowledge. When a novice wishes to learn more about technology, it can be a daunting task to break through the barriers to understanding what the technology is all about. I think Miller should have been considered as a textbook for our class.

The end and the beginning

One major milestone finished. I completed my portfolio and my defense successfully!! Hooray.

It was not easy, but I did not expect it to be. My portfolio is about my goals and my growth as a professional. My defense included a paper I wrote about digital collections. It seemed to be the best choice of my papers. I used so many things from my classes when I worked on that paper.

Funny as I have progressed through my classes, I find myself drawing from previous courses. It is a great feeling, yet it is humbling to realize how much more that is out there to learn and to know. I think that is part of the lifelong learning that we all like to talk about. The more we learn, the more we draw on it and the more we want to know.

2009 Semester

Yes, it is finally here. I am working on getting my portfolio in shape to present and keep up with classes and work. Juggling it all is part of the cost, yet ends up being part of the reward.

I look over my approaching assignments. Another blog on another server. That will make me 3 blogs. One set up at the urging of my advisor, one set up for a class, now yet another one. Maybe they should talk to one another and make my life a little bit simpler

The cataloging project is underway. My teammate and I have settled on a thesis statement and proposal. We will submit and hopefully get approval on the first try. We are looking at the problems in bibliographic tools and the possible solutions in today’s technology driven world. No that is not the exact thesis, but we are looking at bibliographic tools and how they are not meeting the needs of the users. Are the possible solutions such as RDA, EAD, Dublin Core, and more, the answer?

There is a lot of literature out there. Those catalogers like to write!

Cataloging

Yes, there are some controversies out there after all. I have just scratched the surface and stumbled upon more than I bargained for. Some I care very little about, such as which tag goes where, unless it it my favorite tag, which changes from time to time. It all depends upon what I am trying to do. Today I like the 780/785 tags. This group discusses tags that I have never seen before, so they must be very special tags indeed. As I learn about cataloging, maybe I will have some new favorites. At least I will hear about some secret tags!

Today the big discussion on Autocat was the Guardian post about OCLC claiming ownership of all the cataloging records. Interesting topic, but I think we are going to look at the OPAC and how it isn’t meeting the needs of the users of the library. There is a lot of discussion about where users start their searches. Funny it all ties back into the OCLC controversy in its own way. We will have to fine tune it. We, being myself and my partner on this project. Teamwork rules in library school!

2009 New classes

Another semester and more classes. This time it is cataloging and information communication and technology. Cataloging is about controversies? I am to think about and write about controversies in my class. Now what could be a controversy in such a topic? Hmmm…

Wait and see. There must be something, or she would not have assigned it!

Digital collections and the future

The question was asked, “What is the future of digital collections and digital librarianship? ” Where will we be with this in the next ten years? Will we welcome it?”

If the recent past is any indication, we have no clue! Now, that is not as really as cynical as it sounds. Who woulda thought that we would be exchanging pictures and sounds and all, online? Those who are younger, don’t really understand how rapidly this has evolved. Like a snowball rolling downhill. But hang on to your hats, its been quite a ride. The best may be yet to come!

Digital collections are becoming truly awesome. Digital collections are being built to show what can be done. There is more and more “wow factor” being put into these. Much like early graphic webpages with too much going on. The best digital collections, have a wow-factor, but more is needed. It is the objects that are contained and explained, and how they all relate to one another that makes a collection. If it is a historical collection being built, it needs explanations. It needs to have artifacts and tell the story. It needs to explain how, and why. OK, it needs to say: who,what, when, where, why and how. And it needs to show it! As Dr. Martens has tried to get us to understand, it’s all about the metadata. The metadata puts it all together.

Now, to me the metadata is one of the problems. There is no real standard yet. Lots of folks are trying out stuff. But even worse, some objects are being digitized and then stuck in files with numbered labels. No metadata, except that unhelpful label. It may be in a folder with similar items, but that is all. Unfortunately some collections are being built with no policy at all, just someone’s idea of “valuable stuff!’ In the worst case scenario, it may be that once it is digitized it will all be pitched. (I can hear the “everythings online” voices mummering, “Been wanting to clean out that junk for years!”) With no organization, an unlabeled digital file is worse than a bad vertical file! To build a great collection, someone has to see the whole picture, start to finish. If the collection is worth being built, it is worth labels and finding aids. Metadata!

Who will build these collections? I think the “haves.” We had a brief discussion about haves and have-nots in one of 5990 discussion boards. The haves don’t always realize what they have, but they have the funds. The have-nots know that they don’t have it, and sometimes realize what they are missing. Will certain segments of society select the “best” items to put online? Will we leave out others because we don’t want those voices heard? Will we forget where we came from with all the hue and cry? I see the “haves–money and technology wise--” making digital collections that will wow us! The have-nots will want to make some collections, so they will get awesome grants. Who will be in charge and who will see the big picture? Now comes the cynicism, probably the people who need to be in charge won’t be. Sort of like the famous “Peter Principle.” Promote someone to the highest level of his/her incompetence.

What I do see is technology taking over more and more of the searching and delivery. I know it is very unlibrary of me. Yet the ones who know the technology are the ones who are really the haves. They are determining how searches will be made and what will be retrieved. Will history be rewritten because of the new ways of searching?

Creating tags, adding metadata, can be tedius. So how can tagging objects be done? Maybe like the group of church ladies I blogged about. Everybody came and added metadata for the day. Maybe it will be done by all the eager users online doing social tagging (The church ladies used social tagging, too!) What will the role of librarians be? Maybe to help organize all these tags into some sort of authorities or some such organization. The librarians can’t do it all by themselves. They will need technology and they will need the masses. I used to think social tagging was silly, but now I am not so sure but what it may be the next metadata. It will need to evolve and develop. Too many generalities makes everything one big Google search.

If my classes have taught me anything, it is that we are the information locators and providers. We are the ones who can build the vocabularies to make social tagging work. We are the ones who will help gather items into collections. They will probably overlap and intertwine. They will be tagged with things we never thought of by ourselves, but we will adapt.

Ranganthan said we need to save the time of the user. We should not frustrate the user. We need to help the user find what is in these digital collections. To adapt Ranganthan some more, every book has its reader, well maybe every digital object has its viewer, or its use.

Last point, all this data is growing by leaps and bounds R. P. Feynemen, the physicist, (see previous post) explained how so much data could be placed on the head of a pin. We do that now. We will have to get better at miniaturization to carry this information around. We are getting there with our smaller and smaller gadgets. The metadata will have to adapt to those devices, too. That should be easily accomplished in the next 10 years. Will we welcome it or will we run from it?

A Selection of Web-Accessible Collections–Harvard

One of my classmates blogged about Harvard’s open access database for faculty. This site is a different effort. A Selection of Web-Accessible Collections is a fine example of digital efforts. Chinese Rubbings is one such collection, but on that caught my attention, and I don’t know why Is Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics. As I started looking at it, I saw the Spanish Influenza in North America, 1918-1919.

This was a pandemic and killed over 500,000 people during World War I. The collection is organized around other major outbreaks of disease worldwide. Obviously there was a real fear worldwide. According to the website the flu broke out at Ft. Riley, Kansas.

“Cover up your cough and sneeze, Otherwise you’ll spread the disease.” From the U.S. Public Health Service, “Spanish Influenza” Three-Day Fever” “The Flu”, Supplement No. 84 to the Public Health Reports, September 28, 1918: 4.

Other diseases include Cholera, Plague, Smallpox, “Pestilence,” Syphilis, Tropical diseases, Tuberculosis, and Yellow Fever. What makes this a great digital collection, are the grouping of items that are digitized and the connections to the time are shown.

It is a great example of a digital library, in my opinion.

Country Profiles and Country Studies

Believe it or not, the US government has lots of digital collections. Since I work with government documents everyday, I probably have a different perspective than many SLIS students. Government documents are not what you think they are. Yes, there are plenty of dull and dry and statistical docs, but there are plenty that are interesting. Take for instance the Country Studies. This is a “digital collection” of 101 countries that have been arranged, digitized and searchable through the Library of Congess. Since I am an armchair traveler, I enjoy browsing through this collection. Another link is the home page at: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html.

While they were published during the years, 1988-1998, they still occasionally appear in print. For example, this year the Country Study of Iran was published. Our depository recently received our copy. Some countries changed names during that timespan and some countries disappeared and others emerged. This is an interesting series because of the information about the countries tha is covered. There is more information in these pages than would normally be found in an Encyclopedia. The Country Studies digitized text in the Library of Congress and in Google. (Google’s has advertisements inserted)

Shorter and probably more interesting are the Country Profiles. Click on a country you want to know more about. There are maps and text in these profiles. They are fully digitized and are truly a “digital collection.”

As many of you know, government documents set the goal of becoming a digital collection. In many ways they have succeeded. Most new docs appear online and not in print.

As a depository, we struggle to identify our selections and provide links from our catalog, OPAC, to the new publications online. (That is our metadata to the digital depository collection!). We use a PURL (Rersistent Uniform Resource Locator) that keeps the link alive to the doc, even if it moves. The PURL is a service of OCLC. As most people know, web pages move around. Metadata such as a PURL keeps the links alive. This is the PURL to the Country Study of Iran http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS40299. That PURL probably will not work without the referral from the library catalog where it was taken. However, thanks to PURLS we can keep links to the government documents digital collection alive.

NPS digital collection

The National Park Service is one of my favorite Web site and digital collections. Yes, I think it is a digital collection. Lots of images, mingled with text. Interactive. Seems to be intuitive, so that I don’t have to think about what to do. (Another good resource—Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.) With your mouse, hover over a state and see an image of Federal Park Service land in that state. I think digital collections should be that way, easy to manuver.

Here is a little tour I took. The resources on these pages are set up for educators, but are interesting for all to see. The Website is transitioning, so even more digital images should soon be available.

For other learning styles (think Dr. Lester’s class 5053), there are sounds of nature.

Click on the picture to hear the sound.

Bringing it back to the NPS page and then home to Oklahoma.

Chickasaw National Recreation Area

National Trail is the Trail of Tears, National Historic Trail.

Oklahoma City National Memorial

Washita National Battlefield

This digital collection is interactive and interesting. Since I like the outdoors, it is fun to see (and hear).

The National Park Service has done a great job in setting up this site. Makes me wish they would include even more for me to see.

Grand-daddy of digital collections

Maybe not “the grand-daddy” of digital collections, but I don’t know what actually is the oldest. This is definitely one of the first digital collections that I ever saw. The NARA collection, otherwise known as The National Archives of the United States still continues to impress. I went back recently for a look-see and found that it has simply gotten better.

Originally, it was a bit tricky to navigate. Yet with lots of time on my hands, it was worth it to see the images that were contained in the collection. I searched by names and places and saw lots of images.

Today was easier. I discovered that today’s document, or document of the day, was from Project Bluebook. This image is of the actual report by the pilot who saw a UFO on Nov. 27, 1957. Wow!

Pilot sights UFO

or how about a link to that page?

http://www.archives.gov/foia/ufos

Even more profound, the document was linked to more information about UFOs and to background information about Project Bluebook. The metadata explained the image and provided a means to additional information. Before I took digital collections, I did not realize that metadata could perform in this fashion. Yes, I know MARC records can refer to other MARC records, but not as seamlessly as this. The digital collection is superior and has images of the documents that made this country what it is today. Yet what impressed me today was the progress that has been made with digital collections. Oh, I will definitely be back to see what else has been digitized and how they have done it.

Here’s the link to America’s Historical Documents. Take a minute, or even several. This is the stuff that makes digital collections worthwhile.

http://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/

The digital vaults with 10 billion records looked promising, at http://www.archives.gov/nae/index.html 

and they have selected more than 1200 for me to see. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see them tonight. the server did not want to co-operate when I tried it. Maybe the server will co-operate when you do.

http://www.digitalvaults.org

Privacy and digital collections

This semester I have been inundated with articles and WebPages. I am not complaining, because I found a lot of useful information in the deluge. One such article proved more thought provoking than anticipated. This article is about privacy and research on health conditions that may exist in family groups. My paper was about genealogical files, so this article didn’t seem to relate at first glance.

Yet something compelled me to read it, and I could not put it down. Cook-Deegan discusses the issues of confidential information being disclosed about family to researchers. As the family files were built, secrets were disclosed about family lineage. Since the research was being conducted about a condition, the researchers hoped to publish it. Some family members objected to publication for various reasons, even though the persons who were actually involved in the situation gave their permission. It becomes a matter of ethics and privacy when disclosure is sought. How that question is answered depends upon the researcher.

Genealogical files that are”simply family history,” if there is such a thing, contain gems like Cook-Deegan describes. Some examples: Children who are adopted and don’t know it. Previous marriages that have not been disclosed. Other “family secrets” that might be OK to tell in a family gathering, but not broadcast in a global forum such as the Web. These are important issues that digital collectors should think about when writing about family history. There are no easy answers.

Cook-Deegan, Robert Mullan. 2001. Privacy, families, and human subject protections: Some lessons from pedigree research. The Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions 21: 223-237.

Online family files–who should be included?

Digital collections in the genealogical world have a lot of issues. There are copyright, privacy, accuracy, and preservation issues; just to name a few. All digital collections have these problems, but in genealogical files they seem to be at times overwhelming. It makes me wonder why people put collections online, except for maybe 5 minutes of fame.

 

As family historians struggle to make their records more accurate, they encounter even more problems. Much misinformation is available in family trees that are placed online, and family stories abound. While some family stories may be true, others were told to build a “better pedigree” than what they found.

Yet there are reasons not to include those who might be an embarrassment to the family. Privacy issues may prevent those family secrets from being shaken loose. For example, if someone is adopted and doesn’t know it, the last place they would want to discover it would be in a family online file.

Policies of online providers, such as Rootsweb.com to limit family files to those who have “passed on,” is a good rule. It saves embarrassment, preserves privacy and saves feelings of those who might be harmed. It just makes good sense.

There’s plenty of room at the bottom

Where do we keep all these digital collections? Where will we find the space for the mushrooming digitizations?

Maybe the answer is in nanotechnology. When Feynman talks about putting 120,000 volumes of a library on a library card and mailing it out; it is still mind boggling. Feynman delivered this speech in 1959, yet it still not entirely realized. What we still haven’t accomplished is the miniaturization of the the machines, or have we? I wonder about the web and the exponential growth. Maybe shrinking it is the answer?

If we miniaturize our collections, then storage won’t be a problem. While we can compress files, this is something entirely different. Sounds like something out of the movies, yet physicists are working with nanotechnology, today. Feynman is another forward thinker like V. Bush and his memex

R.P. Feynman. 1959. There’s plenty of room at the bottom: An invitation to enter a new world of physics. Transcript of his talk is available online and is published in Caltech’s Engineering and Science 1960 issue.

Feynman’s Talk “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom:An Invitation to Enter a New World of Physics” .

Handbook for Digital Projects

I came across this online book with a lot of helpful information. Handbook for Digital Projects: A Management Tool for Preservation and Access, edited by Maxine K. Sitts. Northeast Document Conservation Center, Andover, Massachusetts, 2000.

This is the Table of Contents for the book:

Introduction

Overview: Rationale for Digitization and Preservation

Considerations for Project Management

Selection of Materials for Scanning

Overview of Copyright Issues

Technical Primer

Developing Best Practices: Guidelines from Case Studies

Vendor Relations

Digital Longevity

Scholar Commentary: An end-user speaks up

This book is online and provides much thoughtful information and practical information about building a digital collection. This collection is about preservation and not about creation of digital collections. Considerations include longevity, selection, quality, integrity, and access that are transformed by the process. Worth your time!

Ethics and online family histories

Early in my online quest for family history, I was surprised to find my personal information on the Internet for all to see. For the most part, it is not as easily found now, since major family history sites have been more vigilant and removed personal information about living individuals. The information was initially shared by a “helpful first cousin.” Our information, along with a lot of other individuals who do not know this happened, was burned into cds and sold by family history software manufacturers. When I confronted the individuals who included me and my immediate family in their family web pages, I was met with anger. They addressed my concerns by saying I should be glad that I was listed on their pages and then blocked my e-mail address from communicating with them. These people are only remotely related to me, if at all. I was shocked at their response.

Even at that time, family history collections usually excluded living relatives from online access. Of course, there are those who believe that if information is known, it should be shared. Pictures of people are still placed online and along with family trees with family gossip. As some people would say, just because you know something doesn’t mean you have to repeat it. However, repeating information about living relative involve privacy issues and the ethics of disclosing personal information.

Why does it matter? When we place things online, they are there forever. Correct or incorrect, personal, private or public. It may be retrievable through archival files, even though it was deleted. My intentions with my family history collections that I am publishing for private groups, will protect living family information. Our little secrets won’t be shared to the world by me.

For more on this topic and sharing collection information, Steve’s Genealogy blog along with the comments are worth reading.

http://stephendanko.com/blog/2007/07/31/ethics-in-publishing-family-histories/

Copyright, yes I said copyright!

I am working on sources for my paper, and I have been exploring copyright. Since it is a bit fuzzy to me, I was happy to find a source that makes things clearer to me. Yes, I know there are lots of good websites that I have seen posted by others in my class and by my professor. I still like a tangible material to look at and examine. This book is illustrated and thin. (More points in its favor!)

Some information that I gleaned from its pages:

The 3 parts that are essential for copyright are: it must be original, it must be a work of authorship, and it must be fixed in a tangible medium of expression. (Waxer & Baum 4-5).

 

Somethings are not protected by copyright. Things like slogans, discoveries, etc. If an idea and its expression can’t be separated, it cannot be copyrighted. Standard or stock features, scenes, etc. cannot be copyrighted. Works in the public domain, cannot be copyrighted. (Waxer & Baum 12-13).

 

Waxer, Barbara M. and Marsha L. Baum. 2007. Copyright on the Internet.Thompson Course Technology: Boston.

http://www.amazon.ca/Copyright-Internet-Illustrated-Essentials-Barbara-Waxer/dp/1423905512.

 

 

 

Catalog Flash Mob

What fun! St. John’s Church in Beverly, Massachusetts had an event to calalog the church’s library. Self-described as a ” ‘flash mob of cataloging fools!” They had twenty people show up and “cataloged” into Library Thing.  http://www.librarything.com/blog/2008/11/first-ever-catalog-flash-mob.php.

There are a lot of links on the Library Thing blog and lead to their “collective efforts.” Here is one of the links.  http://www.librarything.com/catalog/StJohnsBeverlyFarms

Web 2.0 and adding tags as a social group. Social and social–works for me. They turned a tedious task into something fun. As I recall from one of my classes, it needs to be labeled so someone can find it, and that is exactly what they did! Following this Legacy Library guide, they accomplished a lot!

I never have gotten into Library Thing. Maybe its time I did!

Three historical photo collections

Collection #1—A global collection of photographs. It is arranged by years and locality. This collection is for users to build. Seems a bit like a wiki, but not everyone can edit. The most recent photos are 1982, that I found. Not a large collection, yet. I enjoyed looking at the historical photos. I was disappointed that there were no Civil War photos in the US. Photography was used a lot in the Civil War and appears in many books. However, this should be an interesting collection to watch it grow.

 Histografica

Collection #2—This site is arranged by themes. American photos and it is more of a cultural commentary. People, animals, fashion, old cars. This site is a lot of fun. Check out American Princess 1922.

  Shorpy in HD

Collection #3—The Digital Collections of BYU are quite interesting. I selected search “all collections” of the Historical Photographs collection. I typed in the word America. Many portraits of Native American chiefs and others. What I enjoy about browsing this collection are the thumbnails combined with the descriptions. It is a large collection that will be fun to continue to browse. 

Digital Collections at BYU

Why Bother?

What a negative!! Arrrggghh!! Why do I bother going to library school?? Ever since I first started working in libraries in the 90s, there have been those who have predicted and called for the end of the library. From the so called “wall-less” (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/AboutLibrary/CUNews/cu_101697.html) libraries to libraries are disappearing and are irrelevant. What is the point if the professionals of the discipline do not see value to libraries and buy into the current trends that all information is available online, so who needs the libraries! While there is some truth to this supposition, it is too simplistic!

Articles such as Ross and Sennyey’s The Library is Dead, Long Live the Library! The Practice of Academic Librarianship and the Digital Revolution, are part of this long trend of devaluing librarianship, and the librarians who buy into it. While this article makes some excellent points about the necessity for libraries to change with the new trends in technology, they make me feel like I should just roll over and play dead and forget library school.

Fortunately, I don’t buy into their total package deal. Under all that hype about publishers and the Internet being all that users care about, I think they miss several important points. With the rapid development of information being available online, it rapidly changes and sometimes disappears. Information on the Web is here today and gone almost as quickly.

Service, is one of the major aspects of librarianship. Filtering all that information for people is part of library services. Whether it is done personally, or through a well designed web page is part of that service.

Collections, is another part of librarianship. Collections are being redefined in the digital age, yet what is here today may not be here tomorrow. Using one of their examples of government documents. Ask most government documents librarians about purls (http://purl.oclc.org/) and document availability. Docs are replaced at the whim of the agencies and may appear, move and disappear as pages are re-designed. Ask about what happened in post 9/11 and the Department of Interior(http://www.doi.gov/)

pages (http://www.ombwatch.org/article/articleview/213/1/104/). Like much of information that libraries provide, the most current information is not always what is needed. Sometimes previous documents are necessary for users. The philosophy being presented in this article and others, is that only the most current information is ever needed. That philosophy defies scholarship and research goals. Changing government information at the whim of the agency director flies in the face of “Freedom of Information” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act) and (http://www.usdoj.gov/oip/index.html), critical to open records access to government in the US.

Additionally, collections should not be totally in the hands of commercial entities as this paper seems to suggest. Commercial entities will provide what is profitable, not what is needed. The “long tail” or “just in case” collections are needed for scholarship and research.

Library as Space, is about the building and its uses. While the authors make some valid points that using the space in different manners call into question the existence of keeping the building, again they do not understand the changing nature of users. Those students who use the library for “study hall” also use the services of the building. By my own observation, users will browse the collection searching for ideas and alternative solutions to their information quests. Granted my experience is in an academic library, haunted by undergraduates, for the most part.

So what is the point? The point is that information professionals are important if they take themselves seriously. While Ross and Sennyey make some valid points about the necessity for changes within the field, they miss the point about what librarianship is all about!

Article cited: Ross, Lyman and Pongracz Sennyey. 2008. The library is dead, long live the library! The practice of academic librarianship and the digital revolution. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 34 no. 2: 145-152.

Allen County Digital Calendars Collection

Family history has always interested me, but I never pursued it until I started using the Internet. Now it is easier, and cheaper, to travel across country and view information about people who lived in other locations. Since I am interested in Allen County, Kentucky to research my family history, I discovered this site several years ago. It is still available through Kentucky GenWeb, although it has recently changed servers.

This digital collection is a set of calendars depicting the local landmarks of Allen County. While most digitization projects include photographs, this collection is drawings and captions. Local students of Scottsville High School drew the pictures for selection in calendars for the years 1976-2001. When I searched the Allen County, Kentucky genealogy page I discovered my ancestor, David Harris’s name and property as the April 1993 entry. Joe Murray drew a picture of the existing home, and a caption gives general information about David Harris, the property and the heirs who have inhabited the property. David Harris received the land as “compensation” for 3 years service in the Revolutionary War. Additonally, there is a reference to another property, Old Buck Creek Methodist Church, that another ancestor helped to establish. Digital collections like this make exploring historical roots more interesting.

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kyallen/calendar.htm