As we wrap up this academic year, I am evaluating this academic year by ideas, not by closing a library. My choice! It’s been a tough year…but the ideas survive and nourish a tired brain.

One of the biggest trends this year has been “big data.” If you haven’t had time to think about this yet – what it is, what this means for science librarians or why libraries should pay attention – this is a good beginning article.

Data Science, Machine Learning, and Statistics: what is in a name?

The University of Virginia has an interesting site all about data and researchers and their university. A model for universities? Maybe. If nothing else, use this a good model for citing data practices.

University of Virginia data management consulting group – citing data

Data visualization is another big topic in libraries and research. Good visualization is not new. Twice in two days I ran across reference to my favorite visualization – Charles Joseph Minard’s famous graph showing the decreasing size of Napoleon’s Grande Armée as it marches to Moscow; a classic in data visualization.

Charles Joseph Minard (Image: Wikipedia Commons)

Good visualization tells a story, clearly, forever!

Stephen Hawking’s advice for twenty-first century grads: Embrace complexity

Service Design (Slideshare) – Slide 119

I have been trend-doing all this academic year. Read more about it in this informal report.

How does your academic year measure up?

Where did I ever come up with the idea that there might just be a day at my job where I was comfortable? It is never going to happen.

Almost four years ago, we moved to the DC area. A new environment, a new commute, a new job will add stress. But, I assumed the stress  would lessen as time went on. Not so!

I made mistakes. I hope I learned from them. I continue to make mistakes – new ones I hope. I was reminded of this reading a Maria Shine Stewart blog post  If You’re Perfect, Don’t Read This.

“I suspect that if one is not making a few mistakes on campus or off, a learning curve may not be steep enough or one is staying within a comfort zone, avoiding risk.”

Universities and Libraries are also in NO COMFORT zones these days. Changes in library collections, services, and the increasingly accelerating rate-of-change … of data, of technology, and of information make for most uncomfortable working situations.

“It is only by ongoing practice, with all the trial and error that entails, that a wider field of vision on campus might be attained.”

I couldn’t find my comfort zone these days if it reached out and bopped me on the head!

I cope by reading!

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/rss-coasters/

This very busy Fall semester, I barely keep up reading my daily email alerts from ASEE First Bell, Inside Higher Ed, Wired Campus  and Scholarly Kitchen.  I become increasingly anxious every day as I scan the headlines – the death of higher ed; eBooks are the end of the book; MOOCs;  keeping up with gadgets; teaching digital millennials – and then skim the articles that I think have some resonance in my daily life as a multi-branch science librarian. My brain is truly a giant cloud of tags and nebulous half-formed ideas.

Luckily, I was rescued this morning by my RSS feeds. I had concentrated time to read and am a better person for reading from the important (to me) RSS feeds:

John Dupuis blogging at  Confesssions of a Science Librarian

• Science Blogging: The future of science communication and why you should be part of it
• Getting Your Science Online: Presentation at Brock University Physics Department
• Current/Future State of Higher Education: Week 2 reading list!

From more than 10 years of reading Library blogs, I always check in with two school librarians that transcend their day jobs and continue to speak to information trends and educational management issues:

• Doug Johnson at the Blue Skunk blog and yes, I do bring my own devices to work, it makes me more efficient as I travel between building to have my own technology – laptop and tablet – with me. (No, work did not pay for these, it took me three years to get efficient!) BYOD – to work
• Joyce Valenza from the School Library Journal and NeverEnding Search blog reminded me to get back to this great online conference that I paid for and just haven’t had time to watch all the session – yet! Library 2.012 archive posted

YES! Someone has written about my nebulous ideas that have been niggling at me just beneath the surface of my consciousness:

• By Melonie Fullick Failure, crisis, disruption: The (perpetual) end of higher ed
• From the blog Agnostic, Maybe: the neverending reference interview of life by Andy Woolworth: Save the [Insert Noun Here]

For a little inspiration: Quoteflections…what is truth?…The search for truth is more precious than its possession.  ~ Albert Einstein

And, how about J.R.R. Tolkien on George R.R. Martin:

Friday Fun: J.R.R. Tolkien on George R.R. Martin, Posted by John Dupuis on August 24, 2012

It is the end of the semester…almost. Which means people are stressed and cranky and everyone needs a break. When I think of taking a break, it always involves reading a book. Reading is my de-stressor. But, I’m a little stressed thinking about reading these days. Since the ACRL 2011 conference I have been reading “scholarly” papers. [See Proceedings of ACRL2011 for all articles.]

Library metrics in all their madness:

• Stop the Madness: The Insanity of ROI and the Need for New Qualitative Measures of Academic Library Success James Neal

Recommended reading from Raj Patel keynote speaker at ACRL2011:

• The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin 1968
• Tragedy of the Commons: The Meaning of the Metaphor by John Vandermeer Science & Society Vol. 60, No. 3, Marxism and Ecology (Fall, 1996), pp. 290-306
• The Tragedy of the Commons: twenty-two years later by Feeny D, Berkes F, Mccay BJ, Acheson JM. Hum Ecol. 1990 Mar;18(1):1-19.

Just for fun:

• Public Attitudes to Science 2011

And, now I’m trying to read a new genre of book [See  A Truly New Genre May 3, 2011 By Alexandra Juhasz] -  a video-book – and it is very stressful. Maybe I need that tactile feel of the book in my hand.

I did find an article this morning about students and Kindle use – they weren’t big fans of using textbooks on Kindles. The article states:

The digital text also disrupted a technique called cognitive mapping, in which readers used physical cues, such as the location on the page and the position in the book to find a section of text or even to help retain and recall the information they had read.

I need a real…fat…book!

Luckily, in my reading today, I found a poem that decreased my stress…maybe it will help yours!

The Libraries Didn’t Burn
by Elaine Equi

despite books kindled in electronic flames.

The locket of bookish love
still opens and shuts.

But its words have migrated
to a luminous elsewhere.

Neither completely oral nor written —
a somewhere in between.

Then will oak, willow,
birch, and olive poets return
to their digital tribes —

trees wander back to the forest?

The Association of College & Research Libraries – ACRL 2011 conference was held in Philadelphia, PA March 30- April 2. I attended most sessions with my on-the-cusp Library Administrator hat. There was not much smiling, much less guffawing, in the sessions I attended. If there was a theme – it was assessment. One presenter tried to take the sting out of the word assessment…think of it as “critical consideration,” he said…still, not very smile worthy.

I have pulled the ACRL 2011 papers I want to read from this conference and the list is daunting. I have pages of notes on assessment management systems, from sessions and from vendors. I did learn that embedded librarians are now known as integrated librarians. I want to go back and read everything on IL (Information Literacy) and Reference Services – all the sessions I didn’t attend. And I need to find time to see all of the  ACRL Virtual Conference sessions.

Both keynote speakers, Raj Patel “these are dark times” ; and Jaron Lanier “Google and Facebook are the consumer, we are the product” urged librarians to re-envision libraries to save the world – as one tweet put it – no pressure. I did buy their books:

The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier

Technology at this conference didn’t “WOW” me – but again this was a serious issues conference – in this serious time – and it looked like the “fun stuff” was on the periphery. I didn’t see many QR codes and only used 2 other session twitter hashtags – #acrl2011 #revorevacrl11 -  @KMH_nowinVA.  Though, I heartily agree that according to  PAscibrarian “Caffeine and sugar [act] as elixirs to scholarship.” #acrl2011 and RT @cclibrarian: If you can use “fun” things in a relevant way, great! But I think worrying so much about being “cool” isn’t always useful. #acrl2011. Good to know, as I am seriously uncool. I am disappointed that I didn’t get to bump anyone’s smartphone! I did pass out lots of cards and received many to contact this week.

The highlight of my conference was lunch on Friday with Holly from Webster University in St. Louis at the Reading Terminal Market – Pearl’s Oyster Bar. As Holly and I discussed the friendly midwest and how much I missed it; two ex-Chicago and now Philly residents across the bar from us advised me to embrace East Coast living. That Lobster Bisque I had for lunch was very good – along with the smiles and laughter we shared.

Maybe that was the point. These are serious times and we need to humanize and celebrate the human connections.

I drove to Philly from DC – and got lost in NJ going home. Figure that. Getting from here to there…is hard.

I can’t find a good balance in my life and it is – quite literally – messing with my mind and health.

For others, January is for setting resolutions. For me, it is for getting around to things I didn’t get done last year, like that doctor’s visit. My doctor, kindly asked me “Is your blood pressure always so high?” and “Is this a good weight for your lifestyle.” Neither questions had an answer that made me feel like I was on the right track. Oh, no, I hate making resolutions…but, it looks like they are needed here.

I rationalize that the pace of my work and the long, frustrating commute don’t leave much time for finding the right balance. Family, friends, work, play and reading…oh, and a good meal out every so often…that’s all I need. It shouldn’t be so hard to balance.

Luckily, some people and pieces that I need for balance have been floating around me lately. While  I won’t go so far as to say they have come together,  I am beginning to see a glimmer of what balance may look like. Balance  needs to connect all the people and pieces of my life that are important to me.

I read Will Richardson’s beginning-of-the-new-year blog titled  The Choices We Make. He talked about the “Twitter Effect”. It reminded me of the” eMail”  effect of the early 2000’s. Then we would check our email incessantly to be in touch, in the know, tech cool. Now, we check our “news feeds” on Twitter for the very same reasons. It has more to do with short attentions spans (and let’s admit it, being tech cool) than about reading and thinking more deeply about important topics. I can get caught in a Twitter frenzy throughout the day following links– and it usually makes me feel scattered and disjointed. Often now, I find myself tweeting a link just so I can go back and find it again…if I ever do. Richardson does go on in this post to discuss the number of friends one has. “Friending” as a verb always makes me cringe. A real friend should be cherished – with time, thought and care -  and I’m not sure being a friend in Facebook makes anyone feel special and important.

Using  Twitter as my memory  does allow me to go back and find articles that I want to read – like The Social Animal: How the New Sciences of Human Nature Can Make Sense of a Life by David Brooks.

Help comes from the strangest places. We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows. They are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.

Help comes from the strangest places… luckily for me it comes from words and music, thoughts and ideas. I had the opportunity to listen to a Faculty Round table discussion at The Catholic University of America and was reminded that “to engage in work is charity” and that we should think about putting the” emphasis on the process and not on the end results” and always that “inspiration fuels intellect.” Roger Rosenblatt’s essay And Then What Happened? captures for me the need to write and connect with our fellow human beings. Hence, this blog post and hopefully more frequent ones to come in this new year. (Oh, no that isn’t a resolution, is it?)

In a small way the inspiration that fuels my intellect and all of these connections came this weekend when I attended the National Symphony Orchestra’s performance at the Kennedy Center. Being at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC during the JFK Inauguration 50^th Anniversary was inspiration enough. The concert experience was a once-in-a-lifetime event.  I can’t do the music and the experience justice in words. Suffice it to say that we who attended knew we heard something extraordinary – and I was connected to my mother and mother-in-law in that space through that music -  and I wept at the beauty of the connection. Please read about the performance.

National Symphony Orchestra

It was instructive to hear conductor Christoph Eschenbach, at Saturday’s National Symphony Orchestra program at the Kennedy Center, lavish the same attention to nuance and layered sonorities in Bernstein and Gershwin that he brings to the symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler. Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story” received a reading of rare perception and tonal luster, with a string-heavy balance of almost Ravelian lushness in “Somewhere” and a bracing treatment of the Varese-like riot of percussion in the “Mambo.”

David Brooks uses a scientist character in his essay to remind his protagonist about science and being human.

“I guess I used to think of myself as a lone agent, who made certain choices and established certain alliances with colleagues and friends,” he said. “Now, though, I see things differently. I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.

“I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.”

We didn’t travel this past holiday to see loved ones, but we did Skype family members. Face-to-face through technology is better than a plain phone call. But, when my son paid us a surprise visit in early January, I knew then that Skype could never replace real face-to-face; and you can’t hug on Skype. This age of 140-characters, “friending” from afar and and my work with information and technology can be isolating.  Skype, no matter the length of the call, is never long enough and no substitution for face-to-face connection. Living with  loved ones, forever or for a short visit, gives you time for the big thoughts and the little laughs. The daily connection is what makes us human and happy.

If I am not back to a good balance in my life right this minute, at least I know the pieces are within my grasp and the connections are limited only by miles, my lack of imagination, and my lack of sleep!

“Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.”

NOTE: You will be able to hear the concert from the Kennedy Center: From the Washington Post NSO Gets Contract to Record JFK concerts, new work

What are the metrics of your life? Do they tell the story?

Are we in the story? Have you seen the Scale of the Universe? A little humility is a good thing.

Return on investment, crowd size and election returns are on my mind these days. Along with journal package prices, budgets and bills –lately, these are my daily measures and nightmares. I love graphs and seeing if the representation of numbers tells the story. I have to laugh to look at these depictions of the crowd size at the Rally4Sanity (yes, I was there…lost in a very mild mannered crowd.) It was about the crowd there, as much as it was about the signs. What was the story? The story was – the middle holds. You are not alone.

I was there...somewhere!

I had fun watching Chuck Todd play with his technology during 2010 election coverage (see description of all 2002 election gadget use here) – I miss my SmartBoard (with its Smart Slate.) Technology is fun and frustrating. I can’t count the number of viruses we have had on our work computers these past weeks. Time tracking viruses and cleaning computers is not time well spent!  I am working with my new smartphone (Android) and finding it is taking up way too much of my time learning what all the little symbols mean, and do I need all these apps? I don’t think so…but, wait, I need to try the new twitter app for Android (which one to try?) … no time to tell the story now. Later.

I’m interested to read the latest report on the Blogosphere. Who’s blogging, what’s up with mobile blogging, and are short blogs better blogs? Who has time for everything? Not me, as has become apparent by my lack of blogging – short or long – lately. Though, longer readings like William Blake’s America 2010 by Mark Edmundson tend to stay with me a long time and I think of them often and want to discuss them with people smarter than me.

Do any of these numbers or technology things tell the story of my life? Not really. Do these activities add value to my life? Hmmmm…

I read something from Seth Godin’s blog about the idea of measuring additions to your life (N+1)… or subtractions to your life (N-1) …

N-1

Fred had an inspiring post about the ability to always add one more thing. His old roommate called it N+1. Just when you think there’s no more, you find a little room.

Perhaps it’s worth considering an alternative. N-1. There are tons of things on your to do list, in your portfolio, on your desk. They clamor for attention and so perhaps you compromise things to get them all done. What would happen if you did one fewer thing? What if leaving that off the agenda allowed you to do a world-class job on the rest? What if you repeated N-1 thinking until you found a breakthrough?

Seth Godin

Last month I read only in short snatches before bed. I started a great new book [Great House by Nicole Strauss] but was not enjoying it, much less concentrating on the plot or even noticing the beautiful language of the characters and story.  What was the matter with me? I was a mess. I don’t function well without my reading…long sustained time to read. I had to subtract something from my busy days to add time for reading or I was going to bust.

It is not enough to read the phone/computer screen for hours at a time. It does nothing for me (OK, it does help with work, provides a paycheck and adds links to this blog post.) I need book time to fill my mind and soul. What gets subtracted this week to make time for reading? This subtraction – whatever I decide it might be – will add to my life.

I need a story.

Information can be stress inducing, don’t you think? There can be too much information, or too little information. It can come at you too fast or, sometimes, too frustratingly slow. It can be good, scholarly, peer reviewed information; or very, very biased information. And, maybe, the  most stress inducing factor of all, is the rate of change of information and how we access that information.

I am in the information business at an academic library and the beginning of the Fall 2010 semester is well underway with lots of stress. I tell my engineering first-year students that they need to be project managers of their own information. I should practice what I preach.

I look for guidance and wisdom from others about how to manage my stress and information. CUA colleague, Bruce Rosenstein, posted on 7 Self-Management Tips for the New School Year.  Well, I have already failed miserably on his first tip – maintain your health – with the “I’m back at school” bout of bronchitis. I do agree profoundly about reading and keeping your mind agile with the flow of ideas. Blogging helps me do that. I am always looking for the sense of meaning (while enjoying the ironic idiocy of human endeavors – personal and public!) I would add to Bruce’s list that I like to develop a short list of broad goals to focus on for the semester, so that during the day to day workload, I can always glimpse the bigger picture in the distance. There is that looking for meaning thing again.

I have noticed that stress is, well, everywhere. The CUA Office of Human Resources sponsored a series of “stress management” workshops this past summer. I was too busy to attend – I need to work on that! Last weekend, my pastor’s weekly letter was all about stress. He notes that you should ” … Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.”  This week I am lucky to be working with first-year students who aren’t  jaded yet – and they thought it was fun to find journal articles. [Yet, they are stressed after and between classes because dorm space is tight on campus this Fall. It makes for full libraries, though, which is a good thing!]

I barely scratched the surface with all my classes – teaching them about journal access and databases (most with new interfaces and numerous Web 2.0 tools like RSS and TOC alerts.) And, you try explaining the state of scholarly press and open access movements,  to faculty and students  – there’s some stress!

Information – and the tools to access that information – continue to change at a rapid rate. My RSS aggregator of choice  – Bloglines – is closing down October 1; forcing my move to Google Reader. It  is no easy task to keep up with the information I need for my job.  I am surprised  to read that Twitter is now the news channel of choice. I don’t think that reading tweets is deep enough reading to let the ideas flow. Yet, I wonder if that will change with the news that Twitter is revamping the site to  include media links. I use Twitter for “news feed” – science, libraries, authors, schools and universities, sports – during the day. I also use Twitter to feed my users about new and exciting things (well, I think nanotechnology and books about infrastructure are fun!)  in the CUA Science Libraries. But, I still want to read longer articles from blogs and reports and in-depth analysis, which I find from my RSS feeds. Though, I am a little stressed out reading the new ACRL report Value of Academic Libraries.

This begs the question – are blogs dead? Well, read Thomas Friedman today about blogging and China and see if blogs can be the voice of a people?

From my RSS feeds this week, I like Will Richardson’s thoughtful and subversive blog – here he links to a Smithsonian article “Reading in a Whole New Way”; and Stephen  Downes  linked to a useful post about workplaces and generations and stress.

How’s your stress? What are you focusing on this semester?

Read something fun every day and I bet you will feel better.

[Source: Asking Good Questions – article and image from http://library.sasaustin.org/questioning.php]

Nomenclature for non-Librarians reading this blog:

ALA is the acronym for American Library Association
ACRL – Association of College and Research Libraries, division of ALA
LITA – Library and Information Technology
YALSA – Young Adult Library Services Association
AASL – American Association of School Librarians

2010 ALA Annual Conference in Washington DC – WOW…that was a big – hot – conference [25,444 attendess and temperatures seldom below 95 degrees for the 6 day conference.]  Here is where you will get all the  “good stuff” links wise. I guess you had to be there to actually get the good stuff if the multiple bulging bags of books and the lines in the mail/shipping  center were any indication of getting good stuff. The exhibition area was huge, unwieldly and like another planet without basic provisions like food and water and coffee!  I navigated with due caution (and probably missed out on lots of good stuff – fondly known in Librarian parlance as “swag”. ) I never learned how to do swag in Library school. By Monday afternoon, after attending an author “tea” I did figure out that if I stood in the hall after the talks the publisher reps just handed me books – then I got them signed and I will give them away to deserving homes – after I read them!

It looked to me – a “newbie” first time attender – like the conference was many things to many people. Will Manley saw it this way – book people and machine people.

It was an organizational meeting grounds. I spoke with other Librarians who attended and were on ALA committees and they used much of the times attending ALA meetings. I did sit in on the YALSA  Best Fiction for Young Adults meeting and realized… ah ha, that’s how they pick the best books lists.

The conference was a showcase for best practices in libraries – but I have to say I was somewhat dismayed by most of the Librarians presentation styles. Bad powerpoints abounded. I tried to stick with my division of ALA – ACRL; but, discovered the LITA presentations had much more thought,  content and presentation panache. [More on the best, most thoughtful session of ALA DC 2010 Top Tech Trends soon.] Some intrepid Librarians know that presenting the  message is important and they practice with hilarity at Battledecks!

Be inspired at your conference, seemed to be another theme for me at the ALA Conference. I caught some (but unfortunately, not all) of the big name speakers. Toni Morrison spoke Saturday evening and was quietly eloquent. I did get to hear Mr. Eppo van Nispen tot Sevenaer (Director of DOK Delft – The Most Modern Library in the World) and so appreciated his F^5 approach to design and services. [Stay tuned and I will link my presentation describing this – here, soon] See him  at  TedxRotterdam 2010 here.

I was reminded everywhere during the conference…  Libraries are all about FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY! Librarians are teachers -all the time- and information literacy is a challenge and a calling. But, I always knew that Libraries are all about READING!

And though I attended sessions on Mobile Reference, eBooks, Marketing your Library services, and Tech Trends, as well as, talking and networking with our vendors like a good academic librarian should – I loved the time I got to spend with the authors and editors who were so eloquent and passionate about their books and reading.

Don’t forget Libraries are all about READING!

“There is nothing more beautiful than a beautiful story.”  (Eppo’s father!) ALA DC 2010 was the story of Libraries in all their organizations, contradictions, beauty and necessity.

I learn so much reading blogs. Who thinks reading blogs is declining? I was reading Is Twitter Replacing the RSS Feeder? – while cleaning out my RSS feeds in prep for going being out of the office for five days. If you think blog reading is declining, check out John Dupuis doing great work with blogs and instruction!

I’m trying to catch up on all my work…submitting time sheets, processing new books, finalizing performance reviews and clearing my RSS feeds so I can attend the ALA Annual Conference guilt free. How serendipitous to read this blog entry by Nancy Pearl written by her husband, Joe about a book – Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh- and then to just get up from my desk and find the book in my Physics Library at CUA. So. my RSS feeds and blog reading led me to this book! I love good books and I’m checking this one out. But I won’t be reading it this weekend…I’ll be at ALA.

Nancy Pearl is going to ALA, too!

From the ALA Wiki:

ALA Auditorium Speaker Series

Nancy Pearl with Mary McDonagh Murphy

Saturday, June 26, 8:00 -9:00 am
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird, an American classic, Nancy Pearl will interview Mary McDonagh Murphy, Emmy award-winning filmmaker and author of the upcoming book, Scout, Atticus and Boo: A Celebration of Fify Years of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Nancy Pearl speaks about the pleasures of reading to library and community groups throughout the world and comments on books regularly on NPR’s Morning Edition. She’s the author of Book Crush: For Kids and Teens: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment and Interest; Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment and Reason; and More Book Lust: 1,000 New Reading Recommendations for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason, all published by Sasquatch Books. In 2004, she was awarded the Women’s National Book Association Award, given to ” a living American woman who… has done meritorious work in the world of books beyond the duties or responsibilities of her profession or occupation.” In 1998, Library Journal named her Fiction Reviewer of the Year. She is the model for the Librarian Action Figure. On her monthly television show, Book Lust with Nancy Pearl, she has interviewed authors as diverse as E.L. Doctorow, Ann Patchett and Terry Pratchett.

Sponsored by HarperCollins