Just a quick clarifying update: the posts from January-May 2013 are from a WISE course I’m just finishing up, Transformative Learning and Technology Literacies, with Professor Michael Stephens. It’s been a great experience, and I’ll be working with him on an independent study over the summer to build a MOOC out of another course he teaches, the Hyperlinked Library.
A lot of really neat government data is just around, waiting for people to do things with it. People use it for apps that geolocate stuff, mashing one set of publicly available data with another; Needlebase (retiring in June) has some really fantastic sample databases that use public data, and it’s really fun to explore how that’s linked.
There are a couple fascinating datasets that have been released recently, or at least have been updated with a fascinating interface. The 1940’s census data is all over library blogs (libraries – both public libraries and specialized genealogical libraries – are a very popular starting point for ancestry research), and has actually been experiencing access problems because of unexpected demand. The interface is really pretty beautiful, and obviously I’ve looked up my grandparents’ families and imagined a little about what they were like at the time this census was taken. The one drawback when exploring the data, though, is that you need to zero in by location rather than by name or any other kind of data point; I know this is the way the data is organized, but it makes it a little difficult to navigate. Obviously the NYPL has done something about this and created a pathway using 1940’s telephone directories, which is pretty simple and brilliant.
There’s also the 2011 Federal Taxpayer Receipt, which calculates what your federal tax paid for in 2011 based on either your tax information or your estimated income. I love the way they’ve designed this interface, and it really helps humanize the data to see what my personal contribution was. I wish I could see the data as one big set, though, and I also wish a large percentage of it had not gone towards ongoing military operations, but I do appreciate the transparency this information represents.
Every Friday, I send an email to a handful of my coworkers with links to a few animal videos I’ve come across during the week. These are people who help find information for doctors and researchers in specialties like neurology or orthopaedics, and many of them are former nurses and have subject specialties of their own. Cat videos are something almost anyone who is on the internet regularly might be able to claim as a specialty, so you wouldn’t think that there’s a lot to learn in “curating” a small collection of them to email out once a week. But in thinking of them as a “yay it’s Friday” morale and relationship builder, I’ve learned a LOT from committing to sending these emails out and trying to make them as satisfying as possible.
First, don’t assume that since you probably know more about something you can anticipate what people who know less than you might want. Of the people who have expressed interest in this email, I am the only one with an un-orphaned Twitter account, and I believe I can safely assume the only one who might regularly check in on Buzzfeed, Reddit, Cute Overload or Cute Roulette, so I was pretty sure I had a handle on providing a cat video experience that would blow these people’s’ minds. Maru was a big initial hit, but I experienced declining returns with other popular internet cats – keyboard cat, for instance, was a complete dud. That’s when I stopped assuming I knew what was going to make someone’s Friday morning awesome and started asking.
As it turns out, only one recipient was a true cat person (weird for a library, I know) – other people had dogs or no pets at all, and weren’t interested in the cat-internet community. So I branched out and started including other species – I try to include one cat video every other week because one person REALLY loves them, but also one dog video and one video of a more exotic species, which always ends up being a great “I didn’t know!” conversation topic (last week’s red panda video led to some research on whether red pandas are more closely related to pandas or raccoons [raccoons, although they haven’t been close in a very long time]). I’ve also gotten very positive feedback about videos that include more than one species, so I try to mix it up a little that way too.
The other major realization for me has been about quantity and the time it takes to absorb it. Animal videos are awesome, right? So an email FULL of animals will be amazing! Except someone sitting at the circulation desk trying to field walk-ins, telephone calls and whatever other desk tasks they’ve been assigned is not going to have time to watch half a dozen animal videos, even if they really want to. In fact, one woman told me she forwarded it to her personal account and watched them over the weekend! The last thing I wanted was to inadvertently assign homework, so I knew I had to change my methods immediately; I limited myself to three links, two videos under two minutes and an image or slideshow. When I learned that people were still struggling to figure out when in the day they would watch these videos, I started including notes about the media type – “3 minute video,” “8 slides” – along with the little blurbs I wrote about them.
So here’s my ultimate formula – three links. Two videos of cats and/or dogs, bonus if they include other species (goats have been popular lately, and I recently had a special request for otters), one image or slideshow. A little blurb about each, mentioning a specific recipient if there’s been a special request or we’ve developed some kind of inside joke, and a short description of the medium. I’m happy to report today that everyone looked at/watched everything in the email and we all had quite a few laughs! Here is today’s tiny collection:
It strikes me that 1. usefulness and 2. minimal content are both things we covered in my web design and information architecture course, and would be two of the first things I would be mindful of if I were designing a website or interface. But I had to learn them all over again over cat videos! The truth is, I think I thought I knew all I needed to know because I knew a lot about cat videos, but that had nothing to do with making my coworkers happy on Friday mornings.
Every day at lunch I take a walk on the esplanade. On sunny days, everyone’s happy, I get to pet a few dogs and watch the duck party, wave at a sailor or a gondolier, it’s great. On cold days, though, everything takes on a weird poignance; I’m one of only a handful of people there, maybe one of the only people to ever notice or see certain things. The marriage proposal written in chalk, for example:
Marriage proposal in chalk on the esplanade, 3/15/2012
Or some of the very first blooms: Yesterday, it was a limping Canada goose. I inherited what my grandmother calls my mother’s bleeding heart for animals by the side of the road, under bushes, in danger of being attacked by a hawk, you name it, so when I saw this goose limping I called Animal Care and Control, who I have on speed dial. They forwarded me to the state wildlife line, who apparently knew exactly which goose I was talking about (“He’s been there for a couple weeks,” the guy said); then I was transferred to the lady who knew how to talk to someone who called up to ask them to help a limping goose. The answer was “no,” but not in a sad/we-don’t-care way, in a we-know-what-we’re-doing-and-this-is-best way. She explained that they’re federally protected animals (I forgot to ask why – I know they’re not endangered, but maybe they’re on federal land? They’re such a pest that the federal government doesn’t want you to help them? Unclear), that they’re very resilient (we both laughed), and VERY hard to catch (another laugh). Basically, unless the goose is chasing people or looks ill to the point of contagious, they do nothing because after years of trying to find the right thing to do they’ve determined that doing nothing causes the least harm to the goose. I was completely satisfied with this answer. What struck me was that after a little over half a semester in Evaluation of Information Services, I seem to have much more faith that an institution’s way of doing things has developed through methodological trial and error. I’m always pretty likely to assume that the person who should know more actually does, but a year ago in this same situation I might have lost sleep that night, wringing my hands over the limping goose, but I didn’t. I also was conscious of how much I appreciated this woman’s willingness to take a couple minutes to talk to me about why they weren’t going to do anything, and how much that little effort on her part meant to me. I did thank her for that, which I think she thought was a little weird.
One of the things that has me excited to be an internet-extroverted know-it-all again is the Boston Digital Humanities (soon-to-be New England Digital Humanities, I believe) meetup I attended Tuesday.
There are a lot of digital humanities groups around, but the point Zach Davis made was that the Boston area has both the humanities resources and the technical skills to form a really powerful digital humanities community. Zach’s presentation was a great overview – for some people there it was a first introduction to digital humanities, and for some it was a review.
For me the most interesting part of the evening was listening to everyone their introduce themselves, what their interests are, and what interests them about the digital humanities conversation – a great moment of looking around and thinking “these are smart people and they are all so much more than their job descriptions.” Many of them qualified their introductions by mentioning that they didn’t think they belonged there, even though after they talked about themselves a little there was a rousing chorus proclaiming that they obviously did.
A fight did sort of brew around the issue of the influence of technology on culture, specifically younger generations; I maintain that it’s a perspective thing, and that if you look at technology from the right angle there’s incredible potential, much of it only being realized once it’s already being practiced. But, I understand that from another perspective, technology – specifically the occasional k-hole of internet content – might look destructive, or at least a frightening distraction. I think it depends on the looker’s definition of valuable interaction.
Rapportive is my absolute favorite plug-in; it makes me feel like Batman from inside my email, totally certain that I’m a few steps ahead (even though at this point everyone I email probably also has it). I’m excited that they’re celebrating being acquired by LinkedIn, and I just want to highlight one idea from the announcement that I think is relevant to anyone working with information technology:
When we founded Rapportive, we had one simple belief: we would build software that you don’t have to remember to use. Our software would be an intrinsic part of the tools you use every day. It would be there when you want it, and out of the way when you don’t.
This definitely echoes the librarian sentiment of meeting users where they are. It feels especially relevant to me in working to make our link resolvers and our catalog (secondary, at this point, to the link resolvers) to try and create a seamless experience for our users. Not even close right now, but you have to shoot for something.
After going to Sweden for a friend’s wedding last year and heading back to school, I took a hefty timeout from this blog and really from writing at all. I do still tweet, although I focus primarily on finding material for my library’s twitter feed (@MGHTreadwell).
I told myself that I felt like there was plenty already out there; that it was enough to keep up with it, I didn’t have to talk about it too because people were already saying what I would say better than I would say it (true). And honestly, I’ve started keeping up with a lot more than just library blogs; I’ve become more interested in geek feminism and the discussion about women being silenced on the internet, as well as keeping up with the larger pictures of data management, information technology and the digital humanities. It’s funny that librarians, the people users turn to to help them manage information overload, end up buried under it themselves.
So I haven’t been checked out, just quiet; it’s the same in class. I used to be one of those inimitable chatterboxes with an opinion on everything, but now I sit there hoping I won’t get called on, which is strange considering that I’ve been more on top of my work this semester than any other. I’m just not confident that I’ll be able to answer the question, even though I usually would have given the answer that ends up being right.
Part of me is nervous that I’m not working as hard to distinguish myself as my peers are, and that at some point that’s going to show. But I think we probably all feel that way, and that’s never stopped me before – if anything, it’s made me work harder. Part of me is nervous that I’m too competitive, or that I’m not a good enough collaborator to really be able to produce anything worthwhile working with a group of smart people. I guess that sort of has yet to be tested, but I’ve worked harder at building relationships with people who are interesting, who are doing interesting things, and who have good style (they’re the easiest, because I can start there). And there’s always part of me that’s going to be nervous about something, but it doesn’t explain the radio silence and the unwillingness to break it.
Then I looked at the date on my last blog post, and I realized that shortly after that I was told by someone I admire that I was basically a know-it-all. It wasn’t meant to silence me as a girl or to shut me down professionally, but it has had a huge influence on the way I see myself and my role in professional relationships. Maybe I am a know-it-all, but being reserved to the point of timid is not helping me to be invested in my field. It’s not a quality I admire in my peers or the people I look up to, and I need to find a way to balance my tendency to get excited about ideas with my ability to listen without just retreating.
So for the last few weeks, there has been a cockroach living in the bathroom attached to our office. I’ve never lived anywhere that’s had a cockroach problem; most of the cities I live in have other things, like earthquakes or mice. I wasn’t really any more freaked out by it than I would be by anything else that moves across the floor very quickly making a scuttering sound, or might be in my shoe when I try to put it on. Which is to say, it would be worse if it were spiders, but my imagination still runs a little wild.
It’s been okay though, because it’s mostly been confined to the little crack between the toilet and the bathroom floor, where it would run when you made loud noise or sprayed it with something you have on-hand (Lysol disinfectant, Windex, lemon-scented computer cleaner from the 80’s). I would stomp when going in there, giving it time to hide, and my officemate and I would make jokes about bringing bagpipes or a tambourine into the office. We were even brainstorming names for it.
But my officemate is out this week, which means there’s no one to make jokes with and I’ve developed some pretty serious paranoia. Going to use the mouse? Is that the mouse as you know it, or is there a cockroach on it? Going to take a drink of water? Is that your orange Nalgene or a cockroach swimming pool? Where have his feet been? On the keys you’re touching? On this handkerchief you just got out of your bag? On your lip balm!?!?
It also means she’s not eating at her desk, which means she’s not dropping crumbs for the cockroach over on her side of the room, which means I found him scuttering around on my desk looking for crumbs when I came in this morning.
Thinking quickly, I grabbed the hole punch and the lemon-scented computer cleaner, planning to stun him with the cleaner and then smack him with the hole punch. For some reason I have this weird feeling that if I stepped on him – even in my clogs, which have a one-inch wooden sole – the feeling of crushing the life out of him will remain with me forever, burned into my sense memory, like that time I stepped on a mouse Zeppelin killed in my bare foot. I can’t unfeel that. So the hole punch was a good solution, until it opened, like it always does, and scattered hole punches all over the floor, creating a confetti distraction and giving him time to get away.
I chased him for a while, crawling under the desks and spraying computer cleaner, but he was too fast, it got in my eyes a little and I had a meeting to go to. I hunted for him again when I got back, and then off and on throughout the morning – I caught up with him a few times and sprayed him with computer cleaner until he found another dark crack somewhere, but it didn’t even seem to be slowing him down, and I never got another hole punch opportunity.
Until I braved the bathroom a few minutes ago. I figured that since he’d now had a taste of freedom and sampled the dark cracks in other areas of the office, he wouldn’t be caught dead trapping himself in the bathroom again. So I walked in with only minimal stomping to find him just chilling next to the toilet brush. I backed out, slowly and quietly, grabbed the computer cleaner and rushed back in to spray the HECK out of him. I don’t know what changed this time – the lemon scent created a lack of oxygen maybe, or I sprayed so much that everything was too slippery to climb on – but he was looking dazed, and started to run back to his little home. I quoted some Samuel L. Jackson and kept spraying, when suddenly he turned sharply and disappeared behind the door. I looked behind it, thinking he had just gone around instead of under the toilet, but he wasn’t there – and that’s when I saw him, out of the corner of my eye, scuttering STRAIGHT AT ME. I sprayed CONTINUOUSLY, DIRECTLY on him until he turned white, but he never veered off-course; he ran directly underneath my one-inch wooden-soled shoe, and I CRUSHED him.
It felt AWESOME. Now I have to go clean his corpse and approx. half a can of computer cleaner off the bathroom floor.
Update: Just flushed him down the toilet. His body was SOAKED in computer cleaner.
So what library nerd could NOT pick up on the pivotal role a library resource (The Secret History of Giants, FYI) plays in Thor? There’s even a BOOK CART! Why is nobody talking about this!?!? There’s not even an image on the internet!!!
Apparently, Stan Lee’s cameo in the new Spider-Man is actually AS a librarian. Maybe people will want to talk about it then!
In the meantime, chew on this:
I was lucky enough to see another John Palfrey keynote at MLA 2011: Join Forces today, and while the idea that stuck last time was the promise and potential of the Digital Public Library of America, this time there’s two:
1. Children and teens need to be educated about information literacy. They need to learn what their rights are and how to be responsible in terms of their digital identity, as well as how to explore the deeper resources of the web rather than just cutting and pasting Wikipedia articles. While not all of this can fit into one curriculum, building something alongside, say, Health Ed, where they learn about other grey areas of maturity and responsibility like sexual health and drug use, might be a useful way to introduce these ideas. (Amelia Peloquin is really the germinator of this idea, but I think it bloomed for both of us during the keynote.)
2. Libraries need to get into the search engine game. It doesn’t even need to be said, but the resource of first resort when it comes to nearly any user question is Google. How can libraries maneuver back into that position, or at least get in the running? Palfrey seems to imply that they can somehow build a competitor, which I think is a. reinventing the wheel and b. totally impossible without Google’s budget. BUT, what if we could make library resources available in Google’s search results?
I’m not talking SEO; again, there’s just not cash in the budget to hire the resources required to play that game. Also, it’s basically hoodoo; you could spend years trying to figure out the elusive, ever-shifting algorithm or hire someone to kill a chicken over your server and the traffic would likely be the same. However, I’m in the pipe dream stage of proposing some sort of partnership. Fact: Google already returns results based on a user’s location. What if Google also showed results from the local public library’s catalog? The user could determine via search results if and how that item was available, and not only have access to deeper and more in-depth results than your average search but also be turned on to the fact that his or her library is full of awesome stuff.
How would this happen?
Really, there are scores of benefits on every side of this deal, as well as just as many cons that haven’t occurred to me yet. But we live in a time where you think of something that’s going to be awesome for the user and then try to make it happen, so I’m composing a letter to Google’s Cambridge office, and also Bing, which is looking for niches where they can outdo Google. Because why not?
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