Academic libraries support certain software by virtue of what they have available on their public computers, what their librarians are trained to use, and what instruction sessions they offer. Sometimes libraries don’t have a choice in the software they are tasked with supporting, but often they do. If the goal of the software support is to simply help students achieve success in the short term, then any software that the library already has a license for is fair game. If the goal is to teach them a tool they can rely on anywhere, then libraries must consider the impact of choosing open tools over commercial ones. Suppose we have a student, we’ll call them “Student A”, who wants to learn about citation management. They see a workshop on EndNote, a popular piece of citation management software, and they decide to attend. Student A becomes enamored with EndNote and continues to grow their skills with it…
Author: Bryan Brown
Outernet: A Digital Library in the Sky
To me, libraries have always represented a concentration of knowledge. Growing up I dreamt about how smart I’d be if I read all of the books in my hometown’s tiny local branch library. I didn’t yet understand the subtle differences between libraries, archives and repositories, but I knew that the promise of the internet and digital content meant that, someday, I’d be able to access all of that knowledge as if I had a library inside my computer. The idea of aggregating all of humanity’s knowledge in a way that makes it freely accessible to everyone is what led me to library school, programming, and working with digital libraries/repositories, so whenever I find a project working towards that goal I get tingly. Outernet makes me feel very tingly. In a nutshell, Outernet is a startup that got sponsored by a big nonprofit, and aims to use satellites to broadcast data down to Earth. By using…
Embracing Modularity with the Unix Philosophy
Unix, the ancient operating system that powered mainframe computers in the 1970’s, couldn’t have been easy to design. Computers of that era were unbelievably expensive and slow compared to what we have today, and this put extreme limitations on the software that they could run. Programs had to take up as little disk space and system memory as possible because there just wasn’t much to go around. With that in mind, the original Unix programmers focused on writing tiny programs that 1) had one functional focus, and 2) played nicely with other programs. The reasoning behind this was that small, simple, single-purpose programs would be easier to improve than large, complex, multi-purpose ones, and if a user didn’t like the way one program worked they could swap it out for a different one (as opposed to being stuck with one mediocre way to do things). In practice, programs would be…
Don’t Go Chasin’ Waterfalls
Fellow LITA blogger Leo Stezano has been knocking it out of the park lately with his insightful posts about Agile Development. Agile is a word that gets thrown around a lot in the tech world, and while many people in the library world may have a kinda-sorta understanding of what it is, far less have a solid understanding of why it is. Agile seems to make a lot of sense on the surface, but one can only appreciate Agile when one knows where it came from and what it was rebelling against. In the beginning, there was the dreaded Waterfall model: As you can see from the diagram, you start with requirements and work on them until they are done. Then you move on to design and work on it until it is done, then implementation, etc. and the fun rolls downhill from there. The basic assumption of the…
Teamwork and Jazz
Jazz is a pretty unique genre that demands a lot from musicians; a skilled jazz artist must not only be adept at their instrument, they must be highly skilled improvisors and communicators as well. Where other styles of music may only require that a musician remember how to play a piece and run through it the same way every time, good jazz artists can play the same song in an infinite number of ways. Furthermore, they must also be able to collaborate with other jazz artists who can also play the same song an infinite number of ways. This makes jazz an inherently human art form because a listener never knows what to expect; when a jazz group performs, the outcome is the unpredictable result of each musician’s personal taste and style merging into a group effort. In a lot of ways, team projects are kind of like a jazz…
In Praise of Anaconda
Do you want to learn to code? Of course you do, why wouldn’t you? Programming is fun, like solving a puzzle. It helps you think in a computational and pragmatic way about certain problems, allowing you to automate those problems away with a few lines of code. Choosing to learn programming is the first step on your path, and the second is choosing a language. These days there are many great languages to choose from, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The right language for you depends heavily on what you want to do (as well as what language your coworkers are using). If you don’t have any coder colleagues and can’t decide on a language, I would suggest taking a look at Python. It’s mature, battle-tested, and useful for a just about anything. I work across many different domains (often in the same day) and Python is a…
What is a Librarian?
When people ask me what I do, I have to admit I feel a bit of angst. I could just say I’m a librarian. After all I’ve been in the library game for nearly 10 years now. I went to library school, got a library degree, and I now work at FSU’s Strozier library with a bunch of librarians on library projects. It feels a bit disingenuous to call myself a librarian though because the word “librarian” is not in my job title. Our library, like all others, draws a sharp distinction between librarians and staff. Calling myself a librarian may feel right, but it is a total lie in the eyes of Human Resources. If I take the HR stance on my job, “what I do” becomes a lot harder to explain. The average friend or family member has a vague understanding of what a librarian is, but…
Leveraging MOOCs for Fun and Profit
Let’s Talk about MOOCs If you are a current or recent graduate student or work in higher ed, you have heard of the disruptive tech du jour, Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOCs). While MOOCs are in their infancy, they are being scrutinized pretty heavily because of their potential to drink academia’s milkshake. While the course structure of a MOOC and a university course are fairly similar (a domain expert organizes a field and puts together a linear curriculum of lectures, readings and quizzes), the primary differences lie in the method of interaction (synchronous and personal vs. asynchronous and impersonal) and their perception of credibility (though certain platforms are experimenting with offering credentials, they don’t carry as much weight as a traditional university degree). While it will probably be a while before MOOCs start poaching would-be university students, we can still enjoy and make use of MOOCs as they…
Virtual Machines in a Nutshell
Many of you have probably heard the term “virtual machine“, but might not be familiar with what a VM is or does. Virtualization is a complicated topic, as there are many different kinds and it can be difficult for the novice to tell which is which. Today we’re going to talk specifically about OS virtualization and why you should care about this pretty fabulous piece of tech. Let’s start with a physical computer. For the sake of having a consistent example, we’ll say it’s a Dell laptop running Windows 7. Dual booting is a popular method of installing an additional operating system onto a physical computer in order to have more options and flexibility with what programs you want to run. Lots of Mac users run Boot Camp so they can have both OS X and Windows side by side. While dual booting is a great choice for many, it…
Why Learn Unix? My Two Cents
There’s an conversation shaping up on the Code4Lib email list with the title “Why Learn Unix?”, and this is a wonderful question to ask. A lot of technical library jobs are asking for UNIX experience and as a result a lot of library schools are injecting bits and pieces of it into their courses, but without a proper understanding of the why of Unix, the how might just go in one ear and out the other. When I was learning about Unix in library school, it was in the context of an introductory course to library IT. I needed no convincing, I fell in love almost immediately and cemented my future as a command line junkie. Others in the course were not so easily impressed, and never received a satisfactory answer to the question of “Why Learn Unix?” other than a terse “Because It’s Required”. Without a solid understanding of…