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.