Caveat Lector

All-righty, the blog dinner is on! If you don’t believe me, check out the signup page for yourself.

If you’re not in a clicky sort of mood, here’s how you sign up: email Karen Docherty and say that you want to be part of the “Weblogs, Webloggers, and Weblog Enthusiasts” theme dinner. Then show up at the hospitality desk in the ACRL registration area at 7 on Friday.

(If you get told the dinner is closed, email me instead so I know to expect you. I’ll sweet-talk the restaurant [’ware Flash] however I have to.)

Looking forward to it!

I did a swing through my application folders both paper and virtual, and noticed something so glaring and so important that I thought I needed to share.

Save for one place with its own online application system, every single time I’ve gotten a telephone contact with a potential employer, it’s been with a paper application. This is even more glaring because I’ve sent rather more applications over email than on paper.

Well. That’s stupid, I thought. I put as much effort into the typography of my HTML résumé as I did my paper one (print and screen, thank you; the résumé has a print stylesheet as well as a screen stylesheet), and the content is absolutely identical. What’s more, anybody interested in my XHTML/CSS chops can just check the bloody code.

On further reflection, however, I can guess why it happens. Paper applications have well-worn procedures attached to them that electronic apps probably don’t. I’m depending on the computer-savvy of support staff to keep my app from getting lost, and that can be a dicey proposition. Moreover, because some apps will inevitably be paper, all apps probably get printed, and a cover letter printed from email just doesn’t look very pretty.

Whatever the explanation, the trend is crystal-clear, so clear that I have to go out for more résumé paper, my existing stock having run out. Given a choice between paper and electronic application submission, I will always choose paper henceforth. It’s more hassle and more expense for me, but it’s more effective.

Go ye and do likewise.

I have heard some interest in a blog dinner at ACRL, so here’s the deal. Friday night is the “dinner with colleagues” night. Some dinners are “themed;” I’ve contacted the person in charge of the dinner arrangements to try to add a blog theme to the theme mix.

Just to be clear, you don’t have to be a blogger yourself to join in. I’m perfectly happy to talk to people who just plain old like blogs.

Anyway, go here and watch to see if the blog theme gets added to the list. If so, send email to the person-in-charge to get your name added. I don’t know that we need to be too draconian about overflow, though, so if we get extras, we’ll manage.

If I can’t get the blog theme added, I’ll wing it. People are meeting in the registration area. I’ll be there at 7 sharp with a “One of the Blog People” button (black lettering on a white button); find me between 7 and 7:15, and we’ll go forage.

A local has recommended Cafe Brenda, which is already hosting a non-themed dinner. Looks good to me, but I’m open to other ideas.

I had some friends over for dinner and games yesterday; two of them were friends-of-friends when they arrived and really-truly friends when they left, which makes me happy.

Despite keeping late-ish hours, I woke up this morning feeling energetic, and I only picked up more energy from the library-remodeling meeting. I’m just really, really jazzed about that—by the time this is over, we’ll have done much more of the planning and development than we were expected to do, and the eventual result promises to be absolutely smashing.

It’s a very different project from any one I’ve ever led before. I have led projects (even when “project leader” wasn’t exactly in my job title), but they were technical projects. All I had to do was figure out a route from A to B for a set of bits and implement it, with help where needed.

This is marvelously different. This has been about scoping out the territory, figuring out who needed to be in which smoke-filled room, gathering data and using it wisely, and tying together a lot of people who don’t know each other but ought to.

I couldn’t have done this five years ago. Heck, I’m not even sure about one year ago. But now I’m doing it, and it’s all working, and I’m finding that it’s a lot of fun.

One of my groupmates suggested that since this is a career-portfolio sort of project, a website celebrating it would be a fine resource for all of us. I quite concur with that… so keep your eye on textartisan.com ’round about late April or early May.

Despite accidentally leaving the Silver Surfer’s electrical cord in the SLIS library and having to go back to campus to retrieve it (I am suffering rather a lot of absentmindedness of that variety these days), I got another résumé out, and am gearing up to tackle a really grotty online-application system. (Argh, plain-text résumé you want? Why did I have to waste all that print and XHTML/CSS design time?)

In the meantime, I printed out a couple-three copies of the résumé for ACRL. The nice thing about having a couple of interviews under my belt is that I know the résumé is effective or I wouldn’t have gotten that far. So I can print it out sight unseen, trust it’ll be all right, and spend my effort on cover letters.

And somebody backed out of our LITA chapter’s tech-trends demo session this afternoon, so I’m the last-minute replacement with a few minutes’ chat on blogs, RSS, and the like. I was sort of hoping to do some writing on the final library-renovation report, but oh well.

Heck with energy bars and energy drinks. Good projects and good friends are where the energy comes from.

Spring break is a holding pattern for academic libraries; as I expected, Rohan, Oz and Avalon have held their peace since the interview and calls two weeks ago.

Oh, I didn’t even mention that Avalon called, did I? Well, they did, unexpectedly, and they sound like a pretty good fit, all in all. I’m hoping they’ll call again, because they also have location in their favor—a very livable area for one like me.

On the (mildly) down side, I didn’t get the show-horse job that I’ve always been pretty sure I wasn’t going to get. (Again, in five to ten years I suspect I’ll be a natural choice for these.) What I can glean from the timing is that I was fairly low on their list, as I never got called for an interview, but I was still interesting enough that they kept me on the list until they were sure they had their librarian. That’s not bad, for me and a show-horse job.

I’m still up for a work-horse job at the same institution as far as I know, but again, I don’t fancy my chances. I don’t fancy them enough that I’m not going to bother nicknaming the place.

The OCLC job I was up for has been taken down, so I assume I am now officially out of the running. There’s nothing else up at present that’s interesting. I should goose my HR contact there to see who’ll be at ACRL, though.

One more résumé out last week; a couple more jobs in my to-be-applied-for queue at del.icio.us. I’m still being moderately picky about what I apply for, but if I hit graduation without another nibble or two, I shall have to stop being picky.

While I was working on the annotated bibliography last week, I walked past a couple of books on digital-library implementation, and snagged them to read. I need to quit running myself down; I know more about this stuff than I think I do, and what I don’t know appears to be less arcane than I thought.

Spring comes late to the Frozen North. Today was the first day of “Spring” Break that actually felt springlike, so David and I walked to the park and back, stepping our careful way over rivulets of melted snow and up ice-covered park paths.

And I saw a bug. A veritable arthropod, a little blackish-greyish thing with wings buzzing about. I didn’t see it for very long, and David didn’t see it at all—but when we stopped at the playground to sit at a picnic table, we saw another bug, and a fly landed on David’s jacket.

Spring’s coming, then. The trees don’t show much sign of it, and we’ve still quite a bit of snow to get rid of yet, but the bugs don’t lie.

Didi has this curious notion that David is her trusty steed:

She won’t do this with me; apparently I am not of sufficient quality to be a lady’s palfrey.

And not a day after wistfully opining about the uses of a unified search-command syntax, I find out that there used to be one—ANSI Z39.58. I also find out that it’s been withdrawn and not replaced.

Well, that’s a bummer. Even if it didn’t appear to address things like truncation symbols and proximity operators. It was a step in the right direction.

What isn’t a bummer was that I could locate Walt’s fine discussion of what happened quickly and easily, which I couldn’t have done if he weren’t putting stuff up in HTML. Nifty.

Lorcan Dempsey has a fine and pointed post on why the Googlish “spider it up and search it all locally” approach tends to work better in many situations than either the libraryish “offer a ton of databases and let the user sort ’em out” approach or the federated-search “send a single query hither and yon” approach.

Don’t miss the comments, which make a cogent point about excluding likely-irrelevant resources being highly helpful to successful searching. Remember the uproar when Google pondered excluding blogs from search results? If that offended you—consider the case of paid search-result placement, or “safe-search” controls on image searches. Some stuff I guarantee you don’t want to search.

The last comment (as of this posting) by Larry Campbell, though, got closer to my somewhat inchoate thoughts:

Wouldn’t you expect to find (to mix metaphors) some specialized search boutiques along with the big boxes, as well as all manner of sizes and services in between?

I’m not so much concerned with specialized search boutiques (which I take to mean individual targeted databases) as with specialized search parameters. If I’ve learned nothing else this semester in my How To Search Good class, I’ve learned the awesome power of database-specific search parameters. I can pop into Dun and Bradstreet’s and find you all companies in a specific area of a specific market capitalization; try that with Google. I can find you mentions in the medical or chemistry literature of specific chemicals I’ve never before heard of. Honestly, I’d think this was magic if I hadn’t spent the semester learning about the search parameters behind the curtain.

But how is even Google supposed to give me this kind of niche-directed search power? I don’t see how they can, in large part because the search power isn’t a function of the search engine as much as the organization of the data being searched. It’s all about the metadata, again, and we all know what happens when we tell Web authors to use metadata—not to mention that it’s unclear how Web authors are supposed to know which sets of targeted metadata to use, as that amounts to telepathic awareness of how other people will find their content useful.

That said, even DIALOG has figured out the uses of federated search, and I have to say I think they do a pretty fair job with it. One could do a lot worse than examine how DIALOG’s OneSearch rips apart queries, discards the bits of them that don’t work in particular databases, and reports back to the user about what it could and couldn’t do.

I don’t think DIALOG could do as well as it does, though, if it hadn’t converged on a more-or-less common set of labels for database fields. I can pretty much trust that if there’s an author field in the DIALOG database I’m searching, I get to it with AU=. (I know, I know, personal names and corporate authorship—work with me here, will you?) The /ti suffix never means anything but “title.”

Compare this to the chaotic stupidity of database-field labelling across the universe of scholarly-article databases, a substantial reason RefWorks is such a royal pain to enter data into. This is largely fixable and should be fixed. Time for vendors to sit down in a smoke-filled room and hammer out a standard or two.

Despite my hatred of edge cases, I would want to see such a standard allow specialized parameters to be passed from searcher to engine(s). I don’t want to lose the power of CO= in Dun and Bradstreet just because I’m using my favorite federated-search engine that (because it’s a general-purpose tool) doesn’t recognize it. I would hope this would be as simple as offering a key/value pair option, where the sophisticated user inputs both key and value… but I daresay there are wrinkles I’m not considering, as I haven’t yet thought about this very hard.

While the vendors are in that smoke-filled room, by the way, I’d like to see a standard for search syntax. I don’t care that not all databases support truncation; that’s fine. (Speaking of which, when did Google start stemming? For some reason I only just noticed.) What I want is to use the same character for truncation in every single database I search. It is truly stunningly dumb that I can’t do that already.

If regular-expression engines hadn’t converged on Perl syntax, nobody would use regexes; they’re annoying enough even given their (mostly-)standard syntax! Search is the same way. Nobody should have to read the helpfiles for every database they search just for syntax peculiarities. No federated search should fail because of incompatible search syntaxes. That’s insane. Time and past to fix it.

I’m aware that the hard part of that problem is figuring out fallback behaviors for bits of syntax that a particular database doesn’t support. I’m willing to say the database folks ought to just work through that, though. Over time, it ought to be a unifying force on the industry, as laggards spruce up their search engines to support the new “standard” syntax.

And then we all win, librarians and novice searchers alike.

Today I did a little bit of legwork for our library-redesign project: talked to someone in the university IT hierarchy about possible partnership.

Oh, sure, he said right away. We’d love to do that; we don’t have a lab in that part of campus. We buy, install, and maintain the machines; the library supplies the staffing.

Audible clunk as my jaw hit the floor. Paying for the equipment was the biggest budget hurdle we had, and maintaining it the biggest staffing hurdle—and both had just evaporated right in front of me.

I’ll have to rewrite two pages’ worth of budget and partnering recommendations tomorrow, but boy, I can’t complain about the reason I’m doing it!

It pays to ask people for help. Really does. Even getting shot down most of the time, it still pays, because of the occasional jackpot like this. Wow. I still haven’t quite gathered up my jaw.