Come view the fruit of my labor

For our final project in IST 605 we created LibGuide pathfinders on topics of our choice as lists of reference aids for library patrons. Mine is on the nerd-o-rific subject of patristic exegesis (early Christian biblical interpretation):

http://demo.libguides.com/patristicexegesis

Please let me know if you have comments or suggestions. This will become part of my portfolio, and my hope is it will be used by an actual library in some modified form.

What I'm going to do with that

One nice thing about getting an MLS is that, unlike everything else I've gone to school for, when I tell people what I'm studying people don't ask "What are you going to DO with that?" Granted, I previously studied English (kind of useful), classical Greek and Latin (not a lot of Greeks and Romans I can talk to), and religious studies (perhaps useful, but if you're studying religion people think it's because you want to be ordained and, well, I'm female and Catholic, so, hmm). So in comparison, my MLS is obviously a professional degree, and most people think being a librarian is a legitimate job, although there are always those who think Google is going to make librarians obsolete.

I don't know if I should be ashamed to mention that I first applied to library school more than a decade ago, straight out of college. I got in, but I wasn't sure what kind of grad school I wanted to do, so I got a job in the Real World and decided after about two weeks that I would rather be in grad school. So I went to grad school, blasted through my masters and my coursework and exams for my PhD, then realized I didn't want to write a dissertation. After dithering around for a few years, having a baby, etc., I decided to get my MLS. That makes me sound flaky, doesn't it? And for a while there I was kicking myself that I didn't go straight to library school out of college and save myself ten years of dithering.

But now, aside from the fact that the path I took that led me across the country and brought two really wonderful people, my husband and my daughter, into my life, I realize that this path actually prepared me well to do the very specific thing I want to do. For one thing: subject specialists in academic libraries are usually supposed to have at least a masters degree in addition to the MLS. Check! For another, maybe I'm just a slow learner or maybe it took me more than one graduate department to find my groove, but I really learned a lot about my discipline, and how to do scholarship within it, while I was working toward my PhD.

I had the opportunity to observe Suzanne Estelle-Holmer and Amy Limpitlaw, reference librarians at the Yale Divinity School Library, for my reference class (IST 605) this semester. It's not a busy reference desk, as so many public and academic reference desks are, but they do field a lot of tricky questions from scholars and other patrons outside the Yale community, as well as helping students write research papers in patristics and biblical studies. I was able to help out with a couple of questions, and while I certainly saw skills in action that all reference librarians employ (the reference interview, for one), I answered those questions based on my previous knowledge of theology and church history. I always loved the beginning stages of research, learning introductory information on topics and tracking down sources, more than the actual writing of papers, so now I can help other people with the searching, learning more about a variety of topics in the process and building up my knowledge to help future patrons even more.

So now I have a better idea what I'm going to do with all those degrees. My dream job is essentially to do what the librarians at the div school do, although in reality I'm more likely to be a librarian in a more traditional academic environment. But in either case I'm sure the knowledge I've acquired in my earlier college experiences, as well as what I've learned about other topics I'm interested in, will help me do the job I'm training for now.

Distance learning: how it is easy, how it is not

Since it's about the middle of the semester, at least according to my syllabi and to people I know at other schools who have fall breaks, I've decided to do a couple of mid-semester inventories. This will be about the distance learning experience, which is entirely new to me.

What do I like about it? At Syracuse, courses are taught in an asynchronous format, which was a great selling point to me, because it means I don't have to be at the computer at any particular time. (If I take an online course from another school through WISE later in my program, which is certainly a possibility, I will have to conform to the requirements of whatever school offers the course, so this might be different in the future, at least for a semester.) This was a huge selling point of the iSchool for me; I have a two-year-old daughter and I do most of the childcare in our family, at least for the time being, so I appreciate the flexible schedule. I particularly like the asynchronous format of discussions, because I can give more time to formulating my contributions and considering those of my classmates than I would in a traditional class, and this gives quiet people such as myself an opportunity to speak (or write) more. Nobody sits in the front or back of the classroom, and while I can go a day or two without posting, I know my absence will be noticed. I've also found my instructors engaging and accessible, and assignments are well thought out--I've spent a lot of hands-on time at my local libraries, both public and academic, observing librarians for reference and examining books for information organization.

What's hard? Well, time management is paramount, and it's always been a skill I need to improve; it's easy to go a day or two without getting anything done when real life intervenes, and nobody I see in my daily life is involved enough with my coursework, as on-campus classmates would be, to remind me about the project that's due next Tuesday. It is also, I am not going to lie, really a challenge with a kid. I know I'm not the only one in this situation by any means, and thank goodness my primary responsibility outside of school is child care and I don't have a paying job on top of that (wow, gratitude for no income!), but two-year-olds require a lot of attention and mine is no exception. So I do most of my work during naps and after bedtime, and during those times when my wonderful and helpful husband watches her for an afternoon so I can go to the library and work or interview a real live librarian. I am feeling this out as I go along, and so far I've managed to do my work, if barely, without additional child care. I am really looking forward to preschool next year, I can tell you that.

My last post was about the NYLA conference, which I'm really glad I attended, and I think I'll really need to attend conferences or SU events periodically (fortunately I am well enough positioned, geographically, to do so), in order to have real-life contact with other library students and librarians and concentrate exclusively on librarianship for at least a short period. Distance learning, augmented by social networking, has proven to be a lot more personal than I had expected, but it is still really nice to be around other like-minded adults once in a while, and of course the long-term plan is that I will be around them every day!

NYLA 2009: My first library conference!

This week I spent about a day, or two half-days, at the 2009 New York Library Association conference in Niagara Falls. The theme of the conference was "Libraries: Peace, Love & Freedom," and many of the vendors and NYLA division booths were decked with tie-dye, lava lamps, peace signs, and other hippie paraphernalia. There were also some sessions on intellectual freedom in libraries and other relevant issues, although I only made it to two panels due to time constraints. I must poke gentle fun at the theme, having lived a bit too long in Berkeley, but it was a colorful theme and I got a neat pair and a half of socks!



I volunteered at the iSchool booth when I first arrived, chatting with prospective students and alumni. I also attended two conference sessions. One was a panel of representatives from library schools around the state, talking about what's going on in their programs. Megan Oakleaf, my professor for 605, represented Syracuse and discussed the cooperative projects between students and libraries in IST 613, Library Planning, Marketing, & Assessment, which I'll be taking next semester. I'm glad I went to that, because it got me thinking about what I might do for my project. I also went to a session on Living History Through Social Networking, which discussed the use of social networking tools to teach information literacy. See the wiki here. I learned a lot about Twitter especially that I didn't already know, and now I have a better idea of how to use it both personally and professionally.

The best part of the conference was the SU reception for students, faculty, and alumni on Thursday night. Not just because of the wine! but also because I got to meet alumni and other students. As a distance student, it's easy to feel isolated from other people, so I really enjoyed interacting with people in person, and especially meeting students who began the program this fall on campus and are in roughly the same place that I am. It's also interesting to hear perspectives on how courses are taught in person vs. online.

It also occurred to me that conferences are like the gateway week in the summer (or maybe it's the other way around!) - you can get away from the distractions of daily life for a few days (and I've discovered as I go on how many distractions we distance students have, especially jobs, families, and kids) and dive head first into the exciting world of librarianship. It's really invigorating; as I did after IST 511, I came home full of ideas and enthusiasm for the path I'm headed down. I also discovered that sections of NYLA such as ASLS (academic and special libraries) have their own little conferences, and the ASLS is having theirs in my husband's hometown of Ithaca next June, so I have a lot more of these to look forward to!

Fall semester courses: IST 605, Information Resources: Users and Services

The other core course I'm taking this semester is Information Resources: Users and Services, or Reference for short, but what we've already learned is that when it comes to the actual job of a reference librarian, "reference" is only one of many duties one might need to perform. We spent the first week of discussion looking at current job listings for reference librarians and compiling a list of skills and responsibilities required for the jobs. These skill areas included collection development, instruction, web development, management, and a whole host of other skills--often in one job! The good news is that even people like me who don't have a lot of library experience have probably developed some of these skills in other contexts, and for those who have a lot of interests, specialization is certainly not going to be a limitation. The more challenging aspect is that there are a lot of skills for reference librarians to master, and (it appears) hardly enough hours in the day for one person to do so many tasks.

I really have no idea if reference is an area I want to work in, but it's certainly a strong possibility I will staff a reference desk at some point in my professional career, so I'm looking forward to this class.

Fall semester courses: IST 616, Information Resources, Organization and Management

I'm enrolled in two core courses for my my first semester of completely online courses. IST 616 is on information organization and access, which is a topic that both intrigues and baffles me. I suspect that when it comes to the choice between patron-oriented library services and technical services, I'm going to fall on the technical services side of the line (but who knows, really), and I have at least an abstract interest in cataloguing, classification, and that sort of thing. But at the same time technical services is, well, technical, and while I am good enough at coding, classifying, and other techy things when I set my mind to it, my inner humanities scholar gags a bit whenever I see too many acronyms in one place. So I am more nervous about this course than the other class I'm taking this semester (reference sounds pretty straightforward, doesn't it? except it's not), but I'm sure it will all make sense at the end of the semester, and I'll have a better idea if this is the sort of librarianship I want to do.

IST 511, Day Five, The End

I am happy to be finished with my first three-credit course for my MLIS. I had a fabulous time, but it was also intense, so it's nice to be back home and able to decompress.

The week culminated in a poster session, where our groups presented posters on issues in librarianship. Our group researched virtual reference--providing reference services by email, Internet chat, text message, etc. as opposed to the more traditional in-person and telephone reference services--and here we are with our poster. Shout out to Laura, Lisa, Jesse, and Jason!



What I really enjoyed about the poster session, much more than I'd expected, was speaking to presenters from other groups about their topics, such as the Dewey Decimal system vs. other classification systems in public libraries and allowing potentially controversial outside groups to use public library space. Since the poster session was an hour and a half and each group member presented for half that time, I didn't get to visit every poster--and unfortunately I only had time for a quick drive-by of the winning group's poster, which was about e-books. The winning group can submit their poster to the ALA conference, and if it's accepted the iSchool will pay for some of their travel expenses, so I'm very happy for them and I hope perhaps I'll see their poster again soon, and for more than a few seconds!

After completing my residency, I'm really glad I decided to go to Syracuse, and I'm looking forward to the next two years (or so) of classes. One thing I really appreciated about both 511 and 601, but especially 511 because it related specifically to libraries, was getting an early glimpse of what it's like to be a professional. This probably sounds silly to people who go to school to, you know, get jobs, but from my perspective, as someone who's always loved school just a little too much, graduate programs in the humanities have great appeal to my inner nerd who loves to read books and think deep thoughts, but they never trained me in the same way to be a professional--professor, because that's probably what you're going to be if you get a PhD in religion or classics. I never saw myself as a professor or scholar at the beginning of grad school the way I see myself as a librarian now. It's exciting, and a little frightening at the same time, but mainly exciting.

I have a few weeks' break before I begin classes this fall, but I intend to keep up this blog through my iSchool career and beyond, and I might also comment on a backlog of "fun books" that are waiting for me.

IST 511, Day Four

So in an earlier post I briefly mentioned the potential conflict between intellectual freedom and my concerns as a parent. My daughter isn't even two yet, and aside from randomly grabbing books off the shelf when we're in the library and carrying them around because she does that with everything, she hasn't shown any interest in inappropriate materials. So I have a while before I worry about whatever content she might come across in her reading. But I am a moderately protective sort of parent and have certain values I would like to instill in my child and all that, so this is on the far horizon for me.

According to the ALA Code of Ethics, librarians are supposed to provide equitable access to all library users and safeguard their rights to privacy and confidentiality. There's nothing in the statement about minors. There's also no way the ALA can defrock or disbar you, and there will clearly be cases when the code of ethics will conflict with the interests of parents, the community, the library's own interests (what happens when the person who wants you to ban a book also controls your funding?), the law, and so on. At first the contrarian in me wants to rebel against this code, and it's not just because I'm a parent (because, let's face it, I was a contrarian before I was a parent). I am not, and I doubt any librarian really is, a librarian first and foremost with no other allegiances. We have other bonds, to our families, to other members of our community, to our local and national governments. We're each at the center of a unique web of obligations and have to figure out how to negotiate them for ourselves. Each of us holds our own unique middle ground, and nobody else can stand there with us. So I am glad the code of ethics is there, to provide the full force of its pull in the tug of war between intellectual freedom and whatever struggles against it. I hope I can always uphold it, and one reason I look forward to academic librarianship is that the university is the ideal environment for free inquiry and I'm proud to be a part of that pursuit.

This all plays into my fascination with first amendment issues. Until now I've mainly been interested in the religion clause, but it is interesting to see how intellectual freedom, the corollary to freedom of speech, plays out in the world of librarianship. Sometimes I get caught up in the debates, but for the most part I enjoy considering issues from all sides and chilling in the big gray areas.

On a lighter note, we also talked about professional organizations. In the past I've attended annual conferences for the American Philological Association (the other APA, the one that doesn't have a maddening citation style, not that I'm bitter) and the American Academy of Religion, both of which are small beans compared to the ALA, which has TWO annual conferences, plus various divisions with their own annual conferences, plus regional organizations with THEIR own annual conferences, plus other specialized organizations like the American Theological Library Association with THEIR own annual conferences. And everyone who goes to these conferences knows the point is to 1. present scholarship 2. get free stuff from vendors 3. drink and 4. hook up. Well, some of us are happily partnered and not interested in #4, but free stuff and drinking? Several times a year, in some of the country's most fabulous metropolitan areas? I'm there. Here are some librarians in my hometown at the 2007 ALA Midwinter conference.

IST 511, Day Three

I was looking forward today, because this afternoon we got down and dirty with real-live books at the Bird Library. We began our tour in the basement of the library, where Peter Verheyen, the head of preservation and conservation, showed us books from the library's circulating collections in the process of being repaired. A lot of this was at least vaguely familiar to me, since I spent a year as an undergrad repairing books at the undergraduate library at the UW. Conservation is not really something you get an MSLIS to do, so I am probably not going to be playing with the books, but as Verheyen's colleague David Stokoe pointed out, you're not supposed to read the books you're fixing, and I'd want to do that. Stokoe, upstairs in Special Collections, showed us some older books he was working on, including a sixteenth-century English translation of the New Testament from the Vulgate that predates the King James by a few decades. You can tell from the fact I was reading the book instead of examining the restored binding that maybe conservation is not what I'm called to do anyway.

Then Professor Ken Lavender took us on a "romp through the centuries," really the millennia, because it began with a cuneiform tablet. And those gorgeous illuminations in medieval Latin texts were not left out. This one, from the Le Louchier Hours, is amazingly vibrant in person.



Given my interests in classics, early Christianity, and old stuff in general, it should come as no surprise that special collections is an area I'd like to explore, and I'm hoping to take Ken Lavender's preservation course at some point when I can be on campus and play with the books.

IST 511, Day Two

Today we learned about intellectual property and copyright law, which made me realize I probably shouldn't have posted that YouTube video yesterday, technically. Oh, look over there, a purple unicorn! Hopefully that distracted the lawyers.

Our guest speakers were John Schuster from Morrisville State College and Jan Fleckenstein from the Barclay Law Library here at Syracuse. John had a really interesting career path, starting out as a philosophy grad student (!) before going to library school and working for about 15 years for a database vendor as an instructor, traveling around the world to train customers, before taking a job in his hometown at the Morrisville State College library. Jan has worked in law libraries for 25 years and has finally decided she's at the point in her career that she needs a law degree, so she's working on her J.D. now. So I took away a couple of pieces of advice from their talks:

• Learn how to learn, because you'll be learning all through your professional career.


• You can leverage one subject specialty into other subject specialties. Both of them started out somewhere other than where they expected to end up. Jan pointed out that even an undergraduate background in a specialty area can serve you as an academic librarian, so with my masters plus ABD I should be on the right track. And John ended up teaching philosophy at Morrisville, as well as talking philosophy for four hours when his boss interviewed him for his previous position.


• Be prepared to teach, because you'll be teaching patrons even if you're not doing formal instruction.

I'm tired and I've still got stuff to do, so if you think this post needs more cowbell, here you go.

IST 511, Day One

I have been running full speed for nearly 14 hours, so this is not going to be much, but here are a few things that stuck with me from my first day of IST 511 (or the first day of our residency, since we've been working online for several weeks):

One of the public librarians who spoke today, Kate McCaffrey, worked in a prison library for a couple of years. My husband and I just watched all five seasons of The Wire over the course of a few weeks a while ago, and I was reminded of this scene:



We're told that as a result of presentations from librarians who work in all different kinds of libraries, which will be happening all week, there's a good chance we'll change our mind about what kind of librarians we want to be. I am still pretty convinced I want to work in an academic library, but after today I think I'd rather work in a prison library than an urban public library!

I bring my laptop with me but try not to use it during class because I know I'll get distracted, but I'm always writing down links I want to investigate later, such as:

• International Children's Digital Library


• The Library of Congress: American Memory


• The Wayback Machine (archived web pages)


• Librarian's Internet Index: a list of trustworthy websites, compiled by librarians

I'm glad I have a few weeks after this class to decompress, because I feel like I'm getting stuffed with ideas and areas of interest I want to explore (not to mention I visited the Syracuse rose garden yesterday and now want to learn all I can about roses!). I'm really enjoying the class so far, even though I've been going pretty much nonstop for fourteen hours.

IST 601 Reflections

Today I finished an intensive two-day, one-credit course, IST 601: Information and Information Environments. Part of the intent of the course, as our professors emphasized, was to communicate the iSchool's expectations for us for the rest of the program. A lot of us haven't gone to grad school before, or been in school for years, and even those of us who are lifelong students (ahem) don't necessarily know APA style, or how a library science paper differs from a humanities paper. I found the wording of the paper assignment rather frustrating and spent Thursday (I admit it, I wrote it on Thursday) banging my head over it before I came up with a topic and wrote it, but I'm glad I did because we got prompt feedback and I have a better idea of what kind of writing I should be producing from now on. I also had the best group experience ever. I've always dreaded group projects because there is the inevitable weak link, the inevitable dithering around for hours deciding what you're going to do and talking about it ad nauseam instead of just doing it, and so on, but our group worked efficiently and we did a great job on our presentation, considering the time constraints, as did the other groups in our section. I am used to hiding away in my little cave and pounding out my innermost thoughts, as I'm doing right now, but group work really can be rewarding, and it also teaches you to work with people, which is what everyone has to do, especially librarians.

At the end of class we were asked to write down a few things we've learned from the class, so here are my Few (Important) Things:

1. Look for opportunities to innovate. If there was one word to sum up the class, it was innovation: when to do it, how to do it, obstacles to doing it...In a couple of years I'll be entering the profession full-time, and I hope to be the sort of person who sees opportunities for positive change and has the skills to propose and implement those changes. Innovation is not just about teh internetz and geeky gadgets (although those are cool), but about changing processes. I wrote down: "Be alert, not complacent, proactive, not reactive."



2. I will always be learning: skills and technologies, not just book learning. I think I get to a point sometimes where I feel like what I know is enough: with HTML, Excel, and PowerPoint, for example, I have a basic knowledge of the software/language, and heck I've been using HTML for 13 years, but I haven't moved beyond the level necessary to do what I currently want to do. I should challenge myself to keep learning more about what I already know, as well as adding new skills to my repertoire. After all, at some point what I know will become outdated, and coasting on what I know now won't serve me in the long run.



3. Be/model what you want your colleagues to do. We read an article about organizational change and discussed whether it's possible to change a negative, toxic work environment into a positive one, and after hearing some discouraging stories from people who work full-time now, mostly outside of libraries, I wondered whether it was really possible without the right management--because people know when they're being manipulated and you can't just trick them into having good morale when their managers don't model the same positive attitudes they're trying to convey. I am probably years away from library management if I ever get there and if I ever feel that's my calling. But it's likely I will be working with non-MLS staff even at the beginning of my career, and it will be important for me to model the kind of cooperative work model I want them to implement instead of just thinking that being a manager in whatever capacity gets me off the hook somehow. Actually, given my personality, I'm more worried about conveying no energy than negative energy, but there are a lot of ways to take that first statement I wrote.

This course has given me a lot to think about, and right now I feel like I could go out and change the world--well, after a good night's sleep, and if I didn't have to start IST 511 tomorrow. But I think it will permanently change the way I see processes, and my role in them.

Reader response: "Research"

The chapter "Research," by Ron Powell, summarizes the state of research in library and information sciences and briefly describes different methods researchers employ. This was a short chapter, and I found myself wishing that Powell had sacrificed a little brevity for the sake of exploring these methods in more depth and giving the reader examples of studies using each method.

It did pick up for me a little when Powell began to describe methods "more unique to the study of library resources and services" (173): content analysis, bibliometrics, and comparative librarianship. The first two methods in particular appeal to me for two reasons: first, they are more oriented toward texts than human subjects (there's a reason I wasn't a psych major), and second, they are by nature interdisciplinary; Powell doesn't give examples, but I imagine content analysis and bibliometric studies tend to focus on particular areas of knowledge, so the researcher will be able to investigate her field of expertise.

There are qualitative methods I wish Powell had described in more detail and, again, given concrete examples, because the terms sound familiar to me from my studies in religion: phenomenology, hermeneutics, reflexivity. I'm familiar with hermeneutics from my studies in biblical interpretation, but what does it mean to do a hermeneutic study in library science? I suppose that's why further reading is suggested at the end of the chapter.

I have to be honest and mention that "true" research is the reason I haven't yet finished my dissertation and why I'm not sure I want to be a professor; I love teaching, but I'm not sure I want to do scholarship. In my limited reading of library scholarship thus far, however, I think it's possible I'd be more interested in library research than humanities research, because it seems more pragmatic and concrete than the sort of scholarship I was doing as a religious studies student. Part of my journey over the next two years will be discovering whether this avenue of librarianship is one I want to explore.

Powell, Ron. "Research." The Portable MLIS: Insights From the Experts, ed. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008, pp. 168-178.

Reader response: "Library 2.0 at a Small Campus Library"

Note: This is an assignment I submitted for IST 511. I couldn't find anything about social networking at theological libraries, but I think a small campus library is a similar enough environment that if I do find a job in a seminary/div school library, I will be able to apply the authors' experiences to my own situation.

In “Library 2.0 at a Small Campus Library,” Jason D. Cooper and Alan May describe the use of Web 2.0 technologies by the library faculty at Montevallo University, a small public liberal arts university in Alabama. The authors demonstrate how a small academic library with limited personnel, financial resources, and in-house technical expertise can take advantage of freely available Web 2.0 software to serve its users and promote library resources to the campus community.

The library’s experiments with Web 2.0 began in 2006, when two technical services librarians proposed the idea of a library blog to the library’s director. Given enthusiastic authorization to proceed, the librarians created a blog on Blogger.com which eventually included five librarian co-bloggers. The librarians used the blog to publicize new databases, announce important information such as a library closing due to a power outage, and promote readings and other library events. The director also used the blog to respond to patron comments solicited in the biannual LibQual survey. To collect data about blog usage, the bloggers tracked the number of visits, visitor location, visit duration, and other information with Google Analytics, finding that the blog received several thousand views each month, most of them, predictably, within close proximity to campus.

Following the blog’s success, the librarians experimented with other Web 2.0 technologies. They generated a custom RSS feed with ListGarden for new browsing items, creating a web page for the display of the 50 most recent items and linking them to the library’s online catalog. They also featured photos of the library and other local sights of interest on Flickr, using the geotagging feature to show where photos were taken and publishing pictures to their blog using Flickr’s RSS capabilities.

At a Library 2.0 Summit at Mississippi State University in 2007, three of the librarians met with librarians from other institutions to discuss the implementation of Web 2.0 technologies at their home libraries. Central themes included “the challenge of bringing together the many stakeholders within a large institution,” where the layers of bureaucracy can increase the time needed to approve a new program, and the importance for all libraries, given the public nature of Web 2.0 technologies, of “cultivat[ing] an atmosphere of trust among those who represent the institution in online spaces and among the directors and administrators who oversee their work” (p. 94).

The librarians who attended the summit continue to discuss the implementation of Library 2.0 at their home institutions on social networking sites such as Ning and Facebook. The authors summarize the significance of the Montevallo librarians’ experiences for libraries of all kinds, especially smaller academic libraries: “The software and Web tools described here are readily available to libraries of all sizes and budgets. Librarians should work with their directors and administrators to employ these tools as part of their ongoing efforts to effectively serve their campus communities” (p. 95).

Cooper, J. D. and May, A. (2009). Library 2.0 at a Small Campus Library. Technical Services Quarterly, 26(2), 89-95.

The Portable MLIS Chapter 14: "Readers Advisory Serives: How to Help Users Find a 'Good Book'"

When I go to the New Haven Free Public Library, I'm usually headed to the children's section on the second floor with my daughter. But every few visits I linger to look at the new books, which are on a row of shelves to the right of the central aisle to the elevators and the rest of the first floor, across from the circulation desk. New books are arranged by subject, and usually I check out history and politics, occasionally fiction and other sections. Unless I'm looking for something in particular, it's where I do all my browsing, and 90% of the books I check out are new books, most of which are impulse...not purchases, but checkouts. So from a merchandising standpoint, as Mary K. Chelton explores in her essay on RA services, my local library is doing a great job. (They use the ends of stacks, too!)

I don't think I've asked a librarian to recommend me a book based on my reading preferences since junior high or high school, and this is partly because I prefer to do my own research, partly because I have plenty of unread books to keep me occupied, partly because the process has become so automated and convenient in its automation that I find it a lot easier to play with Amazon's rating and recommendation system than to ask someone in person for a book recommendation. When I originally started purchasing from Amazon, its recommendations were (I believe) based merely on a keyword search of what other items were similar, so if I had enjoyed one edition of Hamlet, it recommended the Signet edition, the Arden edition, the Folger edition, and so on...rather frustrating and not particularly useful from my perspective, or, I suppose, Amazon's. As years have gone by, the recommendation system has become much more sophisticated, based on other customers' preferences and purchases as well as my own browsing and buying history.

It's hard to imagine one human being taking the place of all this, but as Chelton describes the role of the RA librarian, the librarian has resources Amazon doesn't, including tools like NoveList and the ability to provide in-person reading groups and book talks. And there is nothing like the sort of conversation all book lovers enjoy: "I just read The Sparrow and loved it! Jesuits and space aliens--how can you go wrong? Do you have any ideas for what I should read next?"

There are, as Chelton notes, online sources such as listservs and blogs that offer a similar experience remotely and asynchronously. It occurred to me while reading that the opportunities Chelton describes--listservs, blogs, wikis--are not really ideal for this sort of discussion. I've posted on various online special-interest forums (e.g. photography, wedding planning, parenting), and I think threaded discussions on open forums would be much preferable to all of the above--easier to read than a listserv (which even in the old days when there were few alternatives, I couldn't tolerate long because so much chat, much of it irrelevant to my interests, clogged up my inbox), more democratic than blogs, where discussion topics originate with one person or a small group of people, and more personal than wikis, which are not really discussions anyway. And, of course, they exist--I've never participated in an online book forum, but a quick Google search turned up a bunch.

Readers advisory is not an area of librarianship I've considered, and since I am probably headed the academic route, I'm not sure I would have the opportunity to do it anyway, but it does sound like fun and a great way to keep up with new books being published, as well as to revisit old favorites. So if I were to go into public librarianship instead--and who knows where I'll end up, anyway?--it's an option to consider.

Chelton, Mary K. "Readers Advisory Services: How to Help Users Find a 'Good Book.'" The Portable MLIS: Insights From the Experts, ed. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008, pp. 157-167.

The Portable MLIS Chapter 11: "Information Retrieval: Designing, Querying, and Evaluating Information Systems"

The topic of information retrieval is an odd combination of something I find quite interesting and yet also something I know little about (at least from the design end). This response will probably be less cohesive than previous responses, because I will just comment on a few individual topics that brought other things to my mind.

1. Considering the question "How do you organize your closet?" (113) made me realize that most of the organization I do is entirely for myself. I am the sort of person who has a lot of clutter but knows roughly where everything is, but when I have to explain to someone else how I organize something--say, when I am trying to help my husband navigate the kitchen--I realize that my organizational strengths, if they exist, do not lie in creating a system so transparent that after five years of marriage my husband can figure out where I put the colander. So if it began with closets (again, loosely but for my purposes functionally organized), I would be fine, but creating information retrieval systems for other people is going to be more of a challenge.

2. "In design, there is rarely one perfect solution...design requires multiple decisions and compromises, and you can never be sure that you couldn't have designed the system better if you had worked on it longer." (114) So here I am planted squarely in the realm of the humanities: There Are No Right Answers! You Can Never Be Wrong! But Also, You Can't Know If You're Right! I love this sort of uncertainty, and yet it drives me batty. There is some comfort, though, in the problem-solving aspect: information retrieval begins with problem definition. This is how I think about more abstract philosophical thought processes: when I was teaching introductory religion, I pointed out to my students that each major religion poses one great human problem that needs to be solved, and then provides a solution. So much of life--information retrieval, philosophical meditation, plumbing--lies in figuring out what the problem is.

3. Metadata. I am intrigued by cloud tags, which I use on SmugMug, my photo hosting site. If you want to see what my tag cloud looks like, you can go here. If you want to see about 800 pictures of my daughter, you can click on "auletta." This is not only a shameless plug for my cute kid (it's that too), but also a good example of tagging on SmugMug in general. I use tags mainly for my own reference and for my family's, so any relative can click on his or her name and find any pictures he's in, or so I can click on "maine" and find all the pictures I've taken in Maine. If you search all of SmugMug for photos tagged Auletta, the overwhelming majority of results are pictures of my daughter, who has a conveniently (in this case) unusual name. Three of the other four are pictures of Ken Auletta. But if you search "tupelo," which is both a kind of tree (and what's tagged in my photos) and the name of a town in Mississippi, you will get pictures of water tupelos as well as pictures of Tupelo, Mississippi, and other pictures tagged or captioned with the word "tupelo" for whatever reason. If you search "tupelo mississippi," my tupelo tree pictures come up because they were taken in Mississippi (but not in Tupelo), so I have them tagged with "mississippi" too. There I go, throwing off your search. There is probably some inevitability in spurious results, even if "all and only the relevant information" is the ideal.

Tupelos in Mississippi, but not Tupelo, Mississippi.

The other thing I think is cool yet troubling about metadata is the idea that "the way that we group things affects what we know and think about them" (116). The first thing that popped into my mind was the classification of ancient Christian beliefs into "orthodox" and "heretical." We treat heretical Christian sects differently than what eventually became orthodox Christianity, even though who the winners-who-write-history would be was not clear when the heretics and proto-orthodox Christians were tussling it out. So we assign the descriptor "heretical," which is a pejorative, to sects that competed on equal ground with proto-orthodox Christianity at the time they flourished. Thus the person who designs information retrieval systems, and especially the person who assigns tags/descriptors/subjects/etc., must be conscious of the way that simply grouping things can reflect the designer's inherent biases.

Weedman, Judith. "Information Retrieval: Designing, Querying, and Evaluating Information Systems." The Portable MLIS: Insights From the Experts, ed. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008, pp. 112-126.

Updated July 9, 2009.

The Portable MLIS Chapter 9: "Reflections on Creating Information Service Collections"

G. Edward Evans offers seven pieces of advice to librarians specializing in collection development, which is an area of librarianship I think I'd really enjoy, so I'm glad it was assigned. I will just discuss a couple of them in this entry.

Remember our "product" is access to information regardless of format. Given my love for all things old and especially for books, new and old, I am probably a little prone to the view that "libraries equal books," although I am trying to disabuse myself of that notion, and I'm sure I will have shed it once I've completed my MSLIS. I remember being somewhat scandalized back in 1997 when I was working as a circulation clerk at the undergraduate library at the UW and the new library administrator was busily weeding (hemorrhaging?) books to make space for a computer lab on the second floor (the first floor was reference and periodicals and the third was and remained stacks). In retrospect it makes sense to provide all those terminals for students to access increasingly digitized information, but at the time I thought it was wasteful and contrary to the mission of the library to make it contain fewer books. I think it is possible the "e-book bandwagon" Evans dismisses (p. 91) will still happen, although it is unlikely to replace physical books: Amazon's Kindle has been reasonably successful, and CEO Jeff Bezos has said he's open to the idea of facilitating library lending of Kindle editions (Levy, p. 4). Of course, since any e-book limits its readership to a reasonably affluent economic class due to the initial cost of the devices, e-books will not likely replace physical books for library users anytime soon (although some libraries might consider circulating Kindles too--due to the expense and risk, this might be more appropriate for academic libraries, for example).

Just one more little thought on this section: was anyone else a little put off by the statement, "We had to rework any order for nonprint items into a form that looked like a book or journal order" (90-91)? I can understand the motivation, and perhaps the ends justify the means, but it seems rather...deceptive.

Embrace change and be flexible. I feel fortunate in that I'm old enough to have experienced a lot of technological developments in my adult life, so I appreciate them and could recognize their significance, and also young enough that adopting them has not been too traumatic. When I began college in 1993, students were just beginning to use email; in 1996 I created my first website using my allocated space on the UW server; in 1998 I was able to take a writing course that integrated Internet technologies and reinforced basic HTML. I regret that I haven't always kept up with technological developments as quickly as they come up and have been reactive rather than proactive, but I hope to reverse that trend at the iSchool, taking to heart Evans' advice that "Being able to help your colleagues get through what may be viewed as traumatic change by some people will be a great career asset" (92).

Build relationships. This piece of advice is not about building relationships with patrons (although that's important too and is covered earlier), but with vendors. Evans encourages librarians to have a friendly and cooperative relationship with outside entities (jobbers, parent organizations, etc.), rather than the adversarial attitude that a lot of librarians seem to have, in his experience. This seems intuitive to me, although maybe it's not because librarians, who usually work for nonprofit organizations, don't have to worry about the bottom line, making profits, pleasing investors, and so on, the way that vendors have to do. My dad runs a small business and, since he's responsible for sales as well as making sure the day-to-day operations of the business function, he has to work with people in a wide variety of professions, which he does well and which I've always found an admirable quality. This certainly seems to me preferable to a de facto antagonistic attitude toward vendors displayed by the authors of Chapter 3, "Human Rights, Democracy, and Librarians," who say if we lose sight of "our main purpose" (with which, in itself, I don't disagree), "We will purchase the titles vendors tell us to (who are in turn told what to publish by their corporate HQs), accept only the Web sites our corporate controlled filters filter..." (33). I have a knee-jerk reaction to this view of corporations, which I think are in themselves neutral, noting that 1. corporations are motivated by profit, in part so they can continue to exist and serve their customers--I suppose a world full of tiny free presses motivated by ideals rather than profit would be nice, but ridiculously inefficient for whoever is doing collection development, and 2. corporations are made up of people, and you have to deal with them, and if you can have pleasant interactions with people you have to deal with, life is just a lot nicer.

Evans, G. Edward. "Reflections on Creating Information Service Collections." The Portable MLIS: Insights From the Experts, ed. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008, pp. 87-97.

Levy, Steven. "The Future of Reading." Newsweek, November 26, 2007. Page 4 of the online version, retrieved June 25, 2009. http://www.newsweek.com/id/70983

Updated July 9, 2009.

The Portable MLIS Chapter 1: "Stepping Back and Looking Forward"

In "Stepping Back and Looking Forward: Reflections on the Foundations of Libraries and Librarianship," Richard E. Rubin summarizes the missions of libraries throughout history, culminating in the modern mission of the American public library, and discusses four foundational values of libraries today:

1. Intellectual freedom


2. Service and the public good


3. Education


4. The value of the past: Preservation

In a future post I will return to the subject I promised to cover in my first post on this blog, the interplay of preservation and innovation. Here I will just say that we moderns tend to view periods such as fifth-century Athens and the Golden Age of Roman literature as ages of innovation, as opposed to our view of periods such as early medieval western Europe (from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Carolingians) as focused on preservation of the ideas of earlier, more intellectually fecund eras, or more pejoratively as periods of stagnation. There is some truth to this view, but it is overly simplistic to someone with an interest in late antiquity. So I have a quibble with Rubin's headline "Think Again" for the age of the great Muslim and Byzantine libraries of the Near East (p. 6): for one thing, it suggests there was no original thought happening in the monasteries of western Europe, which is not the case; for another, it suggests that preservation is not a thoughtful process, which, while it may not have been for your average sleepy, nearsighted monk desultorily copying manuscripts, certainly is so in a more schematic sense. Simply deciding what to preserve, for example: there is my old favorite Cassiodorus' Institutiones, an annotated bibliography of works to include in his ideal library; see also the medieval obsession with etymologies, bestiaries, and other encyclopedic accumulations of knowledge. (End rant by inveterate history geek.)

And indeed, in the section "Belief in the Value of the Past: Preservation," Rubin acknowledges that preservation is an active, thoughtful process in which librarians "[n]ot merely...store contents, but...represent, organize, and maintain those contents in such a way that people have access to the materials of the past" (12). Representation entails not merely the material book or other source, but the creation of "digital repositories that make information and artifacts available to those who would never be able to consult them in the past" (13). (See my earlier post about the new connections between texts made possible by digital media; not to mention that even the most educated ancient reader with the most prodigious memory would have had much more finite access to texts and might not even have been aware of texts that existed in his or her time that are now part of our modern canon, because the transmission of texts was so cumbersome.) Likewise, the creators of catalogs and digital repositories organize information in as intuitive and user-friendly a way as possible, which involves no small amount of thought and consideration of user needs and thought processes. Maintenance of resources might not be as laborious as it was in the days when texts had to be copied so they would not be lost, but the technology in which those texts subsist is ever-evolving, so that digital technologies which we imagine to impute some sort of permanence may be obsolete in much less time than it takes paper to disintegrate, and even books that pass through dozens of hands each year require constant repair and replacement (to which I can attest from the humble beginnings of my library career in book repair).

One way in which the mission of preservation of today's libraries differs from that of earlier eras is that today we consider it worthwhile to preserve as much information as possible, and have the resources to do so. Due to the finite availability of materials and scribes, as well as the time-consuming process of copying books, librarians before the advent of printing could only preserve so many texts, and countless others were lost to fire, pillage, and other accidents of time (much to the chagrin of classicists who would love to have all the plays of Euripides, or all the books of Livy). So there was inherent to the system the sort of prioritization that is not necessary today, a process informed by value systems of librarians (i.e. for the period that interests me, a religious system, not that all texts preserved were religious). Not that every library preserves every piece of information in existence today, but the combined capacity of libraries more nearly approaches the ability to do so, and librarians themselves think it is a worthy goal to do so. In this manner libraries provide users as much as possible with "unimpeded access" to as much information and as many viewpoints as possible, leaving it up to the user rather than the librarian to select which expressions and viewpoints to consider (10). So the function of the library to preserve, as it has always done, now more than ever underlies the value of intellectual freedom (and certainly the other core values as well).

I should not make this entry much longer; however, while I haven't engaged all the content of this chapter, I do wish to note that as a parent of a toddler, I'm sure I will become increasingly interested in intellectual freedom as it relates to minors, particularly the question, "Who is ultimately responsible for what a young person is reading or seeing--the librarian or the parent?" (11). To what degree do we entrust to librarians the duty of acting in loco parentis? And does this depend on whether the librarian is at a school or public library? I am inclined to think, as a parent, that librarians have a responsibility in this regard similar to that of teachers, which might lead them to inhibit my daughter's (and other children's) intellectual freedom more than Rubin would like (and perhaps if there were a paragraph break before "The struggles to protect Intellectual Freedom" on p. 11 I would be assuaged). No doubt I have another sixteen years as a parent and my entire career as a librarian to puzzle this one out.

Rubin, Richard E. "Stepping Back and Looking Forward: Reflections on the Foundations of Libraries and Librarianship." The Portable MLIS: Insights From the Experts, ed. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008, pp. 3-14.

About Vivarium: etymology and vivaria past and present, plus reflections on living knowledge

Vivarium in Latin literally means "a place for life," and is usually used to describe artificial microsystems like aquariums and terrariums created by people for the purpose of observation and research (see the wiki article). Cassiodorus' Vivarium on the Ionian Sea was named after the fishponds on his estate. In honor of the ancient Vivarium and its library, Saint John's University and the College of Saint Benedict have named their online digital collection Vivarium as well. (Saint John's is notable for its abbey, the setting of Kathleen Norris' The Cloister Walk, as well as its Liturgical Press and the St. John's Bible, a modern illuminated Bible whose exhibit I visited at the Library of Congress a couple of years ago.)

Naturally there is immense appeal to the image of the vivarium for the librarian. In addition to the importance of Cassiodorus' Vivarium itself to the mission of preserving classical texts for subsequent readers, there is the beauty of imagining collections of knowledge as living things. We treat information often as knowledge that was created or discovered before us and that will survive us, and the mission of preserving it as the mission to keep texts alive (I use the word "text" in a less limited sense than the verbal sense, although it is mostly with words that I am myself occupied), not only in a physical sense (i.e. these very pages) but in a less literal sense: texts only have meaning and value insofar as they are available too, and in fact read by, readers, and succeeding generations of them, we hope. Different readers will have different ways of reading texts--a modern reader of Homer will understand the Iliad differently, and find a different sort of value in it, than an ancient listener, to say nothing of the way that, say, the Bible is read and interpreted even now, and has been, by different readers in different communities in different religions. So the vivarium keeps texts alive not only by keeping them in existence and available and read, but by making it possible for those texts to be ever-reborn in different readings by different readers. (It is no different for art, music, and other sorts of collectible media; only the vehicle is different.) In that sense, even though the mission of the vivarium is preservation, the media it preserves are constantly changing.

Also constantly changing, especially in our times, is the vehicle of preservation. History has seen a slow change in the preservation of knowledge, from oral traditions (still strong in some cultures) to written forms of preservation, including cuneiform, wax and stone tablets, writing in ink on papyrus and paper, either on scrolls or bound in codices, then printing, and finally in our times in recordings of various sorts, film, and digital media. So even though the canon for, say, a classicist or patristics scholar is relatively finite, contained in a series of Oxford texts or the Patrologia or whatever, the medium for storing those canons is always being updated, although always with reference to the ancient manuscripts, such as they exist. So someone like me who is obsessed with ancient texts must nevertheless be proficient in using modern technologies to access them--which comes with the benefit of ease of use, searchability, and other advantages formerly unavailable. Searchability, hyperlinking, etc. also make the texts more alive by making them refer/speak to/with each other in much more tangible ways than previously--glosses on texts and juxtaposition of one text with another are instantaneous, perhaps taking some of the joy of research and making connections away from the reader but also increasing the possibility of new connections that were unseen before because they were difficult to make and because the reader had to be a repository unto himself (or herself, but we are talking generally about male readers in the long previous centuries I mean here) in order to be able to make them.

About Vivarium

In this introductory post I want to sketch out a few themes on which I will expand in future posts. For now I will just briefly explain what this blog is, why it is called Vivarium, and what directions I anticipate it taking over the course of the next two years and beyond, although I can't even begin to predict where I will go from here--such is the joy of life and especially of new beginnings.

I am beginning the masters program in library and information science at Syracuse University this summer as a distance student. (Due to program requirements and my upstate New York connections, my program will include occasional residencies.) My previous academic background is in classics and English as an undergraduate, and religious studies as a graduate student, with a particular interest in patristics, especially that slippery period called late antiquity, from the decline of the Roman empire to the early Middle Ages. This blog takes its name from the monastery founded by Cassiodorus late in his life on his estate in southern Italy. One of the missions of his monastery and the object of his writings was to found a library for the preservation of classical learning, both sacred and secular. I am interested in the interplay of preservation and innovation, as well as the transition from classical Roman culture to full-fledged Christendom, both of which the idea of Vivarium captures (and other concepts as well).

As my interests and background suggest, I am passionately attached to all things old, and of course this includes rare books, even the form of the book-as-codex itself, which may become obsolete within my lifetime. It is probably a healthy challenge for me to enter a program (not to mention a field) that is very technology-oriented. I hope I will be able to look back as well as forward, learning to handle old information in new ways.

More to come.