I’ve been so busy between the launch of the new MPOW, my own writing, and the sundry demands of summer, that Free Range Librarian has been hard to attend to. But the French have it right: taking a breather in August is a good idea. September will come, and with it the usual efforts.
So here are some random thoughts.
The magic of knowledge: even after my harrowing experience in MySQL training, I was elated to open a big fat MySQL manual our letter carrier had just brought me and read syntax where previously the words were just squiggles on a page. I even (cautiously, on a copied page) modified a SQL statement in a query and voila! improved an internal function in the new MPOW. O.k., o.k.–“voila” took four hours. But once it was done, it felt like “voila.”
Congrats to fifteen years of Current Cites. Now, make it a feed, will ya, Roy?
I appreciate all the comments on this blog and elsewhere about hewing to the OpenURL standard. But don’t expect the tipping point to come without at least one concrete, usable example that can “tell the story.” I agree it would have been good if OCLC had implemented Open WorldCat with OpenURL, but they didn’t. So who among us can stop talking about OpenURL in the abstract and demonstrate its value in a way the rest of us can see, taste, or feel? Show me.
Seth Finkelstein commented on this blog that the Long Tail doesn’t translate to FRL being an A-list blog within a smaller community. Correct, Seth, and I don’t have A-list Anxiety (though I can think of one blog that might as well be called just that). The magic of the Long Tail to FRL is that I can have very few readers but be part of a composite voice that is significant; not only that, I can be a constituent voice on a variety of small topics. This relates to danah boyd’s observations on apophenia, in a post that talks about link bias, that most of the metrics for measuring the A-list are gender-weighted. She’s far too polite to call it a giant d–k contest, but I will. I tried to raise this point at BlogHer–in retrospect, the only problem with BlogHer was the uncritical acception of Guys’ Rules for measuring success.
We hardly ever get any library technology conferences in California, so if you are even remotely techy, you better go to LITA Forum this fall, or better yet, send your systems person, who will come back full of ideas and thoroughly grateful for the experience. Techies deserve to be among their kind for two or three days… I’ve done the systems thing in libraries and it’s good to sit down with other people and tell stories about how you were expected to keep all the servers running, untangle the problems with Norton Enterprise, get the kids’ CD-ROM server working, order, configure, and install dozens of new machines, troubleshoot an IP address that’s not responding, replace four sets of broken headphones, and oh yeah, cover the reference desk a couple of hours per week. I’ve often wondered why the cross-training never happens in the opposite direction–you know, have the reference librarians figure out why the full backup didn’t run this week, or get the children’s librarian to ghost a few new machines with the public setup.
But that gets me into a post for another day, rolling around in my head: how to be a good former employee.
Posted on this day, other years:
- Of meeting rooms and other things - 2018
- PC Easy-Bake Oven - 2004
Re Open
Re: “the uncritical acception of Guys’ Rules for measuring success”
But it is exactly the debate over how to measure success that has led to the great conversations that are happening out there right now…like danah’s great post.
I actually thought the majority of voices in the room during the opening debate were saying “toss out the concept of A-List” (or the Guy’s Rules) and that I was in the minority in thinking that I still needed to play by those rules until the rules can be changed.
It’s funny how our perceptions are so different.
Which leads me to wonder if human nature is to feel like the underdog unless we have mass adoption or agreement?
What do you think?
Proximity can be an issue–who you’re sitting next to–but my perception may have been strongly colored by the way that disagreement with the standards didn’t lead to action, even “by BlogHer 2006 we’re going to do things differently.” I’m not saying a lot of women didn’t feel that way in the moment, but in terms of moving forward from the you-go-girl experience, I didn’t see that happening. I think it CAN happen, but it will take some aggressive work, and that means signing on to the idea in a way that translates to real outcomes.
I’ve never been a student at SFSU; I attend University of San Francisco. As for “walking over” to Stanford, possibly–I don’t know how they feel about walk-ins; their website isn’t too friendly to the non-Brahmins.
At USF, I would guess that the link “Check for Holdings” in databases is probably an OpenURL link, although I can’t be 100% sure (without going there). In any case, OpenURL is used by hundreds (probably thousands) of libraries to assist tens (probably hundreds) of thousands of users/uses each day. (We see 2,000-3,000 OpenURL uses each day just from our databases, and we’re a pretty small player.)
The concrete example: An article in Architectural Record is indexed in the Avery Index. The user at, say, UC Berkeley wants to see the article. The user clicks on the OpenURL icon (which may have any of a number of names at different libraries–for UC, it’s “UC e-links”). UC’s resolver sees that UC Berkeley has electronic access to Architectural Record from three different full-text aggregations, and offers all three for the user. The user clicks on one and gets the full text. Result: UC doesn’t pay to have yet a fourth copy of Architectural Record as part of an Avery+Full-Text package, but makes better use of existing resources.
Yes, I think that it would be sad if somebody were to start ‘ranking’ blogs, however it is done, in our space.