Karen Schneider had an energizing warning for the conference attendees — for years now, libraries have given up ownership, control, and expertise in information management. We don’t own or build our catalogs and supporting — we rent embarrassingly poor systems from unresponsive vendors. We don’t catalog our own data (or when we do, we’ve brilliantly decided to pay OCLC for the privilege of doing this work) — again, we rent. We don’t even own the materials our customers need; this, too, is rented.

This made me think: I’m all in support of Google’s book digitization project, but… um… do we have any plan whatsoever for when our physical collection completely loses relevance? More to the point, if the entire function of libraries becomes that of collection managers (read: people who sign great huge checks to cartels of publishers)… well, how many librarians do we really need on campus, then?

Research is getting easier all the time — I know serious researchers that use Google Scholar almost exclusively… to very good effect. Teaching information literacy will be relevant only until incoming students have better information literacy skills than our instructional staff.

Anyone want to take bets on when that’ll happen?

Part of the answer, as demonstrated at this conference, is to take the power back. We need to start building things; we need to find new, better ways for customers to find information. Remember — librarians did this for centuries, until computers came along and scared everyone. Google isn’t the only company that can build a good search engine. And a concerted effort by a few institutions could take any of the commercial ILS vendors sitting down, as the Evergreen folk have shown.

We can do this. We need to totally change what we’re up to.

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The dilution of research skills and the need for information literacy, a topic we have discussed frequently, has made its way to mainstream discussions once again: Searching for Dummies.

Also interesting is mention of another topic we debated, Wikipedia. The article cites a grass roots effort by grad students to put good information into the open encyclopedia.

Higher education is fighting back. Librarians are teaching “information literacy” and establishing alternative Web indexes. Graduate students, in the front lines as teaching assistants, are starting to discuss joining Wikipedia rather than fighting it, as many instructors still, quixotically, do.

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Recently, Steve reminded me of a project that is a coproduction of the Universities of Wisconsin and Alabama. The project, Publisher’s Bindings Online, 1815-1930: The Art of Books, is a digital collection of decorative publisher’s bindings. These bindings, most commonly achieved by a mechanical metal stamping process, range from the gawdy to the elegant.

What I find most appealing about this resource is the Teaching Resources pages, which at last gives us an example of how digital collections can provide “added value” that the analog items can’t supply alone. These brief essays and glossaries are exactly what I want from online collections.
Where I’m skeptical (and this a tentative skepticism) is the extreme specificity of the project’s subject. In reality, how much use will this expensively produced database see? How far reaching is the potential for teaching and scholarship on 19th century trade bindings?

I guess the crux of the question is – using this resource as an example – is such a website worth the institutional funding and people hours required to construct it? Should digital collections attempt to cast a wider net?

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Ahhhh, changing jobs. At least I have a bit of down time and am able to do a little catch-up reading…

I ran across a this post by Jeffrey Zeldman in which he laments:

The bad news is that college and university design curricula are still mostly about everything but information architecture, usability, application design, user-focused design, accessibility, and web standards.

It is a point of pride that I can say that my library school cannot be described by this statement. All of the people who participate in this blog took the class Information Architecture for our introduction to producing web content. Librarians, take a bow.

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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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I wonder if you (friends) could give me recommendations about library articles concerned with instruction. Particularly, if you know of any articles that would provide a good exemplar for what an article on instruction should be: what it should include, etc.

If you’ve got it, you might need to print and mail it – unless its on the free Web. I’d appreciate it.

I’m working on an article idea in my head, and would like to know the effort it would take to realize it.

Thanks in advance for your good offices.

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Well, the blog has been awful quiet lately, so I will try to restart a conversation with a request for feedback from the four of you.

A website project that I have been working on for the past year has just gone live: the Instruction Toolkit. I would like to try a little experiment here. Before I give too much background on what it is supposed to be about, browse around the section labeled “Find Documents” and let me know if it makes sense and if you think that you get it. I am a fan of the jump into the deep end sink or swim (browse) style of usability testing. I find that user first impressions are invaluable when designing a site and this is a work in progress.

I can follow up with a post about the work done on the project afterwords.

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If you come from a state school, a land grant university, or another institution with a huge undergraduate population, chances are pretty good that bibliographic instruction (BI) is sexy right now. Instructing young people how to become “information literate,” meaning, “able to collect, interpret, and use information,” is reaching the top of the proverbial heap as far as priorities are concerned. Some schools even offer credit courses in research skills. Where can I find a journal article? What exactly is a “subject” and what is a “keyword”? How does this bibliographic management software work?

Without these skills, our students could end up with nearly clueless about how to do research and put that research into practice.

Some un-sexy places, though, don’t have credit courses for information literacy or even an established BI program in the library. So how does a librarian accomplish the goal of information literacy without teaching BI sessions or courses?

I hadn’t heard this phrase before a reference meeting this week, but part of the answer is the “teachable moment.” In other words, how much are our reference interviews also instructional sessions? As librarians, we need to remember that telling someone where they can find the microform room is not enough: we should tell them where the floor guides and maps are, too.

Maybe I wasn’t listening closely in library school, but it always seemed that reference was one initiative and instruction was another. It hadn’t been stressed enough (to me) that providing answers was really only cover – quick camouflage – for teaching someone how to find answers for themselves. And this counts for every interview to the extent that it’s possible.

I’m wondering if there are any anecdotes you all have about this? Any teachable moments to convey? Any stratagems? Any nerdy subterfuge?

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