Annoyed Librarian

The RL team are going away for a few days. In our absence, we recommend the Annoyed Librarian who writes with great wit and insight about the US rubbish librarian scene.

Unfunny cartoon

This is from Cardiff University's Resource Bank of rubbish librarianship.

An addiction to web 2.0

An addict writes:

“You get up in the morning, that's one. Send another at the station. That's two. One before starting work, coffee break, couple at lunch and so on. You also think 'oh, difficult meeting with the boss, I'll want a tweet after that' and so on. So - far from a tweet being a tweet it becomes integral to the way you do things. Part of the panic of not having a tweet is the insane craving, but just as importantly, tweets help you get through things. Of course, you entirely ignore the fact that other people can have difficult meetings with the boss and not need to tweet. You also tend to hang around with people who tweet, and there's a concern that if you didn't tweet, you wouldn't see those people and would miss out on the gossip. Tweeters reinforce each other, and the habit that they both share.”

The Information Professional versus Google

CILIP’s website includes “Practical Guides” written by their Information and Advice Team which are considered of sufficient value to be password protected. One of them, The Information Professional versus Google, seems to be intended as a crib sheet for librarians to use when their role is being questioned. One would expect it to gather together and articulate the strongest arguments in favour of our profession. Unfortunately, it is a shocking example of bad writing, grammatical inconsistency, and the muddled thinking and poor reasoning that blight our discourse.

These are its main arguments:

• "A course at CILIP mentions that in 2007 Google only indexes 6% of the web."
• "Most material on the web is not vetted."
• "Information Professionals have a role in teaching information literacy; we are often in a good position to educate people about the web".
• Young people tend to skim read articles. Librarians are good at writing abstracts.
• "Information Professionals are often providing a service for the public good, not every one can afford to subscribe to the internet or afford books."
  
• "Information Professionals are developing IT skills to encourage users to library websites." (Is this wise?)
  
• "Information professionals save time. Frank Ryan says the three things he has learnt are that time has a value, the internet is not free (it still takes staff time to find free material) and pay-as-you-go pricing does not work for users." (Who is Frank Ryan?)
• "With the growth of web 2.0 and social media the role of information professional has changed, our role can often now be of "moderator" – providing quality control rather than being susceptible to popular low-quality information." (Eh?)
• "Search engines are constantly being updated to improve the service; this can result in them going offline, addresses changing or "broken links". Information professionals are able to update and index their own collections in a consistent manner." (What does this mean?)
• "Archives of things such as news items often go offline after a while. Libraries often have access to buy in online or physical collections." (“Things such as news items”!)
• "The cost of digitising a library is approximately $10 a book so physical libraries are likely to exist for some time. It has taken Google book search 3 years to digitize a million books, so it is likely to take 200 years to index all the books." (Assuming, that is, there are no further advances in scanning technology in the next 200 years)

Maybe CILIP should consider "vetting" its own material on the web?

Mediocre 2.0

While we will highlight particularly moronic academic library blogs, even the more sensible ones can seem less than essential. It’s certainly hard to imagine any scholars actually reading them.

A common approach is to list websites that might help research: for example, this one, and this. Clearly librarians should be experts when it comes to identifying useful sources of online information but we wonder whether randomly listing them on an unstructured, non-searchable blog is of much use to anyone. Better, surely, to draw on this knowledge when dealing with specific enquiries?

We can’t help thinking the motivation for such blogs is less to inform academics (who, presumably, are perfectly capable of finding the information they need) and more to show that librarians are hip to web 2.0.

The danger is that they give the impression that librarians have nothing better to do than idly surf the web for vaguely interesting websites. Writing about the recent KPMG report, Update editor Elspeth Hymans states: "We all need to think lean, and think how what we do adds value. Not 'Do I do what I do well?', but 'Does what I do need to be done at all'?" Quite.

Save your library: open up a Twitter feed

There's an interesting debate going on regarding a report which, in passing, suggests that public libraries might be staffed by volunteers.

One thing it shows is the limitations of Twitter as a forum for debating complex issues. The Twitter comments are either moronic (e.g. "This is scary #libraries keep being mentioned as being choppable today") or, more usefully, refer people to blog posts. The CILIP forum includes a couple of robust and persuasive comments from actual volunteers, and this is very good too

Library 2.0 guru Phil Bradley doesn't see it like that. This is his solution:

"Take a video camera, video it all, put it on YouTube, open up a Twitter feed, stream questions from the rest of us in order to give us better insight. Then go out onto the streets and ask people what they think?"

Pitiful video

Do other professions do this sort of thing?

Even more pointless

Link