Librarian in a Banana Suit

Library Technology Conference 2010

Rachel — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:55:16 +0000

My colleague (& partner and crime) and I are currently putting the final touches on the workshop we’ve been preparing for the Library Technology Conference at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, in little over a week. We’re giving a 90 minute hands-on workshop called “Second Life and Twitter for Librarians: Virtual Tools for Building Local and Global Networks.” Angela will be speaking about Second Life,and I will be speaking about Twitter.

I’m excited, but also pretty nervous!

I’m really looking forward to visiting Macalester, which is where I earned my undergraduate degree. Sad, though, that my most favorite professors have all already retired or moved on to other Universities.

Anyway, I will surely be posting more about the conference before, during and after the fact. Next Wednesday March 10, SLIS is hosting a dry-run of our workshop at noon in the U of I Main Library Computer Lab 3092, with cookies!

Content Providers, Content Creators

Rachel — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 04:00:24 +0000

Librarians often conceive of themselves as information providers: they select and provide the resources that they consider most authoritative in given contexts. But this approach can exclude multiple valid perspectives. In my research, I’ve sought to understand how librarians might implement a more inclusive yet critical approach to information. How can librarians encourage patrons to consider where information comes from, and to seek the “missing voices”? To address these questions, I turned to theories such as information literacy, critical literacy, and new literacy to construct my own conception of critical information literacy. I then explored methods to apply these theories via my work with teenagers at the Iowa City Public Library (ICPL).

My qualitative analysis surmises that patrons are more able to conceive of information as a construct rather than an a priori truth when they themselves engage in the processes of information creation. They realize that they are more than passive recipients of authoritative sources – this is the critical perspective. At ICPL, teenagers create and re-create content by blogging, podcasting, and adding personalized content to the library catalog. These practices allow them to critically engage with library texts.

Librarians have long been creating content without recognizing or formalizing their processes as “information creation.” They build metadata, construct finding tools, develop instructional materials, produce scholarly work, and present research to their peers. By formalizing the processes of information creation and extending these opportunities to their patrons, librarians can participate in the liberating practice of critical information literacy.

Check Out My New Banana Suit!

Rachel — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:31:31 +0000

I am in love with the new look for Librarian in a Banana Suit. Don’t you love it, too? The White as Milk theme by WordPress was good to me, but my brilliant and talented fiancé decided I needed a new custom CSS stylesheet with little bananas flying around in the background, and viola! Here it is, a little Valentine’s Day present just for me. I am such a lucky girl!

Goodbye, Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger

Rachel — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:52:10 +0000

Two of my favorite authors died within the last 24 hours. Howard Zinn, the historian and author of A People’s History of the United States, died of a heart attack last night at age 87. I love Howard because he had the guts to tell the “untold” histories of unheard Americans, like Native Americans, Black Americans, Women, and Vietnam Vets.

J.D. Salinger just died too, at age 91. While I love Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, and Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters, and Seymour: an Introduction, my favorite book of all time is still Franny and Zooey. Whenever I’m not feeling like myself, I can just pick up a copy of Franny and Zooey, and then I start to feel like me again. . . you know what I mean?

These guys are both great. I’m really going to miss them!

Fabulous Ways for Librarians to Use Twitter

Rachel — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:56:46 +0000

Clive Thompson from Wired Magazine — one of my favorite techno-journalists — writes that tools like Twitter can help us develop a “sixth sense” about the people in our networks. All those seemingly mundane facts like “having homemade bagel & lox for breakfast!” and “reading Vonnegut during flight delay…” can add up to give us a picture of what’s happening in the lives of those around us. As librarians, we can use Twitter to help our communities develop a sixth sense about who we are and what we offer, and we can also use it to develop our own sixth sense that will help us tune into the wants and needs of our communities, too. For instance, if you see a lot of chatter in your network about the recent PBS documentary Copyright Criminals, you can schedule a showing at your library and then send a tweet about the event to all your Twitter followers!

So how do you use it? For a basic yet comprehensive introduction to Twitter, MakeUseOf’s The Complete Guide to Twitter is eminently useful and readable. And once you have the basics down, like #hashtags, @mentions, d direct messages, RT retweets, trending topics, and saved searches, you’re ready to get to the fun stuff!

For starters, Twitter will instantly be much more interesting if you build a good network. Search for people who say interesting things — family, colleagues, favorite authors, CNN, The Onion — and add them to your network. Likewise, if you actually take the time to craft interesting tweets, you’ll be adding more value to your network and more people will want to follow you. Although tweeting is a fine art that takes time to perfect (no, really!), you can begin by sharing links to interesting articles, telling jokes, and publicizing unusual events. For more ideas, check out SocialMediaTrader’s 13 Odd Ways to Use Twitter.

Twitter is also a really useful tool for that beloved librarian activity, search & discovery. Chris Lake has written a “Bitchin’ Guide” about special commands and shortcuts that can help librarians massage locally relevant information out of Twitter. For instance, you can constrain a search for “farmers market” to show results only from your zip code; likewise, you can use Boolean operators to search for local chatter about “swine flue AND H1N1″ to find out whose weekend fiesta to steer clear of. (We librarians love our Boolean operators!)

But my absolute personal favorite use of Twitter is to query my network — in other words, to ask people I know if they can help me out with this or that. So if I’m looking for opinions from my colleagues on a new author, trying to borrow an electric drill, or wondering if anyone else is going to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Sing-A-Long this weekend, my Twitter network is a great place to start! They’ll always give me excellent information, in real-time.

Eventually you’ll be ready to check out all the add-ons and applications that will help you do even more neat things with Twitter. TweetDeck, TweetStats and Twanslate are personal favorites (use Twitter to ask “Where is the bathroom?” in French!); Traffikd has a pretty extensive list of resources here.

Finally, even outside the library there are scads of people finding interesting uses for Twitter. AcademHacK is connecting with his college students in (and outside of) the classroom, and ReadWriteWeb is rethinking the way they do journalism. And while technophiles and technophobes alike all have their opinions on what’s up with Twitter, I think David Pogue from the New York Times sums it up rather nicely: “Twitter is precisely what you want it to be.”

(Yes, I am on Twitter, as BananaSuit)

Launching B Sides: an Open Access Journal

Rachel — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 21:49:40 +0000

December and January have been all about launching B Sides, our lovely new open access electronic journal for the University of Iowa School of Library and Information Science! We hope the site will be ready to go live at the beginning of spring semester on January 19th, when we will begin soliciting submissions from current SLIS students and alumni.

As the founding editors, my colleague and I have been busy rounding up faculty sponsors, setting up the peer review process, customizing the content management software, working with a graphic designer, and meeting with both the University’s ITS department and Digital Library Services. Whew! In the meantime, here’s a little snippet from our homepage to give you an idea what B Sides will be all about:

“B Sides is an open access peer reviewed journal that showcases student work from the University of Iowa School of Library and Information Science, including writing, images, posters, presentation slides, audio recordings, and videos. It provides a space for current students and alumni to converse about their work and contribute to the scholarly literature of Library and Information Science.

“Regarding early vinyl records, B sides were a place where artists could push themselves intellectually and experiment without being constrained by the forms that their record labels believed would be commercially successful. For collectors, musicians’ B sides have become rare treasures that allow fans and scholars to more fully appreciate the nuances and intricacies of talented recording artists. The B side metaphor carried over from vinyl records to cassette tapes in the 1980s, when certain groups of underrepresented musicians weren’t being heard because record labels failed to recognize the value of their creative processes and would not produce their work. Refusing to accept silence, these innovative musicians took initiative and began producing and distributing their own “mix tapes.” Today, these musicians are considered among the most influential and important artists of that era.

“B Sides, the journal of the University of Iowa School of Library and Information Science, proudly carries the B side metaphor forward by giving an underrepresented group of new scholars a voice to experiment, explore, and contribute to a growing field.”

ICPL Technology Petting Zoo 12/11/09

Rachel — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:11:14 +0000

The Iowa City Public Library put on a fantastic Technology Petting Zoo today! ICPL’s Emerging Technology Committee offered an inservice session to expose library staff to new gadgets, including the Sony eReader, Overdrive eAudio, iTouch, the CanoScan Scanner, and eeePC. I presented on Flip Video, which I’ve used with ICPL teens in Teen Tech Zone to help them produce their own YouTube videos. You can check out my Flip Video presentation notes by clicking here, or you can click here to download the pdf.

Pedagogical Zones

Rachel — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 04:24:59 +0000

Lev Vygotsky located the Zone of Proximal Development between a child’s “current development level and the level of development the child could achieve ‘through adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers’” (Vygotsky, as quoted in Woolfolk, 44). He wrote that children are always on the verge of being able to solve certain problems, and that they just need some structure, clues and reminders to help them. This Zone of Proximal Development is the area “where instruction can succeed, because real learning is possible” (ibid). Carol Kuhlthau built on Vygotsky’s claims when she described her theory of “zones of intervention.” She studied the information gathering process of high school students, and noticed that doubt, confusion and anxiety often prevent students from knowing how to move forward in their work. When uncertainty prevails, mediators can intervene in the search process. “Mediators” can be friends, family, librarians, teachers—in other words, any capable peer or adult who can provide the student with some clues or structure to help her find her way.

These problem zones that have followed the child from elementary school to her high school research project will follow her all the way into post-secondary education and professional practice, for this is where she will encounter “indeterminate zones of practice—uncertainty, uniqueness and value conflict—[that] escape the canons of technical reality” (Schön, 6). Indeed, while Vygotsky and Kuhlthau seek to guide students through uncertainty and back onto firm ground, Donald Schön argues that firm ground, or the “Ivory Tower,” where everything is concrete and static, is not actually relevant in the real world. He proposes “deviant” education in which mentors or coaches fill the role of Vygotsky’s “capable peers” or Kuhlthau’s “mediators,” with the difference being that these mentors will not help apprentices find their way out of indeterminate zones of practice, but will rather teach them tricks—for example, problem framing, implementation and improvisation—that will make them more comfortable operating from within these indeterminate zones.

Indeterminate zones exist wherever cultures meet, clash and grapple—these are what Mary Louise Pratt calls “contact zones,” and she also sees the value of learning how to operate from within them. Although contact zones are often fraught with asymmetrical relations of power and thus engender colonization, slavery and miscomprehension, the contact zone can also be a creative space where participants resist authority and produce autoethnographies, critiques, collaborations, parodies, denunciations, imaginary dialogues, vernacular expressions, etc. Pratt helped to develop and teach a course at Stanford called “Cultures, Ideas, Values” that actually sought to function like a contact zone. She wrote that this was the most exciting teaching she’s ever done, but also the most difficult. If asymmetrical power relations can be left aside, the contact zone will transgress imagined utopian boundaries in which “the situation is governed by a single set of rules or norms shared by all participants” (Pratt, 13). When participants in the contact zone achieve mutual respect, this meeting, clashing and grappling of their cultures and values can create “exhilarating moments of wonder and revelation, mutual understanding, and new wisdom”—what Pratt calls “the joys of the contact zone” (Pratt, 17).

bell hooks has not written about a particular educational “zone,” but she has written about transgressing traditional boundaries to find freedom in education. She urges

all of us to open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions, I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom. (hooks, 12)

Like Schön and Pratt, hooks sees the most educational value not in learning how to return to what is certain, but in purposely transgressing the boundaries of certainty to explore what is unknown or uncertain. She writes that the classroom itself is a radical place of possibility—a participatory space for sharing knowledge. For hooks, the classroom should always be a “contact zone,” where mutual respect presides between teacher and students and all will grow and be empowered by the process.

This model of the teacher-student relationship is one that hooks encountered and liked when she first read Paolo Freire. Freire rejected the notion that education is a narrative process in which the teacher narrates her views to passive students. Instead, he claimed that education should always be cognitive: “Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information” (Freire, 74). Together, teacher and student, or “teacher-students,” learn to cognize cognizable objects, which are not the private property of the teacher but rather the object of mutual reflection in dialogue and solidarity. And what is cognition? It is the act of consciously exploring reality, which is a process undergoing constant transformation; it “denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent and unattached to the world” (Freire, 75). Cognition celebrates the “zone of indeterminate practice” because, in reality, all is indeterminate.

Vygotsky believed in the importance of “more capable peers” to a child’s educational development, and Kuhlthau thinks mediators can help students when they become confused or anxious. While neither “peers” nor “mediators” are highly authoritative, Vygotsky and Kuhlthau’s theories still rely on one who knows more to guide one who knows less through an “indeterminate” zone in education. Schön agrees that low-authority teacher figures are important, although he calls them mentors or coaches and believes that their purpose is to show students the ropes in a never-ending zone of indeterminacy. Indeed, whether “indeterminate zones of practice,” “contact zones,” “transgressed boundaries” or “acts of cognition,” many educational theorists are praising that special territory where complex ideas thrive and concepts are fluid. But it is Freire who would say that, within this zone (what he calls “reality”), there is no place for “more capable peers,” “mediators,” “mentors” or coaches”—i.e. “someone who knows more” to guide someone who knows less. In Freire’s view, to deny this truth is to return to the ivory tower, where only stasis and domination can prevail.

Should Librarians Be Liable?

Rachel — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:22:01 +0000

The freedom to access and create information is the most important ethical consideration of a librarian’s work. This is true of both public and private librarians. Democracy depends upon an informed citizenry, which in turn depends upon the freedom of information. Whether librarians serve the public or a private organization, they should not seek to censor or repress the information that their users seek.

Individual information seekers in a democratic society must be held accountable for their own use of information. If librarians were liable for the information they help discover, intellectual freedom would be destroyed. Librarians would withhold information that isn’t necessarily “accurate” to save themselves from being punished in a court of law. This is true for private as well as public libraries, and would have particularly disastrous effects on research communities. Even in rigorous research environments, “accurate” information is not always the most valuable information. New scientific hypotheses, for instance, often disprove the accuracy of previously recorded information. Rather than worrying about information liability, librarians should be concerned with discovering “more” and “useful” information. Conflicting viewpoints are necessary to challenge existing hypothesis and promote stronger research.

Conventional wisdom tells librarians that intellectual freedom requires them to be “neutral” conduits for information. But I don’t believe this to be true, or even possible. As humans, our flaws and biases prevent us from ever being truly neutral. Whenever librarians select or recommend information resources, they exercise their personal biases in some small way. Ethical librarians need to openly acknowledge their biases to information seekers. If they are honest about who they are and why they recommend certain resources instead of others, their users will be able to make better decisions about how to use the information.

Librarians also need to acknowledge the biases of their users. In order to provide information seekers with resources that will best fulfill their needs, librarians need to talk to them and try to understand where they are coming from and what they value. This holds true at an organizational or community-wide level, too. Librarians who understand their communities well and respond to their communities’ needs will appreciate that some resources, although highly valued in some communities, are actually inappropriate for others.

Once these biases have been acknowledged, both librarian and information seeker are at last free to speak to each other — as one human to another — about the nature and value of the information in question. Librarians can and should respectfully converse with their users to help them select, interpret and evaluate information. However, any decision about how to use the information is ultimately the responsibility of the information seeker. Whether the seeker is a highly trained research specialist or simply a casual amateur, it is nonetheless up to them to critically evaluate the information and decide how they will use it.

Organizations do suffer from information failure at times. Medical misinformation for a research participant or outdated engineering standards when building aircraft might result in human injury or even death. When information failures such as these happen, the reasons are complex and can be challenging to assess. Often it means that many checks and balances failed to catch the mistake. If an organization is found liable for malpractice in a court of law, then it is the organization’s duty to investigate the cause and to discipline or terminate the responsible parties. As with any profession, some librarians will at times unfortunately be careless or mistaken in their work. This is indicative of poor job performance and should be treated as such. However, a librarian should be liable for malpractice only if true intent to mislead or harm can be proven in a court of law.

Workers in any organization need to understand that librarians do not necessarily endorse information and cannot vouch for its absolute authority; this is the nature of information. All professionals should be aware that information exchange is a conversation between biased parties, and that they are ultimately responsible for critically evaluating their own resources. This relationship between librarians and information is necessary to protect the free discourse that is cherished by democratic societies.

“Understanding Open Source”; ILA Annual Conference 2009

Rachel — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:26:20 +0000

Karen Schneider gave a lovely pragmatic talk on understanding open source at the Iowa Library Association 2009 Annual Conference (which was a welcome change from the sometimes cult-ish “Open Source is good, Open Source will solve all your problems” rhetoric). I hope to be able to link to her slides on slideshare as soon as I can find them, but here it is in a nutshell:

I. What is open source?
Schneider started out with a definition of open source from Wikipedia (I love it when librarians aren’t afraid to use Wikipedia!): “Open source software generally allows anyone to make a new version of the software, port it to new operating systems and processor architectures, share it with others or market it.” She pointed out that sometimes you don’t even know when you’re using open source: Audacity, WordPress, Firefox, and lots of in-flight movies are just a few examples of open source software in action.

Open source, open access and fair use are all ways for people to avoid reinventing the wheel and instead build on each others’ work to solve problems more efficiently and creatively. Schneider argued that if you’re hell bent on “protecting” everything, essentially you’ll end up inhibiting progress. We all shared a laugh over cloak-and-dagger librarians who say, “Meet me in a dark room; I’ll hate you forever if you tell anyone what we’re doing.”

Debunking some common myths about open source, she claimed that: a) open source generally generates very high-quality code, which is made better by diverse, heterogenous coding communities; b) open source is inherently secure, because “with many eyes, all bugs are shallow” — enough people are looking, testing, seeing & correcting; and c) open source developers aren’t always guys in a basement with Duran Duran t-shirts.

II. Tips for evaluating open source software – 5 key assessment areas:

1. Openness:

How truly open is it?
Is (all of) the code freely and publicly available?
How is it licensed?
Is it easy to find?
Can you follow development activity in real-time or near-real-time?
Is it well-documented?
Also see The Foundations of Openness

2. Longevity and Staying Power:

How widely is the code used?
How long has it been in use?

3. Innovation and Development:

Is there a migration path or roadmap?
What is the development planning process?

4. Community Engagement:

What forms of engagement are available — lists, chat channels etc?
How active are the communities?

5. What Support Models Are Available?:

Self-service: you install it, you maintain it, you rely on the goodwill of the community for assistance
Commercial support: you install it, you pay a company for support and development
Hosted support: you pay for a service hosted on servers maintained by a company

(click here to see more links for ILA Annual ‘09)