Author: Graham Lavender

The Library Student Bill of Rights by Char Booth

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This article, written by Char Booth and posted on Tame The Web, is certainly not a brand new one, but it’s new to me, so I thought I would share it. I believe that library schools have a lot of work to do towards updating their programs for the 21st century, and Char has provided some insightful suggestions. I especially agree that there should be more of a focus on teaching students how to evalute, use, and develop technology, since this is a key skill for information professionals.

From The Library Student Bill of Rights:

In order to create a more vibrant and resilient profession, the students of library and information studies programs should be entitled to the following rights:

1. The right to educate. Students should receive training in learning theory, pedagogy, instructional design, and assessment methods regardless of their areas of focus.

2. The right to evaluate. Rigorous, realistic, and applied instruction in action research methods as well as techniques in environmental scanning and user needs evaluation should be available to all.

3. The right to challenge. Debate and critical inquiry between library students should be encouraged, while information activism should be considered alongside impartiality as one of the unique contributions librarians make to the information world.

4. The right to innovate. Technology evaluation, selection, experimentation, development, and planning should be woven throughout the curriculum, rather than sequestered to the “information” side of learning.

Why You Should Blog – article in The Marginal

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I wrote a short article for The Marginal, McGill’s SIS journal, and it’s now online in the Fall 2008 issue. It’s called Why You Should Blog – here’s reason #1 of 3 that library school students should become bloggers:

1. Self-promotion.
Let’s face it: when you apply for your first full-time gig after graduation, your potential employer will be going through a stack of CVs from people just like you, and every single candidate will have an MLIS, and the vast majority of them will have some experience working in the field. If you don’t make your CV stand out, it will never make it to the top of the pile, so you need something to show how special you are. Blogging shows that you’re interested in the field and have ideas to contribute, so when you include your blog’s URL on your CV, employers will take notice. They’ll also have the opportunity to take a look at a sample of your writing and ideas. Even if your interviewer doesn’t take the time to follow the link to your blog, they may google you; it is becoming more and more common to google a candidate’s name before making a hiring decision, and having a blog shows that you have a constructive online presence (wouldn’t you rather they find your blog than those photos of you partying at Thomson House?). A blog is also a good thing to list on your business cards.

Guest post – Jared discusses online music

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Today’s guest post is from my professional partner, Jared Wiercinski, Digital Services / Outreach Librarian and Music & Contemporary Dance Librarian at Concordia University. Thanks, Jared!

Graham and I met through the Professional Partnering Program which is organized by the Canadian Library Association McGill Student Chapter. It’s been a great experience so far. I got to gulp down a really tasty radioactive sugar drink at the kick-off event, and Graham has been continually handing over secret documents from McGill (obtained through his work with the library administration there). So far, so good.

Graham was kind enough to invite me to write a guest blog post on anything I wanted to write about. At first I struggled with the idea, not knowing what to write about. Writer’s block, I believe it’s called. But then it dawned on me – why not write about online music?

Concordia has a really interesting Music Department that includes jazz, classical, popular and (my personal fav) electroacoustic music. Probably the most interesting  project for me so far has been looking at different ways to make sound recordings available online. For the most part things are pretty old school here. As far as course reserves go professors typically bring in compact discs to the library and then students come in and borrow them (or not). Truth be told it’s pretty hard to motivate yourself to come to the library to listen to CDs with so many other alternatives: iTunes, peer-to-peer file sharing sites, MySpace, YouTube, last.fm, et cetera. Especially during this holy season known as winter.

So I’ve been experimenting with different ways to make music available through our website. The set-up I’m currently using involves a Flash Player embedded in a web page that plays the mp3 files off of our server. The web page is hidden behind our WAM software, which means that only students who are registered in the course can listen to the music. This pilot project is in the early stages but seems to be going well. So far I’ve set up online audio files for two courses: “The Music of the Beatles” and “Rock and Roll and Its Roots”, both taught by Craig Morrison.  Needless to say it’s been a labour of love.

So yeah. That’s all I’ve got to say. Drop me a line at jared.wiercinski@concordia.ca if you’re interested in or working on this type of thing as well. I’d love to hear from you. Cheers!

A librarian’s story

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I’m always fascinated to hear the stories of how successful librarians got started in the field, so I wanted to share a post I found by Char Booth over at info-mational. Apparently this article was written in response to a library school student’s request, which makes it particularly relevant for me. Be sure to follow the link to the full post – Kickstart:

Straight out of library school most of us are identical on paper, so landing a first position is the luck of the draw that can take you literally anywhere. This is precisely how I found myself a year out of library school living in a cabin in rural Ohio, chasing wild turkeys into trees and throwing logs on the fire to stay warm….

I have definitely been accused of naivete when I talk about the potential of fostering change in libraries that seem too stilted and/or stolid to roll with the punches. I hear people say my time at OU was idyllic, that their workplaces are too large, too small, too oldschool, too conservative, too entrenched, too poorly funded to allow any sort of innovation or development. Similarly, whenever people wonder why I can be so blithe, I simply tell them that my first experience as a librarian made me this way. I saw the way academic libraries can work, and by work I mean work extremely well.

If you are a recent graduate in academic libraries chances are good you will have to take a job somewhere so depressingly unlike where you want to be that it breaks your heart. Take it from me, it might be the precise thing that teaches you who you are in the library sense as well as personally.

How should national libraries archive blogs?

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I came across an article today at techno-geek site Ars Technica about a new initiative by the German National Library. The Library wants to archive blogs, which is reasonable enough, but through an odd piece of legislation, it appears that they have the authority to require that bloggers deposit their writing in the archives. If bloggers don’t comply, they could face a fine of up to 10 000 euros. From Ars Technica:

The law indicates that interfering with the Deutsche Bibliothek’s activities is an administrative offense, one punishable by fines of up to €10,000. Fears apparently spread that the bloggers would be facing a stark choice: hand over all their past material in an archive-worthy form, or face a hefty fine.

I’m all for archiving blogs – it’s great that national libraries are considering online material as an important source of information. If anyone wants to archive the posts I’ve made public on this blog, they’re certainly welcome to do so! Fining bloggers for not actively submitting their material would be silly, but fortunately it doesn’t seem that this will actually happen. It’s important to be aware of the power held by institutions, but we also need to realize that no one from the German National Library has actually threatened to take advantage of this power.

Professional partnering continues

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This week I spent some time with my partner from the McGill CLA Student Chapter Professional Partnering Program, Jared. He showed me around the Concordia libraries, where he works, and then we sat down and he told me a bit more about what he does. Since I’m interested in academic libraries, this was a great experience for me, especially since I’d never been to the Concordia libraries before.

I met him at the downtown library – his office is at the Loyola campus, but he comes downtown quite often for meetings. He showed me the collections and services available to students, but what interested me the most was meeting some of his colleagues. We had a great chat with one of his fellow librarians about information literacy programs in academic libraries, which really captured my attention because I’m taking an info lit class this semester and I hope to be involved in that area one day. We also bumped into Olivier Charbonneau, a Concordia librarian who is an expert in copyright law. I told him how much I’d enjoyed his talk at McGill last week, and Jared had a question for him about whether he could legally use an excerpt from a recent translation of an old play.

Then we took the shuttle bus to the Loyola campus, which is located in the much quieter Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood of Montreal. Here Jared introduced me to some more librarians, and I was amused to discover that they’d seen my name before: Jared had been passing around my business card because he liked the way I’d designed it at Moo.com. We sat down in his office, and he showed me his list of responsibilities for the year. It looks like Concordia is going to be keeping him busy! Besides spending a certain number of hours each week doing reference (including some chat reference), he has a number of projects working on digital services and outreach, and he’s on a whole bunch of different committees. I never doubted that academic librarians work hard, but this really confirmed it.

Overall, it was an eye-opening experience, and I’m looking forward to meeting up with Jared again.

Zotero lawsuit update

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As I briefly mentioned earlier when writing about Zotero, Thomson Reuters, owners of EndNote, is suing George Mason University, creators of Zotero. It seems that the lawsuit is going ahead, with recent statements having been released by both parties. As reported by Disruptive Library Technology Jester:

George Mason University issued a statement this morning regarding the lawsuit filed against it by the Thomson Scientific division of Reuters. It looks like GMU intends to fight the lawsuit. It has restored the functionality that allowed Zotero to understand the EndNote® citation style file format and announced that it will not renew its site license for Zotero.

…

In a comment to this post, Allison noted that Thomson Reuters has issued a response:
The Scientific business of Thomson Reuters has initiated a law suit against George Mason University (GMU) because of violations of the terms and conditions of the EndNote® Desktop license agreement.

Thomson Reuters VP, Business Strategy and Development, Dave Kochalko said, “Simply put, we strongly believe that the creators of Zotero have reverse engineered our software code which enables EndNote’s bibliographic formatting capability. These format files only exist as software code; there is no content or information independent of lines of code and these files can only be interpreted by the computer. A key value of EndNote is its ability to format a bibliography within a manuscript and the format files are integral to that capability. We have talented employees who have invested many years in building this resource for the EndNote community.”

FriendFeed

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Do you have trouble keeping up with all the online content produced by your friends and the people you admire? Many people who interest me post to blogs, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitter, and more, and it can be a pain having to visit an assortment of different sites to see all of their updates. I’d been hearing about FriendFeed for a while, so last month I went ahead and created an account. FriendFeed publishes all of your friends’ updates in one convenient location and makes it easy for your friends to do the same with your content.

What I like about FriendFeed:

  • It’s easier than having to run around to different sites – sort of like using an RSS feed reader instead of visiting all your favourite blogs individually
  • It allows you to comment on all types of items and even gives you the option of quickly indicating which posts you like (you can also see which other users have “liked” the same item)
  • If you’re interested to see what a particular person has been up to lately, you can easily see all of their updates

What I don’t like about FriendFeed:

  • It can be a bit overwhelming – especially because, by default, FriendFeed includes updates from friends of friends. Even after whittling down the number of types of posts that appear, it’s still a lot, and this is especially worrying considering the following point:
  • Not many of the people I follow use it. Naturally, this is always the case with new technology (would you have bought a telephone in the days when most of your contacts didn’t yet own one?), but it means that I have to continue monitoring the individual sites to catch updates from my FriendFeedless friends.

Overall, I definitely think it’s worth a try, and if you go for it, don’t forget to add me.

Professional Partnering followup

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This post is going up a bit late because I spent most of reading week in New York City (visiting, among other attractions, the gorgeous New York Public Library) and then had to scramble to catch up on assignments. At any rate, I’m pleased to announce that the Professional Partnering kick-off was a great success! Everyone I spoke to was having a terrific time and the food was delicious.

My partner is Jared Wiercinski, Digital Services / Outreach Librarian and Music & Contemporary Dance Librarian at Concordia University. Although I have no academic interest in music or dance (I do, of course, enjoy both in my spare time), his work with library technology is right up my alley. He’s offered to show me around the Concordia campuses and let me see what exactly he does, so stay tuned when that happens, a couple of weeks from now. Did I mention that he’s also a really nice guy? For more about Jared, check out his research guides for music and dance.

Helping students connect with the professional community

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Tonight the Canadian Library Association McGill Student Chapter will hold the kick-off event for its brand new Professional Partnering Program. Here’s how the program works: at the end of the summer, students interested in the program filled out applications including such information as the types of library that interest them most, and these students were matched up with local professional librarians who volunteered to be part of the program. Tonight, the students will meet their partners for the first time at a casual event, complete with food and suggested icebreaker activities.

As External Liaison Officer of the CLASC, I will be helping out with the event, but I’m even more excited to meet my partner, an academic librarian here in Montreal. I just hope I don’t overwhelm him with all my questions!

What will happen after tonight? As explained on the CLASC’s Professional Partnering page:

Partners are encouraged to determine what types of activities work best for them. Suggestions include:

* a tour of the workplace
* job shadowing
* regular e-mail correspondence
* informal chats on the phone or over coffee
* c.v. and job-seeking advice
* career planning sessions
* introductions to professionals at conferences, lectures, or meetings