Better electronic resource trials

Just read "Community organizing for database trial buy-in by patrons" by JJ Pionke.

• Via IDEALS (Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship): https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/79049
• Via Taylor and Francis: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1941126X.2015.1059643#

Good article suggesting some tips on running more successful, or rather, more patron-involved trials of electronic resources.  The typical trial process given in the article is basically what I do with a few "flourishes" added, so I learned a few things that I may try for next time and add to my list of steps:

1. Listen to the needs of the potentially affected patrons.  Although this seems obvious, I know we all find it hard to seek out the needs instead of just assuming we know them.  And sometimes the needs mentioned are not actual needs.  But understanding them better should be part of the process.
2. The trial acting as a case study was done in March.  I've tended to have them run whenever the trial requestor suggests or simply as soon as possible.  But there may be some value in running them during either March or November since, at my current institution at least, these are the peak periods of use for electronic resources.  All other things being held equal, this should ensure the most use and therefore the most supported feedback possible.
3. In the case study, the health librarian running the trial made personal contact with the relevant patrons, including the faculty department head.  I've always thought this should happen more but as eResources Librarian, it's not part of my role.  But I could encourage this and try to make it easier for those subject liaisons who would be doing this.
4. The article makes the true point that someone who is "one of us" is more likely to be listened to than otherwise.  Again, this is not my current role, and I'm not sure that it's as simple as that, but some aspects of becoming closer to the relevant patron group might be helpful in this and other situations.
5. The article finally mentions that training, support material, and updating communications followed immediately on the heels of the trial end.  Although this kind of this on my list of things to do, it might be helpful to increase the priority of the timing.

Good article, JJ.  Thanks for the tips!  Anyone else have anything interesting to suggest for running trials?

Ethics of Vendors Having Direct Communications with Patrons

I was sitting in a meeting with a sales rep from a library information resource vendor when he mentioned that his sales visits were quite different in the past.  He would spend all day on campus, talking with faculty, handing out brochures, giving demos of his products, etc.  He went on to say how he could help us with promoting his products within our institution, with premade emails with links, graphics, brochures, etc.

This made me think:  academic libraries, and particularly mine, I think, have a hard time "getting the word" out about the products that we add to our collection.  It always difficult to know which resources to promote and how exactly to do so.  We want them to know and appreciate the value of the collection but we don't want to overstep our bounds and become pushy sales staff in the minds of our faculty and students.  Even if we knew which and how, it's a question of time and staffing:  there are so many things that we all have to do, promotion tends to get put to the bottom.

But it's always in the best interest of the company that we acquired the products from that our patrons use them more.  We collection statistics and how and how often these resources are used and these numbers tend to inform our decisions on whether to renew, cancel or change our subscriptions, and even if we should get more products from the same vendor.  Why don't we allow vendors to provide training to our patrons?  Why don't we want vendors to communicate with faculty, pushing new and old products?  Why don't we let them take some of the work of letting our patrons know what we have and what we could have?

Some of the answers are obvious:  vendors are biased.  Librarians like to think that we're a little more objective when it comes to the various products that are available.  Allowing vendors to promote directly to the users would be the difference between deciding on a car by reading Consumer Reports or by watching car commercials.  Yes, the producers may know more about their products but they don't always say it all.  They will always fib a little.  But is this such a bad thing?  We all know salespeople lie, so maybe the value of the increased information would outweigh the hopefully slight misrepresentations.

Also, vendors want to sell new products.  This is fine and good when they are talking with the people who have control of the money that will be spent on them and are experienced in managing similar products.  But librarians find that when faculty know about new products, however they find out about them, they tend to pester us with requests for products that we can't afford, can't use, or are not going to be valuable to anyone else.  This wastes our time and harms our relationship with our patrons.  But again, maybe this shouldn't be the end of the discussion.  Perhaps by having to deal with these issues, faculty and other users on campus can learn more about the nature of acquisition of these resources, that immediately perceived use isn't the end of the analysis, and that things are much more complicated in the library than they may think.  And maybe "waste of time" is the price we pay to have a more involved faculty.

Finally, I think one of the reasons we don't let vendors train users directly is a bit of fear for our own jobs.  If a ProQuest-paid instructor can teach how to use ABI/INFORM Complete, what's left for the info lit librarian to do?  Well, actually I think we SHOULDN'T be teaching how to use interfaces, but rather general search strategies regardless of interface, judging quality of sources, etc.  Just as staff are short when it comes to promotion efforts, many libraries don't have enough instructors to teach all the students frequently enough. Why not let the vendors lighten the load where they can?  There is plenty of instruction to go around.

Perhaps there are other reasons why we should or should not allow vendors direct communicative access to our users.  What do you think?

What goes around comes around.

/ Listening to today's episode of Spark about proto-versions of today's online and often "2.0" technology:

1. Pirate radio (e.g. "Pump up the Volume") as proto-blogging/file-sharing;
2. Removal of toll booths (e.g. "Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State") as proto-net-neutrality;
3. Prince's song titles (e.g. "U Got The Look") as proto-texting slang;
4. Ham and CB radio (e.g. "Ham Radio's Technical Culture (Inside Technology)" or "Smokey and the Bandit - Special Edition") as proto-social networking tools; and
5. Eighteenth century coffee house communication (e.g. "Flesh and Stone: The Sociology of Richard Sennett") as proto-status-updates and the explosion in Renaissance Europe of letter writing (e.g. "") as proto-information-overload.

This is an interesting concept and one that speaks to me personally.  When faced with many criticisms of modern tools (facebook, Wikipedia, ereaders, etc.) my response often includes something about how what we have now is not completely unique and has connections to things we've done in the past (why and how).

The criticism of facebook and Twitter in the style of "I don't want to know about what you had for lunch and when you go to the bathroom," earns the response "So why do you talk about similar things over coffee with your friends?"  Social communication in person is often (and has often been) trivial and inane.

The criticism of Wikipedia that "Anyone and their uncle can fiddle with an entry at will," is met with "Yes, that's the strength of the tool."  That's why there's a rather extensive entry about my home town when there will probably never be one in a more traditional encyclopedia.  We have often valued socially generated and grounded information over more objective sources.  In studies about information seeking behaviour, we tend to start with our friends and family before going to the library or other potentially authoritative sources.

And I just read a thought-provoking article about how reading digitally may result in lower retention than print reading (I'm not convinced that it's an important point given such early days).  My immediate response is, as the author agrees, the benefits outweigh these possible negatives.  The reasons why print might allow greater retention than digital apply even more to say pre-printing-press material compared to the "sanitized" and "stream-lined" movable type versions.  And, to make a huge generalization, you have to pay for progress with some loss.

[ Listen to the complete broadcast and the full interviews at CBC Spark. ]

It's simply misconceivable!

I had a bit of a chuckle reading through the List of common misconceptions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions) on Wikipedia the other day.

I recently read something about someone trying to correct something in a Wikipedia entry based on his current research who then had his correction removed and a good finger-wagging explanation of the Wikipedia rules given to him.  Their point is that Wikipedia is not the place for cutting edge fact and that only commonly held and therefore well documented information.  The direct quote was something like "Wikipedia is not about what's true.  Wikipedia is about what's verifiable."  Now I can understand their point (although I'm not sure this is the best strategy especially if they do not let users know this in even a subtle way) but it seems to conflict a little with their having a page listing common misconceptions, doesn't it?  If these are truly common, then they represent the popular opinion and until they become the UNpopular opinion, wouldn't the truth be considered a bit too cutting edge?  I'm afraid that Wikipedia rules cannot reasonably contain both the cake and the eating of this particular cake.

The other odd thing is that many of these "common misconceptions", to my mind, aren't really misconceptions but rather misunderstandings of the words being used.  Take for example, the page's second point under Astronomy:

Black holes, contrary to their common image, do not necessarily suck up all the matter in the vicinity.

It's explained that black holes do have a specific mass and therefore can have less that other stars making them less "sucky" in terms of gravitational pull.  Perhaps they think that most people have this image of black holes just continually sucking in all matter from everywhere regardless of how far away it is.  Perhaps that IS what most people think but the crucial "truthiness" in this hinges around the word "vicinity".  I think the point about black holes (and I am no physicist) is that there IS a vicinity (i.e. the space inside the event horizon) in which black holes suck up all matter.

There's also the fact that "The United States Supreme Court did not actually rule that tomatoes are a vegetable, instead of fruit, in the botanical sense" despite some thinking that it did.  Or that "The word theory in the theory of evolution does not imply mainstream scientific doubt regarding its validity" while certainly many people like to pull that one in anti-evolution arguments.  These are, at base, problems with the public misunderstanding the meanings of words, not the concepts.

This would all be fine if this was it.  I could mentally translate "list of common misconceptions" to "list of common faulty word usage" but for a line that stands out in this list:

"Irregardless" is a word.

And for proof, someone has basically given the fact that it's in the dictionary.  It's used commonly enough to qualify as a word.  I'm not sure I like that idea, that there's a number of times said or people saying it beyond which any given configuration of sounds becomes a word.  In that case "um" has been a word for a long time.  Ok, even granting that, I guess what most people SHOULD say instead of "it's not a word" is that "it shouldn't be a word".  That's what I'm thinking when I hear it used.  "Why are you saying that?  If you stopped for just a second and listened to what you're saying, you'd realize that there's no point in saying 'irregardless'!  So just stop!"  Ok, fine it's a word.  That doesn't mean that it means what you think it means. Please stop saying things like that before some reasonably intelligent lifeform passes over Earth because words like that disqualified us from being labelled 'advanced'.  That and 'orientate'.  /shudder

Here we 2.0 again

Good, brief article about how the hesitation seen surrounding Web 2.0 movements mirrors that of the hesitation presented at Web 1.0 stuff.

I have to admit, although I am not the most regular blogger, Tweeter, or user of facebook, I find myself having to defend of them on a regular basis. "I don't need to know what people are having for lunch or when they go to the bathroom." Really? That's what you think people post? Yes, there's a lot of mindless chit-chat online wherever you go, but you find the same or worse in person, when you have to feign interest. At least when it's online you can turn it off, turn the page, scroll away, ignore it, or block it out forever.

Despite what so many people say, this mindless chatter about trivial things is what so many people LOVE. It's called socialization. We love learning about what other people are doing even if we disagree. Hell, for some people they like the "disagreeable" stuff the most. And we certainly like sharing our own anecdotes with others. So it's a little foolish to claim that you don't want to hear about it. I know you like it. I've listened in on your silly conversations on weather, trips to the bank, and the price of lettuce.

But perhaps that what this is all part of... Complaining about Web 2.0 is just like complaining about the weather. It IS the small talk itself. In fact, it's more like complaining about gossip. Even those who take part in it complain about it and complaining about it is just as much "fun" as taking part.

[ Web 2.0 déjà vu reveals human traits from Troy Media Corporation ]

Woah, defensive much?

Defensive Dice by M Hillier

Just read "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" from Get Rich Slowly. This is a personal finance blog that I follow mostly for the headlines since they are enormously long articles and have nicely descriptive titles. This entry was about how comments like how biking instead of driving can save money are met with complaints about being judged like the following:

I must say that articles like these bruise my ego a bit. I WANT to do everything possible to minimize my impact on my financial health and the health of the environment, so it bothers me somewhat to continually hear about biking, when it’s just not realistic to my life.

I read the article and many of the comments and it frustrates me how obvious the message is, i.e. chill people, it wasn't meant to be taken as a commandment, and how stuck in their defensiveness many of the readers are.  I'm not sure that the "I just can't do it" people really understand how suggestions work.  There's nothing constructive about saying that some people can't use a given suggestion.  Isn't that obvious?  Not everyone can do everything.  Not everyone will do everything.  Not everyone should do everything.  Perhaps it's not possible to bike to work.  Perhaps it is.  The point of the suggestion is that it's something important enough in the suggester's mind to be considered.

Even the comments about how there are still people, beyond the completely incapable, that are not so much incapable due to some unchangeable status but have made choices that have led them into a state in which they are incapable.  To those people, I would hope that they could realize the role they had in getting them to where they are.  Not that they are at fault or to blame but that they were captains of their ship and made their own bed, for better or for worse.  We are much less helpless than we think we are.  Sometimes, when we think we can't, we actually can.  The only barrier is the "can't" itself.

"2.0" from May 15, 2011

Mentions of 2.0 in the news from Sunday, May 15, 2011:

Decision 2.0 (from RUMOR: KEVIN DURANT WANTS THE DECISION 2.0?): I don't know much about basketball but as the article says, this "decision 2.0" is about his future, his career, his contract(s). Not sure what 2.0 has to do with it. Is it the second decision, the first being to sign the contract in the first place? Or is it the publicity of the decision? Dunno. Any ideas?

NeGP 2.0 (from Mobile governance and NeGP 2.0): NeGP stands for national e-governance plan, which is actually a division of the dept of information technology in India. 2.0 seems to refer to the "citizen engagement" in the projects in this "plan".

Snake Oil 2.0 (from Snake Oil 2.0): This is an article about social media experts and how it's all a scam. 2.0 is being used as synonymous with Web 2.0, although Andy, the author (and not a good one at that), uses the phrase "Social Media 2.0" which seems redundant to me. Perhaps I've missed a meeting.

"2.0" catch up

Anti-Semitism 2.0: "The concept of the "evil Jew" has made a well-disguised comeback: Criticizing Israel and Zionists, is now deemed a legitimate option to cursing Jews and Judaism." (from Hudson New York)

Egypt revolution 2.0: "...the revolution is not yet finished. But two months since the beginning of the revolution that toppled Egypt’s president, ideas are diverging on how to continue the fight. Some of the young people who played a key part in the movement see reason to continue taking their demands to the street, while others find the battle now lies in political organization and mobilization ahead of upcoming elections." (from Christian Science Monitor)

Ad icons 2.0: "The Old Spice guy may not be as orthodox an icon as the Marlboro Man, but his success sets high expectations era for online advertising, as well as some lessons. Although not a necessity, it helps to catch the eye and entertain — this is where ads migrate from the realm of advertising to content." (from hindustantimes)

Payment 2.0: "...the future of consumer payment transactions. The company today announced Serve, a set of applications designed to let users make payments more easily online or with mobile phones via special accounts funded by credit cards, debit cards, or bank accounts." (from cnet News)

Data 2.0: "The Data 2.0 Conference will provide a forum for exploring the convergence of information on the web, featuring sessions that will examine hot topics including the implications of data ownership, responsibility and privacy." (from PR Newswire)

Tsunami 2.0: "Following the now infamous earthquake and tsunami in Japan, can social media be used for the social good of a country in crisis?" (from PacificaPatch)

ATM 2.0: "ATM machines today can process cash and check deposits without envelopes. It’s also why some new ones can be operated with a mobile phone instead of a bank card, and why many can operate under almost any environmental condition. In the years ahead, ATMs will feature biometric identification capabilities, intuitive pictograms to assist illiterate customers and more." (from Forbes)

Newspapers 2.0: "...publisher of The Daytona Beach News-Journal, who is adding $25 to the salary of any employee able to sell a three-month subscription, $50 for six months." (from Chortler.com)

Life 2.0: "The Science Exchange’s latest art exhibition – LIFE 2.0 – explores how our notions of nature and technology may need to change in an era in which we design hybrid and synthetic life forms and can rebuild nature from the ground up." (from Messenger Community News)

The Royal Nonesuch 2.0: "Charlie Sheen's Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is Not an Option Tour..." "...ever read Huckleberry Finn? Remember The Royal Nonesuch? That's pretty much what this is: all they had to do was sell the tickets; the show itself is secondary at best." (from NowPublic)

Class warfare 2.0: "Over the past four decades, Upstairs, Downstairs has been watched by more than one billion people..." "Now, for the first time since it went off the air in 1977, the series will debut three new episodes (with more to follow in 2012), providing a long-awaited coda to the original..." (from the Calgary Herald)

Journalism 2.0: "Does the journalist who reported on a Quran burning by a right-wing pastor in Florida last month share some of the blame for the deaths of 24 people in Afghanistan in the wake of that event? And is the fact that they died some kind of indictment of the evolution of digital media, or 'Journalism 2.0?'" (from gigaom)

Conservative values appeal, version 2.0: "The Conservative approach is, in some ways, a manifestation of social conservatism, but one that leaves behind some of the accompanying moral debates." (from the Globe & Mail)

Recycling 2.0: "The free collection, which also included document shredding, was part of the mall's Earth Day celebration. The public was encouraged to bring their old computers and other electronics to the mall for recycling, rather than throw them away and risk releasing hazardous materials into the air or water." (from phillyBurbs.com)

Palin 2.0: "...all signs point to [Michele] Bachmann running for the Republican presidential nomination later this year." (from abc NEWS)

Treatment 2.0: "Treatment 2.0 is a concept launched in November 2010 by UNAIDS and WHO that calls for a radically simplified treatment platform. Its viability and implementation at country level will determine the level of success in the response to HIV in the coming years." (from UNAIDS)