Yesterday I got a referral from wired.com to a photo I took in 2007, from a story written in March 2009. My photo was their NuvaRing example for laying the ground rules for a “found” photoshop contest about the birth control of the future.

I drew over my surname because at the time I was trying to be slightly anonymous on the Internet. Oh, those were the days.

Visiting the photo reminded me that I’d added it, on request, to two Flickr groups a long time back: One of these things is not like the other… and Contraceptives & Other Images of Birth Control.

Between the groups and friends and that one person who was reading year-old wired.com articles, my birth control has, to date, been viewed by 2,288 people, over a period of 3 years. (Ha. Period.)

2,288 people. 3 years.

The Internet is a vagina-centric time machine.

Update: I just realized that by blogging about it I’ve completed the Internet circle. Yay.

Several survived. 3 of the casualties (thin shells, thick membranes) became an emergency omelette, with garlic and cheese and a salad and sourdough toast.

It occurred to me as I was cooking that my first reaction to the egg suicide was laughter, not crying or punishing myself in some illogical way for not being a good egg carton steward.

Part of it is just growing up. Obviously, there’s no actual reason to cry over a carton of broken eggs (unless you are starving and you can’t get more eggs). There never was. There never will be.

Part two is coping. Most people I’ve talked to my age, particularly those in high stress and/or professional positions, admit to having some kind of Impostor Syndrome. I think this generally gets compounded for people (like myself) who are anxious by nature. By accepting that I will probably always feel like I’m faking at least some part of my life, it’s okay to mess up. Somehow.

And the third part is finally not giving a shit.

I think I’m finally pulling myself up over the lip of the third part.

The first part of the talk was a pretty dry but informative overview of an ethnographic study ProQuest did to better understand the research habits of its primary users: students. Primary research included:

• field observation of mostly undergraduate student researchers, either in person in their “natural habitat” or remotely
• online chat-based focus groups with end-user researchers
• focus groups with librarians
• end-user researcher surveys

Some results included the fact that participants overwhelmingly thought that libraries have the best information over the Internet at large, but they often start their searches in search engines because they don’t now where to begin on library sites. Library sites usually have no clear/compelling starting places, and it’s difficult to identify useful and appropriate resources without prior knowledge. Users generally satisfice (what Law called a compensatory behavior) by going to search engines instead, sometimes even returning to their or another library through search results. (And when I say he talked about search engines, I mean that he was talking about Google. No other search engines were really discussed. Bing was mentioned in passing, but not in the context of its seeming ability to be relatively good at getting deep web stuff.)

To sum up this portion of the talk, he cited the Ithaka Report to say that usage of the library as gateway is decreasing, and library disintermediation from the research process is increasing.

I was totally with him up to this point: Libraries are not being used as they used to be. Check. People are using other online tools, tools thought by librarians to be inferior. Check. Librarians want people to use their tools. Check.

I thought we were on the cusp of talking about getting web tools and library tools to work better together. But we were not.

Law views Google as competition. Instead of making library databases and catalogs and what-have-you play nicer with search engines, he has headed up the creation of a new product called Summon (taglined “Web Scale Discovery”).

It’s:

• is a single, pre-harvested unified index, including full text when available
• makes results available without authentication
• is customized for a given library’s content
• is vendor and resource neutral (but still dependent on vendor buy-in)

He referred to it as being “like Google” but for library websites.

I do think the product would do a few things well. Its core mission is to provide a way for people to search across content types in a timely fashion, replacing slow and clunky federated search. It also provides the opportunity for the user to do some vetting before they even look at a resource, if useful metadata is provided. This would allow users to look at only a few really pertinent results and then go off to use whatever resources are at their disposal. It would also be a great discovery tool for figuring out what databases and tools are useful for a given topic, especially since once people figure out what tools to use for that topic, they tend to return to them again and again. It’s a true gateway model, in that sense.

However, as you can probably gather because I only write information science-related posts when I’m angry, I have a few problems with Summon. I think Summon makes some assumptions, which I will put in quotes so someone doesn’t think these are ideas I espouse:

• “Google is bad for research.” In an increasingly cross-disciplinary world, where traditional media and traditional publishing are no longer the sole, or even primary, sources of research, I think it’s problematic to say that Google is not a research tool. Discouraging people from using Google is just going to make your library look even more out-of-touch than people already think it is.
• “People start their research at the library.” Some people do. I know I start with search engines and Wikipedia to get a grasp on what terms and names I should look for when I go into a research database. During the Q&A period I asked Law about what suggestions he had for addressing users starting their research in Google, and trying to get them to Summon. His reply, which I think was a good one in general but not specific to the tool, was that libraries should have keyword rich landing pages that pull in hits. I guess I was hoping that you could make canned searches in Summon and make landing pages with them.
• “Librarians should decide what resources are legit and which aren’t, even on the open web.” Someone in Q&A asked about whether open web content could be included in Summon. The answer was yes: whatever librarians deem important. I do think the opportunity to include open web content with scholarly sources is a good one, but, as I said before, decisions about what’s important on the Internet are made by completely different metrics, especially as resources become more cross-disciplinary. I imagine this capacity for the tool would generally be extremely limited to a few scholarly sites, populated on some sort of as-used basis, or ignored all together in the face of the enormity of the information that would have to be vetted by librarians to make it a truly integrated search. (This was tried once. It was called the Internet Public Library, and it was outgrown by the post-2000 web and made obsolete by, yes, search engines.)
• “We can change user behavior.” This is the We Know Best Approach. Instead of following users’ lead and meeting them where they’re starting, we’re trying to force them to start where we want them to start. That doesn’t work, and it’s generally a waste of time and money.

Ultimately, I think the “Google is bad, but let’s build a tool like Google” business model is not going to work out. Because, as long as there is Google, people are going to use Google. I think a better use of library resources is figuring out how to get scholarly work visible in search engines. Take that same metadata and work with search engine companies to get it into search engines. If a resource is restricted, let those listings tell a person if they can access the resource or not via their institution, given IP range or current authentication or a cookie or a plugin or whatever their library’s method is. And let them get straight at the content from there. The library doesn’t have to be invisible, but it also doesn’t have to be an unmoving wall.

Even if you don’t like filling things out in little boxes, if you do web work, I highly recommend that you fill out ALA’s excellent annual survey on web workers. The results are always fascinating (see last year’s), and it seems like the questions get better and more targeted every year.

So:

Wednesday evening held forth a Mexican feast and Beatles Rock Band, hosted by friends up the street. I thought my fake instrument was drums, but I now fancy fake bass. Perhaps next time I will try “medium.”

I was going to drive home for Thanksgiving, but me finishing up being sick and my parents getting sick precluded that. Instead I had a proper Orphan Thanksgiving with my friend Patti and her family (husband, mom, and dog), complete with dilly beans and Patti’s famous biscuits. I also got to try ABC’s Terminator, which Patti had kindly brought home in a growler.

On Friday, I attended Yourwelcomesgiving with other friends in town. A mixup at the co-op made us the recipients of not the ordered 14-pound turkey, but a 25-pound turkey. I had never seen such a turkey outside of film and Norman Rockwell prints. Delicious and absurd. A communal effort resulted in two kinds of potatoes, roasted root veggies, brussels sprouts, tofurkey casserole, two kinds of cranberry sauce, fruit and thyme sorbet, two kinds of stuffing, and of course turkey. I contributed pumpkin bread and snickerdoodles. That particular crowd always has an amazing array of homemade and carefully selected booze: this time we had some local beer, some red wines, and homemade mead.

A sad tale about the pumpkin bread. I combined two recipes, for the bread and filling respectively, but didn’t think of the results of a liquid center in a 9×5 inch pan. The 7×3 pan turned out fine, but the larger loaf vomited liquid cream cheese mixture all over the cooling rack when I tried to turn it out. Lesson learned: small pans.

Today I went to the market and got the following:

• a generous quart each of beets and potatoes: $3.50
• 2 garlic bulbs: $2
• a dozen fresh eggs: $2.50
• a quart of Winesap apples: $2.50
• a giant bunch of kale: $3.75

I also went to Sparrow and got a pork chop and a couple of their awesome lamb/herb sausages.

Long story short, this week I inadvertently got a much-needed break (even if part of it involved snot). I made some decisions about future plans that I’m feeling pretty good about. And ate a lot of food.

My attendance at the market was limited for a while (that whole crutches thing for all of September and part of October), but I’ve recently gotten back in the swing of strolling over to Kerrytown on Saturdays. I’m going to package the journal in some nice way for mailing, but for now I thought it might be interesting to just list out what I’ve gotten since starting the journal. (Today was a particularly nice haul, I think.

October 17

• “spicy” greens seasonal salad mix: $2
• head of green cabbage: $1
• quart of sweet onions: $2
• quart of Yukon gold potatoes: $3
• jar of bay leaves: $3*
• about a pound of hanger steaks: $7.50*

October 31

two garlic bulbs, three shallots, and a lime: $2.15*

November 14

• haruki turnips with greens: $2.75
• kale: $2
• quart of purple Viking potatoes: $4
• dozen eggs: $2.50
• cup of coffee: $2
• giant plantain tamale with raisins and sauce and a side of cabbage salad: $4

*These were cheating a bit; I got them at Sparrow’s, right next to the Market.

I wanted to address the subject because I recently landed my first full-fledged librarian job, and I don’t do anything that librarians “traditionally” do at all. Basically I’m a web dev for a scholarly publishing house that happens to be in a library. And, most librarians I know don’t do “traditional” librarian work either, or it takes up very little of their time. Instead they teach, they build websites, they manage social media, they wrangle data. Sure, they’re all working with information, and promoting information literacy, but they’re not sitting behind desks and organizing tiny cards in tiny drawers in giant chests.

I had a bit of a crisis of faith about halfway through grad school. I had worked in libraries since high school, and I thought I wanted to be an academic reference librarian. Then after two semesters of what I perceived to be really dry, really commonsensical courses in reference, cataloging, database searching, etc., I thought, my god. What am I doing here? I almost dropped out. I then realized that the other courses I’d been taking (information technology, complex systems, information policy), and the other work I knew how to do (web dev and design) could be folded into the label “librarian.” I feel much better about it now, but it took a long time.

I recently asked Twitter for librarians to tell me what their titles are, and what they do, and where they do it. If you’re a librarian, I’d love to hear from you.

The past month I’ve pretty much been cooking, knitting, enjoying the occasional outing, and looking forward to a very fun fall and winter. This period was actually very helpful in getting me to shop and plan meals better. Oh, adulthood.

Thanks to all my friends who were so helpful. Seriously. You people did my laundry, took out my trash, got my mail, took me shopping, and took me to the bar. You’re, like, all my mom. Except for that last one.

I’m feeling really good, and have a small army of friends who are arranging furniture and cleaning up small rain-caused floods and making sure I’m fed and and making sure I’m taking my painkillers and generally verifying that I don’t injure myself in embarrassing ways in my own home.

I get the sutures out in 2 weeks, and then I have 4 more weeks on crutches. Since there are now holes in my bones that need to fill in. I don’t understand how there aren’t nanobots or Cylon goo to do this, but there you are.

And I kept the hardware.