Word of the day

Here's some odd words, from Catherine. No real lessons to be learned, just a demonstration that as new words arise, old words fade away. Bumbershoot (1896) is a self-consciously quaint synonym for umbrella, now much better known as the name of the annual Seattle festival of the arts and music. Copasetic (or copacetic)(1919) is another American word, meaning fine, excellent, going just right. It has an equally contested etymology, and is particularly notable for having been used, correctly, by Buzz Aldrin or one of the other guys on the Moon. Both words are used in what Wikipedia describes as "character dialogue." Have a copasetic day.

Companies mean paper

Asked to think about my experience with companies, as I joined the Board of ALIA, I naturally thought of two companies I have been involved in - NetAlert, and CAVAL. The overwhelming impression when thinking of these enterprises is the amount of paper they generate. Every company focuses on board meetings, and these focus on large volumes of paper.

With NetAlert (six meetings a year, voluminous paper) a large chunk of a room at home is filled with the papers, after more than seven years - December 1999 onwards, to June 2007.

The funny thing about the paper is that the really contentious matters - gossip, plotting, contested decisions - are transacted in other ways, by telephone or in person or by long email exchanges, They don't make it into the paper chase.

What does make it is all the ancillary documents - major reports, multiple versions of planning documents, and heaps more. Companies around the edges of the public sector are risk averse - not as risk averse as the public sector itself, but keen to leave matter undocumented. Other than the plotting and chat, of course.

Word of the day

Todays word is infoglut - thank you, Anne. I guess we can all work out what this means, and, indeed, it isn't all that new. The word has been around at least ten years. This reference is called into being today from Bill Harris's nicely named blog, Dubious Quality. Not that Bill is negative about the infoglut - he says "I've said this before, but this has to be, by far, the coolest time in history to be alive." Perhaps the infoglut needs to be renamed infocornucopia. You read it first here. (Actually, not: someone has speculatively registered www.infoglut.com).

Librarians watching librarians: our image again

Rebecca has pointed out the ABC website which provides information about the forthcoming ABC comedy, The Librarians. Take a quick look. "The Librarians" will have an impact on how people see us, and already librarians of my acquaintance are looking definitely askance. Others are embracing the idea - some people at the ALIA Library Week gig last night were suggesting we have a celebration on the set.

On the other hand an ALIA newsletter suggests " With a plot like that, the series seems set to tackle some outdated librarian stereotypes. Why not break some of these stereotypes by joining other ALIA groups in planning big screen viewings in local pubs."

"It seems our colleagues are a little worried about the harm the series might do to our image", Rebecca suggests. "Perhaps a nice blog post about it will calm their nerves?" I doubt that, Rebecca.

Unfortunately we librarians are victims of stereotypes which do not serve our interests well. But are we victims? Rebecca suggests that the ABC wouldn't have such a marvellously comic stereotype to work with if some librarians didn't insist on fitting it so well.

Kevin Dudeney, whose blog is linked from this one, has had a few posts lately about Youtube offerings regarding librarians, and I am afraid that they don't offer much comfort. Their main value is to those seeking to define the stereotypes more definitively. There are plenty of short videos shot with backdrops of books arranged on shelves, of standard library circulation operations, and of librarians behind desks. In the library where I work, however, only about 15% of customer document uses (that is, the ones we can count) are loans of physical items such as books and DVDs. Most of the rest are digital and online.

Have a look at The Angry Librarian from tv12673 on Youtube - just do a title search. It is wonderful. It is clear that the librarian has much more of a problem than the customer, and it is great the way the librarian's evident problems build through the short video. Too many of us are more than a little worried, but we do need to look at ourselves, too.

One thought is that we might try to define and detail the stereotypes a bit. Lets talk about them. And see if we can find some stereotypes we like and live them. Some of the new library stereotypes which have been promoted have lacked some credibility, to my mind. What would be credible, and helpful? What do people have in mind when they say, as they quite often do: "I think we need a librarian for this job?"

Who is interested in joining yet another ALIA group, Friends of Library Stereotypes?

Word of the day

Todays word is twopointopia. Dana came across this in Annoyed Librarian, a blog. Blogging on 1 May, Annoyed Librarian said "I thought I'd made that one up, but I Googled it and someone beat me to it." Twopointopia is the new world that will be created by Library 2.0. And she is right - only 64 references in Google to the word, so you are in right at the beginning. Annoyed Librarian is using the word more, too, describing her part of the world as "not one of these fast-paced, post-modern twopointopias" in her May 23 post. For all those people who use the term Web 2.0, I'm afraid you are being parodied. And the same goes for those who use the term Library 2.0, only more so.

Word of the day

Indra suggests glanceability, from Lorcan Dempsey's blog. Like any useful neologism it has already leapt well beyond its origins way back in 2006 in an article on glanceable design by Matthews, Forlizzi and Rohrbach. New words of value, like this one, spread quickly, and their meanings start to evolve almost immediately.

The word is defined by Tony Hirst as "the ability to look at a screen and capture the information you require at a glance." So glanceability is VERY important. Lorcan also refers to Matthews et al who define the word as enabling "users to understand information with low cognitive effort", and further: "Glanceability refers to how quickly and easily the visual design conveys information after the user is paying attention to the display."

For librarians and their friends, Lorcan's library-specific conclusion is predictable but important - library website "require quite a bit of cognitive effort to figure out what is available where as they present a thin guiding layer wrapped around a resource fragmented by legacy categories." Not glanceable at all, really.

Librarians and Second Life

Educational technologists seem to have a strong leaning towards Second Life, the bizarre online phenomenon which now means so much to so many people - 6,619,620, the site says, as of today. Is the same thing true of librarians (who sometimes bear an uncanny resemblance to the ed tech people)?

I have to admit that my first impulse (and second, too) is to see this as extremely retrograde. Functioning smoothly in the world they are actually standing in seems to be something which many librarians (among others) have yet to achieve, and a second life might seem a lower priority than this one.

However, Kathryn Greenhill has a great post headed Ten Very Good Reasons Why Your Librarians Should Be In Second Life. Read the ten reasons, and then read Kathryn's next post which offers six bad reasons, and also links to Walt Crawford on the topic - one of four million ghost avatars in Second Life, as he puts it. There is more than meets the eye.

What do you think? If people keep raising the subject, I'm going to have to have a look at Second Life myself.