SLA Heart of America Blog

23 Things for Fun and Continuing Professional Development

If you’re like me, one of the things that drew you to librarianship (and to the Internet) was the constant access to information. The constant impetus and opportunity to learn. Often, I don’t even care what I learn – hence the wild variety of books on my personal shelves, from earthworm farms to mythology, cookbooks, origami, quantum physics and all those dictionaries. (Yes, that list is for real). But I admit, I get extra excited when I can learn anything about libraries.

That’s one reason I really like the 23 Things program I recently stumbled across online. It’s a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) opportunity created for librarians, by librarians. It seeks to familiarize us with the wide world of Web 2.0, while sneaking in networking and professional involvement along the way! And, it’s entirely free.

The Things are both informative and interactive.  For example, Thing 1 starts off with an introduction to blogs and encourages you to start your own.  Thing 2 runs you through finding, reading, and subscribing to other people’s blogs.  Thing 3 discusses personal branding, and offers some exercises and ideas to get you started.  Things 6 and 7 explore networks, online and in person.  A few of the Things direct you towards specific sites or tools.  Some of them work you through more general sorts of solutions.

Some of the Things, I am already familiar with, and you will be, too.  Some of them, I have heard of but never used. Many  of them, I could use an excuse to do more with.

The best place to participate is through Cambridge University’s CPD23 blog. They started a-Thing-a-week in June, and are currently on Thing 9. 23 Things is primarily self-directed, though, so you might want to start here, at Thing 1. An introduction and outline of all the Things can be found here.

23 Things has been both popular and useful for a couple of years now. It originated in 2006 at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County (PLCMC), in Charlotte, NC. Helene Bowers dreamed it up as a way to familiarize a large, change-resistant staff with new technologies. Here is the original PLCMC site. Bowers explains her idea and offers suggestions for creating a successful 23 Things program in this 2008 School Library Journal article.

Also in 2008, in Seattle, everyone’s favorite library association, the SLA, offered their own version of 23 Things. They revisited it again last year, updating their 23 Things wiki and reinvigorating our interest. And, as they say, it’s never too late to participate!

Is it time for you to jump on the 23 Things bandwagon? If so, let us know!

Post by Julie Timmins, MLS. Part-time medical, part-time public, but all-the-time Information Professional.

OMG – The Millennials are Coming

SLA Annual Conference Presentation by Mary Ellen Bates

Link to presentation slides:  http://www.batesinfo.com/extras/assets/omg.pdf

Actually, the Millennials are already here.  Mary Ellen Bates led this session about working with what she calls “digital natives”.  Here is a collection of snippets from her presentation. 

She describes their expectations of life experiences as “augmented reality” where there are enhancements to the real experience.  Her example was the moveable yellow line on the football field during televised games.

Having been online their entire lives, Millennials not only prefer to be in constant contact with people, they believe this activity establishes and validates their credibility.  Social capital matters.  Millennials believe:

1. Distance doesn’t matter. They don’t have to leave their homes to get the information they need.
2. Sharing is the default. They don’t understand the concept of hoarding information because sharing is the norm.  This might be why privacy concerns may be less valued, and why the issue of copyright and intellectual property might be challenging concepts to grasp.
3. Information is ubiquitous.  If all you’re offering is information, they may not be impressed.  Sharing knowledge- not just information- equals power. 

Personal branding is second nature. They are voracious consumers of information, but rely on their personal networks for filtering.  These networks include Facebook friends, Twitter groups, and other electronic collections of people to which they choose to belong. When you reach out to them, you will be tapping into their networks, one way or another. (She added that we should find opportunities to show them what they might be missing by allowing the information that reaches them to be filtered by their groups or friends.)

Millennials like to engage in “media snacking” which simply means they want to multitask all day (work, Facebook, Twitter, ipod, etc) in order to feel connected.  Otherwise, they may feel distracted.  Some even sleep with their phones in their hands (something I have seen in my own house for years!)

Mary Ellen advises those who are not Millennials to respect their culture and understand that they not only bring new perspectives to the workplace, but they also create new perspectives.  They also have updated technology skills that force others to adapt and evolve.

And finally, Millennials consider the library a service and not a location, online news is accepted as an adequate source for current information, and anything on the Internet is considered “fair game”.

By Valerie Vogt, Shook, Hardy & Bacon Reference Librarian
Heart of American Chapter Program Planning Committee Member

Thomas Friedman Presented at the SLA Annual Conference

 (c) The Photo Group 2011- All Rights Reserved

Thomas Friedman is the author of The World Is Flat and the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times.

According to a very reliable source, Thomas Friedman turns down 93% of speaking invitations. He’s been called “the country’s best newspaper columnist” and named one of “America’s Best Leaders”, besides the 3 Pulitzer Prizes he has received. It’s no coincidence that he spoke to the SLA Annual Conference just a few months for his new book is due to be released, That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.

Friedman began by describing inventions that were not even in existence a decade ago such as Facebook, 3G, the Cloud and Skype. Several decades ago when the internet browser was born, no one had an inkling of the convergence of technologies that was about to happen. From the laying of fiber optic cables in just 5 short years to the advent of “uploading” and self-publishing electronically, an explosion in the global economy has made Detroit and Dubai next-door neighbors. This inflection point in history is making yesterday’s “average” unacceptable. Routine work is being eliminated in our economy and replaced by technology. College graduates today face the prospect of not getting hired, but rather having to invent their own jobs.

Anything that can be done, will be done. If you don’t do it, someone else will. The only question is, will it be done BY you or TO you? There are now 4.8 billion cell phones on the planet, and connectivity is reaching every corner of the globe. There is no such thing as a local story anymore. Just one tweet by a U.S. Congressman illustrates this point conveniently. Friedman argues that behavior still matters and that our society will come back full circle to old-fashioned values like strong family relationships, honesty, integrity, trust, etc. once the technology smoke has cleared.

My favorite quote of the presentation was “The Internet is an open sewer of untreated and unfiltered information, full of gold nuggets.” Friedman confirmed his appreciation of librarians by saying that after writing 5 books, he knows our value as information professionals and researchers from personal experience.

Mary Odom, HOA President

Personalized Search Results, their significance to you and your library

Remember when you read 1984 in high school?  You were outraged that freedom of information could be so curtailed.  You knew in your heart that you would stand against Big Brother if it ever came to that, and you swore that you would doggedly protect intellectual freedom so that it never would.  You became a librarian.  An Information Professional.

And you’ve done a fine job protecting our rights and freedoms from a government that might restrict them for our own good.

In the mean time, though, private companies have silently stepped into the role.  Two giants, Facebook and Google, now offer Personalized Results.  You may have noticed, Facebook has filtered the information you see in your newsfeed.  They do this so that we won’t be overwhelmed by too much information, so that we can focus on the people who matter most and tune out the rest.  However, a growing percentage of people (a recently estimated 35% of people in their 20s) get their news information primarily from this social site, and that information is filtered as well.

Even more significant, Google quietly announced in late 2009 that they would be rolling out Personalized Search for all users.  This means that your Google search results are now tailored to you, based on IP address locations, previous searches, and the results you chose from those searches.  Consider the example of three people searching the same phrase, "Joplin tornado."  One is an environmentalist, another an investment banker, the third a medical librarian (like me!).  With Personalized Search, each would get different results.  The environmentalist could read about the environmental impact of natural disasters and green rebuilding.  The banker would get results geared toward the economic repercussions of the storm and the estimated costs of rebuilding.  The medical librarian would get results about casualties. The first two examples are supposition, but this last is true.  I was surprised to see such gruesome results, especially when I compared my medical-librarian-Personalized-Results with an un-filtered search that retrieved general news, updates from the Red Cross, and even a pet rescue site.  I could have used some of that information.

On one hand, Personalized Results can be very useful.  If you are a car enthusiast who searches for Jaguar, you won’t have to sift through results about wildlife. 

However, and here’s where the fear comes in, you may gradually lose touch with opposing view points.  As Google targets your search history and builds a profile of your beliefs, you will see fewer and fewer opinions in your Google results list that vary from your own.  And, as in the Joplin example, we don’t know what we are missing until we look at it from another perspective.  This personalized Google feature can be worked around (add the string “&pws=0” to the end of your search query), but you have to know about it to be able to change it. 

What is the significance of this for special librarians?  In the hands of a professional, Personalized Search could save time, if we are able to use it to work for us, rather than against us.  If I Google a word I am unfamiliar with, it would be nice if the results included medical dictionaries and definitions. 

But I abhor the idea of my searches being filtered, even through my own perspective.  As a librarian, I know the value of balanced information.  If I am doing research about a new procedure, I cannot miss out on information just because Google’s algorithms don’t think I would be interested.  I cannot avoid a second or third view point, especially if it’s a dissenting view.  The times when I turn to Google, when I need a general starting point for an unfamiliar topic or if my databases have yet to index something really new, are the times when I most need an un-limited breadth of information.

This Personalization phenomenon is still relatively new.  But it’s also still prevalently silent and unknown, and it is affecting our (and our patron’s) information consumption more than we may know.  What will we do about it?  And how will we let it affect our Information Profession?

By Julie Timmins, MLS

For more about this topic, checkout:

Filter bubble, by Eli Pariser (2011)

The Googlization of everything: (and why we should worry), by Siva Vaidhyanathan (2011)

Republic.com and Republic.com 2.0, by Cass Sunstein (2002 and 2009)

The Control Revolution: how the Internet is putting individuals in charge and changing the world we know by Andrew Shapiro (2000)

The Information: a history, a theory, a flood, by James Gleick (2011)

Google News, News For You! and more on personalized, socially shared news

Pros and Cons of Personalized Search

And for a wholly dissenting opinion, see The Technology Liberation Front

More on how to un-personalize your search, including how to trick your location