Just embedding my Rhapsody feed in this post so I can see what it looks like. I don't really have the energy to put it up on my blog somewhere right now.
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July 2007 Archives
Originally found via Library Stuff is this blog post through Seattlest, Does Self-Checkout Make Libraries Less Friendly?
*sigh*
This is one of those issues with me that drives me nuts. I will forewarn you that this post will probably make me sound like a horrible librarian, but here's the deal; I hate chit chatting with patrons. I'm not unfriendly, on the contrary, I'm quite friendly to anybody who walks through the door of my library, but I wish most people would just save their life stories for somebody else. I'm there to do a job, and even without checking books in and out all day, I have more than enough on my plate to occupy my time.
Then there's the patron perspective, I love self-checkout as a patron because I don't have to talk to anybody! I have no desire to get to know the librarians at my own branch (which is not the library I work for); probably because I know they have more pressing matters than to chit chat with their patrons all day.
I've never been one for small talk anyway, brief snippets of "how do you dos" are fine, but we've had patrons come to the library and talk to various members of our staff for hours, yes hours! You're like a deer caught in the headlights, there's nowhere to run, nowhere to go! Some of our more chatty patrons probably think I'm not friendly, but one thing most people have come to realize is that no matter how I feel about that person, I will bend over backwards to find what they're looking for. It's not because I care about why they're looking for something, it's because it's my job to help them. I don't need to know the back story to be good at my job. I don't even need to like a person to be good at my job. They come in with a problem, and hopefully they leave with some more information to help them with the solution. That is my goal for everybody.
This is one of them sticky issues, but a question has been floating around in my head ever since a recent meeting at work. I'm not asking this to be sarcastic, I'm actually serious because I don't know how other librarians feel; but how far should customer service go in libraries? Is it really my job to listen to a patron's life story for 2 hours in the name of customer service or is there a point where you have to say, "Hey listen, it's been nice chatting with you, but I really have to get back to work?" I've been thinking about this for some time because I actually think that some people within my organization believe it is my job to listen to their life stories in the name of customer service. My prior customer service experience was in food service, there's just no way a person has the luxury of chatting up another person that long when you're working in food service. My dad owned a bakery most of my childhood and he's probably more like me in personality. Many of his customers loved to talk to him, but he was good at breaking off the conversation when he needed to get back to work without offending his customer. If they wanted to talk for a long time he had no problem calling them into the back while he was baking to work as they talked. He seemed to know the right balance to keep the customer happy but still be able to get his work done in the day. There are some patrons I do genuinely enjoy talking to, but for the most part I see conversing with patrons as a necessity to a point.
That being said, I don't always dislike working on the desk. Of course all of my time is desk time when I work; I don't have a choice otherwise. I love the challenge of helping people find what they need, and I'm lucky enough to work with some great people who prefer the chit chatting, so we generally tag-team (I find the stuff and then they can chit chat with my co-workers if they so desire).
Of course nobody uses our self-checkout anyway because it's set up poorly. The user interface is horrible, the error messages are generic and unhelpful, and I suspect most people bypass it to chat with us at the desk. I actually had one patron said he wouldn't use it because it would "put us out of a job". The irony of that is it was a Saturday and we had a two page list of things to do that day from our supervisor sitting on the desk in front of him.
Maybe the answer boils down to what you expect from a library. I expect libraries to be a place to find information and for somebody to be helpful when I need help. The customer service I expect from a library is no different than the customer service I expect from a restaurant or a store of any kind. My standards in customer service are actually surprisingly high given my indifference to most things. I suppose it's hard for me to step out of that and realize the motivation others feel to share their life stories with complete strangers (because even though they see me every day at the library, I am really a complete stranger to them).
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We've been planning a week long camping trip with friends for about 6 months now. It's amazing how much you still save until the last minute, even with the best intentions of planning early. I'm still psyched about the trip though. There will be 6 of us altogether; Josh and Stacie are coming from Milwaukee, Adhamh is coming from Iowa and he will be bringing his girlfriend from Indiana. We're going first to Northern Wisconsin, to a wonderful campground that Alex and I have visited before (about 2 years ago). We also decided to avoid driving through Chicago and we're taking the ferry across Lake Michigan to Wisconsin. I'm looking forward to the 4 hours it will take to ferry across the lake where we can hang out on the boat and not be in the car (plus there's beer on board, gotta love that). The longest ferry trip I've been on is 30 minutes to Kelley's Island in Lake Erie, so this will be new for me. I love being on the lakes though so I am really looking forward to it!
We'll spend about four days in Wisconsin, everybody else will head home and Alex and I are going to camp by ourselves in the Upper Peninsula, not too far from Wisconsin. Then we'll make the trek home through the UP. I think it's going to be a great time, but I will not have access to the internet for about one week. I fear the state of my email when I return. I'll have to be vigilant about posting my pictures when I get home. The last week long camping trip we did we came home with about 200 pictures from the trip and it took me about a year and a half to finally get all of them posted to Flickr.
Alex and I just got back from our first Mega Geocaching Event in Kendallville, Indiana this weekend. We met lots of great people at the Midwest GeoBash! A common practice in geocaching is to leave sig (or signature) items either in geocaches or with people that you meet at various events. Sig items can be anything, either something that you make, poker chips are popular, or simple business cards also work. Before the first event we went to, I had an idea to purchase some Moo Cards as our signature items. I used pictures from Flickr that I had posted of our geocaching expeditions. I think this has turned out to be one of the better ideas I ever had. For one, when it comes time to start trading sig items, since most people we encounter don't know what Moo Cards are, we can tell them. We usually let them go through the pictures and pick out one that they like, and this often leads to discussion about various geocaches or locations that we've been to, based on the pictures. Geocachers like to talk about their favorite geocaches so that's always a great icebreaker when you're meeting someone new. Another wonderful thing about the Moo Card is that it's memorable. While at GeoBash I had one man walk up to me and ask where I had got the cards and he explained that he found one in a geocache just south of where we were. We remembered that we actually visited that cache and left our sig card over a month ago! He had seen us trading them with some other people at that moment and realized that Alex and I were the couple that dropped it in the cache. I would really like to see Moo Cards catch on as sig items, I think they're fun and I'm happy to leave them in caches or give them out to geocachers at these events.
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I finally started an account over at Geni, and I'm officially addicted. Geni is a social genealogy and family tree site. I started by adding a few relatives and invited my husband to join to add his. Alex was addicted within minutes, adding his family and inviting more people to add to our family tree. I was messing around with it today, adding more family and pictures, and also inviting my own family members to join. My sister accepted an invitation earlier today.
I've sort of dubbed myself the family historian, although I tend to not have the time to completely devote to this task. I am interested in gathering our pictures, family stories, and history though. When my father moved to Las Vegas I quickly volunteered to take the family pictures off his hands, in hopes to someday organize them (although it is likely they will continue to stay in the box). A good part of my father's side of the family is traced back pretty far, but I'm still interested in discovering as much as I can for myself. Since my mother is from Germany, tracing my history on that side would be more difficult, but I also think interesting since I know very little of that side of the family.
I'm grateful for an online application like Geni, especially when you can add the power of social networking to it. What really struck me was a comment my husband said to me a few days ago. Alex doesn't get excited about web 2.0 and social networking applications like I do, but he mentioned that this is finally something he can see as a useful approach to online social applications. It does kind of make sense, each member of your family could potentially add a different perspective to your family history that one person could never consider.
One big thing that I would like to add to the Geni wishlist is integration with Flickr or other outside photo applications. Most of the pictures I added today were already on my Flickr account; it would've been nice to pull those off of Flickr instead of trying to search my computer for them. It looks like GEDCOM export is coming soon, though.
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I can understand if Scholastic is a bit upset about the photographs of the last Harry Potter book ending up on BitTorrent. I was even a bit upset, and I hope they find who did it and prosecute the hell out of them! In addition to shutting down the material on the BitTorrent site, though, they are also trying to silence anybody who blogged or reported the story, even if they did not post a direct link to where the book can be found. TechCrunch has a story there, I'm sure we'll be seeing more of these popping up across the internet in the next few days.
But really this is just a bullying (albeit very polite bullying) tactic by the publisher to try to stop word spreading that the book, like almost all popular media today, is available free on BitTorrent for those who choose to steal it. They're trying to shoot the messenger, and this kind of stuff has a chilling effect on free speech.
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Me as a Simpson's Character
Originally uploaded by heidigoseek.
Ever wonder what you would look like as a Simpson's character? You can find out at SimpsonizeMe.com
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A lot of hoopla is going around about doing away with the Dewey Classification System. A NYT article popped into our school list about one library who has decided to drop Dewey altogether. Do I think we should get rid of Dewey? Yes and no. I applaud the libraries that are finally looking at ways to make libraries more usable for their patrons. What I don't think we should do is to stop making it usable for our staff; although logic tells me that a simple classification for patrons should also be simple for staff to use. I don't necessarily think that that Dewey should be abandoned; I do think that if used it should invisible to our patrons.
The Dewey Decimal Classification has been around for 131 years now, and in the span of those years, our patrons still have not figured out how to use it. They don't know what the numbers mean, they don't care what the numbers mean, and I don't think we should have to force them to. I'm in favor of a more bookstore like classification for our patrons in public libraries. As librarians we need to stop thinking like librarians when it comes to our patrons needs too. We want everything to have a place, a number, a home on the shelf, but this is not how our patrons think anymore. Some are already used to iTunes and Amazon, the world of the miscellaneous.
Appropriately, I just spent the last few work days, with the rest of the staff at my branch, relabeling our CDs away from Dewey to a genre based classification (much like you would find at a music store). I've already noticed considerable positive differences in the organization of our CD collection. It is much easier to find things in the Classical music section for one. Finally, Halloween sound effects and Halloween music are brought together from opposite ends of the Dewey spectrum into a Holiday classification. It's not perfect, there are some things that are missing, one being Alternative and Rap sections, although I know the exclusion of one has to do with subject headings and the other was a conscious decision not to add. Since the changes were done globally by subject headings, there are some assignments that I don't disagree with, namely the distinction between what is Rock and what is Pop. Of course the problems have to do more with the limitations we have when dealing with physical items.
I think we do need to step back, take a deep breath, and do a huge reality check in the profession. We need to decide if we are really serving our patrons, and if some libraries decide that Dewey is not serving our patrons effectively then I am in total support.
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Thanks to Josh for posting this and bringing it o my attention!
So all I have to say is, wow...
Qualifications for a librarian: Do you like books? Do you like people? My, how things have changed...
I've wrote in the past how much I love Rhapsody. I got a Sansa Rhapsody Player for Christmas and decided to go with the Rhapsody service; I've been impressed with how seamless the player and the music service work with one another. I like the price of the Rhapsody service and I like the fact that I can get virtually any music I want whenever I want. One of my favorite Rhapsody features is their channels, I normally subscribe to the Alternative Channel, whenever I plug in my player in to my computer, and Rhapsody automatically loads my player with about 4 hours of different songs based on whatever channels you have loaded.
Lately I've been getting a bit frustrated with how little Rhapsody plays nicely with other services I would like to use. First I've been trying to find a way to integrate Rhapsody with Last.fm for months now. Every solution I've tried that is supposed to work fails. I love Last.fm, I also love MusicStrands, but I haven't been able to use these since I stopped using iTunes to manage my music.
Rhapsody has made a few strides in opening up; this has become apparent by the changes they've made to their website. I now have a profile with RSS (unfortunately the RSS feeds don't always work), I can access the playlists that I create on the standalone client via the website (which I really like), and I can listen to music through the website if I'm logged in, even when I'm not on my computer. I don't mind using the website at all to listen to music, so when I saw that FoxyTunes should work with Rhapsody Online I downloaded it.
Trying out FoxyTunes right now, however, proved to be another failure. The player is configured to recognize Rhapsody Online as my player, but when I click on anything it just opens Rhapsody Online. When I start playing a song with Rhapsody Online, the player doesn't recognize that one is playing. I was really excited about the fact that FoxyTunes now has some Twitter integration...I guess this is not in the cards for me right now.
I won't be dropping Rhapsody, the price and the ease of use with my player are more than enough to keep me using it, but I hope that they open up soon. There are some great music services out there that I would love to be using right now, but I feel locked out of them.
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WikiMindMap is a nifty tool that maps Wikipedia articles in concept map form. I love Wikipedia articles because they are often packed full of great content, but sometimes it's hard to parse out that content and it can be a bit overwhelming at times. I have to admit that I'm not normally a fan of concept maps; I find them confusing when they're trying to diagram simple things, but for Wikipedia I think they could come in handy. Check out this concept map for my research topic last semester for Digital Rights Management. I actually created my own concept map on paper while researching this topic and it looks quite a bit similar to the one that this tool created. If only I had known about this last semester!
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end of an era/error
Originally uploaded by pelicanwind.
I think it would be premature for me to throw out AACR2 altogether considering my cataloging final is in a couple of weeks. But this picture says exactly how I feel about the rules.
I went into my cataloging class very open minded, I actually thought that I would enjoy it. Why wouldn't I? I'm detail oriented, I love structure and organization, and I love rules.
That is only one side of my personality. I love rules to the extent that they make sense, I don't love rules that are in place for the purpose of having rules (I tend to not follow senseless rules very well). Given that, I quickly learned that cataloging was not something I would enjoy, like I thought I would.
I don't want to diminish the importance of cataloging; the organization of library materials is no small task. What gets to me is how dated the rules are. Why do we still have rules that limit how many authors get displayed in a catalog record when data is stored in digital form in a nearly unlimited fashion? I understand the need for this rule if we were still using card catalogs, but we're not.
Of course don't get me started on LC subject headings...talk about dated. I understand that LC does the best they can to constantly update headings, but there's no possible way for one group to keep up with the amount of new information to categorize every day. (see Wikinomics) We need the collective intelligence of many groups or many people to even come close.
I'm also reading Everything is Miscellaneous right now. The rules are no doubt changing...I finally got to reading through some feeds today came across David Lee King's thoughts on Everything is Miscellaneous and I completely agree with this:
Weinberger says: "Users are now in charge of the organization of the information they browse. Of course, the owners of that information may still want to offer a prebuilt categorization, but that is no longer the only - or best - one available. Put simply, the owners of information no longer own the organization of that information." (pages 105-106). That is HUGE. We - librarians, libraries, information professionals… are NO LONGER IN CONTROL OF ORGANIZING INFORMATION. Our customers do that now.
This is Huge!! It's also something our patrons will expect from our information, whether we like it or not.
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I do realize that my blog posting has been lame of recent. It does seem that when I do finally get to blogging and end up writing more lame posts like this. I won't apologize for that though, that's just the way life and blogging goes with me sometimes.
First things first, I'm posting this in Word 2007! We'll have to wait until I'm done to see how well that works though. It was pretty easy to set up and I may just continue to use this to post entries. I tend to install too many blog apps that either end up not working or aren't exactly what I hoped they would be once I got them working.
I have received my new computer so hopefully there will be minimal complaining in the computer area (at least until 3 years from now until this one dies). I have a shiny new HP with all sorts of neat things and Windows Vista. Now that I've been using Vista for about a week or so I have to say that I do like it. At first I called it "cool and annoying at the same time" but it feels more like the "kinder, gentler Microsoft." The error messages seem a bit more helpful (if not a little too frequent). I've heard from others that it's slow, but this doesn't seem to be the case for me yet. I think it's snappy and I even like the nifty vista-like animations. I haven't had much of a problem running my old applications on it, but I've only been installing things as I need them. Now, I just need to keep it running this way and I'll be happy.
I did have a list of things I wanted to post about, but those are stored on my other computer, and I have been neglecting that one since I got the new one. One post I had in my mind is how to sync GPS tracking data with your digital images to auto geocode your pictures. I ran a little test a few weeks ago but I never wrote about that. The bummer is that the one utility that worked the best is only available for XP, but everything else runs fine on Vista...I suppose this is why I'm hanging on to my old computer.
If you don't see me around my blog this summer I'll probably be doing one of these things; geoaching, something for my class, working, camping (in August, yea!), more geocaching. We attended a geocaching event a few weekends ago, we'll be attending a least 3 more until September (not including our camping trip which will be week long geocaching with our friends). We're eagerly awaiting the Midwest GeoBash in Kendallville, IN, presently there are 915 people signed up to attend. That's a lot of GPS receivers in one place :)
What I really wanted to do this summer is some website maintenance; I've been meaning to update the site for some time now. Things never go the way we plan though, oh well.
Hopefully some real blog posts are on the way (I know I said that last time I posted a lame post).
