A lot of people worked very hard on the website usability studies and redesign, as well as its constant maintenance.  These folks include Sherrida Crawford, John Taylor, Becky Murphy, Vince Spezzo, and all the folks who write content for the website (especially our steady bloggers Laura Wright and Maureen Puffer-Rothenberg)!

Congrats folks on all the hard work!!!

She joined one of our library’s catalogers and I for lunch to discuss her internship at my library, where she will be learning cataloging under his direction.  While we were in the middle of disucssing  the challenges of cramming the whole scope of cataloging into five months, I brought up RDA.

She had never heard of it.  I asked about her understanding of FRBR.  “What’s that?”

I knew for a fact that she had taken an introductory class on the organization of information, as well as a class on indexing and abstracting.  So I guess somewhere in there, I expected her to learn about these emerging standards.

Imagine the look of horror that spread across her face when we explained what they were.  “But what if I had gone into a job interview and someone had asked about RDA or FRBR?”  Exactly.

MLIS programs should be at the leading edge of exploring emerging trends in our field.  They should be preparing their students for the rapid change that we experience in libraries, and equipping them to evaluate and make tough decisions regarding formats, standards, and techniques of description

I’m not picking on FSU alone here.  In my time at VSU, I’ve served on and/or chaired several search committees.  The number one reason that candidates aren’t selected is that they lack experience, or reveal their ignorance in an interview.  It is my opinion that since librarianship is a practical science, it should be practiced by its students, at least in the form of a mandatory internship.

And no, I’m not talking about folksonomies and tagging here.  Although they are fun and very useful, they are no replacement for standards-based high-quality metadata.  I would never want my library’s catalog to look like my personal photo collection–with spotty tagging and organization at best!  Reference librarians, library staff, other catalogers and users all make use of high-quality cataloging metadata for locating the specific items that they need.  All it takes is a single mistake in a cataloging record to ensure that an item is lost to its user forever.  Catalogers:  take it from a Reference Librarian–what you do is important.

So, my plea is this:

If you teach in an MLIS program, stay in touch with librarians to know what your students should be learning to be prepared for the real world.  Look at the entry-level job ads that are being posted, and ask if the average graduate of your program will leave with the skills necessary to do that job.  Look at the advanced-level job ads that are being posted, and ask if your students are being instilled with the intellectual curiosity and passion that will lead them in that direction.  Make internships required for all your students, so they can at least get a taste of what librarianship is really like.

If you are a cataloger, constantly strive to improve what you do, and stay in touch with the cataloging community.  Think about the long-term effects of your description choices–after we’re long gone, our bib records will remain, either informing or misleading the next generation.  And please pass along your skills and passion to the next generation by offering mentorships and internships.

If you do it for no one else, then do it for our users.  After all, they are the ones who truly suffer if tomorrow’s catalogers are unskilled, and that perfect resource can’t be found.

After that I presented Crafting the User-Centered Library. I recorded myself in the session and have created a slidecast:

After my session, I had a great lunch with friends and spent the afternoon watching the Pecha Kucha session. As always, the conference was a blast, and seeing some of the leading thinkers in LibraryLand was a true delight. Thanks again everyone for a great conference, and I hope to see you all again soon!

Get ‘em while they’re hot, people!  The Desk and Beyond: Next Generation Services by editors Sarah Steiner and Leslie Madden!  I wrote Chapter 7, Friending our Users: Social Networking and Reference Services. You’ll also see the cutting-edge work of well known Reference Librarians from all over–it’s a title not to be missed!!!

And a big “thankyou” to Leslie & Sarah for all their hard work!

Why am I digging this up again?  Because our brilliant newly hired Electronic Resources librarian is encountering the same problems I did in my short interim–only many times over.  Our institutional online subscriptions are being paid for, but they are not able to be used because of the need for a login/password.  There are dozens, if not hundreds of these subscriptions floating out there.

1) Publishers, vendors, IT folks, administrators, lawyers, whomever.  I’M BEGGING YOU.  Please let our users access the resources that they are paying for with their tutition and tax dollars.  Just grant us IP access.  Yes, I know you’re “working on it.”  Yes, I know it will “take some time.”  But in the mean time, our users are being cheated.  And they’re angry at you and me because of it–but I’m the only one who hears it.

2)  If anyone out there in library- or technology-land knows of a way to elegantly bypass this from a user’s perspective, I’d be grateful to hear it.  I want my users to click on a link for the PDF of an item and have them actually be able to use that item.  I don’t want them to see a username/password prompt.

They’re coming.  Save me, please!

If you didn’t go, you missed Jason & Rachel‘s presentation on podcasting for instruction.  Wow.  I didn’t think that it would be possible for me to ever want to do podcasting, but they actually got me excited about it.  Sweet! (and congrats, Jason, on the MLIS and commemorative tattoo!)

Hi Cliff:

Someone on my team brought your email to my attention. I want to first
apologize for the confusion over access to this title. American Journal
of Obstetrics & Gynecology is a title which is unique for Elsevier in
that we provide the full-text only online, while the print edition
refers readers to the online version to read the full-text.

This has caused some confusion as the online version, as one of the
online support representatives advised, is accessible by username and
password only. I understand this is not ideal for institutions and most
institutional customers would prefer access via IP range.

While we are working on a solution to this problem, we’re not quite
ready to publicly launch the final version of the American Journal of
Obstetrics & Gynecology website which will be IP range enabled. That
said, as your users urgently need access, I would like to make available
to you and your users access to the new site ahead of the public.

If you let me know the IP range that you would like enabled, I will have
one of my colleagues set up access and contact you with the details.

I hope you find this an acceptable solution and I look forward to
hearing from you.

Regards,

And my response:

I’ll take the IP access to AJOG (it’s the least I can do after complaining publicly). Our range is: [snip]

Let me know when it’s up and I’ll test it to make sure it’s working. I look forward to the day when all libraries’ users can have that kind of easy access. But for now, thank you for your patience and hard work on this!

For a moment I thought of politely declining IP access as an act of solidarity with those folks/institutions who don’t have it, but that would be hurting my users and helping no one. So there you go. Score one for my library’s users. They probably will never know that this went on and couldn’t care less–but hey, us librarians are just supposed to make resources easy to use, right?

And yes, I’d like to thank Elsevier for doing this. They’re making an exception to help my users, and they’re also working on a more wide-spread solution. Hopefully all of us (vendors, users, and librarians) will continue to find and fix problems to make our users’ experiences easier.

SNSes are by their very nature social- -people get on these sites to interact with other people that they know.  Right now the only services I could push out would be our catalog and databases.  Because they have no social interaction (users can’t share what they’re reading/researching), there’s no point in pushing the services into a social sphere.  As Laurie Bridges points out, the services that actually get used are the ones with a high degree of social interactivity (no matter how silly they are…I’m looking at you Pirates vs. Ninjas vs. Zombies vs. Werewolves people!).

I think it’s awesome that institutions are reaching out to their users by putting more of their services out on SNSes–this is user-centric service, to provide services where the users are.  But I would rather wait until MPOW has a next-generation catalog and interactive databases that allow users to interact with data and each other.  For now, I can spend my time on trying to get us that next-gen catalog, and interacting with students by being myself in Facebook!

Now I do have to say that both times that I spoke to someone at Elsevier I had very pleasent customer service experiences (and anyone who knows me, knows how I rave if I get a good customer service experience).  The folks that I talked to were prompt, polite, and were as helpful as they could manage (which wasn’t much, due to the agreement between the publisher and the vendor).  I am pleased with their customer service, it’s just that my users can’t easily use the product that they are paying for.  Which is bad.

Here’s my take on things.  We pay over $600 for an institutional subscription to AJOG, which includes print and online access for that title.  Somewhere between the publisher and Elseveier, someone made a decision that this title should be available by username & password only, and not by IP range.  Which means that my library’s users have to jump through several more hoops (some of them aflame, it seems) just to get online access to a journal that they are paying for.  This is bad.

Here are my options:

• I can rant about this (done!), and maybe Elsevier would even bend the rules just for my institution (because I’m a loud mouth).  Those are high hopes in the contract-driven, litigious e-resource world we live in.  But that wouldn’t change things for other institutions who have the same type of subscription, and whose users have to jump through the same stupid hoops just to get access.
• I can ask Elsevier to work closely with the publisher, libraries, and Elsevier’s customers (library users, not librarians!) to figure out the easiest way for users to get access to online content (done!).
• I can spend anywhere from minutes to hours trying to create a work-around that would give my users the username and password.  Hopefully before they get to the login screen.  If they notice it.  If they write it down.  If they don’t think they they have to pay for the article.  If they don’t get so frustrated that they give up and move on.  Maybe they’ll need help?  Too bad, no way to put that in there… (not done, yet).

Needless to say, I think that all vendors should take a close look at how their users get access to the resources that they are paying for.  Is it easy?  Is it quick?  Is it clear?  Does it take twelve steps just to get to the full-text?  Look I’m not asking for a price cut, I just want my users to get what they’re paying for.

Please.  Think of the users.