“I can quit Googling anytime, man!”

On the heels of last night’s post, I saw this older article come across Twitter entitled “100 Things You Should Know About People: #8 — Dopamine Makes You Addicted To Seeking Information”. Apparently, it would appear that librarians are not simply the kind, educated information philanthropists that society and culture has caricatured us. No, we are users and pushers for the dopamine system.

[…] the latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine causes us to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases our general level of arousal and our goal-directed behavior. (From an evolutionary stand-point this is critical. The dopamine seeking system keeps us motivated to move through our world, learn, and survive). It’s not just about physical needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts. Dopamine makes us curious about ideas and fuels our searching for information. The latest research shows that it is the opoid system (separate from dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure.

And, of course, it’s not without potential drawbacks.

With the internet, twitter, and texting we now have almost instant gratification of our desire to seek. Want to talk to someone right away? Send a text and they respond in a few seconds. Want to look up some information? Just type it into google. What to see what your friends are up to? Go to twitter or facebook. We get into a dopamine induced loop… dopamine starts us seeking, then we get rewarded for the seeking which makes us seek more. It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, stop checking our cell phones to see if we have a message or a new text.

I’m curious to see further research or postings on the dopamine system, but I’m not sure if I’m perpetuating a dopamine loop or engaged in a legitimate short term inquiry. But, I swear, a couple of database searches and I’ll drop it.

Honest!

The Body of Information

I just finished reading a New York Times article entitled “Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally” that came out a few days ago. Librarians certainly talk about how information is organized and how it can be accessed, and so I thought this article relates well in talking about how the brain (our ultimate end user) perceives information. It is part of an psychological field called embodied cognition.

Notable quote:

“How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body,” said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. “We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.”

We talk about how information is presented all the time, but this brings it to a whole new level. Should we be designing the user experience with these types of body cues in mind? Does this have a viable use in the library at all?

Re: Nothing is the Future, ctd.

Some of the commenters to Wayne Bivens-Tatum’s post “Nothing is the Future” seem to be under the odd impression that his post is an response to Library 2.0/101. It could be one till you get to the last paragraph of his post.

I’ve used "mobile" just as one example. The same could be said of various service or organization models. You can plug in any term you want, and know that when anyone tells you that thing is "the future," they’re wrong. And to be clear, my criticism isn’t of any particular services or trends. If there’s a new, popular way for librarians to communicate with or reach out to library users, by all means librarians should adopt it, or at least experiment with it. My criticism is the hype and the reductionism, and the implied claim that some librarians really know what the future holds, and that it just happens to be centered around whatever they happen to like at the moment. Maybe they’re convincing themselves, but they’re not convincing me.

(Emphasis mine.)

From the bolded text, Mr. Bivens-Tatum is addressing all forms of library future hyperbole. While Library 2.0/101 make an excellent target for such criticism, the logic presented also makes an excellent case for the librarians who are overly cautious and/or completely rejecting minor changes to the practice and profession (e.g. the people who make the overzealous argument that rejects any new service, program, event, material, web tool, or website based on their own biases without patron consideration or input). It’s a dangerous, dismissive, and ultimately untenable position to maintain in this information-communication revolution. It’s antithetical of the evolution of knowledge and ultimately critical of anyone working on better content delivery, regardless of their means and methods. If the zealotry of the web 2.0 techno-narcissists with their grand prophetic-like innovation announcements is bad, then their counterpart in the sneering cynical criticisms of pompous ludbrarians[1] rejecting deviance from the status quo is equally harmful for rational forward looking discourse.

(To provide a visualization of how I am seeing this, I made up a simple chart.)

I count myself in the middle of this chart, perhaps with a leaning towards the right end. The middle sentence between the two bolded ones in the quotation holds more of the essence of the “change in the library” conversation that I’m interested in. It is about watching and listening to what patrons are doing and saying and then providing materials and services that work towards or meet their expressed needs. If I can provide both a low tech or a high tech solution, who gives a damn which is used so long as there is a solution? I am beholden to the end result (patron with need satisfied), not the process that achieved it.

Tim Spalding in the Thingology blog makes an excellent concluding point in his reply to the Academic Librarian post, stating:

It says something that hasn’t been said before as well. But if it prompts librarians to dismiss technology’s impact on the future of libraries, it will do great harm. Instead, I hope people use your essay as a way to "kick it up a notch" intellectually, get past the small stuff and confront the very real changes ahead.

(Emphasis mine.)

I couldn’t agree more. It’s really time to get past the crap, get over our hang-ups, and talk like adults. This divisiveness that has been generated is really beneath a profession who values the free exchange of ideas. Let’s start acting like it.

[1] Luddite + Librarian = Ludbrarians.

Re: Nothing is the Future

This is a reaction post of “Nothing is the Future” by Wayne Bivens-Tatum (Academic Librarian).

While my astute professional peer makes excellent points concerning the hyperbole in library technology trends, I feel that there is an excellent lesson to his post: while librarians can and should act as leaders for their patrons, they should also be followers and listeners. I see librarians as bridging the gap between the past and future, interacting on a medium of the patron’s choosing. While we should have an eye to emerging technologies to gauge their development and adoption by society as a whole, it behooves us to remain mindful of the established and accepted communication mediums. Yes, there are marvels of the digital age and certainly things that librarians should be aware of[1], but it is folly to set sights constantly on the horizon to the detriment of what currently exists and works.

In following, it is not for our patrons to take us to a brand new technologies, but to remind us of the merits of existing ones. As Mr. Bivens-Tatum simply states, people still interact with the library using letters, telephone, and other last established technologies. There should be no rush to usher to declare these mediums dead in the favor of what holds the current fancy of the technological vanguard. In listening to what patrons want and use, we are performing the most basic function of the library: giving people what they actually asking for. Simply put, it is the act of matching the demand that the patrons have articulated to us as a wanted and desired material or service.

To this end, my take on Mr. Bivens-Tatum’s blog title would change it to “People are the Future”. In the greater picture, our existence is constantly in their hands. At the local level, they will always (hopefully) tell us what can be done to meet their needs. Whether this is a mobile app or extended weekend hours, only the community that we serve can answer that question. People are the future for libraries, for they are the ones who dictate our services, programs, collections, and, ultimately, our fates.

 

[1] Personally, I don’t take all of the Library 101 RTK list literally. I don’t think that librarians need to know how Hulu works (to use the most infamous example), but the important takeaway is that this presents a trend of television on demand via the internet (something very worthy of notice as all forms of television and movie content make their way to online). Same goes for a lot of the named products, sites, and items on that list. The 101 RTK list gives an excellent heads-up to some of the emerging trends in information and communication.

Budgets, Banners, & Blogs

With the recent library budget cut proposals announced in New York City, it inspired me to do a new banner for the blog. If you liked the last one (or future ones), you can grab them for yourself off of my Flickr account. I’d like to thank John LeMasney for indirectly pointing out Inkscape to me. It’s been a fun program to fiddle around with. You can check out John’s blog project, 365 Sketches, and see what things Inkscape can do.

Dismantling the Echo Chamber

I had never heard of the term “echo chamber” till I read Ned Potter’s post as part of Bobbi Newman’s thoughts on the phenomena. Well, I had heard such a thing referred to in a more unflattering term, but never applied to an online community. It makes perfect sense in retrospect since the online world is vast and niched enough to produce communities for any interest. It is not a stretch of the imagination to fall into a space where you have surrounded yourself with like minded people with identical or closely similar ideologies. In contemplating this on my own, I have come up with a few conclusions I’d like to share.

First, I think the real issue with the responses to Mr. Godin’s post is not that there is an echo chamber, but that there is no equal platform to respond on behalf of the library community. He doesn’t allow comments so there is no way to place any of our rebuttals next to his original post. (He does have trackbacks which could put a reply next to the original entry, but the single trackback is from another business blog.) So, we are left to our own platforms to disagree in front of an audience that is (unsurprisingly) mainly our professional peers.  I don’t think it is shocking that there was such a unified response disputing the assertions and ideas that Mr. Godin had posted since they are an egregious misrepresentation of what libraries are doing and where they are going. (As I wrote so in my post regarding his entry.)  But, without a similar platform or venue, we were left to equivalent of talking amongst ourselves. I do take heart in the number of replies in agreement with my sentiments, for this is an instance where it is good to know that the online librarian community is in relative agreement.

(On a tangent, I know that comments in blogs has been a topic for a long as people have written blogs. One of my favorite political blogs, Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish, does not allow comments. Over time, Mr. Sullivan has asked his readers as to whether or not to open up posts to comments and it has been steadfastly voted down each time. The difference between Mr. Godin’s and Mr. Sullivan’s blogs is that latter offers an email address for reader feedback, comments, and dissents (some of which are posted). There is no other resource for Mr. Godin’s blog, save to post and hope that he reads his trackbacks or links to see what people are writing.)

Second, I really don’t think the replies represent a true echo chamber. I think that that they are replies from likeminded people who find Mr. Godin’s post to be an incorrect assessment. I really don’t find it shocking in the least since finding people who are similar in temperament and beliefs to ourselves is something we do on a daily basis. In a paper from 2008, a study revealed that followers of political blogs are more likely to read only blogs that are in agreement with their own beliefs. Infrequently, there will be crossover where someone reads blogs that are radically different than their own ideologies. I would not think that it would take a giant logical leap to infer that librarians who are online tend to read blogs written by people who agree with their philosophy and approach to the practice of librarianship. (Specifically, that Library 2.0/101 people tend to read other who support it, school librarians read other school librarians, public librarians read other public librarians, and so forth.) In order to establish the presence of an echo chamber, I feel I would need to see replies on librarian blogs and the ones they reference on a longer timescale. For now, I remain unconvinced.

 

I can only speak for myself, but I try to avoid homogeny in my Google Reader feeds by trying to find a diversity of voices on library and librarian issues. In building my own virtual “Team of Rivals”, I subscribe to several blog feeds written by librarians and MLS graduate students to which I rarely agree with their viewpoints. But I feel it is important to do so and I do it for a number of reasons.

First, it makes me work harder to justify my own positions. I feel it makes my positions stronger when I am forced to defend them in the face of adversarial contention. It leads to robust, more concise rationales that can be easily explained and defended. Second, it is opposition intelligence gathering. If I learn of the viewpoints and justifications of those I disagree with, I can create stronger arguments to overcome them. Perhaps a holdover from my brief stint in law school, but there is strength in knowing your argument and that of your opponent when you engage in earnest debate. Third, it has caused me to moderate or change my position in light of different approaches and knowledge. By getting a broader vantage point on an issue, I learn other perspectives and ideas that I had failed to consider or simply did not know. It is part of a greater open-mindedness that I try to embrace when approaching all things in life.

I would like to imagine that, as librarians, we are inherently "echochamber proof". How could we possibly espouse on the merits of a well rounded collection that portrays all views on a topic when we limit our professional personal learning to only those who hold similar beliefs? For while each is within their own right to exhibit their biases within their personal readings and activities, a diverse range of professional reading sources is (in my opinion) the best way to grasp the occupation as a whole. While we are united in our belief in common principles (intellectual freedom, unfettered inquiry, uninhibited curiosity, to name a few), we bring to the table our own approach and philosophy to these guiding principles. To dismiss others out of hand for their differing viewpoints or (worse) on their professional standing, publication affiliation, anonymous nature, or other irrelevant conditional, I find it to be distressing.

It strikes me as the pinnacle of irony that there are those in this profession would defend the right of another to obtain radically divergent and odious materials and resources in the name of the greater good of intellectual freedom, yet would dismiss a professional peer commentator not on their merits but over irrelevant secondary circumstances. (Hence a visit to this blog from The Irony Fairy, pictured to the right.) That baffles me at times and has the inklings of a "do as I say, not do as I do" mindset when it comes to one of the underlying philosophic principles of this profession. Perhaps my idealism is getting the better of me as I close this blog post, but I find it more to my liking than the dark grip of cynicism that is far too common when it comes to different thought presented on the internet.

In closing, I am reminded of a quote from Edward R. Murrow:

If we confuse dissent with disloyalty — if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox […]. Every act that denies or limits the freedom of the individual in this country costs us the … confidence of men and women who aspire to that freedom and independence of which we speak and for which our ancestors fought.

Librarians & that pesky image problem

For the record, you will not find any similar results for any of the other division searches.

Library Day in the Life Round 4 (The Love Note)

Sunday Night Ponderance

What would a transliteracy READ poster look like?

Would it be someone holding a laptop? A smartphone or other mobile device? Or seated at a computer? Or a wifi router? Or e-reader?

And, more importantly, why haven’t we seen one yet?

I want to take a picture of me with my laptop with the banner page of my favorite blogs. That’s my READ poster.

Friend of a Friend’s Group

I need your help.

A few months back, after an exchange of emails with Steve Lawson following his fundraiser for the Louisville Free Public Library, I was trying to think of a way to help libraries in general. I am hoping that what I am going to propose right now will do just that.

Friend of a Friend’s Group is a wiki set up to collect information and resources for everything dealing with a “friends of the library” group. From starting a friend’s group to fundraising and advocacy, I’m hoping to harness the combined knowledge and expertise of the library community for this important purpose.

As we are painfully aware, 2009 saw a great deal of turmoil as libraries fought back the budget knife in states and cities around the country. Many were forced to cut services and/or hours, some had to lay off employees, and some even had to close their doors. From all prognostication, 2010 is going to yield the same hardships. This wiki project seeks to combat this by giving libraries of all sizes the advice and tools to build and use library advocates within their community. The library is a community supported, community driven institution and there is no time like the present to cultivate and utilize the grassroots support that awaits realization.

At present, I have created a skeleton of what I think the wiki should include. As wikis are quite mutable, please feel free to add topics and areas that I missed. However, please keep in mind the spirit of this project: to provide libraries with fund raising ideas, advocacy suggestions, and practical information regarding and for their friend’s group.

Please take a moment to check out the wiki. If you are familiar with wiki coding and have things to add, please do not hesitate to do so. If you are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with wiki coding and still want to help out, you can still help out through this submission form. I can add your content to the wiki from there.

Together, we can make something great. Please lend a hand in building this resource for our combined future.

ADDENDUM:

Norman Oder at Library Journal pointed out to me that there are two ALA groups that address certain aspects of this.

Associations of Library Trustees, Advocates, Friends and Foundations and Friends of Libraries USA.