LibraryTechtonics

OK, just one more, then I’m going to see the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Jessamyn was in town giving her talk at Simmons, which was good and interesting by all accounts. She stopped by on Tuesday for lunch, and we sat out on my porch and discussed the ups and downs of leadership in our profession (as well as in library schools), librarianship’s recent obsession with gamers, the current job market, and stuff in general.

I really enjoy discussions with Jessamyn because she’s a smart and cool friend and colleague. Discussions with her tend to light a fire under me about one thing or other I’ve been meaning to address, to remind me that I’m not alone in my thinking, and to remind me of why I chose to stick with a profession that I thought for a while was trying to toss me out. It’s worth your while as a librarian to find a librarian — or a bunch of librarians! — who do the same for you. It keeps you on your toes, and gives you fuel to be all the librarian you can be.

Just a quick post.

I sent Meredith an email officially deeming her a rock star for putting together the ALA Chicago 2005 wiki. Too cool. I added my blog to the conference blogger list, and added a page of wifi finding fun, because everyone knows I’m all about free wifi.

If you’re a newbie to ALA conferences, or if you’ve never been to Chicago, check out the wiki, it’s entirely helpfulicious. Oh, and if you do know Chicago, visit the wiki and help out.

If you’ve sent me an email anytime in the past month or so, I haven’t forgotten you, I’m just trying to catch up. The perils and mixed blessings of actually starting to work and all that.

I’ve also got a serious backlog of drafts I want to post here. ’s coming, ’s coming…

Jessamyn mentioned that she might stick around in the Boston area to see the founder of Wikipedia speak at Harvard, and I mentioned to my SO* that I wished I could go (I’m working that night).

“I wouldn’t think you’d be interested in going to see the Wikipedia guy speak,” he replied.

My SO’s confusion about my interest in the talk is well warranted. We’ve had several conversations about Wikipedia’s virtues and shortcomings, and my overall opinion is that Wikipedia is good for select things, not all things, and should not be considered a die-hard authoritative source. I don’t consider myself a bad person for wanting to know where the content in the articles came from, so it makes my brain itch in a most uncomfortable fashion when I read so many articles with so much uncited information-as-fact (which was my feeling even before I was a librarian). Throw in the NYT-Wikipedia weirdness that happened a few weeks ago, and my brain develops *hives*.

At the same time, I do use Wikipedia. I can see Wikipedia as worth a quick look as a jumping off point for research, and an excellent resource on all things geek. I’m also totally hip to the value of the shared information conciousness. I mean, I became a librarian, didn’t I? And, well, while “librarian” doesn’t equal “all about information mindshare” to the general public sometimes, I think it’s an evolutionary aspect of our profession. So while Wikipedia has its issues, it’s something that librarians should be aware of, use, and keep an eye on. Heck, librarians should get their hands dirty writing *articles* and making *edits* on Wikipedia, adding citations (even if it’s just a note that says, “I was there when it happened” or “I’ve seen it” or something like that) where possible to set a good example.

But that’s just my opinion.

Anyway, in once again discussing the Wikipedia pros and cons, I mentioned to my SO the NYT weirdness, and that there’s a contingent of Wikipedia supporters who believe that the reason why librarians have a problem with Wikipedia is because it undermines the academic privileged regime over general knowledge, or so it might be worded. And thus the subject line of my post was uttered by my SO.

He’s right on a certain level. Equal parts of fun and horror on Wikipedia come from the fact that a good amount of the knowledge comes from the mindshare-at-large. Some people just *know* stuff, there is no formal citation, so to speak. And that’s very cool, really. However, when you get into issues of what one user “knows” versus what another user “knows”, especially if there’s a difference of opinion, it becomes knowledge by consensus, where the consensus is discussed by one person then the other editing each others’ edits, until you have Balderdash. Eventually. Hopefully.

So yes, I wish I could hear the man speak, and possibly chat with him myself. If you’re in the Boston area, you should really consider attending his talk. His creation has grown to create both a positive and negative buzz among the online world, from geeks to librarians, which means he did something write, and makes seeing him speak worthwhile whether you like Wikipedia or not. Besides, he could change your mind, or at least give you something to think about.

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* A few of my colleagues and friends have recently mentioned that they think it’s really funny, and possibly weird, that I reference my guy as my “SO” rather than by his name. Just to clear this up, he asks me to do that, and I respect his request.

I’m working on a few different projects for Somerville Public Library, and one of them is finally complete and live. Two different virtual tours of the library had been created for SPL in the past, but neither was quite complete enough to serve the purpose of showing patrons around. So I merged the two, edited the content and feedback form, updated the maps, added a few new pages, and formatted the tour to match the rest of the site (as it exists now, anyway, since we’re working on the redesign), and voila, new tour.

The site redesign is going slowly, but well. There have been some requests for different new functions on the site, which I’ve decided to incorporate into a phase of the redesign instead of working on as individual projects. I’m in the middle of surveys of the staff, with a patron survey forthcoming, so if anyone has any recommendations or examples of surveys (especially multiple-choice surveys) about web sites for patrons, I’d appreciate any tips you could offer. There’s a creative brief, project planning documentation, and the rest of a schedule to complete, plus a few content management systems to fully evaluate. The planning always takes the longest, and involves the most work, but it’s totally worth it.

One of these days I’ll do a series on technology project planning for libraries.