Library Day in the Life: Days 4 & 5

I didn't have time late last week or earlier this week to finish this "Library Day in the Life" blog thing, so I'll wrap it up today.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

7:00, up and at 'em, as my dad was fond of saying.

9:00-10:00, arrive at the office, check email, prepare for attending a day-long virtual conference, "Handheld Librarian Online Conference". Most of the librarians here wanted to attend, so one kind person (thanks, Sarah!) took it upon herself to have three meeting rooms reserved for us to gather in to listen to the presenters together. So from 10-4:30, I was in one or another of these rooms listening to some very interesting (for the most part) presentations about how libraries can cater to patrons who are increasingly relying heavily on handheld devices (mainly smart phones) to access our services. Here are the sessions I attended, with a few thoughts on those that I remember:

Gerry McKiernan, Opening Keynote: The conference got off to a shaky start with this presentation. McKiernan's voice was difficult to understand because of audio problems (mainly distortion) and then it got too soft. I was following the hashtags for the conference on Twitter and many people were complaining about the audio. Many others were having problems just logging into the site that was hosting the conference. The bugs were finally worked out about the time that McKiernan finished. His talk contained useful information about the prevalence of handheld devices and how much people are relying on them today, but it wasn't really the kind of inspirational/motivational talk that a keynote usually is.

Alison Miller: This presenter discussed her experience with being involved in the Altarama/Infoquest project, "a collaborative reference service that enables users worldwide to send questions via SMS text messages on their mobile phones."

Virginia Cole, Baseema Banoo Krkoska, & Gabriel Macias: Launching a Text a Librarian service. The first two presenters talked about using Mosio's commercial product "Text a Librarian"; Gabriel was there to represent Mosio and demo the product more fully. A colleague of mine and I had visited Mosio's booth at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago about a month ago and were so impressed with the product, we immediately recommended its purchase. Our library admin has initially stated that with the current budgetary constraints, it's not possible to make the purchase; my supervisor is trying to find a workaround.

The last few presentations (Tom Peters, the Academic Library Panel, and Joe Murphy) started to get jumbled in my mind because, frankly, we didn't get a break (our library supplied lunch for everyone, but we just ate as we listened), and I was getting Text a Librarian and Twitter overload. I do remember Murphy saying that texting and mobile phone services mark a revolution for libraries and that we must keep up or be lost in the shuffle.

At the end of the day, I spent a little time catching up with email and then headed home.

Friday, July 31, 2009

7:00, awake too early for my liking, as usual.

9:00-12:00, I spent a good bit of time just catching up with administrative tasks and email this morning. I updated the library's Facebook and Twitter statuses with information about our new high-speed scanner station. I had not had a chance to try out this new machine yet, and I wanted to get a couple of pics of it for our FB page, so I went down with our digital camera to have a look. It is extremely easy to use, and, in the interests of being "green," we are not charging our patrons for its use, which I think is way cool. They can scan what they like and save the images to a flash drive or email them to themselves. If they wish to print pages, they can go log onto one of our public PCs and pull up their images and send them to a printer. It is VERY cool. So I posted all this info and some pictures of myself using the machine to our FB page and got some great feedback from students who are excited about this new service.

12-12:30, lunch

12:30-2, email again. I did have a request from a student who was having trouble accessing an article he needed to find. I decided that this was the perfect opportunity for me to try out Screenjelly.com. This service is free, web-based (nothing to download, don't even have to make an account), and allows you to capture up to three minutes of screen video; it then gives you a URL to which you can direct people who need to see your vid. It's super easy to use (allows you to automatically Twitter your URL if you wish) and really fun. I made this vid, sent the link to the student with a few simple instructions on the optimal way to watch it, and got this response from him: "Thanks! That's a cool tool you have there." Score! He liked the vid, and it was SO much easier and faster for me to record it than to write out all those instructions.

2-3, had to catch up on my journal (I keep a daily log of activities so that I can fill out my monthly report easily) and do my monthly report and time sheet.

3-4:30, worked on my PowerPoint presentation for the Gaming in Academic Libraries workshop that a colleague and I are jointly doing. I really enjoy this type of work -- pulling together a presentation with lots of cool images. In the past, I've been fond of getting royalty-free images from stock.xchng but recently heard about Compfight, which I'm going to try next time I need images. This was also the first time that I've experimented with having almost NO text on my slides, instead using almost all images as advocated here and here.

4:30-6, worked on the very earliest, initial stages of a research project that two of my colleagues and I are going to do together, write up, and try to get published. (Note: I am not in a tenure-track position and thus do not have to publish, but it certainly won't hurt, and this research actually seems interesting.) I don't want to go into the details because I think that the idea we are working on is very cool and it hasn't been done, so frankly, I don't want someone else to take it and run with it.

So that was my week, folks. If anyone has comments or questions, I'd love to hear them!

Library Day in the Life: Day 3

As promised, this post will be shorter than yesterday's, mainly because I don't have a lot of time to write this evening.

7:30 Wake up!

9:30-11:15 Doctor's appointment; arrived at library and chatted with my supervisor for a few minutes before heading up to my office.

11:30-12:30 Made a first pass at the daily slog through the email. One of the people I follow on Twitter retweeted a post from a person who has decided not to use email any more. This person is not employed at an institution as I am (he is an author) and as such can KILL HIS EMAIL. I am SO jealous!

12:30-1:00 Helped three colleagues get a classroom set up for a workshop they were coteaching. The first part of the class was an introduction to SnagIt, so we had to download and install a trial version of the software for every computer in the classroom.

1:00-2:00 Attended the above-mentioned workshop (which included pizza!), whose theme was Stuff We All Have but May Not Use. It was pretty interesting. I've used another piece of software named MWSnap (that's free) to do stuff like SnagIt will do, but it's not nearly as versatile as SnagIt. The workshop also included an introduction to MS Groove, which we all have a copy of as part of our institutional MS Office license agreement, but I had never heard of it or used it. Lastly, we had an introduction to our clicker software and hardware.

2:00-4:00 Again with the email and the slogging. I so wish I could make my email die. Also checked the library's Facebook and Twitter feeds and posted an update to each.

4:00-5:30 Met and brainstormed with two colleagues who are interested in all of us doing a research project together. I don't want to say too much about it because we are in the very, very early planning stages, but the project will involve (hopefully) social networking, engagement of users, and eventual publication in a peer-reviewed journal. I think it was a really positive start to what could be an awesome piece.

5:30-6:00 Wrote this update and am going to head home in a few, where I believe grilled burgers are on the menu tonight for the dear husband and me.

Library Day in the Life: Day 2

I read a post from another librarian on this topic and liked how he did his more like a diary, with times noted for all his activities, so I think I'll do the same.

8:30 Wake up. I slept in a bit just to be sure I'm getting enough rest to (hopefully) get over this cold quickly; not only did I sleep in, but I was generally sluggish and remembered only at 9:45 that I had a meeting at 10:30. Ooops! Had to race to finish getting my hair done, my makeup on, and my lunch packed, and made it in only five minutes late to the meeting (there were only four of us in the meeting, and two others came in after me, so I didn't feel too bad).

10:30-11:00 Met with colleagues regarding creation of an editorial style guide for our big website redo. Our whole campus is working on updating and improving the university's website (both graphics and content), and the library has the largest number of pages of any campus entity except for the Office of Information Technology, so we have LOTS of work cut out for us. The person in charge of the project is Christy, our web content editor. She asked for some volunteers to help out with the style guide, and since I have ten years of experience as a copy editor, I spoke up. The other two volunteers will be great to work with; CD is also an experienced copy editor, and Evelyn is a published author with a strong eye for detail. This was our first meeting, so we discussed some basic logistics (timeline, division of duties, etc.) and finished up quickly. My responsibility for now is just to review a couple of other university's style guides and let the group know what I think of them. After we find one that we all like, we will ask the responsible party at that institution whether we can copy it wholesale and simply adapt parts of it to our needs. Why reinvent the wheel?

11:00-11:30 After the meeting, I stopped by the reference desk to sign in (we keep a notebook there where we liaison librarians are supposed to note our whereabouts so that the people working at the reference desk will know where to find us if they need to refer a patron to us). As I got off the elevator, I noticed a student at the desk whom I had helped on several occasions previously; she's an excellent student in the interdisciplinary studies program. She was looking for me, so my arrival was fortuitous. We came up to my office together, and she asked me to look over her reference list -- part of a larger research project that she's turning in tonight. She had some specific questions that I answered for her, and I found a few other details that needed fixing.

11:30-1:00 I had 76 messages waiting in my email, so I had to slog through that. Only one actually required a response, but it took me a while to answer. It was from a faculty member in interdisciplinary studies, and she had two questions, the first of which was a really simple one about APA style, but the second wasn't so quick. She noted that she has had several students turn in references that they swear are from peer-reviewed sources (which is what she requires), but they don't have authors. She wanted to know if I had heard of this phenomenon outside of .gov sources. I replied that really I had not, and I was puzzled. I asked her to let me know whether these articles truly had NO authors, or whether they had an organization or committee listed as author. If the former was true, then I asked her if she could tell me what database they came from, whether the student used the "peer-reviewed" checkbox in the limiters before starting the search, and what search terms they used. If we have a database giving students references to non-peer-reviewed sources when they use that checkbox, then I need to know about it and report it to the database vendor. I also told her about Ulrichsweb, which is a database that gives publication info about periodicals; in particular, it will tell you whether a given title is peer-reviewed. I gave her detailed instructions about how to use the database and included a screen shot of a sample search I did so she could see what I was talking about. It took me a while to write, and I always make sure to carefully proofread any email that's going to a faculty member; I really don't want to look unprofessional by having typos in faculty correspondence. That done, I got through the last few messages and achieved Inbox Zero. Well, actually it's Inbox 101 read, 0 unread. Wow, I need to clean that up.

1:00-1:30 Lunchtime: Triscuits with Swiss cheese, a hard-boiled egg, carrots, cucumber, Baked Ruffles. Like everyone else in the U.S., I'm trying to lose a few pounds. While eating my lunch, I started working on this post.

1:30-2:00 Looked at a few emails that arrived while I was working on this post.

2:00-3:00 Ref desk shift. Started out with problems with a printer jam and guest passes, but had an interesting and more challenging ref transaction with a student looking for information "from encyclopedias" about the earned income tax credit. Questions like that make me a bit nervous because, frankly, I don't know what that is :). I showed the student how to access the Gale Virtual Reference Database. And then through more chatting with him, I found out that he wasn't wed to the idea of encyclopedias. So we also looked for books and articles; it turned into a 20-minute how to find stuff using the library's website class. Nice kid, I hope he lets us know if he has trouble. Also had a Modern Languages Department faculty member stop by to let me know that they are going to start teaching Arabic in the fall. I'll need to see what we may already have that will support that class and work with my content librarian, Ava Nell (who does the buying for all my departments) to see what needs to be bought.

3:00-4:00 TED Talk Tuesday, yay! One of my colleagues started this series; we watch a talk from the website every Tuesday. Today was one I suggested: "Stuart Brown Says Play Is More Than Fun". It's really fascinating, and I'm hoping it gets people starting to think about maybe doing some more fun activities here, like having a gaming night.

4:00-4:30 Met with my supervisor to let her know that MODL will be offering Arabic so that she can start thinking about what we may need for the reference collection (which she buys). Also wanted her advice about the next step to take, which is to talk to Ava Nell.

4:30-5:30 Called Ava Nell and found out what the next step is (basically to ask MODL people to provide us with the titles they want). Caught up with email. Also had to sign my appointment letter, which is a yearly formality that ensures we all still have jobs. Got that from my mailbox, signed it, and put it directly into the hand of the associate director of the library (it has my salary listed).

5:30-6:30 Wrote two important emails to faculty members. The first was to respond to the professor to whom I wrote the long email earlier; she has asked me to do a library session for all three sections of the interdisciplinary capstone courses she is teaching in the fall. So I picked out dates on my calendar that worked for me and let her know what I had chosen. The second was to the MODL professor, just to follow up on our conversation today and to let him know what Ava Nell said. He mentioned he's making a book database for his personal use with Zoho Creator; I looked it up and it seems cool. I responded and told him that, but I also told him about Library Thing. I think he'll flip when he sees that he can import catalog records using that service :).

Heading home after I publish this post. It's been a really busy day!

Library Day in the Life: Day 1

I started this blog as a class assignment when I first began to work on my master's in library and information science. I did the three posts that were required for the assignment and haven't touched the blog since. But I heard about this Library Day in the Life project and thought it sounded pretty cool: "Join us by sharing details of your day for a week on your blog. Not only is this a great way for us to see what our colleagues are doing and how they spend their days but it’s a great way for students who are interested in the library profession to see what we really do."

So this week, I will attempt to make a post every day, sharing what I do at my job at the University of Texas at Arlington. Today is Monday, and the post will be easy and short. I am not working today because I am home with a cold. If I had been at work, however, I would have gotten in at 9:00 and worked on the reference desk from that time until 11:00. Since it is summertime right now, the desk is not that busy, and I'm usually able to catch up with my email during my Monday morning shift. One of the other things I usually do first thing every day is check the library's Twitter and Facebook pages and start trying to think of interesting things I could post or link to. I am one of about four or five people who have admin privileges on these accounts, and I'm usually the one who makes the most updates. I have several projects I'm working on right now, most having to do with designing upcoming instruction sessions. In particular, I need to pull together a class on plagiarism for entering grad students in linguistics and modern languages (two departments that I serve as a liaison librarian; my others are philosophy and interdisciplinary studies). I'm also working on a class for the library staff focusing on gaming in libraries; I'm copresenting this with a colleague. We are trying to put together a really super presentation that includes a PowerPoint, but we want to make it very simple and graphically oriented, not text heavy. I've always used graphics in presentations, but I usually have also had a lot of text, so this way of putting together a slide show is novel and fun, but also rather difficult. Anyway, had I been at work today, those are the things I would likely have worked on :).

Back to online gaming . . . .

When I started this blog, I was thinking about how online gaming could be mixed with library use to increase the relevance of libraries. Reality set it when I realized that most libraries don't have enough computers to make playing online games in a group at the library feasible. So in my last post, I talked about how console games could step in and help to solve that problem. The teen services librarian at RHPL is making that idea a reality, and I'm sure many other public libraries have similar programs.

I still think that online gaming can be very relevant to libraries, and I'm not alone. Here's an article from D-Lib Magazine titled Parallel Worlds: Online Gaming and Digital Information Services that discusses online gaming. The author concludes with this statement: "Though digital library systems and online games provide extremely different services, there is much that the development community of each could learn from the other. Both types of 'always on' service, used by millions of people, involve simultaneous participation by many distributed online people, accessing and affecting large quantities of data. Technical, interface, and communication attributes from online games are of relevance to the developers of online information and commercial services. Some tools, developed for games, are being used by such services. It will be interesting to see whether there will be a further take-up, or cross-pollination, of concepts, technologies and ideas between these sectors."

School media specialists are becoming more aware of the potential of online gaming as well. In the School Library Journal, there was a fascinating article titled "Meet the New You." The authors of this article describe how they set up a "partnership to create Eye4You Alliance, an island within the teen grid [Teen Second Life]. By setting up shop in the virtual sphere, we hoped to establish a dedicated space for youth that was both informative and interactive and could function as a bridge to other youth organizations." Librarians and teachers are working together to make the experience fun, but they are also making it relevant to students' studies: "A social studies class examining immigration, for example, is building a virtual Ellis Island, complete with the Statue of Liberty and Lower East Side tenements."

If there aren't enough computers for online gamers to actually play together at the library, there are other ways for patrons who are gaming fans to interact. Public libraries could sponsor book clubs that focus on fantasy books, which the online games often mirror. The first title that immediately springs to mind is the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There's also the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. This article about Dungeons and Dragons from Wikipedia lists many, many more authors whose work the creators of that game drew on for inspiration.

Another idea that I had was for a library to sponsor a book club, but the club could meet virtually in Second Life or Teen Second Life. This type of meeting would save the library's resources and would certainly be ideal for libraries that have limited (or no) meeting areas. It seems to me that participation might be increased with a virtual book club because folks would not have to get in their car and drive through bad weather to get to the meeting.

The last link I want to post here is one that is probably familiar to my Wayne State classmates. It is Betsy Stoll's blog, called Binary Footprints. Betsy is pursuing her MLIS degree at WSU, and she is "especially interested in the ways Second Life can be used for education, business, or just to connect." She has many wonderful ideas, and reading her blog really makes me want to try Second Life. But, like most students, I don't have the time right now. Being addicted to one game (see my first post about World of Warcraft) and doing my school work is about all I can handle.

Making the Library Relevant

In thinking more about this topic of gaming and libraries, and in reading the comments I have received so far, I've come up with a few ideas. Granted, libraries' computers are a scarce resource, usually in high demand. I asked the director of the public library in my town, Rochester Hills Public Library, what their policy is about using the computers for gaming. She said that there is a time limit on computer use, but other than that, they do not have a problem with people playing games on them. The computers are there for everyone to use, and they are paid for by the public through taxes, so the library is not going to tell its customers what they can and cannot do while they have their 30 minutes (or whatever it is) at a public computer.

That said, because the computers are in such high demand at most public libraries, it isn't really feasible to have a gaming get-together to bring patrons in, if those games are going to be played on computers. There are many, many games, however, that do not require computers. Ever heard of PlayStation? GameCube? Well, some public libraries are already using these consoles in a big way.

Although I wasn't aware of it when I started this blog, the public library in my town has a gaming day once a month. The last time I was at the library, I noticed some signs about it, and I asked to meet the person in charge of the program. Her name is Megan Johnson, and she is the teen services librarian at RHPL. She started this program about a year ago, and it has been an enormous success. Last Saturday was one of the scheduled gaming days, so I dropped by the library to check it out.

RHPL is a beautiful, well designed facility. They have a very large room for meetings and presentations, which they also use for their gaming days and used book sales. This room is well away from the collections areas, so it does not matter if the event going on there is noisy. And gaming day is certainly noisy. Megan had four consoles (two GameCubes, a PS2, and an Xbox) set up, and about 50 kids were either playing or waiting patiently while watching the kids actually playing. Megan told me that this was a smallish crowd for her; she usually gets 75 to 100 kids. She attributed the lower attendance to the bad weather on Saturday. The games being played while I was there were Mario Kart, Guitar Hero, and Karaoke Revolution. The consoles were connected to projectors, so that actual televisions were not needed; the additional advantage to the projectors was that the picture was very large and projected right onto a white wall. The lights were off in the room, so the images really popped.

The way Megan sets it up is that each kid gets a chance to play. With Mario Kart, it's one race among four players, and the winner of each race gets to play again. With Guitar Hero and Karaoke Revolution, the play time is the length of one song. The kids can then join the line for the next console if they want, or they can go to the end of the line for the console they just played on. I was surprised at how patient the kids were, but they were really getting into watching the other kids play. Megan said that it's a lot of fun for them to be in a big group like that. Although many of these kids probably have one (or more) of these consoles at home, most probably don't have a room big enough to have 50 friends over to play with. She said that the kids police each other and themselves pretty well, but she does usually have a library page at the front to make sure that no one is bullying anyone else and that everyone is taking turns like they should. She also said that she's had a few bad apples show up on occasion, but it's rare.

I asked her about game content. She said that she does not use any games that have an "M" (mature) rating. All are rated "T" for teen or "E" for everyone. She had one mother ask her whether she had vetted all the songs on Karaoke Revolution to ensure that there were no objectionable lyrics. She laughed when relating this story and said that she told the woman, umm, no -- but it is rated "T." Other than that one comment, she's not had any parents complain about game content or gaming at the library in general.

The only downside to gaming day is for Megan personally. The library actually owns only one of the consoles and the projectors; the rest of the equipment belongs to Megan and her husband, who, obviously, are gamers. So she and her husband have to schlep the equipment back and forth from home, and if something gets broken, well, it's her property, so it's her loss. She said that they will soon be donating all of the consoles to RHPL because they are upgrading to the PS3 and the Nintendo Wii.

Libraries and online gaming

When I first started to consider which topic I would like to cover in my blog on libraries and technology, gaming immediately came to my mind. Why? Well, my name is Jody Bailey and I am an online gaming addict. There, I've said it. Most people would probably not think I am an online gamer since I don't fit the gamer stereotype of a teenage boy, probably rather geeky. I am a woman, somewhat of a rarity in the online gaming world, but becoming less so, and am far from being a teenager. I have played computer games since they first became available (e.g., I am old enough to remember Pong). I am not, however, old enough to remember the very first computer game, The Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device, for which a patent was issued on December 14, 1948 (source: Wikipedia, "History of Computer and Video Games"). When one thinks about the development of modern computers and their origins in the 1940s and 1950s, it becomes clear that gaming and computers have been intimately interwoven since the beginning.

Today, computer and video games are extremely popular among technophiles and techno-neophytes as well. From my own personal experience, I don't know anyone in the former category who does not play some sort of computer or video game, and many in the latter category who are just starting to explore computers (and who are, most likely, older people) are most comfortable starting by playing solitaire. Games are a fun way to pass time, but they can also be so much more. They can be learning tools and powerful entryways to places that many people spurn as "boring," for example, libraries.

Before discussing how mixing gaming and libraries can be of mutual benefit to the general public, it might be useful to consider exactly what is entailed in playing a popular online game, namely World of Warcraft (WoW), developed by Blizzard Entertainment. I chose this game as an example because it is one of the most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), with more than 8 million subscribers worldwide as of January 11, 2007. I also happen to be one of those subscribers. Simply put, WoW is an online version of the old Dungeons and Dragons dice game, made much more complicated by the number of players and the addition of a rich graphical interface. The goal of the game is to create a character (often referred to as a toon by gamers) that starts at level 1 and, through a series of adventures and battles, to progressively build on the character and his or her abilities until s/he reaches level 70. A complex system of acquiring more powerful armor and weapons is entailed in this progression, and players can choose professions, such as blacksmithing or leatherworking, to craft armor pieces that they can use to barter with other players for goods or services, such as enchanting their armor or weapon. Players can opt to barter directly with one another, or they can use the in-game interface of the Auction House, a WoW version of e-Bay, through which players buy and sell useful items. The game includes a complex economic system that has spilled over into the real-world economy, with entrepreneurs paying people real money to play WoW and collect WoW gold, which the entrepreneurs then sell for real money (a search on Google for the phrase "WoW gold" returned 1,960,000 hits, even though this practice of buying WoW gold outside the game is specifically prohibited by Blizzard's end-user license agreement and can result in account termination). Social interaction is a necessary part of the game, as it is near-to-nigh impossible "to level" a character to 70 without grouping with other players to achieve common goals. These groups have evolved over time into guilds, which are formal groups that players can initiate and manage as they wish. Guilds can become highly structured and "hard-core"; some of them become like jobs in that there are strict attendance policies and other rules, which, if flouted, can lead to one being "kicked" from the guild.

Although this summary of this one MMORPG may seem long, it is only a very brief introduction to WoW, and WoW is only one among dozens of MMORPGs, which is only one subset of hundreds of types of online games.

Another type of online "game" is Second Life (SL) and Teen Second Life (TSL). I don't consider Second Life to be a true game because the developers of SL and TSL do not set goals for the players in this virtual world, who call their online characters avatars; instead, "Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents" who number almost 2.7 million (source: "Second Life: What is Second Life?") and who control and shape their world. Like WoW, SL and TSL have thriving economies and strong social networks.

How can these online games and social environments serve as learning tools and how can they help "to make libraries a destination and not an afterthought"? (source: Sarah Houghton, as quoted by Rachel Singer Gordon in her presentation at Wayne State University, September 29, 2006, available at http://www.lisp.wayne.edu/) I will address these questions in my next blog entry.