"Information Is Social"

One of the staff members had her last day today. She's the type of person who rarely has anything bad to say about anyone, but she said to me, "I think that you got a raw deal." She said she'd keep in touch with one of the other members of the team and find out where I wind up getting a job. That was nice of her to say. Although, of course, it doesn't change anything.

I had an epiphany though. I found some statistics that showed that hardly anyone is using our online library catalog. It looks like patrons talk to the librarian about what they need, and the librarian searches the catalog. That was how patrons at my last job looked for materials, although they were a less research-savvy group of people than students at this college probably are. This fact is bad news for me because a significant part of my job is creating entries for the online catalog.

I was thinking about how I would discuss this result with others, say at a job interview, when I had the thought, "Information is social."

BOOM. That means people are going to use social ties to find information, which leads directly to hiring an Outreach Librarian.

Then I was thinking about how I would make the way that we could make our metadata, the information about our information, more social. I think that people focus on form rather than function when they discuss how to make our catalogs more user-friendly. "Oh, people like Google, so we need a search box with keyword searching." "Oh, people use tags on Web sites [like you can on LJ], so we should support social tagging." "Oh, people like to read reviews of books, so we need to include reviews in our catalog." (I'm not knocking reviews of books. I use them extensively on Amazon.com to decide what books to buy.)

I don't think that anyone has truly come up with a way to mimic how patrons use social ties to find and share information. When I took my Online Searching class last semester, I found out how professors share information. One of my professors heard that a professor at another institution had come up with a scale that might be useful, so she gave me the name of the professor and told me to find the scale. I did, but only by reading the bibliographies at the end of several journal articles, which was beyond the scope of my assignment. There are some Web sites (Mendeley, CiteULike) for researchers to share citations for journal articles that they use in their research. It would be an interesting study to find our how researchers use those sites (if the study hasn't been done already).

I don't know if anyone has truly done a study about how students share information. Most studies that I know of give the subject a research question and an online catalog, but doesn't follow the subjects around to see how they find information IRL. (And, to be fair, that would be an exceedingly difficult study to do.) Maybe this is giving me my marching orders because social sharing of information has been a research interest of mine for quite a while. (It combines my interest in social psychology with my interest in libraries.)

This topic would be a good topic for my professional blog, except for the fact that I don't have any answers, although it shows that I'm asking the right questions. Well, if I did have answers, I wouldn't be looking for a relatively junior cataloging position; I'd be a leader in the field. However, I have a book checked out called The Social Life of Information, which is on my long list of things to read. Maybe I should make reading it a higher priority to see if it gives me ideas.

There is a plan to enable our metadata to be combined with other, non-library metadata on the Web, which would help with exposing our materials to more people, but I don't think that it really addresses the social aspect.

However, replacing all the Catalog Librarians with Outreach Librarians isn't the answer either, because the Outreach Librarians need the catalog to find out what our holdings are. Bean-counters always try to find a way to decrease cataloging costs, but I don't think that putting crap in our catalog is the answer either. Most of the processes we follow have a reason for existing. There might be another way to do things, but our current way is not arbitrary.

Anyway, figuring this out makes me a little happier with the decision at work because it doesn't seem quite so arbitrary. However, it doesn't explain why no one explained this reasoning to me. But despite getting a lecture about staying involved with the goings-on at the library, the latest staff meeting made it pretty clear that I'm already gone as far as being at all involved with the direction of the library or its day-to-day workings. My boss also looked thoroughly annoyed to see me as he was walking out the door tonight, although maybe he thought that I was going to stop him from leaving. Who knows.

Lightening My Load

Operation Lighten My Load is going well. Thus far, I've given away a wall hanging, a toaster oven, three cat carriers, four cat beds, a scratching post, and some canned cat food that the girls don't like. Someone was also interested in a wall-mounted jewelry box, but hasn't picked it up yet, so I need to contact her and see if she still wants it. (Getting rid of that breaks my heart because I love it, but most of it holds earrings, and I no longer wear earrings. However, I spent over $2000 of my own money moving down here, and I don't have tons of money lying around, so I really need to be ruthless.) More to come....I had planned to go through my stuff and get rid of some of it this summer, although I thought that it would be under different circumstances. On the other hand, as they say, a deadline focuses the mind.

The plan is that my mom will come down here next weekend to help me go through the stuff in the garage. Most of my book boxes are falling apart and need to be replaced. While we have the boxes open, I'm going to go through them and see what I can get rid of. We also want to go to the Lincoln Museum while I'm still down here, and possibly also have lunch in Champaign-Urbana. I'd like to take a day off to make it a long weekend, but am worried about saving my vacation time for job interviews and such. I would work an extra weekend day to make up the time, but I doubt that they'd let me do that.

I think that I'm going to lie down for a while because I had problems falling asleep again last night. I don't really want to call my doctor and ask for sleeping pills because I already take enough meds, although I suppose that if I really have to, I will. First, I want to get serious about starting up a meditation practice again, and see if that helps.

ZZZZonk

I just got off of the phone with my mom a little while ago. I talked to her briefly on Friday, but I was so wiped out, and she needed to get up early, so we postponed until today. (She kept on saying tonight, "Oh, you sound so much better!") I thought about going to the store now so that I don't have to go out tomorrow, but I'm fading fast. This is good because I need to catch up on sleep. Maybe I can go to the gym tomorrow, but I'm focusing on job search stuff first because I can always go to the gym after I get all my resumes sent out.

My mom is planning to come down the weekend after next, not next weekend. That's good too because I can get more stuff done around here before she comes down.

So...it's all good. Harlee is happy because I gave her a good petting while I talked to my mom. She cracks me up. Apparently she decided this morning that I was going to take her to the vet, so she vanished shortly after I got up. Pretty good guess because I did get up early to go to the vet to get her prescription food. She also has decided that I get up too early during the week, so she doesn't get up when I get up. Age has its privileges, apparently.