Ab’s Blog

I’m not saying stereotyping is a good thing, let’s get that straight upfront.

But if you sit down to watch network primetime with any member of the legal, medical, or forensic science professions, you will quickly learn that librarians aren’t the only group outraged by their treatment at the hands of the the media and entertainment industries. It seems that whether the portrait is flattering or not, no one likes to see their chosen career misrepresented for fun and profit.

In honor of Halloween, on which day, in my opinion, librarians don’t even make the top 10 list for stereotypes, I offer a suggestion: the next time you see the DHL commercial, read Harry Potter, visit Ms. Dewey, or hear the adventures of Ruth Harrison, go ahead and laugh. You’ll be doing your part to dispel the stereotype.

The conventional wisdom in adopting new tech is “Neither an early adopter nor a latecomer be.” But in our ramped up “faster” world, how do you know when you’re one or the other?

I think it was just last fall that I first learned about Facebook, and just this past spring that I started hearing about libraries and librarians opening accounts there. Yet now Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook traffic was down 12% from August to September this year. That follows on the heels of reports that Facebook users were angry over changes to the service and that library profiles were being rapidly shut down (because profiles are to be for individuals only, not organizations). It’s too early to say that Facebook is over, but the news got me thinking about how we decide where to invest our energy.

When new tools rise and fall within the space of a few months or a year, perhaps it’s not early adoption to put up a profile on Facebook as soon as it hits the mainstream news. The Facebook community represents a large segment of an academic library’s user base, and one that is particularly hard to reach. Even if the profile is taken down after, say, 4 months, perhaps the work it took was worth it for that 4 months of marketing and outreach. Or perhaps not.

I think the key to experimenting with new websites, social software, and online tools is to ask “If this site/service/tool flops/gets bought/becomes uncool, will we regret the effort we’ve put in so far or will have gotten back something worthwhile for the effort?”–whether that’s new library patrons, a more informed user base, or new staff skills.

This little note was squeezed into the middle of an All My Eye entry about Ingenta at the Frankfurt Book Fair:

We’ve been working closely with Google for over 2 years now, and the latest development is that we will be making our library holdings data available to Google Scholar’s Library Links program.

The full press release is dated September 25 and I’m surprised I haven’t heard about it before today.

So scholars within an institution’s IP range (on campus or using proxied Scholar links) will get appropriate copy links to Ingenta content without an intermediate OpenURL layer; Ingenta presumably gets its contented highlighted in some way; and Google gets data about library holdings, which it may already have in the case of libraries who participate in the Library Links program. The downside is that the scholar may have no idea why he or she is entitled to the full text, unless the library ponies up for IngentaConnect Premium, which adds branding to the Ingenta site.

It is unclear to me what the user will see for content the library doesn’t license and how the distinction will be made. All in all, an interesting development and one to watch.

It’s my birthday, which means it’s time for another diversion.

This guy (girl?), a Yariguíes brush finch, comes in my favorite colors and lives in “the last remnants of a remote Colombian cloud forest,” according to the National Geographic News article.

I said in my last entry that I planned to blog the Digital Preservation Management Workshop after the fact. Well, it’s going to take me a little while to process the wealth of information I learned (as represented by a 4″, completely full binder), so in this entry I’m skipping ahead to brief comments on the iPRES conference hosted by Cornell University on Monday and Tuesday. iPRES stands for “International Conference on the Preservation of Digital Objects.”

Ian Wilson, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, started his keynote presentation with an apt description of preservation as communication across time, “in the 4th dimension,” and, touching on the conference theme of collaboration, noted the necessity of collaboration across libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural memory institutions and advised us to take advantage of popular interest in digital preservation (how do I save my e-mail or the digital video of my wedding?) as we try to build awareness and support.

Other presentations covered the latest news on archiving audio and video; electronic journal archiving initiatives; national initiatives in the US, Switzerland, China, and the UK; and some very specific tools and projects in development.

Conference presentations will be made available, presumably through the conference website.

Between the workshop and the conference, I came back to work feeling both energized and, frankly, a little overwhelmed. The experiences made me aware of a whole branch of librarianship that I had heard of, but knew very little about. Now I’ve been exposed to both the foundations and the practice of digital preservation. On the one hand, it’s essential to preserve our digital assets, our institutional records, our history; on the other hand, there is no clear cut way to do it, no one organization can do it all, and the technologies, policies, legal issues, and funding issues, are all still in flux or perhaps not even fully confronted. Yes, it’s an exciting time to be a librarian!

Next week, I’ll tackle the 4″ binder and have more to say about the workshop.