Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

Library Garden posted on The New IT Librarian Application.
Librarian in Black responded with How to Test Applicants' Tech Skills.
Caveat Lector responded with Testing Your Techies.

Full disclosure: Before I went to library school, I spent ten years as a systems administrator in large corporate environments, and I was damn good at it. I still run my own small ISP. So I'm speaking here as a librarian/archivist but also as a sysadmin.

Library Garden's post is misguided: "If the person's resume and cover letter meet your standards, TEXT their cell phone to set up an interview. Unorthodox? Perhaps, but part of the IT personality is embracing modern technology. Texting is one of the most popular means of communication with our younger population and, if we want to stay current with our patrons, then we need make sure our IT people are familiar with it as well."

This is maybe good advice if you are trying to hire a Library 2.0 guru, but is it good advice to hire IT personnel? No, no, and no. Your IT people need to be able to make sure your servers are backed up. They need to make sure you have fast reliable networks. The need to make sure you have all of the rights you need to administer your data, and all the right tools at your fingertips. They need to make sure that your data are secure. They need to be on top of improvements in file systems, aware of security alerts, knowledgeable about server-class hardware. They probably need to be capable database administrators in a pinch. And if the library staff believes the best way to communicate with users includes setting up text notifications, then your IT people need to be able to set up a good infrastructure for sending text notifications.

Does that mean they need to take in text messages themselves? Maybe you think so. Maybe you think that nobody can set up a good infrastructure of a tool they don't themselves use. But I will tell you, there are plenty of fantastic sysadmins who are complete Luddites about personal technology. Are you really going to hire a sysadmin because she uses twitter? Or are you going to hire her because she writes Debian Linux kernel patches in her spare time? I will give you a hint: there is only one right answer to this question.

Librarian in Black hits it: "And testing an IT person's skills is a lot tricker, but it can be done...assuming you have someone on the other end who can verify the accuracy of the responses. I advocate for essay questions and actual problem-solving questions that present a real problem and ask for code,or a project plan, or a network diagram."

There are two hugely important points here: testing and having someone in-house who can verify the accuracy.

I have no idea how people do real interviews without doing skills tests. My favorite sysadmin test is to hand people this snippet:

crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 3, 175 2008-06-07 23:43 ttyzf
prw-r----- 1 root adm 0 2008-06-10 10:04 xconsole
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 202, 2 2008-06-07 23:43 xvda2
drwxrwxrwt 7 root root 5120 2008-06-10 15:56 tmp
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2008-04-24 15:48 lib64 -> /lib
-rwxr-sr-x 1 root mail 395107 2008-06-09 10:07 elm
-rwx--x--x 1 root staff 15340 2008-06-09 10:07 mmencode

I ask them to talk about it. It's a great piece, because if you have any UNIX admin experience at all, you should be able to at least give a four-word description of that whole class of text. And there are lines in there of some fairly intense levels of complexity, which in many cases only an experienced administrator would be able to describe. It's not a Pass/Fail test, it's a Show Me What You Know test, which is a far better kind. Alternately, I would ask problem-solving questions: "User calls up yelling about [situation]. Fix it." This gives you the opportunity to watch both problem-solving skills and at least the job applicant's stated user-communication skills.

But the vitally important issue here is what Librarian in Black says: assuming you have someone on the other end. It's very, very difficult -- almost impossible -- for an entirely non-technical hiring committee to select a good technical applicant. You can select someone nice, and you can select someone who will fit in with your corporate culture, and you can select somebody who talks a good game. But without finding somebody else with a similar set of job skills to sit on your hiring committee? It's all luck. Trust me, no matter how smoothly the person comes off, no matter how competent he or she seems, you can't do an accurate assessment of technical skills without having the knowledge yourself. Technical people often sound extremely confident in their skill, oftentimes with no good reason. If it is at all possible for you to get an IT person from somewhere else in your organization to sit in on the hiring committee? Do so.

All these papers will eventually be available in the Open Repositories 2008 conference repository. I'm linking to all of the placeholders; papers should be up soon.

This will be very limited liveblogging, because I'm typing in the conference and dictating betwen sessions, so I can't say much. Hopefully I'll get some good fodder for my upcoming sustainability post.

Keynote:

( Repositories for Scientific Data, Peter Murray-Rust )

Session 1 – Web 2.0

( Adding Discovery to Scholarly Search: Enhancing Institutional Repositories with OpenID and Connotea, Ian Mulvany, David Kane )

( The margins of scholarship: repositories, Web 2.0 and scholarly practice, Richard Davis )

( Rich Tags: Cross-Repository Browsing, Daniel Smith, Joe Lambert, mc schraefel )

Ow. I'm not doing this for the next session. I can blog at the breaks.

I've been far too overwhelmed to post here recently, or even to read my blogs, and for that I feel immensely guilty. I've been doing so much: getting settled in my new job at Tufts Digital Collections and Archives, working on my research on romance fiction, working (far too little) on the project I'm doing with Rebecca Rabinowitz on subversive children's literature.

I've also been talking with Alan McKee in preparation for our installation of Henry Jenkins' fangirl/fanboy detente. That has been an absolute joy. It's so wonderful whenever you find another scholar who delights in examining the same kinds of questions that you do. Both of us have found such pleasure in talking about media fandom, and I confess it has been from both a scholarly perspective and a fan perspective. This, of course, is the most wonderful part about being an acafan; the shameless delight in the subjects of our study.

I wonder how much further I would have gotten in children's literature scholarship if the academic blogging community had existed 10 years ago. Would I have made further inroads there? I've made such friends in media and fan scholarship, real genuine friends, people I love and care for -- and I suspect I will be making similar friends in romance scholarship, based on what I've seen of that community. As an independent scholar, it is so discouraging to have no infrastructure for my fields of study. And it's not like I'm not busy, it's not like I'm not doing this scholarship in my spare time after work and dinner and gardening and feeding the cats. If it weren't for the social network of wonderful people who share my interests, I don't know if I would be able to keep it up.

The next panel I attended was Educational Digital Libraries. All but the first of these papers were short papers, which might be why it's primarily the first paper I found interesting, in that first paper was more personally than professionally interesting.

( Children's Interests and Concenrs When Using the International Children's Digital Library: a Four Country Case Study )


( Digital Library Education in Computer Science Programs )

( A Study of how Online Learning Resources Are Used )

( Standards or Semantics for Curriculum Search? )

( Information Behavior of Small Groups: Implications for Design of Digital Libraries )

In my day job, in the local "metadata expert" -- or so they keep calling me, although I will continue to point out that they have a cataloging department, and just because it's got a fancy new computer-based word doesn't mean the catalogers are there we'll metadata experts. But my job entails constantly thinking how users find information. What metadata fields will end-users want, or be able to use? What metadata fields are important only for technical services? What metadata is used technologically to control rights or object manipulation? Under what circumstances is it appropriate to ignore metadata altogether and just do fulltext keyword searches?

Now I'm volunteering at the Second Life Library. (Or I will be, once I get back in; I've been locked out since the security incident this weekend and I can't get anyone from tech support to call me back. Not a great sign, but I suppose they were hacked, and so they're probably overloaded.)

At the Second Life Library, the virtual space is arranged something like a real library. As avatars move around the space, they may see a shelf of science fiction books in the science-fiction room, of reference books in the reference section, or of Gutenberg Project classics arranged in no particular order. Some of these books are portals which will open up a page on your web browser, outside of Second Life. Others will hand you a set of note cards you can read in-world which contain the text of the book, and still others (more clever, but extremely clunky and difficult to use) appear as enormous larger-than-avatar books an avatar can actually read in-world. And how do the users find these books? Well, they wander around and browse, or ask a librarian.

In other words, a collection of electronic texts is made available through one portal (the library building), and in order to find them, the patron wanders around a virtual space, browsing. (In the long run, I think it would be a good idea for the library to provide a list at the front door of all of the electronic texts made available at the library, with either hyperlinks or teleports directly on the list. And now that I'm thinking about it, it would be truly awesome if that list in-world appeared to be an old-fashioned card catalog -- with direct keyword searching, of course, but still looking like a card catalog.)

Do you see what I'm getting at? The idea is that the traditional experience of walking around the library building -- even for those users who were so much into computer worlds that they spend their days in a virtual environment and would rather go to the Second Life Library than to their local library -- is in some cases preferable to be much simpler and faster direct access search. In some ways, the look of the virtual space is the metadata: science-fiction books are behind that display of planets; reference materials are on the shelf by the reference desk.

All of us involved with the Second Life Library really hope it works out. But I will be really curious to see whether this model is currently only appealing because of its novelty. Maybe the experience of browsing through a physical space, looking for displays and book covers that catch the eye, is one that people really genuinely want.

Welcome to the William Gibson world.

I'm on the last day of my third conference in three weeks, and tonight I go home and stay home. I'm only here at JCDL for two days -- I'm missing the third day of presentations and all the great looking workshops and tutorials -- but after three consecutive conferences (and two all-day NELINET classes, and an all-day DigiTool training I'm hosting on Friday) , I only have a few brain cells left.

I've already blogged on Console-ing Passions, bu I didn't say anything about ELUNA. Mostly that's because I don't find user group meetings to be all that interesting to the blogging community at large. How much can I say about a vendor's glowing statements about its own product? And I found that my colleagues who were perfectly willing to complain (quietly and polietly; they are librarians, after all) in private wouldn't call Ex Libris on any of the claims they made about their software. Some of what Ex Libris chose to showcase was itself worthy of negative comment; their method for creating and editing METS objects, for example, is a massive kludge.

Coming to JCDL a week after ELUNA is illuminating. They're very different in intent: one is a user group meeting for a product used by acting librarians; the other is a theoretical conference co-sponsored by the ACM and the IEEE, with ASIS&T added on as an afterthought. But it's very noticeable to me that ELUNA was mostly female attendees (though the DigiTool track was about 50% male) listening passively to mostly male presenters, and JCDL is a slight majority of men with attendees actively participating in a way I didn't see at ELUNA, at least in the DigiTool track. That follows naturally from the librarians vs. programmers balance, I suspect. At JCDL, I'm enjoying the balance of theory, science, and practice -- it works for me.

Oh, also met Dorothea, which was great, and ran into Mark Anderson from the University of Iowa again. Everyone's been great; people in this sector are interesting and smart.

I'm going to put the detailed paper commentary in a second post, just to keep this from being overwhelming.

I'm getting a little bit tired of tools.

That is to say, I'm getting a little bit tired of how much excitement in libraries over all the new tools and technologies which are available to us to very easily morph from How can these new technologies fulfill needs and desires our library has? to How can we use these new technologies? Not there isn't a place for that second question, but I feel like I'm treading water in a tool-driven world. There are a lot of real needs that libraries aren't yet meeting, and the new tools and technologies really can potentially meet those needs, even in a flashy whiz bang awesome way. Simple little things such as LibraryElf meet the need of adding to the possible ways users can be notified of their records. Or the tag cloud that Penn's library is developing, which may well meet the need of helping users find information in the way that makes no sense to them. These are genuinely good ideas. And yet at the same time, I see so many people who just seem to be saying OPML! Podcasting! Library 2.0! Millennials who play World of Warcraft all day!

I'm actually not criticizing anyone in particular. Most of the librarians I know and bloggers I read are exactly on track, I think, seeing the technology available as useful but driven by needs. But I want to step back away from the flash for just minute, and go back to basics. If we're spending all this time on wonderful fancy exciting technology, why do OPACs still suck? Why is it that administering them is a nightmare, and why do so many of them not conform to user needs?

I'm excited about Eprints, though I haven't played with it much yet. It's very simple, basic tool. It does one thing, and as far as I can tell from reading about it, it does that one thing well and in easy to administer fashion. The one thing it does is arguably essential -- or at least essential if you believe in open access or institution based preservation. It doesn't have a lot of flash, it doesn't have a lot of abilities. It starts at the bottom, which is where I want to start.

I've been re-reading Walt Crawford's Library 2.0 essay [PDF]. For some points I agree with it, and on other points I disagree or don't have an opinion. But he certainly raises the question about whether Library 2.0 is about users and attitudes or about technology. Overall, I think it depends who you're talking to, and when. I think most people mean well about being user focused and needs focused, but it is difficult not to get distracted by all the new toys. Wikis and blogs and semantic web, oh my! Perpetual beta!

So while in general I think we're on the right track, I'm just a little tired. I want to step back and think about needs, and that figure out ways to fill those needs, and then, when those needs are filled, start thinking about bells and whistles.

Edited to add: I do understand that one of the rallying cries of Library 2.0 is that users should be helping determine needs, not librarians. But completely leaving aside the places where this is less appropriate, I'd say that the talk is nice, but the walk doesn't always work out that way. Letting users help determing needs isn't always about new technology. Sometimes it is, as in Penn's tagging OPAC. But sometimes it's a suggestion box, a patron group meeting, a friendly face. And technology? Isn't all about empowering the users as decision makers. Semantic web and RDF might be about the users in the long run, but right now? They just aren't going to serve the needs of most patrons. That doesn't mean we shouldn't use them, but it does mean we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking Shiny! Must be useful! For that matter, even things that look good might not be; we'll see how Penn's tags play out in the long run, and virtual reference and IM reference have worked for some user communities and not for others.

Recently, I had an extended interview for a job for which I was ultimately rejected. I don't know who did get the job, but I'm sure I'll know soon enough. You see, this interview was to become Somebody in the library world. The person in this position will be a Mover and Shaker in the world of librarianship and technology. She'll have the opportunity to see potential improvements in librarianship and make them happen, to change the rules, to be part of the paradigm shift. I'm sure in the coming years I'll see her name at conferences, in books, on papers. And I'll be a little jealous every time.

As luck would have it, my next interview -- before I'd even been rejected from the Somebody position -- was to be a Nobody. A cog in a library system, about 6 steps removed from any reference or research or information. My job would be to make life a little more efficient for those who make life more efficient for those who enable the people who do actual library work. And what I discovered, when I interviewed for the Nobody position, was that I'd been corrupted by the interview for the Somebody position. While I'd not gone into librarianship in the hopes of fame and fortune, suddenly I found all other library positions paling before the reflected glory of my unrealised Somebodyness. All my unrealised hopes and dreams (the novelist I'll never be, despite my mother's constant pressure; the open-source revolution I never made; the PhD I never got; even the BNF I'm not) brought to light in all their unattractive, spotted, warty nakedness. Suddenly the simple library jobs for which I'd dropped my career, gone thousands of dollars into debt, and changed my life seemed petty.

It's hard getting my perspective back. I remind myself that it's easy in this day and age for a smart person to become Somebody if she so chooses. I have this blog: if I think of clever and world-shattering ideas I can post them. I'm a programmer: if I don't like existing library software I can write my own, better software. I'm literate and intelligent: I can write articles, attend conferences, and generally make a Somebody of myself. But only if I want to. It's not going to happen because an employer tells me so, but only if it's so important to me to become Somebody that I do the work.

Is it that important to me? I don't know. I'm happy enough in my life, and don't generally think I need to be on the forefront of changing the world. I don't want to be a name everybody knows, though I'd certainly not mind the private satisfaction of knowing that the Somebodys out there owe some small measure of their success to me. (I always did crew in high school plays. Does it show?) It wouldn't have occured to me until I interviewed for the Mover and Shaker position and realised the idea thrilled me. (And terrified me, in equal measure.)

I have to remember that being a librarian is, by definition, being Somebody. Remind myself of all my old lessons in social justice and community activism. Think globally, act locally, and all that. And I do remember, usually. Except late at night, when I'm trying to sleep, and I'm drowning in might-have-beens.

Note to self: Self, remember how parenth_blog and mirith convinced you to become a librarian? It was because they showed you how much you'd love reference, and they were right.

Self answers: Doh! I forgot. And Self gets back to the busy game of looking forward to reference and instruction at a conventional librarian position.

Continued from Openly Available Materials.

( 2. Ease of self-service )

Continued at instantaneous gratification.

I've got some thoughts I've been pondering about some problems which are probably specific to academic reference librarianship, although I may be incorrect about that. I've been formulating these ideas for a while (with much help from cnoocy and tahnan), and I'm just going to brainstorm some ideas onto the page. Because there's a lot here, and going to break this up into multiple posts. I'm partly during this just organize my thoughts, but I would love to hear input and feedback from y'all. Am I oversimplifying, missing things, over complicating? Are these solved problems?

The question is one of relevance. What purpose does a reference librarian serve in an era of:

1. Openly available materials (reference materials on the open Web)
2. Ease of self-service
3. A perception of an absolute necessity for instantaneous gratification

Continued at openly available materials.