To be honest, I was a subscriber of the "Reference is Dead" theory before I took the reference course this semester. Part of the reasons may be that I was not a person who would ask any question to any librarian in person in a library. Moreover, at least in China (and maybe partly in the US), the low usage of reference service in libraries is a fact.
It's very interesting that in last week's #libchat discussion on Twitter, a question "Is reference dead?" was raised up. I believe saying anything is dead is hard, because "being dead" has many possible meanings, which must be defined before it makes any sense. For example, when we say "print books are dead", do we mean printed books are obsolete (which is certain not the case), or will be totally obsolete, or will be largely obsolete, or all the print books are or will be somehow destroyed literally? (And in this case, neither of the possible explanations may not be accurate enough, which is another story though.) And in the "reference is dead" case, too, there may be different definitions of this expression, from no one is using reference, to reference is not longer sustainable for libraries, to reference is not relevant to the members, etc.
But what was really interesting about the #libchat discussion last week is that, it showed how different libraries are or could be in everything. The reference services can be either very popular (so popular that marketing is not even necessary at all), or seasonal, or totally obsolete and then was cancelled. The diversity between different kinds of libraries and individual libraries, which comes from the combination of the different ways the communities and the librarians perceive the libraries and services the libraries offer, is another difficulty for such statements about something being dead.
What makes thing even harder to be predicted is the larger landscape, which I dare not dig deeper in this post. But just like Keri said, "Ready reference is pretty much dead", certainly, because of Google and other social media platforms. However, after taking this course, I do realize that there are some values in the library reference service, regardless of the larger landscape and the future of library reference.
Maybe the biggest value of library reference work that I failed to realize is its representation of the human side of the library. Technology can be too cold and intimidating to library members. In order to be a community center, the human side of the library cannot be more emphasized. After all, not everyone is becoming a Cyborg.
Still another value that is represented in the library reference work is librarians' information expertise. We have the abilities to find, evaluate and use information effectively, we have the vision to use these abilities to help other people and improve the world in a proper way. That's why we are the supermen/superwomen in the information world. That's something we can and should be proud of ourselves. That is our identity no matter we are doing what work in what environment, library reference being alive or dead, libraries being alive or dead. That's why Dave Lankes said "An empty room with a librarian is a library."
I really love the final assignment of this course to do a pathfinder of the topic we are interested in. I kind of regret that I chose a topic that is too academic, "historical anthropology", because it seems that non-academic topic may be more helpful and relevant to the world. As a library student, this assignment reminds me that being a librarian means combining the information skills with the interests I have and share all these products to everyone. Pathfinder is one and only one of the means to do that. But that, being a librarian, is awesome!
Sunday, December 9, 2012
How Libraries Respond to Hurricane #Sandy or the #Election: A List from #IST511
This is a summary of the 511 class in November 13th. In the class, the different assignment groups talked about what they found for the assignment of "How Libraries respond to Hurricane Sandy or the Election". Below are the list talked about in the class:
Kudos to all the classmates in 511!
Hurricane Sandy:
- Offering power, heat and Internet
- One awesome example is the Princeton Public Library in NJ. People uploaded videos to Youtube; or read this report from School Library Journal.
- Offering entertainment
- Little Free Library after Hurricane Sandy
- For example, this report on BoingBoing talks about a FLF in NJ.
- Collaborating with FEMA to offer assistance to the victims
- For example, in Queens Public Library or Cape May County Library
- Offering storytime
- A really awesome example is from Queens Public Library
- Donating food
- Bookmobile
- An example comes from Brooklyn Public Library who offered bookmobiles to the affected area.
Election:
- Library card as voting ID
- For example, in Memphis, TN
- Having panels on voting issues
- An example is the Towson branch of the Baltimore County Public Library
- As a part of the "Searching for Democracy: A Public Conversation about the Constitution" Project in San Diego Public Library, local author Mark E. Smith talked about why we need to stop voting
- Pathfinder
- Political Cartoon
- Library of Congress' political cartoon exhibition
- Mock election
- One really serious example is the mock election conducted by The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
Kudos to all the classmates in 511!
Saturday, November 10, 2012
What I learnt from #NYLA12 (part I)
Due to a number of reasons, I failed to publish my interviews during the conference.
Below is a piece of interview (in two parts) I conducted on Friday morning, in which some of my fellow students, including Mia Breitkopf, Kusturie Moodley and Nick Berry, talked about what they learnt from the "eBooks and Beyond" panel given by George Needham. The central topic of their discussion is about a point during the presentation that whether US LIS education should come back to the 4-year bachelor model, which was adopted many years ago, based on Ken Haycock and Brooke Sheldon's The Portable MLIS.
This model is actually adopted by South Africa (where Kusturie comes from) and China. So you can hear Kusturie's description about how this model is implemented in her country from this interview.
Interview part I:
http://yourlisten.com/channel/content/16926253/LIS_education
Interview part II:
http://yourlisten.com/channel/content/16926254/LIS_Education_2
Below is a piece of interview (in two parts) I conducted on Friday morning, in which some of my fellow students, including Mia Breitkopf, Kusturie Moodley and Nick Berry, talked about what they learnt from the "eBooks and Beyond" panel given by George Needham. The central topic of their discussion is about a point during the presentation that whether US LIS education should come back to the 4-year bachelor model, which was adopted many years ago, based on Ken Haycock and Brooke Sheldon's The Portable MLIS.
This model is actually adopted by South Africa (where Kusturie comes from) and China. So you can hear Kusturie's description about how this model is implemented in her country from this interview.
Interview part I:
http://yourlisten.com/channel/content/16926253/LIS_education
Interview part II:
http://yourlisten.com/channel/content/16926254/LIS_Education_2
In the following post(s), I will talk about what I learnt from this conference.
Monday, November 5, 2012
My Plan for #NYLA12
NYLA (New York Library Association) 2012 Annual Conference's coming!
Below are the events/panels I may attend:
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
You can find the information of all the sessions at: http://www.nyla.org/images/nyla/2012%20Conference/NYLA_Conference_2012-Promo_Brochure.pdf. And the hashtag of the conference is #NYLA12.
Moreover, I will interview a number of participants to share with everyone what they learn so far. Hope those who cannot present can follow up the conference by this series of interview.
So, if you will attend the conference, talk to me there! If you cannot, follow me on Twitter or this blog.
Below are the events/panels I may attend:
Thursday
- 9:00 a.m. Money Matters: Financial Education for Public and Staff
- 9:00 a.m. Prison Libraries Supporting Education
- 4:00 p.m. Keynote
- 6:00 p.m. iSchool Reception at Mouzon House
Friday
- 8:00 a.m. SMART Membership Meeting & Flash Talks
- 8:00 a.m. Improv, Comedy, and Creativity at Work
- 9:30 a.m. Pecha Kucha Presentations
- 11:00 a.m. Bibliometric 101
- 2:15 p.m. Emerging Trends in Libraries
- 2:15 p.m. “Instant Printing”: The Espresso Book Machine
- 3:45 p.m. How iPads Changed the Library
Saturday
- 8:00 a.m. Design on a Dime
- 9:30 a.m. What’s Next eBooks Chapter and Verse
- 11:00 a.m. Special Libraries You Never Knew Existed
- 11:00 a.m. Mobile Websites for Dummies
You can find the information of all the sessions at: http://www.nyla.org/images/nyla/2012%20Conference/NYLA_Conference_2012-Promo_Brochure.pdf. And the hashtag of the conference is #NYLA12.
Moreover, I will interview a number of participants to share with everyone what they learn so far. Hope those who cannot present can follow up the conference by this series of interview.
So, if you will attend the conference, talk to me there! If you cannot, follow me on Twitter or this blog.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
What I Learnt from #IST605's Library Tour
One assignment in this semester's IST605 is that each of the students visit four libraries (they could be anywhere, but not imaginary) and write a review for each of the libraries. There is a limited scope of the reviews, but basically you can write anything about the "librariness" of the libraries.
You can read my writing online, however, I am not particularly proud of mine. One of the most important reasons is that, compared to my initial enthusiasm, I didn't have a lot of time to actually do the tours, especially given my obsession with routine to do the same thing every day.
However, even just chose a number of really easy targets, I still learnt something about US libraries. As I mentioned before, I had some imaginations of what libraries in the US were like when I was in China. For example, I always imagined US libraries were, highly professional, well-managed, quite noisy, more bookless, etc, most of which are just the opposite to what's happening in China. Well, after the library tours, I realize that something are real for sure, but something are just my imagination.
Maybe the deepest impression I have is that, the libraries are really not that "bookless"; all the libraries I have visited in the US are still somewhat book-centered. Like I mentioned before, I am not saying that book-centered libraries are not good, but I am disappointed to see there are so many books in the libraries, which occupy the spaces that can be used in a more meaningful way otherwise. So it makes me thinking that reinventing a library is never easy, but it is extremely interesting.
In last week's 605, Jill asked an interesting question, what would you include in your library if you were designing/redesigning it? There were a lot of reasonable questions. However, I was thinking that there were so many factors to consider that we can never give the answer so easily. Especially when a library is renovated, one has a whole infrastructure based on which the new library will be constructed. For example, it's almost impossible to change the stacks of Carnegie Library. So what would you do?
Moreover, what the library will look like is highly dependent on what it looks like and how the community perceives the library at present. In short, one actually needs so much more information to make an informed decision. Even though I hope that I am not overstating the value of assessment, because sometimes, grabbing a random idea and try it is something worth trying.
The last impression I have during the tours is that libraries are having totally different policies in terms of noise.
On the one hand, Bird Library is the noisiest library I have ever visited. This is an especially strong cultural shock for someone coming from China, because there is a huge pressure for everyone not to speak nearly in all Chinese libraries. Libraries are supposed to be quiet there. As a result, it's interesting that the percentage of Chinese students in Bird Library's quiet zone is actually much higher than other areas. For myself, I am bothered by all the noises as a library member; however, I think it's good as a library student.
It's equally interesting to see all the signs in Onondaga County Public Library telling people not to make phone calls (or eat and drink) in the library. Actually I am more surprised to see cases like this than those mentioned above, especially when there are so many excellent examples of how libraries divide zones to separate people with different needs, like University of Houston Library. Bird Library does an decent job, but I don't think the policy is implemented well enough. Maybe it's impossible to stop people from talking in the quiet zone if you give them the right to talk in other areas in the library. So I am actually very interested to know more examples about the consequences of such policies.
Just like what Jill said in class, getting familiar with all the libraries is important for all librarians. Library tour should be an habit all librarians have.
Off the topic, Robert Dawson, a photographer, and his son, Walker, have been visiting public libraries across the US since 1994. Their blog is a must read if you want to know more about what libraries are like across the country.
You can read my writing online, however, I am not particularly proud of mine. One of the most important reasons is that, compared to my initial enthusiasm, I didn't have a lot of time to actually do the tours, especially given my obsession with routine to do the same thing every day.
However, even just chose a number of really easy targets, I still learnt something about US libraries. As I mentioned before, I had some imaginations of what libraries in the US were like when I was in China. For example, I always imagined US libraries were, highly professional, well-managed, quite noisy, more bookless, etc, most of which are just the opposite to what's happening in China. Well, after the library tours, I realize that something are real for sure, but something are just my imagination.
Maybe the deepest impression I have is that, the libraries are really not that "bookless"; all the libraries I have visited in the US are still somewhat book-centered. Like I mentioned before, I am not saying that book-centered libraries are not good, but I am disappointed to see there are so many books in the libraries, which occupy the spaces that can be used in a more meaningful way otherwise. So it makes me thinking that reinventing a library is never easy, but it is extremely interesting.
In last week's 605, Jill asked an interesting question, what would you include in your library if you were designing/redesigning it? There were a lot of reasonable questions. However, I was thinking that there were so many factors to consider that we can never give the answer so easily. Especially when a library is renovated, one has a whole infrastructure based on which the new library will be constructed. For example, it's almost impossible to change the stacks of Carnegie Library. So what would you do?
(FYI, this picture was not taken from the Carnegie Library in Syracuse University. Picture from: http://www.library.gatech.edu/gtbuildings/GTVA-222.htm)
Moreover, what the library will look like is highly dependent on what it looks like and how the community perceives the library at present. In short, one actually needs so much more information to make an informed decision. Even though I hope that I am not overstating the value of assessment, because sometimes, grabbing a random idea and try it is something worth trying.
The last impression I have during the tours is that libraries are having totally different policies in terms of noise.
On the one hand, Bird Library is the noisiest library I have ever visited. This is an especially strong cultural shock for someone coming from China, because there is a huge pressure for everyone not to speak nearly in all Chinese libraries. Libraries are supposed to be quiet there. As a result, it's interesting that the percentage of Chinese students in Bird Library's quiet zone is actually much higher than other areas. For myself, I am bothered by all the noises as a library member; however, I think it's good as a library student.
It's equally interesting to see all the signs in Onondaga County Public Library telling people not to make phone calls (or eat and drink) in the library. Actually I am more surprised to see cases like this than those mentioned above, especially when there are so many excellent examples of how libraries divide zones to separate people with different needs, like University of Houston Library. Bird Library does an decent job, but I don't think the policy is implemented well enough. Maybe it's impossible to stop people from talking in the quiet zone if you give them the right to talk in other areas in the library. So I am actually very interested to know more examples about the consequences of such policies.
Just like what Jill said in class, getting familiar with all the libraries is important for all librarians. Library tour should be an habit all librarians have.
Off the topic, Robert Dawson, a photographer, and his son, Walker, have been visiting public libraries across the US since 1994. Their blog is a must read if you want to know more about what libraries are like across the country.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Notes on LJ & SLJ 2012 Library Ebook Usage Reports
I am glad to read LJ & SLJ 2012 Library Ebook Usage Reports. I wrote down some facts that especially impressed me when I read the "Academic Library" and "Public Library" parts. (see below)
An impression I had about the general US library eBook market is that eBook is a much more urgent reality for public libraries than for academic libraries. I am really surprised to see the collection and circulation numbers in public libraries this year, which are increasing in a much faster speed than I expected. (Circulation number from 11,000 last year to 44,000 this year, WOW!) Another difference here is public awareness, low level of awareness is a bigger problem for academic libraries.
But on the other hand, it's interesting to see that eBooks represent a higher percentage of acquisition budgets in academic libraries than public libraries. I am not sure how much of the difference can be explained by the limited budgets of public libraries. But clearly, budget is a huge issue in a broader term.
For library eBooks, I cannot agree more with a comment by Professor Dave Lankes, that publishers will not sell eBooks to us just because we complain. We should actually do something more constructive.
Like my previous post mentioned, OA is definitely something all libraries must participate in unity as soon as possible. Some libraries are adopting the eBook model developed by Douglas County Public Library, but more libraries should join, because it ensures that libraries own the eBooks rather than just subscribing them. Moreover, libraries should participate the campaigns on Unglue.It to unglue eBooks to public domain. It doesn't take each participants a lot of money; but if more people/libraries can join, we will definitely have more free resources in the future.
My note:
Academic Library:
Public Library:
An impression I had about the general US library eBook market is that eBook is a much more urgent reality for public libraries than for academic libraries. I am really surprised to see the collection and circulation numbers in public libraries this year, which are increasing in a much faster speed than I expected. (Circulation number from 11,000 last year to 44,000 this year, WOW!) Another difference here is public awareness, low level of awareness is a bigger problem for academic libraries.
But on the other hand, it's interesting to see that eBooks represent a higher percentage of acquisition budgets in academic libraries than public libraries. I am not sure how much of the difference can be explained by the limited budgets of public libraries. But clearly, budget is a huge issue in a broader term.
For library eBooks, I cannot agree more with a comment by Professor Dave Lankes, that publishers will not sell eBooks to us just because we complain. We should actually do something more constructive.
Like my previous post mentioned, OA is definitely something all libraries must participate in unity as soon as possible. Some libraries are adopting the eBook model developed by Douglas County Public Library, but more libraries should join, because it ensures that libraries own the eBooks rather than just subscribing them. Moreover, libraries should participate the campaigns on Unglue.It to unglue eBooks to public domain. It doesn't take each participants a lot of money; but if more people/libraries can join, we will definitely have more free resources in the future.
My note:
Academic Library:
- There are no dramatic changes in this field after 2010. And the relationship between vendors and libraries are not more contentious.
- EBooks represent 9.6% of academic libraries acquisition budgets; and participants predict that the number will increase to 19.5% by 2017.
- 83% of the institutions say they purchase eBooks of "perpetual access" (which may or may not mean that the library own the eBook); 71% choose "subscription".
- The percentage of institutions which are using PDA increase from 16% two years ago to 31% in this survey.
- 52% of the participants identify low perception as the barrier to user eBook access, which has been lower since 2010. But 50% of the participants say that users prefer print, which has been increasing after 2010.
Public Library:
- The mean number of eBooks offered by libraries increase from 4,350 last year to 10,000 this year, while circulation increase from 11,000 last year to 44,000 this year.
- EBook reader (90%) is the dominating device used by library members to read eBooks borrowed from public libraries; tablet (66%) is the second most used device. 24% of the public libraries lend eBook reader for home use.
- Physical barriers are the most important barriers to eBook access, like the long time to wait and limited number of eBooks available.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
"What if they don't care about the library?"
"What if they don't care about library?" For me, this is one of the biggest questions of Participatory Librarianship/New Librarianship.
Based on my old America/China dichotomy, American libraries shouldn't have this problem, because libraries here have a much bigger user base. But after I came here, I realized that this was actually a problem here. I even heard this question in IST511 given by Professor Lankes.
But even so, this is a larger problem in China.
I heard a lot about how Chinese people don't care about libraries, public or academic ones. For example, some people just complain about why the libraries cannot offer some very specific resources, which, in fact, are offered by these libraries. This case is far from the worst. What's worse is that a huge number of people have no idea what a library is; they come to the libraries to buy books. Or worse, they don't know anything about a library.
Chinese libraries are doing marketing, in various ways. But even the best examples may not work effectively, because, guess what, people don't care. That's what I heard from some librarians from Tsinghua University Library, which is one of the best libraries in China and just won the 10th IFLA International Marketing Award earlier this year. Moreover, a large number of Chinese libraries are using Sina Weibo as a way to promote the libraries. Except for few ones, most of these libraries are suffering from either "echo chamber effect" or meaninglessly few followers. In this term, I definitely agree with Dave that marketing itself cannot make a difference.
Back to 511. In class, when one of my classmates asked Dave what if library members don't care about the library. I think Dave made a good point that we should try to find a way to make them care, either by working harder, or by finding what they need or care about, beyond libraries. So here comes the boundary of 511, since it's only about the worldview rather than any real world skills needed by a librarian, I still don't know how to actually make members care, but at least I know there is a direction that may work. That's why I look forward to the "Library Planning, Marketing, and Assessment" class next semester.
Based on my old America/China dichotomy, American libraries shouldn't have this problem, because libraries here have a much bigger user base. But after I came here, I realized that this was actually a problem here. I even heard this question in IST511 given by Professor Lankes.
But even so, this is a larger problem in China.
I heard a lot about how Chinese people don't care about libraries, public or academic ones. For example, some people just complain about why the libraries cannot offer some very specific resources, which, in fact, are offered by these libraries. This case is far from the worst. What's worse is that a huge number of people have no idea what a library is; they come to the libraries to buy books. Or worse, they don't know anything about a library.
Chinese libraries are doing marketing, in various ways. But even the best examples may not work effectively, because, guess what, people don't care. That's what I heard from some librarians from Tsinghua University Library, which is one of the best libraries in China and just won the 10th IFLA International Marketing Award earlier this year. Moreover, a large number of Chinese libraries are using Sina Weibo as a way to promote the libraries. Except for few ones, most of these libraries are suffering from either "echo chamber effect" or meaninglessly few followers. In this term, I definitely agree with Dave that marketing itself cannot make a difference.
Back to 511. In class, when one of my classmates asked Dave what if library members don't care about the library. I think Dave made a good point that we should try to find a way to make them care, either by working harder, or by finding what they need or care about, beyond libraries. So here comes the boundary of 511, since it's only about the worldview rather than any real world skills needed by a librarian, I still don't know how to actually make members care, but at least I know there is a direction that may work. That's why I look forward to the "Library Planning, Marketing, and Assessment" class next semester.
Friday, October 26, 2012
"Death of Library", a Revisit
(Picture from: http://www.agrav.net/gallery/v/travel/Melbourne/Sculpture+out+the+front+of+State+Library.jpg.html)
I love this sculpture outside the State Library of Victoria, Australia. It always reminds me that the threats faced by each libraries are real and potentially vital.
Even after I bought the theory of Dave that we should not talk about "save the library" any more, I still think these two points are not totally contradictory. We can be positive and awesome, yet we must know all the real problems our libraries are having and try to solve them. It's my "optimist pessimism" (or "pessimist optimism" if you like).
Good weekend, everyone!
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Kevin Dames on Library Pirate Paradigm
As the last session of the "Lawyers, Librarians, and Pirates" conference (hashtag: #unysla) organized by Upstate New York Chapter of SLA, K. Matthew Dames, who is currently the Copyright & Information Policy Adviser in Syracuse University, gave an insightful yet informative presentation about copyright, the construct of policy, the shift of paradigms as well as how libraries can survive in such an environment.
By tracing the US history since 1970s, Mr. Dames stated that after intellectual property replaced manufacturing as the foundation of the US economy, intellectual actually took the form of traditional property, namely, intellectual property became something that can be owned and controlled exclusively, which is still the case nowadays. In order to gain a bigger market share across the world, American businesses and government constructed the idea of pirate and push the concept to other countries, which resulted the effect that is called "normalization of copyright laws" by the presenter.
On the other hand, the culture in the library is characterized as free and as transparent as possible. So the presenter identifies the conflicts between the piracy model as well as the free model in the libraries. Even though the side of libraries seems to win in recent events like Cambridge University Press v. Georgia State University, Authors Guild v. HathiTrust as well as Random House's recent claim that libraries own their eBooks, it is clear that the distribution chain of digital contents doesn't necessarily include any middleman, libraries being one of them; and what's more, middlemen are actually being killed in the market.
For Mr. Dames, since the reformation of copyright law is almost impossible based on his observation, the only way library can survive in the market, or even reverse the market, is to adopt the Open Access model. But since the future of Open Access is totally open, and it's almost certain to come in the future, recently, Copyright Clearance Center are helping publishers to transform from traditional publishing models to Open Access model, because publishers understand that, the only way to predict the future is to create it, which is exactly what libraries should do in order to play a bigger role in tomorrow's world of digital content.
Another point Mr. Dames made is that libraries have the furthest distance away from publishers, however, they are also the nearest to library members in the chain. As a result, libraries should figure out how to better serve the members. And moreover, libraries should become publishers themselves, not only in order to take control of the contents, but also to become more familiar with the general process of publishing.
QR code: a short pathfinder for #605thurs
LibSuccess Wiki's "QR Code" page: http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=QR_Codes
I always think I am a fan of new technologies (I am becoming less so, btw), so after hearing about the fact that QR codes were being used by some libraries in 2010, the "QR Code" entry in LibSuccess Wiki was the first place where I got a lot of information about how QR codes are actually used in libraries.
Meredith Farkas. (2011, October 28). QR Codes Rock the Library on Your Phone. Sports. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/librarianmer/qr-codes-rock-the-library-on-your-phone
Meredith is also the creator of the aforementioned LibSuccess Wiki. (Her blog is really awesome, BTW.) This presentation offers how libraries are using QR codes in a systematical way.
Michael J. Whitchurch. (2011). QR Codes and Library Engagement. Retrieved October 24, 2012, from http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Oct-11/OctNov11_Whitchurch.html
I always think I am a fan of new technologies (I am becoming less so, btw), so after hearing about the fact that QR codes were being used by some libraries in 2010, the "QR Code" entry in LibSuccess Wiki was the first place where I got a lot of information about how QR codes are actually used in libraries.
Meredith Farkas. (2011, October 28). QR Codes Rock the Library on Your Phone. Sports. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/librarianmer/qr-codes-rock-the-library-on-your-phone
Meredith is also the creator of the aforementioned LibSuccess Wiki. (Her blog is really awesome, BTW.) This presentation offers how libraries are using QR codes in a systematical way.
Michael J. Whitchurch. (2011). QR Codes and Library Engagement. Retrieved October 24, 2012, from http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Oct-11/OctNov11_Whitchurch.html
Power to the Patron Q&A: BYU’s Michael Whitchurch on Mobile Trends in Libraries - The Digital Shift. (2011, November 10).The Digital Shift. Retrieved October 24, 2012, from http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2011/11/mobile/power-to-the-patron-qa-byus-michael-whitchurch-on-mobile-trends-in-libraries/
Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library did a great job to implement QR codes in the library and share their experiences of these projects.
They used QR codes to conduct a library audio tour and to reserve learning rooms. The results indicated that the second function was used much more than the first. Visibility as well as user needs are the major reasons of the differences.
Because when the library conducted the QR codes projects, the penetration of cellphones on the campus was only 14%, it's inevitable that QR codes could not be very popular (maybe it is still the case today). What impressed me was that the library learnt a lot from the "failure", for example, using a LibGuides page to offer QR codes instructions (this page cannot be found anymore), making QR codes more beautiful to attract students and other suggestions are mentioned in the resources. Also, it is important to think how to use technologies to add value to the library members as well as tracking the usage of these technologies.
Failure itself is not bad at all. It's a true failure if we cannot learn anything from the past. Also, since using QR codes in the library is basically for free, the library won't lose a lot anyway.
There are also some practical guidelines for libraries to consider when they are using QR codes. David Fiander's blog post is a short but useful one. Using mobile friendly website, offering wifi in the spots where the library offers QR codes, using short URLs to make QR codes more user- and machine-readable are the most heavily discussed topics.
14 Million Americans Scanned QR or Bar Codes on their Mobile Phones in June 2011. (2011, August 12).comScore, Inc. Retrieved October 24, 2012, from http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2011/8/14_Million_Americans_Scanned_QR_or_Bar_Codes_on_their_Mobile_Phones_in_June_2011
Report: QR code use rising in unexpected ways | Articles | Home. (2012, August 17). Retrieved October 24, 2012, from http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/Report_QR_code_use_rising_in_unexpected_ways_12422.aspx
These are only two of the reports about usage of QR codes outside the library world. However, the decision made by the library about a specific technology is sometimes totally dependent on the bigger-world scenario.
According to these reports, the usage of QR codes has been increasing since 2011. However, the increase of number sometimes doesn't mean too much. In the first report, .comScore reported that, in 2011, even after a huge increase, the total number of the people who scanned QR codes in their cellphones in June 2011 only represented 6.2% of all American mobile users. Is it worthy using a technology only used by such a small fraction of people?
It's good to know that the number of people who know about or use QR codes is still increasing in 2012. But I am not sure whether the number can ever reach the critical mass or not. I don't want to predict the future -- librarians should be open to the future though. But I totally understand why some technologists don't think QR code has a bright future, for example, this "implementingqrcodesinlibraries.org" made by Aaron Schmidt is a perfect example. In principle, I don't think any technology requiring people to install an extra app can be very popular, not to mention that it can only be used on smart phones.
One more point is that, how many of you feel it embarrassing to stop and scan a QR codes on the street? I sometimes do.
Any ideas about using QR codes in libraries? Please share with me!
Any ideas about using QR codes in libraries? Please share with me!
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Some ramdom thoughts after this week's #ist616 class
Notes: below are some of my notes in today's IST616 class (Resources Organization and Management) and a little bit of explanations of these pieces of notes:
1. shelving can be improved anyway -- to be not so intimidating or even win the members to use the resources.
As proved by a lot of cases, by offering graphic category signs, rather than the numbers or character-number combinations, library classification can be better understood by library members. "To win the members to use the resources" as mentioned by someone in the class is a beautiful vision.
2. how classification can be beneficial to the community -- by user behavior assessment?
As mentioned in Twitter, my central interest/concern toward cataloging (and classification) is how library cataloging can be more relevant to the library members. In terms of this, you can say that graphic display of categories is a way to make cataloging more relevant; but I feel it's not "good enough". I love the idea of some school librarians to design a classification which is more consistent with the curriculum in the school. This is a perfect example that cataloging can be relevant with the local community. It may not be easy, but it's definitely worthy trying.
Someone in the class said that DDC numbers, by large, were to be used to locate resources rather than to be understood. For me, it's an assumption, and a very dubious one. "Objective users needs assessment" (as put by Marie) is important in this term. But I still doubt how people can perceive their own needs toward library catalog. When I was a cataloger in China, I used to conduct a user needs survey about the OPAC of the library. The most surprising finding was not how awful our OPAC was. It was the fact that a lot of library members did not even use our OPAC! Since we haven't offered print catalog for many years, I wonder how people can find resources (at least effectively). Sure, the library changed a much better OPAC recently, but it's extremely hard to change people's behaviors.
3. what about having the idea that library classification is just to spot the resources
Library classification are still mainly used for physical resources. And since physical resources are becoming less important in all kinds of libraries (academic much more than public though), is it OK to maintain the current usage of classification in physical libraries, and wait for its death? (Sure, classification has a bright future to be used by Internet.)
4. How people find resources in different locations, say, in google and bookstores
Library member cannot find resourced effectively in libraries, which may or may not be because of the current cataloging and classification system. However, as someone said, people cannot find information effectively in bookstores and on the Internet! So what does it need to be a good library discovery mechanism in this term?
5. There should be a way to incorporate user's classification, but is it possible?
One random idea I have is that, library organizes a tag day (or week) in which library encourages members to make tags to library collections they think are relevant to a certain topic (for example, Halloween in this month). And libraries display all the tagged resources in a place to increase the exposure of the collections.
Tag is a dilemma for libraries. Most of the libraries are lack of a big enough member base. However, without this member base, it's hard to form a real online community, since the rate of active members is basically the same in nearly all kinds of websites.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
A conversation about LIS education and library practices
The relationship between LIS education and library practices (what the relationship is, what the relationship should be, et al.) is one of the most heavily discussed topics in this field.
Andy Woodworth's blog post "Ten Things You Won’t Find On Your LIS Class Syllabus" is the last article I have ever read and made me think a lot about this topic. You can say that I have been thinking about the gaps between LIS education and the every day practices until now. And this blog post is kind of a brief reflection on this topic. In his post, Andy offered a lot of his suggestions to LIS students about the aspects that LIS education fails to cover, for example, the "new vs. old librarians" meme, many of which are very interesting in the light of New Librarianship.
Several days ago, I posted this question on Facebook. My question was:
Andy Woodworth's blog post "Ten Things You Won’t Find On Your LIS Class Syllabus" is the last article I have ever read and made me think a lot about this topic. You can say that I have been thinking about the gaps between LIS education and the every day practices until now. And this blog post is kind of a brief reflection on this topic. In his post, Andy offered a lot of his suggestions to LIS students about the aspects that LIS education fails to cover, for example, the "new vs. old librarians" meme, many of which are very interesting in the light of New Librarianship.
Several days ago, I posted this question on Facebook. My question was:
There is definitely a gap between library science education and every day practices. But what's that?A number of replies were received, including:
- Business/financial training
- Management
- Actual hands on practice
- Conversations/collaboration with practitioners and marketing
- There is a disconnection with what the field actually needs right now
- Community engagement/public affairs
From this list, you can see the inputs from both library students and library practitioners. You can say that all these ideas are very important. I interviewed a manager in Bird Library several weeks ago. The lack of management training is one of the topics he mentioned during the interview. And I have been wondering about the business model (economics) of libraries, behind the huge dispute around eBooks and other topics. However,\ the most interesting reply I got was from Aaron Tay, a senior librarian from Singapore. He asked, was there really a gap?
I don't think there is a standard answer to this question. People from different backgrounds definitely have different opinions. His answer kind of reminded me of the blog post written by Prof. Lankes about how librarians should be positive about our expertise and future. In this sense, I feel so lucky that I am in SU. I can see people around me are trying the best to engage with libraries and library practitioners in the real world. Prof. Lankes himself has a close relationship with the practitioners. Moreover, 511, which is like the most realist class I have ever taken (or a "worldview" class as what Prof. Lankes calls it), is also a very practical one, in which we need to finish all kind of tasks in groups, some of which are tied closely with the real world, like MOOC.
But I do think that, even in here, there may still be a gap between what we are doing as a student and what we are going to do as a librarian. Last week's 605 was one of the few cases where I have sensed the gap. Mallory and I gave this presentation about database for the reference class. I think this class is very practice-based; however, when I read the textbook, I cannot stop doubting that some of the information is out-of-date or maybe too idealist. So we tried to make this presentation practice-based rather than textbook-based. There were some differences we can observe, which I hope I can talk about in the future.
I have been a librarian. However, sadly, my past experiences cannot help me a lot in this issue. First, I worked in China. Second, the librarianship in China is not as professional as in the US.
I think this question will be one of the questions that will haunt me a lot in the future. However, hopefully, I can become a better librarian in the future after I try all the means to answer it.
I have been a librarian. However, sadly, my past experiences cannot help me a lot in this issue. First, I worked in China. Second, the librarianship in China is not as professional as in the US.
I think this question will be one of the questions that will haunt me a lot in the future. However, hopefully, I can become a better librarian in the future after I try all the means to answer it.
Monday, October 1, 2012
Library personas
I have always been saying that I am a fan of eBooks. I mean, I AM, except for few cases. For example, I subscribed to the print version of Library Journal. After making the decision, I thought it may not be the best idea I have ever made, because, first of all, I assumed that all the articles you can read in the print version of the journal can be found on the website; moreover, after getting the first two issues, I found that most of the contents were book reviews. (I cannot stop wondering, is acquisition still that important nowadays?)
But on the other hand, I did read an article that was not published on Library Journal's website from the October 1st issue. This is Aaron Schmidt's Persona Guidance, which is a very interesting article, and I failed to find it in his column on the website
I read about Europeana's seven personas years ago. I was really excited about it. Clearly, it's a useful way to design and assess your library's services. After a second thought, compared with general user interviews, I think designing library personas can be a more systematic approach to research your members. (But I do think massive user interviews are one of the sources to design library personas.)
In the article, Aaron mentioned a number of the components of a library persona profile, namely, members' names, photographs (even though all the personas are fictional depictions), goals, quotes as well as the ages.
In the real world, Europeana's personas include each user's personal information, interest, media use, searching strategy as well as his/her relationship with Europeana. HathiTrust's personas are very similar with the one of Europeana, maybe because that both of them are digital library projects. Certainly, they are different compared with a "general library". So I felt it interesting to find the library personas designed by Cornell University Library. The library identified three group of library members: faculties, graduate students and undergraduate students, compared with the more general user groups of Europeana and HathiTrust. And for each of the users, there are personal background, library interactions and transactions, key experiences as well as luxuries, comforts and necessities.
However, all these examples seem to fail to consider the goals of the library members, which was mentioned in Aaron's article. It's understandable that it's hard to summarize members' goals into patterns, but as Aaron stated in the article:"A persona's goals are probably the most important piece of the puzzle ... because user motivations and goals should be a focal point, so you need to ensure that the goals of each persona are realistic."
It reminds me of OCLC's “Geek the Library” project, whose focus is actually on library funding, but the value the libraries transfer to the community is "What's your hobby/geek? And no matter what it is, the local library can support it." The whole project is a collection of the personal narratives of library members, which is not a portfolio of personas per se, but is similar with that (in terms of its focus on individuals), and has a stronger focus on members' passionate.
Library persona sounds like an interesting way to think about the library members to me. So, I am curious about what other libraries are using this method besides the above examples.
But on the other hand, I did read an article that was not published on Library Journal's website from the October 1st issue. This is Aaron Schmidt's Persona Guidance, which is a very interesting article, and I failed to find it in his column on the website
I read about Europeana's seven personas years ago. I was really excited about it. Clearly, it's a useful way to design and assess your library's services. After a second thought, compared with general user interviews, I think designing library personas can be a more systematic approach to research your members. (But I do think massive user interviews are one of the sources to design library personas.)
In the article, Aaron mentioned a number of the components of a library persona profile, namely, members' names, photographs (even though all the personas are fictional depictions), goals, quotes as well as the ages.
In the real world, Europeana's personas include each user's personal information, interest, media use, searching strategy as well as his/her relationship with Europeana. HathiTrust's personas are very similar with the one of Europeana, maybe because that both of them are digital library projects. Certainly, they are different compared with a "general library". So I felt it interesting to find the library personas designed by Cornell University Library. The library identified three group of library members: faculties, graduate students and undergraduate students, compared with the more general user groups of Europeana and HathiTrust. And for each of the users, there are personal background, library interactions and transactions, key experiences as well as luxuries, comforts and necessities.
However, all these examples seem to fail to consider the goals of the library members, which was mentioned in Aaron's article. It's understandable that it's hard to summarize members' goals into patterns, but as Aaron stated in the article:"A persona's goals are probably the most important piece of the puzzle ... because user motivations and goals should be a focal point, so you need to ensure that the goals of each persona are realistic."
It reminds me of OCLC's “Geek the Library” project, whose focus is actually on library funding, but the value the libraries transfer to the community is "What's your hobby/geek? And no matter what it is, the local library can support it." The whole project is a collection of the personal narratives of library members, which is not a portfolio of personas per se, but is similar with that (in terms of its focus on individuals), and has a stronger focus on members' passionate.
Library persona sounds like an interesting way to think about the library members to me. So, I am curious about what other libraries are using this method besides the above examples.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Book-more libraries and book-less libraries #ist511
First of all, I am a big supporter of all the bookless libraries (one reason is that, I think different forms of libraries can help us better realize the nature of LIBRARY). There has been a number of examples and a lot of articles to talk about them in the last decade. In short, this movement (if you like) can be traced back to Fiedler Engineering Library in Kansas State University which was opened in 2000 (which is hard to believe, 2000?!). In 2010, this movement became famous because Stanford University's Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Library got rid of most of its physical resources. After that, Applied Engineering and Technology Library in UTSA adopted this bookless model in a more radical way, which was called "the first completely bookless library on a university or college campus" (source: Library Journal). Another really famous example outside traditional settings is Khan Academy.
There are a number of things to be noted:
Second, even as a radicalist in this term, I can think of how much objection the libraries will face then they make such a decision (I heard a lot of stories about all the objections Bird Library was suffered from when it decided to move away some of its physical resources -- BTW, when I first visited Bird Library this summer, my first impression was, why there were so many books!).
Library members love books. Again, in OCLC's "Library Perception 2010" report, after the economic failure, more American people connect public libraries with books. But on the other hand, people also love spaces. Prioritizing strategies in the local context are so important here. But all these things remind me of the tension between "meeting users' needs" and "creating new needs". As shown by iPhone and many other examples, users' needs are created. In most of the cases, users don't know what they need (they just know what they are using and how they like it, based on Atlas). So listening to the users is a dilemma. How do we take what we hear from the library members?
Let's put this topic in the back burner first. Talking about the public perceptions of libraries, in China, libraries are even more strongly tied with books. Maybe it's because "图书馆" (the Chinese word of "library") has "图书" ("book" in Chinese) in it. The connection of libraries and books in the language is so straightforward makes it extremely hard to change public's opinions about what a library is.
Well, the previous statement may not be totally true. First, maybe Chinese librarians have not worked hard to change public's perceptions. A lot of librarians themselves believe that librarians are ONLY about books. Second, sometimes, Chinese people don't know what a library is; many of they cannot even distinguish between a bookstore and a library. In short, they don't give libraries a shit. Third, acquiring how many books each year is still one of the most important factor to assess a library and library director in China (yes, we have a national library assessment system).
In a word, most of the Chinese libraries are still going toward "book-more".
There was a very interesting news several years ago that, in order to have more spaces in the library, Cornell University Library decided to get rid of some repetitive collections, so they sold these books to Tsinghua University Library in Beijing (which is one of the best academic library in China). In the library I used to work, what we can hear every year is that, we spend how much money to buy how many books this year, how many percent more than last year.
To some extent, it's understandable that collection is still the number one issue in most of the Chinese libraries. First of all, as mentioned above, it's still the mindset of the public and some of the librarians and library directors that libraries are only about books. Second, at least in public libraries, people are still complaining there are not enough books to borrow. There are still strong needs for books In China; even in the biggest cities like Beijing, the lack of a functioning community library system makes a few central library working really hard but still cannot meet the most citizen's reading needs. There is hardly a robust eBook ecosystem in China, so relying on physical books is the reasonable choice. The widely adoption of book ATM machines in some major Chinese cities is one of the results of this environment.
But there is also another side of the story. Like what was mentioned in the last post, there is a strong need in the public for library spaces rather than just resources and services, especially in academic libraries. So it's hard for me to understand why Tsinghua University decided to buy all these books from Cornell. Even on the general level, more and more academic and even public libraries find it hard to have enough space to restore all the physical resources in recent years, like what has been happening in the US. Some libraries (like Peking University Library and many others) already have their off-campus repository facilities.
The situations on the eBooks market are becoming better, with some big online retailers and social media platforms devoting themselves to digital publishing and a number of public libraries joining this wave. Moreover, more and more libraries, public and academic, are using tablets and eBook readers as facilitator to learning, with pre-loaded digital resources offered by some content vendors.
With all these developments going on, it's expected that the "library-book" mindset among librarians will change in the future. However, more efforts should be put to change public's opinion about libraries. Librarians cannot wait for the public opinion to change; they should do something to make it change. The easiest answer here is to prepare for enough alternatives to physical books, and communicate our values to the public. It's not a short and easy process. Conversation is always endless.
There are a number of things to be noted:
- Most of the bookless libraries are college libraries.
- Most of the bookless libraries are natural science or applied science libraries.
- Only a few of these examples are truly libraries with no physical resources at all; most of them just remove most of the physical resources.
Second, even as a radicalist in this term, I can think of how much objection the libraries will face then they make such a decision (I heard a lot of stories about all the objections Bird Library was suffered from when it decided to move away some of its physical resources -- BTW, when I first visited Bird Library this summer, my first impression was, why there were so many books!).
Library members love books. Again, in OCLC's "Library Perception 2010" report, after the economic failure, more American people connect public libraries with books. But on the other hand, people also love spaces. Prioritizing strategies in the local context are so important here. But all these things remind me of the tension between "meeting users' needs" and "creating new needs". As shown by iPhone and many other examples, users' needs are created. In most of the cases, users don't know what they need (they just know what they are using and how they like it, based on Atlas). So listening to the users is a dilemma. How do we take what we hear from the library members?
Let's put this topic in the back burner first. Talking about the public perceptions of libraries, in China, libraries are even more strongly tied with books. Maybe it's because "图书馆" (the Chinese word of "library") has "图书" ("book" in Chinese) in it. The connection of libraries and books in the language is so straightforward makes it extremely hard to change public's opinions about what a library is.
Well, the previous statement may not be totally true. First, maybe Chinese librarians have not worked hard to change public's perceptions. A lot of librarians themselves believe that librarians are ONLY about books. Second, sometimes, Chinese people don't know what a library is; many of they cannot even distinguish between a bookstore and a library. In short, they don't give libraries a shit. Third, acquiring how many books each year is still one of the most important factor to assess a library and library director in China (yes, we have a national library assessment system).
In a word, most of the Chinese libraries are still going toward "book-more".
There was a very interesting news several years ago that, in order to have more spaces in the library, Cornell University Library decided to get rid of some repetitive collections, so they sold these books to Tsinghua University Library in Beijing (which is one of the best academic library in China). In the library I used to work, what we can hear every year is that, we spend how much money to buy how many books this year, how many percent more than last year.
To some extent, it's understandable that collection is still the number one issue in most of the Chinese libraries. First of all, as mentioned above, it's still the mindset of the public and some of the librarians and library directors that libraries are only about books. Second, at least in public libraries, people are still complaining there are not enough books to borrow. There are still strong needs for books In China; even in the biggest cities like Beijing, the lack of a functioning community library system makes a few central library working really hard but still cannot meet the most citizen's reading needs. There is hardly a robust eBook ecosystem in China, so relying on physical books is the reasonable choice. The widely adoption of book ATM machines in some major Chinese cities is one of the results of this environment.
But there is also another side of the story. Like what was mentioned in the last post, there is a strong need in the public for library spaces rather than just resources and services, especially in academic libraries. So it's hard for me to understand why Tsinghua University decided to buy all these books from Cornell. Even on the general level, more and more academic and even public libraries find it hard to have enough space to restore all the physical resources in recent years, like what has been happening in the US. Some libraries (like Peking University Library and many others) already have their off-campus repository facilities.
The situations on the eBooks market are becoming better, with some big online retailers and social media platforms devoting themselves to digital publishing and a number of public libraries joining this wave. Moreover, more and more libraries, public and academic, are using tablets and eBook readers as facilitator to learning, with pre-loaded digital resources offered by some content vendors.
With all these developments going on, it's expected that the "library-book" mindset among librarians will change in the future. However, more efforts should be put to change public's opinion about libraries. Librarians cannot wait for the public opinion to change; they should do something to make it change. The easiest answer here is to prepare for enough alternatives to physical books, and communicate our values to the public. It's not a short and easy process. Conversation is always endless.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Occupying Seats in Chinese Libraries #ist511
One topic one can read frequently in the professional literature as well as the news reports about Chinese libraries is the "occupying seats" issue. It happens mainly in college libraries: too many students need to use academic libraries as a space for learning compared with the libraries' capacities. In public libraries too, especially in the vacations, you can see so many students waiting for entering a seat in the library's learning space. I cannot say that the large number of population is the only reason here, but obviously, it is one of the issues that makes Chinese librarianship unique. (So I am kind of curious about how libraries in India are dealing with these issues, if there is any.)
This phenomenon, by the way, is one of the best counterarguments against "Chinese people don't use libraries". They do! They have a need for libraries, though they may not need as much of some services and resources offered by the libraries and expected by the librarians. There seems to be a strong need for library space in such cases. (On the other hand, unfortunately, the focuses of most of the Chinese libraries, public or academic, are still resources or even physical books. I will talk about this issue in the next post.)
On the other hand, a lot of students who get a seat in the library just don't study there immediately. They try to use some ways to take this seat and come back later. This behavior makes the whole situation worse.
You can see a lot of these amusing pictures online:
There are a number of solutions to this problem, one of which is that, some academic libraries in China locks all the learning spaces, and they sell the seats to the students! This policy, as simple as it is, was severely criticized by some Chinese librarians.
Recently, Beijing Normal University Library (I got my undergraduate degree there) had a new policy (in Chinese) that, during certain hours in a day, everyone who wants to get a seat in the library must register in a machine in advance. If they leave the library, they need to log-off in the machine too. And if one is found to break the rule for three times, he/she will be deprived of the right to get a seat in the library for 30 days.
It doesn't sound like a very humanized policy because of the punishment part. However, I don't think this policy is totally unacceptable. It's interesting to know that some other libraries around the world are using this device too (like this Korean library). What makes me feel better about this policy is that, several days ago, the library tweeted a message in Weibo (again, Chinese version of Twitter) that public opinions about this seat management system are welcome.
Besides good management, at least in some cases, the problem in the library is only a part of the bigger issue on the campus. For example, in some universities, all the classrooms are forbidden to be used for anything other than classes. In such cases, it's inevitable that the library is overly crowded. The point is that, rather than just taking care of themselves, libraries under such a condition should try to do something to fix the bigger problem too (as early as possible).
So again, libraries should have conversations with all the stakeholders in this case. They should talk with universities to open all the available learning spaces on the campus. They should also talk with the students about the management measures and maybe about how they can find a space to learn more easily. For public libraries, one of the solutions is to establish a community library system, which also involves conversation, though a much more complex one.
Chinese librarianship is different with US librarianship on many big and subtle aspects. (for example, it may be hard to image the lack of space issue in the US libraries) However, even so, some basic principles, like conversation, can be applicable in China to at least ease the problem.
This phenomenon, by the way, is one of the best counterarguments against "Chinese people don't use libraries". They do! They have a need for libraries, though they may not need as much of some services and resources offered by the libraries and expected by the librarians. There seems to be a strong need for library space in such cases. (On the other hand, unfortunately, the focuses of most of the Chinese libraries, public or academic, are still resources or even physical books. I will talk about this issue in the next post.)
On the other hand, a lot of students who get a seat in the library just don't study there immediately. They try to use some ways to take this seat and come back later. This behavior makes the whole situation worse.
You can see a lot of these amusing pictures online:
(One student used her coat to occupy the seat. Photo from: http://www.guokr.com/post/82085/)
(This time, it's a toy bear.)
(The queue of students waiting for entering the library very early in the morning, which is so not uncommon in China. Photo from: http://www.hinews.cn/news/system/2012/09/03/014900309.shtml)
Recently, Beijing Normal University Library (I got my undergraduate degree there) had a new policy (in Chinese) that, during certain hours in a day, everyone who wants to get a seat in the library must register in a machine in advance. If they leave the library, they need to log-off in the machine too. And if one is found to break the rule for three times, he/she will be deprived of the right to get a seat in the library for 30 days.
It doesn't sound like a very humanized policy because of the punishment part. However, I don't think this policy is totally unacceptable. It's interesting to know that some other libraries around the world are using this device too (like this Korean library). What makes me feel better about this policy is that, several days ago, the library tweeted a message in Weibo (again, Chinese version of Twitter) that public opinions about this seat management system are welcome.
Besides good management, at least in some cases, the problem in the library is only a part of the bigger issue on the campus. For example, in some universities, all the classrooms are forbidden to be used for anything other than classes. In such cases, it's inevitable that the library is overly crowded. The point is that, rather than just taking care of themselves, libraries under such a condition should try to do something to fix the bigger problem too (as early as possible).
So again, libraries should have conversations with all the stakeholders in this case. They should talk with universities to open all the available learning spaces on the campus. They should also talk with the students about the management measures and maybe about how they can find a space to learn more easily. For public libraries, one of the solutions is to establish a community library system, which also involves conversation, though a much more complex one.
Chinese librarianship is different with US librarianship on many big and subtle aspects. (for example, it may be hard to image the lack of space issue in the US libraries) However, even so, some basic principles, like conversation, can be applicable in China to at least ease the problem.
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Some thoughts on classification after #ist511
As a cataloger, I have always been a big fan of "Killing Dewey", which doesn't mean that Dewey be eliminated from the library world, because that is both unnecessary and impossible. However, based on the local context, individual libraries should explore other possibilities other than Dewey Decimal Classification (or maybe Library of Congress Classification) or maybe find new ways to use these legacy standards. There was a great article published in the Library Journal in 2009 talking about some of the approaches US libraries had taken to deal with DDC and accompanying discussions. In some of the cases mentioned in the article, DDC was not killed, rather, it was reinforced or mixed with bookstore classification to become more user-friendly.
However, after that, the discussion of replacing/augmenting DDC has not been as active as I expected. Not until recently, did I read another article on the Digital Shift about how an elementary school library gave up Dewey Decimal Classification this summer. The big change in the library was because the librarians realized that "classification is really just a series of compromises that inevitably results in a less than perfect solution". As a result, the library adopted a much broader classification scheme, moreover, the new classification system "group books by how subjects are taught". Kudos to these librarians!
That is definitely one of the examples about "how library catalog can support learning" after this week's 511 class, in which Professor Lankes talked about theories of knowledge creation. I do think philosophical rethinking of classification as what he did is interesting. Though some level of reductionism and objectivism is inevitable and necessary for anyone to understand the world, approaching toward constructionism is good for both the libraries and the members. (Sorry for all these "-ism" words.)
Being flexible and user-friendly (or even user-generated) is always a solution here. Arranging resources by the actual use of these resources, rather than by the classification system is an idea worthy exploring. Just like the "virtue shelves" idea proposed in Professor Lankes' book, maybe a library can form subject groups (like tourism, cooking in public libraries, and anthropology, history in academic libraries), and letting these library members/experts to organize all the resources relevant to this area.
On the other hand, some of the great ideas mentioned in "Everything is Miscellaneous" written by David Weinberger may work here. With more and more virtual resources are subscribed or bought by libraries (Bookless library!), the order for libraries to organize physical resources (aka, library classification) will no longer be relevant in the future. It's not hard to notice the huge differences between the physical library shelves and online catalogs.
I was trying hard not to cross the line of cataloging and classification when I wrote this post. However, I was reminded of the "putting lipstick on pigs" discussion several years ago about whether OPAC 2.0 was necessary. In this term, I do feel that some of the "OPAC 2.0" solutions are awesome. (In case you don't know about the whole "OPAC 2.0" thing, you can see this presentation given by Mr. Dave Pattern. But on the other hand, even if you have never heard about "Library 2.0", I think it's totally fine, because people no longer talk about it. And people are talking about "discovery platform" rather than "OPAC X.0", which for me is basically the same thing.) But I totally agree that pigs with lipstick are still pigs. Like library website ("No one started their information search on a library Web site" as stated by the famous "Library Perception 2010" report), we should try to deliver our metadata in other platform that people actually are using. (Every time I thought about this issue, I was reminded of this blog post written by David Lee King.)
One revolutionary movement in the classification area is the linked data movement. With more and more institutions publishing their subject headings/classification systems as linked data (like Library of Congress' Subject Heading and classification, OCLC's FAST and even Dewey Decimal Classification!), these former library-centered data can be used by a bigger community, especially by the Internet community to truly organize not only resources owned by the libraries, but actually all the resources in the world.
This vision is awesome, though much more works need to be done before we arrive there. One thing that I recommend everyone to pay attention to is the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group. This program suggests that libraries can play a really important role in tomorrow's Internet world. Libraries are no longer the only knowledge center in the world, but we can use our expertise and metadata to become one node in the new knowledge landscape, which is an important one and can make major contributions to everyone.
To borrow the famous sentence: library classification will be dead, long live information organization!
However, after that, the discussion of replacing/augmenting DDC has not been as active as I expected. Not until recently, did I read another article on the Digital Shift about how an elementary school library gave up Dewey Decimal Classification this summer. The big change in the library was because the librarians realized that "classification is really just a series of compromises that inevitably results in a less than perfect solution". As a result, the library adopted a much broader classification scheme, moreover, the new classification system "group books by how subjects are taught". Kudos to these librarians!
That is definitely one of the examples about "how library catalog can support learning" after this week's 511 class, in which Professor Lankes talked about theories of knowledge creation. I do think philosophical rethinking of classification as what he did is interesting. Though some level of reductionism and objectivism is inevitable and necessary for anyone to understand the world, approaching toward constructionism is good for both the libraries and the members. (Sorry for all these "-ism" words.)
Being flexible and user-friendly (or even user-generated) is always a solution here. Arranging resources by the actual use of these resources, rather than by the classification system is an idea worthy exploring. Just like the "virtue shelves" idea proposed in Professor Lankes' book, maybe a library can form subject groups (like tourism, cooking in public libraries, and anthropology, history in academic libraries), and letting these library members/experts to organize all the resources relevant to this area.
On the other hand, some of the great ideas mentioned in "Everything is Miscellaneous" written by David Weinberger may work here. With more and more virtual resources are subscribed or bought by libraries (Bookless library!), the order for libraries to organize physical resources (aka, library classification) will no longer be relevant in the future. It's not hard to notice the huge differences between the physical library shelves and online catalogs.
I was trying hard not to cross the line of cataloging and classification when I wrote this post. However, I was reminded of the "putting lipstick on pigs" discussion several years ago about whether OPAC 2.0 was necessary. In this term, I do feel that some of the "OPAC 2.0" solutions are awesome. (In case you don't know about the whole "OPAC 2.0" thing, you can see this presentation given by Mr. Dave Pattern. But on the other hand, even if you have never heard about "Library 2.0", I think it's totally fine, because people no longer talk about it. And people are talking about "discovery platform" rather than "OPAC X.0", which for me is basically the same thing.) But I totally agree that pigs with lipstick are still pigs. Like library website ("No one started their information search on a library Web site" as stated by the famous "Library Perception 2010" report), we should try to deliver our metadata in other platform that people actually are using. (Every time I thought about this issue, I was reminded of this blog post written by David Lee King.)
One revolutionary movement in the classification area is the linked data movement. With more and more institutions publishing their subject headings/classification systems as linked data (like Library of Congress' Subject Heading and classification, OCLC's FAST and even Dewey Decimal Classification!), these former library-centered data can be used by a bigger community, especially by the Internet community to truly organize not only resources owned by the libraries, but actually all the resources in the world.
This vision is awesome, though much more works need to be done before we arrive there. One thing that I recommend everyone to pay attention to is the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group. This program suggests that libraries can play a really important role in tomorrow's Internet world. Libraries are no longer the only knowledge center in the world, but we can use our expertise and metadata to become one node in the new knowledge landscape, which is an important one and can make major contributions to everyone.
To borrow the famous sentence: library classification will be dead, long live information organization!
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Censorship and Chinese libraries
My major as an undergraduate is history. It is interesting to be a history student in a country with a "long and glorious" history. But to be honest, I am not particularly proud of the "5,000 years" of history in China (at least, the number is what is publicized by the government and what is believed by the public). One of the reasons is that I subscribe to post-modern theory. As a result, I think history is construction in nature. Hu Shih, one of the greatest Chinese historians, once said that "history is like a girl's face, subject to makeup as one sees fit." Another reason is that, as what I can see, besides the glorious side in the Chinese history, there is also a dark side, which has been influencing the society until now.
One of the dark events is the burning of books and burying of scholars (I am surprised to know that there is a Wikipedia entry of this event) in the Qin Dynasty, which is the first and is also public seen a great dynasty in Chinese history. This event can be regarded as the starting point of the censorship in China. Here, I don't want to rephrase how censorship went through along the long history in China. But burning book is still happening in China, literally and metaphorically.
In Chinese social media world, people tend to have fierce debate about certain issues. Unfortunately, in some cases, these debates turned into personal attack. Burning the books is one of the ways some radicalists expressing anger toward some specific targets.
(This is a picture someone uploaded to Sina Weibo, because he is angry about the attitude of the author of this book in the debate between Han Han and Fang Shimin, which is a major social issue in China in recent years.)
Another event happened in 2010. In a "academic" conference about reading held in South China University of Technology, some scholars burned books which are seen by them as "garbage books". The issue of garbage books is more complex, because the quality of some of the books published in China is really low. But the point here is that, it's still our culture to burn books rather than to use conversations to solve a problem.
And what is terrible is that, censorship (a broader sense of burning books) is becoming omnipresent and stronger in China.
Michael Anti (a Chinese journalist, political blogger and dissenter) gave a speech about the recent development of censorship in China in TEDGlobal 2012. It's one of the most insightful and accurate descriptions of what is going on inside the Great Fire Wall I have seen. Based on his observation, the government's censorship and people's enlightenment are both growing, and they are having complex interactions in China. It's really interesting to see what will happen in a couple of years.
It should have been the stage for Chinese librarians, unless it isn't.
Last week, Professor Lankes talked about people should not ask "what is the future of libraries" in America, they should ask "what should be the future of libraries and librarians in a democracy". That's kind of the starting point of this blog post. It was this question that reminded me some of the difficulties of being a librarian in China under the omnipresent censorship, which librarians in America may not encounter, or at least these problems may not be as much serious here. On the other hand, just like my last blog post mentioned, people in China like to say "there is no choice" without actually trying anything. I also feel that we should not blame everything on the political system. Even though it's extremely hard to change a political system, we can do something to make everyone's life better, which, little by little, will eventually change the whole country.
Before anything, I want to share a number of stories I came across when I was a librarian in China.
The Chinese government has been banning a lot of books. Banning books are not unique in China, what makes things unique here is that you never know what books are banned. Because banned books are a sensitive topic which is highly invisible to the public even if you can find a way to talk about it in the media. This fact reminds me of a Chinese American historian, Ray Huang's books, in which he talked a lot about the different ways of the Chinese governments and the Western governments in the history. One differences he emphasized is that the Chinese governments has been lacking the ability to manage the country using statistics, thus they can only rely on moral principles and secrecy. In an environment in which even talking about banned books is sensitive, is threatened by politic forces, it's no wonder that nearly all the libraries in China have to take some sort of self-censorship measures. (Sure, another reason is that, like I have mentioned, nearly all the Chinese public libraries belong to and be managed by the government. And Chinese universities are highly bureaucratic too, which makes Chinese academic libraries' situations equally bad.)
In China, publication is strictly controlled. Every book to be published in this country need to be approved by the government, which means that libraries cannot buy unapproved book published in China, because these books hardly exist. For materials published outside the country, there is only one legit channel for libraries to buy these stuff, which is the National Publication Import and Export Corporate. I was a cataloger dealing with English books. There were several times when I cataloged books about really sensitive topics, like Dalai Lama, but in these books there were notes forbidding these books to be public accessible. There was another time when an organization in the US wanted to donate some English books to us, but to get these books, our library had to get permissions from several government departments and ensure that there was no book with "inappropriate" contents.
Another story I can think of is our library's public lectures. Public lectures are one of the most popular projects in our library. There are basically lectures in the library everyday, but lectures held on weekends are especially well-attended. Once upon, one of my colleagues who's in charge of the lecture project had an idea to invite a very famous Taiwanese talk show host, Kevin Tsai (who has the same number of followers in Sina Weibo as Barack Obama in Twitter) to give a lecture in our library. Because Mr. Tsai is also famous for his love of reading, so it'll be a perfect idea not only to promote reading, attract his fans, but also to attract the eye balls of the mass media. This lecture could have been awesome, however, it was rejected by our director. I heard the reasons our director gave to reject this idea were, first, he is a Taiwanese; second, he is a gay, both of which are kind of sensitive. So the director thought even if she approved this idea, the Bureau of Culture in Beijing would definitely rejected it, and may blame her for not rejecting the idea by himself.
Ironically, there is this "great development and flourishing of socialist culture" policy in China recent years. To achieve this "goal", a large amount of money was invested in Chinese public as well as academic libraries. The results? The results are interesting but definitely beyond the scope of this post. But in short, no matter how much money be invested, there is no reason that great libraries can exist in a undemocratic country. (To be noted, there are some libraries in China doing relatively better jobs in their relatively loose environments.)
As a maybe too simplistic map, Chinese librarians should give up their hope to rely on the government. They should be more brave to make changes, they should embrace the people, and they should try to influence the society more rather than remain socially aloof. Those are the first step before any substantial changes to be made.
One of the dark events is the burning of books and burying of scholars (I am surprised to know that there is a Wikipedia entry of this event) in the Qin Dynasty, which is the first and is also public seen a great dynasty in Chinese history. This event can be regarded as the starting point of the censorship in China. Here, I don't want to rephrase how censorship went through along the long history in China. But burning book is still happening in China, literally and metaphorically.
In Chinese social media world, people tend to have fierce debate about certain issues. Unfortunately, in some cases, these debates turned into personal attack. Burning the books is one of the ways some radicalists expressing anger toward some specific targets.
(This is a picture someone uploaded to Sina Weibo, because he is angry about the attitude of the author of this book in the debate between Han Han and Fang Shimin, which is a major social issue in China in recent years.)
Another event happened in 2010. In a "academic" conference about reading held in South China University of Technology, some scholars burned books which are seen by them as "garbage books". The issue of garbage books is more complex, because the quality of some of the books published in China is really low. But the point here is that, it's still our culture to burn books rather than to use conversations to solve a problem.
And what is terrible is that, censorship (a broader sense of burning books) is becoming omnipresent and stronger in China.
Michael Anti (a Chinese journalist, political blogger and dissenter) gave a speech about the recent development of censorship in China in TEDGlobal 2012. It's one of the most insightful and accurate descriptions of what is going on inside the Great Fire Wall I have seen. Based on his observation, the government's censorship and people's enlightenment are both growing, and they are having complex interactions in China. It's really interesting to see what will happen in a couple of years.
It should have been the stage for Chinese librarians, unless it isn't.
Last week, Professor Lankes talked about people should not ask "what is the future of libraries" in America, they should ask "what should be the future of libraries and librarians in a democracy". That's kind of the starting point of this blog post. It was this question that reminded me some of the difficulties of being a librarian in China under the omnipresent censorship, which librarians in America may not encounter, or at least these problems may not be as much serious here. On the other hand, just like my last blog post mentioned, people in China like to say "there is no choice" without actually trying anything. I also feel that we should not blame everything on the political system. Even though it's extremely hard to change a political system, we can do something to make everyone's life better, which, little by little, will eventually change the whole country.
Before anything, I want to share a number of stories I came across when I was a librarian in China.
The Chinese government has been banning a lot of books. Banning books are not unique in China, what makes things unique here is that you never know what books are banned. Because banned books are a sensitive topic which is highly invisible to the public even if you can find a way to talk about it in the media. This fact reminds me of a Chinese American historian, Ray Huang's books, in which he talked a lot about the different ways of the Chinese governments and the Western governments in the history. One differences he emphasized is that the Chinese governments has been lacking the ability to manage the country using statistics, thus they can only rely on moral principles and secrecy. In an environment in which even talking about banned books is sensitive, is threatened by politic forces, it's no wonder that nearly all the libraries in China have to take some sort of self-censorship measures. (Sure, another reason is that, like I have mentioned, nearly all the Chinese public libraries belong to and be managed by the government. And Chinese universities are highly bureaucratic too, which makes Chinese academic libraries' situations equally bad.)
In China, publication is strictly controlled. Every book to be published in this country need to be approved by the government, which means that libraries cannot buy unapproved book published in China, because these books hardly exist. For materials published outside the country, there is only one legit channel for libraries to buy these stuff, which is the National Publication Import and Export Corporate. I was a cataloger dealing with English books. There were several times when I cataloged books about really sensitive topics, like Dalai Lama, but in these books there were notes forbidding these books to be public accessible. There was another time when an organization in the US wanted to donate some English books to us, but to get these books, our library had to get permissions from several government departments and ensure that there was no book with "inappropriate" contents.
Another story I can think of is our library's public lectures. Public lectures are one of the most popular projects in our library. There are basically lectures in the library everyday, but lectures held on weekends are especially well-attended. Once upon, one of my colleagues who's in charge of the lecture project had an idea to invite a very famous Taiwanese talk show host, Kevin Tsai (who has the same number of followers in Sina Weibo as Barack Obama in Twitter) to give a lecture in our library. Because Mr. Tsai is also famous for his love of reading, so it'll be a perfect idea not only to promote reading, attract his fans, but also to attract the eye balls of the mass media. This lecture could have been awesome, however, it was rejected by our director. I heard the reasons our director gave to reject this idea were, first, he is a Taiwanese; second, he is a gay, both of which are kind of sensitive. So the director thought even if she approved this idea, the Bureau of Culture in Beijing would definitely rejected it, and may blame her for not rejecting the idea by himself.
Ironically, there is this "great development and flourishing of socialist culture" policy in China recent years. To achieve this "goal", a large amount of money was invested in Chinese public as well as academic libraries. The results? The results are interesting but definitely beyond the scope of this post. But in short, no matter how much money be invested, there is no reason that great libraries can exist in a undemocratic country. (To be noted, there are some libraries in China doing relatively better jobs in their relatively loose environments.)
As a maybe too simplistic map, Chinese librarians should give up their hope to rely on the government. They should be more brave to make changes, they should embrace the people, and they should try to influence the society more rather than remain socially aloof. Those are the first step before any substantial changes to be made.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Librarians and MLIS Students (in China)
My last blog post talked about the idea that you don't have to hold an MLIS degree to become a true librarian. But even after proposing this quite heretic idea, in most of the cases, I do believe it's a really good thing that all the librarians hold an MLIS degree.
When I was a librarian in China, I was actually very surprised that most of the Chinese librarians did not have an MLIS degree (including me for sure). In my library (which is the major public library in Beijing, in case you don't know), the percentage of the librarians with an MLIS degree is lower than 10%. For a number of good academic libraries and top public libraries, the number may be higher. But for most of the public libraries, this number is even lower than us. During the last five years, I found a lot of reasons to explain this phenomenon.
I think the most important reason here is that the library science education in China is largely seen as unrelated with library practices. When I talked to other librarians in the Chinese library community, one comment I heard a lot was that, those library professors did not understand what was going on in libraries. As a result, for library practitioners, the ideas proposed by library science professors are unrealistic in many cases. While on the other hand, for many professors, the developments of most of the libraries are not satisfactory at all. The point here is not which side is right, which side is wrong. They are both right and wrong. I think the point is that, unlike the landscape in the US, there is a lack of communication and trust between the two sides because of some really profound reasons. (In China, you can hear people talking about "profound reasons" a lot. This expression is largely an excuse of people's "having no choice", like an article in Lonely Planet said. So I think I should try to avoid this cynicism, and think deeper about this issue.)
I have not attended any library school in China. As a result, I have little knowledge about what's REALLY going on there. But I do have some connections (which is another expression in the article mentioned above) with library students or people working in library schools. Moreover, my library once had a training session for librarians in cooperation with the library school in Beijing Normal University. I attended this project, and had some really bad experiences.
One the one hand, compared with the curriculum in American library schools, the courses in China are much further away from practices. In the project organized by my library and iSchool, BNU, there was even a course about database. However, the course was taught poorly. The teacher just talked about what elements did a database normally have, and how did they look like, and things like this, without any exercises. I understand the project was only an ad hoc project rather than a real course in the school. However, I still don't think the knowledge taught in a real course had strong connections with what's going on in libraries. This partly explains why many directors in public libraries (again, including the library I used to work) like recruiting students from other professions rather than library schools. One of the comments I heard our director saying a lot was that, librarians need expertise of other professions; what you do in a library is easily to be learnt. Is that so easy? I certainly don't think so. However, this is a popular mindset among library directors in China.
But on the other hand, there are even more problems in the libraries. It's hard to talk about Chinese libraries as a whole, because there are big differences between public libraries, academic libraries and special libraries. There are even greater differences between individual libraries in these categories. But it's a fact that Chinese libraries, especially public libraries, are not doing a good job. They should have done a better job as expected by the public and the professors. But in this case, the "having no choice" expression comes out again. We have some many limitations in terms of management structure and the governance. I don't want to make this issue too complex (which is really complex though). In short, all the Chinese public libraries belong to the government; and in China, the power of the government is so strong and omnipresent, especially in the "culture industry" (in China, the library is categorized into the broader term "culture industry"). The government tends to censor everything in this area. Sometimes, even new ideas come out from librarians, they cannot be implemented because the government is afraid of these ideas; or at least librarian directors think so. Moreover, in most of the cities, like Beijing, public libraries on different levels belong to different levels of governments. For example, the library I used to work, the Public Library of Chinese is part of the Government of Beijing Municipality; while district libraries in Beijing belong to different district governments. It makes extremely hard to harmonize the efforts of different library entities in the same city, and present a uniform brand to the public.
Also, living in Beijing is really hard. Librarians definitely earn much less than people in other professions. So working in Beijing as a librarian is naturally not the best decision an MLIS student can make, who has the ability to take other better paid jobs; not to mention the fact that, many libraries don't like them at all.
Another factor may be that, Chinese libraries (again, especially public libraries) are still publicly seen as the repositories of books. Namely everyone, when they think about libraries, they think about print books. My colleagues used to make a user survey about digital resources. The result of this survey indicates that, many people have no idea what is "digital resource" in the context of a library. This factor, combining the low earning, explains why the social status of librarians is very low in China.
Above is a brief version of this story. For some parts of the story, my narrative is over-simplified. One of these parts is the differences between different libraries in China. There are certainly very good libraries in China, most of which are academic and special ones, like the National Science Library of Chinese Academy of Science. One of the reasons is that, it's a library located in a purely academic institution, thus, there are relatively less institutional barriers. Another reason is that, the director of the library, Dr. Xiaolin Zhang, is a truly creative library leader even around the world. You can never underestimate the library leader's influences on a specific library, especially in China.
I used to think the situations in the US are just opposite to China, that most of the librarians hold an MLIS degree. However, last year, when I read Ken Haycock's book Portable MLIS, I was surprised to find that the percentage of American public librarians who hold an MLIS was much lower than I expected too (though much higher than in China). On the other hand, with the increasing importance of subject librarians, American libraries, especially academic libraries, have a stronger need to have librarians with an MLIS degree as well as a doctor's degree in another field. Again, the real world is too complex to fit into any simple schema.
This blog post is supposed to be the first blog post about some of my thoughts about library management after taking IST 600 Collaborating Effectively in the summer. The point I want to make here is that, when I was in China, I always thought that the librarianship in the US was totally different with the one in China. However, I have know that my previous thought was too simple. For sure, there are a lot of differences, especially in terms of political environment, institutional structure and the culture. But there are also a lot of spaces for improvement in Chinese librarianship. From the strategical level, we should keep the confidence that everything can be better. And in the next few posts, I hope I can cover the topics about how to actually turn things better in China and what I (and everyone) can do to achieve the goals.
When I was a librarian in China, I was actually very surprised that most of the Chinese librarians did not have an MLIS degree (including me for sure). In my library (which is the major public library in Beijing, in case you don't know), the percentage of the librarians with an MLIS degree is lower than 10%. For a number of good academic libraries and top public libraries, the number may be higher. But for most of the public libraries, this number is even lower than us. During the last five years, I found a lot of reasons to explain this phenomenon.
I think the most important reason here is that the library science education in China is largely seen as unrelated with library practices. When I talked to other librarians in the Chinese library community, one comment I heard a lot was that, those library professors did not understand what was going on in libraries. As a result, for library practitioners, the ideas proposed by library science professors are unrealistic in many cases. While on the other hand, for many professors, the developments of most of the libraries are not satisfactory at all. The point here is not which side is right, which side is wrong. They are both right and wrong. I think the point is that, unlike the landscape in the US, there is a lack of communication and trust between the two sides because of some really profound reasons. (In China, you can hear people talking about "profound reasons" a lot. This expression is largely an excuse of people's "having no choice", like an article in Lonely Planet said. So I think I should try to avoid this cynicism, and think deeper about this issue.)
I have not attended any library school in China. As a result, I have little knowledge about what's REALLY going on there. But I do have some connections (which is another expression in the article mentioned above) with library students or people working in library schools. Moreover, my library once had a training session for librarians in cooperation with the library school in Beijing Normal University. I attended this project, and had some really bad experiences.
One the one hand, compared with the curriculum in American library schools, the courses in China are much further away from practices. In the project organized by my library and iSchool, BNU, there was even a course about database. However, the course was taught poorly. The teacher just talked about what elements did a database normally have, and how did they look like, and things like this, without any exercises. I understand the project was only an ad hoc project rather than a real course in the school. However, I still don't think the knowledge taught in a real course had strong connections with what's going on in libraries. This partly explains why many directors in public libraries (again, including the library I used to work) like recruiting students from other professions rather than library schools. One of the comments I heard our director saying a lot was that, librarians need expertise of other professions; what you do in a library is easily to be learnt. Is that so easy? I certainly don't think so. However, this is a popular mindset among library directors in China.
But on the other hand, there are even more problems in the libraries. It's hard to talk about Chinese libraries as a whole, because there are big differences between public libraries, academic libraries and special libraries. There are even greater differences between individual libraries in these categories. But it's a fact that Chinese libraries, especially public libraries, are not doing a good job. They should have done a better job as expected by the public and the professors. But in this case, the "having no choice" expression comes out again. We have some many limitations in terms of management structure and the governance. I don't want to make this issue too complex (which is really complex though). In short, all the Chinese public libraries belong to the government; and in China, the power of the government is so strong and omnipresent, especially in the "culture industry" (in China, the library is categorized into the broader term "culture industry"). The government tends to censor everything in this area. Sometimes, even new ideas come out from librarians, they cannot be implemented because the government is afraid of these ideas; or at least librarian directors think so. Moreover, in most of the cities, like Beijing, public libraries on different levels belong to different levels of governments. For example, the library I used to work, the Public Library of Chinese is part of the Government of Beijing Municipality; while district libraries in Beijing belong to different district governments. It makes extremely hard to harmonize the efforts of different library entities in the same city, and present a uniform brand to the public.
Also, living in Beijing is really hard. Librarians definitely earn much less than people in other professions. So working in Beijing as a librarian is naturally not the best decision an MLIS student can make, who has the ability to take other better paid jobs; not to mention the fact that, many libraries don't like them at all.
Another factor may be that, Chinese libraries (again, especially public libraries) are still publicly seen as the repositories of books. Namely everyone, when they think about libraries, they think about print books. My colleagues used to make a user survey about digital resources. The result of this survey indicates that, many people have no idea what is "digital resource" in the context of a library. This factor, combining the low earning, explains why the social status of librarians is very low in China.
Above is a brief version of this story. For some parts of the story, my narrative is over-simplified. One of these parts is the differences between different libraries in China. There are certainly very good libraries in China, most of which are academic and special ones, like the National Science Library of Chinese Academy of Science. One of the reasons is that, it's a library located in a purely academic institution, thus, there are relatively less institutional barriers. Another reason is that, the director of the library, Dr. Xiaolin Zhang, is a truly creative library leader even around the world. You can never underestimate the library leader's influences on a specific library, especially in China.
I used to think the situations in the US are just opposite to China, that most of the librarians hold an MLIS degree. However, last year, when I read Ken Haycock's book Portable MLIS, I was surprised to find that the percentage of American public librarians who hold an MLIS was much lower than I expected too (though much higher than in China). On the other hand, with the increasing importance of subject librarians, American libraries, especially academic libraries, have a stronger need to have librarians with an MLIS degree as well as a doctor's degree in another field. Again, the real world is too complex to fit into any simple schema.
This blog post is supposed to be the first blog post about some of my thoughts about library management after taking IST 600 Collaborating Effectively in the summer. The point I want to make here is that, when I was in China, I always thought that the librarianship in the US was totally different with the one in China. However, I have know that my previous thought was too simple. For sure, there are a lot of differences, especially in terms of political environment, institutional structure and the culture. But there are also a lot of spaces for improvement in Chinese librarianship. From the strategical level, we should keep the confidence that everything can be better. And in the next few posts, I hope I can cover the topics about how to actually turn things better in China and what I (and everyone) can do to achieve the goals.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
On Oakland's people's library
I may have read this piece of news earlier this week, but when I read about the story that the people's library in Oakland was shut down by the police yesterday, I was both excited by the efforts of the volunteers who established the library and was kind of sad about the result.
According to the news, some activists in Oakland took over the building of an abandoned library in the morning of this Monday, which was one of the Carnegie's donations originally established in 1918 and has been closed since 1970s until this Monday.
After occupying the library, the volunteers coming from everywhere filled the library with donated books and erected banners to make it working again. But that's not all. They tried to get the community to engage! According to one of the occupiers' narration:
As I mentioned earlier, I have been reading Professor Lankes' Atlas of New Librarian recently. This event made me excited not only because it is a perfect example of how libraries can help to improve the society in a broader sense, but also because it illustrates what librarians are.
Definitely, librarians are not only those people who work in a library. On the one hand, if one is working in a library in a "wrong" manner, I don't think he is qualified to be a librarian (I am certainly not unbiased toward this issue). On the other hand, as Professor Lankes puts, people with an MLIS degree, no matter where he/she works, he/she can still do the job like a librarian. But here, this story may extend Professor Lankes' statement further. Because there is little information about these activists' professional backgrounds, it's safe to assume that little of them have a MLIS degree. So we can say, even if you do not work in a library nor have an MLIS degree, you can still be a librarian by doing things like this, to sharing information to promote knowledge creation in your community.
Sadly, according to the news, this library was closed by the police last night. But on the other hand, even this library being open for less than a week, we can still expect the little changes it posed to the local community and the society as a whole will turn out to be something great. Just like we can see the influences of Occupy Wall Street Library in this library by its name "people's library", we can expect this library inspire other people to make our society better in the future.
For more information, you can follow Twitter hashtag: #peopleslibrary
According to the news, some activists in Oakland took over the building of an abandoned library in the morning of this Monday, which was one of the Carnegie's donations originally established in 1918 and has been closed since 1970s until this Monday.
After occupying the library, the volunteers coming from everywhere filled the library with donated books and erected banners to make it working again. But that's not all. They tried to get the community to engage! According to one of the occupiers' narration:
the organizers also put out a press release, went door-knocking in the neighborhood to inform and invite the community, and built a gardening program that invited youth to come and develop the blighted space.And they even planned to host a poetry reading program according to the news! In short, they did it, and they did it like awesome librarians.
As I mentioned earlier, I have been reading Professor Lankes' Atlas of New Librarian recently. This event made me excited not only because it is a perfect example of how libraries can help to improve the society in a broader sense, but also because it illustrates what librarians are.
Definitely, librarians are not only those people who work in a library. On the one hand, if one is working in a library in a "wrong" manner, I don't think he is qualified to be a librarian (I am certainly not unbiased toward this issue). On the other hand, as Professor Lankes puts, people with an MLIS degree, no matter where he/she works, he/she can still do the job like a librarian. But here, this story may extend Professor Lankes' statement further. Because there is little information about these activists' professional backgrounds, it's safe to assume that little of them have a MLIS degree. So we can say, even if you do not work in a library nor have an MLIS degree, you can still be a librarian by doing things like this, to sharing information to promote knowledge creation in your community.
Sadly, according to the news, this library was closed by the police last night. But on the other hand, even this library being open for less than a week, we can still expect the little changes it posed to the local community and the society as a whole will turn out to be something great. Just like we can see the influences of Occupy Wall Street Library in this library by its name "people's library", we can expect this library inspire other people to make our society better in the future.
For more information, you can follow Twitter hashtag: #peopleslibrary
Friday, July 6, 2012
ALA Note 1
I have been back from ALA Annual for some days. During these "post-ALA" days, I had a rest (though not very good), started to do all the orientation things in SU (which are so much), had a major dispute about what librarians should be like with some of my Chinese colleagues (which proved my words in the presentation in ALA Annual was right!). And finally, I decided to brag about my trip to Anaheim, California and my experience there. (BTW, I am in Ohio, which is so hot!)
As an ALA Annual newbie, I am extremely excited about this conference. Not only because it's so huge (there seem to be two different versions about the number of participants of this conference, either 20,000 or 16,000), not only because I will give a presentation about RDA (or, Resource Description and Access) in China, not only because there are over 2000 panels to attend, in which I can learn so many things, but the most important reason may be that the conference is so important in the American library land which I am eager to understand and join.
As a first time attendee, I made many mistakes. I mean, yes, I did some homework. For example, I even made business cards (here and here) through Vistaprint just before I went to Anaheim, and got them just before the conference through a friend. But on the other hands, I did a poor job in planning the schedule (I am really regretful for using Google Calendar, which became a mess when I arrived at California from New York; and I failed to realize that ALA Scheduler had this functionality), preparing for my presentation (if I had more time, I could have had the time to visit Disneyland Park, rather than Disney Downtown alone), not to mention the fact that, I haven't fitted in the American librarians' culture for 100% percent yet.
But as a starting point, I think it's a great experience for me. I learnt a lot, I experienced a lot. I got some friends in the conference, and talked to even more librarians. In a word, this conference is AWESOME!
I attended many panels (even though, sadly, most of them are about cataloging and RDA), got some really interesting ideas about everything. I talked with many great librarians in the conference, including those whose blog I have read in China, like David Lee King, Roy Tennant and Jason Griffey, and those I knew for the first time (like Topher, Shannon, Henry and Erenst). I am especially excited to attend a panel organized by Hacklibschool, which is extremely useful for me to start my Master degree's study. I also attended one of the parties in Tiki Bar in the third day. It was great, even though actually, I have never attended any parties in China (cannot believe that, huh?) and is an introvert (I am trying to work on that), as a result, I guess maybe I was the most aloof person in that party. But I have to say, the party rocks!
Below is a list of all the panels I attended during the conference:
June 22:
ALA 2012 Unconference
NMRT Conference 101
Opening General Session
ALCTS 101
June 23:
OCLC Dewey Update Breakfast
RDA Update Forum
Conversation Starters: Hacking Library School
MARC Formats Interest Group
June 24:
FRBR Interest Group
LC Bibliographic Framework Transition Update Forum
RDA Worldwide (I am a speaker!)
Discovery Systems: The Promise and the Reality
Cooperative Library and Information Studies Alumni Reunion
June 25:
Current Technology in Libraries: Flash Presentations
The Ultimate Debate: Cloud Computing: Floating or Free Falling?
Building a Library Lab for Emerging Technology -- No Research Programmers Required
Battledecks 2012
I know I missed so many interesting panels this year. But since I will attend ALA Annual 2013. So hope I can have a better experience in Chicago next year.
(to be continued...)
As an ALA Annual newbie, I am extremely excited about this conference. Not only because it's so huge (there seem to be two different versions about the number of participants of this conference, either 20,000 or 16,000), not only because I will give a presentation about RDA (or, Resource Description and Access) in China, not only because there are over 2000 panels to attend, in which I can learn so many things, but the most important reason may be that the conference is so important in the American library land which I am eager to understand and join.
As a first time attendee, I made many mistakes. I mean, yes, I did some homework. For example, I even made business cards (here and here) through Vistaprint just before I went to Anaheim, and got them just before the conference through a friend. But on the other hands, I did a poor job in planning the schedule (I am really regretful for using Google Calendar, which became a mess when I arrived at California from New York; and I failed to realize that ALA Scheduler had this functionality), preparing for my presentation (if I had more time, I could have had the time to visit Disneyland Park, rather than Disney Downtown alone), not to mention the fact that, I haven't fitted in the American librarians' culture for 100% percent yet.
But as a starting point, I think it's a great experience for me. I learnt a lot, I experienced a lot. I got some friends in the conference, and talked to even more librarians. In a word, this conference is AWESOME!
I attended many panels (even though, sadly, most of them are about cataloging and RDA), got some really interesting ideas about everything. I talked with many great librarians in the conference, including those whose blog I have read in China, like David Lee King, Roy Tennant and Jason Griffey, and those I knew for the first time (like Topher, Shannon, Henry and Erenst). I am especially excited to attend a panel organized by Hacklibschool, which is extremely useful for me to start my Master degree's study. I also attended one of the parties in Tiki Bar in the third day. It was great, even though actually, I have never attended any parties in China (cannot believe that, huh?) and is an introvert (I am trying to work on that), as a result, I guess maybe I was the most aloof person in that party. But I have to say, the party rocks!
Below is a list of all the panels I attended during the conference:
June 22:
ALA 2012 Unconference
NMRT Conference 101
Opening General Session
ALCTS 101
June 23:
OCLC Dewey Update Breakfast
RDA Update Forum
Conversation Starters: Hacking Library School
MARC Formats Interest Group
June 24:
FRBR Interest Group
LC Bibliographic Framework Transition Update Forum
RDA Worldwide (I am a speaker!)
Discovery Systems: The Promise and the Reality
Cooperative Library and Information Studies Alumni Reunion
June 25:
Current Technology in Libraries: Flash Presentations
The Ultimate Debate: Cloud Computing: Floating or Free Falling?
Building a Library Lab for Emerging Technology -- No Research Programmers Required
Battledecks 2012
I know I missed so many interesting panels this year. But since I will attend ALA Annual 2013. So hope I can have a better experience in Chicago next year.
(to be continued...)
Saturday, June 30, 2012
"Book Exchanging Fair" in the Public Library of China
As some of you may have known, I used to work in the Public Library of China for almost 5 years before I came to the US this June. For your information, PLC is the leading public library in Beijing, China.
It's both very interesting and boring to work as a librarian in China, Chinese public libraries and this specific library. And I certainly hope to share with you many professional experiences I gained from China in this blog or through other channels in the future. In short, working in China as a librarian is just like living in China, for most of the time, you feel many negative feelings, and sometimes, there are good ones.
Most of the Chinese public libraries (basically, Chinese academic libraries are more internationalized and active) are really traditional and without passion and innovation, but sometimes there are some interesting services.
Last week, just after I arrived at Syracuse, I attended the "Academic Librarians 2012 Conference" held in Syracuse University. I listened to the keynotes given by Prof. Dave Lankes and Mr. Roy Tennent, both of which are very inspiring and passionate, even though actually I have listened to some of Prof. Lankes' lectures before.
As I mentioned earlier, Prof. Lankes is one of the reasons I chose Syracuse University (btw, during ALA Annual, many guys I met expressed the same feeling, Prof. Lankes' great, as a result, Syracuse is an awesome choice for library students). In the "New Librarianship" paradigm he proposed, one of the major points is that library should switch from the "lending model" to the "sharing model". This point actually reminds me of a service the Public Library of China developed last year, which is called the "Book Exchanging Fair".
Book Exchanging Fair was first held in the library in Apr. 23rd, 2011 to celebrate the World Book Day (btw, it's weird that there is the entry of "World Book Day" in Wikipedia, however, it was not linked to "April 23rd" page.), which is officially called International Book and Copyright Day, but sometimes is referred as World Book Day. The reason why people chose this date is because it is William Shakespeare's birthday and death date as well as Miguel Cervantes' death date. BTW, the reason I am so familiar with all the story is that it is also my birthday.
The point of Book Exchanging Fair is that people donate books they don't want to possess any more to the library; and in April. 23rd, those people who gave books come to the library to pick up books they are interested which were given by other patrons. And they can only choose as many books as the number of books they donated. There were also some local publishers coming in, donating some of their new titles. And for the books left after the fair, the library in turn donated them to the local libraries run by NGOs.
Based on the "sharing model", it's certainly one of the most interesting event in Chinese public libraries. And it's also well-attended. Actually, earlier this years, it was so well-attended that many patrons had to wait for hours before they could enter the hall. But there are certainly many many problems in this event. The biggest problem for me is that, how to integrate this ad hoc service to more general libraries services to add more value to the library patrons. It's good that library can facilitate sharing between patrons, but it's still not cool if sharing only happens once a year in the library. Another problem is that, it's still book-based. Books are not cool any more, just as indicated by the latest news that Library-a-go-go program lost to eBooks. But eBooks in China is another serious problem to talk about.
It's both very interesting and boring to work as a librarian in China, Chinese public libraries and this specific library. And I certainly hope to share with you many professional experiences I gained from China in this blog or through other channels in the future. In short, working in China as a librarian is just like living in China, for most of the time, you feel many negative feelings, and sometimes, there are good ones.
Most of the Chinese public libraries (basically, Chinese academic libraries are more internationalized and active) are really traditional and without passion and innovation, but sometimes there are some interesting services.
Last week, just after I arrived at Syracuse, I attended the "Academic Librarians 2012 Conference" held in Syracuse University. I listened to the keynotes given by Prof. Dave Lankes and Mr. Roy Tennent, both of which are very inspiring and passionate, even though actually I have listened to some of Prof. Lankes' lectures before.
As I mentioned earlier, Prof. Lankes is one of the reasons I chose Syracuse University (btw, during ALA Annual, many guys I met expressed the same feeling, Prof. Lankes' great, as a result, Syracuse is an awesome choice for library students). In the "New Librarianship" paradigm he proposed, one of the major points is that library should switch from the "lending model" to the "sharing model". This point actually reminds me of a service the Public Library of China developed last year, which is called the "Book Exchanging Fair".
Book Exchanging Fair was first held in the library in Apr. 23rd, 2011 to celebrate the World Book Day (btw, it's weird that there is the entry of "World Book Day" in Wikipedia, however, it was not linked to "April 23rd" page.), which is officially called International Book and Copyright Day, but sometimes is referred as World Book Day. The reason why people chose this date is because it is William Shakespeare's birthday and death date as well as Miguel Cervantes' death date. BTW, the reason I am so familiar with all the story is that it is also my birthday.
The point of Book Exchanging Fair is that people donate books they don't want to possess any more to the library; and in April. 23rd, those people who gave books come to the library to pick up books they are interested which were given by other patrons. And they can only choose as many books as the number of books they donated. There were also some local publishers coming in, donating some of their new titles. And for the books left after the fair, the library in turn donated them to the local libraries run by NGOs.
Based on the "sharing model", it's certainly one of the most interesting event in Chinese public libraries. And it's also well-attended. Actually, earlier this years, it was so well-attended that many patrons had to wait for hours before they could enter the hall. But there are certainly many many problems in this event. The biggest problem for me is that, how to integrate this ad hoc service to more general libraries services to add more value to the library patrons. It's good that library can facilitate sharing between patrons, but it's still not cool if sharing only happens once a year in the library. Another problem is that, it's still book-based. Books are not cool any more, just as indicated by the latest news that Library-a-go-go program lost to eBooks. But eBooks in China is another serious problem to talk about.
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