Archive for September, 2009

Reading habits

Just for fun! Hat tip to Emma at Digitalist for bringing this meme to my attention:

Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack?

I don’t generally snack while reading – there’s nothing worse than getting crumbs in your book!

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?

I will occasionally make margin notes on books I’m reading for my studies. Only if they’re copies I own though (I hate getting out library books that someone has scribbled all over) and only in pencil – no highlighters!

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?

Bookmark. My sister always leaves books flat open, face down, which is the reason I don’t lend her my books any more – doesn’t she realise it destroys them?? I have a couple of bookmarks I use, both of which were presents. If I don’t have a bookmark to hand I’ll use whatever I can find, like a receipt or a piece of scrap paper.

Fiction, Non-fiction, or both?

Both, but more fiction. Partly because I can read fiction faster – it takes me a long time to get through a non-fiction book.

Hard copy or audiobooks?

Hard copy. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to an audiobook.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?

I will avoid stopping halfway through a chapter at any cost!

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away?

Only if what I’ve just read really doesn’t make sense without knowing that one word. I find you can usually figure these things out from the context, but I will look up a word I don’t know if I particularly like the shape of it.

What are you currently reading?

Smoke and Mirrors“, a collection of short stories by Neil Gaiman; and “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky, which I’ve almost finished.

What is the last book you bought?

Their eyes were watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston. Impulse buy – I found myself in a bookshop last weekend, and decided I should look at books I’d never heard of. I have a tendency when browsing to pick up books where I already know of the book, or have read other books by the same author, which probably leads me to read a lot of the same type of thing. This was the first book I picked up where the title and the author meant nothing to me, and looked like a good read.

Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can you read more than one at a time?

I can’t read more than one fiction at a time, but recently I’ve been having one fiction and one non-fiction book on the go at the same time. I tend to read the fiction when I’m at home, and the non-fiction when I’m on the tube on the way to and from work.

Do you have a favorite time of day and/or place to read?

On the tube, as I mentioned above – anything beats the Metro! Also before I go to bed. I tend to read in bed when I’m at home.

Do you prefer series books or stand alone books?

No real preference – I do have a few series I’ve got really into, and when I’ve started on a good series I like to read them all, but I enjoy stand alone works too.

Is there a specific book or author that you find yourself recommending over and over?

Probably Margaret Atwood – I find it difficult to name a favourite author (and impossible to name a favourite book) but she’s certainly among my favourites. I actually recommended one of her books to a guy in a bookshop who came and asked me what he should get his (female) friend for her birthday a couple of weeks ago – he said he didn’t know what women liked to read! I asked him if he knew what other books she liked and he said Dan Brown… I was tempted to suggest he just close his eyes, spin in a circle and then buy the first book he put his hands on, as she obviously wasn’t very discriminating, but I decided I’d try and get the poor deprived girl a decent book instead. I recommended Oryx and Crake.

How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author’s last name, etc.?)

Fiction is by genre and then author – it goes general fiction, sci fi and fantasy, graphic novels, mystery/crime, horror, young adult (they’re pretty loose categories though). Non-fiction is by subject – very loosely based on the main Dewey categories, but modified to be more useful to me.

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Careers advice

Several months ago, inspired by a talk at the CILIP CDG New Professionals Conference, I started writing a post about how I got into librarianship. Between one thing and another I never finished writing it, but was reminded of it today by the lovely @SmilyLibrarian, who asked on Twitter: “Wondering how/why people got into librarianship, would like to hear”. From the replies I saw, it seemed like most people stumbled upon librarianship as a career by accident (with the notable exception of @ostephens, who apparently has several librarians in the family and may genuinely have been “born to it”!).

It seems like most of the librarians I know became librarians by accident. I can’t think of anyone off the top of my head who’s ever told me that they’ve always wanted to be a librarian. A friend once told me that they wouldn’t trust someone who said anything like that – I wouldn’t go that far, but I have to admit that I find the idea of deciding, straight out of school, that you were going into librarianship (thinking about it, I do know someone who’s doing an undergrad in library and information science, so she must have decided fairly early on that that was what she wanted to do) slightly baffling. It’s almost a hidden career: not many people who aren’t librarians themselves or are related to librarians have any idea of what we actually do, so how do people actually know that’s what they want to be?

I didn’t know I wanted to be a librarian until about two years ago. I’d wanted to be various things when I was little – a writer, a teacher, an Egyptologist… By the time I was a teenager, I’d fallen in love with photography and decided I was going to be a photojournalist. I did my undergrad degree in photography, and worked as a freelancer for about two years after I graduated. To cut a long story short, I wasn’t very successful at it: finding myself fed up with the career, starting to hate photography, and in a fair amount of debt, I started thinking about what else I could do with my life. I’d started working as an admin assistant in a completely unimportant branch of the MoD, and didn’t really know what else I wanted to do – just that I really, really didn’t want to stay in the civil service.

I went to talk to a careers adviser at the job centre (who was spectacularly helpful, contrary to everything I’d heard about job centre careers advisers!) who talked to me about my interests and transferrable skills. Among several suggestions she made was librarianship (I actually can’t remember what the others were). She told me I’d probably need to do a graduate traineeship if I wanted to be a librarian, and suggested I look for job adverts/descriptions to see if the roles sounded interesting.

And the rest, as they say, is history! From talking to other librarians, I think my story is fairly typical (I even know a few other photographers-turned-librarians). What I find interesting is that it took me so long to realise that librarianship was actually a career option. Libraries were always important to me: I organised all my own and my sisters’ books into a lending library (complete with catalogue cards) for the other kids on our street when I was about 8; I volunteered in my school library in both primary and secondary school; I did two weeks of work experience in my local library when I was 14; my grandma was a librarian for ICI (before she had children and had to stop working). And yet it never occurred to me that this was something I could do for a living. The fact that it was a careers adviser who suggested it to me strikes me as significant: I had careers advice at school, and while I can remember being told that I should consider museum curating, the opportunities in libraries were never mentioned. There was a coment from Katie Hill at the New Professionals Conference that she’d asked her school careers adviser about librarianship, only to be told “you don’t want to do that, you only need 5 GCSEs!”.

I don’t really know what the answer is to this – although, I don’t really know if it’s actually a problem. I love the idea of kids announcing “when I grow up, I want to be a librarian!” – but does it actually matter if most people only arrive at librarianship later in life, after trying other things? Arguably, it results in a more rounded workforce: having experience of other careers/sectors is no bad thing. But then, you do have to wonder how many more people were “born to be librarians”, but may never realise it…

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CLSIG Seminar: Web 2.0 – the truth behind the hype

I went to a seminar last night, hosted by CLSIG, which followed a kind of “web 2.0: pros and cons” format. Now, the fact that the first thing I did on leaving the seminar was tweet about it, then head home and start blogging about it, should tell you which side of the fence I fall on! There were some pretty interesting points made – although I didn’t agree with many of the “cons”, I do think there are some points worth discussing.

Phil Duffy went first with the anti-web 2.0 argument. He began by insisting that he is not a Luddite – he understands technology and is comfortable using it; but admitted that he perhaps does not understand the social side. His first point was that he’s not convinced that “web 2.0″ is actually anything other than marketing hype. He argued that the web was always about users generating and sharing content, e.g. Usenet groups, so it doesn’t make sense to distinguish between web 1.0 and web 2.0 (my immediate reaction is to disagree with this, but it occurs to me that I don’t have much experience of web 1.0 – I only have the haziest notion of what a Usenet group is/was – so I’m going to give Phil the benefit of the doubt here).

Phil went on to point out that as the effort, skill, cost and time required to publish has gone down, the amount of material published has, obviously, gone up. This has led to the well-documented problems of information overload and filtering – the overall quality of what is published has not risen, so it is much harder to actually sort through what is out there to find out what is worth your attention. He also noted that one of the stated advantages of web 2.0 – collaboration – is not always a good thing, quoting the maxim that “a camel is a horse designed by a committee”.

Now, this was my first major point of disagreement with Phil. I completely accept that it can be much harder to accomplish anything in a group than it often is if you’re just working on your own. However, if that were the only point to the argument then no work would ever be done by committee. Sometimes, collaboration is necessary – there are projects that couldn’t be completed any other way. I wasn’t quite sure which comparison Phil was trying to make: between collaboration and solo working, or between online collaboration and offline? If the former, that’s a pointless comparison – both are necessary for different projects. If the latter, that’s also a pointless comparison – surely the same problems will occur in offline collaboration, but without the benefits of not everyone needing to be in the same place at the same time? I get that face-to-face meetings are still necessary, but I cannot seriously believe that the ability to collaborate online, in real time or asynchronously, is anything but a benefit to collaborative projects.

Phil continued by emphasising the need for information literacy teaching (something I thoroughly agree with) when dealing with the current generation who have grown up with the web, expect everything to be available online, and do not know how to differentiate between authoritative and dubious content.

He then expressed his fears about the current generation of new information professionals (hi there!), and how to find new hires who were actually capable of the job. He said (paraphrased) that he doesn’t want to hire bloggers or social media “experts” – he wants people who know how to “shelve books, understand a query however is it presented to them, do primary and secondary research”. I really don’t understand why he thinks those skills are incompatible – I am a blogger, I use social media (although I wouldn’t describe myself as an “expert”), and having been born in 1984 makes me Gen Y – that’s the one that expects everything to be online, and doesn’t realise that Wikipedia isn’t an authoritative source. However, I also know what those papery things with all the words in are, and am well aware that I can’t do all the research I need to at work online. I do tend to go for the online sources first, because it’s quicker to figure out that what you’re looking for isn’t there with online searching – I don’t see a problem with that approach. I think he’s missing the point – it’s not an either/or situation. If he’s not hiring people on the basis of their engagement with social media, he’s probably missing out on some talented candidates with a broad knowledge of alternative communication platforms and information sources.

Phil wrapped up his section with some familiar warnings about the security of your personal information on social networking sites – this gets brought up in every talk I’ve ever been to on web 2.0 and social media, are there really any information professionals out there who aren’t aware of those issues? Part of me thinks it should really go without saying, rather than spending your limited time pointing it out. I did enjoy the anecdote about an exercise he does with new trainees, where he searches for MySpace profiles containing the phrase “Hammonds trainee” (although was I the only one that thought: MySpace? Seriously?? Just how young are these trainees! Surely a Facebook search would make more sense…). He also showed some rough calculations, working out the amount of money that was lost by employees Facebooking during work hours (came to about £21m, although I didn’t note down how he’d worked that out and I don’t think he’s put his slides online). That also struck me as a pointless thing to say – as someone in the audience pointed out, employees will always find something to waste their time on, regardless of whether or not they use social media. Nobody spends 100% of their work time on work-related activities, and I’m sure that was the case long before the Internet.

Karen Blakeman was up next, discussing the positive side of web 2.0. She began by pointing out that the oft-repeated warnings about the potential for misinformation on the Internet were perhaps exaggerated – people have circulated, knowingly or otherwise, false information for hundreds of years (I would add that the Internet – access to lots of sources at once, coupled with enough judgement to decide which are authoritative – can actually make it easier to fact check).

Having asked the audience for their suggestions of what web 2.0 actually meant (suggestions included collaborating, sharing and serendipity) Karen suggested that a good way to think about web 2.0 was in terms of what you actually wanted to achieve, rather than focusing on the specific tools. Thinking about tasks like sharing knowledge with colleagues, keeping up-to-date, providing information effectively and on multiple platforms, and monitoring your (or your company’s) reputation, can give you a better idea of what can be accomplished using web 2.0 than just talking about blogs, wikis and RSS feeds.

The point about using web 2.0 to monitor what people are saying about your company was one that kept coming up – definitely a good use of the technology, especially if you’re in any kind of customer service role. I won’t go over all the advice that Karen had, as there is plenty of detail on her slides, but she had lots of practical tips on what different web 2.0 services can be used for. She also pointed out that useful technologies aren’t always the newest – her personal favourite professional network is the email discussion lists she subscribes to.

All in all, an interesting session. I’ll be keeping an eye on the blogs for the next few days to see what others thought of the debate – I’d be interested to see if anyone shares my opinions on Phil’s talk in particular, or if I’m just being an over sensitive gen Y-er.

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Designing an HTML newsletter in Outlook 2003

For the last month or so at work, we’ve been doing an information audit – basically gathering together key people from each of the firm’s practice areas and asking them, in a roundabout way, if we’re meeting their information needs. One of the more surprising comments to come out of it so far concerned the design of our daily current awareness bulletin, the Legal News Updater (LNU).

We’d been asking everyone what they thought of the content of the LNU, and the response had been overwhelmingly positive (happily for me – I took over putting it together about a month ago, so good to know I’m apparently doing it right!) until one person just casually mentioned: “Yeah, the content’s great… it looks a bit crap though”. When we asked her to elaborate, she said it was “boring” and ”dated”. I have to say I could not agree more – I’d thought as soon as I started that the layout could do with jazzing up; but with a million and one things to do in the library every day, the aesthetics of the current awareness email takes a back seat! For reference, this is the layout she was commenting on:

LNUold

Exciting, no?

So, having been given an official excuse for spending my time playing around with HTML, I set out to give the LNU a much-needed facelift.

Our critical friend had mentioned the Legal Week email alerts as a good example of newsletter design, so I had a look at that to begin with. It’s a really simple design – just a table, with a few pictures thrown in and some nice colours. One thing that struck me was how closely they’d modelled it on the design of their website, so I aimed to do the same with the LNU – it makes sense to be using the corporate colours/fonts in our bulletin, which is after all the only communication from the information centre that everyone in the firm sees. This also meant that I could steal the colour codes and fonts from the source code of the firm’s website, thus saving me a considerable amount of time… But that benefit was, of course, very far from my mind!

This is what I ended up with:

LNUnew

Ok, it probably still isn’t going to win any design awards, but I think it’s an improvement on what we had!

I learned quite a lot in the process, which is mainly why I wanted to write this blog post (yeah, you could have skipped through all the rambling above. Sorry). Designing a simple HTML template is easy enough; making it work in Outlook is surprisingly difficult (I should note that I am only referring to Outlook 2003 – apparently things are different again with Outlook 2007, as with the myriad web-based email services your audience may be using. As no one here uses anything other than Outlook 2003 I didn’t have to worry about testing the display in different email systems – I just had to make sure it displays on a Blackberry as well as it does on a desktop PC).

For example, Outlook doesn’t like CSS at all, so the template had to be in pure HTML. This meant looking up some deprecated HTML to stand in for the things I only knew how to do with CSS – and ignoring the warnings on all the websites I used to look up the old code, which all insisted that you never actually use this old code, it’s so much better to use the equivalent CSS instead, and you will look like an amateur if you insist on using this antiquated crap. Ah well. I don’t think it looks too bad.

The other major problem I ran into was trying to make the anchor tags for the TOC work. For some reason, once you paste the code into an email, Outlook reads all of the anchor tags as external links, and tries to open them in your internet browser. I spent many frustrating hours re-doing the links, searching the web for solutions from other people who’d had the same problem, and trying the occasional solution suggested (none of which worked). Interestingly, most of the forums I found where people were discussing this problem ended with someone popping up on the board saying something along the lines of “the only solution to this problem is don’t use anchor tags in your newsletter. They just don’t work in Outlook and there’s no way to make them work”. Which would have been fine, I would have accepted that answer and stopped trying, but I know they can be made to work because the old LNU template used them!

For anyone else struggling with the same problem, the solution I eventually found was ludicrously simple. Once you’ve inserted your HTML into a new email, before you save it as a template, do the following. Right click on each of the links in turn and select “properties” (or highlight the link and go to insert -> hyperlink). This should bring up a box that looks like this:

linktextNote the garbage Outlook has helpfully added in – there should be nothing before the # symbol. I have no idea why Outlook does this, I don’t know what that extra code means, but if you delete it then the link works fine. So, just delete the “outbind://64/”, OK it, repeat for every other relative link, then save your template. Once you’ve done this, you shouldn’t have any more problems with your links.

So those were my main issues – other than that there were just lots of little niggly things that made what should have been a quick job into a needlessly time-consuming one. But hey - we have our slightly prettier LNU now, and we’ve had some positive feedback on it. One of our lawyers even said it was “sexy” – whatever floats your boat I guess!

Postscript: here’s a couple of resources I found useful:

This book, which is a really handy quick-reference guide to HTML and CSS. Some deprecated HTML tags are also provided in an appendix, and chapters from previous editions dealing with deprecated code are included on the author’s website (accessible via a password printed in the book).

This article - handy step-by-step guide to creating a newsletter template in Outlook, although a few of their tips didn’t work for me (I’m not sure why they insist that you should save your template as a signature, it worked fine for me just inserting the HTML into a blank email and saving that).

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Athens users: follow-up

Last week, I blogged some thoughts on managing user access to e-journals, inspired by a tweet from Ben “Bad Science” Goldacre. I won’t rehash everything I said in the last post, but my basic point was that confusion over the different ways of accessing online subscriptions often leads users to just pick one and ignore the rest. Usually this works, but occasionally they will find something which doesn’t work with their preferred method, and will then assume that they can’t access it at all (I should note that I was under the impression at the time that the resource Dr Goldacre was talking about was accessible offsite via a proxy server – this turned out to be wrong, they apparently only allow access on campus; but I think the general point still stands, if not for this specific resource).

Now, as a student I completely understand this approach. No one wants to try and remember several different passwords, and you shouldn’t have to go hunting around to find out how you can get into a journal/database. It wastes time. Ideally, there would be one solution, with one login to remember, that would allow you access to everything you needed wherever you were. As a librarian however, I know that this solution doesn’t exist, and won’t for some time. What interests me is how we get this across to users without just causing them more problems. Do we explain every possible access route they have, watching them glaze over and knowing that they’ll forget it immediately? Or do we explain the most common route, make information on the others available (e.g. on the library website) and hope that they won’t just give up at the first hurdle? When I worked in e-access at City University we took the latter option. Mostly, it worked (at least I hope it did, although I guess we wouldn’t really know about it if people just weren’t using the resources they couldn’t get into through their library login).

My last post on this topic sparked a bit of debate in the comments section: Dr Goldacre appeared to be under the impression that I was arguing that a single login, available off-site, was unnecessary; and that he shouldn’t have complained about not being able to access a journal via Athens. That was really not the point I was trying to make. I agree that it’s a massive pain in the arse that the many journal publishers/platform providers can’t just agree on one authentication method to use. My comment that Dr Goldacre’s assertion was “wrong” was in reference to the fact that he appeared to believe that no Athens = no access. I am interested in the ways that users confuse the access method with the resource, and what we can do about it. I actually think Owen Stephens summed it up much better than I did in his comment – it’s a question of “education vs simplification”. There is a trend towards simplifying the access process for users, hiding the complexities so that users don’t actually need to understand how it works in order to use it, which overall I think is a good idea. However, this can cause problems if a particular service isn’t working – if users don’t know how their access actually works, they won’t know what their options are if it goes wrong.

I wanted to post this update so that I could make that a bit clearer. I guess that fact that I have such a small audience for this blog (less than 20 people subscribe to my RSS feed, and on a busy day I might get 10 visitors to the site – most days it’s less than 4, if any), and that I very much doubt that many of those visitors are non-librarians, means that I don’t think it’s necessary to state what should be common assumptions. I didn’t explain in my first post that a single sign-on, available anywhere, that works with every journal/database, is a Good Thing because I think that goes without saying. I don’t think that’s an interesting discussion because it’s already been had: the interesting discussion for me is what we do about the fact that this Good Thing doesn’t really exist.

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Wikipedia to Colour Code Untrustworthy Text

Now this looks interesting: apparently Wikipedia are introducing a new gadget to colour-code text according to how long it’s remained unedited, and how reliable the editor is (based on how long their edits persist). Obviously it won’t be perfect: the developers admit that “If 20 people are all biased in one way, our tool does not know it…Our tool can simply measure consensus.” I still think it’ll be a useful shorthand though – you can of course already look into the page history to see when items where edited and by whom, but how many people actually do that? I could see this being really useful for anyone trying to teach digital literacy – a simple, visual way of demonstrating why Wikipedia should be treated with caution.

Hat tip to Stephen’s Lighthouse for pointing out the Wired article.

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Athens users

On Tuesday evening, I got home after having dinner with some library school friends and decided to put in a couple of hours work on my dissertation in advance of a meeting with my supervisor on Wednesday (which went swimmingly – didn’t get told off for starting a new job when I was supposed to be studying this time!). Two gruelling hours and 900 barely-coherent words later, I decided to wind down before bed by browsing through my Twitter feed. Almost immediately, I spotted this from Ben Goldacre (of Bad Science fame):

“dear annals of internal medicine editors. your paywall doesn’t accept Athens logins. your journal may as well not exist. authors take note.

Something about that tweet made the former HE e-journals assistant in me sit up and take notice. Unfortunately I was too spangled at the time to think any more of it than “that’s interesting for some reason” – so I tweeted to that effect and went to bed.

The next morning I found this reply from Owen Stephens (posted at 5.30 am – brutal!):

“I find it interesting as well. He’s wrong of course – UK only view and the move away from Athens in HE makes it less true”

Now, I agree with Owen that Dr Goldacre’s tweet was “wrong” – a cursory glance at the Annals’ subscribers FAQ shows that, while they don’t appear to support Athens authentication (at least, it isn’t mentioned), but they do provide username and passwords for individual subscribers or IP authentication for institutions, so it’s pretty far off the mark to claim that they “may as well not exist”. Especially with, as Owen pointed out, the move away from Athens in UK HE – I don’t know exactly what the situation is with that in the NHS (any health librarians out there who can shed some light on that?) but the impression I got when I worked in e-journals is that Athens generally isn’t considered a suitable long-term solution.

However, the point that interested me wasn’t simply that he was wrong, but why he had arrived at the conclusion he did. If whatever institution supplied him with an Athens login subscribed to the Annals of Internal Medicine, he would have been able to access it without using Athens; if they didn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to access it even if the Annals did support Athens. We got this confusion a lot from our students when I worked in HE – we’d been phasing out Athens logins for about a year when I started (we only still used it for the dozen or so titles which wouldn’t accept our IP authentication system). We used to get lots of calls and emails from angry students (usually around deadlines) demanding an Athens login, because the titles they needed to use weren’t letting them in with their University ID and password. I always tried patiently explaining that they still wouldn’t be able to get in with an Athens login – Athens is not a magic key that gives you access to everything, you still only get what we’ve subscribed to, etc – but sometimes it was just easier to set them up an Athens account and let them figure it out for themselves.

Is there something about Athens that just inspires blind loyalty in its users? A year before I started at the university, when the IP authentication was first set up and they stopped automatically issuing every student with an Athens password, a candidate actually ran for SU president on a “Bring Back Athens” platform. He issued a leaflet about how the library were sacrificing students’ research in favour of saving money, claiming that students would have access to only a fraction of the titles they’d been able to use with Athens (clearly not true – the library had actually increased it’s journal subscriptions!). The e-resources manager wrote a very careful, thorough and polite response, which I used to copy-and-paste responses from when dealing with confused students a year later.

The main point I wanted to make is that, yes, users are frequently confused about what library resources they can access, and how (and perhaps even that they are library resources – I wonder if Dr Goldacre realises that somebody paid for the subscriptions he uses?) – but what can we do about it? At the end of the day, who’s fault is it if users don’t know what access routes they have? Perhaps it’s a moot point really – I generally found with the students that, once they’d got past the initial “I NEED this for my DEGREE and the library is MAKING ME FAIL” panic, and you’d helped them either find an alternative access route to Athens, or an alternative source, all the rage just vanished. It’s a short-term thing; the users weren’t bothered where the information came from, they just knew they needed it. As Owen put it, in reference to Ben Goldacre’s original tweet: “Shows how uninteresting this stuff is to users – someone who usually does detail doesn’t care”.

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