No Shelf Required
So there’s a new-to-me tool thingy I heard about in an Inc Magazine article called When Companies End Remote Work, This Is What They’re Really Saying (Hint: It’s About Trust). It’s called Trello. It’s half Wiki, half Facebook, and half Pinterest.
Here’s their overview video. Creating an account takes about 30 seconds. It seems like something that teams across the UCI Libraries might like!
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new article by Michael Patrick Lynch, author of The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data, which we currently have ‘available’ via print dda. This article’s a good read if you have 10 minutes, and I may well try to incorporate some of the takeaways from it in my W39-C classes.
One thing that stuck with me was the clause- in regard to Google searching- about “our human tendency to favor convenience without regard to consequences.” I myself started to send this out to our bibref-listserv, which is more convenient than posting on a blog, but then I remembered that our blog is arguably a better tool for making our collective staff insights more discoverable for posterity’s sake.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Blog released a reader survey on how academics perceived/defined four buzzwords in the Higher Ed industry, two of which are readily used in today’s libraries: “Digital Humanities,” “Flipped Classroom,” “Adaptive Learning,” and “Competency-based education.”
If you don’t have a moment to read the brief article and responses, to summarize, the attempts at defining these terms are generally not positive, and some are even sarcastically hostile. The takeaway for me is that we should use such terms very sparingly in academic parlance, and never assume that our audiences are familiar with or fond of these terms.
Yesterday afternoon, several of us library staff attended a group viewing of a webinar jointly sponsored by the ALA Office for Diversity, and the Library Leadership and Management Association (LLAMA), called Racial and LGBT Microaggressions-An Introduction for Library Leaders.
Perhaps the most poignant feature of the webinar was a reference to a tumblr blog site called Microaggressions in Librarianship, which documents the prejudices that many of our fellow library staff have encountered in the workplace. It’s worth visiting the blog and reading through the many posts, which underscore the fact that while libraries may be symbols of intellectual freedom, there are still plagued by the same close-minded problems that all of society faces.
Afterward we had a good discussion about some of our workplace experiences, and we agreed that these events and conversations are very valuable in helping us continue to foster an inclusive and positive work environment. (Thanks to our Diversity Planning Task Force for funding it!)
P.S. Here’s the archived webinar recording.
This interesting article from the NY Times explains how smartphones’ AI systems, case in point Siri, may help gradually nudge people on the autism spectrum into being more sociable. Because of a machine’s programmatic patience, it can handle infinite difficult and challenging queries and topics that may otherwise frazzle those who help people dealing with autism.
Our wonderful in-house ANTswers chat bot here at UCI makes me consider a few things in relation to this article: 1) users on the autism spectrum might gravitate toward an AI interface if they have had comparable success with their smartphone AI, and 2) when we review transcripts, we may need to consider that some obtuse questions/conversations may come from a user on the autism spectrum, rather than someone merely acting mischievous.
As of late 2013, the new kid on the Scholarly Communications block appears to be AcademicTorrents.com. I just heard about it this afternoon through the collective brain listserv of Business Librarians, which cited this Scholarship 2.0 post from 2/1/14.
I browsed AcademicTorrent’s dataset list, and the oldest set appears to be dated 11/20/2013. Considering how much content has been added since then, it definitely seems to be off to a good start, and I’ll be posting a link to it on my Datasets page on the Business Research Guide.
Interestingly enough, the background on their Log In page features one of the halls at Strahov Abbey Library, i.e. a stereotypical gorgeous library of gilded-pillars-and-venerable-tomes. I’m not enitrely sure what to make of that, but I figure we librarians can take it as a compliment.
Gosh, how I wish I could take credit for this. Huge kudos to Tim Hodge and the team at Coastal Carolina University for this exceptionally spectacular citation metaphor. And huge thanks to my B-lib colleague Ilana Barnes for putting this on my radar in the first place.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/21758525[/vimeo]
For those of you who don’t want to watch the video, here’s CCU’s script too. I’ve pasted the text below in case this url ever goes away.
Welcome to Kimbel Library story hour. Today we have a story for you that’s wonderful. And disturbing.
This is a story about Jim. He’s smart, creative, and his ideas have real merit. He also hates wearing pants. Unlike his ideas, which freely float like squid through an ocean of thought, his pants constrict and inconvenience. Like an octopus. Devouring a seal.
Anyway, Jim discovered a solution. He stopped wearing pants. After a few weeks of glorious pantslessness, something frustrating started to happen. Nobody paid attention to any of his good ideas: instead, they just asked him dumb questions. Where were his pants? Why no pants? What’s with the not wearing pants thing? Should we call the police? It didn’t matter that Jim was smart and well-educated. Without pants, people didn’t trust him.
The moral of the story is that in the university, we cite sources for many of the same reasons we wear pants: it shows respect to the people around you. It says that you care enough about them that you will inconvenience yourself for their comfort. It speaks to your kick-ass ability to follow directions, which might be the most important thing you learn in college.
But seriously. Your professors really care about this stuff, so not citing sources, or doing it poorly, sends the opposite message: you are a jerk who only looks after number one, and nobody else matters. This has consequences beyond just failing your paper or getting expelled from the university. It makes your professor think of you as a weirdo. A pantsless weirdo.
First, BIG thanks to Danielle K. for putting Google Forms on our radar with an email she sent out to one of our Reference teams in which she surveyed us with a Google Form! I wanted a solution to Springshare’s relatively inadequate libguide survey templates, so I could record users’ analytics on both my Business Research Guide and Instruction sessions. Enter the customizable (screenshot below) and embeddable Google form, which includes a nifty auto-populated Excel file of responses saved in your Google Drive. The current iteration of my form is here.
Now the plot thickens; how to ask precise questions that yield accurate results? Coincidentally I had recently filled out a Likert scale form for the (great!) ANTPAC training session run by Caitlin P. Afterward Cynthia J. approached me to brainstorm from feedback on the session, and we started talking about the potential for usability snags with Likert scales entries in terms of users reading left-to-right and rapidly entering answers.
Well a Google search for: ‘Likert scale left to right’ yielded this excellent citations-and-all entry called Survey Respondents Prefer the Left Side of a Rating Scale from the Measuring Usability Blog. In a nutshell the author recommends one err on the side of having the more negative rating (e.g. poor, strongly disagree) on the left side of a Likert scale to avoid an agreement bias, though it’s worth noting that the effect is marginal compared to factors like participant number and survey wordiness. I hope this best practice method can help colleagues who also try Google Forms or other survey means.
(How poetic that this post immediately follows Kevin’s entry on Survey Fatigue.)
Last week I celebrated my first year anniversary with the UCI Libraries. Because I could write a thesis on all of the important things I have learned in that span, and because posting a wordy thesis is frowned upon for a blog, I decided instead to share some fun lessons I have learned along the way.
1. The UCI Student Center will ruin all of your directional self-esteem. Budget a half hour for aimless wandering if you have a meeting in one of its lesser offices.
2. The best way to get through a Monday morning or a Mega Meeting is to go to Peet’s and buy a Honey Bran muffin. Be forewarned: Becky Imamoto and I will fight you for them.
3. Your capability to find the person you want on the inter-office AIM List is inversely proportional to your urgency to speak with them.
4. Hummingbirds are the noisiest birds on our campus. Also if they were the size of ostriches, they would be utterly terrifying.
5. Don’t work late in a library and leave when it has closed for the night. Especially if you are acquainted with The Walking Dead show, or The Shining movie. Twin zombies will lurch out from the shadowy stacks and ask you to play and eat brains with them.
I recently had the good fortune to attend the SLA (Special Libraries Association) Annual Conference, where I also encountered two of our colleagues, Julia G. and Bethany H! SLA is a smaller and arguably more manageable beast than ALA Annual, though it’s pricey to attend. That said, the expenses are worthwhile for intimate networking opportunities (many familiar faces by day three), focused subject presentations, and a high concentration of relevant vendors, all of which are quite useful for me as a business librarian.
Two standout presentations that may be of interest to my UCI Libraries friends were:
2) Leadership: A Commanding Officer’s Viewpoint.
I also schmoozed at events hosted by the Business & Finance subgroup. Having chatted with many early-career business librarians, we all ponder which group will give us the best professional-involvement-ROI (Return On Investment), and our two key groups are SLA- B&F and ALA- BRASS (Business Reference & Services Section). Currently I am the new webmaster for BRASS, and I look forward to attending my first ALA conference, (aack, flying tomorrow!) in part so I can compare the in-person business subgroup experiences between ALA and SLA.
Maybe I should start packing…