I have been offline as far as RSS feeds are concerned and have just gone back to my Bloglines account to find 717 posts waiting for me to read. Yeah, right. I missed Dave’s glorious return to Circulatable with another piece of first rate commentary and musings. Since I have been wandering in the same mental realm I am going to post on the same topic rather than just comment.

My library has a lecture series called “Evolving Directions in Academic Research and Resources” where we invite a faculty member to talk about his/her research and comment on the role of the library: its strengths and challenges in the world of a researcher or scholar. The last speaker was a historian who in an offhand comment mentioned that the one thing that is missing from the online environment was an experience comparable to browsing the stacks.

I brought this up with a number of colleagues when talking about the state of the library catalog and of course everyone immediately said that we do have such an experience: our online catalog’s browse by call number feature. But there is a significant disconnect between what librarians know about resource discovery processes and how much our patrons know about those processes. This is where one of Dave’s comments was particularly poignant: “One thing I think libraries need to think harder about: the actual production and presentation of, and not just the collecting of, cultural materials.”

This is a problem that boggles my mind: we have got the goods but we don’t know how to tell people. However, I am convinced that we are on the brink of breaking through this barrier. For example, I have recently seen Jeremy Frumkin’s great work with LibraryFind. This is an example of applying the slickness and sheen to library world a la Google, iTunes, Flickr.

I get inspired by these things, too. I took some time to mock up what might be a better virtual browse the stacks display so that we can start thinking about how to bridge the gap between how a faculty member thinks about the online research experience and how librarians think about it. Dave, I think we are undergoing a change, but it is a change in process more than anything else…

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In the new College and Research Libraries News you’ll find the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Annual Report for 2006.

My eye was instantly drawn to the “Advocacy” section of the report. Although there are both a legislative advocacy component as well as a “grassroots” advocacy component (that is, “To provide training for academic librarians in influencing, persuasion, and advocacy”) – there is no component for advocacy to the public.

While I realize that academic libraries don’t necessarily have an agenda to bring the general public into an awareness of their successes, trials, and difficulties, it leads me to wonder about the success library organizations have had in getting their issues to the general public.

In my mind, legislative advocacy has to be undergirded by an awareness in our polity about the issues that concern libraries. The voting public needs to know. So don’t we need “public advocacy”?

Each month American Libraries has a section on banned books and the battles they raise. I wonder how much of this gets attention in local and national media – any ideas?

Are our organizations (ALA, ARL, etc.) doing enough of this kind of outreach to a wider audience?

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ALA announced yesterday that librarians attending the upcoming Midwinter conference will have the “opportunity to proudly proclaim their ‘radical’ and ‘militant’ support for intellectual freedom, privacy, and civil liberties” by purchasing a red, white, and blue button that reads:

“Radical Militant Librarian – Defending Access, Defending Privacy, Defending Freedom.”

The buttons will cost $2.00, unless bought in bulk (at which time the cost goes down). What a radical bargain! And in the colors of France!

ALA claims that the slogan on the button is a response to FBI complaints about politically “radical, militant librarians” who raised their voices over the PATRIOT Act.

My anticipation is that many of our least radical, and certainly least militant librarians will happily, jauntily purchase a button and sport it at work the following week. The kitsch value of this button is irresistible (”Must… buy… buttoon… must… have one for my blazer.”) I also anticipate that many of our most militant library spokespeople will not be wearing this button at ALA this summer.

From the OED:

Militant: 3. a. Combative; aggressively persistent; strongly espousing a cause; entrenched, adamant.

Radical: 3. e. Characterized by independence of, or departure from, what is usual or traditional; progressive, unorthodox, or revolutionary (in outlook, conception, design, etc.).

That this button is a fundraiser is a granted point. But the slogan strikes me as blind, purchasable flagwaving that can (and will) be worn by librarians who will hardly deserve the label. “Revolutionary”? “Aggressively persistent”? How many of us can claim such a thing? The trumpet is hardly loud enough to be heard over the wall, much less bring it down.

Maybe this button should be given by ALA to the deserving few.

My own button would realistically read: “Clean, Showered Librarian: Defending Thai Food, Defending Lost, Defending Wisconsin Cheese.”

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I have been a fan of the other ALA, A List Apart Magazine, for a couple of years now. I am greatful for a journal dedicated to standards-based web design that prioritizes none of those bolded words over the others. I tend to eschew extremism in the digital library realm of any kind. If your site is too flashy, literally or figuratively, you will probably do a disservice to your readers and sacrifice function/content to form. However, on the other end of the spectrum is dear old Jakob Nielson. Quite frankly, if librarians made websites that had the visual and aesthetic quality of useit.com’s lowest common denominator design, i.e., design elements sacrified to the usability gods, I fear we would reinforce a stereotype that libraries are the old world of information and not relevant to the 21st century information world.

Last week’s ALA feed included the article “Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign,” a great piece on the importance of moving away from web design for design’s sake only. What jumped out at me, though, was an analysis of Apple’s iLife software:

The new iLife packaging wasn’t just a redesign for the sake of redesigning. It seemed to represent much more than that. Personal computing was no longer something done to accomplish something else more efficiently, but rather a part of everyday life, even critical to communication and social interaction. The iPod, for example, was no longer only for the technorati; it was quickly becoming mainstream for coder and soccer mom alike. And that’s what the new packaging seemed to portray—less about technology, more about people.

What struck me as relevant to librarianship is the way that the highlighted sentence in this passage could be adapted for the realm of library services, especially instruction. In instruction sessions that I have participated in I find that one of the greatest challenges is getting across to students the point that what I am saying to them is relevant to their lives as students (remember the adage by Zweizig). The way that the author frames the transformation in the perception of Apple’s software has a counterpart for library materials. We need to present our collections and deliver them to patrons in a manner that puts them squarely in the middle of the patrons’ lives. I would try to appropriate the crucial sentense above for libraries by stating: library collections and services should not be used as a last resort when Google and Amazon don’t suffice. Rather, they should be a part of everyday life within your given community as a student, citizen.

Consequently, the challenge that I have been seeing in my own experiences is one of presentation.

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