Audition is set for tomorrow evening. Two pages of sheet music for a piece I don’t know arrived in my email.
I found a (legal, so hush up) mp3 of the piece, and will attempt to teach it to myself tonight. We’ll see how it goes…
Well, the Edubloggie went to Joyce Valenza, who is to be congratulated and back-patted and all that good stuff. Up with librarians!
And I shall meander back to my well-deserved obscurity, pausing only to remark that winning would have been extraordinarily awkward, as I still insist on firewalling CavLec from my job, no matter what professional matters I may decide to discuss here. So, whew.
The Center for History and New Media at Mason is a group of smart, energetic humanities-computing professionals with an excellent track record, big ideas and bigger plans. Among those plans is Firefox Scholar, which I’m happily watching develop.
I encourage all my techie-librarian readers to subscribe to Dan Cohen’s new weblog. Dan is CHNM’s Director of Research Projects, and CHNM’s research projects have a lot in common with what digital librarians are considering and doing.
(Bias note: Everybody knows I work at Mason, right? And I’m hoping that CHNM will pass one or two of their earlier projects to me for archival. That said, I think CHNM is tremendously cool, and will still think so even if I don’t get my hands on their bytes.)
My continuing DSpace usability crusade led me to the browse buttons on community and collection home pages.
Yes, you heard me right: browse buttons. That’s just wrong. Buttons are for search. People browsing expect to click links, not buttons.
Fortunately, changing the buttons into links isn’t all that hard. It’s just non-obvious enough, though, that I thought I’d pass on how to do it.
DSpace community and collection browses are addressable; the URL formula is the local URL prefix plus “/handle/” plus the community’s handle plus “/browse-title” (or -author or -date): http://dspace.myu.edu/handle/1234/56/browse-title for example. The trick is that you can’t actually use the handle server to get there (I tried!), because the handle server gets confused by the “browse-title” portion of the URL.
So here’s what works, straight-up:
<p id="browselinks"><small><fmt:message key=”jsp.general.orbrowse”><fmt:param><%= name %></fmt:param></fmt:message></small>
<ul><%= request.getContextPath() %>
<li><a href=”/handle/<%= community.getHandle() %>/browse-title">Title</a></li><%= request.getContextPath() %>
<li><a href="/handle/<%= community.getHandle() %>/browse-author">Author</a></li><%= request.getContextPath() %>
<li><a href="/handle/<%= community.getHandle() %>/browse-date">Date</a></li>
</ul></p>
The next thing you’ll want is to give this an introduction. The browse directive in Messages.properties is—rather stupidly, I’m afraid—called jsp.general.orbrowse. Edit it to read Browse {0} by: and you’re golden.
I’m not sending this live on Monday because I haven’t made it pretty yet, and I’m also considering getting rid of the triply-damned combo box in the search form (we all know I’m anti-combo-box, right?) because it’s confusing—if you’re on a community or collection page anyway, you expect that to be the search scope. But I’ve tested this on my staging server, and it does work as expected. Happy hacking!
I’ve been watching the tempest Jenny started, and I get a sense that a lot of people are missing the point.
The point is not that all speakers have to be comped. The point is that all speakers should be treated fairly. Jenny’s right that it’s bizarrely unfair that non-members get comped and members don’t. That’s a speech act, folks; it’s got locutionary force to spare. I can’t blame Jenny et alia for calling the perlocution as they see it; it sure reads to me like “we value non-members more than members as speakers.”
So don’t comp anybody. That would be fair. Or offer all speakers the same (percentage or dollar) discount to the conference, off whatever their normal registration fee would be. That leaves the membership incentive intact, while still providing all speakers a nice perk. Or—here’s a fun option!—offer free or discounted memberships as speaker gimmes. Members can extend their memberships; non-members become members (and, one hopes, future revenue sources).
I’m not a marketing or conference-finance expert. Doubtless someone who is could come up with even more clever and innovative ideas. Remember the point, however. The point is fairness to all speakers regardless of membership status in the organization. The point is not screwing your own members over!
That said, a colleague at MPOW wants to work with me on a presentation for the next ACRL… and I think I’m going to turn her down. Since I’m no longer an ALA member, I could theoretically get comped—but the idea is pretty detestable, actually. We all know I’m not fond of ALA. Why should an ALA conference get my presentation labor? I’d rather prepare something for the next code4lib gathering.
I got a nice compliment from a coworker on yesterday’s choral performance. Specifically to me, you understand, not a general “y’all sung great!” Though we emphatically didn’t suck. For a group that practiced all of three times together, we were pretty damn decent.
(Much credit goes to our organizer and lyricist. She wrote stuff it was just impossible to miss with. “We Wish You Would Pay Attention” was a general favorite.)
What stands out to me is that I haven’t sung so badly in, well, ever. My low range has gone missing entirely, my high range still peters out at the top, and I’ve utterly lost the ability to transition smoothly from high to low. Disgraceful. I used to be a second alto, dammit. Where did my voice go?
Well, I know the answer to that. It’s vanished into the howling void of “haven’t practiced in years.” So that’ll just have to change. I’ve asked to audition for the local community choir. I got shot down the last community choir I auditioned for, but that was then, this is now, and I don’t want to lose my singing voice entirely.
And the next time I have a few hundred dollars to spare, I’ll send my recorders to von Huene for revoicing. I’m so out-of-practice that I really need to work with instruments in good trim.
Time for a good sinus-clearing rrrrrrrrrrrrRANT. Haven’t done one of those in a while.
Got an email today from another peep on the way out of graduate school. He had two questions for me. The second one was how he’d explain “wasting” a year in grad school to the professional schools he now means to apply to. Yes, well, they mostly won’t care, and I told him so.
The first question, ver-fricking-batim, was “How can I leave graduate school, if I have no real career skills?”
Gah. Some people would go lie down with a fit of the vapors. I don’t have the vapors right now. I have whatever it’s called when you want to go wring some handy necks.
You. Out there. Yes, you. You 22-year-old kid scared of the workforce, not sure what you’re going to do in it. If I catch your little shrinking-violet butt going to grad school (especially in the humanities) just so you don’t have to try for a job, I swear unto whatever $DEITY heedeth my oath that I will come out there and kick said butt with my copper-toed hobnailed stompy boot. You hear me?
You don’t acquire career skills in graduate school. (What graduate school teaches is not career skills, even for the career they’re nominally apprenticing you to. Honest. I do not kid.) You certainly don’t acquire work experience there. You acquire useful things such as work skills and work experience by, you know, W-O-R-K-I-N-G.
I actually don’t much care what you work at, youngster. Chances are, it’ll be low-paid, high-stress, and not what you want to do for the rest of your life. That’s cool. You won’t be doing it for the rest of your life. You’ll be doing it until you find something better, or until revelation comes down from on high about what you do want to do for the rest of your life, at which point I magnanimously concede that grad school (especially professional school) in the desired area is a reasonable decision.
Just, please, dammit, don’t end up like a certain new librarian I know, okay? She ducked into grad school right after undergrad. When she got out, she didn’t find work, partly because she had all the job-seeking sense of a spavined tree-sloth, and partly because People Who Should Have Known Better told her to hold out for more than the entry-level jobs in her field that she could have landed and should have been chasing.
So what did she do? After a couple years of, um, farting around (sorry, there is no more polite way to put it), she ducked back into grad school, this time in librarianship. She graduated same time I did. I’m employed. She’s not, in some part because she clearly expected to land the first job she applied to and dropped out of the market with a bruised ego when she didn’t. (Free clue: I sent out somewhere in the ballpark of fifty résumés to land the job I’m in.) Also in part because her résumé was middling at best and her cover letters were atrocious, bad enough to knock her out of contention at any library I can think of.
Actually, I shouldn’t say she’s not employed. She’s working. At a big-box retailer, and—shall we say—not in management. Seven and change an hour. She’s 28. With no real work experience, and no clue how to get any. Employers aren’t impressed by that, and I’m frankly hard-pressed to say they should be.
I’m doing my best for her, but I’m under no illusions; this will be a long haul.
Do not be her. Do not pass “go to grad school,” and do not pay $200 to apply, hear me? She is deeply unhappy and bitter. Grad school did not help. Grad school hurt, because the kind of knockabout entry-level life that’s only expected at 22 is both less attractive and less feasible at 28. (Heck, it wasn’t fun at 26 when I did it. Though of the five jobs plus temping stints I’ve had since age 22, there’s only one I really wish I hadn’t taken. The entry-level life frequently isn’t as bad as it’s painted.)
Haul your butt out of school and into the job market before I have to haul out my stompy boot. Thus endeth the serm—I mean rant.
I read through the OCLC report on library branding finally; it did take me a while. It didn’t answer the question I posed earlier; it didn’t interrogate the importance of books relative to other media in respondents’ lives, so it really doesn’t tell us how happy or un- we ought to be about the book brand.
Be that as it may, the book brand isn’t the first thing that jumped out at me begging to be commented on. The several questions about “free information” did, because I don’t think those are useful questions to ask.
What does “free” mean to the average information-seeker? I would argue that it means free to them at point of contact. It doesn’t mean produced for free. It doesn’t mean “not paid for by anybody.” It certainly doesn’t mean Creative-Commonsed or Free Documentation Licenced or open-accessed or self-archived. It means that they can read it without opening their wallet. Period.
Under that definition, why on $DEITY’s green earth should the average information-seeker not seek out and trust free information as much as paid? There’s a metric ton of information out there, trustworthy and usable information, that is free in this sense—everything in libraries being a not-unworthy portion of that information. Patrons don’t sort out the upper reaches of the payment chain, and why should they? (If you sense that I’m frustrated with faculty obtuseness as regards their role in the broken scholarly-communication system, you are not wrong.)
This says to me that libraries aren’t going to make any progress in patron mindshare with the free-vs.-paid-for distinction. This really, truly shouldn’t be news to anybody; we’ve been flogging this distinction for ages, and we’ve gotten noplace.
So what horse is still alive for further flogging?
I would want to trial-balloon a “Deep Web” play in my next survey, if I were OCLC. I would want to know how many people have heard of the Deep Web, what they think is in it, whether they think information useful to them is in it, whether they would access it through their libraries if they could. This moves away from free-vs.-paid and toward exclusive-vs.-nonexclusive. People like the idea of being privileged. If the library is a place that privileges them, I think they’ll go for it. Special-collections and archives get a boost in this campaign, too; access to rare or unique information is the ultimate in privilege.
Nota bene, this isn’t a permanent strategy either. (Is any strategy permanent?) As libraries move toward becoming publishers, the ratio of exclusive to non-exclusive information will tip toward the latter. How long until the tip is definitive? I have no idea, and I work in that area! It may not be in my lifetime. I can’t imagine it happening in less than ten years. But I do believe that over time, the shift will be from buying (and doling out access to) information to producing it (in the text-artisan sense) and then sifting it intelligently and profitably.
Still, as a stopgap, the Deep Web might be a useful battle standard.
I was neither surprised nor amused by the complete miss-in-baulk given to electronic library resources by patrons. Your standard, garden-variety librarian started out with a smoldering (and by no means unjustified) hatred for these things, and embers of that hatred remain. E-resources are not promoted. Librarians often do not model their use during reference interactions. Public-library web sites do not call attention to them, never mind providing access to them outside library walls. So of course patrons don’t know they’re there. Add that to the generally abysmal state of e-resource user-interfaces, never mind those of library websites, and you have a spicy stew of zero usage. Who’s surprised? Not me.
(I have a rant brewing about library websites, because my public library’s website is so unbelievably horrible—it takes THREE CLICKS to get to the OPAC search, minimum!—that I swear I would redo it myself for free just so it wouldn’t annoy me so badly. But this is a rant for another day.)
Point being, we’ve shot ourselves in the foot with our lingering loathing of e-resources, and we’d better poultice ourselves fast. We have stuff that can compete with Google well enough for our purposes; we are the public face of the Deep Web. We’re just plain not connecting patrons with it. We can’t blame that on patrons. It’s on us.
We went into the instruction room today to practice our library-themed carols (”Up on the rooftop/Construction men! Renovation’s come again!”) and were singing at the top of our respective lungs, when—
—some poor student in the study-room next door banged on the wall for quiet.
Heh. Those librarians. They just don’t know how to respect study space.
(We moved to a conference room to finish practice.)
Tomorrow’s the luau, though, and the students are just gonna hafta cope. Librarians get to go wild once a year. It’s in the Secret Librarian Handbook.
Holiday party. MPOW. Tomorrow, 12 to 2. In the ancillary side library.
There will be librarians. Including me. Singing rewritten-for-the-library carols. In funny hats. Real blackmail material here, folks.
Be there or be reindeer-shaped.