Mobile technologies, specifically smartphones, have become a peripheral appendage to our everyday experience. We often see individuals oblivious to current surroundings exhibiting dedicated attention to their mobile devices. This behavior is often viewed in a negative light; however, with the level of global media engagement people are able to achieve with these devices, it can be hard to blame them. The ability to participate in social media, sending quick messages to friends, listen to music, watch videos, surfing the web, fact check information, or even read a great book, is all right in your hand. When attempting to interact with patrons through technology, utilizing their familiarity with their mobile device can help to achieve a more positive experience. This is when “Let’s build an app” is often reverberated. Although that is a great idea, it is a complex development process and there are a number of ways to achieve interactive…
Category: Original Content
A Couple of Not Totally Useless Things You Can Do on the Command Line [written for beginners]
As a librarian who has been very engaged in the movement to demystify programming, I’ve really focused on teaching and sharing tools that users can use in daily life, as that has been the most common question I get when teaching, “When will I use this?” This post has been heavily influenced by my work in teaching programming to the non-programmer and teaching something that can be applied beyond the classroom. With the start of school on the cusp (and for some already come and gone) I wanted to throw something not totally useless out there for you to tuck away to use on a rainy day or now if you’d like. These have been written in mind that you may have some, experience with the command line but very little. I apologize for those more experience users if this is a bit dense in explanation. I’ve ran these successfully…
Taming the Beast: A Case for Task-Driven Projects
Have you ever been assigned to a project? If so, you know that they can be daunting, sometimes overwhelming creatures that seem challenging to overcome. Where do you begin? What next? Before you know it you’re lost in the jungle with no clear way out. So, how do you tame the beast? How do you get through a project without getting lost along the way? In this post I’ll be making a case for tasks. Paving the way through the jungle Tasks are the real, tangible steps taken to accomplish a goal, in this case, a project. Together, they build the roadmap that helps you get from point A to point Z. So, how do you come up with tasks for a large, sometimes abstract project? First, you need to understand what the end goal is. Second, you need to understand where you are currently at. Then you start plotting…
Required Reading
Stop what you’re doing and pick up a copy of Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. Douglas Rushkoff’s 21st century call to arms ought to be required reading for librarians (not just those with the word digital in their job title). This is a quick read with big impact and it deserves more than a skim. This book caught me at the perfect moment as I’ve just taken on a new role as Scholarly Technologies Librarian for Indiana University, where one of my main job duties will be technology training for staff. I’m in the brainstorming stages now, but I think I’ve already zeroed in on the real challenge. Learning styles and technical abilities aside, one of the biggest obstacles to teaching technology is our attitude toward the technology itself. In terms of programming in particular, Rushkoff writes, “We are intimidated by the whole notion of programming,…
If You Build It They Might Not Come
I’ve felt lately that I am trying to row upstream when getting faculty and students to use our research guides. They have great content, we discuss them in instruction sessions, and we prominently feature them on our webpage. In spite of this though they are not used nearly as much as I think they should be. This summer, I spent time brainstorming ways to market the guides to increase usage and it hit me that maybe I’m going about the process all wrong. I’m trying to promote a resource to students that is outside the typical resources they use. Our students use the university’s learning management system, Moodle, extensively. It is the way they access courses and communicate with their professors and fellow classmates. We have integrated links in Moodle directly to the library, but based on our Google Analytics students go directly from the library homepage to the databases….
Creating Campus-wide Technology Partnerships: Mission Impossible?
Libraries have undergone significant changes in the last five years, shifting from repositories to learning spaces, from places to experiences. Much of this is due to our growing relationships with our IT, instructional technology, and research colleagues as the lines between technology and library-related work become continually more blurred. But it’s not always easy to establish these types of partnerships, especially if there haven’t been any connections to build on. So how can you approach outreach to your IT campus departments and individuals? There are typically two types of partnerships that you can initiate: 1. There is a program already established, and you would like the library to be involved where it wasn’t involved before 2. You are proposing something completely new All you have to do is convince the coordinator or director of the project or department that having the library become a part of that initiative is a…
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…
Agile Development: Sprint Planning Meeting
In my last post, I talked about the sprint review meeting; this month we look into planning a sprint. As I said last time, this meeting should be separate from the review, both to differentiate the two and to avoid meeting fatigue. Objective Sprint planning takes into account the overall project plan and the results of the previous sprint (as presented in the sprint review) and sets out a plan for the next week discrete development time period. Timing The timing of the sprint planning meeting is the subject of much discussion, and different teams adopt different conventions based on what they feel is the best fit for their particular process. Personally, I prefer to hold the planning meeting on the same day as the review. While this puts pressure on the Product Owner to quickly adjust planning materials based on the outcome of the review, it has several important advantages: The knowledge acquired…
Dates: Or, the Continuing Frustration of Unnecessarily Ambiguous Metadata
The MARC data structure, and the AACR2 rules that usually accompany it, are strange beasts. Every once in a while I’m asked why I get so frustrated with them, and I explain that there are things — strange things — that I have to deal with by writing lots of code when I could be spending my time trying to improve relevancy ranking or extending the reporting tools my librarians use to make decisions that affect patrons and their access. This is one of those tales. I’m a systems librarian, which in my case means that I deal with MARC metadata pretty much all day, every day. Coming from outside the library world, it took me a while to appreciate the MARC format and how we store data in it, where appreciate can be read as hate hate hate hate hate. I find it frustrating to deal with data…
Organizing Library Workflows with Asana
As coordinator for non-Roman language cataloging at my library, I have to keep track of several workflows simultaneously without actual fluency in any of the 10+ languages that my section deals with. As a librarian it goes without saying that I’m a big fan of organization and efficiency. So I’ve implemented a free task-based program called Asana in order to keep track of my section’s productivity, statistics, and progress. Asana was created with the objective of eliminating dependability on email in order to manage projects. Tasks and conversations are all in one place to promote transparency and accessibility, which is extremely valuable when you are on a team of five or more people with multiple established workflows. I’m certain I’m not alone when I say that email can often seem like a void that creates more confusion than clarity when it comes to communicating important work updates. Not everyone that…