Blogging is innate to the human psyche and I’ll devour my own tail if I want to

I wish I could remember where I read that blogging about blogging is the refuge of the truly desperate blogger. It has a terrible snake swallowing its own tail feel, like books about books, sitcoms about sitcoms, mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors …

Nevertheless, today I am blogging about the process of blogging. Why, at what seems the embryonic stage of this blog rather than its death knell, do I choose to write about the process of writing? Am I determined to alienate my small but devoted band of readers? (I wouldn’t actually have thought I had any until I chatted with them over morning tea and hot cross buns at Easter, and there’s a good chance that not posting for almost a month might have disillusioned even that loyal following).

(‘Ouroboros’, from MShades’ Flickr photos and reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence)

Readers of this blog — if there are still any left — are probably aware that a significant amount of what I do at work consists of monitoring the publication habits of Swinburne University researchers. This is mostly done automatically; I subscribe to table of contents alerting services for the major bibliographic citation databases like Web of Science and Scopus, and I have a Google Alert on the search term ‘Swinburne University‘. Google’s alert service notifies me when Google indexes a page containing my search term, while the citation databases notify me when someone affiliated with Swinburne University publishes in a journal indexed by that service.

Naturally, this method isn’t foolproof. As my colleague Sara mentioned some time ago now, Google Alerts are not always perfectly accurate. On average, I receive one or two unrelated alerts every day. One of the problems with my particular search terms is the existence of the philosopher Richard ‘Swinburne‘, and the fact that he works at a ‘university’. But if I just need a quick overview of who’s talking about us, it’s a good start.

Over the last few months, I’ve received well over 40 unique alerts for blog posts, newspaper articles and media contributions referring to a single piece of research published by two Swinburne researchers. Usually it’s our astronomers who attract the most attention here and overseas; our research centre is world class, and the stellar subject matter inspires an amateur cult following. It’s such a delightfully romantic Enlightenment Era profession, being a stargazer …

Yet it’s the humanities researchers who’ve been making waves of late (I hope the oceanographers will forgive me for that one). The Brain Sciences Institute researchers have recently discovered that Pycnogenol can have a significant impact on the cognitive ability of the elderly. Earlier in the year, a study conducted by Swinburne psychology researchers caused controversy in the international media as the preliminary results were (no doubt wrongly) interpreted as a third of Australians aged 18 to 25 cheat on their partners.

And the single most popular piece of research? An article published in the February issue of CyberPsychology & Behavior, which has generated a collossal amount of traffic on the Web (and in my inbox), the results of which have appeared in posts from bloggers as diverse as Welsh MPs, American cataloguing librarians, creative writing groups, marketers and the writers of the popular technology news blog TechCrunch.

So what do librarians and members of parliament have in common? What research discovery could have the power to create so much interest in the blogging world across such a variety of topics?

The answer is simple. Susan Moore and James Baker have given us all a reason to keep blogging. The study suggests that like keeping a diary, blogging can help those who feel alienated, lonely and distressed to vent their frustrations and build a support network through comments and feedback. Pseudonyms (increasingly called ‘netonyms‘ in an online context … shudder), allow bloggers to communicate thoughts and emotions that they may be too afraid to put forward under their own name.

It doesn’t sound like a revolutionary notion. In fact, it makes perfect sense. Many introverts like to write, and some of the world’s greatest writers use(d) pseudonyms when really they had no reason to be ashamed of their work. I suspect the reason that the meme (dare I use that word without fully understanding its meaning?) has appeared to reach such plague proportions in the blogging world is that for many bloggers, it gives a sense of validation to what might otherwise have been considered pointless vanity publication.

For that, I think bloggers can thank Swinburne.

Travel, or how I broaden my mind

There are many reasons why it would be easy for me to hate my journey to and fro work.

(‘Late…again’, from alistair_35’s Flickr photos and reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence)

For starters, as the crow flies I’m less than 30 minutes away from Swinburne, but it takes me almost an hour to get here. Arguably that’s my fault for not having a car or a licence to drive it (whichever order is appropriate), but cars are pollution factories and I have a conscience.

And why would anyone drive when the train stops right in the middle of the campus?

For good reason, as I’ve discovered. Whenever I hear people in other states whinge about their public transport systems, I’m tempted to lose my cool. Since Connex took over the Melbourne train system early this decade, we’ve developed new terms to describe inefficiency. My train was 25 minutes late last night and I missed the first third of the performance I was trying to attend. Of course, Connex apologised for any inconvenience caused, as they did when they cancelled my train again this morning and I stood on the platform for 22 minutes in the cold. Such a sincere, heartfelt recorded message always makes me feel better about being late for appointments.

Last week Connex gave out free sample boxes of cereal, as if to say: ‘sorry for making you late for work again — have breakfast on us’. Which is fine, but I’d rather they spent the money on improving the system (completely aside from the fact that I don’t like Special K). Food and trains don’t mix; I was entirely unreceptive this morning to a woman who thought I should enjoy having her children crawl all over me and rub their potato chip-coated fingers into my work clothes.

To make matters worse, I’m housesitting at the moment in an unfamiliar geographic location with a lovely dog, an affectionate cat and a pool. Melburnian readers of this blog will have noticed that we’ve rediscovered a forgotten concept called ‘rain’ this week. This morning, I woke up to find that the pool water was level with the surrounding tiles and there’s more rain forecast. By the time I get home, I think the dog will be teaching the cat to swim and the house will have floated away.

Such is life. Luckily, there’s one significant benefit to a long and painful train journey — it helps me catch up on my reading.

The end is the beginning is the end

Well, I never said it wasn’t going to take a while. In fact, I’m pretty sure I said I’d be at the back of the fleet, ambling along at my own pace. Many of my fellow travellers crossed the finish line well before Christmas, whereas I only just got around to enjoying my movie tickets. Nevertheless, here I am at Task 23, which asks me to reflect on the 23 Things experience.

I’ll admit, I made some careful decisions about this project at the outset. As one of the younger and most recently qualified staff members, I’m already familiar with many of the tools included in the program. I could easily have elected not to participate, but frankly I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I’m still fresh and enthusiastic enough about my profession to believe ‘I don’t get paid to do this’, ‘I’m not going to get anything out of this’, and my personal favourite, ‘I didn’t get a masters degree to do this‘ will never be valid arguments for non-participation.

In fact, I’ve gained a lot from 23 Things. It has given me the chance to get to know my colleagues better. I tend to be tied to my desk most of the time, so the chance to meet others, even virtually, has been fantastic. I didn’t expect the level of camaraderie that grew across campuses, floors, units and levels, but I think even if that were the only outcome of the program, it would be an excellent one. Writing a blog can be a bit like staring into an abyss; it’s difficult to know what the target audience is, or indeed if anyone is reading the blog at all. So thank you very much to those who left comments on my posts or stopped for a chat. Like most of you, there are times when I wondered if this project really deserved the hours I devoted to it, but your feedback has motivated me to continue when I felt like giving up.

It was a pleasant surprise to discover that several of the tools I hadn’t used before could actually help me manage my online life. LibraryThing will help me keep track of the books I want to read, and share my love of reading with others. While I might not use it directly in a work context, it will certainly make my journey to and from Swinburne much more enjoyable. If someone finally invents a day with more than 24 hours in it, I may even be able to take advantage of the recommended reading other LibraryThing users provide.

A little time between drinks and a change of web browser has helped me to appreciate the storage and sharing capabilities of del.icio.us (though remembering where to put the dots is still a challenge). I was really glad when one of my colleagues found something useful in my shared bookmarks. Ironically it wasn’t one of the many hundreds of library– or institutional repository-related resources I’ve been collecting for over a year, but a chilli chocolate cupcake recipe I hadn’t even meant to share. (Who would have thought it — I’m a person as well as a librarian!) Actually, I also recommend the rose white chocolate mousse and baklava recipe, though that’s a lot of work for a 5cm x 5cm snack.

I don’t want anyone to think that I don’t appreciate the need for authority in research works, but depending on the style of writing needed, its formality, purpose and target audience, I would consider using Technorati as a quick background research tool. While fun blogs like I can has cheezburger will always slip through on the basis of their popularity, the ranking scale of Technorati blogs should act as a basic mark of quality in areas of serious research. Blogs like Information wants to be free have a high Technorati ranking because other blogging librarians have linked to them; this alone points to their reliability. After all, some researchers have discovered that blogging is a good means of disseminating their research quickly and widely before their articles reach the scholarly press. Blogging is also a good means of creating and controlling an online profile — something that most employers will now look for in a candidate.

These are all wonderful outcomes, and in each blog post I’ve discussed the possible applications of these tools to a library setting. Hopefully anyone who enjoyed blogging for 23 Things will consider writing for the Swinburne Library Blog, as I will when I get my life back.

While 23 Things is a resounding success (on buy-in alone) when measured against most staff development programs, unfortunately not everyone has enjoyed the experience. Many of my colleagues evidently found it a trial. I’m not going to link to any of their posts for their own privacy, but I want it to be clear that I’ve read and appreciated them.

As a result, I have some suggestions for why the program almost failed:

• The time factor: Right back at the launch of the program, someone suggested that the tasks would take fifteen minutes each. Hardly. I’ve been assured by one of the committee members that this was never the case, but several of us remember hearing it so I doubt we all dreamed it. Even people who wrote the bare minimum in their posts (as opposed to my excessively long essays) spent several hours on each task. One of my colleagues noted that staff in customer service areas were made to feel guilty for wasting time if they sat down to complete a 23 Things task. The same colleague observed that on this basis, the only way for many staff to complete the program was to perform the tasks outside work hours. One staff member wrote her final task after her contract ended. I know I lost many weeks at work trying to cram in all the tasks, and since I tried not to let the program interfere too much with my (real) work, that meant sacrificing a lot of time outside work as well.
• People felt out of their comfort zone and abandoned: Some of the tasks (particularly the wiki task) were very challenging for people with limited technological experience. The digg task left many people wondering how porn, silly videos and other offensive material related to libraries, and they didn’t feel that the 23 Things committee supported them in finding out. A blog post, and an audio recording of someone reading out the blog post, is not terribly helpful when you’re confused. This was felt especially strongly over Christmas, when many of the support staff were on leave.
• The schedule for tasks was questionable: Why did we set up a blog, then abandon it to play with image generators and other ephemeral tools, then come back later to subscribe to a feed reader? It seems illogical to me. Blog and feed reader tasks should all have been together. Splitting them up over several weeks meant that many of my colleagues wrote off blogging as a pointless method of communication; they thought they had to keep visiting a blog to find out if anything new had been posted. I didn’t feel it was my place to encourage them to skip ahead to discover why this wasn’t the case, but I can understand their frustration.
• The participation progress chart damaged morale: 23 Things was touted as a ‘self-paced’ program that would stretch on for months to allow full time, part time and part year staff all to have a chance to complete the tasks. This was a relief for those of us who don’t really have a quiet period over the summer, and those who aren’t at work at all. Yet round about the halfway mark, a wiki page cropped up that documented our progress for all to see. It was an invasion of privacy — suddenly everyone knew how well or how poorly we were doing — and for those who were struggling, seeing themselves at the back of the pack was frankly demoralising. One colleague was very disappointed to be ‘cast into the ranks of the “tardies“‘, and I agree that it hurt me at the time too. The star chart meant that people who had actually put some time and effort into the program could see that those who wrote ‘I did the task’ were credited with the same number of points as they were. Next time, keep it private.

I’m sorry that this all sounds so negative, but for the sake of any future programs I’ve chosen to be very honest. This blog is a product of 23 Things, and for me it is both the best outcome and the ultimate test. Can I keep it going? It has been a great forum for me to spell out my thoughts  on information and the future of libraries, and to invite other professional colleagues to comment or debate with me. Most of my traffic so far has come through the 23 Things website, but my WordPress statistics indicate that I’ve had at least one click from an Australian blog register I joined several weeks ago. Plus now that there is actually some content on this blog, I’m going to take the plunge and join the Libraries Interact Australian library blogroll.

And perhaps I might expand my audience even further now, since I just discovered that I’ve had Google indexing turned off for the last six months (which might explain why no-one can find me … least of all me).

Best of luck, everyone!

If Second Life is the answer, what was the question?

The Library 2.0 proponents believe that we should meet our users in whatever spaces they choose to inhabit. As you know, I only partially agree with that notion at the best of times.

But what about when that space is a notorious haven for violence, perversion, pornography and criminal activity?

Australia’s greatest exponent of Second Life in libraries is without a doubt Kathryn Greenhill, Emerging Technologies Specialist at Murdoch University Library, also known by the alias Emerald Dumont. Task 22 of the 23 Things program salutes her passion for virtual worlds by asking us to investigate Second Life and how libraries are using it.

There are a number of influential library bloggers who push for libraries’ involvement in ‘gaming’, not for play but for learning. I’ll be posting on the Swinburne Library Blog in the near future (so stay tuned!) about how Swinburne internet architecture researchers use gaming technologies to measure our CPU usage. But how many true ‘gamers’ amongst our library user population would be involved in gaming for the sake of learning? Call me old-fashioned, but I imagine most of them just want to escape from the realities of work and study life and be entertained. And that’s perfectly fine.

I love the idea that new technologies can help libraries reach users whose access has previously been limited by distance, time and/or disability. Peter Lor’s inspiring plenary at VALA2008 (PDF) pushed us to think of our libraries as politicised spaces. It’s an angle I’ve always been reluctant to accept, as I believe that our role is to provide an information service with as few barriers as possible, not to push a political agenda. Yet arguably, our anti-censorship, pro-freedom stance already places us in direct opposition to any form of government, no matter how (purportedly) democratic.

The notion of librarian as anarchist is so divorced from the popular culture concept of conservative, tweed-and-pearl-wearing shushers to be laughable. Yet anarchy actually much closer to the reality than the stereotype will ever be. Underneath the calm exterior, we librarians like to stir the pot.

IFLA (in the person of Peter Lor) encourages us to bring our politics to work with us. Lor argues that we need to become skilled manipulators of the information economy to ensure that no-one is excluded or left behind. To that end, Africa-specific table of contents service Africa Journals Online has been created to help journals published in the developing world gain international exposure. Similar projects in Nepal, Vietnam and Bangladesh are also underway. Contributions to the PKP support forums indicate that the development of free, open source journal hosting software allows academics from developing countries to disseminate their research both in local and worldwide spheres, free from the usual barriers of cost, distance, language, and cultural imperialist prejudice.

I’d love to think that we could use Second Life in similar ways, but it’s an unrealistic goal. Firstly, there’s a technology barrier that for the moment remains insurmountable. Dana notes that the technical specifications for Second Life require better-than-average graphics cards and fast internet connections — beyond the capabilities of most middle-class Australian households, let alone the unreliable PC access available to users in developing countries. This barrier may go some of the way towards explaining the remarkably low Second Life adoption rates in Australia (again, thanks to Dana for an excellent interpretation of the stats). On the basis of these statistics, librarians’ usual argument for participating actively in Second Life — because our users are there — is at best misguided.

Secondly, while there are no humans in Second Life — only an endless parade of impossibly beautiful avatars — it is nonetheless run by humans, and sadly we seem as incapable of creating a socialist utopia in virtual space as we are on earth. Virtual worlds have sparked considerable media and legal controversy over cases of virtual rape and paedophilia.

If we’re going to coax people out of their comfort zones and into new and exciting places, we need to be sure that they’ll be safe. With the lack of control in Second Life — which is admittedly its defining characteristic and perhaps its greatest benefit in an entertainment context — we can’t make any such promises.

Thus, I’m inclined to disagree with ‘Priceless‘ that Swinburne Library will eventually need to inhabit Second Life, because I’m (thankfully) not the only one in vehement opposition. I support those of my colleagues who think it would be more beneficial to master the real world libraries first, before trying to expand into virtual ones.

I’m afraid that for me, A Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette has the final word on this:

‘Librarians should think twice before joining Second Life in an attempt to connect with patrons. Your patrons don’t want to be friends with you in real life, so it’s not likely that they’ll be interested in hanging out with your avatar.’

Further links:

• Infoisland.org, official website of the Second Life Library Project
• YouTube : Tour of Info Island/Second Life libraries (video, 3 mins 21 secs)
• Libraries / changing spaces, virtual places : VALA 14th Biennial Conference and Exhibition (VALA2008) : program and proceedings
• An article in defence of Second Life by a librarian who works the virtual reference desk in her spare time
• iLibrarian : A quick guide to Second Life for librarians
• Serious Games Source : Enjoying your first life? Why not add a second? Developing library services in Second Life
• Women’s voices for change : Learning in a virtual world, by Ellyssa Kroski (iLibrarian)
• CBC News : Science Friction : Virtual crime and punishment vs free thought, by Stephen Strauss — an interesting question about the lack of socialised behaviour in virtual worlds
• MediaShift : Your guide to virtual worlds

We can cast all we like, but we may not catch any fish

As I’ve mentioned before, I am not the Annoyed Librarian. But as Kathryn Greenhill suggests, every librarian gets annoyed sometimes, and some things annoy us more than others.

One of my chief irritants is the fad for podcasting.

I’ve never been able to get enthused about podcasts. For starters, podcasting is not a new technology. Like many of the ‘Web 2.0′ concepts, it’s simply an old idea repackaged and then aggressively marketed. Podcasts are just glorified audio files, and we’ve been listening to those for years.

And then there’s the term itself. It’s frankly woeful. It’s believed to have appeared first in a Guardian article in February 2004, suggested as an alternative to ‘audioblogging’ and formed by condensing the words ‘iPod’ and ‘broadcast’. Yet multimedia search directory ZENcast maintains that it’s actually short for ‘Personal On Demand broadcast’.

Whatever its etymology, ‘podcast’ is ghastly. Since it does away with spaces, it qualifies linguistically as a ‘runtogether‘, but it should never be considered a real word. And it’s not alone. ‘Podcast’ isn’t actually the worst Web 2.0 aberration of the English language — at the moment, I think it’s a tie between ‘vodcast’ and the truly horrible ‘vlogging’.

Libraries seem to be obsessed with podcasts, and I don’t know why. We’re meant to foster equitable access to content, but the use of the proprietary name ‘iPod’ suggests that we’re peddling an expensive Apple product to our users. What about generic mp3 players? Or even no players at all? Since when did libraries prostitute ourselves for a brand name? (Oh, hang on — Thomson, Elsevier, Springer, SirsiDynix — well, I guess I just blew that theory out of the water …)

(‘Katamari Damacy iPod’, from emsef’s Flickr photos and reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence)

Phil Bradley discusses some of the challenges of using podcasts in the library setting in his book How to use Web 2.0 in your library. This is a great all-round book on the rise of emerging technologies in libraries. It’s enthusiastic but not gushy, and Bradley addresses the risk of its content dating quickly by providing an accompanying website. We have a copy of the book in our collection, but I’m afraid you can’t have it at the moment as it’s sitting on my desk.

Bradley argues that podcasts have become universally popular because of their convenience. Users can listen to them on a PC while they’re working, or download them to mp3 players to enjoy at their leisure. I worry that part of the reason libraries have been so quick on the uptake is that yet again, podcasting is considered a cheap option because it can be practised and maintained in-house. The only essential piece of equipment for recording is a microphone, which often comes as part of a PC’s initial package. Add to this one of the best audio manipulation software packages on the market (which just happens to be a free, open source download), and you have a very cheap tool for promoting the library if someone with the necessary technical knowledge is prepared to donate time to the task.

I’m wary of the notion of library budgets driving library services. It’s fine to want to employ our users’ tools to help them access the library, but if we want a half-decent information service we need to maintain a high standard of professionalism. We also need to be prepared to spend money. Many people from overseas find the Australian accent impenetrable; given that our international student numbers are already sizeable, and we’re hoping to lift them to about a third of the student body over the next few years, we need to ensure that we’re not developing services they’ll find utterly inaccessible. There’s a strong argument for hiring professional voiceover artists to read our scripts. After all, we run theatre studies courses here; I bet there are plenty of students who’d jump at the chance for some work experience before they graduate. And on that basis, it wouldn’t cost us an arm and a leg.

There is also the ongoing issue of accessibility. Audio recordings are offensively exclusionary to anyone with a hearing impairment, and they are also less than appealing to students with a limited grasp of the language. All students, regardless of their ability to interpret spoken English, will tell you that listening to a lecture online is not the easiest way to absorb information — it’s too easy to become distracted and disengaged. We need to be careful that the reasons we choose to utilise new technologies are the right ones; many libraries are guilty of desperately clutching at whatever faddish Web 2.0 tools come their way in the hope that users will find their services relevant and fun. We need to be careful that we’re still driving the technology, and that it’s not the other way around.

Of course, there are applicable uses for podcasting in academic libraries. Visitors to the National Gallery of Victoria can hire audio guides to help them make the most of the Gallery’s collection. Why don’t we do the same? As Tony suggested at a forum on international student needs, a walk-around audio orientation is a wonderful tool for students who can’t or don’t want to attend conventional library tours at the start of semester. We keep being told that our ‘net generation’ users have a short attention span and are fond of discovering new things for themselves – well, this is a much more interactive way for them to familiarise themselves with our resources. There are plenty of students who choose to spend their first few weeks on campus socialising, rather than learning about our services. That’s fine, and actually extremely valuable. But we should ensure that we’re ready and waiting for them later in the semester when they need the library, and that we meet them with whatever resource they find helpful and accessible – not just a gimmick.

Blogger’s note:
If you really must listen to a podcast, you may be interested in this interview with Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Australian writer, and author of Year of wonders, March and People of the Book. I’ve always found Year of Wonders remarkably similar to a (much older) British children’s book, A parcel of patterns, but then they’re based on the same historical event so I suppose that explains it. After all, there’s no such thing as plagiarism in fiction — only homage.

I found the interview by running an exclusive audio search on the EveryZing search engine. EveryZing has a built-in multimedia player, so users can search for a podcast, click on the result that interests them and listen to the audio directly through the EveryZing website. From the player, users are also given a number of other options, such as downloading the audio, subscribing to the podcast series, copying custom HTML code to a website, or rating the podcast on digg, del.icio.us and other popular website sharing services.

Don’t be scared; I’m just a librarian

I am amazed at the plethora of potential uses for YouTube, even for those like me who have never created or shared a film. Thanks to the tip from my 23 Things colleague, Sara, I now use YouTube to preview music from new artists so I can decide whether to go to their concerts or buy their albums.

Librarians are big fans of YouTube, so there are plenty of library videos to be found for 23 Things Task 20. Personally, I like this spoof from Library videos – the best of …  blog (thanks times23) about how overdue library books give this librarian the blues:

I have a weakness for the blues, especially when the song includes the desperate plea ‘Don’t be scared; I’m just a librarian’. I haven’t had to use that line yet, but no doubt there will come a time …

Blogger’s note: Incidentally, while librarians may be fans of YouTube, unfortunately the creators of WordPress are not. For those who want to embed videos in WordPress posts, I recommend this YouTube help video; I would have been in trouble without it.

Congratulations : ye have overcome the wiki one*

Task 19 of the 23 Things program requires me to put a photo of my pet on the library staff wiki. My lilac Burmese cat Lily is already there, in excellent company with 77 other pets:

I regret that this was quite a difficult task for those who don’t have pets, those who have recently lost their pets, and those who struggle with the wiki software.

I’m not going to go into too much detail about the origin of the wiki; my colleague Dana gives an excellent linguistic rundown on her post so I’ll save myself the time. But I think I’ve made it clear in a previous post that I like the idea of wikis as a means of keeping as much of our corporate work accessible, transparent and current as possible.

There are many reasons why wikis are better than intranets in our setting. For starters, intranets tend to be a top-down method of communication where senior levels of management deposit policy documents and statements to trickle down to their underlings. There is usually little or no encouragement for contributions from further down the food chain. That’s not how we want communicate in a library. Libraries are spaces for learning, creativity and collaboration at all levels of scholarship; that should include the library staff.

Secondly, intranets are usually maintained by a single administrator who uses complex HTML and stylesheets to build pages. While our web managers are quite capable of running a system like that, it defeats the purpose of a horizontal communication tool if we have to email them every time we want to make a change. Documents on intranets tend to go out of date very quickly and become redundant when an administrator has to see to other tasks; staff members are unlikely to pay attention to an internal method of communication if it’s perceived to be constantly out-of-date.

Many of my colleagues seem to have found using the staff wiki quite stressful. I agree with Dana that remembering the special wiki markup language is actually very difficult for those schooled in the HTML encoding used in websites; it’s like learning Dutch after learning German — the languages are similar on the surface, but sometimes their similarity is actively misleading.

For me, learning to use our Swinburne Library MediaWiki software has been a process of trial and error (lots of errors and quite a trial at times). I’d never used a wiki before June last year, but I found many of the help manuals on Wikipedia very useful for both basic and more advanced skills.

Library staff will have noticed that it’s particularly difficult to upload documents to a wiki. This is because wikis can’t really compute the concept of a word processed document; the software makes the assumption (whether good or bad) that if you’re adding textual content, you’ll do it in wiki markup. Uploading images is not an easy task, either.

I was disappointed that my idealistic viewpoint on democratic flows of information is hampered by my pedantry. I found it difficult to search for specific pages on the wiki; no matter which keywords I used, I often couldn’t find the page I was looking for. So I made a decision to introduce categories to our wiki, so that it’s easier to browse by topic, unit or campus for pages of interest. Every time someone adds a page to the wiki, the software sends me an email so I can log in to add the page to a category. This might appear a little intrusive, so please let me know what you think in the comments or on my talk page.

The other problem I discovered with wikis is that attempting to navigate around them can lead users into a bit of an abyss. It’s especially difficult to go backwards. You can click the Main Page link on the left-hand side panel to return to the homepage, but if you’ve come across a page purely by chance you’ll struggle to ever find it again. My response to this problem is to add breadcrumbs to each wiki page in the hope that it’s easier to feel my way around. On our Online Services and Strategies pages, I’ve also added a section for related links at the base of each page to help users find more information or return to an area of interest. If you’d like to do this to your own pages, please feel free. I think it’s a handy trick. Again, please let me know what you think in the comments.

*’ I write unto you, young men, because ye have overcome the wicked one.’ (1 John 2:13)

Library 2.0, or why I’m not running off to join the cult just yet

I’ve been particularly interested in reading everyone’s posts on Library 2.0. Like any radical movement, Library 2.0 has its sceptics and its fanatics. There is a very lively Ning community, a large bibliography on the subject by librarians who can’t get enough of it, and there’s absolutely no chance you’ll attend a library conference this year without having to sit through at least one cringeworthy session on Library 2.0 and the mission to make libraries cool.

Yet the question remains: how radical is Library 2.0 really?

Let’s start with definitions. A quick review of the literature suggests that the boundaries are very broad, and very poorly defined.

Back in December 2005, Sarah Houghton-Jan had this cheerful opinion:

‘Library 2.0 simply means making your library’s space (virtual and physical) more interactive, collaborative, and driven by community needs …  The basic drive is to get people back into the library by making the library relevant to what they want and need in their daily lives … to make the library a destination and not an afterthought.’

But by January 2006, she was starting to sound a bit jaded:

‘Perhaps Library 2.0 is just one of many perpetual regularly scheduled library-world wake up calls to re-focus on the users and what they want.’

The same year, Meredith Farkas declared herself a 2.0 sceptic:

‘Library 2.0 and Web 2.0 don’t exist. Web 2.0 is hype. Library 2.0 is just a bunch of very good ideas that have been squished into a box with a trendy label slapped on it.’

This remark put her at loggerheads with the fanatics, or ‘twopointopians‘, as the Annoyed Librarian pointedly describes them. There is a tendency for discussions on Library 2.0 to become very heated; whether or not ‘twopointopians’ are the ‘earnest, humorless librarians’ the Annoyed Librarian suggests, they nevertheless condemn anyone who doesn’t agree with their perspective as out of touch, afraid of change, and worse still — professionally negligent.

I don’t consider this a valid description of Meredith Farkas, who has (quite literally) written the book on social software in libraries. She is hardly averse to change, or to the role that technology might play in the libraries of the future. She recognises that many libraries have fallen behind:

‘There are plenty of libraries that never do surveys and that never ask their patrons what they think or if they’re happy. Some people have been teaching the same things in their information literacy classes for years, in spite of the fact that students aren’t using the same tools to do their research anymore.’

Michael Stephens’ popular library blog Tame the Web sits squarely at the other end of the spectrum — in the pro-Library 2.0 camp. Stephens looks at how several pro-Library 2.0 writers define the concept, and compares their assumptions with Wikipedia’s definition of Library 2.0. From the snapshot of the Wikipedia entry Stephens provides, we could just as easily be reading about Web 2.0, since the definitions are almost identical:

• Beta is forever
• A disruptive idea
• Harness the long tail

What Meredith Farkas and other sceptics recognise, but the Library 2.0 champions don’t see, is that one of the biggest stumbling blocks for Library 2.0 is just that — the fuzzy term. An increasing number of library bloggers are beginning to repudiate the title ‘Library 2.0’ because they feel it has been hijacked, or ‘co-opted‘, by overzealous librarians and vendors:

‘the term Library 2.0 has been co-opted by a growing group of libraries, librarians, and particularly vendors to push an agenda of “change” that deflects attention from some very real issues and concerns without really changing anything … We’re blindly casting about for a panacea and it’s making us look like fools.’ (blyberg.net)

I would argue that the tag ‘2.0’ has always been meaningless rhetoric, no matter to which subject it is applied. Tim Berners-Lee, the originator of the Web, loathes the term Web 2.0, describing it as ‘a piece of jargon‘ so meaningless that ‘nobody even knows what it means‘. He argues that if Web 2.0 means user-generated content like blogs and wikis, then it still means ‘people to people‘, which is ‘what the Web was supposed to be all along‘.

People are sick of 2.0. Wikipedia earmarked the article on Library 2.0 for deletion in late 2006, claiming it was a neologism without substance. The entry was only saved by aggressive lobbying on the part of heavyweights like Jessamyn West, David Lee King, Karen G. Schneider, Bill Drew, Walt Crawford and the term’s originator, Michael Casey.

When we’re discussing a push towards involving users in decisions about the future of their own libraries, applying version numbers to successive waves of theory is patently ridiculous. It places an uneven focus on technology, which already sits on a pedestal in the eyes of twopointopians. Novelties such as gaming and social networking software can’t solve the crisis in the relationship between library and user. While we can’t hope to provide better services to our users without better technology, it is only the means to the end, and not the end itself.

Amanda at Data Obsessed believes that:

‘the important part of it [Library 2.0] is not the shiny technologies but the intention behind their implementation … those intentions are classic ones — perhaps those provided by Ranganathan.’

If you’re a librarian, it’s likely you’ve heard of Ranganathan, the early 20th century Indian librarian who wrote the seminal text Five laws of library science.

His laws are simple:

1. Books are for use (so every library user should be able to access them)
2. Every reader his or her book (every library should cater to a wide range of books for a wide range of users)
3. Every book its reader (even the most unusual book in the collection will find a reader)
4. Save the time of the reader (make searching for a book as quick and painless a process as possible)
5. The library is a growing organism (if the library doesn’t grow and change, it will fail to meet its users’ needs)

Can we apply these rules to our libraries? Indeed, does Library 2.0 apply these rules to our libraries?

Back in 2004, Alireza Noruzi (correctly) wondered if Ranganathan’s laws could be related to the Web:

1. Web resources are for use
2. Every user his or her web resource
3. Every web resource its user
4. Save the time of the user
5. The Web is a growing organism

Yes, technology can help us to achieve all five of Ranganathan’s goals. We can house larger quantities of digital material than we ever could with print, which allows us to cater to more users — those who can’t come into the library in person, those with a disability and those who speak languages other than English. We can use RSS feeds and social bookmarking sites to provide desirable content to our users, allowing them to pick and choose what suits them. If they desire it, we can even visit them in the online spaces they choose to inhabit. Best of all, we can use blogs to open up a two-way dialogue with our users, and to build communities of practice with others in the profession.

But there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered. What else do we need, aside from technology, to make this happen? Is Library 2.0 really a new release, or just a bug fix? What, if any, are the new features packaged in Library 2.0? And indeed, is the term ‘Library 2.0′ the only problem? If we just find a new name to describe the movement, will we be able to get on with combating the growing crisis in libraries?

Perhaps not. Meredith Farkas, who among other professions is a trained therapist, maintains that catch-all terms are misleading. Lumping everything that’s wrong with libraries under the heading Library 1.0 disguises the roots of the problem, and therefore prevents us from finding a cure. ‘Why do people like to squish things into these neat little boxes as if the world was meant to be that way?‘ she rues. ‘Web 2.0. Library 2.0. I don’t like labels and I don’t like boxes.’

Farkas argues that by continuing to squabble over the scope of Library 2.0, we are ‘focusing on the wrong things.’ She thinks we should ‘be more concrete‘ in the way we describe change to libraries, librarians and users. She maintains that the concept of Library 2.0 ‘seems a lot more pie-in-the-sky than teaching a group of librarians what a blog is, why it’s a good thing for libraries, and how they can start one.’

Of course, Farkas is right — not just that we should do away with the label of Library 2.0, but that we are wasting time thinking about it. The only reason we exist — the only reason we have ever existed — is to fulfil the information needs of our users. These needs might be explicit or implied, immediate or long-term, and the users we serve may be known to us or anonymous, but ultimately they are the only motivation for our existence. And if we’re not concentrating on serving them, whatever excuse we give, we’re failing.
A selection of perspectives on Library 2.0:

• LibraryCrunch: Born in the biblioblogosphere
• Cites and Insights: Volume 6, number 2, Midwinter 2006
• blyberg.net: 11 reasons why Library 2.0 exists and matters
• blyberg.net: Library 2.0 debased
• Annoyed Librarian : The cult of twopointopia

Will del.icio.us be Delicious in the years of maturity?

I’ve talked about why it pays staff who move around a lot to make as much content as possible available online. I’ve recommended shifting frequently-used documents to email, or a staff wiki or intranet. But what about all those wonderful webpages we bookmark each day and squirrel away in our browsers’ bookmarks folder? How can we access these from elsewhere?

The long and short of it is that we can’t. But we can submit them to an online service accessible with an internet connection from anywhere in the world.

There are several web-based bookmarking services (also known as ‘social bookmarking‘ sites) that allow me to upload my favourite pages to a website for my own use or to share with others. The beauty of this is that I can then take my bookmarks with me wherever I go — home, work or anywhere else with an internet connection — the perfect solution to the problem of finding a great site for research and being in the wrong place to bookmark it at the time.

I’ve never really gelled with del.icio.us, the most popular of these services. I’m not sure why; the concept itself is brilliant. I think maybe it’s something to do with never remembering where to put those confusing dots. Thankfully they’ll be removed in version 2.0.

(‘Coffee cream bunny rabbit bookmark’, from Amigurumi’s Flickr photos and reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence)

I joined del.icio.us when I first started at Swinburne. Back in those days I was using Internet Explorer, and I found the process of adding tags pretty convoluted. Like most users, I am only going to use new software if it doesn’t make my existing workflows more complicated. So not surprisingly, I quickly gave up on del.icio.us.

I also tried Jumptags, one of its newer rivals (not owned by Yahoo). While it looked pretty, I was frustrated that it logged me out of the service every time I left the site (even if I visited the site more than once during a single browser session). I was also concerned about test sites I wanted to bookmark for easy access but not share publicly; I wasn’t sure how Jumptags would manage these. Finally, like del.icio.us for Internet Explorer, as there was no easy way to add a page to Jumptags without having to stop work and open a new browser tab, I continued to use Ctrl + D to save a link, then export it to Jumptags later. While synchronising my browser-based bookmarks and my Jumptags bookmarks was a relatively easy process, I needed to remember to synchronise every afternoon. Not much chance of that. Again, I gave up.

What about other services? CiteULike and Connotea are popular among researchers, but as they’re designed primarily to help academics share scholarly works, images and other resources with their colleagues for export to bibliographic software, they have a completely different agenda and target audience from del.icio.us. Others like Faves, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and the truly awful Digg, return to the idea of a ‘social’ service by allowing users to ‘rate’ the bookmarks added by other users. None of them appears to completely satisfy my needs.

I acknowledge that my current system isn’t working. Even with my bookmarks neatly filed in folders, it’s hard to find anything and even harder to deduplicate. So now that I’m a Firefox devotee (and running out of time for the 23 Things program), I thought I’d give del.icio.us another shot. There’s only one hitch; I’m using Firefox 3 Beta 3 at the moment, and the del.icio.us toolbar isn’t compatible with this version yet. Damn.

I think you can probably learn a lot about me from my bookmarks. Feel free to let me know what conclusions you draw in the comments!

More links:

• Lifehacker : Auto-hide your Firefox bookmarks toolbar
• Lifehacker : Manage your del.icio.us account from your desktop with Netlicious

Blogger’s note: Amazingly, the title of this blog post relates to physics:
‘I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.’ – Albert Einstein

How a single number makes my life easier

While I enjoyed using the features available to me through iGoogle, they are more useful to me in a personal than a professional context.

One of the ways I handle quick and easy access to my most frequently used sites and services at work is through a Firefox extension called Speed Dial. It allows me to assign a keyboard shortcut to websites of my choice for faster access. Speed Dial uses this combination of keys as shorthand for the website’s URL, in a similar way to the speed dial on my phone, which conveniently stores my emergency contacts (the patient people I call when Melbourne’s public transport system breaks down) in keys 1 to 9.

I’ve put Speed Dial in charge of my homepage, so that in essence I have twelve homepages instead of one. When I open a new browser window or tab, Speed Dial displays thumbnail images of my chosen pages; I can click one of these to be swiftly directed to the site. Otherwise, I type a URL in the address bar as usual.

I use the following commands to navigate at work (this should give you some idea of how I spend my time):

Ctrl+1: Swinburne Research Bank
Ctrl+2: Swinburne Library staff wiki (authorised users only)
Ctrl+3: Google Scholar
Ctrl+4: Scopus
Ctrl+5: Index of Swinburne Library subscription journals
Ctrl+6: Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory
Ctrl+7: Swinburne Library
Ctrl+8: Google Reader
Ctrl+9: Swinburne 23 Things Blog
Ctrl+1+0: Libraries Australia
Ctrl+1+1: This blog
Ctrl+1+2: Test website (not publicly available)

Further links:

• Lifehacker : Preview favourite sites with Speed Dial
• Dana’s user experience blog : because, as Dana says, life can be simpler