How do we describe who we are and what we do?

Does anyone else seem to have difficulty doing this? I was having a chat to my friend and colleague, who is also enrolled in the Master of Information Studies at Charles Sturnt University, and we think it's rather a difficult thing, because many people don't know for sure what a librarian does. And I don't think we're necessarily very good at telling people what it is that we do do. Oh for sure, we all say 'I'm a librarian' at dinner parties and at the pub, but what do people think when they hear that's what we do?

I'm not sure about you, but I often have people ask me if I spend a lot of time stacking books (it's called shelving people!) or envying me because of all the time I spend reading books while at work (!)

Clearly I am not the only one who struggles with this. A quick Internet search throws up a lot of forums and discussion threads where the perennial 'What does a librarian do?' question gets asked, even by librarians themselves. I guess it's the sentence that comes after the 'I'm a librarian' that people get stumped on, the subtitle to our job titles (haha- get it? Subtitle. Sorry, you'll have to excuse the lame book-related jokes- I just can't help myself.)

How do you describe what you do in one sentence? This link on LibraryThing provides some interesting answers. I also find just a simple one liner such as 'I help people find information' insufficient, because that's not all that I do! So then in a social situation I often  find myself listing some of the cool projects or things that I'm working on, which usually works a treat (except it means I may start going off on a tangent while the poor person looks at me glassy-eyed...)
Just for kicks, I did a Summon search for just that: 'what do librarians do', to see what results I got. For those interested, my search returned 148 074 results (59 864 of them classified as journal articles and 33 752 identified as journal articles from scholarly or peer reviewed sources.) Whoa. Lots of people have  researched and written about this topic, so I am clearly not the only one who thinks about this.

I harkened on one article, randonmly, that was published in American Libraries, to see if that author gave a definitive one-liner, and in fact the author, Charles Curran (2001) did! His response to this question is that librarians and information scientists ODAPCOSRIU (pronounced O-DAP-COS-RI-U, to rhyme with 'what librarians and information scientists do') Catchy hey?

The acronym stands for the following:
Origin
Dissemination
Acquisition
Properties
Cassification
Organisation
Storage
Retrieval
Interpretation
Use

This definitition was published in 2001, which is pre social media, pre ebooks, pre Google+ ! I wonder what else could be included in this acronym now? I also wonder where the teaching/infomration litereacy element fits in?

As much as I like the idea of describing what we do in an easy (even rhyming!) acronym or oneliner, I think it is a nigh on impossible task, as our jobs are constantly changing and evolving. Or maybe we should just make up t-shirts to wear in the library that say Change Agent on them?

What are your thoughts? What else should we include in the definition?

Reference:

Curran, Charles E. "What Do Librarians and Information Scientists Do?" American Libraries 32.1 (2001): 56. Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 5 July 2011.

ALIA Sydney Presents: Knowing me, Knowing you

Have you ever looked at the job ads and wondered how do you become the person who gets that job? And with so many jobs having generic titles these days, what are these jobs really about? 

Come together to widen your library circle and hear a bit more about of those jobs you've always wondered about. Our discussion leaders will share their stories and then it is your turn to bring out your networking skills and get to know the people around you as we open some great topics up for discussion and you can find out all about those great jobs you never knew even existed. 

Featuring:

 Larissa Reid : Reader Services Librarian from the Law Courts Library

 Bernard de Broglio : Internet Coordinator from Mosman Council

 and Jo Croucher : Digital Library Services from UNSW Library     

With many more talented discussion leaders to be announced in the coming weeks.

Monday 25^th  of July  2011 6:30-8:00pm (arrive from 6pm)

Upstairs, City Hotel, 347 Kent St (cnr of King St) Sydney City, 2000

Cost: $5 for ALIA Members / $7 for Non-ALIA Members (Pay at the Door)

Numbers are strictly limited so please RSVP to aliasydneygroup@gmail.com to ensure you don’t miss out.

Tour Time

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/newlow/2492781333/ (CC-BY-2.0)

Alas, for those cycle minded librarians out there, this is not a post about the Tour de France, which has just started (but speaking of, is anyone else gearing up for some late nights watching it?)

In fact, this post is all about visiting other libraries. Having worked in a library for many years now, and in various sorts of libraries, I still NEVER tire of going to check out the local public library or the State Library, whenever I’m visiting a new place. Heck, even if I’ve already been to a place, I often like to re-visit the library there, because there is usually a new exhibition that I’d like to see (particularly the state libraries).

There’s just so much to see and learn, by immersing yourself in what other libraries are doing. Even if you don’t get a behind-the-scenes tour of the library, there’s still a lot that you can learn by walking around and experiencing it as a user would. In fact, I think it’s beneficial to go out of your way to experience even your own library through the eyes of a user, because it gets you thinking about the user experience in different contexts- what are the positives about the user experience? What are some barriers to access? What could you change to improve things? How could you use that good idea in your own library context?

It’s all about bringing what you learn back to your own workplace, or if the library you visit has a different client group or different focus to yours, it may even help you crystallise why certain things work in some libraries contexts but perhaps not in others, or it could just be an awesome idea that makes you go ‘wow, that’s really cool’ and be proud of what your fellow library colleagues are achieving and doing.

I recently took a trip down to Melbourne, and high on my list of things to do, was to check out the Melbourne City Library.

The first thing I saw was the cafe that seemed like a lovely warm haven from the bitter cold Melbournian Winter’s day outside.

Wandering into the library, I discovered the magazine and newspaper reading area, prominently featured as soon as you walked into the Library. Here, I also found the travel guide section and the learn- a-language section, which is clearly one of the most popular sections of the Library (this hasn’t changed from my days working at a public library.) Great for travellers and the like, walking in to browse the travel books and current affairs magazines and newspapers:

I also discovered the English Learning Centre around the corner, which featured lots of resources on IELTS, learning English and the like. What a great service! This area was full of patrons doing self-study.



A wander further up the stairs to the mezzanine level revealed the CD/DVD collection, and the Playstation/Young Adult area- cool! I found a guy in a suit playing the Playstation, so clearly not just a drawcard for teens! 

Playstation area:



I also noticed that there was a lot of space available- different configuration of individual tables, and larger tables scattered around the library and in separate rooms. I didn’t notice a lot of powerpoints for laptops, but there were a lot of people plugged in, with laptops, so lack of powerpoints clearly wasn’t an issue.

I still hadn’t even gotten to the other library collections yet! These, I discovered upstairs on level one, next to the gallery space and piano. How cool is that?  I was enchanted with the sign on the piano that invited people to book to use the piano at various times of the day. A polite note advised everyone along the lines that Chopsticks was not considered soothing nor relaxing music for other library patrons, which I found amusing. There was no-one playing while I was there, but my research for this blog post revealed a story of a homeless lady who often comes in to play concertos on the piano. You can read about her story here. 

A walk through the collection showed shelves of recently returned books- YES! In a similar way to Jennifer Byrne from the First Tuesday Book Club on ABC, I (and I suspect many others) LOVE having a sticky at what others have just returned. You can read about why Jennifer Byrne loves the library in other ways in last month’s issue of InCite. I wonder how long the books stay there until they get shelved?

Speaking of, I saw a veritable army (not quite) of funkily-dressed, young, hip people in amongst the shelves, shelving books with a friendly smile as I walked past. Very cool. The lovely and friendly service was something else that I noticed at the library- by a mere hovering near the Information desk, I was served immediately, by a friendly and efficient staff member, when I enquired about the free Internet available (it’s available to anyone who has a Victorian residential address, as long as they sign up for Library membership.) There are also temporary computer user memberships which allow visitors to access the Internet.  Membership is also free to anyone who reside in the state of Victoria. I was very impressed with this- many public libraries in NSW have rules for who can join, depending on where you live. If you live out of the council area, you sometimes have to pay to join.

I also saw lots of different spaces- spaces for group study, different rooms for different purposes eg computer rooms, even a room with a DVD player that you could book to watch movies in. I also noted a large collection of other language books-my Mum would be impressed with the collection of Chinese books available.

On my way out, I also noticed a ‘Hot Picks’ stand of the most popular titles, a short loan collection which had a one week loan period, in order to maximise the number of people accessing the resources. Again, a shelf that I would love to frequent, given the opportunity!

'Hot picks' shelf:


All in all, I had a wonderful experience visiting the Melbourne City Library, and I thought the library design was very well thought out- clearly the needs of library users were taken into consideration when designing this library, in particular with regards to the prominently displayed high use collections, a high emphasis on access to resources for lots of different user groups in the community, as well as excellent client service -all wonderful aspects about a modern day library that is clearly doing well in these areas.

What libraries have you visited in your travels? What's on your must-visit library wish list? As an avid lover of libraries, I'd love to hear your thoughts, so please add your thoughts in the comments below!

-Crystal

Crystal Choi is a member of ALIA Sydney. She is an academic librarian and tweets @crystalibrary

The Google+ Project, Yay or Nay?

Unless you have been completely disconnected this week or totally snowed under reading #blogjune posts, you know the internet is all a twitter (literally) about Google+, Google’s latest stab at social networking. While the jury is still out for this project, many are jumping on board and giving it a test drive. The pull is so strong that allegedly Mark Zucerberg has even joined up.

Features

The three main features that differentiate Google+ are:

• Circles- The ability to share information with specific groups of defined people instead of just sending out information to everyone
• Sparks-This feature offers links to news items, blog posts, etc on specific topics, the idea is that they will ‘spark’ conversations within your circles
• Hangouts and Huddles- for tailored video chatting, collaboration and information sharing 

Other features include the ability to download your data stream to create a backup and also, as one might expect, integration into other Google products.

 

A few initial features that Google+ is lacking are

• Google+ for Tweet Deck
•  The ability to feed tweets and blog post automatically and utilize RSS
• Apps!

One other issue that has come to light is about information re-sharing. Tim Bradshaw at FT Tech Hub found that much like tweets, anyone in your Circles (and consequently their Circles) can share and re-share anything you post including photos.  But is this really a problem in the social networking world? For some yes, for others no, but at least it is good to know going in.

 Google+ and Libraries?

So what are the potential opportunities for libraries? The two most obvious are the possible uses of Circles and the Hangout feature. Tailored conversations could be constructed with Circles; book groups, mothers groups, professional clients, students groups, seniors, etc can each receive specific news and information. I am reminded of how The Library of Congress offers a myriad of RSS feeds on a variety of topics, could Google+ circles be applied similarly? But do we need another RSS like way of communicating information? The other potential is with the video conferencing feature in Hangouts. Whenever we can meet up online in real time for free, we owe it to ourselves to least have a good look. Video conferencing is nothing new, but the ability to do it with groups quickly and easily is definitely interesting. It could be applied to book groups, research work, live reference chat or professional development. 

The Elephant in the Room

But the question remains, do people want yet another social media platform? Between Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Foursquare, etc, do we really have the time to spend populating yet another feed? Will Google+ go the way of the Wave? Only time will tell. 

Roundup

Obviously we are still in early days and the opinions are pouring in, here is a brief roundup of some of the online chatter surrounding Google+: 

Turn Google+ Into Facebook at Tech Crunch

‘My Tweet-length opinion is that Google+ is like Facebook with a more usable, streamlined Photos and Groups interface (and that might be enough to win). Only time will tell.’ 

Google Plus Review: Fun, interesting and totally empty at Washington Post

“Playing around with Google + last night, I had a ball clicking buttons and playing with the features the network had to offer. But I kept running into the same problem — there was no one in this sandbox but me.” 

First Night With Google Plus: This is Very Cool at Read Write Web

“Anything that can increase the percentage of social software users who are actively curating dynamic, topical sources is a net win for the web and for the people who use it.”

Google+ First Impressions at Mashable

“Conclusion: Google+ is a bold and dramatic attempt at social. There’s a reason why Google calls this a “project” rather than a “product” — they don’t want people to think of this as the final product, but as a constantly-evolving entity that permeates every corner of the Google empire.”

Eight Quick Thoughts on Google Plus at Manhattan Local News

“Google is going after some of the obvious issues with Facebook.”

Google+ first impressions: My big three takeaways at Venture Beat

“Circles allows for the complexities of real-world relationships to be organized in a better way than what’s currently available in social networking” 

A big thank you goes out to @VesnaC, @eclecticlib and @MissEmilieLib for your thoughts on Google+

-Amy Barker is an ALIA Sydney committee member and tweets as @unlikelylibrary

A Big Thank You to Everyone!

After a day of rest, I just want to say a big thank you to everyone who contributed to helping ALIA Sydney blog everyday in June. This includes our many fabulous guest bloggers from all over the world, the amazing Katrina McAlpine for coordinating the event, all of our committee members who contributed and helped keep things on track and of course, all our dear readers. Thank you all out there for your comments, sharing our content and being the reason ALIA Sydney exists. 


As we officially move into the second half of June we have 5 exciting new events planned which will be all advertised right here on our blog first and the blogging won't stop either as we  plan to continue to bring you plenty of original content from librarians and information, doing their thing right around the world. 


Stay Tuned. 


Kate Byrne


Convenor, ALIA Sydney

Tips for applying for library jobs in the public service

I don’t purport to be any sort of expert when it comes to applying for jobs, but I’ve had some recent experience with this - both as a job seeker and a recruiter. The focus of this post is particularly on permanent Commonwealth public service jobs, although many of these tips will be applicable for state public sector jobs as well as jobs at universities.  That said, not all of the Commonwealth agencies will follow the practices which I’m describing here.

This post looks at the first half of the process: finding jobs to apply for and the written application. There are some things I have to say about the second half of the process: the interview, referees, the order of merit, but that will have to wait for another post.

Monitoring the job market

The first step is finding a suitable position to apply for. I’d really recommend only one place for the Commonwealth public service jobs: http://www.apsjobs.gov.au/ There is no requirement (and usually no budget) for Commonwealth jobs to advertised anywhere else, so if you’re at all serious about considering the public service as a potential place to work, then make a profile and alert on this site as soon as you can. If you don’t want to do that, than at least search the site every Thursday afternoon. The new jobs are advertised then - and that way you have the full two weeks to write your application.

You can often find out about new positions from ALIA or other professional associations. That’s convenient and may be enough for the casual observer, but not all library-type positions from APSjobs end up on the association-related lists and websites. That’s why it’s best to do your own monitoring – if you find a position that has gone under the radar, you may have a real advantage in your application.

If you’re looking for work, you’ve probably signed up with one of the library placement agencies. That’s a wise move, but it would be a mistake to do only that and expect that the agency is going to do the rest of work for you. This is particularly true if you’re looking for a permanent position in the public service. In most Commonwealth departments, there is only one way of applying for a position. It involves using that department’s online recruitment system - completing the various online forms, uploading your resume and statement addressing the selection criteria etc. For permanent positions, there is no shortcut for recruitment agencies. Even if you’re with an agency, the formal application has to be completed by you. This process is often relaxed when it comes to temporary positions and that’s when the placement agencies can be particularly helpful for you.

Be in it to win it

I’m the first to admit that applying for public service jobs is a chore. I’m not exaggerating when I say I could write at least five private sector job applications in the time it takes to write one good public service application. I’ve known some people, really good librarians who would be ideal candidates, who rarely apply for public service positions because they hear about positions too late and never have the time to complete a good application before the deadline.

The difficulty of applying for public service jobs is not all bad news for job seekers. It means that if you can satisfy the requirements and write a credible application, then you are at a comparative advantage because so many other potential candidates did not even reach that point.

Selection criteria

If you don’t have much experience or confidence with responding to selection criteria, this is what you need to do: Stop reading this post and get a hold of one of Ann D. Villiers books on the topic. Sometimes they’re difficult to buy in print, but most public and university libraries should have good holdings.

When a recruitment panel member is wading through a large number of applications, needing to make that crucial (and sometimes mean) first cut, applications which fail to address the selection criteria are a gift - because that’s an automatic fail. Sometimes it’s a bittersweet gift, because the candidate may have had some potential.

All selection criteria need to be addressed. It’s not good enough to address five out of six. The following are not ways of addressing selection criteria: “Refer what I wrote about criteria x”, describing the criteria in a different way, writing an essay about the why the criteria is important, stating that you meet the criteria without providing evidence from your education or work experience.

Selection criteria are the main reason why public service jobs are so difficult to apply for. As a job seeker you will see some criteria again and again. Some of them may be standard for that particular agency. In different agencies you may see a slightly different version of a criteria. Do not fall into the trap of recycling your public service job applications without extensive customisation! There are two reasons for this. First, selection panel members get annoyed if they sense that that the applicant is writing for a different job’s criteria. Those applications go straight to the reject pile. Second, writing the selection criteria is your only opportunity in the written application to state why you’d be good at this job and why you’re interested in working for that particular agency. Responses to criteria which have been copied and pasted from application to application end up sounding generic and passionless.

Selection criteria are the key to public service jobs - and not just for the written application. It’s common for interview questions to correlate directly with one of the selection criteria. You can’t anticipate the specific questions which you may be asked, but if you’re comfortable with expounding on aspects of the selection criteria, you should be able to handle any question.

- Morgan Wilson


Morgan has worked in several law libraries and business libraries in Sydney and Minneapolis - St. Paul in the USA. He is currently working as a librarian for the Australian Public Service in Canberra. He blogs and tweets occasionally at www.explodedlibrary.info and @explodedlibrary

Crowdsourcing and social engagement in libraries: the state of play

“The Australian Women’s Weekly 1932-1984 now available for 
text correction in Trove at the National Library of Australia” 

 

As Manager of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program and now Trove at the National Library of Australia I have had the wonderful opportunity to utilise and promote crowdsourcing and social engagement technologies over the last three years.  This would not have been possible without the ideas and assistance of everyone on our small Newspaper and Trove team.

I wrote an article called ‘Many Hands Make Light Work’ two years ago which outlined the activities and motivations of Australian newspaper text correctors in the first six months of service.  This generated wide international interest in the library and archive world.  Australia was under the spotlight for breaking new ground and demonstrating library innovation.  The two main things that people asked are: “will the user activity continue?”, and “how can these technologies be applied more widely in the library/archive world?” I shall attempt to answer these two questions in this blog post.  

1. Will the user activity continue?

The newspaper text correction activity has expanded in leaps and bounds and continues to grow. This is despite the fact that since start up little has been done to change the process or motivate correctors and no extra staffing has been available to support users/volunteers.  I remember getting very excited when a million lines of text had been corrected after the first four months.  Now we have two million lines corrected every month and this figure continues to increase.  There are nearly forty million lines of text corrected to date, by over 30,000 volunteers. The Trove annual report gives highlight statistics. We think we are doing things right and other people seem to agree since we were very honoured to recently win the Excellence in E-Government Award for Service Delivery for Trove/Australian Newspapers.  The keys to success of newspaper text correction seem to be:

• The simplicity of the task
• The addictiveness of the task
• Volunteers wanting to help a worthy Australian cause. 

I have compared and analysed the growth of user activity with other similar services such as Wikipedia and Distributed Proofreaders.  This has helped me to identify and write about the top ten tips for crowdsourcing, so that librarians and archivists can make their own crowdsourcing projects a success. I also gave a presentation to the NAA/CAARA Archives 2.0 workshop on this topic.  Using certain features in the design and functionality of your interface/website can make it a success.  Crowdsourcing functions go hand in hand with utilising social media features.  So, still being a reference librarian at heart I am going to recommend you to read a book on this topic:

Malone, E, and Crumlish, C. 2009. Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience. O'Reilly Media. 

Our users are motivated by being part of an active social online community and Trove has a forum, twitter, blog and YouTube presence so that they can engage with each other and us. This is critical to maintaining the crowdsourcing activity. Social engagement has been a learning curve for us, and we have been operating in a ‘pilot’ mode for the last six months. One of our team members recently gave a presentation on the social engagement pilot.

 2. How can these technologies be applied more widely in the library/archive world?

I think there is greater if not more potential to utilise crowdsourcing in archive collections, rather than library collections. It can be used as a means to improve our basic functions (collect, describe, organise, deliver, preserve). For example most handwritten documents in archives still cannot be effectively converted into text by a computer program (OCR) and are therefore not full text searchable.  The current method is to transcribe these documents manually into text files. Very few libraries or archives would even consider starting such a mammoth task that has no end in sight.  However users of these documents particularly genealogists have a strong inherent desire to help other users. Large transcribing projects have been started by volunteers, rather than libraries or archives and have been going on for years.  Most notably these include transcription of birth, marriage, death, and shipping records (i.e. people’s names). However until recently the technology to do this was fairly clunky, it did not involve the utilisation of social engagement tools, or harness a willing crowd of library users, so involvement and activity, although good was not maximised.  Now we know so much more we can put it all together and I really believe librarians and archivists have a significant role in this area. Five good examples of this are:

• Transcribe Bentham from the University College London. Transcribing the Jeremy Bentham archives.
• Civil War Diaries Transcription Project from the University of Iowa.
• Digitalkoot from National Library of Finland.  Uses gaming technology to correct historic newspaper text. 
• Waisda from Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Uses gaming technology to add search terms to archival films.
• World Memory Project from the United States Holocaust Museum. Transcribing 17 million names from Nazi records of Holocaust victims.

I have been a member of the RLG Partners Social Metadata Working Group for the last two years. We are now in the final stages of publishing three reports with our research findings. We have released a summary discussion document. This outlines our key findings and makes recommendations for how libraries and archives can effectively and easily apply some of these new technologies into their services.   

But technology alone is not the answer. We need to look firstly at what people want to do, then the basics of what libraries want to do, and then ask “how can we harness new technologies to achieve all our needs?” We need to learn the art of working ‘with’ our users not doing things ‘to’ or ‘for’ them. Charles Leadbeater calls this ‘The Art of With’ (this is a great read). Our users want to have meaningful opportunities to participate and contribute, and be offered the opportunity to do so; to share easily and think and work laterally; to have viable ways to collaborate and get things done. Librarians and archivists (information management experts) have the tools and knowledge to work effectively with our users and come up together with good practical ways to do these things.

Rose Holley is the Manager of Trove – Australia’s National Discovery Service http://trove.nla.gov.au