SLA Day on the Job

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Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to spend the day with Curriculum Services Specialist Ann Cullen at Harvard Business School’s Baker Library as part of the Special Library Association’s (SLA) Day on the Job program. Coincidentally, another GSLIS student who I had met twice before (once as part of an informational panel for prospective students, and once at the Somerville Public Library, where we both volunteered at the Friends of the Library book sale earlier this month) was starting her summer internship at Baker that day, so we went around together.

Ann – herself a doctoral student at GSLIS – introduced us to several other Knowledge and Library Services (KLS) librarians and staff. We also got to sit in on a meeting of reference librarians discussing virtual reference; saw behind the scenes of the historical collection; and of course we got a tour of Baker (and got to see inside Widener as well). I may never work in a business library, but Day on the Job provided an excellent inside look at a top-notch academic library. A great experience!

ACRL Creative Collaborations

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Yesterday was the ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) New England Chapter Spring 2011 Conference at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. This was my first library conference and, other than having to get up extra-early to drive to Worcester, it was a great experience. I met and talked to several librarians, some of whom were Simmons GSLIS alums, all of whom were friendly and interesting.

I also especially enjoyed one of the morning breakout sessions, where Judy Montgomery and Rebecca Sandlin from Bowdoin College in Maine gave a presentation strategies for collaboration between the library and IT department. Some of their tips: collaborative strategic planning; identify core shared values; leverage positive relationships; collaborate visibly on projects; reward collaborative projects and attitudes; and have equal partnership to preserve both cultures.

Bowdoin’s LIT (Library/Information Technology) partnership would have been a great example to study in the Principles of Management class at Simmons: an organic process of real leadership, thoughtful collaboration, and internal buy-in, rather than a top-down forced merger.

Overall, the ACRL conference was a great learning experience – and a chance to get my feet wet before ALA Annual (next month!).

Digital Library Launch

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Tomorrow, the digital library we have been building in LIS-462 is officially launching! Over the course of the semester, the class has digitized the scrapbook of Caroline Stokes, a student at Simmons from 1929-1933. We’ve done everything from digitization to metadata, writing content to creating the database and website. It has been a huge effort but a great learning experience. View the Caroline Stokes Scrapbook here.

The Caroline Stokes Scrapbook home page.

Academic Uses of Social Media

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The GSLIS Tech Lab streamed the Berkman Center for Internet & Society webinar “Academic Uses of Social Media: Exploring 21st Century Communications” this afternoon. John Palfrey, faculty co-director of the Berkman Center (and author of Born Digital ), gave an introduction and noted that, when looking at the growth of social technologies, it is important to keep in mind the digital divide (which so often corresponds to the socioeconomic divide).

The keynote speaker, Danah Boyd, sought to provide “a higher-order conceptual understanding” of the “cultural logic” behind social media and networking sites. She examined the components of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter; what do these services do? She spoke of the user profile as “writing the self into being” and the friend structure as “writing the audience into being.”

Boyd also talked about the creation of a new kind of public space; its persistence over time, its replicability, searchablity, and scalability. She also spoke of the invisible/imagined audience, the collapsing of contexts, and the blurring between public and private, and how “young people” are participating in a public environment but still want privacy.

One of the most interesting points she made was that face-to-face interactions are private by default and public by effort, whereas interactions through social media are public by default, private by effort. She, too, emphasized that not all young people are “digital natives,” and that even because they use certain technology doesn’t mean they understand it: for example, one can use a search engine every day without really knowing how to structure a query properly.

Near the end of her lecture, Boyd showed a slide with this image: “Replace fear of the unknown with curiosity.” The source appears to be a blog concerned with celebrity news and fashion, but it’s an excellent position to take, all the same.

GSLIS After Dark Poster Session

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Tonight, I had the opportunity to present a poster about my experience working in the library of America’s Test Kitchen at the annual GSLIS alumni event, “GSLIS After Dark.” My fellow library intern and I had put the poster together over the past few weeks; we made it as a PowerPoint slide, converted it to PDF, and had it printed by PhD Posters. It turned out really well, and we enjoyed sharing our experience with other students and alumni.

We called our poster “Books for Cooks: The America’s Test Kitchen Library,” and it had information (too small to see here) about our mission, outreach to staff, and projects we’ve tackled, like creating a library map and moving the catalog online with LibraryThing. Most people who stopped by seemed interested…of course, we also had snacks: homemade blondies from a recipe in Baking Illustrated.

Preserving Your Personal Digital Memories

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We used to keep photographs in shoeboxes or albums, and documents in file cabinets; what now that many of our photographs and important documents are digital?

As part of ALA’s Preservation Week, Bill LeFurgy at the Library of Congress gave a webinar entitled “Preserving Your Personal Digital Memories,” which M.I.T. Preservation Librarian Ann Marie Willer was kind enough to stream and make available to GSLIS students.

LeFurgy outlined the risks to digital files: obsolete storage equipment (e.g. floppy disks), scattered files (on different devices or services), and user mistakes, forgetfulness, and procrastination (how often do you back up your files?).

He introduced the concept of active management and broke it down into four steps:

  1. IDENTIFY where you have digital files
  2. DECIDE which files are most important
  3. ORGANIZE selected files
  4. MAKE COPIES and STORE them in different places

Simple enough, and the time and effort you put in is up to you (though the more time and effort, the better your results).

LeFurgy recommended storing files on CD-R, but said that no storage technology could be trusted for more than five years; it’s a good idea to test it annually, whether it’s a CD, an external hard drive, or a USB drive.

Speaking Volumes: Rare Books at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

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Earlier this week I went to an interesting talk at Simmons: Dr. Anne-Marie Eze, the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, spoke about Isabella Stewart Gardner as a rare book collector and about the upcoming exhibit “Illuminating the Serenissima: Books of the Republic of Venice” (May 3-June 19, 2011).

Though Isabella Stewart Gardner is most well known for collecting art, she began collecting books first; however, no one has looked at the rare book collection as a whole or considered Gardner as a collector/bibliophile till now. Dr. Eze is doing this, and cataloging the 5,000 books, which date from the 14th century through the 20th and include illuminated manuscripts, children’s books, incunabula, and inscribed “association” copies from authors with whom Gardner was friends – Henry James, for example.

In her talk, Eze noted – and seemed disappointed – that Gardner did not write in her books. Here seems to be the difference between a librarian/historian type and a rare book collector: the latter would want the book to be free of underlining and marginalia (unless it was the author’s or another famous person’s own notes, which could increase its value), but Eze would have been pleased to discover some, as a clue to Gardner’s life. I was reminded of a line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s from “Improvisations of the Caprisian Winter,” translated by Franz Wright:

So many things lie torn open
by rash hands that arrived too late,
in search of you: they wanted to know.

And sometimes in an old book
an incomprehensible passage is underlined.
You were there, once. What has become of you?

ALA Annual Conference – Update

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I recently received word from the Student-to-Staff program that I will be working with ALA’s Public Information Office (PIO) at the ALA Annual Conference. Someone from the office has already contacted me, and I’m really looking forward to working with them at the conference.

The PIO page on the ALA website offers a PDF download of “quotable library facts,” some of which I thought I’d share here. Spread the word!

  • 62% of adults in the U.S. have public library cards (2010 survey)
  • There are more public libraries than McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S. – a total of 16,604, including branches.
  • Americans check out an average of more than seven books a year. They spend $34.95 a year for the public library – about the average cost of one hardcover book.
  • More than 65% of public libraries provide services for job seekers.

Simmons GSLIS in the News

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Faculty and students from Simmons’ Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) were featured in this Boston Globe article, “Checking out the future,” by Sam Allis. Here’s an excerpt:

“Tomorrow’s librarians face a two-year graduate school curriculum freighted with technology courses that didn’t exist 10 years ago, courses that will likely be replaced by others within a year or two. The future of libraries is a constantly evolving digital landscape, and technical literacy, as it is in so many other fields, is absolutely essential to find a job in a brutal job market…

…While the core mission of librarians hasn’t changed — they are still committed to provide information to patrons who need it, wherever they are — most everything else has.”

This is more or less what I say when confronted with the “libraries are dying” sentiment. They aren’t dying; the core mission, to provide equal access to information, still remains and is just as relevant as ever. Not all of that information is contained solely in books anymore, however; we have to keep pace with technology and use it to our advantage. Libraries are not dying – they are  evolving.