work

This is me. I work on the web

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Great meme going around on flickr. I think it started from this photo by Nick Hodge, but it has been spreading quickly through the Australian web community, championed by Lisa Herrod .

I did mine on Monday, but even though it is flagged as publicly available, it still isn’t showing up under a search for the iworkontheweb tag, although it is in the iworkontheweb pool .

Here’s the photo, This is me. Check it out to find out why I think talking about web2.0 now feels so much like trying to tell people about the internet at the start of the ’90s.

Best workday ever.

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So, call me a twopointopian for loving my workday today. If exploring new worlds for librarianship, experimenting with new ways to do what we do and raving about it isn’t your thing, skip this post.

Here’s why today was fantastic for me:

9:15am – 20 minutes or so in a meeting for Enquiry and Loans staff showing pretty slides and telling them what emerging technology is and why I think it’s important for library staff to learn about it, and then outlining the 23 Things program.

9:40am – Upstairs to the accountant for Teaching and Learning where I used her credit card to order a Second Life island for the university.

10am – 12pm – Reference desk shift. Just another ordinary one, where I felt like I helped people and their faces lit up when I explained what the library held for them.

12:15pm – Emailed all library staff announcing the 23 Things program starting mid September, and inviting them to register

12:30pm – Emailed the university’s Second Life Interest Group telling them that we have an island

1:30pm – 5:00pm Seminar with Stephen Abram where he outlined Top 10 Strategies for Library Success and with versatile wit, speed of thought and intelligent charm quietly blew the minds of 30 or so librarians.

5:00pm – 5:30pm Made a short video clip of Stephen talking about 23 Things programs, to use for the launch of the 23 things at work.

6:00pm – 10:30pm Shared food and drink with Stephen and six other librarians who all were interesting thinkers and conversationalists.

Wow!

UPDATE 2 September 2007: OK, so I had a lot of awesome library techie things improbably converge in the one 12 hour period. “Couldn’t possibly get better”, I thought.

This weekend when catching up on my feeds, I discovered it did get better. On the same day, Michael Stephens from Tame the Web  highlighted this blog as one of his 5 blogs for Blog Day07 that “inspire me, engage me and make me think”.

Excuse me, I’m off to lie down in a quiet room.

Watch out! Reading books can kill you.

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….if they tell you how to kill yourself.

BACKGROUND

Australia’s Federal Attorney General is appealing a decision by the Office of Film and Literature Classification to allow the sale in Australia of Philip Nitshke‘s new book, the Peaceful Pill Handbook.

Dr Nitschke is a prominent voluntary euthanasia campaigner notorious for inventing the “suicide machine“. This includes software to ensure voluntary consent from a terminally ill patient and then allow self administered lethal injection. He has been working toward finding a “mix it yourself” cocktail of drugs to create a “peaceful pill”, which can be used to end life.

The book, which looks like it has very specific factual information about means of death, is being sold online through Exit International: a peaceful death is everyone’s right.

According to Exit,

In December 2006, the Office of Film and Literature Classification decided to provide The Peaceful Pill Handbook with a ‘Restricted Class 1’ Classification. This meant that althought the book was still a Prohibited Import and subject to seizure by Customs – the book could be published and distributed in Australia under strict controls.

The International Edition, which is for sale in US and Canada is in its third print run. He again works with Dr Fiona Stewart, who co-authored his earlier book: “Killing me softly” voluntary euthanasia and the road to the Peaceful Pill, available through Amazon.

MY DILEMMA

I’m a philosophy subject librarian in a university that teaches an Ethics program, so I’m asking myself whether I’d recommend it for our shelves. My cop-out answer is that like all purchases, I’d check with the course controller, and then if I was still unsure, I’d ask my supervisor. OK – but what do I REALLY think?

CON

Our university is full of people in a turbulent time of their lives. Young males have the highest rate of suicide, and they make up a high proportion of our students. I know that traditional Australian media usually don’t report suicides (murder/suicides excepted) in fear of copy cat deaths. Maybe a book like Nitschke’s could be used for murder as well as suicide?

PRO

I believe part of my job involves protecting the right of my readers to make up their own minds, by offering all sides of the story – even those I don’t agree with. People are scared of suicide to an extent that they possibly block out signs of likely self harm in others, and this book might create understanding. Nitschke has stated that his position has been influenced by Dr Peter Singer, and this would illustrate a practical extension of the arguments of someone who is required reading by our students.

My mind weighs on the side of the PROs and my gut on the side of the CONs. Given my doubt, I’d purchase the book…we’re not a public library and what else are university libraries for if not to provide greater understanding? (But I wonder how I’d feel if I found it on one of my boy’s bedroom floor?)

Librarian bundles for philosophy scholars.

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My last post discusses how some clever librarians are using web tools to bundle useful resources to clients. Here’s an example of how a philosophy subject librarian could use them.

1. SEARCH BOX FOR MURDOCH UNIVERSITY PHILOSOPHY OPEN ACCESS RESOURCES.

The search box below uses google to make a single search of these resources. (Try it – it’s a real one and works)





HOW TO: follow the steps at Google Co-Op searches. (I added the banana on wheels image just to play around with adding a logo).

2. BUTTON TO ADD ABOVE SEARCH BOX TO IE7 BROWSER TOOLBAR’S LIST OF SEARCH ENGINES

If you click this buttonreferral link you’ll see a page with a clickable button. Click it to add the search box above as a “search provider” in your Internet Explorer 7 toolbar.

HOW TO: follow the steps at Innovate

3. STARTER BUNDLE OF USEFUL RSS FEEDS FOR PHILOSOPHERS
Some useful blogs for philosophy scholars are:
Epistememlinks list of blogs
Conscious Entities
Pain for philosophers
Philosophy of friendship

I’ve been playing with OPMLManager.com, but didn’t quite get it together to create an OPML file for importing into an RSS aggregator, but I’m sure you get the idea.

HOW TO: Follow the pointers from What I learned today.

Thanks to CM for sparking my interest in this one.

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Systems Librarianship – some lowbrow thoughts

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…or how sometimes Systems Librarianship is like the Simpsons or Australian Idol.

First, an instant replay of a conversation in my household yesterday….

………………………..

ME: “I thought I’d need to know more to be a Systems Librarian”.

CO-PILOT: “No, you just need everyone else to know less”…………………………

I’ve been pondering about the skills I need to do my job.

Why? Well, I’ve come back from my holiday and MPOW is now actually paying me to spend a couple of days every week looking at blogging, podcasting, RSS feeds and other social software. (Yay, hooray, yippee!). Not exactly systems librarianship, but I’m not sure what you would call it.

Also Corey Wallis recently raised the issue on librariesinteract.info of “What exactly makes a Systems Librarian“, referring to the excellent Dorothea Salo post on TechEssence about “Hiring a Systems Librarian“.

When I left my Systems Librarians’ job in 1997 to go off and have babies, I thought, “By the time I’m ready to return to the workforce, I’ll have to be a childrens’ librarian, because all the young graduates going though library school will just know all this technical stuff”. But, even though more librarians have IT qualifications, it’s still hard to find a good Systems Librarian.

Tentatively, I’m concluding that maybe I don’t need to be able to code JavaScript while installing a printer driver and cobbling together a really hot mashup. Maybe I can stop being worried that one day my employers will find out I can’t do all this stuff. Perhaps they already know and don’t mind.

We’d both be delighted if I was technowonderwoman, but maybe it’s also OK to pick things up quickly, be able to see gaps in our services that can be filled by technology, know which people in the library know what, and to communicate enthusiastically to other library staff.

Remember the Simpsons episode where the town gets lots of money and, at the meeting to decide how to spend it, a stranger in a candy striped suit bursts in and, via a song and dance routine, convinces the townsfolk to install a monorail ?. By the end, the whole town is chanting “monorail, monorail, monorail” – except Marge, who is rolling her eyes and wondering how she’ll get them to see sense.

I’ve had moments at work where I’ve felt like the guy in the candy striped suit, singing and dancing about something that I only half understand, trying to drum up enthusiasm from people who trust me. I’ve also had those Marge moments where I’ve heard other staff chanting “mono-rail mono-rail”, and tried to work out how to put the brakes on without seeming killjoy.

(If you’re really keen, the episode has its own wikipedia entry for Marge vs. the Monorail, the Monrail lyrics are here, but it’s really much more fun to listen to this 1 minute sound bite of the Monorail Song…(http://www.simpsoncrazy.com/downloads/music/monorail.mp3″). [sorry about the link, but I have a media player plugin that did strange things to a link with .mp3 in it

Just last week, however, I found comfort in another trash TV icon, Australian Idol. Ostensibly a singing contest, a contestant with perfect rhythm, pitch and a magnificent voice was voted off. Her technical skills were undisputably better than the other contestants, but the judges concluded that she just wasn’t connecting with the public and there was no warmth to her.

Maybe, just maybe, it can be the same with Systems Librarianship. Maybe having perfect technical skills is a big asset, but perhaps if someone with less skill is connecting with people better, they are more suited to the job. Made me feel better, anyhow.

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