First Books of 2017

Actually I've had the 'Handbook of Usability Testing' for years -- the first edition, that is.

Something funny about that article title...

Something funny about that article title...

Looks Like Uncle Julius

Found this picture in a book titled, "German Chicago: The Danube Swabians and the American Aid Societies". That older fellow with the bowtie sure looks like my Uncle Julius.

Behind the Scenes in WYSIWYG

 Looking at the 'plain text' behind the WYSIWYG. I'm impressed:

<hr />
<p>&nbsp;
<h3>Alumni Receptions 2017</h3>
</p>

Email Outside of Work? France Says 'Non Merci'

A couple of interesting articles on the law just passed in France regulating (remember that's not outlawing!) emails outside of work.

Deutsche Welle reports:

From today, organizations with more than 50 workers will need to start negotiations to define the rights of employees to ignore their smartphones and not be forced to check and send emails on weekends and in the evenings.

Engadget comments:

French companies will be more likely to respect your work/life balance -- even if they don't mark certain hours as off-limits, they can't make unexpected requests that force you to drop everything.

Distinguished Guest in Library

 Welcoming distinguished guest in town for the holidays.

At the Reference Desk with an Eye on a Couple of Things

Wednesday evening. Seventh game of the 2016 World Series. Audio was off but we could take a peek at the video every once and a while if only to check the score.

The Gift to Be Indexing

Indexing? It's a tough job but someone's gotta do it. That said, I largely agree with the sentiment expressed below. I guess the way I would express it isn't "reflecting how the reader thinks" so much as establishing categories (or stepping stones?) of content that the reader can then plow through.

The role of the index in digital products has become a subject of heated debate when information professionals gather to formalize standards. Some publishers and authors are under the misguided impression that a full-text search can replace the traditional subject index. The American Society for Indexing (ASI) has spent the last few years reminding the world that a good index is not just a concordance; it adds value to a digital object beyond the basic word search. An index created by a good indexer reflects how the reader thinks and offers entry points that may not be written in the text. With increased attention on analytics and search, there is also a strong argument to be made that indexes are more important for digital publications than print ones.

Badgett, Nan. Medford, NJ. "A Review of "The Accidental Indexer", Information Today, 2015, 240 pp. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19322909.2016.1229075

Yabba Dabba Doo!

Go Cubs! Go Cubs! Go Cubs!

Lost in Space

Yesterday's stroll through the southwest side of Chicago. Finally found Ogden and Western (though when I got there, I had to ask what way was north).

Current Cites for Sept. 2016

Current Cites for Sept. 2016 is out! You can find the issue here...

This month I recommended a helpful article from the Journal of Web Librarianship that discussed the use of Google Analytics to improve library website design.

First Saturday of the New School Year 2016

Annual photo with Jim from Access Services.

First Seven Jobs

Okay, since everyone's doing it:

1. Sales Assistant (Radio Shack, Chicago) - 16 yrs old.
2. Print Shop / Mimeograph Machine (Small indy business selling mailing lists on magnetic tape*, Playboy Tower, Chicago) - High School.
3. Customer Service, Credit Dept. (Carson, Pirie, Scott, Downtown Chicago) - College.
4. English Teacher (Year Abroad Program, Paris) - Post-College.
5. Manager, Hot Dog Stand (Fullerton Ave. Beach, Chicago).
6. English Teacher (Rome, later West Berlin).
7. Construction/Rehab Worker (West Berlin).

*Computer storage 70s style [source]:

Current Cites for July 2016

 Current Cites for July 2016 is out! You can find the issue here...

This month I recommended an article describing an innovative 'beacon-based' navigation system which opened with this excellent piece of advice, "...as with other technologies before it, usefulness does not magically emerge from implementing new technology; rather, it is the culmination of a comprehensive plan for merging technical know-how with business knowledge or user-generated content."

Chicago FestWeekend

 Three days of incredible events:

• RibFest on Friday, 6/10
• LitFest on Saturday, 6/11
• Blues Fest on Sunday, 6/12

Depaul University 'Library All-Star' Award

Wow! Awarded the "Library All-Star" Award from the library at Depaul University. They brought the thing over this Saturday. Thanks, everyone!

From the original nomination by head of our department, Terry:

“I would like to nominate Leo Klein as a Library All-Star. He fielded a question from an American Studies professor on a Saturday and provided a referral to me as the liaison to that department. In the meantime, his intellectual curiosity and service orientation led him to research the question and by the time I came in on Monday, he had successfully located several data sources and communicated with the professor, satisfying all of his needs for a presentation he would be delivering at the end of the month.

Not only was the professor happy with the speedy turnaround time, but it saved me a lot of time and effort in the process! I believe that for both of these reasons, Leo deserves this recognition in addition to my thanks (already communicated).”

From the Awards page:

"The Library AllStars award seeks to acknowledge and celebrate particular instances of exemplary service, where a staff member has gone the extra mile, made a big difference, saved the day, or made an especially significant and positive impact in some specific way -- whether that's something they did internally for the library organization, or directly with one or more colleagues, or through the provision of service to anyone in our library user community."

Again, thank you everyone! You don't know how rewarding this activity is. It's not a job -- it's an opportunity to serve!

University Librarian Scott Walker biked over with the "Library All-Star" Award for me on Saturday. Thanks, everyone!

Logical Next Step

 Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Current Cites for April 2016

 

Current Cites for April 2016 is out! You can find the issue here...

This month I recommended a rather enjoyable research article that looked at focus groups involving college students and their searching habits -- a situation rather familiar to those of us fortunate enough to work in public service. Included were lines like, "few students were aware of what a 'subject librarian' was".

Job Description : Part-time Reference Librarian

Just got a request to describe my activities as a part-time reference librarian. Here's my response:

Basically the part time job is totally reference (i.e. public service) work. Questions run from 'where is the copier/bathroom/color-printer' to 'I'm writing a research paper on advances in chemistry in the 18th Century and need to find some research articles'.

Am I an expert on advances in chemistry in the 18th Century? No, but I know where to get the student started and I can also show the student how to find articles and, equally as important, how to evaluate search results so that they branch out into even better material. I also know, finally, what the limits are and who and when to refer them to other people.

That's pretty much what I do.

MPOW: The Gravy Train

Hard to go on a diet in a place like this. 

Current Cites for March 2016

 

Current Cites for March 2016 is out! You can find the issue here...

This month I recommended an article that took text-based content analysis and applied it to tweets from the Twitter accounts of 10 different academic libraries. Interesting results.

Current Cites for January 2016

 

Current Cites for January 2016 is out! You can find the issue here...

Starting the year out right. I pointed to the "big anniversary issue" coming from the Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP) celebrating its 20th year as an open access journal.

'Join the Conversation' Makes It to This Year's Banished Word List

 I've lived to see the day!  "Join the conversation" has made it to this year's LSSU Banished Word List!

University Releases 2016 Banned Words List (WGN)

SAULT STE. MARIE, Mich. – A university in Michigan has come out with its annual list of banished words.

Each year Lake Superior State University bans words or phrases it deems overused, misused, or in poor taste. Top contenders for 2016 include “vape,” “break the Internet” and “conversation.”

Now if only "disruptive" and "iconic" could make it to next year's list! Puh-leeeeeeezzzzeee!

Note to Google

 Note to Google: No, we aren't open till 2am tonight. It's intersession.

UPDATE: I contacted Google through the "Feedback" page and they fixed the thing in about a day. Not bad.

On the Importance of High School Libraries

Student protest at DeSable High School against the firing of their librarian. The students were right to do this. In fact it would seem more of a survival tactic than simply a protest.

It's amazing to think of an institution that claims to be about education that has no library function. What are the students going to do when they hit college? They'll each have to learn how to do research -- that's what going to college involves -- and this is infinitely harder to do if they have no prior familiarity with what a library is and how it functions.

What's next? Take away the textbooks? :-(

UPDATE:  Good news...

Old Pal Unexpectedly Drops By

 

Current Cites for November 2015

 Current Cites for November 2015 is out! You can find the issue here...

I recommended an article titled, "When IT No Longer Remains Anonymous -- For All the Right Reasons" (EDUCAUSE Review). It looks at two approaches to academic IT depts. -- one reactive (okay) and the other pro-active (better).

Ask a Librarian

 

Interesting article looking at the transitory nature of the web. Technology and formats change all the time. In a sense, you never step into the same web twice. That said, the article subtitle, "If a Pulitzer-finalist 34-part series of investigative journalism can vanish from the web, anything can" -- just isn't true. I found most of the original "vanished" articles using the database Newsbank.

Current Cites for September 2015

 

Current Cites for September 2015 is out! You can find the issue here...

I recommended an article from Computers In Libraries that's near and dear to anyone who's experienced the same on a website they've managed, namely "Hacked! Lessons Learned From An URL Injection".

File Under, 'Things I Don't Usually Think About'

So I was at the local Subway Sandwich place, ordering a Ham and Cheese. The guy at the counter asked me what I wanted on it.

"Mayonnaise, lettuce and tomato," I replied.

"In that order?"

I was stumped. I mean, I don't usually get down to that level of detail.

"Go with whatever works best," I finally blurted out.

First Saturday of the New School Year at Depaul

First Saturday of the new school year at Depaul -- with colleague Jim.

Free Books: Tough Choice

 

At the Reference Desk: Free Books on the 'book truck' near the library entrance! It's either "WordPerfect: The Pocket Reference" (1987) or "Minute Manual for Apple Writer IIe" (1983). Tough choice.

I finally went with the "Minute Manual for Apple Writer IIe" -- I mean, how could I pass such pertinent pieces of information as:

How Much Can I Save on One Disk?

A normal Apple disk can hold a total of about 143k or 143,000 characters of information. The amount of usable space on a disk is equal to 128k to 136k or about 40 single spaced pages or 80 double spaces pages of text. When you run out of room on a disk and attempt to save a file, the computer simply beeps and displays the message, 'DOS :DISK FULL'. Put another disk in the drive and save the file again. (p.115)

At the Tech-in-Motion Timmy Awards in Chicago

 

Happy New School Year! (UIC)

First day of classes at UIC.

A Higher Authority

Personal Confession: Nowadays there's all this talk about 'STEM' in education. That's nice but frankly what got me going -- starting in high school -- was the notion of the 'Renaissance Man'. ‪#‎LongLiveTheHumanities‬

Funniest Reference Question of the Year (By Phone)

Patron: "Sorry, I know you probably get this question all the time..."

Me (interrupting): "Ask what you want -- we're here till 9pm!"

Patron: _SILENCE_

Patron: _MORE SILENCE_

Patron: _EVEN MORE SILENCE_

Me (finally): "Did you have a question"?

Patron: "That was it -- I wanted to know how late you're open."

Message to Box.com

You call this a slideshow? By default, over a third of the photo is covered up with usage data (of all things) on the right. Why not make showing usage data optional through a setting in the embed code?

Site Launch: GermaniaBroadcast.net

Today was the official launch date of GermaniaBroadcast.net. I announced it on all the usual social networks.

It's actually been up for maybe a month -- with me fiddling around, adding content, rearranging it and the like. I guess, an alternative name for the thing could be, "Fun with Drupal and Content Management".

The site is built around various digital records that we have of daddy, William Klein and his radio show, "The Germania Broadcast" (1927-1970). Working with the data, I managed to organize everything into four principle categories, Events, People, Places and Library (or 'Documents').

The neat thing with Drupal is how you can connect one item in one category with items in any other. Say, the name of a singer pops up in the description of a concert in 1928 which happened at the Auditorium Theater; You can relate the person to the event and location going backwards and forward. The magic is called "Entity Reference" but again, I like to call it, 'Fun with Content Mgmt".

In any case, there's a slightly fuller explanation of the original radio broadcast plus background here: The Germania Broadcast : An Introduction.

Dumb 'Security' Idea About to Be Axed by Bank of America - Finally

Well, it took them a while but Bank of America is finally saying 'bye-bye' to a particularly ineffective form of online security called 'SiteKey'. Probably better known as a 'security image', the idea was to assign you an image which you were then expected to remember every time you logged in. Yeah, good luck with that.

There actually was research on this. Not surprisingly, researchers found that "users will enter their passwords even if their site-authentication images are absent." Brad Stone summarizing the results in the New York Times put it this way, "Of 60 participants who got that far into the study and whose results could be verified, 58 entered passwords anyway. Only two chose not to log on, citing security concerns."

Of course that was 2007 or more than eight years ago. The NYT article concludes with a comment from one of the original researchers, "sometimes the appearance of security is more important than security itself.”

I'd only add that all too often, the mere mention of 'security' is expected to triumph over everything including common sense. The truth of course is that everything deserves a healthy measure of skepticism.

Library Workers of the World United!

Wow, a student I've seen before just came up to the Ref Desk and thanked me for teaching him how to do research! Best feedback ever! ‪#‎NLWD2015‬ (link).

Current Cites for March 2015

 

Current Cites for March 2015 is out! You can find the issue here...

I recommended an article from The Journal of Web Librarianship with the title, "Use and Usability of a Discovery Tool in an Academic Library". It went over usability testing of the "discovery tool" (in this case, Primo by Exlibris) at KU Libraries. Funny thing is, I kept switching back and forth from the article to the two institutions I'm connected to -- just to compare notes.

Love Those ALA Profile Prefixes

 Renewed my ALA membership today. Love their Profile Prefixes. Click for larger image...

Neutrality Rulz!

Happy days are here again! At least for a while.

When people first started hooking up to the Internet, it was a two step -- or two layer -- process: You had your phone line which was owned by the local Bell carrier, and then you had an internet service provider or 'ISP' -- of which there were many.

Then the phone companies developed a slightly faster system (DSL) which, surprise, surprise, the ISPs had no access to. Within a short time, the ISPs simply disappeared. The phone companies, ATT & Verizon, after being broken up for a couple of years, zoomed back to national dominance -- this despite the fact that since DSL, they really haven't done much innovation.

And that precisely is the point where the Internet started to resemble a traditional communication network -- with mediocre service and a handful of players. All I can say is, 'bout time!

Eat Cake!

 "Eat Cake!" -- happy greetings that welcomed me on the way to the Reference Desk this evening.

Current Cites for Jan 2015

 

Current Cites for January 2015 is out! You can find the issue here...

Although my focus is usually tech, I went this month with a set of articles from Library Trends that looked at the state of libraries in countries from the former "eastern block". How libraries fared in what used to be known affectionately as "communist dictatorships" makes for interesting reading -- as well as what they've done since.

Daddy in Wartime London with the ABSIE Team

 

Amazing picture of daddy along with what looks like the rest of the 'American Broadcasting Station in Europe' (i.e. 'ABSIE') team in London in 1943 (see larger image). I just came upon it after going through a box of old pictures. Note, daddy is in the back with the headphones next to the guy in a vest/sweater.

The picture above is a close-up (flipped) of the New York Times that the fellow on the right has on his desk. It dates from Sept. 30, 1943 and has the headline: "Naples' Fall Near as Allies Break Line and Pursue Fleeing Germans on Plain; Russians in Kremenchug, Aim for Baltic".

Here's a write-up I once put together on his tour of duty: "Daddy Was a DJ to the Germans in WWII" (6/9/07)

First Day at the Reference Desk for 2015!

Not asked once -- not once: "Would you have my textbook up in the stacks?" Devastating.

Steve Jobs and the Role of the Humanities in a World of Tech

I always thought the best preparation for any computer-based activity, such as web development, was a thorough knowledge of English poetry. Who knew that Steve Jobs agreed with me?

When asked if he was a 'computer nerd', he replied: "I wasn’t completely in any one world for too long. There was so much else going on. Between my sophomore and junior years, I got stoned for the first time; I discovered Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas and all that classic stuff." (Playboy Interview with Steve Jobs, 1985)

Frosty Takes a Dive

 

Happy Blue Beanie Day!

Happy Blue Beanie Day! As Ethan Marcotte says, "...[C]ould you imagine anything like responsive web design without web standards?". #bbd14

'No, Herr Policeman, Chicago is nothing like your East German Communist Dictatorship.'

What with all the talk of the 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, I recalled an episode that happened to me a bit earlier while visiting East Berlin.

The way it worked is you got to spend a day there but had to be back by midnight or they'd make you pay a fine. Normally we'd go there, visit the sites (such as they were), head to a couple of bars to spend the practically worthless East-German marks, and then head back to Checkpoint Charlie.

One night as we were racing back, we got stopped by an East-German policeman or border guard or I don't know what -- on the final street right before Checkpoint Charlie. "Why", I asked the guard.

"Because you crossed the street against the light," he explained. The fine for this trespass was 20 marks (West German of course). Naturally I grumbled as I handed over the ransom money.

"But," he said by way of defense, "we have our laws, you have your laws. It would be the same in Chicago."

I looked at the deserted street I had just crossed and then the huge forbidding Wall stretched left and right with watch-towers, spotlights and men armed with machine guns -- all to keep their own people trapped inside.

"No," I assured the guard, "this is nothing like Chicago."

At the Reference Desk: A Humble Request

People, could you please refrain from sticking pencils in dictionaries!

1st Saturday of the (School) Year

Nice day; lot of traffic.

Current Cites for Aug 2014

Current Cites for August 2014 is out! You can find the issue here...

My pick this month was an article on modeling library instruction as 'performance art' -- from a librarian whose background not surprisingly is in theater. The focus was on instruction sessions but there's no reason why such an approach can't be incorporated, at least to a certain extent, in face-to-face interactions at the Reference Desk.

WebDev with a Bag Over My Head

 Mystery website at MPOW. I inherited the thing. It was put together maybe 6 years ago or more. What system does it run on? Nobody knows -- not even the original developers. On the other hand, many of the pages end in 'aspx'.

Some links on the main navigation end in '#' (i.e. empty hashtag). "#"? You click on that link and you'll go absolutely nowhere. It's the web equivalent of a dead-end. What'd they do? Launch the site without bothering to develop those particular pages?

I guess you could call this the equivalent of walking into a house with a bag over your head. I think I'd prefer an actual bag.

Stormy First Day for Academic Year 2014-2015

Stormy first day for academic year 2014-2015.

Certified 'Library-Lover'

Results from the PewResearch Library User Quiz. Of course, I took the thing while sitting in the library (Depaul) so you could call me biased.