Remaining Relevant

We all get frustrated with work, right? Yesterday I had to vent it on Twitter:
Remind me again why I thought becoming a Tech Librarian was a good idea? Sometimes I think I’m a professional joke.
I got some great responses. Sometimes the best way to get some perspective, I suppose, is to ask for it. And the thoughts of people NOT in the profession are invaluable.

This from a woman with whom I went to high school and to whom I have not spoken in over ten years:
Sarah: Think of what you do as an art - i wonder if libraries will cease to exist - tragic on many levels but if books are available on the Kindle ( might have wrong nic nac name ) But if the book is fading out - what about their home? Please don’t be angry i think your profession is awesome… but surely its come up - NPR talk radio did a huge segment on the topic and left me sad I love too read a book a week sometimes I get books on tape- huge fan of the not having to alphabetize - bane of my existence
Lichen: Hi Sarah. Thanks for your thoughts! Honestly, I don’t believe Libraries are about books, they are about community and freedom.
You’re right that the way people read is changing and Libraries have got to keep up with that change. Some are, some are not. It’s hard to know what needs to be done to save them, and encounter only resistance from my colleagues.
Sarah: how so? i think i get the freedom part and local community it enriches by its presence as do museums- resistance how?
Lichen: Some librarians do not like change. Most of them refuse to see that the way people collect information is changing.
Lichen: They just stick their heads in the mud and resent anyone who points it out.
That person would be me.
Sarah: Pioneers you are- like beastie boys were to rap music-
Lichen: YAY! I’m a Beastie Boy!

From another friend via Facebook:
Because in 5 years you will be the only one that still has a job at a library?

And from my fella who often works with librarians:
Lichen, you’re a librarian, in a public library. Your job is the definition of uphill battle. It’s hard work and red tape and low pay and no respect from anyone about how hard it is but it’s a great service that you’re doing….

So it is all worth it, in the end. Here’s to hoping the discouraging days are few and the friends are true.

James Kingsbury made an entrance into my life over the last year. My mother has been transcribing his diary as a fundraiser for the Cook Library Friends Group and often phoned me with details of his agrarian life and accounts of our Tamworth. From the bookjacket:

This young lad writes cautiously at first but, as he warms to the task, he gives us a sharp and concise picture of the life of a teenager of that period. Each member of the family worked hard and long on the farm. They were active in town and church. Family life was close and loving; school was fitted into the farm schedule where practicable; religion was a basic part of their life; and there were also some lighter moments to savor and remember. There was much visiting near and far among family and friends. There were birthday parties, berry picking, mountain climbing, swimming, picnics, sleighing, orating, debating and entertainers coming to town. The Fourth of July was perhaps the highlight of the year and long to be remembered. Read on and see life in the mid 1800s through this teenager’s eyes.

James was a young school teacher with hopes to attend university. The Journal is mostly an accounting of daily life in rural Tamworth, NH. Some mundane, some charming, and somehow he’s become part of the fabric of our family life. Mom shares his latest dispatches over suppers. A favorite from a New Year’s Eve journal entry:

Ere another year shall have passed, we may be numbered with the forgotten and the dead. And our words- with however bright a luster they may shine while we live- be covered with oblivion’s pall. If our deeds are worthy of heaven’s countenance, they will be registered in heaven and will endure when earth’s provided monuments have fell.

According to an letter to his family, James was aboard the the David Tatum, a steamer transporting troops north. But in early August 1863 he vanished at a landing at Helena, Arkansas. No one heard anything again.

Diary of a Tamworth Boy, 1849-1852: Journal of S. James Mills Kingsbury is set to go to print any day and for some reason this morning, I made it my business to find out what happened to young James. Ancestry was first and according to the US Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, James was “mustered out on 12 Aug 1863 at Helena, AR.” If he had been discharged why hadn’t his friend known it and why hadn’t he come home to NH?

I searched for Union cemeteries in Helena and found nothing. Figuring James for a mere foot soldier lost to history, and as a last effort (and flying in the face of my fancy librarian training) I googled his division, the 9th New Hampshire Infantry, and there, five results down on the page the Internet Archive led me to the History of the Ninth Regiment, New Hampshire Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion (1895). The index showed the Mr. Kingsbury had been misidentified as Kingsley. The rest is, indeed, history:

Another sad incident of the morning was the falling overboard of James Kingsley, of Company K, from the upper deck: so swift was the current that before a boat could be lowered he was lost to sight.

In the space of a Sunday morning, the internet let me trace the lifespan of a neighbor who lived 150 years ago. James Kingsbury, no longer among the forgotten and the dead, welcome home. It’s a good day to be a librarian.

Our local chamber hosted a Breakfast Forum this morning focusing on social media. Enjoying a lovely view from the Derryfield, we chit chatted with the others at the table. Shooting for common ground a baby-faced real estate broker commented on how much he loves his Kindle and answered some of the librarians’ questions about it. Pretty unanimously, the librarians responded with reasons why they could never be interested in this. They didn’t sneer. They weren’t rude. But what message does this send to the people at the table? I worried it was along the lines of ‘librarians are not interested in new things nor do they have open minds.’ Nothing shuts down a conversation faster than judging what someone else is clearly passionate about. How often do we do this to our patrons?

I wish, above all else, the response from my colleagues had been more along the lines of, ‘gosh, that sounds really neat, maybe we should start lending them at the Library.’ Even if we don’t mean it! Here the message is more like ‘we are open-minded and here to serve a public, you are the public and if you’re interested it deserves our attention.’ It turned out to be apropos for the following hour of presentations.

I did not bring my computer, for once, but wished I had for live-blogging purposes. I did manage to capture some great snippets analog-style:

George Wallace, Discovery Communications Group (Quotes are his, other is my annotation)

If you are not in this space in six months your competition is going to own it.

And despite what we like to think Libraries DO have competition, a lot of it. We have to be proactive about maintaining our important role in our communities.

We are all biologically predisposed to connect with each other.

Libraries are built around connecting people with each other. We are the beating hearts of our communities. It’s natural that we would also be this for an online community.

Strategy:

What are your clients?
What are they interested in?
What do you want to hear from them?
What do you want to talk to them about?
What value can you offer?
[I missed a couple and can't find the slides - will update if I get more info.]

These sound suspiciously like writing my online library policy (still to be written). The more I think about this the more LIKE businesses I realized we are. Also, are businesses an under-served user base?

Your website is a hub.

YES, it’s a place to gather all your divergent web presences. Think of it as ‘home,’ you still go out to meet people at the Facebook club or bowl at the Twitter bar, but then you bring those relationships and experiences home and they become part of your identity there.

People trust friends over companies

It’s true and libraries are beautifully positioned to be both. We can leverage our resources and staff to provide the coverage of a large organization, but we can be personal like a friend. THIS is why it’s so important to speak in your own, personal voice on the internet and not as The Institution. Too many libraries think blogging their press releases is blogging. No. If you talk like that you netizens id you as a business and you lose credibility with them.

Leslie Poston, co-author Twitter for Dummies

You MUST respond.

Inviting comments, as in a form on a blog or a wall in Facebook, and then not responding too the comments folks make is a little like picking up the phone and not saying hello. Or worse, saying hello and then hanging up. It’s just bad manners. The days are the static web are dead. You must commit to interacting with your patrons online.

Be human. People want to hear from YOU.

In my Library that usually means what you are reading, but I often write about technology or the latest cool knitting book or whatever I’m interested in. People respond better to other people - don’t you?

Tweets should be a ratio of 9:1. Nine personal and one business.

This could, of course, apply to all social media. I think the same should be true with a blog.

You do not have to follow people back.

Despite our desire to collect friends and reach as many people as possible, libraries are here to serve a geographic community. My unofficial following policy for the Library is that if you list Manchester, NH as your location or it’s clear from your profanity-free tweets that you’re associated with Manchester, I will follow you. I bend it for the greater Manchester area or even as far as all of NH. But I really want to see my ‘followers list’ as a collection of Manchester-based twitterati.

My final take away from this info-packed hour came during the Q&A session and resonates on a number of levels:

It’s the easiest thing in the world to think of reasons NOT to do something.

You can’t be a librarian without being interested in the future of THE book. But I prefer the future of books. In other words, what happens when the useful life of a book is done? It’s outdated; no longer popular; unwanted.

Imagine an elderly patron’s surprise upon finding that her book sale find had already been re-purposed:

If surveillance turns you on more than contraband, Photojojo gives instructions for a bookish clandestine camera case. [Via Craftzine.] Might come in handy to photograph babes with books.

“Can I save my work to a floppy from 1993?… [desperately]… What am I supposed to do then?”

Sound familiar? It’s a routine conversation around here. We generally offer our bargain-basement $10 flash drive or explain how to save to the desktop and then email their file to themselves. Neither of these are particularly elegant solutions, but with a public computing system that returns the machine to its original state upon logout, it’s the best we can offer.

That’s why I was particularly interested to read about the feature of Dropbox that allows a file to be placed in an online folder and then assign in a unique url. It seems especially suited to Tom’s ingenious use in Document Delivery (Your email admins will thank you.), but I am considering how it might solve our ‘you can’t take it with you’ dilemma too?

ps. If you do work in ILL or document delivery, do read Tom’s post. Gold.

When introducing my Advanced Internet class I struggle, at times, to describe Web 2.0 to the uninitiated. The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google provides a nice summary:

Through the first decade of its existence… the World Wide Web was a fairly prosaic place for most of us. We used it mainly as a giant catalog, a collection of “pages” bound together with hyperlinks. We “read” the Web, browsing through its contents in a way that wasn’t so different from the way we’d thumb through a pile of magazines. When we wanted to do real work, or play real games, we’d close our Web browser and launch one of the many programs installed on our own hard drive: Microsoft Word, maybe, or Aldus Pagemaker, or Encarta, or Myst.

But beneath the Web’s familiar, page-like surface lay a set of powerful technologies, including sophisticated protocols for describing and transferring data, that promised not only to greatly magnify the usefulness of the Internet but to transform computing itself. These technologies would allow all the computers hooked up to the Net to act, in effect, as a single information-processing machine, easily sharing bits of data and strings of software code. Once the technologies were fully harnessed, you’d be able to use the Internet not just t look at pages on individual sites but to run sophisticated software programs that might draw information from many sites and databases simulaneously. You’d be able not only to “read” from the Internet but to “write” to it as well - just as you’ve always been able to read from and write to your PC’s hard drive. The World Wide Web would turn into the World Wide Computer.

It’s a lesson the libraries especially need to take to heart - internet users are unimpressed by our static websites - no changes for weeks on end. It’s akin to opening your doors and then walking away. Some patrons would be happy for the materials - if they could find it. But some would wonder how this warehouse is different from the Barnes and Noble down the street - what makes the Library different and essential? We need to make our websites, including catalogs, writable as well as readable.

In other news, only a quarter of the way through this book is fascinating - even to this demanding non-reader.

I’ve been following David’s posts about online friending with extreme interest. In a nutshell, he suggests that before libraries join social sites they do it deliberately: set goals, a target audience, find a voice, and do outreach around it:

You might have noticed that most of my suggestions on getting friends for social networking tools … doesn’t involve using the tool to make friends. Instead, it’s all about YOU leaving the library and meeting your community.

On this point I think I have to disagree… or at least embellish. To me, the gift and the power of this type of tool is in its potential to reach constituencies we are not otherwise reaching. These are the people who are not already using the library. They are not attending lectures; they may be looking at flyers or cards idly and, while it doesn’t hurt, it won’t necessarily translate into a service to them. Why not meet them where they already are?

To me, representing the library online requires the same kind of cultivation as any other contact. I manage MPOW’s Twitter and Flickr accounts. I use each service’s search feature to identify other users in my community. Every so often I repeat a search for my town. When something comes up I look at the profile, to confirm the user’s location and under the assumption that if it’s not listed in the profile they might not want to be identified geographically. Then I scan their content for anything overtly offensive. If I don’t find an inordinate amount of profanity or pornography, I friend them. It’s fun, actually.

And then, here’s the money part, I make it part of my routine tasks to review the content and look for ways to pop in. If someone is wondering on Twitter where the good local Greek joints are, I jump in with a list. Or if they post a lovely photo of a particular mill building, I might offer some snippet of history.

To me, this is a way to begin to get embedded in the fabric of your community and isn’t that the ultimate goal?

When New Hampshire dispensed with tokens in favor of EZ-Pass, I was one of the stubborn hold-outs who declined. I was uncomfortable with the idea of affixing my car with a device capable of tracking where I’d been. Not that I have anything to hide but something about it was just a bit too big brother to me. Most motorists do not understand this attitude, I imagine vegetarians get the same treatment, they try and convince me; cite how quick and easy it is; they gloat as they speed through NH’s many tolls while I fumble with quarters. People seem to take it as a personal affront, a judgment of their choice to surrender privacy for convenience.

Taking this issue one step further, I heard on the radio last weekend that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, had proposed doing away with highway tolls entirely. He would replace them with a chip, hidden inside our inspection sticker, that would track how much individual automobiles used his roads, and then bill those drivers accordingly. Unlike my sacrifice when it came to EZ-Pass, it didn’t sound as if there would be any choice in the matter. Register your car in Massachusetts = get tracked.

Perhaps I am too feverish about this issue. Maybe it does just amount to paranoia. But I wonder what it means to a profession that is so devoted to protecting the privacy of the public when that very same public is invited and then forced to potentially surrender that privacy and does so with no complaint?

It’s natural that libraries define their user-base by who uses the library. We cater to those who already come in the door all too often, without considering who doesn’t. Usually, the exception to this rule comes around this time of year - budget season. During budget season we’re suddenly serving a COMMUNITY, our TAXPAYERS… but are we, really?

Too often we only consider the users we know; I understand why, but it’s the easy way out. In most libraries there is a notable absence of my peers. Yes, I admit it, I alone represent the hopelessly hip and heartbreakingly sophisticated 30-something set. (Sarcastic, too…) These are the folks that if some unexpected car trouble or tax-form mission brought them into the building might be impressed by a simple touch. Say… a sign quoting David Bowie? They’re not going to forget it and they might think, ‘Hey, maybe the Library isn’t as staid and institutional after all.’

We need take every opportunity, large and small, to compromise the bun-wearing, shusshing, rigid image that still exists.

THE 99 THINGS MEME

Things you’ve already done: bold
Things you want to do: italicize
Things you haven’t done and don’t want to - plain font

1. Started your own blog.
2. Slept under the stars.
Sleeping in the yard was a favorite summertime treat when I was little. Once mom almost got trampled by a moose - no joke.
3. Played in a band.
My lack of both talent and drive means I will probably not achieve, but I would like to.
4. Visited Hawaii.
5. Watched a meteor shower.
6. Given more than you can afford to charity.
I like to give to local charities and really like it when I get some kind of something, a magnet or mug, in return. Admirable to give to charity, but why would you give more than you can afford.
7. Been to Disneyland/world.
World. Family vacations. So fun.
8. Climbed a mountain.
Where I grew up, you couldn’t avoid it.
9. Held a praying mantis.
Not intentionally. Bugs = yucky.
10. Sang a solo.
11. Bungee jumped.
12. Visited Paris.
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea.
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch.
15. Adopted a child.
16. Had food poisoning.
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty.
18. Grown your own vegetables.
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France.
20. Slept on an overnight train.
I’ve slept on trains lots… love the rocking. And I’ve been on trains at night. Somehow, though, I don’t think either qualifies.
21. Had a pillow fight.
With a half dozen of my firm, scantily clad friends… natch.
22. Hitch hiked.
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill.
Contrary to popular opinion recently at my POW, I have never done this.
24. Built a snow fort.
25. Held a lamb.
Someday I want to raise sheep and goats… someday.
26. Gone skinny dipping.
No running water in Maine means modesty becomes less admirable.
27. Run a marathon.
28. Ridden a gondola in Venice.
I went to Venice with my mom when I was 19. We did not spring for the gondola. I wish we had now, but at the time it seemed like gilding the lily.
29. Seen a total eclipse.
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset.
31. Hit a home run.
32. Been on a cruise.
Not the kind with shuffleboard and feasting, more like beer and tackle boxes.
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person.
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors.
I only recently found out we were all Irish and I have been to Ireland.
35. Seen an Amish community.
I’ve seen Amish people, but purposely going to a community doesn’t appeal. Too much like going to a zoo.
36. Taught yourself a new language.
I’d like to learn Turkish.
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied.
I don’t really equate money and satisfaction. I’ve had enough money to feel safe and grateful. And I am satisfied.
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person.
39. Gone rock climbing.
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David in person.
41. Sung Karaoke.
In the bar in a Chinese restaurant in Falmouth, MA. Johnny Angel. An evening I wouldn’t mind forgetting.
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt.
43. Bought a stranger a meal in a restaurant.
44. Visited Africa.
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight.
46. Been transported in an ambulance.
47. Had your portrait painted.
48. Gone deep sea fishing.
49. Seen the Sistine chapel in person.
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling.
52. Kissed in the rain.
53. Played in the mud.
54. Gone to a drive-in theater.
55. Been in a movie.
56. Visited the Great Wall of China.
57. Started a business.
58. Taken a martial arts class.
59. Visited Russia.
60. Served at a soup kitchen.
61. Sold Girl Scout cookies.
62. Gone whale watching.
63. Gotten flowers for no reason.
Makes me grin just to think of it. I love getting flowers.
64. Donated blood.
65. Gone sky diving.
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp.
67. Bounced a check.
68. Flown in a helicopter.
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy.
A family friend made me an alphabet book. The ‘L’ entry was LICHEN and had my picture. I love that thing.
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial.
71. Eaten Caviar.
I loved it as a kid; now I think it’s too salty.
72. Pieced a quilt.
I think piecing it was as far as I got though.
73. Stood in Times Square.
74. Toured the Everglades.
My family hired a boat. We fished and explored… do it. It was great.
75. Been fired from a job.
76. Seen the Changing of the Guard in London.
77. Broken a bone.
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle.
Even been the only one on it.
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person.
80. Published a book.
81. Visited the Vatican.
82. Bought a brand new car.
First time in March, 2008. It was a good thing to do at least once.
83. Walked in Jerusalem.
84. Had your picture in the newspaper.
85. Read the entire Bible.
It was required in high school: Bible as Literature.
86. Visited the White House.
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating.
88. Had chickenpox.
89. Saved someone’s life.
90. Sat on a jury.
91. Met someone famous.
92. Joined a book club.
93. Lost a loved one.
94. Had a baby.
95. Seen the Alamo in person.
The basement disappointed me… I’m not the only one.
96. Swum in the Great Salt Lake.
97. Been involved in a law suit.
98. Owned a cell phone.
99. Been stung by a bee.

For anyone who actually made it this far, there you go - happy new year. Via.