Webinar: Empowering the Reader in a Digital World

We had hoped to have a group of IP's, (information professionals, what librarians are called these days), attend this, but it didn't work out, and I was asked to go alone and boil it down for everyone else.

The hour-and-a-half presentation by Al Carlson and Chad Mairn was an overview of the e-book phenomenon with regard to libraries, and was aimed at librarians with little assumed knowledge of it.

It's not as good as hearing the presentation, but the slides and notes can be viewed here:

http://www.slideshare.net/chadmairn/empowering-the-reader-in-a-digital-world-7312595

Carlson and Mairn believe that, "history suggests that eBooks will rapidly invade the codex space", and that, increasingly, library web sites will be the way services are delivered, rendering physical circulation of materials, library locations, and courier deliveries obsolete.  But they point out  a number of ways in which current e-book technology and distribution models are problematic for libraries as well as for publishers.

What does a library actually buy when it purchases an e-book from OverDrive or NetLibrary?  What about the profusion of file formats and proprietary DRMs, and all the different e-readers and other devices people want to read e-books with?

They conclude,

• ePub offers huge benefits to public libraries, but also some threats to libraries as we now envision them.

• We need to figure out how to exploit ePub’s power without being destroyed by it.

• Use the Force, but don’t go over to the dark side, even if they offer you candy. ___________________________________________________

Are Carlson and Mairn right?  Will e-books replace printed books as DVD's replaced VHS cassettes?  The analogy is not quite parallel, since DVD's are still physical containers, whereas e-books are digital.  The library owns DVD's outright, whereas it only buys access to download e-books from a vendor, for as long as that vendor has the right to provide it.  But I am inclined to agree that they will, over time, for certain kinds of books.  The New York Times's addition of an e-book bestseller list lends weight to the prediction.  Still, for libraries and for publishers, the current e-book distribution model is seriously flawed.

My Lenten "Vacation"

Back at work today, after taking most of Holy Week off.  Several people asked whether I had a good time off.  Of course I said yes.  What use to bother them with what the end of Lent is like?

I was glad that R. was able to come with me to all the Triduum rites:  The Lord's Supper and the Washing of the Feet on Thursday night, the Stations of the Cross on Friday afternoon, and the celebration of the Lord's passion and death, with the Veneration of the Cross.

We usually go to the Easter Vigil on Saturday evening, a long service, not heavily attended, when the new fire is lit and candidates are baptised and/or confirmed or received into the Church.  This year, we were scheduled to serve as eucharistic ministers at the SRO Sunday 10:30 Mass, with babies, Easter outfits, and people lining the walls.  I think I must have gotten a lot of the standing crowd, because I was the last one left distributing hosts.  At least I didn't run out.

As of Sunday, I had gone 22 days smoke-free.  I had observed my "smoking devil" building a case for smoking again after Lent, but I was amazed at the struggle I had to put up to overcome the temptation.  I felt hungry for tobacco smoke, as if it were a food I was starved of.

 

Richard Klein's book, Cigarettes Are Sublime, is just about the last word on cigarettes, "with its origins in the author's urgent desire to stop smoking."

This book attributes to the cigarette a certain philosophical dignity that derives from its being considered a symbolic instrument, and lends it the poetic qualities of a sacred object or an erotic one, endowed with magical properties and seductive charms, surrounded by taboos and an air of danger, a conduit to the transcendental, and a spur to repression.

Blogging Reference

Rain early this morning.  It's clearing now, in good time for the Art In The Park festival downtown.  I had to detour around it to get to the library.

Two weeks smoke-free, and I still feel like Gollum without his "precious".  Shouldn't be surprised.  I smoked for years and years.  Sigh...

10:00  Open

Is the book shop open today?

Where is tax help?

PC for Josh

Here's Ron K., retired colleague.  Needs help copying entry for Reds from The Motion Picture Guide.  Says, "Don't ever let them get rid of this!"

Where is tax help?

Woman says man has USB device plugged into back of catalog PC, thought I should know.  I go to look.  A man is charging a phone and an iPod.

Where is tax help?

Where are tax "booklets"?

Deputy sheriff stops by to ask how my quitting smoking is going, gives me a thumb-up.

Man has read Mr. Hooligan by Ian Vasquez, wants author's two previous books, Lonesome Point and 2008 Shamus Award winner In the Heat.  Place ILL requests for him.

Police officer asks for deputy.  They take a young man at an Internet PC into custody, walk him downstairs.

Today's paper.

Couple of women looking for The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene.  Take to shelf.  She asks me to show her how to use self-check machine, but her card's expired.  Have to send her to circulation.

"Could you direct me to the tax assistance?"

11:18  Make round of floor.  All is well.

Police officer goes back out 2nd floor exit,  Young man they were talking to comes back up, gets back on Internet PC.

"Do y'all have a stapler?"

"Yeah so where's the Henderson Room?"

Go to pull more humor for my display.

11:50  S. goes to lunch.

Phone:  Darlene wants Bullet by Laurel Hamilton.  Find on new shelf, put on hold.

DT from Youth Services asks who on staff does the African-American BookLetter.  I say I believe it is done by BookLetters, is not a staff production.

Phone:  Jolene wants to know what was the sitcom with Kevin James.  Was it King of Queens, 1998-2007, with Kevin James, Leah Remini, and Jerry Stiller?  That's it.

Where are meetings rooms A and B?  Tallahassee Authors Network is meeting there now.

Where is tax help?

PC for Sadie.

12:18  Watching people going about using the library:  browsing, working at tables.  No one seems to need my help at the moment.

Phone:  The Norton Anthology of African American Literature.  Circulating copies are lost, but have in reference collection.  Can he photocopy?  Yes.

PC's for 3 boys.

Phone:  He needs a couple of tax forms, schedules C and SE, will come in.

1:04  Back from lunch.  Sandwiches in the gazebo with David Downing's Zoo Station, a very readable suspense story set in Germany in 1938.  It's got that feeling of creepy paranoia and danger, like Philip Kerr or Alan Furst.  Great atmosphere.

Woman wants to know more about how she could listen to the OverDrive downloadable audio book of Suze Orman's The Money Class.  Could she download it to a floppy disk?  How about a USB drive?

Dad w 2 girls wants The Greek Way, Emerson's Essays, Robert Lowell.  Take to shelf.

She wants geometry, trigonometry.  Take to shelf.

Christy from tax help stops on way back from restroom."Only one more day!"

Help girl restart her PC session.

Baseball books, take to shelf.

Here's Jerry to research online racing forms.  A betting man.

Help w printer jam.

Her reservation expired while PC was hung rebooting.  Persuade man to let her have his reservation for that PC, get him another, thank him, get her logged in & happy.

2:22  We got off easy today.  A lot going on, Art In The Park, the Garnet & Gold game over at the stadium.  Tomorrow's Palm Sunday.

Phone:  She wants Atlas Shrugged.  Can't find our copy.  Checked in from "Discard" on 1/3, which is odd. Is copy at branch.  she asks me to reserve it, she'll pick it up there.  Call branch, they trap it.

Phone:  S's husband.

Ruby walks up.  Called yesterday with unemployment questions.  I had printed out eligibility requirements for her.  Says they told her she couldn't draw unemployment and go to school, but wouldn't give her chapter and verse to support it.  Get her to WorkForce Innovation and Florida Statues sites on PC.  Ruby can be demanding.  I always feel a shiver of dread when I see her coming.

Woman needs to see the Florida Statutes and Administrative Code.  We have the statutes in print, but she'll need to go online for the Administrative Code.

3:17  PC for Kendrick..  PC for Kometrius.

Do three more things for Ruby, who wants to get her nephew a Bright Futures scholarship.

Woman complains about guy next to her watching music videos.  She's trying to work.  Give her another.

Where is PC 45?

PC for Bryan.

Couple of young black men wearing rosaries around their necks ask for PC's.  I've been wondering what that's all about.  Found a number of forum discussions, often heated.  Catholics don't wear rosaries as necklaces.  Found a story about it from 2008.  Apparently they are worn for protection.  But police have been finding gang-related signals in them as well.  The first story is three years old, but I didn't start seeing them here until last year.  Possibly adopted from use by Hispanic youth.

4:05  GRE test prep book.  When she tries to use the self-check machine, her card is blocked.  She must go to circulation.

Phone:  Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown.  Hold for Kevin.

4:30  30 min. announcement.

Help w copier.  Help w self-check machine.

Refill humor display.

Books about Stonewall Jackson.  He hasn't been to the library since he was in middle school.  I say, "Welcome back!"  He's been watching the PBS series on the Civil War by Ken Burns.  He takes Stonewall Jackson:  the man, the soldier, the legend by James I. Robertson, and Henderson's Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War.

5 min. announcement.  Time to go.

On Quitting Smoking, and on Too Much News

I was sorry to say goodbye to my Camel Lights.  It came to me in prayer during Advent that I needed to quit, and I thought I had better listen and obey, for my own good.

The hard parts were letting myself actually run out of cigarettes, and then a week later on my Saturday off at home.  That night and Sunday morning the craving was intense.  In church I was afraid I might faint.  And then after Mass the craving eased.

There is so much to keep you busy when you smoke:  all the "moments" when it is time to have a cigarette.  Quitting was like being out of a job, with so much time on my hands.

So Jules agrees, there is too much news!  I just do not want to hear about every disaster on the planet 24 hours a day.  And I do not feel obliged to care about all wars and disasters on the planet.  I say to myself, "No one is forcing you to read the news every day."  I guess that's true, though I have to handle several daily newspapers at work every morning.

I guess I could just tune out more than I do.  When you use newspaper archives as I do, you realize that the news doesn't change very much over the years.  Look at the microfilm from the 1970's and you will see that.

B&R Roundup

Sorry, I haven't posted anything substantial this month.  I've been absorbed with personal and uninteresting stuff:  being a "legislative spouse" for my wife, who has been chained to her desk at the state capitol during the two-month legislative session, and Lent, quitting smoking at 57, (10 days smoke-free  so far).  I've also grown weary of the recent news topics.  I wish I lived in the days when it took weeks to hear news from distant places.

I'm reading Red Jade, the third of Henry Chang's crime novels featuring Detective Jack Yu.  This is a great series, with a unique, insider's portrait of New York City's Chinatown.

My turn for a book display last week.  April is National Humor Month, says Chase's Calendar of Events.  Dave Barry, Kevin Nealon, Roy Blount, Paula Poundstone, other recent stuff from Dewey 814 to 818.  When I came in today after the weekend, everything I'd pulled was gone.  Work the comic novel angle, pull Jonathan Coe, James Wilcox, Stephen Fry, and others.

Public Access Internet:  it feels like we've pretty much caved to the amazing resistance to or inability to apply for a library card.  If they don't have a card, we ask their name and issue a guest pass.  It is not worth making a fuss about whether they've already had a session, when they can go back and forth between Media on the first floor and us in Adult Services.

The Bibliophile's E-Reader...

The Library Thing-e "patented “LikeaBook®” casing feels like fine morocco leather and emits a faint “old book” smell."

Blogging Reference

Working w MF today.  Azaleas are in full bloom.  It's overcast w a chance of rain.

10:00  Open.  Not many waiting.

Which way to do income taxes?

Just the regulars take PC's:  Freestone, Myrna.

Lady in motorized chair, "Where is the tax assistance?"

Older couple, "Where they doin' the tax help?"

Phone:  What Color is Your Parachute?  She wants at branch.

Where is Henderson room? (tax help)

Can't find his PC, point him to it.

PC's for Homer and Peter.

PC for Jerry.

Why doesn't copier work?  Is "asleep", wake it up.

Jerry having trouble w #36.  It's sluggish.  Give him another and test it.  It's got the browser hijack bug.

Copier needs paper.

Now another person has complained about #36.  I guess I'd better shut it down, put in a call.

Couple want to renew interlibrary loan, The Man God Uses by Henry and Tom Blackaby.  Send renewal request to lending library, tell them to check next week for new due date.

Where is Downtown Market?

Woman on #58 has got virus, restart PC to wipe.

His music download window is frozen, restart PC.

Where can he search for warehouse jobs online?  Show him our Job Search Center.  He says he'll just buy a newspaper.

Wall Street Journal.

Today's Democrat.

Phone:  When is today's FSU baseball game?  What was the score from last night's game?

He's new in town, on unemployment, living at the Shelter, wants to get job training.  Give him info on Lively Technical Center.

Where is PC 63?

Tax help man says hi, says it's been slow.

L. is here, time for lunch.

Tuna sandwich & Kristin Lavransdatter.

Back, M. goes.

Edwin wants to see what we have by Joyce Meyer.  Reserves Power Thoughts:  12 Strategies To Win The Battle Of The Mind.

Returns copies of Democrat.

Man is being sneaky about printing, sending jobs to printer, walking away to reading area, coming back to get them.  I catch his eye to let him know I'm on to him, and take the paper from the printer feed tray.  He packs up and leaves.

Lit crit on Harry Crews?  Show Literature Resource Center.

M. is back from lunch, going to clean off her desk, I'll stay out here.

Phone:  Gators are playing Butler in NOLA today, where is Butler University?  Who named for?  Is in Indianapolis, founded in 1855 by abolitionist Ovid Butler.

Different Seasons by Stephen King, take to shelf.

Mom and son: have we received Scorpia Rising by Anthony Horowitz yet?  Not yet, on order.  How will they know?  Is first time they've reserved a book.  Set her up for e-mail notification.

1:52  Cloudy and breezy out.

Can she check out DVD's up here at the self-check machine?  No sorry, books only.  Says they won't check her out downstairs, she's already got her limit of DVD's checked out.  Sorry, can't help her, what they say goes.

Man wonders if I can name a song if he sings a bit of the melody.  Doesn't ring a bell.  I tell him I'm not much help with current music, unless he knows a line of the lyrics I can search on.  He says he had the iPhone app that can identify tunes, but he accidentally deleted it.

When he leaves, another man tells me the man was following him around.  He seemed a little manic, but was friendly enough.  He's gone now.

Last Sunday's real estate section from the paper.

Phone:  Eat Right 4 Your Type by Peter D'Adamo.  Find on cart, put on hold for her.

PC's for Josh, Carol.

Today's NYT.

Returns Democrat.

He can't find Final Exit by Derek Humphry on the shelf.  Only copy at this location is in Large Print, take to shelf.  He says that will do.

Books on meteorology?  Take to shelf.

Phone:  It's Not Me, It's You by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor.  Is in transit to main from a branch, where it was turned in today.  She doesn't want to reserve it, will come in Monday.

Where is public phone?  Make change for a dollar.

PC for Antoine.

3:00  L. leaves.  Her last day with us as a volunteer!  She got a position at one of the branches.  We'll miss her!

C., a tax help volunteer, leaves us some Krispy Kreme donuts on her way out.  Give them to M. to take down to Circulation

"Something's wrong with this computer, I can't get the Internet to go!"  She wants to go to Google.  Get her to Google.

Books on personality types.  Find him several based on Myers-Briggs test.

3:30  Somewhat quiet.

NADA Official Used Car Guide, will use at desk.

Help her open and print an e-mail attachment.

Do we have a pen?  Hers ran out of ink.

PC for Cheryl.

Where is stapler?  Attachment woman thanks me.

The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence.  Take her to shelf.

3:58  Thunder.

Phone:  Wants to know about calcium silicate, an anti-caking additive to salt.  An older man with a "New Jersey" accent, he goes on to talk at length, comparing local health food stores, asking about my work,  It's quiet, so I indulge him for ten minutes or so.

It's raining, 30 min. to closing.

PC for Kashika.

Rain has stopped.

PC for Ruby.

Help man w e-mail.  "Send" in his courseware e-mail launches a spell-check window that instantly minimizes to taskbar.  He needs to reopen it, approve or skip changes before he can send.

Help woman w self-check station.  Use library bar code, not bar code on back cover.

Help woman print PowerPoint handouts.  When opening .ppt in browser, rather than natively in PowerPoint, File>Print will not offer PowerPoint options like handouts, (6 slides per page).  She needs to right-click on slide and choose Print to get those choices.

15 min. to closing.

Books That Disappear

I ran across a story at Mainstreet.com, a personal finance portal, The Most Stolen Library Books, by Jeanine Skowronski, whose informal survey of librarians is pretty accurate.  My only quibble is that the books in question are not so often stolen outright as they are legitimately checked out and then not returned.  In our system they are more often marked "assumed lost", rather than "missing".

Someone has gone to the trouble to get a library card to check out the one book that they need or want, and when they don't return it, they forfeit their library privileges.  I've always felt that this is a class issue.  People who are living hand-to-mouth, with little disposable income, and more chaos in their lives than the well-off would believe, will accept their loss of library privileges before they will pay for a lost book.  I often sense that this is the real story behind the "I have a card, but I left it at home" excuse that we get from people asking for a computer guest pass.

This is borne out by Skowronski's selection of test prep books as one of the most stolen classes of books.  In fact, the test prep books that go missing are the ones for low-level entrance or certification, for the GED, the ASVAB, and the TABE.  Higher level test prep books, for the GRE or the LSAT, do not get lost nearly so often.

The article mentions Zane, an author of explicit black erotica.  These titles disappeared so quickly that we simply gave up buying them.  And Dave Peltzer's A Child Called It: yes, I am always looking for donated copies for replacements.

We had students from a local university, FAMU, repeatedly asking for David H. Jackson, Jr.'s A Chief Lieutenant of the Tuskegee Machine: Charles Banks of Mississippi .  We don't take requests for university course materials, but inevitably one got through to interlibrary loan, and was then lost, which cost us dearly.  Our solution was to purchase a copy, held at the reference desk, for use in-library only.

Another title we had to purchase for in-library use only, after many lost copies, to forestall interlibrary loan requests, is Behold a Pale Horse, by William Cooper,  a conspiracy book about the "New World Order".

The Domes of Baggins End

I visited an old friend in Davis, California in 1981, but I never heard of this cooperative community on the UC campus there until I read about it in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week.  There is a struggle between the student residents and the school over the future of the domes, which are showing their age.  They were built in 1972.

Yes, a vintage hippie commune, still here in 2011!  It seemed so sweet and pure to me, with it's vegetarian pot-lucks and government by consensus: a rarefied idealism that thrives best among care-free students or the highly committed.

Back in the '70's, when these domes were built, choosing an intentional community was a serious option for people who identified with what Theodore Roszak named the Counterculture.  And I guess it still is.  For myself, when the '70's came to an end and I married R., I no longer cared for such togetherness.

Still, reading about the domes brought back good memories of coming together with others, of sharing all in common, of the magic of a simple life, experiences that left their mark on me to this day.  There are more pictures here.

Virtual Reference: Behind The Curtain

If you have been following this blog, you will know what we do at the reference desk, where I spend most of my work day.  It is when reference librarians are in the workroom that our work is specialized.  One will process requests for materials, another will work with books to be mended, discarded, or sent to the bindery, and so on.  I am our library's coordinator for a small crew of IP's, (information professionals), who help with a statewide virtual reference service called Ask a Librarian.

Ask a Librarian started as a project funded by the State Library of Florida with a nucleus of community college libraries, but our library joined early on, in 2003.  The idea was to establish an online presence for trained information professionals who "can guide you to the answers you need in minutes rather than your wasting hours navigating hundreds of unhelpful and irrelevant web sites."  Today, Ask a Librarian has 119 participating community college, university, and public Florida libraries.

Virtual reference was conceived as a screen-sharing experience.  The user and the librarian would share a browser window and a chat box, with the librarian "escorting" the user in a search for answers on the Web, while conducting the "reference interview" with chat.

From the beginning, this approach presented problems.  The shared browser window did not work reliably, owing to the great variety of operating systems and browsers in use.  Many librarians were uncomfortable "escorting" users while they searched the Web for good information for them, (a sometimes uncertain and time-consuming process).  They preferred searching outside the shared interface and pasting worthwhile links in the chat box.  Some users were uncomfortable with librarians sharing a window on their computer.  It felt invasive to them.

Ask a Librarian initially used a console called Docutek VRLplus.  The only screenshot I have is from an error report.

Do you see?  There was a problem with the shared browser window on the right.  Docutek in the end made browser-sharing optional, and enabled posting hot links in the chat box.

In 2008 Ask a Librarian migrated to a new product, Instant Service, which added an e-mail feature for libraries without their own reference e-mail arrangement.  Screen-sharing was still an option, but pushing links in chat continued to be the overwhelming preference, and now Ask a Librarian has dropped the screen-sharing component entirely.  Instant Service has since become  ATG Live Help.

Here you see a frivolous request.  Details show neither a user-name nor an actual question.  It's not unusual to get empty or idle requests from bored schoolchildren.  We were once bombarded with silly questions from a classroom in New Zealand.

Here is a chat session in progress.  Roberto from Miami asked, "How can I borrow books that are not in the system?" (We can see which library web site they have come in from.).  I had to go to the web site of the Miami-Dade Public Library and figure out where patrons can request new materials and interlibrary loans.  I found a link under More Library Services, Suggestions for Purchase, which takes you to a web form that doubles as an interlibrary loan request form if you check a button and agree to pay $2 per request.

 

 I had a good hour at the Collaborative Desk this week.  I was able to help Roberto find out about interlibrary loans at his library.  Another man who came in through the State Library's site needed to know how to get a copy of his Florida birth certificate.  When I found out that he was now in Tennessee, I sent him a link to the Florida Vital Records Office in Jacksonville.

Users going to Ask a Librarian from their library's web page see a notice that their question will not necessarily be answered by staff from their library, but often they think that we are in their library, and can help them with reserves and patron account issues.  Sometimes we have to suggest that they use the e-mail option, (which goes to their library), but we do the best we can, helping them navigate their library's catalog or databases.

You can see the address box and "Push" button above the chat window that lets us send the user a link which opens a new window on their desktop.  This shows in the transcript as Sending:  http://www.mdpls.org/catalog/suggestion.asp.

Ask a Librarian added the functionality to receive and reply to text messages last year.  I haven't seen many yet.  Testing our library's texting address was comical.  The reference staff are all too old to have any experience with texting, and it took some asking around before we found someone who knew enough to send a test text message on their mobile.