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Sunday, February 10, 2002 |
How To Think About Technology "We have two choices. We can watch technologies come down the stream and pluck out the ones we think valuable. The questions I pose here can help in making those kinds of decisions, and this is necessary and important work. Or we can, as a profession, decide that it is better to be further upstream, engaged with the people who are thinking up new technological goodies and be a part of that process to influence their design and development. I'd rather be upstream. Our presence in the development process would undoubtedly help to produce things that are more helpful not only to us but in general." [at Library Journal, via NewBreed Librarian]
I would rather be upstream, too, which is one reason I started this blog. I want to prove to vendors, especially those outside of libraryland, that they should be working with us, not ignoring us. I read an interesting interview with Jane Margolis about Computer Science's Gender Gap in which she says we need women in CS for the perspectives and testing we bring to development. She illustrates this point using examples of flawed products that were developed by all-male teams.
I'd make a parallel argument for the need to integrate librarians and libraries into the IT world. There's the obvious taxonomy and organization issues, but another good example of the alternate perspective we could provide comes from a web design mailing list I'm on. It's comprised mostly of techie web designers. It's a great list, but they all seem to think that everyone should run their 19-21" monitors at a resolution of 1024 x 768, surf with browsers that are not maximized, using the latest and greatest browsers, and on a high-speed Internet connection. They just don't understand how the rest of the world really views and uses the Web. I think they would be very surprised to see how patrons use the Web in libraries. They desperately need an alternate perspective.
One last thought about the LJ article: it says one question to ask yourself is "does it feel right?" It's a good question, but sometimes you don't know the answer. Not knowing or not being sure feels wrong, but sometimes you have to get yourself past that uncertainty and take a chance. Failure is better than not even trying.
8:52:42 PM 
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Yay! Today I finally got the remote authentication set up for the Homer Library's databases. I've been trying to get to this for some time now, so I'm happy I can cross this off my list. Plus, now I won't feel like such a hypocrite when I preach to other libraries the gospel of remote access. Expect to see this in action at this month's SLS Tech Summit.
And BTW, that there is an official plug. If you're a librarian in the Chicagoland area, you're eligible to attend this event for free-free-free. I'll have covered some of this material at past Tech Summits, but I'll go into more detail at this one and provide a more complete picture, as well as discuss how blogging can be utilized on library Web sites.
5:07:38 PM
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From my referers today (I say referers, you say referrers....), I found my way to LibrarySpot's News section. It's a collection of solid links that will keep you up-to-date on news (not on new reference sites per se), but what would be really neat is to see all of these feeds generated via RSS so that all of the latest headlines for each site are automatically displayed on one page. That would be information diffusion in libraryland. Plus, you could pick and choose which of those headlines you want displayed on your own page. I'm still hoping to find time to write up how to do this with a third-party aggregator. If you know of a good article or tutorial that has already done this, please send it along!
As Paul and Lori will attest, you can't really grasp how this works or how valuable it could be until you see it in action.
12:19:15 PM
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Review Of Netflix DVD Rental Service "What kind of selection do they have? Well, their selection is IMMENSELY larger than anything that Blockbuster offers. Over 10,000 movies to rent. Can't beat that! What about late fees? There aren't any. You simply rent the movies, keep them as long as you like, and send them in when you are done. It's really that easy. NO LATE FEES!! WOO HOO!" [Slashdot]
This is partially a "me, too" post to let folks out there know that there are better places to go than Blockbuster for DVDs. I recently joined NetFlix after paying $12 in late fees. Twice. Most of the reviews of NF focus on how you can rent a lot of movies for $20 a month, but I subscribed for a different reason.
I want to watch movies I've chosen, not something that was left on the shelf after I dragged my butt over to Blockbuster and there wasn't anything better to select. And the whole point of DVDs is the extras, which require additional time to watch. So even if I only watch 3 movies a month, it's still worth the $20 to me because I factor in my time, the convenience factor, and the wide selection from which to choose.
Here's the thing - NetFlix understands my schedule. They know that I want to watch what I want when I want without having to go somewhere to get it. The DVDs magically appear in my mailbox, and the fact that there are no late fees solidifies my loyalty to them.
Libraries need to pay careful attention to this model. You need to be able to provide me with the service I want when I want it without having to go somewhere to get it. And if your circ staff is still haggling with patrons over dimes and nickels in late fees, then you need some serious customer service training. Your library needs to fit into my busy life, not the other way around.
10:56:24 AM
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Comments by: YACCS
© Copyright 2002 Jenny Levine.
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