New Zealand libraries on Twitter (part 1)

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[Edited 30/8 to add some more names and htmlise the @ links. Shall try not to edit further without extreme provocation. 🙂 ]

I tweeted that I was planning a blogpost about New Zealand libraries on Twitter, but neglected to mention that by “planning” I meant that I have all sorts of cool ideas about it in my head, the extraction of which generally depends on what other cool ideas I come up with in the meantime. This seems a bit unfair, so I decided at least I can blog this much so far, and hopefully having blogged a bit will inspire me to keep going.

So, I have a list of all the New Zealand libraries I’ve found on Twitter. (If I’ve missed one out, please let me know!) As of today, these break down to:

(Oh Access! The whole point of me typing this up in a database was so I could rearrange the information and copy/paste it out again! If I’d known you were going to be like this I’d have used Excel! –Hah, found the export function.)

Academic Libraries
@cpitlibrary
@LincolnULibrary
@Massey_Uni_Lib
@OtagoLibrary
@UnitecLibrary

Public Libraries
@AlexArchivists
@Auckland_Libs
@chblibraries
@ChristchurchLib
@dnlibraries
@Ed_Puke_Ariki (I think? or possibly should count as museum, for which I have another more haphazard list.)
@elgarweb
@GisborneLibrary]
@GreyLynnLibrary
@HDLibraries
@invlibrary
@kapiti_lib
@Kintalk
@kowhaireader
@Manukau_Libs
@mtroskillib
@nelsonlibraries
@NLNZ
@pncitylibrary
@PukeAriki
@Remueralibrary
@rodneylibraries
[ETA @RotoruaLibrary]
@shorelibs
@tararualibrary
@Taupo_Libraries
@UHLibrary
@wanganuilibrary
@wcl_library
@xenathecat

School Libraries
@anyquestionsnz
@Ashslibrary
@gbhslibrary
@Kingshighlib

Special Libraries
@EnergyLibrary
@KinderLibrary
@lilac_library
[ETA @L2_S2S]
@nzicalibrary
@rnzfblibrary
@WMLIB

Stuff that’s awesome but isn’t a library communicating with its users
@DigitalNZ
@newOnDigitalNZ
@Schoollibsnz
@SLIS_NZ
@Te_Ara

I ~~may remove~~ have removed this last category from my list and will remove it from any further analysis I do.

Not all of these accounts are currently in use. Further analysis to follow in due course.

On the Humanities and the Innovation Adoption Curve

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I’ve been catching up on my reading and am currently up to:

Herrera, G. (2011). Google Scholar Users and User Behaviors: An Exploratory Study. College & Research Libraries, 72(4), 316-330.

which looks at usage data about Google Scholar cunningly culled from link resolver logs. There’s some really interesting stuff, but something they quote in their conclusion made my mind go off on a tangent:

On the other hand, the 2009 Ithaka faculty survey concluded that humanists “have been later and slower to change in many ways than their peers in the sciences, to be sure.” –Schonfeld and Housewright, “Faculty Survey 2009,” 34.

Which is an observation that comes up time and again, and often it’s implied that this is because the humanities are inherently conservative. But is that really the case? Correlation doesn’t mean causation.

Could it instead be simply that new technologies are designed by computer scientists for computer scientists? Engineering and physical sciences work similarly enough that they can adapt their usage pretty easily. But the humanities — a few of us have been doing some mini sessions on scholarly ebooks for faculty, and what we’re hearing from faculty is that in the humanities they have completely different kinds of texts which need to be used in completely different kinds of ways, and these ways are not supported by the technology.

So I rather suspect that it’s rather less to do with the people than commonly implied, and rather more to do with systematic bias in the technology.

The fallacy of "push communication"

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It’s actually been a while since I’ve heard people talk of push communication, so maybe I’m a day late and a dollar short on this, but I can’t help when I have my epiphanies.

The idea behind push communication (when I heard it, at least) is that instead of waiting for users to come to your website for news, you could push it out to them through, for example, an RSS feed.

Hands up those of you who, when you ask your users to put their hands up if they use an RSS reader, ever get anyone putting a hand up? No, nor do I. And this is the problem: if you’re pushing information out to somewhere that people don’t visit, you’re still asking them to pull it.

Even if you push it right to their email inbox, if they only check their email when their kids mention they’ve sent photos of their grandkids; or if you’re pushing it to their student email account and they only ever check their dotcom-mail if that; you’re still not going to be successful.

My phone company pushed an SMS message to my cellphone on the 28th July to say that my account’s going to expire next year, my terms and conditions have changed, and I can get a new phone on some special offer until the 31st July. I finally noticed this message on the evening of the 31st July.

I only listen to the radio in the aftermath of natural disasters. I have friends who (by choice) don’t even own a TV (I use mine so rarely I forget which buttons on the remote to press). There’s no guaranteed way to push your communication to all your users short of accosting them face-to-face, and even then, even if you offer candy, a measurable proportion will still avert their eyes and walk right past you.

Of course RSS is still a handy tool, because it lets you embed the feed in places where hopefully the users will go. We embed ours on the library homepage, some subject guides, and our Facebook page. But that just gets more users, not all. (The most common response when I tell students about our Facebook page is laughter. Sure we’ve got 900+ followers. But that leaves probably 18,000+ non-followers.) We can communicate all we like through these channels, but the majority of our users — even when they’re motivated to find out which buildings are open to be borrowed from/returned to this week — still don’t know what’s going on in the library until they get a library tutorial. (And in the last few weeks the attendance rate at my tutorials is running at about 2/3.)

Long story short, if you want a message to get to all or even most of your users, you’re going to have to push hard and you’re going to have to push really really smart.

Launching Ref2RIS – convert your typed bibliography to Endnote format

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Several months ago I blogged about Converting a plaintext bibliography to RIS format for Endnote. It’s not as painful a process as typing up hundreds/thousands of records, but it’s still painful.

This last week, I had to repeat the process. Eight painful work-hours later, I heard a colleague had something similar to do. And I thought there must be a way to automate it so one doesn’t have to do the endless typing every time.

Then I was home sick and got bored and ended up making a basic APA converter. Then (still sick and still bored) I got all fancy-schmancy and named and documented it and everything.

Thus, Ref2RIS.

Notes:

If you really can’t get access to MacOS or Linux to do this on and can’t get sed on Windows, email me – I’ll do it for a dollar or a good cause.
If you need a style other than APA, also email me. Whether/how quickly I get around to it will depend on a complex formula of many factors, but I think it’ll be quicker to make than the first one was, and right at the moment my motivation is high.
If you use it successfully, please let me know, spread the word, and/or if you’re really enthusiastic there’s a tipjar on the site.

Working in a library that rocks

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I’ve been meaning to write something like this for a month or two, and being sent home after another 5.5mag aftershock (an hour before a 6.0) seems like a good occasion to finally get around to it…

[DISCLAIMER: This is about my personal experience: everyone’s experiences are different. Also I take no responsibility for facts: reality changes on a daily/hourly/minute-ly basis and I can’t always even keep up-to-date with the current situation let alone remember the past.]

After September, it was I think almost a week before we staff were allowed back to work to start tidying up, and I was chomping at the bit to get there and be able to do something instead of being stuck at home.

After February, it was… longer. Even when we could get back to campus, the libraries themselves were closed, and we only had a half dozen desks between us. So we had only the very occasional shift there — and that suited me just fine. Granted work had clean water while at home I was still traipsing to the Red Cross water tanker and boiling everything. But my old 30-minute bus-trip to work was now 90 minutes or so, driving over broken roads, past broken buildings, around the perimeter of the broken city. By the time I’d got to work I’d already be on the verge of tears.

So for some weeks I worked mostly from home, through the power of the internet. Our virtual reference service proved wonderful for communicating with students, and for communicating among ourselves. We could do a lot to get our e-services and e-resources operating at a distance. And I could be home to answer the door for visitors from the Red Cross, Salvation Army, Australian police, EQC inspectors, etc. Not to mention tradespeople – I needed a chimney taken down and I’d been in the middle of getting the house painted. Water came back on but sewerage remained dodgy; I took delivery of a chemical toilet.

At work we got our smallest branch open; then another branch. Not my own branch, but we could actually work in a library. It was still nothing like normal. All the tutorials I’d normally teach in first semester were cancelled (many of the classes they taught into had been cancelled due to lack of facilities.) At some point around here I took two weeks’ leave — leave which I’d needed even before the quake…. Two weeks later I came back to work much rested and refreshed: it was a full two hours before I burst into tears.

But things settled down. Most importantly for me, my manager gave me projects to do: day-to-day business is one thing, but moving beyond survival mode I need something I can get a sense of accomplishment from, so this helped tremendously. One day I was able to visit my office to retrieve some files, and found my umbrella there from February. (My potted mandarin seedling, alas, was past its best-by.) When our temporary office space caused my RSI/OOS to rear its head again, my new manager got me a semi-permanent desk to work at. We got part of Central Library open so I even got some regular desk shifts where I could interact with real students again, face-to-face. My buses got more reliable, so getting to and from work was now only 60 minutes, and I bought an e-reader to keep myself occupied on the way.

There are still (as of the morning of the 13th June) two and a half branches closed out of the five. One and the half are/were in the process of working towards reopening. The other one — my one — there’s no timeframe for. (The building itself is safe, it’s the neighbouring buildings that there’s concerns about. In the meantime we can at least make daily retrievals of requested books.) An aggregate of rumours was leading me to the impression that it would be a long time, perhaps on the order of the rest of this year or so.
The team whose library I’m working in are wonderful, and have been fantastic. But I miss my team, who’ve been broken up and scattered around. Having desk shifts again is also great. But I miss having desk shifts in my branch, serving the students and staff in my subject areas. I’m constantly thinking how tough it is for them to be without their branch, especially for those who ‘lost’ their branch just a year before that in a merger with ours, and especially after we were shut so off-and-on for renovations and after the September quake. I’m almost used to the new routine; but it’s hard; and even without these latest quakes it was going to change again in a couple of weeks or a couple of months.

The shaking itself doesn’t scare me. (I must admit I’ve always been fortunate in which buildings I’ve been in — some sound a lot scarier.) Evacuating a library leaves me just a bit shaky afterwards. Wading through liquefaction to get home is an absurdity that makes me laugh, and seeing families gathered, on a sunny winter day, on porches and lawns and at mailboxes watching the traffic crawl by — really it’s a beautiful thing.

But the days, weeks, months ahead — the day-to-day of a world turned upside down — that is challenging; and rewarding; and all in a day’s work; and a long hard trudge.

5 Reasons Why Print Books Don’t Cut the Mustard

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(With apologies to Wired.)

No-one can dispute that print books have been pretty popular over the last several centuries. But really they are fundamentally flawed. Unless they can precisely duplicate the experience provided by an e-reader they’re doomed, because all people want the exact same reading experience and never compromise on some criteria in order to fulfill others.

Let’s skip a page of boring context and cut to the bulletpoints that are the only things anyone cares about anyway.

1. An unfinished print book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it.

You know the drill. You pick up a print book, start reading it, get distracted and leave it next to the sofa. Next day, when your eye’s caught by another print book on the wooden bookshelf and you open its cover, the print book doesn’t display the page of the print book you were reading yesterday to remind you where you were at. Two weeks later you’ve got a dozen half-read print books in a dozen obscure locations of your house (some of them with scraps of paper marking the point you left off – that’s right, even if you pick up the same print book you were reading yesterday, it won’t automatically remember your page number). Eventually you realise you’re never going to finish any of them and in a tidying frenzy you dump them all back on your wooden bookshelf.

2. You can’t keep your print books all in one place.

Print books on the wooden bookcase, beside your bed, in your handbag, at work, in the car, at the physical library – it’s impossible to keep track of them all. And if you finish reading a print book at the start of a commute, you can’t just open it again to choose and start reading a new print book, because all the other print books are at home, on the wooden bookshelf.

Worse yet, you can’t keep your print books all in two places. There’s no app for syncing a print collection between two locations. If your print books are on the wooden bookshelf at home, they can’t be in your handbag at the same time.

To add credibility and pathos to my opinions, I shall here mention a friend who lost access to her house post-earthquake and with it her entire collection of print books. When she got the occasional half hour to retrieve items she had to rapidly choose which to spend her time rescuing. If they’d been electronic they’d have been in her iPhone all along — and if she’d lost that, she could have retrieved her computer on which they’d have all been synced.

3. Notes on paper margins are pointless

You spend hours reading a print book and making ink notes in its paper margins and what have you got at the end of it? All that useful information is still stuck inside the print book. You can’t click and drag it into your word processor where you actually need it. You could cut and paste it and make a nice collage, but even librarians who appreciate marginalia are likely to look askance at that.

4. Print books are priced as disposable, but aren’t marketed that way.

I talked with someone today who had some print items he no longer wanted and wanted to donate them to the library. The library didn’t want them and I couldn’t think of any library or used bookstore that would. The best thing to do would be to throw them in the recycling bin. But he hesitated, and I found even I hesitated to make this suggestion in so many words. Because we’ve developed this utterly idiotic idea that the print book, each with runs of thousands or millions, is nevertheless a priceless artefact whose destruction is a kind of sacrilege.

5. Print books can’t be used as a clock.

Look at the bottom of your print book and you won’t see the time – only a page number. You can’t go back to the title page and open up a game of sudoku. Storing too many polaroids in it makes the pages bulge. If you want to check a definition, you have to fetch an entirely different print book. The only thing a print book does is let you read that one novel.

Well, not quite the only thing. It does make nice kindling.

Links of interest 2/6/11 – collaborating with students

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Reading my RSS feeds sometimes a theme emerges from the chaos – this time it was ways in which academic libraries have collaborated with students to enhance both library services and student learning.

Research
Students Studying Students: An Assessment of using Undergraduate Student Researchers in an Ethnographic Study of Library Use “reports on the use of undergraduate students enrolled in an Applied Anthropology course as researchers for a library use study at Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library”.

Similarly, Brian Mathews writes about Exploring graduate student use patterns of the UCSB Library.

Experimentation in an Academic Library: A Study in Security and Individual Student Engagement
“The Special Collections and Rare Book Department at Western Michigan University collaborated with a student worker to develop a system to improve security and employee performance. The student was taking a course in psychology that required him to develop a workplace behavioral intervention with a client and modify an important behavior for employee performance.”

Library instruction
Building a Participatory Culture: Collaborating with Student Organizations for 21st Century Library Instruction – literature review and summary of some events where the library hooked into student association events, or initiated their own in collaboration with the student association, to teach library skills.

Displays
Brian Mathews again: Reframing the Concept of Plagiarism, Or What I Learned From Banksy – on art projects in the library.

Communication
A Friendfeed discussion on Our library posts a newsletter called “Stall Times” in our bathrooms. A student using the pseudonyms “Mike Koch” and “Hugh Jass” recently made a parody called “Small Times.” Our creative manager contacted him and invited him to collaborate. The conversation doesn’t go further in depth but does include links to archived bathroom newsletters from this and other libraries.

Back to Brigham Young University – they’re also famous for their parody of the Old Spice commercial, made by the Harold B. Lee Library Multimedia Production Crew, consisting of two full time employees and ten student employees – see their behind the scenes.

There’s lots of scope for collaboration with journalism, media, music and film students. Language students could translate subtitles. History/literature/etc students could work with digitisation projects. Computer science students could work on components for open source library software. The sky’s the limit…

Links of interest 7/4/2011 – reference and webdesign

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A bit of fun: Book Sculptures

College & Research Libraries (C&RL) will become an open access publication beginning with the May 2011 issue.

Citation Management Software: Features and Futures (RUSQ) compares RefWorks, EndNote, and Zotero from both a user and librarian perspective.

Reference and virtual reference
Search for the answer, not the question – “Assume the answer to your question is out there, and think about how the answer might have been written.” I’ve been teaching students something like this, focusing on thinking about who would have written about something and where they would have published.

“Are We Getting Warmer?”: Query Clarification in Live Chat Virtual Reference (RUSQ)
“Results indicate that accuracy was enhanced for librarians who used clarifying questions in answering ready reference (factual) questions.”

Mu, X., Dimitroffa, A., Jordana, J., and Burclaffa, N. A Survey and Empirical Study of Virtual Reference Service in Academic Libraries The Journal of Academic Librarianship 37(2) pp. 120-129.
“Virtual Reference Services (VRS) have high user satisfaction. The main problem is its low usage. We surveyed 100 academic library web sites to understand how VRS are presented. We then conducted a usability study to further test an active VRS model regarding its effectiveness.”

Website usability
One-Pager is a simple, mobile-friendly, user-friendly “library website template that allows your patrons to find what they want” – described elsewhere as a solution to messy library websites.

A couple of papers from Computers in Libraries are reported:

Usability Express: A recipe for libraries (worth it just for the classic xkcd cartoon)
Building Great Websites (“Take-away goal: Reduce your site by half – it doesn’t mean you have bad content, but people cant find it because there is too much to look through”.)