All roads lead to ugliblog

Via the awesome power of Google Analytics, we now know that the demand for facks about flirting spiked on March 10, 2009.

yayCRL!

Last weekend I went to my first librarian conference, the ACRL 14th National Conference in Seattle, Washington. It was quite the adventure. I had a great time, saw some interesting presentations, hung out with cool librarians, and had the opportunity to facilitate a round table discussion on Millennial Librarianship -- what it means to be a young librarian joining the profession right now.

My favorite experience of the conference had to be the dance floor at the all-conference reception, in a giant room called the "sky church" at the Experience Music Project. I'd never considered the possibility of a librarian-filled dance space before, and it was an amazing sight to behold -- so many different librarians, so many different styles of dance! Good, good times.

I didn't have my camera, but some other librarians did, and shared some photos of the event on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/search/?s=int&q=acrl2009+dancing&m=text. Unfortunately, it is hard to capture the utter joy and wonder of the experience in static images.

Copyright violated?

I have a little copyright issue, and need some advice.

I get really fired up about community history, and the role of libraries in preserving our community histories. About two years ago, I worked on a local history project that involved lots of people in my home community, the library, and other community organizations, and came to fruition in an essay and exhibit. The purpose of the project was to gain some publicity for a historic building and community gathering place very near and dear that is in constant financial trouble.

So, I was googling around the Internet yesterday, and I found the following video:



The Parks and Recreation Dept., who I intended the research to ultimately benefit, posted the video on their blog.

That's cool, right? Community history belongs to the community, and people are interacting with it because it means something to them. I shared my research becuase it's not just me and the archive that are wrapped up in the pool. There is a version of the essay on a local wiki, and I would love it if people added to that. Some have. The history of that pool means a lot to me, and to so many others in my home community, so we should all be able to celebrate it and pass it along, right?

Well, maybe not entirely. The images are copyrighted and property of the public library. There is a use fee and use agreement connected with the images. The fees help to keep the archive alive. The agreement helps keep the use of the images legal. Taking screenshots of the images and then citing "courtesy of..." when the library mostly likely did not okay this, isn't really legal. If the library did okay it, please, prove me wrong. If taking screenshots of copyrighted images is legal, please, prove me wrong.

I'm a librarian. I'm uptight about citing sources. I think plagiarism is the 8th deadly sin. The research for this project took a long time and involved a lot of people. I cited my sources like crazy so that other people wouldn't have to spend two years in front of a mircofilm reader reading unindexed newspapers to find information about the building, and to find the photos used in the video.

Am I being too uptight? Too invested? Should I let it go? Should I let the library and historical commission deal with it, since they own the images and I donated my time and research to them? Any free advice?

It's going to be okay!!

This whole job searching thing is getting stressful. I tend to break my collarbone every 5-8 years, and would just like a job with a nice health care package, please.

I nervous googled “librarian, interview questions,” and found these resources for you.

Librarian interview questions

Some more interview questions

How to apply for a library job

After reading through some of these, I began to hope that no one asks me in a professional situation, “what is the best reference question you’ve ever been asked?” Friends, I cannot lie, it was the student that asked, “Which Van Halen album is ‘Panama’ on?” Looking over my glasses I exploded, “1984!!!” The student looked at me with eyes that knew I was wearing a hand-me-down cardigan from my grandmother. I didn’t know until then that I was dying for someone to ask me a question that could exercise the part of my brain where useless facts are stored.

Librarians know lots of facts that they don’t get to use often. Trivia is how librarians show off. It's an over-looked professional quality of librarianship.

Friends, to make a long story short, it's going to be okay. We've got skillz. Our treasure troves of trivia are the furthest thing from useless. Hang in there.

A Librarian's Essential Accessories

Recent conversations with fellow librarians have driven home the fact that I am woefully unprepared, wardrobe-wise, to begin my career.

1. While I have managed to acquire glasses, what am I to do if my spectacles need a rest? I will need an eyeglasses retainer, just to be on the safe side:
2. With the variable indoor weather of many libraries, cardigans have become a mainstay of the librarian wardrobe. My current cardigan collection is inadequate, and who knows what future heating and cooling systems will throw my way. In a recent web search for proper attire, I came across this gem:
Ladies and gentlemen, the cardigan for dogs has finally arrived, and is available at the low low price of $49. I'll be stocking up on these soon, so that all my future (XX Small to Medium) pets can be appropriately outfitted. Remember, librarianship is not just a career, it's a lifestyle!

Facebook, aka Fort Creepy

The term "creepy treehouse" seems to be a popular topic on various blogs focusing on social computing and education. The term is often connected with facebook interactions. According to Jared Stein of flexknowlogy, a creepy treehouse is:

n. Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards. Such institutional environments are often seen as more artificial in their construction and usage, and typically compete with pre-existing systems, environments, or applications. creepy treehouses also have an aspect of closed-ness, where activity within is hidden from the outside world, and may not be easily transferred from the environment by the participants.

n. Any system or environment that repulses a target user due to it’s closeness to or representation of an oppressive or overbearing institution.

n. A situation in which an authority figure or an institutional power forces those below him/her into social or quasi-social situations.

Popular examples of this defination of a creepy treehouse are professors that make students follow them on twitter, or forced use of the blackboard facebook app. In our own words: would you take your Collection Development textbook to the bar to read while all your friends are there having a lively time? It would take a special person to say "yes" to that.

We think the concept of a creepy treehouse is best described as a social situation online that makes you uncomfortable. The action is invasive, and perceived as inappropriate by one of the parties involved. One element of this may be a social situation that crosses a contextual boundary (educators friending students and vice versa) or a generational gap. There are some people you'd just rather not hang out with online.

In conclusion, stop creepy treehousing. Use privacy settings, friend lists, and exercise your "ignore friend request" right. It's okay to feel strange about the amount of information people can find about you online. Define your personal limits (cough cough myspacers...). Boundaries are something to be thoughtful about, especially on new frontiers.

More info:
Attend our ML2SIG discussion Monday, January 19, 12-1pm, room 806 Hatcher.
Chris Lott: Social Networks vs. Tools
Classroom 2.0: avoiding the "creepy treehouse"
Get out of the creepy treehouse (check out the discussion thread)
for those still interested:
Wikipedia: Social software in education

Cleaning it up

I was cleaning my desktop today, when I came across this screenshot. It happened to me while I was making a sweet Presidential bingo board for the library's election event, bound to be a total hit with the ugli population. I mean, who doesn't like bingo? I'm not sure how pop-ups are generated, but it nearly killed me that this ad popped up when I was image searching Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson would hate this.

Librarian Hero

As if we need more reasons to admire Josie Parker of the Ann Arbor District Library!

Read the story online:
http://www.mlive.com/annarbornews/news/index.ssf/2008/12/ann_arbor_library_director_sho.html

Recession good news

Dear readers, UGLi Blog has been hit hard by the global recession, leading to a dearth of posts in recent times. Thankfully, Reuters has reported some more positive results of the recent economic downturn:

* In another sign of holiday cheer, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department reported a 250 percent rise in the number of guns handed over in a no-questions-asked program to exchange weapons for holiday gift cards. The department's station in a high crime suburb received 964 guns, two hand grenades and two briefcases full of dynamite. [Emphasis added.]

http://www.samstoybox.com/toys/DynamiteShack.html

If only I had a couple of briefcases full of dynamite, I would be RICH in holiday gift cards right about now. Now I know what I should have been investing in all these years.

* More people are seeking love online to compensate for the pain of losses. Match.com, which has online dating sites in 40 countries, had its largest membership growth in the last seven years in November. "During these trying times, people are looking for hope in their inbox," said CEO Thomas Enraght-Moony.

Could this possibly become a Depression when there are so many opportunities for informating? I think not, my friends. I think not:

http://images.google.com/images?q=internet dating

Choose Your Own Adventure: The Case of the Missing Book

Books go missing from libraries. Librarians and library users hate that. Patrons demand explanations, and librarians yearn for the answers. Where do books go when they are missing? They choose their own adventures. Go ahead sleuths, track down that book. Your patrons depend on you. Here are your options:

Get paranoid.

Explain that some books just don't fit in.

Surrender the book. You've had it all along.

(A special thanks to Katie for making this possible.)

Happy Birthday, UGLi Blog!!

It's been one heckuva year. Thanks for all the good times, UB!

In honor of this joyous occasion, here's a quick link to some of our favorite posts: OMG, yay! Any other favorite blog moments? Suggestions for the next year? Post them in a comeback!
<3

Punk'd!

Funny thing happened this afternoon while I was working Ask a Librarian, our instant message chat reference service. To give you some context, the most common questions we get on this service are about access problems for our online databases, often a frustrating (and generally boring) topic for both the patron and the librarian. Chat reference is usually a rather proper exchange, as far as text chats go, and often concerns bibliographic information. But not today...

[15:58] meeboguest940311: Hi dude whats up

(I'm used to people being occasionally informal on chat, especially the millennials, but this gave me pause. I considered several lines of attack, including some uptight, librarian-y responses, before settling on a laid-back approach.)

[15:59] UMLibraryAskUs: hi
[15:59] UMLibraryAskUs: not much
[15:59] UMLibraryAskUs: what's up with you?

[15:59] meeboguest940311: can you tell me who the cool bald guy who does film is?

[15:59] UMLibraryAskUs: hmm
[15:59] UMLibraryAskUs: at Askwith?

(I was thinking "film" as in videos and DVDs, not film studies.)

[15:59] meeboguest940311: No at the grad
[16:00] UMLibraryAskUs: oh, yes. That's Scott Dennis.

(Scott Dennis is my librarian crush. He knows pretty much everything about electronic resource collection development. He is, in fact, a cool bald guy.)

[16:00] meeboguest940311: Oh yeah, that is his name. Thanks!
[16:00] UMLibraryAskUs: no problem!

[16:00] meeboguest940311: later dude
[16:00] UMLibraryAskUs: l8r

(I was particularly proud of my signoff. All in all, a quick, entertaining exchange.)

I emailed Scott to tell him he's famous -- that pretty much everyone on the library website today is looking for him -- and it turns out he was the patron at the other end of my fun chat:

Katie, I cannot tell a lie… That was me, doing a live demo for a Screen Arts class I was teaching. I wasn’t planning on it, but when I showed the Library Help feature in CTools, a student in the class said, someone is there right now waiting to chat? In a tone of disbelief. So I decided to prove it on the spot. I didn’t want to make whoever was on chat duty actually have to do any research work, and I wanted to be funny, so… It worked like a charm. The class roared with laughter (about 50 of them in Angell Hall Auditorium D), and they were very impressed with your hip current texting style! That’s really a librarian? One asked. I’m very lucky you were the one on duty! Thanks. --Scott

It's been a long week, but now I feel great. I'm so hip, a studio audience of 50 millennials can't even tell I'm a librarian.

[Uptight Librarian Note: I received permission from Scott to post this on the blog; I don't go around randomly publishing patrons' private messages to the internet.]

Nerds in possible like

Hey boy, why you didn't call me?
-The Blow

Lately, Katie and I have noticed on our ugliblog analytics that people in need of relationship advice are turning to google and landing on ugliblog. There seem to be a lot of people out there who need advice about flirting, flirt texts, flirting in Grand Rapids, flirting with librarians, good comebacks for flirting with nerds, among many others. Over the past three months, people have landed on ugliblog by searching over 20 different keywords dealing with the subject of flirting. In order to stay relevant to the needs and interests of our readers, I will now provide you with some innovative flirting advice (a special thanks to Katie and Greg who helped me brainstorm this system awhile back).

Scenario: You are at the bar. There is a rather cute person in the corner, reading a book. This person is so perfect that you may try to find them on Craigslist missed connections later. You look up from your crossword puzzle and stout, just as the person looks up from their book and i.p.a. You want to wink, but that's soooo 20th century. So go ahead, take those skills that you learned in the chat room and apply them to the bar. Throw that cutie a sign language winkey emoticon ;).


I hope that this helps those of you that are struggling with this whole flirting thing. Please note that flirting with emoticon sign language has never been tried by those who invented it, so the success rate is still unknown. Please share your success stories with us!

The secret about girls is that they want you to like them.
-The Blow

By Special Request: What is Community Informatics?

Questions abound concerning one of my specializations at the School of Information. Even SI is struggling to come up with some set definition. I think that basically it is about sharing information. How is this different from Library and Information Services? LIS is about the how. Community Informatics is about the what and the why. For me this means seeing libraries as community centers (both public and academic) that serve the needs of their communities. I think that a lot of community informatics involves getting librarians out from behind the desk and into the community, visiting different organizations and groups, finding out what they need the library to be. Information is meant to be shared, and this process won’t work if librarians are confined within the walls of the library. Sometimes this might mean creating unlikely connections.
I worked on a project a year ago that connected a public library and archive with the parks and recreation department, our local neighborhood association, and the city commission of my hometown. We brought an exhibit on a local pool created in the archive to the place in the city where it belonged, at the pool (see http://www.historygrandrapids.org or add to and edit the wiki version http://www.viget.org/Richmond_Park_Pool). This made people in the community aware of the archive and the library, while we all celebrated the rich history of our neighborhood pool. People asked me reference questions at the opening of the exhibit. Reference questions while waiting in line to do cannon balls off the diving board? Yes, please.

Want to know more about Community Informatics at the School of Information?
http://cic.si.umich.edu and
http://www.si.umich.edu/msi/ci.htm

Terrestrial Life in Space!

Following up on my July lit review, I am particularly geeked by this recent bit of news... WATER BEARS IN SPACE, everybody!

Like, OMG, you guys. I could talk about this story in relation to popular/scholarly information and its potential uses for library instruction, but I'm really just too overwhelmingly excited that we (Earthlings) have reached the Final Frontier, surviving the vacuum of space without special equipment. It's a good week for science, y'all.

Tardigrades: so incredibly sci fi.

DUCK HUNT, or How I Spent My Mandatory Vacation

A lot of people out there in internetland have been googling "library orientation scavenger hunt" or similar keywords, and some folks have ended up here (you'll have to take my word on this). I wouldn't want to disappoint ye olde googlers or our regular (excessively observant) readers who are curious about what I ended up doing for the Great Indoors. UGLi Blog, as always, is here to meet your needs.

Earlier this summer, I was scratching my head trying to come up with scavenger hunt ideas, but nothing really sang to me until the deadline for the Great Indoors (i.e. the day itself) began to approach. This is typical for me, as I do my best innovating in times of great need. Somehow I decided ducks would be a good organizing theme, specifically rubber duckies. The idea began with "the UGLi duckling" and evolved from there. I go with whatever pops into my head when crunch time rolls around. Here's how it went:

The prizes for the scavenger hunt were rubber ducks with the MLibrary logo (naturally we put these in a much bigger, inflatable duck):

At the reference desk, participants were given a map of the library and Smartypants, their first duck. Each duck handout said FOUND on one side and LOST on the other. The found side gave a short bio of each duck, and the lost side told students the name and location of the next duck to retrieve.

These ducks (Smartypants, Michigander, Hypatia, Arnold, Quackers, Techie and Duckerton) were all associated with an area of the Shapiro Libraries (UGL reference desk, Askwith, Science, stacks, Bert's Cafe, computer lab and instructional center). By collecting all seven ducks and returning them to the reference desk, students earned their very own coveted squeaking rubber ducky. As you can probably imagine, the whole thing went over quite swimmingly.

Top 500 Reasons to Come to the Great Indoors

This little guy, plus 499 friends:

The Great Indoors: Sunday, August 31st from 4-6 pm @ Shapiro Library.

Collections for Personal Enrichment

I like to collect things. I have quite a few collections of things, most of which have no value to any museum, archive, or estate/ junk sale. When I write this three of my most worthless, yet highly cultivated, collections come to mind. My collection of tattoos I have seen (good and bad), boat names (good and bad), and t-shirt sayings (just bad).

On a recent sailing adventure I found a real treasure to add to the boat names collection. Sighberspace. What a terrible boat name. Imagine with me for a moment Sighberspace’s distress call; “Mayday mayday, this is Sighberspace.” It’s such a bad joke name for a boat, not to mention just a downright terrible computer joke that can only spark more terrible computer jokes. If I wanted to relax, you’d better believe I’d spend some time floating around in Sighberspace. Har har.

Millennial Mania

Lately I've been thinking a lot about millennials.* The librarians I know often discuss millennials -- our current generation of younger patrons. How do millennials access and use information and how do they communicate? If librarians can pin down millennials' needs, we can better serve them and we can maintain our relevance in an increasingly decentralized information age.

I realized recently that the youngest of today's library school students are among the first crop of millennial librarians. In this vein, I have a confession to make. I am a millennial (a fact that I hadn't confronted about myself until, fittingly, I read it in black and white on Wikipedia). So what does it mean that we new librarians are in the same generation as the students that more experienced librarians are desperately seeking to understand?

As a millennial (however reluctant I am to admit it because it makes me feel like an awkward middle schooler), I am accustomed to rapidly-evolving information and communication technologies. I remember dial-up, but barely. I may not be a skilled texter, but I could be if I focused more. I rarely have the attention span to read a book cover-to-cover, but I can spend hours following a trail of interesting Facebook updates.

I've been asking around about millennials, and I've heard they expect information resources to be intuitive, to be Google or Wikipedia-esque in their ease of use. I've also heard that millennials are as likely to rely on peers as they are to rely on their superiors for "expert" advice. I’m not sure how true these things are of me, but I think they may be generally true of those youngsters born in the 1990s.

This collaborative way of approaching knowledge (and in a sense determining our truths by the consensus of any given moment) signals a shift in society discussed --and sometimes bemoaned-- by philosophers and pundits alike. But older generations have a history of worrying about what cultural dead-ends those young kids are leading us into. And as of yet, cultural evolution has continued apace both despite and because of the innovations of the young.

Personally, I don’t think we need a revolutionary response to millennials’ supposed information, communication and technology prowess. I don't think we need the brand "Library 2.0" to open ourselves to a paradigm shift. Libraries have always evolved to reflect society’s views of knowledge, and have so far managed to remain relevant and useful. Maybe we respond a little more slowly to the latest technology, perhaps with slightly more deliberation. But we adopt the things that work and we empower our patrons adopt them, too. I value this traditional function of libraries as much as the next librarian, millennial or no.

So, what does it really mean to be a millennial librarian? Is there really a generational gap here, or are the reports of our differences greatly exaggerated?

* Beware that Wikipedia link, the year range listed for the "millennial" or "gen y" generation changes regularly. I guess that's a symptom of society's attempt to describe itself as it evolves. Or the lack of authority and dependability of Wikipedia articles. Take your pick. For more on naming the millennial generation, see this Washington Post article.

Theft, Part II: TO CATCH A THIEF

I think one reason our library director considered the stakeout a viable option for dealing with a series of thefts was that Oberlin actually has a history of apprehending library thieves (which is a whole other amazing/ridiculous story).

James Shinn, who got his 15 minutes of infamy in the early 80s, was caught by a librarian at the Oberlin College Library in 1981. He had stolen 480 rare library books with a combined value of $35,000. Shinn is a nerdy-interesting Google if you are curious. A brief 1981 NY Times article describes the manhunt. Besides inspiring librarians in general to beef up security for special collections, Shinn also gave librarians at Oberlin a hearty sense of their own crime-fighting capabilities, thus enabling me to have my very own brush with library covert ops nearly 25 years later.

The Oberlin College Library has a special room named for James Shinn and plastered with news stories of his crimes and capture. This room is not open to the public and is rarely visited by staff. The Shinn Room is the library’s Executive Washroom. I mean, where better to study a rich history of library heists and library heroism than a library director's bathroom? Nowhere, I suppose.

[Something I discovered along the way:
books about people who are crazy about books.]

P.S. Mr. Shinn, if you Google yourself regularly, thanks, and no hard feelings!

Summer Time Warp

The library is quiet. There are a few people studying at tables or working at the computers. A librarian sits behind a computer at a desk. There is a middle aged man (Patron) sitting at a public computer.

Patron: (gets up from the computer he is seated at and slowly approaches the librarian) Excuse me, do you know what the date is?

Librarian: (looks up from the computer) Hello. Yes. It is August 5th.

Patron: (confused) I'm sorry did you say August?

Librarian: Yes.

Patron: (squints and shakes his head) It's August?

Librarian: (shows patron a calendar on the computer screen) Yes.

Patron: I missed my flight.

Librarian stares at patron with a commendable straight face. There is a long silence.

Patron: Huh. (pauses) Do you have a pay phone I could use? I think I need to make a phone call.

Librarian: I'm sorry, we don't have a pay phone. There is a pay phone on Liberty near Border's.

Patron hurries out the door. Librarian shrugs and goes back to looking up interesting things on the internet.

Theft, Part I: LIBRARY STAKEOUT

STOP, THIEF! Security is a legitimate concern at libraries and librarians often struggle to balance the ideal of open access with the reality that monitored areas are sometimes less prone to theft. Is it our responsibility to protect innocent borrowers from visitors who will prey on unattended valuables? What level of monitoring would our users prefer and what would serve the community's best interests? Librarians like to ask such questions of ourselves and each other. If no immediate agreement can be reached, we form committees to deal with the issue. Or, on certain occasions, we snap into action. This is story of one such action.

In my undergrad years, I worked as a circulation desk attendant and student supervisor at the Oberlin College Library. One year, we had a rash of laptop and backpack thefts. No matter how many signs we posted warning people of the danger, they still left their stuff unattended and it still got stolen. One patron came to the desk in tears to report not one, not two, but three separate thefts of her valuables over the course of a week. (Responses among library staffers ranged from sympathy to incredulity that she would leave her stuff unattended the second two times.)

The library administration decided reporting these numerous incidents to Safety and Security after the fact was not enough. We needed to catch a thief red-handed. Thus, a plan was hatched and a LIBRARY STAKEOUT was born.

Late in the semester, the library's student workers received an email announcing extra work shifts. We were told we had the chance to join the library's effort to end the theft problem once and for all (well... at least for that school year). Get paid for a covert mission in the library? Yes, please! The following day, I signed up for my very own stakeout.

This is how it went down: A circulation staffer planted a "dummy" backpack in a high-traffic area of the library. Whoever was on stakeout duty got paid to sit in a darkened room for an hour with a walkie-talkie and keep a watchful eye on our planted backpack. If we saw someone grab the bag, we were to radio down to library administration, where the library director or assistant director would run out of his office and stop the thief as he or she exited the building. The staff implemented this plan with fervor (that particular and rare fervor of bored library workers who are suddenly tasked with a vitally important stakeout mission).
Photo: abbyladybug on Flickr - pretty much exactly where our backpack was planted.

You're probably buzzing with excitement right now, just as we were in those precious, early days of Operation Catch-A-Thief.... Come on, already! Did you catch the thief or what?

Day in and day out, we watched that dummy backpack. Day in and day out, we brought the backpack back to the staff area at the end of the day's scheduled stakeout shifts, simultaneously relieved and disappointed that no theft of our utterly conspicuous fake bag had been attempted.

Soon, since no more thefts had occurred, the stakeout shifts became more expensive than they were worth. How could it have been that we had so many thefts, followed by none at all, right as we began our stakeouts?

I have a theory. Remember that email I told you about, in which all the student workers of the library system were offered extra hours? And remember how hilarious and ridiculous it seemed that the library would pay us to sit in a darkened room watching a planted backpack, armed with only a walkie-talkie, intense focus and the library director as backup? I forgot to add that there was a clarifying email sent out a couple of days after the first, reminding us that this library stakeout mission was supposed to be... a secret.

But if all those other library workers were anything like me, they got that first email and immediately told everyone they saw that day about an amazing new project at the library. And like me, when they got that second email, they probably thought, "Oh, well... you probably should have told us that to begin with."

Instead of catching our thief red-handed, the Oberlin College Library effectively spread the word that the building was being closely monitored by staff. Instead of stopping crimes in progress, we successfully prevented them.

Come to think of it, all the library had to do was convince its student workers that a series of stakeouts would occur, and we took care of the rest. I guess it just goes to show: you should never, ever underestimate the power of a funny story.
Photo: StudentsReview - Oberlin's Mudd Library. Looks like a fortress, but it wasn't really. Until the stakeout.

The Typical Librarian (a Friendless Old Hag?)

My good friend Remigio recently forwarded me a comic that depicts the typical librarian in a slightly negative light:

http://www.theonion.com/content/cartoon/nov-19-2007

This satirical commentary on our current political climate, where debate continues as to whether the use of torture will strengthen our national security, compares steep overdue fines meted out by librarians to the cruelest form of physical punishment.

Since we librarians generally have a sense of humor, I'm not going to argue with this representation.

But one "friendless old hag" to another, is this -

- the face of a sadistic state-sanctioned torturer?

Most likely. Steer clear of this one if you see her in your local library. Safety first, friend. Safety first.

METADATER: a long explanation for a short joke

Caution: This post contains a hearty portion of information nerdiness/ geekiness/ dorkiness. I will try to "overexplain" some things a little for the benefit of our average reader (returning readers will notice that "overexplanation" is something I do on the regular, for real).

So, feel free to skip ahead if you already know a thing or two about metadata. Or don't, if you want to see me try to explain it.

Context: What the heck is metadata, anyway? According to wikipedia and SI, metadata is "data about data." Metadata helps us make sense of information by providing us with context. It allows us to better communicate and organize information and thus retrieve information more efficiently.

Titles and formatting are examples of metadata often used to describe text. For instance, the metadata I apply to READ THIS NOW! tells you a lot more than a less invasive "read this now" would have. The metadata (bold, caps and exclamation point) I use to describe the data (three words which represent your imperative) helps me communicate my meaning, draws your attention and hopefully inspires you to continue reading. It also allows me to classify what I say as important, rather than just plain old words like the stuff around it.

Recently, when I asked a fellow information professional if he had any thoughts on metadata, he asked, "Can you be more specific?" I said no. He said, "It's a ... good thing?" Metadata. It's a good thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata

Aaaaanyway...

What's the deal with METADATER? Last semester, I was writing a literature review on Metadata Standards and Interoperability for the Digital Libraries course that Emily and I took together. While this may sound vaguely impressive, I can assure you that I had almost no idea what I was talking about, but I sort of guessed at a string of plausible words and ended up sounding mildly coherent. Professor, if you're reading this... sorry dude. Thanks for the passing grade.

So Emily and I were both typing like mad in the office trying to get these overly technical lit reviews done and submitted on time, and I typoed "metadater" and I sort of cackled and said "METADATER!" in this incredibly nerdy affected voice and we both died a little in a good way. We wrote the term on the office white board and it lasted for a while.

Since then, we've realized what METADATER is really all about. We've learned the true reason I discovered the concept in the first place.

METADATER is an online dating site for information professionals. Or it should be. It doesn't actually exist. But it could.

After all, http://metadater.com/ was recently "registered\purchased." And who knows what it'll be when it finally goes live.

I'll give you a few moments to think about the ramifications.

Seriously?
Yes.

Well... seriously bad/good joke. I mean, word play and information science? It doesn't get any better/worse. I warned you it was nerdy.

Need a good LOL read?

I'm going to get really agitated if one more person remarks to me, "Do you really have to go to graduate school to be a librarian? I just thought you needed to know the Dewey Decimal System...hmmm...." (The best response I've ever gotten to the "what are you doing with your life?" question was, cracking up laughing, "no really, what do you want to do when you are done with college?") Though I think that graduate level education is appropriate for librarians, I think that most of the things that we encounter in libraries are experiences that our Web 2.0 education cannot fully prepare us for.

Scott Douglas' Quiet, Please is memoir of his experience as a public librarian. Douglas humorously describes the current issues in libraries, and the experiences that library school doesn't prepare us for. Basically, the book is a collection of humorous accounts of grumpy-pants co-workers, the importance of community, issues surrounding Myspace and porn in the library, food in the library, and my favorite, problem patrons. No one can resist a good problem patron story. Librarians live for them. They spice up our days.

Douglas' memoir is a fun read that I think all information professionals can relate to in one way or another. Let's be honest, it's a total jungle out there in Library Land, and you probably need some summer reading that will remind you that you can survive it. Read on and on.