But you're *all* special

Lately a lot of articles and books about generational differences have come across my desk. Boomers, Gen X (me), Millennials. There are similarities, and not all the generalizations apply to everyone, but there are significant differences that you can't avoid. My problem with the Millennials is their innate sense of entitlement which, in most cases, I place the blame squarely on their boomer parents. This sense of "we're all special" and "we're all winners" is just not realistic. Case in point:

I've got a high school graduation to go to on Saturday morning. Turns out that there's going to be 11, yes eleven, valedictorians! ELEVEN!? I'm sorry, but doesn't the very definition of this word make it a singular? Let's check...

"the student usually having the highest rank in a graduating class who delivers the valedictory address at the commencement exercises"
Merriam-Webster.com

Yep, just what I thought. It's not a plural within a single school. So, how do eleven students give a single valedictory address? The don't. Er, well, they all do. In this case each of the eleven students is allowed to give a two minute speech. WTF? Yeah, a lot of wisdom from some very smart kids can be boiled down into what are in effect soundbytes. (As a co-worker described it: a Pecha Kucha graduation.) To make it worse, they were informed by the school that each talk had to be based around a movie and had to use quotes from the movie of choice to illustrate whatever they were trying to express. So much for trusting the smartest student in the class to make an appropriate or inappropriate speech as they see fit. Wouldn't want to give them that amount of trust.

Now, I don't know the exact reasons for having 11 valedictorians but I'm going to make an educated guess: we wouldn't want to disappoint any of the 4.0 students. They've all earned it. Sorry, but ONE student has earned it, not eleven. If you've actually got a tie (statistically improbable that it's an eleven-way tie, but not impossible) then use additional factors like attendance or extra curricular activities. Come on adults, show some backbone to your kids and pick a winner. The other ten will get over it.

Oh, and there's going to be just one salutatorian. Just proving that earning either of these honors isn't exclusive, just that you're a member of a grade range.

Small rural libraries and technology

Recently I was speaking with someone about a forthcoming open position which would be dealing with many small rural libraries. The person was saying that they had mentioned to a board member that would be hiring someone that they should be sure to look for someone more technology oriented/comfortable than the person leaving the position. The board member responded something to the effect of "sure, but we need someone who can focus on the needs of small rural libraries."

Do you see a disconnect here? This conversation to me implies that someone in the position of hiring the next library leader in that area believes that the "needs of small rural libraries" and technology are mutually exclusive. Well, they're not. How about this for an idea: look to hire someone that understands the needs of small rural libraries and has a basic yet solid grasp of technology. Better yet, someone who can understand how technology can help small rural libraries. Just an idea.

Of Media Equity & Library Reciprocity

I do believe that this is the first blog post I've ever written on request. However David Rothman and I participated in last night's episode of Uncontrolled Vocabulary and during the after show he asked that I funneled some of my "righteous indignation" into a blog post. David is the one who came up with "media equity" and "library reciprocity" which I totally love. So, in exchange for those terms, I write this post. Honestly, I've blogged some of this stuff before (but it's been a few years) and I think it comes across better vocally (listen to the episode, it's story #2 which is about 15 minutes in) than in print but here goes...

Media Equity

Why do so many libraries insist on treating their public-access computers differently from every other type of media in the building. Think about it, anyone can come in off the street, whether they live in your town or not, pay taxes to your library or not, pull any book of the shelf sit down and read it. For audio if they've got a portable player with them they can do the same with CDs and/or tapes. But when it comes to the computers so many libraries require some sort of ID. Maybe a library card, maybe a driver's license.

Why do we have to show ID to get a library card? Well, it's not to track the patron, it's to track the materials that they patron will be removing from the library. If they don't return the item, we want to be able to track it down. Using materials in the library however required no ID, nor should it, ever! But when it comes to those darn computers, we require ID left and right.

Granted, some time management systems require a unique user ID and the library card is a convenient, pre-existing ID that we can reuse. But what about visitors to your town that don't have a local library card? Give them a temp card but don't make proving their ID a requirement for a guest card. What possible purpose could it serve? If you've got a "purpose" for me on this one then my response will be "then why don't you require an ID to use a book in the library?" If a patron isn't removing the resource from the library (wether book, CD, tape, magazine, or computer) what possible legitimate purpose does showing ID serve?

Library Reciprocity

This one is a little harder to explain, especially separately from the media equity issue since that issues typically leads to this one. Anyway... This is the attitude that typically bugs me: "You don't pay taxes here therefore you don't get services." While I understand that in principle, how it's sometimes practiced is what drives me nuts. For example, "if you don't pay taxes here you can't use our computers." But wait, harkening back to media equity, if I don't pay taxes to your library I can still walk in and read a book. Why should I have to pay taxes to your library to check my e-mail on a computer?

Another way to look at it is this: if every single one of your library's tax payers demanded library services tomorrow, your library would collapse. You work off the assumption that not everyone who pays actually receives. Think of me, the outsider, as using the services that one of your tax payers isn't. Ultimately, I'm paying taxes somewhere and maybe one of your locals is currently in my town wanting to use my library's services. Isn't it a wash in the end? (I realize that this is a harder point to agree with from certain points of view.)

I'm not advocating that anyone should be able to check out books from any library anywhere. There's still the traceability of the item to contend with and loaning a book to someone from another state who's just visiting could significantly increase the chance that the book isn't returned. Remember, I'm talking about in-library use.

Lastly, what about tourist meccas that have "so many tourists" that to provide services to all the tourists would "prevent us from providing services to our public"? I've got some trouble with this too. By having this attitude you end up offending the tourists who just want to check their e-mail. Yeah, offend the tourists. Do that enough and they'll stop coming. They stop coming and you loose what they contribute to your local economy, the budget suffers, and the local's taxes go up. (A stretch but I'm trying to make a point here.)

Remember, it's about service. Not service to "your" patrons but to patrons. Firemen and police don't ask for proof of residency and tax payment before offering basic service. Why should libraries?

Thanks for listening. Now all you Uncontrolled Vocabulary people who promised to comment, it's your turn.

Odds & Ends

There's been a few news items of late that I've been thinking about yet somehow can't bring myself to write long posts about so I'll just throw out my general opinion on the issues here:

The SAFE Act
Many a library blog have been complaining about the implications of this potential new law when it comes to offering public and open WiFi in the library. While I'm not defending this bill in any way, shape, or form, I think certain bloggers are overreacting. Here's the relevant text:

"Anyone providing an “electronic communication service” or “remote computing service” to the public who learns about the transmission or storage of information about certain illegal activities or an illegal image must..." [emphasis added]

The key phrase here is "who learns about". In other words, providers of open WiFi are not required to troll for illegal activity, just report it if they find out about it. Which, in my opinion is something that we should be doing from a moral standpoint anyway. (You see child porn on a computer in the library, you say something.) If you're concerned about having to report, this is just another reason to not look over the shoulders of your patrons.

The Kindle
I've held one and I'm not impressed. I have a Sony Reader (and not even the latest version) and that impresses me. (I may have one or two of my facts wrong in this bit so please correct me if appropriate. The Kindle is $400. The Reader, $300 or less. The Kindle has a keyboard, the Reader doesn't. So what. I'd rather have that space taken up by the screen instead of having another device on which I have to type with my thumbs. I can easily get pretty much any document I want onto my Sony Reader through an iTunes-esque interface. For the Kindle I either need to buy it from Amazon or go through some undocumented hack-like steps to get my files into it. The Kindle is physically larger than the Reader and just feels more cumbersome. The Reader does audio, the Kindle doesn't. (Ok, not a big deal to me but it might be tom some people.) Those big honkin' buttons on the side of the Kindle are too easily accidentally pressed. The Kindle's WiFi? From what I hear every little thing you do is going to cost you. But you might be in the airport and finish off the last book and need to buy a new one you say. Sorry, but if you're on a trip and have read everything on a device that can hold hundreds of books, you've either had way too much free time to read (go out and get some exercise) on your trip or it's the result of poor planning on your part. Go buy a paperback for $7.99 at the gift shop. At least then you'll own something more than a license.

No, the Sony Reader isn't perfect but I don't believe the Kindle is the killer app of eBooks or even much of an improvement. It's tacking on a bunch of features to a good product that no one really needs. And no, I'm not going to get into the whole DRM discussion here as that applies to both platforms. (Well, no more than I did at the end of the previous paragraph.)

Google is not the enemy

I've heard negative comments about Google before and I've not commented on it but I'm in a fightin' mood today so I'm going to say something this time.

Yesterday a presenter from an academic library made an off handed comments about how she "doesn't let" her students use Google. When questioned why not, she went on to explain that Google is "unreliable" and "doesn't use boolean" though it is "sort of built in." (I believe she was attempting to point out that boolean operators are not necessary when searching in Google but are typically necessary in professional databases.) Shortly thereafter she admitted to "sometimes cheating" by using Amazon.com to search for resources on a topic instead using library resources.

Anyone but me got a problem with that? Where to begin?

Well, let's see. Google is just another tool in a searcher's arsenal. Nothing more. Nothing less. For some things is may be exactly what the searcher needs to use. Sometimes, not. But to dismiss it out of hand because it doesn't require the use of boolean operators and that not all of the resources it finds are 100% reliable is intellectual arrogance to the n^th degree.

If you've got a problem with the results that Google finds, teach your students to be skeptical and good information evaluators. Don't refuse to let them use the tool.

If you're upset that your students are using the resources we've paid tens of thousands of dollars for, you've got a marketing problem. That's not Google's fault, it's ours.

If, after the students are completely aware of the paid-for library resources and then still prefer to go to Google (or Amazon.com) first, then I'd blame the interfaces in those databases before I'd blame Google. People like simple. Google is simple. "Professional" databases are not.

If you don't like the fact that Google doesn't require a knowledge of boolean operators that's not Google's fault either. Google doesn't require them because <em>it works differently</em> than professional databases. Professional databases index things like title, author, abstract, article content, and a <em>controlled vocabulary</em>. Google does index content but it's hardly controlled and the relevance algorithm is centers around the number of links to that resource. Ok, it may be a popularity contest and you may not like that it is, but that's what seems to be working.

I'm not trying to say that boolean shouldn't be taught. I'm not saying that Google has all the answers. I'm not even saying that Google is always an appropriate tool for research. But none of that means that you should refuse to let someone use it. Really, when you're dealing with young people, isn't forbidding them from something just going to make them want to use it more?

Do we not because we cannot? Would we if we could?

I need to learn to take better notes when I'm thinking about a "larger issue" blog post. The topic of this one has been percolating in my head for a few months now and it came up for the fourth time yesterday so I figured it was time to sit down and write my post. The trouble is, I can not only recall two of the four instances which illustrate my issue. Of well, I guess that'll have to do.

The first time I started thinking about this issue was about two years ago when I was working for BCR. I was attempting to convince some folks there that maybe we should consider using wikis internally. I figured that our static-Web-page-based procedures would be a great first step. The benefits I saw were easier editing, revision tracking, editor tracking, and that in the future we would have the ability to go back and see how procedures have changed over time. The responses were as follows: we all know HTML so it's already easy, only the folks involved in a particular procedure would change that procedure's page so there's no need to track who made the changes, and (this is the illustration of my point) we've never cared what the procedures used to be before, so why would we in the future. Needless to say, my idea was not implemented.

Yesterday I was in my department meeting and we ended up looking at our training portal, where folks can sign up for our workshops. I just happened to notice that a user could see the current month and click to see future months but could not click to see previous months. (I just tested this and it turns out there must have been a glitch yesterday because I can now click to see past months. Despite this, my illustration still holds.) I asked why can't you look at past months? The response "why would you want to? No one's ever asked for that feature in the past."

Here's what I mean by the title of this post: In some cases do we not do things, not because we don't want to, but because the ability to do them doesn't exist? If the ability to do something did exist, might we then think "Hey, now I can do X or Y or Z instead of just A, B, or C!"

Can I actually come up with a reason why someone might want to see what procedures were 10 years ago? No. Can I tell you why someone might want to look up one of our class reregistration screens from two months ago? No again. But if those options are available to our us or our users, maybe someone will come up with a use for them that we could never have predicted.

I'm sure some of this comes out of my having taught two graduate-level courses in Knowledge Management technology. I'm also sure that reading Everything is Miscellaneous has a lot to do with my thoughts on this. But really, are we eliminating possibilities by making decisions based on either how we've "always done it" or by saying "why would anyone ever want to do that?"

Web design rant

I lived through the browser wars. I remember "best viewed in..." logos on Web pages. Those days sucked and I never want to go back. So, why oh why, am I still seeing the following in 2007?

• A page coded as 100% valid XHTML Strict (yes, strict!) being told the code is "incorrect" by the code checking software.
• A newly launched library Web site that took piles of cash to develop with an XHTML Transitional DOCTYPE yet the homepage has 267 validation errors.
• A government Web site that looks like this in IE
  
  but like this in Firefox
  

ARGH!!!

Come on people!

Time for another rant.

If you've ever stuck a CD into your computer and had your player program magically tell you the name of the album, the artist, and all the track information, then you're familiar with the Gracenote (formerly known as the CD Database, CDDB). This is a generally useful collection of data about CDs totally created by volunteers. How is the data gathered? Well, whenever you put a CD into your computer and the program fails to fill in the information, you can fill it in and then submit the data back up to the larger collective. Here's my beef: I'm sick and tired of the number of basic mistakes in the data. The number of mistakes I've run into recently leads me to believe there is no quality control at all. Here's my first example:

Incorrect:

In this case someone thought that the name of the album was "Chronicles (Disc 4)" which was "disc 1 of 1" in a set of one. Sorry folks, but the name of the Album is "Chronicles" and this happens to be disc 4 of a 6-disc set. Additionally, this is a book on CD. They don't have composers! (Nor, folks is the name of the person reading the book considered a composer. The number of times I've seen that.)

Correct:

My other example:

Incorrect:

In this case someone has decided that the author's name is "Cynthia Lennnon", the name of the album is "Lennon 1" and that this is a "Compilation CD". Well, I'd forgive the misspelling of her name (I'm hardly one to be able to complain about that,) but it carries through all nine CDs. They got the "disc 1 of 9" correct but still insisted on misnaming the album itself. And finally, compliation CD are albums with multiple artists, typically a different one for each track. Sorry, this is another book on CD, there is only one artist. (If it was an anthology by multiple authors then this option should be checked.)

Correct:

Just had to get that off my chest.

Permission Slips

Photo: Pesky Library

This is something that's got me totally riled. It's a complex situation but I'll boil it down to only the points necessary to understand the situation.

Student A's Junior Prom is this weekend and it is being held at A's school and is an official school event. A has invited Student B to the prom. B goes to a different school. A has a permission slip/agreement that says things like "I won't cause trouble at the event", "can be kicked out of the event for causing trouble" and other similar language. All of the rules mentioned are said to apply to both A and the guest, B. This permission slip/agreement has to be signed by A, A's parent, B, B's parent, and A's principal. So far I'm totally o.k. with this. Everyone involved should sign and yes, the principal has the right to bar his own students and outsiders from an official school event.

But here's the thing, the permission slip/agreement must also be signed by B's school principal. In other words, the principal of school B has veto power over something that student B is doing on their own time and has nothing to do with the school that this second principal is responsible for!

Let's take this out a step. If A wanted to invite someone from a school in another state (not unheard of) then the principal in the other state would have to sign the form. Why!? Student B's principal doesn't have to give permission for A to take B to a movie on a Saturday night, so why is this any different?

The bottom line: No principal should have the right to control what that student does, off school grounds and not on school time? That's between the student and their parent. (Any attempts to set me straight are asked for and welcome but will be met with strong debate.)

DMV, part one of n

I finally had the cash and the time to get out to the DMV this morning. In total I have to get the car inspected by a Sheriff's Deputy (to make sure it's not a stolen vehicle,) get a Nebraska title, register the car in Nebraska, and get a new driver's license. I didn't expect to get it all done today but...

The inspection was quick and easy. Basically, just a computerized VIN search which cost me $10. Then off to get a new title. Trouble is, my ex (we divorced in 2002) was still listed on the title. Why hadn't I fixed this before? No clue. It just hadn't dawned on me as something I needed to do. So I took all my paperwork including proof of the divorce over to the next window and I was told that wouldn't work. I needed something from the divorce decree that established she'd given up all rights to the car. Or, I could get her to sign a power of attorney for the car. Back home I went to look through my files.

I found an "Affidavit of gift of motor vehicle" in my divorce papers which to me, since it said "the transferor has transfered and conveyed to transferee, all of transferor's right, title and interest in and to the... motor vehicle." [emphasis added] Sounds good to me, but when I got back to the DMV I was informed that that would only save me some money on taxes or some such and "that may be the way they do it in Missouri [where the divorced occurred], but that won't work here."

So, I'm back to faxing the form to my ex (this isn't really a problem, it's just an annoying and delaying bureaucratic step in this whole process) so she can sign it, have it notarized, and fax it back to the DMV. I then get to go tomorrow and try to get my new title and registration.

Speaking URLs

Ok folks, this needs to end! The URL is (for example) "www dot themagazine dot com" not www dot the magazine, all one word dot com. There are no spaces in URLs, everyone knows this, stop it.

Un-sync-able

I've yet to get my Treo to sync to my office computer. This means I'm running two calendars, two task lists, and two contacts lists. I'm going nuts! I hope to have this resolved in the next few days.

UPDATE 2:50pm: Permissions reset, software reinstalled and I'm syncing again. (Let the puns continue.)