Another day, another line

As I’m approaching this second year of my MLS program, I’ve been getting more and more accustomed to new professional experiences. In May, I presented my first poster, and in about 12 hours, I’m going to be giving my first talk—on the same topic, incidentally.

I wouldn’t say that I’m nervous—it’s just a 5-minute lightning talk, after all—but I’m looking forward to finishing with a few seconds to spare and sitting down. Really, I haven’t put that much extra preparation in since the poster. I’m basically going to be saying the same things I said there, just in front of a lot more people. The tricky bit, I guess, is swooping in under 300 seconds, while not talking so fast as to be confusing.

No caffeine tomorrow morning, then.

What’s funny is that I’m not nervous because of the many and important people. I much more dislike talking in front of a small group of peers than on stage in front of 50 or so colleagues. Really, you could put me in front of a crowd of thousands, and it wouldn’t bother me that much. Stage fright is not one of my issues.

All said, I guess I’m a little twitchy because it’ll be a new experience, like riding a roller coaster for the first time or stepping into prom. I’m not nervous for the act itself, just for the novelty.

And I’m definitely adding a “Talks” section to my CV that afternoon. What’s a professional life without shiny new headings?

It’s not technology’s fault

Steven Pinker, renowned popular linguist and professor of psychology at Harvard, has set up a straw man. In an op-ed from todays NYT, Pinker speaks against fear-mongers who prophesy that technology will be the downfall of civilization. The oft-repeated concept is that technology, while it makes information access faster, is training the human mind to find pithy answers with no attention span.

Pinker’s assessment that “such panics often fail basic reality checks” is valid—the Internet is not rotting our minds, per se. Still, I think he has set up a ridiculous straw man, thus entirely missing the point.

One commenter on a Boing Boing post about Pinker’s article, Christovir, points out that resistance to change has characterized every major advance in technology: widely-readable expressions of the Bible, printing, the phone. (Comment #7) And in every case, the general populace has been in no way harmed by these advances; to the contrary, we call them “advances” for a reason.

In his article, Pinker mentions that science, for example, would be totally shot if technology were harmful to human thought. Since science is doing better than ever, he concludes, technology must not be harmful to human thought.

That’s true.

Here’s where Pinker goes wrong. I agree, doomsday speech about the Internet being the precursor to pandemonium is total bunk. But that’s not the point—we all know those ideas are a little extreme. But it’s totally sensible to argue that the easing of quick access to information on a screen is developing a culture of shortened information seeking behavior.

Savolainen discusses the concept of an “information source horizon”. (article, behind a pay wall) Basically, people have a mental map of where they can get information, in some order by preference. When they actually try to answer a need they have, they take preferential courses through this horizon—”information pathways”, in Savolainen’s terms—sequentially resorting to less and less preferred sources as they must. Often, people will stop short of an answer if it requires them to go too far down a pathway. (Props to Carolyn Hank, such an awesome instructor that I actually remember these things.)

As the effective distance between us and some satisfactory amount of information shortens—one way you could define advances in technology—we become more and more resistant to spending high amounts of effort on intellectual pursuit. Put another way in example, if I can find a blog post through Google giving me enough easy information on something that I’m happy, I won’t even consider going to a print collection in a physical library.

Of course, Pinker’s science example stands, mainly because to get the necessary information for such high academic pursuit, one must go really far down an information pathway. The problem is, almost no information needs, across the whole scope of humanity, are that demanding.

Technology is in no way hampering human intellect, but Pinker is wrong to completely dismiss claims that technology is affecting how far people are willing to go to satisfy information needs.
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EDIT: I forgot to mention that Pinker does say more in his op-ed, though nothing to directly inform my points. I’d encourage you to read it in full—he’s not wrong; I just think he’s overlooking real issues.

Around once

As of this afternoon—after the class of 2010 walks—I’ll be a legit second-year MSLS student. It’s a little odd to think that when I met all those second-years last August, they were no more educated or mature than I now am. I think we new students all assumed that they knew kinda what they were talking about, even though they really didn’t. And this coming August, the tables will have turned.

I’m a bit torn on my reflections of this year.

I have learned so, so much about what it means to be a librarian, and I am outright excited to get a real job somewhere next year. If it weren’t for the ridiculously awesome teaching skills of the faculty here, I’d almost call the classes a waste of time. I’m not sure what precise area I want to go into—I can see myself behind a reference desk just as easily as cataloging full-time—but I’m thrilled that I’m a year closer to whatever it will be.

But at the same time, I’m disillusioned. When I decided to apply to grad schools for library science, I didn’t have a lot of experience at all. I knew that I liked information and how it could be organized and defined, and I knew that I liked helping people learn things, and I knew that I enjoyed knowing a little bit about a lot of things. And, yes, I have found that librarianship is about all those things. But I’ve found even more that librarians tend to live in a shell. We talk about reference interviews and metadata standards and community analysis and information seeking behavior. I concede that all those are important and necessary, but the user gets lost in the mix all too often.

In short, I am dismayed that so many librarians practice their art for the sake of the art itself, not the patron.

See, I try to emphasize end goals. Almost never will I start something without considering the whys, or without carrying those whys to their ultimate reasons. We are lost if we assume that better semantic access, or understanding of visceral needs, or cost-benefit analysis is all that matters. As far as I’m concerned, all of those pale in comparison to individual patrons finding the best information for their true needs as efficiently as possible. Sometimes, better semantic metadata serves that end, but sometimes it doesn’t.

Over the last year, I don’t know how many incarnations of the Pareto Principle—the 80/20 rule, if you will—I’ve been introduced to. Word frequency, journal significance, author productivity: they all seem to be governed by inverse functions. 80% percent of this is accounted for by 20% of that. Over and over and over, it comes up everywhere.

That rule also applies to productivity in any work setting. 80% of results arise from 20% of the effort put in.

If I’ve learned nothing else this year, it’s that 80% of our efficacy as librarians stems from 20% of the work we do. The other 80% of our work serves small populations with relatively insignificant needs.

Don’t take that the wrong way. One of the philosophies I’ve been imbued with is that every patron matters and no need is too small or silly. There are no stupid questions…well, OK, there are very few stupid questions. I don’t mean to imply that we should ditch those patrons who have needs at the margin.

Still, I’m not sure that it’s the best use of our time to focus so heavily on fine-tuning of teeny details. It frustrates me that my time can’t be devoted enough to helping people find information.

<\soapbox>

So what’s cooking for next year? Well, I’ve got a cataloging internship set up from May through December at another university’s library, and I’m registered for three great classes with excellent professors in the fall. I also plan to become more active professionally. I presented my first poster ever on Wednesday, and I might try to work it into a paper. I’m getting involved with IFLA and hopefully will learn a lot as part of the Newspapers section. Events to plan, stuff to write, meetings to hold—I’m busy, and I like it that way.

Still, I’m glad it’s summer and I can take the evenings off.

Here’s to another year.

Breadth

There was a time when I struggled to find words to describe my field. I wanted to pursue LIS for some vague reason. I suppose I just wasn’t sure what that reason was.

6 months post-orientation, I’ve discovered the opposite problem: everything is information. My studies—literally every course, every research interest—can be shaped to any situation you can throw at me. Now if you ask me what LIS is, I’ll still stumble for words because too many careen through my head. They’re hard to catch and form.

Then again, my obsession might be an artifact of the graduate school experience. A comparison to the oncologist who sees cancer everywhere would not be inaccurate. I do spend roughly 80-100 hours a week thinking about information. (It may also be indicative that the moment I typed that number, I began to wonder about the proliferation of completely fabricated results and their ultimate consequences to the information seeker, if any such consequences really exist.)

For example, I’m sitting at Caribou facing the pick-up line. Conveniently near the bar is a rack of propaganda: flyers for Caribou’s iced tea, take-out coffee, and the like. Is this an effective use of space? Do people actually pick these things up and read them while waiting for their large extra-foam hazelnut latti? In my experience, no.

Then, the question becomes why. Is it just ignorance, the same reason that people gloss over signs and ask librarians where the bathroom is 20 times an hour? Or is there something deeper? Maybe it’s the nature of the coffee line. To anecdotalize, I often use the time between ordering and sipping to prioritize my time while at the coffee shop: mental to-do lists and calendar review. I don’t have time to passively take in the scene and notice what Caribou is trying to tell me while I wait.

Anyway, this is the type of speculation I’m always engaging in, even when I don’t have to. I am uncertain, though, whether it’s a good thing or not.

Hands

A couple of hours ago, my assistantship program had a seminar on presentation techniques, particularly with respect to academic interviews. The professor leading the session, whose research focuses on storytelling, provided a really insightful analysis of the communicative aspect of presenting. The details were lovely—in fact, I’ll probably take a class from him if I get the chance—but I want to focus on one topic which came up in the Q&A afterward: nerves.

As is inevitable in any practical discussion of presenting, someone asked what to do about nerves. It wasn’t intended to be a focal point. Still, we talked about it for a good 15 minutes.

Interestingly, not all of us shared this particular difficulty. At least 3 people who were in the room, including me, don’t actually feel that nervous when talking to groups, whether 5 or 500. One mentioned that, as far as class presentations are concerned, she doesn’t put that much stock in school: it’s important, but not so much so that she worries about it. Another was a middle school teacher.

I, on the other hand, find myself somewhat in between. Just before taking the spotlight, I tend to become downright panicky, but as soon as my foot hits the stage, my nerves disappear. I suppose I am capable of reasoning my amygdala into putting on a good show.

However, one effect does not fade no matter how comfortable I am: I tremble, specifically in my hands. It’s actually a remarkably bizarre feeling, feeling one’s own body react to something when one’s mind is perfectly at ease. It’s not nerves or fear or stage fright. I can be absolutely relaxed in the center of attention. My hands simply agree to disagree.

Over time, I’ve learned to channel that energy pretty well: big gestures, deep breaths, extruding that pent-up energy into intensity of speech. If you ever have the (potential mis)fortune to watch me present, you’ll notice that I become a distinctly different person physically than in a one-on-one conversation.

Gross motion tends to drown out fine motor disfluencies, I suppose.

Uptime

I’m certainly becoming frustrated with the system on which grad school seems to be based. The general philosophy, it seems, is to toss a plurality of information at our brains and hope that some of it sticks in a meaningful way. We are expected to accept, learn, process, and produce at a rate unheard-of.

Such a thing is out of my comfort zone. I have a tendency to ponder to a fault. When I get something, it becomes deeply entrenched in my mind, but as of late, I require a lot of time in the process.

The model of grad school and my M.O. are frequently at odds. For example, I just wrote a hurried critique on a 2007 study of automated retrieval system evaluation in the absence of user input. The article, though laden with complicated statistics, has at its core a proposal which could revolutionize how we process system efficacy.

Were I able to leave my analysis of possible future research alone, I’d be able to move on to my next assignment which is due tomorrow, but I can’t get out of my head the purported correlation of that article’s system with measures of user satisfaction, implications for information retrieval at large, how user experience interacts with satisfaction….in short, I keep pondering while syllabi threaten to leave me behind in my reverie.

It’s not that I feel incompetent, just that my maximum ratio of uptime to downtime is uncomfortably different from that demanded of me.

O Dios mio….

Yesterday, in course of my determination to eat böreği with friends, I had to fill up with gas. The drive was quite uneventful, albeit slow in the fresh snow and sleet. For all the #snOMG, the roads really weren’t that bad yesterday. Anyway, the transaction was intended to be quick, much like any other at a gas station.

It wasn’t.

As I was getting out of my car, this guy came up to my door and started motioning to me while chattering away in Spanish. Note: I did study Spanish last year, but….well, it was a year ago, and we most certainly did not cover this situation. After a little confusion, I figured out that his car had stalled and needed a jump. I obliged (in slow English; I really didn’t want to let on that I spoke any Spanish at all, because I had no idea how to talk about cars. More on that below.). So I finished filling up my tank, then gingerly backed up and parked next to his open hood.

Hilarity ensued. By “hilarity”, I mean “miscommunication like whoa.” We began the interaction with a bunch of stumbled confusion over which color was positive. He kept holding up the black end of the cable and saying “positivo”, which was abjectly wrong. My frozen brain finally spit out, “No, es negativo. El rojo es positivo.”: mistake number 1.

He gawked at my sudden bilingualism for a moment, then proceeded to get agitated when I didn’t understand his rush of Spanish instructions. At this point, my brain refroze and the little conversational Spanish I’d retained since Spring ’09 iced over. In the process, I managed to connect up the cables completely backward—which didn’t break anything, but didn’t help either, because my battery was working just fine, thankyouverymuch—at which point this poor, confused man started muttering unkind words in Spanglish. He also demanded to know why I connected the negative end to the engine block. I, in my total ignorance of Spanish verbiage for “grounding” and “hydrogen” and “go boom”, did my best to charade that that’s just how you do it.

At this point, you should soak in the image: me, huddled in the cold, trying desperately to remember any Spanish vocabulary for cars which I may or may not have studied in undergrad; him, trying not to lash out at the stupid American for his ignorance; our cars, giving each each other confused glances about the complete lack of communication between their owners.

So I stood back and fought the urge to intercede—at this point, he didn’t want me touching anything, and I didn’t want to (he was connecting everything in the wrong order entirely, after all)—while the guy haphazardly connected the cables well enough to jump his car. In the end, both cars started, nothing exploded, and we both went on our way, perhaps a little frazzled from the experience.

Note to self: car repair + stone fortresses of misunderstanding = facepalm. Now, I just need to figure out how to explain electric current and how it relates to attaching the negative cable to the engine block of the non-starting car for purposes of grounding the connection far away from the liberated, highly explosive hydrogen gas from the battery…in Spanish.

That which binds

I am horrifically sentimental at times. Whether this is a flaw or a strength is uncertain to me. In any case, this University is the worst offender.

Yesterday, as I wandered from Caribou to Manning, I was assaulted by four-and-a-half years of memories. See, it’s not the words or the ideas which get me: it’s the places. And as the buildings and quads passed through my sight, I realized that I associate specific events with each of them. There is scarcely a location on campus which, for me, isn’t tightly bound to an event or seventeen. In all seriousness, I can think of only three buildings which I don’t have a clear association for.

The quote may be completely spoken to death, but it holds even so:

What is it that binds us to this place as to no other? It is not the well or the bell or the stone walls. Or the crisp October nights or the memory of dogwoods blooming. Our loyalty is not only to William Richardson Davie, though we are proud of what he did 200 years ago today. Nor even to Dean Smith, though we are proud of what he did last March. No, our love for this place is based on the fact that it is, as it was meant to be, the University of the people. –Charles Kuralt at the UNC Bicentennial

Midnight adventures of questionable legality from steam tunnels to roofs. Epic battles resulting in shredded latex refuse on muddy ground. The love of toast. Halloween murder mysteries. The cups of coffee—psh, the gallons of coffee. Sunday chocolate devotion. Remaining to the buzzer, even while standing alone. Battle wounds in the name of the cards being mine, !@#$ it. Seafood seafood gumbo. Hijacking classrooms until horrible hours. Pages of translations performed in hallways. The window lounges. 40 laps of the Pit at 3am. Emergency room visits. Rainy espresso days. The endless amusement derived from chucking acorns at their source. Squirrels leering from trash cans. Caroling under umbrellas. Caroling under soap. Ten dollar tickets. Secret bathrooms with vandalized grout. Free blue books and Scantrons. Knowing where Krispy Kreme is. Exploding chalk. Pretending you’re supposed to be there. Coaxing the voice of an angel from trembling. Jazz squares. Cuban rock. Bouncers staring for a long time at IDs. Hours of pondering yielding two lines of proof.

One tassel left. Another right.

Yep, definitely a librarian

I had a spectacular librarian moment this morning. A particular girl who I’ve known for a few years—we were in a couple of Latin classes together—came up to the desk and asked if I knew where the term “nabla” came from. The question wasn’t for a class. She was just wondering.

So, we tried to find out. Wikipedia sort of knew, but there weren’t any clear sources. We suspected it would be a Greek word, so we went over to our dictionaries in reference. Alas, no ancient Greek. So I directed her to the Classics library; they have a Liddell & Scott hanging around.

The whole exchange took 3 minutes, but it embodied a huge aspect of why I’m here: helping people find things, regardless of academic pursuit or lack thereof.

Incidentally, I kept researching after she left. Our suspicions were right.

55%: extensible?

The folklore of reference work states that reference librarians give patrons correct answers only about 55 percent of the time. In almost half of reference transactions, either the librarian provides misinformation, unhelpful information, or nothing at all. The old research this is based on has its validity, but it’s definitely a shock to the aspiring librarian that we get it wrong so frequently. That number typically is used with regard to traditional reference transactions: a patron asks a research-type question (e.g., “What’s dada?”), and the librarian tries to provide factual data.

But any librarian will tell you that most questions they get aren’t reference at all, but directional, like, “Where’s the bathroom?” or “How do I find this call number?” I haven’t seen any research on how frequently patrons get the wrong answers to these questions. Granted, I haven’t tried to look up articles, but it seems obvious that librarians and support staff would have a hard time screwing up the layout of the building they work in every day. Right?

I started really questioning that assumption yesterday.

A little background: The Law Library and Health Sciences Library at UNC are treated distinctly from the Academic Affairs Library (i.e., every other library on campus), but they’re perfectly well integrated into our circulation system. For example, you can request a book from Law to be picked up at the Art Library, Document Delivery will pick it up for you, and it should be ready for check-out at Art within 2 days, if that. By the same token, you can return materials from any UNC library to any UNC library, and Doc Delivery will take care of getting them back to their proper home library. It’s a really convenient system which makes research (and leisure reading) a lot more accessible.

That conference I talked about last post was held at UNC’s School of Law. I had a couple of books to return—one from Davis (the main library) and one from the SILS library—and I figured I’d just return them at Law while I was there. In an effort to be irrelevantly polite, I asked the student working the front desk if it was OK to return AAL books there.

Silly me.

First off, she got really confused when I said “Academic Affairs”. Not like that’s standard library terminology which you learn on day 1 or anything. Anyway, I went ahead and explained that the books were from Davis (in effect, this is true) and that I wanted to return them here.

She said no.

No? Wait a second, you just said that you could do that because of Doc Delivery.

Yes, observant reader, I did say that, mainly because it’s unquestionably true.

I almost corrected her—”Yes, you can, and I know you can because I work in the libraries, too.”—but I opted to play dumb and see how far I could take it.

“Oh, you can’t?”
“No, we don’t do that here.”
“You can’t have them sent back to Davis?”
“No.”
“But isn’t there some sort of courier or something that takes books back and forth?”
“Well, we request books for the law students from Davis, and we can get them sent back when the students return them, but…”
(I can only presume that she connected the dots and realized I was right at this point. But, of course, she couldn’t admit defeat.)
“But we can’t do that for you. It’s against our policy.” (!)
“Oh, you can’t check these in here?”
(At this point, it was almost irresistible to walk her through checking in the book and putting it in the blue container for Doc Delivery, but I held strong to my feigned ignorance.)
“No, you’ll have to take them to Davis yourself.”
“…Oh. OK. Have a good afternoon.”
“You too. Sorry I can’t help.”
“No problem.”

It’s against your policy? You can use Doc Delivery to get books for law students and to send them back, but not for any other students who happen to be in the building? Oh, sorry, I thought that the process had nothing to do with patron type at all, and that the whole purpose of Doc Delivery was to make transactions like this possible. Whoops.

I left it at that, though I considered surreptitiously sneaking behind a desk and checking them in myself. Still, I gave her the benefit of that doubt so far—maybe there’s actually a reason that they can’t. No idea what it would be, but I don’t work in Law, so it’s possible there’s something.

So I asked a librarian at Davis, just to be sure:

“Hi, I need these checked in. Also, I have a completely hypothetical question to ask you.”
“OK, shoot.”
“Hypothetically, say I needed to return some books from Academic Affairs—much like these right here—but I were at the Law Library for whatever reason. Could I return them there?”
“Absolutely, you could.”
“OK. Just curious for no particular reason. Thanks!”

Nope, I’m not crazy.

I really wasn’t that irked by the Law support staff’s ignorance. I needed to walk by Davis anyway to get to my bus. But it got me wondering: how frequently does this happen? How often do patrons get incorrect answers to directional questions as simple as “Can you check these in?”

I know I’ve misinformed a patron before. The printing system here at UNC is completely wacky (another issue for another blog), and we don’t have student printing available at the Math/Physics Library. Last I’d heard, the nearest printing available is in the Undergraduate Library, so I told a patron that when he asked. Later, I checked on it, and surprise, ITS had recently added a print station in the Campus Y, at most a quarter of the distance away.

So, brave souls who read this far, how often do you think this happens? Do you know of any research on the topic? And how can libraries ensure that they don’t make dumb errors like this?