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At the 2012 eScience Symposium, Christine Borgman stated that “if we don’t produce a new workforce, libraries will become ever more irrelevant.” Conversation around this topic called for more people with math, science, and programming skills to become part of the profession of librarianship.

Encouraging people in the profession to be more math-science-and-computer literate isn’t necessarily saying “All of you librarians working in science need to get more programming skills!” (this is a debated topic in the digital humanities, as well — see Miriam Posner’s post on what you should consider before exhort everyone to code: http://miriamposner.com/blog/?p=1135).

We recognize that a new skill set is needed to do the work e-science and data librarians do, and we recognize that that skill set is lacking in our workforce. Librarians and educators can do several things to start making up the balance:

1. Educate new librarians with a focus on e-science, like Syracuse University’s eScience Program: http://eslib.ischool.syr.edu/
2. Promote librarianship as an exciting career choice where you can use your math, science, and programming skills to work with teams of scholars to advance science in ways that don’t necessarily involve working in the lab. Plenty of former scientists have come to information science to find it fits another aspect of scholarship they want to be involved in — open access, scholarly communication, data management. Find and encourage these people to join us!
3. Current librarians with an interest can become better programmers. Learn what programming is, why it’s part of how science is done, how to do it on some level, and, perhaps most importantly, how to hire good librarian-programmers into positions at your institution. An applicant who has skills creating workflows in Python doesn’t shine on paper unless the hiring librarians know what workflows and Python are.

If you’re one of the #3s, read on! Here are some resources and online courses that may be of use to you.

Coursera (https://www.coursera.org) is the platform that Stanford, Princeton, and other universities are using to put their courses online for an unlimited number of participants. At the website, you’ll find courses like Computer Science 101 (https://www.coursera.org/course/cs101) (which just started April 23rd!). Browse the catalog and see if there’s anything that will help you do your job better now or help you find something on the horizon.

Caltech is also offering full, online, live lecture courses (with homework!). See Learning From Data, already in progress: http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html

Codecademy (http://www.codecademy.com) is a fun, interactive way to learn basic programming skills. If you’re an ALA member, there’s also an ALAConnect group dedicated to discussing codecademy lessons: http://connect.ala.org/node/165060

Following the link gets you to several more links to the actual class sites — from computer science to anatomy to entrepreneurial technology.

Me, I’ve booked up my January-March with:

Human-Computer Interaction

Computer Science 101

Information Theory

What are you taking?

I’ll likely be blogging some about my experiences with this online learning endeavor.

I started this site when I was in grad school because I figured I’d need a place to house my web projects and learn to code more and build websites. That was true. Then I used it as an extension of professional-me online and it was nice but kind of boring.

I think the time has come to wrap this back up into a more holistic package. All that to say — fair warning, healthy doses of silliness (and food) will be coming to this site. I may professionalize it back up if I’m ever looking for a job again. But for now, expect more music, food, learnin’, and metal in addition to the data and the libraries.

See you around!

Things are busy here for the fall semester. My summer tour is over. I attended workshops, conferences, and set up site visits to some neighboring libraries to see how they run their data services. I wrote up notes for all these to share internally with my colleagues in the science/social science library and not all of it is fit for public sharing, but I do love establishing the model of reporting back from conferences and sharing what we’ve learned.

Do any of you formally or informally report back on conferences or workshops within your institutions or within non-institution groups? How do you do it? Right now we have write ups on our SharePoint server and I’ve been reporting verbally (very concise) at our regular meetings with the invitation to chat more if something sparks an interest.

In that same vein, the Yale Libraries’ Standing Committee on Professional Awareness is hosting a “Conference Recap Forum” today. I think this is a great idea and I’m excited to hear what everyone else has been up to. It’s a diverse group of librarians presenting in 10-15 minutes on topics related to their jobs. I’m presenting on basic elements of data curation issues — here’s my blurb:

Michelle will present on data curation issues in the life sciences based on what she learned at the Summer Institute on Data Curation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Research Data Lifecycle Management workshop at Princeton University in recent months. She will discuss what data is, why it’s important, and the main challenges, questions, and initiatives surrounding curation.

Since this presentation is for such a mixed group, it really is just an intro to the fact that data and data curation issues exist and are being worked on. Nothing too in-depth. I really just want it to be a spark for potential conversations among colleagues.

The more data-savvy of you may not find the slides or handout as helpful, or maybe you’ll have ideas about how I can improve the “pitch” to a group of more general librarians.

Slides are on SlideShare for download and also in PDF format:

hudson_SCOPA_2011-data_curation_presentation

hudson_SCOPA_2011-data_curation_handout

This morning I arrived early to find a package from the National Archives and Records Administration addressed to me. Over the past few months, the government information librarian and I have been shepherding an order for a large batch of data sets on Vietnam that are available through NARA. It’s been a good experience for me as a relatively new data librarian. We broke up one large order into a couple smaller ones, did the dance to get the price quote from NARA, found the fund codes to purchase the files with, consulted with faculty to find out which formats were best, and made decisions about how to deal with paper documentation.

Today I received the second order. I checked over it all to make sure all the requested files for all the separate record groups are included. This is kind of a chore, as the numbers and acronyms used barely follow any kind of logic.

I’m going to give the paper documentation to a library staff member so it can be scanned. I put all the data files on the secure social science data archive server, and I’m going to hand over the original disc of data to the faculty members. Soon, I’ll arrange all the files on the SSDA into record groups and get them cataloged appropriately with their given titles and descriptions. Eventually, I’d like to scan the administrative stuff as well and have it live on our SharePoint instead of on my shelf where it’s currently residing.

After this, I have a patron request to take care of regarding real estate value in the US over time. After that, I have to continue depositing data sets for two different projects (one political science, one environmental) into our pilot institutional repository, work up some use-cases for those, and organize my thoughts for the meeting on it next week.

At some point today I need to wrap-up my thoughts on ALA in some kind of tangible format, and I should do the same for the Summer Institute on Data Curation I was at a few weeks back.

In short, I don’t do much that’s different from what every other librarian does, so maybe you should consider a career in data librarianship, too!

Yesterday afternoon colleagues and I got to attend the C2 computer science lecture by Ben Shneiderman. His topic was “Information Visualization for Knowledge Discovery” and it was just an hour long, but I we could have made a day out of it. I’m still processing a lot of what he presented and it’s been a while, actually, since I’ve really thought about information visualization.

Main points:

The Human Computer Interaction Lab at UMD was founded in 1983. That makes it older than me. It’s always useful for me to put that in perspective — this new, exciting stuff that’s changing the way we interact with information and gain knowledge has its roots in decades of research and dedicated people who have been working on this longer than I’ve been alive.

TimeSearcher, a tool for visualizing long time-series data, is available for free from UMD.  I’d love to play with this. Let’s hope a researcher comes to me needing help!

Treemaps are still awesome. I remember I was in high school the first time I used one to visualize my hard drive usage. I’ve seen them all over lately, but I didn’t realize they were the work of the HCIL!

NodeXL is a very exciting development! It’s a plugin for Excel that lets you visualize networks. Network visualization is complex (understatement?), but the fine people at UMD don’t stop at finding ways for researchers with lots of money to be able to do it — they want you to be able to do it, too. There are options for automatically sucking down data from Twitter, Flickr, etc. so you don’t have to mess with APIs. I haven’t even downloaded it yet and it makes me regret that my day today is filled with exciting meetings so I probably won’t get a chance to until later, but I’m excited. It’s like Christmas. I can’t wait to unwrap my NodeXL. There’s also a book, Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL, written by Ben and colleagues. I checked and Yale does have the ebook!

The Social Media Research Foundation has been generously funded by Microsoft Research (yay MSR!) but they’re looking to find other sources of funding and maybe become their own entity.

Ben made a great point when he said, “Visualization gives you a clue about a query you might pose.” I think that really sums up the “knowledge exploration” aspect of visualization and how it capitalizes on our ability to literally see patterns and become curious about those patterns.

His best point was when he linked to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals and reminded us that those are what we’re working for by finding new ways to interact with information and get insight.

He encouraged us to attend HCIL’s 28th Annual Symposium. My summer is completely booked up, but I look forward to the tweets!

Since I’m new (my two-year anniversary as a librarian was in January!), a lot of the issues I grappled with are still fresh in my mind. The team has asked me to make a list of things that were helpful, things I wish I’d known, etc. So I thought — why not make it a blog post? So here you go. This is what I wish I’d been told about liaisonship and collection development when I started.

All the stuff bibliographers/liaisons actually do

Librarians assigned a subject responsibility do many things. Here’s a list of some things I can think of, by no means exhaustive.

• Create subject guides and course pages
• Subject-based library instruction
• Research consultations one-on-one with students and faculty
• Purchase materials — books, databases, serials
• Make decisions about preservation and reformatting
• Outreach to faculty and students in their subject areas
• Sign off on approval books/work to create approval plans
• Review gift books
• Handle endowments and write endowment letters to donors

Available tools and technology

I still don’t fully have a grasp on all the tools and technology used to make collection development purchases and decisions. I can think of at least five different ways to purchase something at Notre Dame, and more ways than that to see what we hold, how many times books have circulated, and how to get items we own listed in our catalog or on our website. Information about these different things are in disparate places and knowledge of them came to me piecemeal. There should be a centralized “getting started” page or tutorial that tells new collectors about the following:

• The Aleph back-end system for the catalog (how and where to download the software, how to get permissions, how to use it to investigate monograph records). Not everyone may want this, but I found it very helpful and I’m kind of a geek. More information is better, as far as I’m concerned.
• The Datamart: https://datamart.library.nd.edu/ and how to use it to pull statistics, view funds, and interpret what all of the data means. A discussion of what it’s best suited for and what it’s NOT suited for.
• The Checklist for Electronic Products form (this is how we initiate the purchase for an electronic product), how it’s similar and different from the DDW form (the database-driven website — to get it listed in our beautiful database catalog), why you’d use one over the other for a free resource, who’s in charge of each of these things, who’s responsible for assigning subjects to the new resources, and how to get subjects changed or added most efficiently. I think there’s a lot of confusion over both of these tools.
• The GOBI system (formerly Blackwell’s Collection Manager) for viewing approval plan books, initiating purchases, getting results emailed to you based on your subject areas. Just as an aside, I was really excited about the slickness of the Blackwell 7 system and I liked using it, browsing for books, looking at the forms, initiating purchases. I don’t like GOBI at all. I’ll use it when I have to because it’s my job, but I’m not excited about it, and I won’t spend extra time there.
• The reformatting/missing books database. Preservation sends out a message every now and then, but I often forget it exists unless they’re reminding me.

Endowment policies and politics

This may not be an issue for every selector or every university, but I think it’s really helpful to understand where money comes from and what it’s to be spent on. I handle the economics endowments at Notre Dame. Understanding what collection endowments are and how they work would help me do my job. I know that I can find information on the donors of my endowments if I look for it, but only because I’d come across it somewhere before, not because anyone explicitly directed me to it. Maybe the approach to handling endowed funds isn’t very strict here, but we’ve definitely got a responsibility to spend these funds mindfully, and I’d like to better learn how to make good judgments in this area.

Additionally, I’d like to be better at writing endowment letters to the donors. I can be as sincere as can be, but how do you really genuinely thank somebody for donating thousands of dollars to your library? How do you assure them you’re aware of the meaning of an endowed fund and that you steward the collection wisely? Notre Dame is very good at being both genuine and elegant in its outward presentation, and I think interactions with donors and alumni should reflect those qualities as well.

The purchasing processes

How are serials different from monographs with regard to purchasing them for the library? How are print and electronic resources different? What’s the process a database or electronic product has to go through to get licensed? What are some best practices? Can I just find a book on Amazon and tell the monograph acquisitions people that I want it bought & processed?

What makes everyone’s lives easier on the other end? I’ve never had a problem getting anything done, but I suspect it’s because the acquisitions people are so flexible. If I’m just starting out, I’d prefer to mold my practices to their standards and save someone a headache.

Decision making

What tools or strategies are best for making decisions about collection development?

Gift books: I was surprised to hear that gift books shouldn’t leave the gift books room. It would’ve been much more comfortable for me to cart a load of books down to my office and make informed decisions about their usefulness to our collection by looking them up for myself. I could still do that on a mobile device, but at a considerable loss of time and comfort. I feel like I’m discouraged from doing real research on what should be added to the collection from the gifts pile. How do other people make good decisions with this restraint?

Lost/damaged books: We have a database that lists all of these by subject area. How often am I expected to look at it? How often do other people look at their subjects? How do I make an informed decision about what to ditch or get replaced or fixed? Do I check circulation rates, maybe? Find out how many copies we have and if any of them are just newer or older editions of the same missing/damaged work? What’s the easiest way to do that? I’ve had trouble in the past getting my hands on the actual book to look at it and see if it’s something we need to replace (and if the book is missing — that’s impossible, obviously). Maybe there can be a checklist of basic guidelines for figuring out whether something is worth replacing or fixing.

New purchases: Obviously, if a faculty member requests a book in my area and I have funds, I purchase it. How often should I “push” potential purchases to faculty in my departments? I’ve sent econ faculty lists of monographs from our acquisitions slips, but no one has ever had any input. Granted, that could be because they’re books. Grad students know to come to me when they want data purchased, and as far as I can tell, it’s only data and statistics that anyone needs. How do you make decisions about monograph collection development when your fields don’t use books? How do you find out about new resources in your fields?

Interlibrary loans: Is it helpful to look at the ILL history for a department? How often should I do it? Does this largely depend on the discipline?

Budgeting & managing funds

How does the budget allocation process work for each fund? When am I expected to have these funds spent down? It seems I never know until I get an email that says “You need to spend the funds remaining on this account.” Is there a calendar somewhere or some guidelines to help me establish a system to manage my funds through the fiscal year?

Connecting and communicating

What are the best ways to connect with faculty in your assigned departments? A colleague mentioned getting to know the administrative assistants and having them send out information to the faculty and students via a listserv. I wish I’d thought of that! I didn’t even realize that was a possibility.

Another colleague said that he regularly sends his own monthly newsletter to his faculty, informing them of recent purchases and any library news that’s going on. I think that’s fascinating and proactive, but I think it really depends on the department you’re a liaison to. Which brings me to my next questions.

How do you avoid being annoying or overcommunicating? And how much communication is enough? For the past two years I’ve sent welcome emails to new faculty in economics telling them about library resources and services. In that email, I offer to meet to discuss doing workshops or instruction for classes, and I inquire about their areas of research and urge them to let me know if they notice any gaps in the library collection with regard to those areas.

I’ve never received a single response, not even an acknowledgment of receipt or a hello. I don’t know if I’m just doing it wrong, if new faculty are overwhelmed already, if they think my contact isn’t very helpful at all, or if they think it’s helpful but prefer not to reply or take advantage of any of our services. I have no way to gauge what communication is effective when I get no feedback from my faculty, so nonresponse leads me to believe that none of it is effective and they’d rather not hear from me directly, so my liaison/collection efforts would be better spent doing other things. This may or may not be true — there’s no way for me to assess this when nobody’s talking to me.

Some guidelines about best practices for communicating with faculty would be great. If I know I’m “expected” by the library administration to send a welcome letter to new faculty every year, I could do it without feeling like I’m overstepping some bounds or wasting my time. The same would be true of sending monthly newsletters, occasionally inviting requests for purchase, or plugging library workshops and instruction every now and then. I’m sure librarians who have been at this longer definitely get a feel for what works or doesn’t work, and a lot of liaisons here have very robust relationships with their departments, but it’s choppy water to navigate for a new librarian, and some more expectations might be welcomed.

Ikaruga has fairly simplistic gameplay: ships and bullets have two polarities, light and dark, and only bullets of an opposite polarity can hurt you. Bullets of the same polarity make you stroooong. Technique involves deciding when to store up energy, when to do double-damage on enemies, etc. Still: one weapon, two modes.

Radiant Silvergun, in contrast, has seven weapons, all of which you can equip from the start. The game is designed such that almost any scenario has a “best” weapon — one that will make the job easier or more elegant. The technique, then, is switching between all of these to get your job done.

While I admire minimalist design and the ideology of simplicity, I’m a maximalist. I’m capable of using many tools to do the same job in various situations, and that works for me. I think it makes me flexible, optimal. I don’t get caught up trying to force tools into jobs they’re not made for. I might have a hammer, but not everything is a nail because I also have a screwdriver and a saw. I use no less than four tools to read websites I want to keep track of and five different methods to track my to-do lists in work and life. It sounds onerous, I know, but really it’s all the same once you learn a tool and settle into a process of doing something.

All of that to say, hey! Here are some cool services I use you might wanna know about! Previous tools (Mendeley, the Pomodoro Technique, Feedly, the mighty Evernote) were covered here, in “productivity and the tools thereof.”

Keeping up!

My Morning Coffee. “Why do you need four tools to keep track of websites!?” you say. “Can’t you just use an RSS reader like everyone else?!” you say. Well, yes, and I do! I use three of those! Feedly, Reeder (see below), and FeedDemon. But I don’t always want information pushed to me, and I don’t always want to forgo the experience of visiting a site in its digital incarnation. My Morning Coffee is a great Firefox add-on that will load up several pages on demand or even at the start-up of the browser. You can customize by day. It’s fantastic. As you can see, Tuesday is my Arts & Letters Daily day. Otherwise I’d never get anything done. Also useful for simply loading up websites you know you’re going to need during the day (in my case, the library website and the stats tracking page). Plus, I really enjoy its name. Mmmm.

Reeder is an iPhone/iPod/iPad/iThing app. It syncs with Google Reader and does a fantastic, elegant job of organizing and displaying posts. Easily worth the $2.99, and I’ve never seen anything better for mobile RSS reading.

Rumor has it a Mac app is coming soon! I don’t have a Mac, but I hold out hope for a Windows release someday.

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Getting things done!

I know, obsessing over tools and techniques to get things done often results in not getting anything done. It doesn’t have to be that way!

The Hipster PDA. It started out as a joke, I know, but it’s really useful. Pictured here are my Hipster PDA (the clipped notecards), a recycled notebook that’s a stand-in for when I forget my Hipster PDA, and a beautiful Moleskine notebook my dear friend Ray Henry made for me. The point of the PDA is that when you’re away from your devices, you jot things down on disposable, re-usable, give-away-able notecards. When you get to your main method of to-do-listing, you input the items. The cards are clipped — infinitely refillable, not bound in some form that’s difficult to keep together. You’re not attached to them like you’re attached to your Moleskine. And aren’t you attached to your pretty journals!? You know what I use that notebook for? Very important things, only, like hilarious phrases and band names. I might carry my iPod everywhere, but sometimes it’s just easier to write something on paper.

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NirvanaGTD. Nirvana! Hooray! My official GTD application for work-type-things. It’s stylish, web-only, easy, and it works. I take the items off my Hipster PDA and input them into my Nirvana inbox whenever I’m at my desk. Then I process my inbox and put items into timeframes, into categories, into contexts, into whatever I’ve come up with for a particular type of activity I do at work. You can schedule due dates or schedule a task to be done ON a date and forget about it until that day. There’s no corresponding app for any platform, but the mobile web interface works fairly well. I won’t lie, I’m anxious for an app. If you’re curious, I still use the Pomodoro Technique to actually schedule tasks I know I’ll need to be taking care of. I can round up a whole bunch of items for “today” (see the starred ones?), assign Pomodoro values to them, and get crackin’.

Errands. So I use Nirvana to get things done at work, but not for shopping lists, packing lists, lists of foods I need to try and things I need to do around the house. For that, I use the free Errands app, and it works perfectly. It’s not as slick as many apps, but it really does its job. You can contextualize, set due dates and priorities, etc., but I use it bare-bones for its list ability. I can make a big list of everything I generally shop for. I can mark and unmark items at will, rather than checking them off as “done” forever. I haven’t made a shopping list manually in months. Similarly, I have a big list of items I frequently pack for trips, so I don’t have to re-remember everything I’m going to need.

43things. You may have noticed that my “someday” folder in my Nirvana system is empty. I don’t put things in Nirvana until they’re actionable. For “someday” items, I prefer something more social. With 43things, I can make my big long-term goals public and add entries within them that show how I’m progressing. People can cheer my goals and I can see everyone else’s goals and maybe find some inspiration. I think it’s really cool. I don’t fret about whether these are SMART goals or the actual progress I’m making on them. That’s the point of “someday,” right? These are things I don’t stress over putting on a to-do list. I don’t think every life goal is a box that needs to be checked.

So that’s some of what I do to keep my life in order. How about you? Do you take a minimalist or maximalist approach to managing your work/life? Do you know of even better apps? Do you just love Ikaruga and/or Radiant Silvergun?

What do you know about knowledge transfer? Here we like to call it the “what if I get hit by a bus and/or win the lottery?” scenario. We don’t have knowledge management practices in place. I’m faced with transitioning everything I’m in charge of to everyone else — people who may or may not be designated (or exuberantly willing!) to take over my roles.

I’m going to start by brain-dumping everything I’m in charge of or know a lot about. This includes but is not limited to:

data reference

data products

data curation efforts

data purchases

data use

data analysis

collection development + liaisonship for economics, education

virtual reference

instruction/reference statistics

the library newsletter

the library Facebook/Twitter

the library mobile site

the reference blog

Then I want to take stock of where information regarding all these issues can be found:

in my email inbox

in my filing cabinet

in the purchasing system

on my blog

on the wiki

on the vast interwebs

Then I’m going to lay out a plan for transitioning information about the topics that live in these various places into one place — the library wiki.

Strategies:

tutorial videos

wiki entries with all usernames/contacts/necessary information

wiki entries of brain-dumping related to topics (conversation is ephemeral)

wiki entries full of usable, clean reference data for the past two years

workshops/presentations on data and data reference

workshops/presentations on any software I frequently support (libraryh3lp, desk tracker, the wiki) as requested

While I’m certain some things are going to fall through the cracks, is there any obvious angle I’m missing? Not about the content — you guys don’t know what I’m in charge of — but general concepts of how to impart information when you’re leaving a position.

ballet mecanique

John Matthias and company read his poem “Automystifstical Plaice” which you can read online at that link. You can find out more about the performance of the piece at the Notre Dame Creative Writing website.

The poem is inspired by (among other things) the story of how Hedy Lamarr listened in on the conversations her husband (an arms dealer in Nazi Germany) had with prominent officials about wartime technology. When she escaped to the United States she asked to be put in contact with someone who knew about synchronization. She was put in contact with composer George Anthiel whose work with synchronization was based on synchronizing player pianos to make beautiful avant garde pieces like the score to Ballet Mécanique.

Together, they developed and patented a frequency-hopping torpedo guidance system. Now called spread-spectrum communication, this technology is the basis for our cell phones and wireless internet.

Then, as I walked by the “look at these new books!” shelf today, I found this! A new biography on Hedy Lamarr by Ruth Barton and so far it looks to be well-researched and entertaining.

So yes, I recommend everything — Automystifstical Plaice the poem, Ballet Mécanique the film and score (this could be a whole post itself but I will leave you with just one more link instead of droning on!), Barton’s new biography, and wireless and cellular communications technology. Especially that last one. Thanks, Hedy and George! And thanks, John Matthias for your informative poem!