Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Blogging
I came across this article about blogging today. It focuses on creating an institutional blog, but has a lot of good points about getting and keeping a reader's attention (only one of which I used in this particular post).
Monday, September 27, 2010
Community Continuity
When talking about belonging, we tend to refer to a “sense of belonging” rather than to “rules for belonging”. At least, we do until we’re contemplating joining a country club or some other formal organization with a prescribed set of membership expectations. Because I think of belonging or not belonging in terms of feelings, it was very interesting to read Dr. Howard’s chapter on Belonging in Design to Thrive and consider the idea of belonging.
I don’t think of myself as a joiner, yet I’m a member of numerous professional organizations and this past winter I volunteered with Habitat for Humanity for the first time since college. All of these things come with certain rituals and expectations (and remuneration, of course).
Professional membership often just requires a membership fee. In return I get newsletters, continuing education and networking opportunities. Sometimes I serve as an officer in which case more is required of me. There is an election/initiation ritual, a series of meetings at which stories are shared and, in time, I become more familiar with the group and its history and do not need to ask for explanations at meetings. I had never thought of this process as a leveling up, but in a way it is. I have more knowledge, more history, more to contribute and a greater sense of belonging. Professional organizations typically have stories of origin as well.
Habitat has an incredibly strong origination story, but it’s not always so easy for a woman to “belong”, especially in the south. For some reason, the men want to follow the schema they were born to, the one that tells them to take over heavy wheelbarrows, wield hammers and assume that a woman can’t possibly use a chop saw. Fortunately, Habitat has recognized this and created Women Build so that women can learn building skills and infiltrate the manly routines of the regular builds (and no, that’s not how they describe it on their website).
Reading about belonging helped me understand a lot of what makes a successful community, online or otherwise. I also realized that the techniques that contribute to success have to be ongoing; they can’t stop with the first wave of members. Too often, an early core group has access to the community but fails to retain new members because there is a disconnect somewhere. They may have forgotten to tell their stories, maybe even forgotten their stories, or abandoned an initiation ritual because it took too much time or cost too much money. I am so sorry that new employees at a company I used to work for no longer get a two day orientation with meals and teambuilding exercises but are instead subjected to one day of HR policy plus some name games. Perhaps a routine or protocol was never explained to new members and as the early members dropped out, the meaning of the “Fight Club” soap bar was lost. Identifying a bard or historian seems like a wonderful way to ensure continuity and thereby ensure the success of the community.
I don’t think of myself as a joiner, yet I’m a member of numerous professional organizations and this past winter I volunteered with Habitat for Humanity for the first time since college. All of these things come with certain rituals and expectations (and remuneration, of course).
Professional membership often just requires a membership fee. In return I get newsletters, continuing education and networking opportunities. Sometimes I serve as an officer in which case more is required of me. There is an election/initiation ritual, a series of meetings at which stories are shared and, in time, I become more familiar with the group and its history and do not need to ask for explanations at meetings. I had never thought of this process as a leveling up, but in a way it is. I have more knowledge, more history, more to contribute and a greater sense of belonging. Professional organizations typically have stories of origin as well.
Habitat has an incredibly strong origination story, but it’s not always so easy for a woman to “belong”, especially in the south. For some reason, the men want to follow the schema they were born to, the one that tells them to take over heavy wheelbarrows, wield hammers and assume that a woman can’t possibly use a chop saw. Fortunately, Habitat has recognized this and created Women Build so that women can learn building skills and infiltrate the manly routines of the regular builds (and no, that’s not how they describe it on their website).
Reading about belonging helped me understand a lot of what makes a successful community, online or otherwise. I also realized that the techniques that contribute to success have to be ongoing; they can’t stop with the first wave of members. Too often, an early core group has access to the community but fails to retain new members because there is a disconnect somewhere. They may have forgotten to tell their stories, maybe even forgotten their stories, or abandoned an initiation ritual because it took too much time or cost too much money. I am so sorry that new employees at a company I used to work for no longer get a two day orientation with meals and teambuilding exercises but are instead subjected to one day of HR policy plus some name games. Perhaps a routine or protocol was never explained to new members and as the early members dropped out, the meaning of the “Fight Club” soap bar was lost. Identifying a bard or historian seems like a wonderful way to ensure continuity and thereby ensure the success of the community.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Why I don’t buy from Zappos
We’re all familiar with Zappos, right? The friendly online shoe company that offers free shipping and free return shipping and is notable for its excellent customer service? I have a problem with them. It has nothing to do with customer service. It has nothing to do with their website. It has to do with (thank you, Dr. Weinschenk, for the word) indebtedness.
I first ordered a pair of shoes from Zappos about four years ago. I saw a beautiful pair of green Dansko sandals in a shop but they didn’t have my size. So I did what anyone else would do – I searched online. Not only did I find my size, but they were the last pair at Zappos for a ridiculous percentage off AND I got free shipping and returns. I ordered them, they didn’t fit, I sent them back. All with almost no trouble on my part. A year ago, I was hunting for a pair of red sandals. I had red sandals on the brain. Zappos has lots of red sandals. I ordered three pairs, intending to keep one at the most. I sent them all back. Perfect, right?
Wrong. You may have noticed that I have not actually purchased anything from Zappos. And now, after my two good encounters with the company, I feel downright guilty. I still look at shoes on the website, I read the reviews that make me feel good about a particular item, I may even drool a little – but I don’t even put anything in my shopping cart anymore. I can tell myself that this is a huge corporation which undoubtedly has the price of returns worked into its business plan. I can tell myself that this is no different from taking up a salesperson’s time in a brick-and-mortar store and returning THOSE shoes. But I know that I will not order from Zappos again unless I plan to keep the shoes. Unless I have actually tried them on in a store. I feel like I owe them that. Yet, if I try shoes on in an actual store, I will probably just buy them in that store.
In this week’s readings, both Howard and Weinschenk discussed the importance of remuneration. Howard points out that “functionality is not a sufficient condition for remuneration” (47). Functionality is important, of course. No one enjoys running into “404 not found”, especially when you are convinced that THAT LINK led to the very answer you were looking for – if it only worked. But functionality, as Howard points out, serves the user best by running in the background, by being the “old brain”, so to speak.
I teach a few LIB 100 classes each fall. These are “introduction to the library website” classes for freshmen and transfer students. If you’ve looked at the library website, you’ll understand why an introduction is necessary. I try to make the classes fun and useful. I try to explain why it’s important to know how to use library databases. I try to explain why Google does not actually answer all questions or necessarily provide the best information. And I try to explain how to search a database for a journal article. And as I do this, I am inwardly cursing all of the database vendors and designers who have designed this part of the “deep web” to be impenetrable to the average user.
Here’s why. I do not use a database such as Academic Search Premier every day or even every week, mostly because I’m not a reference librarian. So when I teach one of these classes, I sometimes stumble. I can’t tell, unless I am watching every move a student makes, how he or she got to a certain point or even how he or she can get back to the starting point. There are layers and layers of choices (i.e. barriers) to navigate before getting to a manageable number of usable articles. Many students give up before they arrive at the final destination. There is absolutely no remuneration along the way. There often isn’t an indication that the path chosen is the correct one. But, as Google has shown us, people don’t need or want a zillion options. They want to ask a question and get the answer.
I completely understand why certain information is not available on the surface web – there are issues of remuneration and copyright and privacy at work – but I am looking forward to the day when a student can go to the library website, enter a search and come up with a reasonable result. Professionally, I’m interested in the nuts and bolts, because someone has to know the nuts and bolts or the functionality disappears, but personally, I want things to be easy. There are tools (called discovery layers) that can do this for a library. They’re still fairly new, but several are quite promising. Maybe the next time I teach LIB 100, I’ll be able to focus on where to find the typewriter instead of on how to find a research article. Perhaps by then I will have also gotten over my Zappos guilt.
I first ordered a pair of shoes from Zappos about four years ago. I saw a beautiful pair of green Dansko sandals in a shop but they didn’t have my size. So I did what anyone else would do – I searched online. Not only did I find my size, but they were the last pair at Zappos for a ridiculous percentage off AND I got free shipping and returns. I ordered them, they didn’t fit, I sent them back. All with almost no trouble on my part. A year ago, I was hunting for a pair of red sandals. I had red sandals on the brain. Zappos has lots of red sandals. I ordered three pairs, intending to keep one at the most. I sent them all back. Perfect, right?
Wrong. You may have noticed that I have not actually purchased anything from Zappos. And now, after my two good encounters with the company, I feel downright guilty. I still look at shoes on the website, I read the reviews that make me feel good about a particular item, I may even drool a little – but I don’t even put anything in my shopping cart anymore. I can tell myself that this is a huge corporation which undoubtedly has the price of returns worked into its business plan. I can tell myself that this is no different from taking up a salesperson’s time in a brick-and-mortar store and returning THOSE shoes. But I know that I will not order from Zappos again unless I plan to keep the shoes. Unless I have actually tried them on in a store. I feel like I owe them that. Yet, if I try shoes on in an actual store, I will probably just buy them in that store.
In this week’s readings, both Howard and Weinschenk discussed the importance of remuneration. Howard points out that “functionality is not a sufficient condition for remuneration” (47). Functionality is important, of course. No one enjoys running into “404 not found”, especially when you are convinced that THAT LINK led to the very answer you were looking for – if it only worked. But functionality, as Howard points out, serves the user best by running in the background, by being the “old brain”, so to speak.
I teach a few LIB 100 classes each fall. These are “introduction to the library website” classes for freshmen and transfer students. If you’ve looked at the library website, you’ll understand why an introduction is necessary. I try to make the classes fun and useful. I try to explain why it’s important to know how to use library databases. I try to explain why Google does not actually answer all questions or necessarily provide the best information. And I try to explain how to search a database for a journal article. And as I do this, I am inwardly cursing all of the database vendors and designers who have designed this part of the “deep web” to be impenetrable to the average user.
Here’s why. I do not use a database such as Academic Search Premier every day or even every week, mostly because I’m not a reference librarian. So when I teach one of these classes, I sometimes stumble. I can’t tell, unless I am watching every move a student makes, how he or she got to a certain point or even how he or she can get back to the starting point. There are layers and layers of choices (i.e. barriers) to navigate before getting to a manageable number of usable articles. Many students give up before they arrive at the final destination. There is absolutely no remuneration along the way. There often isn’t an indication that the path chosen is the correct one. But, as Google has shown us, people don’t need or want a zillion options. They want to ask a question and get the answer.
I completely understand why certain information is not available on the surface web – there are issues of remuneration and copyright and privacy at work – but I am looking forward to the day when a student can go to the library website, enter a search and come up with a reasonable result. Professionally, I’m interested in the nuts and bolts, because someone has to know the nuts and bolts or the functionality disappears, but personally, I want things to be easy. There are tools (called discovery layers) that can do this for a library. They’re still fairly new, but several are quite promising. Maybe the next time I teach LIB 100, I’ll be able to focus on where to find the typewriter instead of on how to find a research article. Perhaps by then I will have also gotten over my Zappos guilt.
Friday, September 17, 2010
"It's not technology, it's what you do with it"
Check out the two "Dot" films on the Nokia Europe website (they're "below the fold" on my screen so you'll have to scroll down). A friend shared this with me and I thought it an excellent example of communication using a combination of old and new technologies. I especially enjoyed seeing how they made the film and hearing the difficulties they had along the way. And, of course, now I think it would be fun to have one of these $550 phones that hasn't even been released yet.
Incidentally, the American Nokia website for the same phone? Blah. Another reason to appreciate the power of the internet.
Incidentally, the American Nokia website for the same phone? Blah. Another reason to appreciate the power of the internet.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Letters from a Scribe
This blog being a bit of “user-generated content” with a very limited audience as far as I know, I think you all know that I’m a librarian. Some of you may equate librarians with the scribes mentioned by both Howard and Shirky. As I was reading this week’s assignment, I certainly couldn’t keep that thought pushed too far back in my mind, perhaps because it’s not a new one to me or to the profession. It’s one of the reasons why the degree path is now most commonly “Library and Information Science” instead of simply “Library Science”.
Because the obsolete scribes are dancing in front of me, waving their pens and parchment, I thought I’d write a bit about what librarianship means to me.
For hundreds of years, librarians have been keepers of books (incidentally, I hate the idea of "professionals as gatekeepers", but it's definitely there and yes, I am one, though I like to think it's a wide-open gate). The root “libr-“ means book. Libraries are traditionally either a building for holding books or a collection of books. Now, of course, a library can be a collection of almost anything that is related to information, which is to say, almost everything. I’m uploading podcasts into my iTunes library while I write this, how convenient. If I’m looking for a picture of my mother-in-law for our family reunion, I go to my photo library. If I had actually taken the time to tag my photos, I could even find one of her quickly.
The tagging and the finding is a lot of what librarians do these days. Most of us have very specific functions. Technically, I’m an archivist, not a librarian. I happen to have an MLIS but I work with individually or institutionally generated materials (personal papers, university departmental records), not commercially generated materials (books, CDs, journals). Much of this is unpublished so my job is to make this material accessible to the public. It’s a bit of a struggle sometimes and the digital world has been very hard for a lot of archivists. It’s also hard for the people who want to use the archives. In the instant access world of blogging and scanning and 3G and wikis, it’s hard for people to understand that some things really do exist only on *gasp* paper. It’s harder still to explain that many of these things are fragile and that they can’t photocopy or scan them and that we don’t have a digital version because, quite frankly, we don’t have the time, money or staff to digitize everything.
I wish I didn’t have to explain this, which is why I do what I do. To me, librarianship is about access and preservation. I want to save things in whatever format, but I don’t see the point of saving them if no one can find them. For example, Clemson’s Special Collections has a copy of this incredibly cool image of Nikola Tesla’s Colorado Springs laboratory:
It’s a famous photograph (also a double exposure, in case you were wondering). Ours is inscribed to Bernard Behrend by Tesla. Behrend was a Swiss-born engineer, a contemporary of Tesla, and is also the donor of some of Clemson’s most valuable books. I happen to think that the value of this image, of our thousands of historical Clemson photos, of our Cooperative Extension records, lies in our ability to get the information out to people who need it but might not know that we have it. We don’t have the endless money, staff or time that it would take to get all of this information into a digital format, but we do have access to other tools. I want to learn about those tools and I hope someday to incorporate the appropriate tools into this area of librarianship.
It may be that I am falling into that trap where “it is easier to understand that you face competition than obsolescence” (Shirky 59), but I don’t think librarians are going away any time soon. This doesn’t mean that I think certain librarian roles aren’t going to go away. In fact, I’m surprised some roles haven’t already disappeared. I just happen to think that more filtering and sorting and presenting is going to be necessary when “the ability to connect everybody to everybody” is no longer what sells the network (Howard 221).
Because the obsolete scribes are dancing in front of me, waving their pens and parchment, I thought I’d write a bit about what librarianship means to me.
For hundreds of years, librarians have been keepers of books (incidentally, I hate the idea of "professionals as gatekeepers", but it's definitely there and yes, I am one, though I like to think it's a wide-open gate). The root “libr-“ means book. Libraries are traditionally either a building for holding books or a collection of books. Now, of course, a library can be a collection of almost anything that is related to information, which is to say, almost everything. I’m uploading podcasts into my iTunes library while I write this, how convenient. If I’m looking for a picture of my mother-in-law for our family reunion, I go to my photo library. If I had actually taken the time to tag my photos, I could even find one of her quickly.
The tagging and the finding is a lot of what librarians do these days. Most of us have very specific functions. Technically, I’m an archivist, not a librarian. I happen to have an MLIS but I work with individually or institutionally generated materials (personal papers, university departmental records), not commercially generated materials (books, CDs, journals). Much of this is unpublished so my job is to make this material accessible to the public. It’s a bit of a struggle sometimes and the digital world has been very hard for a lot of archivists. It’s also hard for the people who want to use the archives. In the instant access world of blogging and scanning and 3G and wikis, it’s hard for people to understand that some things really do exist only on *gasp* paper. It’s harder still to explain that many of these things are fragile and that they can’t photocopy or scan them and that we don’t have a digital version because, quite frankly, we don’t have the time, money or staff to digitize everything.
I wish I didn’t have to explain this, which is why I do what I do. To me, librarianship is about access and preservation. I want to save things in whatever format, but I don’t see the point of saving them if no one can find them. For example, Clemson’s Special Collections has a copy of this incredibly cool image of Nikola Tesla’s Colorado Springs laboratory:
It’s a famous photograph (also a double exposure, in case you were wondering). Ours is inscribed to Bernard Behrend by Tesla. Behrend was a Swiss-born engineer, a contemporary of Tesla, and is also the donor of some of Clemson’s most valuable books. I happen to think that the value of this image, of our thousands of historical Clemson photos, of our Cooperative Extension records, lies in our ability to get the information out to people who need it but might not know that we have it. We don’t have the endless money, staff or time that it would take to get all of this information into a digital format, but we do have access to other tools. I want to learn about those tools and I hope someday to incorporate the appropriate tools into this area of librarianship.
It may be that I am falling into that trap where “it is easier to understand that you face competition than obsolescence” (Shirky 59), but I don’t think librarians are going away any time soon. This doesn’t mean that I think certain librarian roles aren’t going to go away. In fact, I’m surprised some roles haven’t already disappeared. I just happen to think that more filtering and sorting and presenting is going to be necessary when “the ability to connect everybody to everybody” is no longer what sells the network (Howard 221).
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Wikipedia + Academia
This article about an aspect of Wikipedia's Public Policy Initiative showed up in this morning's edition of Inside Higher Ed. It seems like a good way to begin changing people from users into collaborators while simultaneously strengthening the quality of the information and citations.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Human-scale Inventions
My thoughts bounced around quite a bit as I was reading the last chapter and the epilogue of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. There are so many intriguing paths that I was finding it difficult to focus on just one or two. I contemplated pursuing licensing and Creative Commons but that had the potential to turn into a dissertation. Shirky mentioned that “the most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years…” (270), but I suspect that the gap is going to begin to narrow more and more rapidly. We probably won’t be sure until we can look back and say, “oh, yeah, now that was an amazing use for Twitter.” The implicit and explicit bargains made by and for tool users got me thinking about the episode of 30 Rock where two of the characters hijack the Janis Joplin Wikipedia page in order to convince a method actor to behave strangely (Retreat to Move Forward, January 22, 2009). By the next day, according to this possibly questionable blurb, Wikipedia itself was hijacked by “fun-hating administrators”.
But it was the mention of “human-scale inventions” (300), that put most of what we’ve been discussing in perspective. Shirky contends that the transistor and the birth-control pill had a greater effect on society than nuclear power “because no one was in control of how the technology was used, or by whom”. Actually, plenty of people and organizations put themselves in control of the Pill, but as with Prohibition, full restriction proved a losing battle in the United States. Social tools are about as human as a human-scale invention can be. They allow creativity, collaboration, organization, deception and a gazillion other human necessaries. They can be misused as in cases when “enough people’s behavior becomes antisocial enough to wreck things for everyone” (283) or they can be used with extraordinary effectiveness as in Shirky’s example of the Chinese parents expressing anger over school construction in the wake of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (295).
These examples are on a manageable or at least conceivably useful scale, yet I am often overwhelmed by the amount of information out there. I never tweet and I rarely check my Twitter account because so much is just a tedious account of what’s going on right now by people who are too bored to do anything else (“plane is delayed”, “still in the airport”, “on my third latte need plane to arrive at gate now”). I try to follow far too many RSS feeds and have learned to appreciate people who write descriptive headings so that I can ignore subjects that aren’t quite within my realm. My delicious bookmarks are chock full of sites I find funny or useful, but I sometimes catch myself getting absorbed by something trivial like Regretsy or PassiveAggressiveNotes.
I’m currently trying to decide if this overload is a result of my age (I have personal experience with rotary phones, handwritten thank you notes and TRS-80’s) or my Meyers-Briggs personality type. I’ve been giving that last one a lot of thought lately. For some reason, it has been coming up in conversations. I’m typically an INTP (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking Perceiver). The introverted, which I’ll touch on here, means that too much interaction exhausts me, not that I don’t like people or can’t be outgoing and friendly when a situation calls for it. Still, I definitely prefer small groups, whether they are virtual or corporeal. Virtual groups do have an advantage of being avoidable. I can bring even the most ponderous wiki into my own personal human scale by a finely-tuned search or by simply ignoring it. I don’t have to read blogs or contribute to wikis or tweet if I’ve reached my personal threshold. It’s much harder to ignore the people who complain about campus parking. In person. Every day.
Through endless choices and options for customization, social networks and online communities are a boon for both introverts and extroverts. The extroverts can create/antagonize/organize/share and quite possibly get input from other extroverts. The introverts can ingest or reject as much as they need to. In fact, they can even meet with extroverts on their own terms. What can be more human than a completely customizable interactive experience?
But it was the mention of “human-scale inventions” (300), that put most of what we’ve been discussing in perspective. Shirky contends that the transistor and the birth-control pill had a greater effect on society than nuclear power “because no one was in control of how the technology was used, or by whom”. Actually, plenty of people and organizations put themselves in control of the Pill, but as with Prohibition, full restriction proved a losing battle in the United States. Social tools are about as human as a human-scale invention can be. They allow creativity, collaboration, organization, deception and a gazillion other human necessaries. They can be misused as in cases when “enough people’s behavior becomes antisocial enough to wreck things for everyone” (283) or they can be used with extraordinary effectiveness as in Shirky’s example of the Chinese parents expressing anger over school construction in the wake of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (295).
These examples are on a manageable or at least conceivably useful scale, yet I am often overwhelmed by the amount of information out there. I never tweet and I rarely check my Twitter account because so much is just a tedious account of what’s going on right now by people who are too bored to do anything else (“plane is delayed”, “still in the airport”, “on my third latte need plane to arrive at gate now”). I try to follow far too many RSS feeds and have learned to appreciate people who write descriptive headings so that I can ignore subjects that aren’t quite within my realm. My delicious bookmarks are chock full of sites I find funny or useful, but I sometimes catch myself getting absorbed by something trivial like Regretsy or PassiveAggressiveNotes.
I’m currently trying to decide if this overload is a result of my age (I have personal experience with rotary phones, handwritten thank you notes and TRS-80’s) or my Meyers-Briggs personality type. I’ve been giving that last one a lot of thought lately. For some reason, it has been coming up in conversations. I’m typically an INTP (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking Perceiver). The introverted, which I’ll touch on here, means that too much interaction exhausts me, not that I don’t like people or can’t be outgoing and friendly when a situation calls for it. Still, I definitely prefer small groups, whether they are virtual or corporeal. Virtual groups do have an advantage of being avoidable. I can bring even the most ponderous wiki into my own personal human scale by a finely-tuned search or by simply ignoring it. I don’t have to read blogs or contribute to wikis or tweet if I’ve reached my personal threshold. It’s much harder to ignore the people who complain about campus parking. In person. Every day.
Through endless choices and options for customization, social networks and online communities are a boon for both introverts and extroverts. The extroverts can create/antagonize/organize/share and quite possibly get input from other extroverts. The introverts can ingest or reject as much as they need to. In fact, they can even meet with extroverts on their own terms. What can be more human than a completely customizable interactive experience?
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