Work links (weekly)

• The seven [info literacy] headline skills expanded

  I regularly refer to this; it’s a good way to explain what library skills training is all about to academics.

  tags: work, information, literacy, skills, usered

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My library roots/routes

Working out of the office at the BL, 2009

Thought I’d join in with the Library Routes Project and blog about how I ended up as a librarian, and how I got to my current post.

Roots

I was a very early reader; apparently I taught myself to read a bit when I was 3, and the teachers at nursery school worried about me for a while because I insisted on reading all the picture books before I’d go and play with the other children. I used my public library regularly and had my own bookshelves too, holding favourite reads that I’d plough through over and over again. When I was a little older a few friends joked that I’d grow up to be a librarian, and this would bug me for some reason, I guess because it implied I was nerdy. Anyway I loved computers, and librarians don’t do anything computery, do they?

My parents had drummed into me from an early age that I was expected to go to uni, and so I did. I considered studying Computer Science for a long while, but ended up going for one of my other favourite subjects: Music at Southampton University. By this time I was going out with my now-husband, and moved in with his family over the holidays so I could get work in London. His mum worked for the local council, saw an advert for vacation library assistants, and encouraged me to apply. I thought ‘why not?’ as the pay was decent for a holiday job and the hours were ideal, and I was fortunate enough to get a post.

My role was an unusual one – a vacation assistant based almost entirely behind the scenes, working for the community library service rather than a particular branch. Lots of photocopying worksheets for kids doing summer events; basic circulation, processing and withdrawing old stock; helping out colleagues with IT bits and pieces etc. One of the most interesting bits for me was preparing playgroup loans – crates of 30-odd books with a set number from each section of stock kept in rolling stacks (board books, picture books, multicultural, non-fiction etc). A few times I got to go out as a second person on the mobile library which was based at my workplace; unfortunately this was never a fantastic experience as the mobile staff only wanted a helper if they were going somewhere a bit dodgy! I ended up doing this job for all three of my student summers, getting slightly more responsible tasks each time, but I still didn’t think of librarianship as a career, maybe because outreach/children’s work didn’t particularly appeal.

Routes

What finally got me thinking seriously about it as a career was a blog post a friend of mine did when she was considering what to do after uni. She linked to a few different pages about librarianship and graduate trainee schemes, including the CILIP website. I’d had no other serious career plans at the time (writing jingles for a living sounded fun but precarious) and suddenly this seemed like a decent option, with a logical career progression which meant I’d know what to do for the next few years! I ended up following the ‘traditional’ career route she’d researched pretty closely – in my final year at uni I applied to some traineeships and spent the next year at the London Library (a lovely place to work and to visit if you get the chance). From there I got a place on the full-time MSc in Library and Info Studies at City plus AHRC funding (yes, I was a truly lucky one), enjoying the geeky modules, tolerating the rest and writing my dissertation on using tagging to describe music according to its mood/emotion.

Between finishing the diploma and starting the dissertation I worked for a month as a library assistant at Trinity College of Music as sick leave cover, and apparently I made a positive impression! This experience got my foot in the door of music libraries, and I’m sure played a big part in me getting an Assistant Librarian job at the Royal College of Music after completing my dissertation (after several unsuccessful interviews elsewhere, including a cringeworthy experience at the BBC for which I was woefully underprepared…).

My current job is Librarian (Systems and User Education) at Trinity College of Music – as a temp I envied my colleague doing the job, so when I heard it was becoming vacant I just had to go for it. To my great fortune I was appointed and this week I’ll have been working at TCM for two years! I love the systems side of things, and have been incredibly lucky as the Jerwood Library’s a very supportive workplace and my boss has encouraged me to get plenty of training and attend events to continue my professional development (although I’ve decided not to formally charter for now). The user education side comes less naturally to me – I do love helping people to find information and empower them to do it themselves, but I’m not a natural ‘teacher’ of groups. I also look after online resources and marketing, which means I get to use Facebook for work!

Since starting at TCM I’ve become embroiled in the world of music libraries – I’ve joined IAML(UK & Irl) and attended one of their Annual Study Weekends which was very interesting and good fun. I’m also the current secretary of the Music Libraries Trust which is another new experience for me and fascinating to see how a grant-making group works from the inside! Who knows what awaits me in the long term – right now I feel quite strongly that I wouldn’t like my boss’ job leading a whole library because of the amount of bureaucracy and diplomacy that requires. A 100% systems/online resources/e-librarian type job in the future is appealing but I’m happy where I am at the moment. I got to where I am today with a large amount of good luck (e.g. the timing of various vacancies); I think serendipity must play a role in most people’s careers!

Work links (weekly)

• Aviary – graphics editors online

  Lots of online graphic-editing tools, including taking website screenshots. Unfortunately don’t seem to work in IE6, so I need to wait for work to upgrade before I try them out!

  tags: work, usered, screenshots, graphics

• Super Screenshot!

  Quick tool for taking a screenshot of a whole webpage (not just one screen’s worth. Some options e.g. size, filetype.

  tags: work, usered, screenshots, graphics

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Work links (weekly)

• Subversive Handouts: One Librarian’s Secret Weapon

  Interesting ideas about preparing handouts for one-off info literacy/research sessions.

  tags: work, usered, handouts, information, literacy

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Group mash – creating subject search from reading list

Pens at Mashed Library 2009

As promised, this is a write-up of the Group mash project I participated in at Mashed Library 2009, which won team members Amazon vouchers – thanks UKOLN!

Something I learned from last year’s Mashed Library event was that if you have an idea, tell people about it before you forget what it was and you may well get help to bring it to life. So this was my tweet (with corrected typo!) that started the project:

#mashlib09 I want a tool that takes in feed of reading list and suggests new items to add to reading list. Any takers?
2:07 PM Jul 7th

Fortunately for me, Owen Stephens quickly replied and took me under his wing, and had soon recruited Fiona Bradley, Nicole Harris and Chris Langham to complete our team.

The idea

I expanded on my tweet to the group. Our college has externally validated degrees, and this year its courses were revalidated by a new university. The courses passed, but one comment the validating body made was that the reading lists were a bit out of date and could do with revision (a story I’m guessing is familiar to many). So, it’s looking likely that next term I’ll give a half-hour training session to academic staff on revising reading lists, covering searching relevant literature indexes, current awareness etc, as we particularly want to encourage the use of our journals. I thought it would be good to give them a starting point by analysing each course’s existing reading list and using the content to generate suggested searches.

The plan

I found it interesting to see what Owen did once we’d discussed the absolute basics – he started mapping out on paper the different stages required to make the tool, then we discussed what web services we could use to obtain/wrangle the data for each part, then divided up the workload between us.

• Input = reading list data – I knew I could get this in a rudimentary RSS format from my library’s catalogue, but hadn’t yet done the custom work required. However I had set up feeds for new items, including one for new books, so we chose to use this as a proof of concept.
• Output = We scaled this back – originally a list of results from carrying out suggested searches, we decided instead to provide a list of suggested searches which the user can click on to execute.
• Process = the tricky bit! We decided Yahoo Pipes would allow us to manipulate the data. We needed to take in the RSS reading list, extract the subject terms from each item, then count up the most common subject terms and output those. We’d then use those to build search URLs for an online resource, in this case RILM, which is an excellent service abstracting musical literature.

The mash

Extract keywords from RSS pipe

I’ve published the two Pipes that make up the tool: Extract keywords from JL book feed and Create RILM search from keywords (which uses the keywords pipe). Virtually all of the first pipe was done on the day plus the groundwork for the second pipe (figuring out the syntax of a RILM search URL). Afterwards I joined everything up and made a few tweaks, including ditching a plan for searching different combinations of search terms.

A summary of the steps involved (you can ‘view source’ to see the modules in each pipe – Yahoo account required):

• Keywords pipe: Fetch feed from inputed URLs
• Use a regular expression to extract the subject
• Filter non-unique items, which adds a count of how many times each subject appears
• Sort descending by this count, then trim off everything but the top 3 subjects
• Strip out everything in the feed except the subject terms, and make them into a new RSS feed
• RILM pipe: Take in the output of the keywords pipe, then do a bit of data tidying – add ‘Search RILM for’ to the feed title, and set up the subjects for the search URL by inserting Boolean ANDs etc.
• Build the URL using the cleaned search terms, and add it as a link to the RSS feed
• Output – three-item RSS feed with the title ‘Search RILM for x’, linking to the search URL.

To give it a go, go to Create RILM search from keywords, copy a reading list RSS feed from my library catalogue’s RSS page and paste it into the ‘Enter RSS url’ box then submit (or just use the example feed provided), and hopefully you’ll get three suggested searches back. If you have IP/Athens/Shib access to RILM via Ebsco, feel free to click through and see how the search results look! Known bugs include that some of our search options don’t seem to be working via permalink, e.g. sorting by date descending and limiting to published from 2000 onwards. There’s likely to be some rather dud searches too, but I hope this can be resolved by pointing out these are only suggested starting searches and will need tweaking.

Although lots of the specifics are tailored to my needs, e.g. the regular expression for extracting the subjects and the data-cleaning/URL building, and the pipe I made myself is a bit clunky and could do with streamlining, these pipes could be quite easily adapted for other institutions or indeed different purposes, so please feel free to clone the pipes and tinker away!

Work links (weekly)

• Web2practice – Guides to emergent tech and innovative practice

  New animations and guides to using Web 2.0 tools for research, admin or teaching – likely to come in very handy for developing in-house training. CC-licensed. Topics include RSS, Social Media and Microblogging with more to come.

  tags: work, usered, web2.0, tutorials

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Mash Oop North write-up (part 2)

Afternoon chocolate cake at Mashed Library 2009

Here’s the long-awaited (!) write-up of the second half of the Mash Oop North, apologies for the stream-of-consciousness writing style. Last time I neglected to mention a brief session before lunch which was loosely based on a kids’ TV programme called Runaround (which I was too young to have heard of!). Volunteers stood around the room holding up different topic ideas, and we were invited to go to whatever topic interested us, talk to the other people there, then move on (or not) each time someone shouted ‘runaround’. I think this was a valiant idea but didn’t quite work as planned – in most of the groups I encountered one or two people dominated the conversation, and as fairly few people shifted around each time it made it difficult to break into an existing discussion, especially for someone like me lacking in concrete ideas at that stage, and rather more outgoing online than in person! I did hear a couple of people coming up with good ideas though, so it certainly was productive for some people and bore fruit later.

Lunch included both Papa John’s pizza and Seabrook crisps, two excellent foodstuffs. I ate a bit of the pictured cake in the afternoon and it was as delicious as it looks! There was more opportunity for networking and starting to come up with ideas for the afternoon.

After lunch came the lightning talks. These were a fab idea but too popular for their own good – unfortunately I couldn’t hear terribly well from where I was sitting. One time I realised too late that one speaker was extolling Tufte, who I learned about on my library course and is a fantastic source of good advice on the graphic display of information. I’d have tried to move forward had I twigged sooner! I eventually decided to give up on the lightning talks and do something practical – during lunch I’d had an idea, so I tweeted it, and fortunately Owen Stephens offered to help make it a reality. He soon gathered a few others to work on the idea, and after an hour or so of mashing (with snatches of cake and coffee) we nearly had a working prototype. I’ve got the start and end of the process in Yahoo Pipes and just need to find time to create the middle bit and stick the two halves together, so will blog on the project as soon as that’s done. What I can reveal now is that we were awarded the group mash prize (perhaps by default!) which was a £20 Amazon voucher each, I think sponsored by UKOLN. Totally unexpected and very appreciated!

At the end of the afternoon prizes were awarded – you can see the list of excellent ideas on the mashlib09 blog, and I do recommend taking a look as there’s things there that should definitely get developed. After prizegiving ended, we decamped to the pub before heading our separate ways. All in all, a highly recommended event and format which both broadened my professional horizons and helped me take more online contacts into ‘real life’, and I’m looking forward to MiddleMash in Birmingham towards the end of the year (if I manage to get a place, given how popular these events are!).

Work links (weekly)

• Fan Box – Facebook Developer Wiki

  New feature allows a widget (‘fan box’) to be added to any webpage to promote a Facebook Page. Requires javascript or iframe. Can show badge + optionally stream and selection of fans.

  tags: work, facebook, integration, marketing

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Mash Oop North write-up (part 1)

Spotted in the Creative Arts Building at Huddersfield Uni

I’m on the train home from Mashed Library 2009 just now. It’s been an excellent day, with huge thanks due to Dave Pattern and everyone else involved in organising it. As someone said, it was the most organised unconference ever – properly organised chaos!

The event for me started yesterday evening, as I decided to avoid a 4.30am start by travelling up the day before and staying locally (I can recommend the Cambridge Lodge – very friendly staff and excellent fried breakfast!). A trip to a noodle bar and several local drinking establishments had been organised, which was very enjoyable both because of the delicious food and drink and the chance it gave to meet people informally before the event. This really helped me get over my usual introversion and get chatting, which helped me off to a good start the next day.

First session I attended was Dave Pattern on library usage data and Iman Moradi on gaming and libraries. I failed to take notes in any sessions except on Twitter, so here’s scrappy recollections:

• Uni library stats show 20-25% of keyword searches end with 0 results. Resulting page is often a dead end – adding spellcheck etc will give a route out.
• Huddersfield has done all sorts of wonderful things with their usage data – ‘people who borrowed x, also borrowed…’, general suggestions, and increasingly course-specific stuff. I was particularly taken with the way they can use course-based usage stats to create course-specific new items lists!
• Visual features prove very popular (with stats to prove it) so finding ways to include book covers etc is a good idea. I wish sheet music covers didn’t all look so similar! AV material has more promise, but I’m imagining getting matches without ISBNs is slightly nightmarish.
• Dave has a vision of the library website in 2012 – modular, flexible, with services that can be pulled out into students’ website of choice. Also pulling in non-catalogue links and resources, e.g. BBC news feeds and journal articles chosen with knowledge of student’s course and interests.
• Iman had gorgeously designed slides, as you’d expect – he lectures in design iirc, as well as being a library fan! He reminded us of the user perspective, that finding stuff is complex and the more we can smooth that along the better. Serendipity can serve a purpose too, e.g. Huddersfield Town Library did a serendipitous display of novels by colour, which looked pretty and encouraged browsing.
• He also pointed out possible similarities between library use and gaming (sorry Iman, I don’t play World of Warcraft, I’m too busy on my DS). He pointed out a library borrowing history is a bit like a game achievements list – there can be bragging rights on reading certain books. Dave touched on this gaming idea too with the notion of karma points earned by helping other students, redeemable for free printing etc.

Second up was Richard Wallis on Talis’ open source Juice Project. Its aim is to make it easy to enhance OPACs without duplication of effort, or as Richard said ‘slap some mash on your OPAC’ (wonder how he got that authentic mash-on-plate sound effect?). This is achieved by the writing of cross-OPAC extensions to e.g. add Google Book API features, look up a title in Worldcat (and display it in an in-page lightbox if so desired), plus the writing of a vendor-specific ‘metadef’ which defines where the ISBN etc are located on the page. If these are in place, all your friendly OPAC sysadmin has to do is write a little script to tell Juice where to put the extra content on the page, add a few lines of code to the OPAC source page and voila! This is something I’m hoping to get time to play with soon, although I’ll need to learn some Javascript and hope someone writes a metadef for SirsiDynix elibrary, else I’ll need to learn a lot of Javascript. Hoping some more real-world examples will start appearing soon too.

Philosophically I think the Juice Project has it spot on – it’s mad that so many OPAC administrators spend time coding enhancements which then work on their OPAC and theirs alone. Sharing code is definitely the way forward, and allows lesser-resource institutions with little development time to participate. One potential downside is accessibility – always an issue with Javascript, which is why it’s advised Juice is only used to add extra value to a service rather than critical functionality.

My final morning session was Tony Hirst’s Yahoo Pipes mashalong. I’d attended his Pipes presentation at last year’s inaugural Mashed Library event and been left in awe at what was possible, but not quite sure what to do with it. Sadly this time round Tony was beset with technical problems which cut his mashalong tragically short; on the plus side he’s since done a detailed and interesting blog post mashalong as an ‘apology’ (not necessary!) which I’ll be working through myself at some point. Despite the technical troubles this session was worth attending just for Tony’s brilliantly succinct explanation of JSON, which I’ve been baffled by until now – basically it’s a Javascript representation of an RSS feed which can be used to pull a feed’s contents into any webpage. Now I understand why I might want JSON output!

I’ll leave it here for now as my train’s nearly reached London. Another post (hopefully a briefer one) on the afternoon’s proceedings is coming soon…

Mashed Library UK ‘09

Mashupcookbook by Dave Pattern

My employer’s agreed to fund my attendance at the Mashed Library UK 2009 unconference in Huddersfield next month, which I’m very grateful for and really looking forward to after the successful inaugural event in London last year.

I think it may be the most well-organised event I’ve ever encountered – Dave Pattern and his colleagues have been gathering tons of information, ranging from asking attendees about their interests and expertise to gauging opinions on the lunchtime pizza options! As part of the build-up Dave’s been carrying out blog chats with various attendees, and today was my turn (hence my hasty blog update!).

Over the next few weeks I’ll consider what sort of things I’d like to explore on the day and perhaps even come up with some fresh ideas. I’d like to make more progress with our OPAC - API work at Christmas enabled auto-plural searching and it now uses a custom synonym list (so finally searches for cello and violoncello give the same results!). I think spell-checking would be a nice thing to add soon, and I saw someone on the Mashed Library forum discussing this so maybe I’ll pick up some tips. Also very intrigued by the Juice Project…