There is so much shelf space devoted to these books that they will probably hold a place in the Guinness book of records as the “longest running and largest book series.” The Dummies series subtitled, “A Reference for the Rest of Us” and “Learning made easy” has more than 638 editions at last count, 339 titles, with lots of computer books (some in third, fourth, and fifth editions.) Now they even have a book on ChatGPT for Dummies. They are currently being published by John Wiley and Sons. The Complete Idiots Guide to [subject] are being published now by DK Publishing, with around 734 editions.

CliffNotes, for persons needing quick learning, study guides, test preparation, or literary notes of the stories assigned, started in the 1950s, and now owned and published by Course Hero publishers, is another well-known series. This series of study guides has been imitated by many including those I mentioned above. There is EZ-101 and EZ-202 series by Barron’s, B.E.S. Publishing, established in 1939, and is now owned by SourceBook LLC, publishers.

I’ll have to admit that computers and software updates, come so fast now, lots of new editions of instructional guides are required. Yet there seems always a need to know which version of the software you are using in order to pick the right edition, otherwise there could be a glitch which can’t be fixed using the wrong edition of the book. Alas, I’m not sure the latter will work either. I’m still working with a Windows 10 computer, because it won’t run Windows 11, and we are already hearing about a new operating system for 2024; Windows 12; code named Hudson Valley.

There is the ‘Complete Idiot’s’ guide to the perfect wedding, dating, surviving divorce, understanding football, the perfect interview, first aid, and many more. There are books on law, photography, parenting, and some oxymoron titles like Success for Dummies, Consulting for Dummies, and College Financial Aid for Dummies. We are all certainly having fun with the titles anyway.

Based on education and motivation research is, most people who are interested in these books are already involved or motivated to learn more of whatever it is they are engaged in and are looking for help from a book. The motivation may stem from a new class they are taking in high school or college or trying to help someone else, or just getting up to speed for a test or a new job. What amazes me is that so many people gravitate to the ‘Dummies’ and ‘Idiots’ books immediately and may bypass excellent training tools that are available. Although many of the ‘Dummies’ style books are indeed written by some of the best writers in the fields in which they write.

I think we should have more books similar to the Princeton Review series, “SMART.”  Their books, Math Smart, Word Smart, Study Smart, and Word Power at least give us the positive note that what we are reading is not “dumbed” down for us, even if we don’t feel too smart.

Much research has been done over the past 20 years regarding learning. Books written in the 1980s are just now being discovered and suggestions in them are being implemented. Titles like Superlearning 2000, Accelerated Learning, NLP and Reading by the Colors. These are telling us that all of us have a great capacity to learn quickly, we’ve just been doing it the wrong way. The compelling motivation people are showing for reading the ‘Dummies’ and ‘Idiots’ books should clue us into additional insights towards motivating poor readers. There has been much research on brain functioning and we know much more now than in the 80s. But getting teachers and parents to use methods to help children, known to be helpful, like visualization exercises, testing vision and hearing, has been an uphill battle. Those of us who can mentor and tutor, need to also become aware of newer methods of visualization and use of color overlays for better vision and reading that can change the way we see, study, and learn. If a reader can’t see very well what he/she is reading, then even reading the ‘Dummies’ and ‘Idiot’ books won’t help much.

The post Dummies, Idiots, and Other Aliens first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

“The library was one of the greatest places on earth with a gazillion books available. A researcher was looking for information to add to his book on what the future of libraries would be with books written in AI since AI had only the past to look at, but wanted AI to write the future.The next time we went to the library we found it full of books on how the world had changed since the last time the books were there—books on all sorts of things, including the history of AI, which was not so well- known as it should be. One day we came upon a book by an AI researcher who was writing a history book. He was very excited, because he wanted to know what would happen to libraries, if he could only get a copy.”

The above was mostly a generated by an AI writing software program. One wonders how writers using such would ever have novel new information if all the books were AI written with having only past information in their scans.

Here is a short bibliography of the issues:

AI book and article writing software:

https://neilchasefilm.com/best-ai-story-generator/

https://novelai.net/

https://sassbook.com/ai-story-writer

Issues of using AI for writing:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7g5yq/students-are-using-ai-to-write-their-papers-because-of-course-they-are

https://bit.ly/3R0eCP1

https://bit.ly/3D1OJJ3

Issues in Education and Research using AI:

https://bit.ly/3XKbIQB

https://bit.ly/3kkLupk

plagiarism checker:

https://www.easybib.com/grammar-and-plagiarism/

https://papersowl.com/free-plagiarism-checker

Free ebooks; and are they legal copies:

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-best-6-sites-to-get-free-ebooks/

https://worldscholarshipvault.com/where-to-download-free-ebooks-illegal/

https://manybooks.net/

Legal Issues:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/fighting-digital-future-books-2022-review

https://bit.ly/3IWgaaS

https://education.msu.edu/news/2021/exploring-the-ethics-of-artificial-intelligence-in-k-12-education/

The post Where is the New Information? first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

I suppose there are lots of us writers, editors, and librarians who are going to like what a special AI machine can do to help with the load of getting the book written, on the shelf for reference or circulation along, with audio book making, so we don’t have to read everything, only listen.

Some of the issues being discussed relate mostly to publishers and writers; will anyone be left to write good stories? If too many books come out because of the swiftness of how many can be written, and published, where will they go, how do we sell them, review them, how do we make shelf space for them?

We now have many books about AI and the new 2022 best list can be found here.

A new Generative Pertained Transformer-3 (GPT-3) software is doing really well. It is a broadly useful language algorithm that utilizes machine learning to interpret text, answer questions, and accurately compose text. It analyzes a series of words, text, and other information then focuses on those examples to deliver a unique output as an article or a picture. Here is an article about its first book. The article also discusses some of the questions. If AI makes up a story from things already written, who owns the
copyright? GPT-3? Is this the ‘Author’?

We have just recently seen how AI has written a song, and recorded the song using an AI singer to sing it. How does a librarian cataloger, or document this? Doing a search I found there are AI song creators, generators, writers, remixers, et al. One AI song has caught many in wonderment. In just a few days it accrued over $330,000 in streaming revenue.

Would people using an AI book creator make as much money as a writer writing a novel? We do have a book which tell writers how to publish books in Public Domain, but republishing digitized content/words, would be quite different; perhaps plagiaristic. It seems, from reports, CPT-3, while having lots of buttons to push, still can’t make much of a story from what it has to work from.

Some things AI are encouraging and are already being used in libraries, but it appears AI isn’t going to take over the library book or record collections very soon. I have an essay writing software program which will search everything which has been written on a subject of choice; mostly on the internet. The program will also cite where a particular paragraph has come from. I’m not sure using those paragraphs and such would be very useful, if I’m trying to add to knowledge, rather than report it; I’m sure AI would have no idea what my review of a book would look like either, so I only use this program to see the many ramifications of a topic. I can also do this with the carrot2 program for AI in libraries.

I certainly believe we are going to learn of issues documenting, finding, citing, AI created content, along with legal issues of who owns what in AI content. A start would be to check out this article by Westlaw.

The post I’ve Written a Book. I’m a Machine, and Taught Myself How to Write. first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

In all my years of doing and teaching research, and searching for answers, there are two alternative places I like to look when trying to find information I know little about.

The first place is The Reader’s Adviser published by R. R. Bowker in six volumes. Of course the old set I have is the 14^th edition, 1994, LCCN # 57-13277. I’ve been unable to find any online equivalent of this set on CD-ROM or digitized, although there appears to be a readers advisor online database available through ABC-CLIO, but seemingly only available to libraries. ALA does have a series called Reader’s Advisory which could be an updated replacement, but has limited subjects. And there is Robert Teeter’s web site having many resources listed as well.

Volume 6 of Reader’s Adviser, is an index of publishers, names, titles, and subjects. The other volumes cover large subjects such as Reference works and Literature, Science & Medical, Philosophy and Religion, Social Sciences, and World Literature. Each section of each volume has broken down bibliographies of the related topics and sub-topics with articles about each of those subject areas. These bibliographies give a person/librarian a good taxonomy of words to use in any online search, as well as additional information about who the experts are, and other possible resources for answers.

A second set of books I like to use, is the two volume set, The Great Ideas; a Syntopicon of the Great Books of the Western World.  This link is a description of the book and its contents at the Hathi-Trust. Many libraries may still have this in their collection. The volumes contain general articles of 102 topics with breakouts of all sub-headings of the topics one might want to know about, and an index of related articles in the 54+ volumes of the “Great Books.” It’s not unlike a clustering search engine in covering many sub-topics.

Now, having mentioned the clustering search engines, I’ve used Karnak, and Clusty–renamed Yippy; neither now exist. One reviewer says, using these is not a good way to locate closely related terms. I disagree. The one I’ve discovered and use now, is Carrot2. Carrot2 is a wonderful program which works well with MS Edge, Firefox, Opera, and other browsers. Doing a search of “search and research” Carrot2 came up with all sorts of research databases and search engine sites including directories of such. You can have the clusters in a list, a tree-map, or pie-chart. I like all three of the presentations.

Looking for answers sometimes brings us to look at many alternatives; generally, the do-it-yourself kind.

Often it is the alternative between easy (do what we can now,) or harder, do what will require more time or money. So this is about some of those alternatives taken.

When it comes to “what-cha-ma-call-it” questions, Thesauruses, Synonym, and Antonym dictionaries don’t always work, but some taxonomies may help. Finding one can be difficult, but this directory and databases of controlled vocabulary, could be useful. It includes the Taxonomy Warehouse which I’ve used on occasion; finding already built taxonomies for clients.

Some years ago when developing a database of candidates for a personnel service firm, I was wondering how best to put all the information about a person’s expertise into a formal database. I knew there were expensive programs out there for that, such as MS Access which we had, but we were in need of something to be done, often, very quickly. Since we already had all the letters and resumes from the candidates scanned in the computer as Word documents, we tried something different. We put all the letters and resumes into a single MS Word file, and were able to search the candidates for their expertise successfully using the “find” command.

Yes; later we took the information and placed it in an MS Access database, but in a burst of speed necessary, we were able to find and print a report of the candidates we needed for presentation to a client.

In another instance, taking notes and photographing them, then adding those photos to a note taking program like EverNote, allowed us to search those notes and bring up the items we needed.  From an article from MakeUseOf I saw a similar suggestion for indexing books not found on Google. One could enter subjects or notes based on chapters at the front or back of the book, and take photos of those notes; put them into EverNote or One Note and be able to search quickly in that same manner.

Working with a collection of rare race car books and photos, which contained information about motor serial numbers, chassis numbers, and other race result information, we needed to develop a new scheme instead of using the Dewey Decimal outline. This was important because the vintage cars being repaired and sold, often required original equipment; and restored cars brought $millions.

We did use the decimal system but gave each type of auto a place; 100s, 200s, 300s, 400s, etc. One of the sections of the scheme included all the manufacturer’s names, another all the pictorial books, thus getting everything together on the shelf similar to the Dewey System, but representing an arrangement of race cars, car manufacturers, and photos. The collection owner used this information for restorations of the cars he bought, and sold. In addition to giving the normal description of the book into our software, BookCat, we were able to add fields and ‘see’ and ‘see also’ notes for a taxonomy which allowed for searching all categories without worry of losing something in the translation of a term used by our foreign neighbors. This was a departure from the regular Dewey which didn’t give us enough depth for these specific fields. I haven’t heard, but we were hoping this collection and the catalog would someday end up at the America’s Auto Museum in Tacoma, WA, where there is a large program for restoring cars.

In one of my earlier pieces in Public Libraries Online, on finding answers, I wrote about the alternate use of cards in a drawer with our experts names on them and their particular expertise. It was somewhat like a card catalog except a topic subject was named, the expert, and a phone number…with the cards filed by topic. This was before PC databases, but could be used as a quick “write it down and enter it later scheme.”

I believe most librarians will find what works for their collections usage—not just doing the standard library descriptions and processes, but looking at how resources are being used and present a much greater access to what is needed and wanted by the public. One can do this often by asking questions of the patrons like, “What is the most important thing you need or need to know?” This often reveals a pattern through others as to what enhancements would be valuable.

Employed by a state prison as Director of Libraries, I realized we were receiving continued questions about businesses. Noticing what was being asked, I then realized we had a need for business planning books and resources. Receiving a grant, we set up a collection of business planning books, and developed a course on business planning for inmates; the course becoming a model for other prison libraries.

The post Finding Answers IV – This or That first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

I’ve discussed ‘finding things’ a number of times in my PL Online articles, and provided (hopefully) helpful hints on both searching and researching. But taking this a step further, having once found on the Internet what you wanted, how do you save that information? We know it keeps changing because we can’t find the site again, although sometimes it can be retrieved from the Internet Archive or the Way Back Machine. Peter Morville wrote a compelling book Ambient Findability about the problems we face in finding information. Here are some ways people are trying to keep found things found:

Everything, a desktop local search engine, will bring up a file no matter where it is on your computer, if you have the right name or a keyword for something in the file-name. The company Autonomy at one time had a desktop search engine which would not only search your computer, but go online and search the web as well for things relative to your search of your computer; it seems such good things don’t always last or are placed in more expensive software for enterprises rather than individuals.

What about PIM (personal information management) software or the cloud? I suppose there is software that will always save your most valued items and bookmarks, but what if your equipment is stolen, or destroyed?
And there are now so many PIM programs available it’s almost like trying to find what really works for you in the proverbial haystack. And the cloud also has drawbacks, for example without an internet connection or if the server you are using as a cloud has technical issues you cannot access the needed materials. In addition, because the materials are saved online with the cloud, there is always a risk of hackers.

One of the foremost researchers in this area is an anthropologist, William Jones. He has published several books on keeping found things found. I was involved with his initial research and sent him my hierarchal folder/sub-folder listings. Of course we found that much of what I had, had the same named files in different folders, and no way to discover if they were the same document or an updated one, except for the date and time given in the record of Word, or other Office programs. This happens when someone sees the links to several activities or information and tries to connect the information. Here is a brief discussion of the issues by Jones.

There have been a number of literature reviews of personal information management. Personal Information Management (Jones and Teevan) contains a bibliography in the 2011 edition. From the book’s description on Google Books: “The book grows out of a workshop on PIM sponsored by the National Science Foundation, held in Seattle, Washington, in 2006. Scholars from major universities and researchers from companies such as Microsoft Research, Google, and IBM offer approaches to conceptual problems of information management. In doing so, they provide a framework for thinking about PIM as an area for future research and innovation.”

You can compare a few systems here.

The post Keeping Things Found first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

I marvel sometimes at the interests of my friends and I also find that I don’t always know them as well as I thought. One friend from whom I learned a lot about U.S. history, I recently learned, has a graduate degree in music. Another friend, a poet, is related to the publisher of Lapham’s Quarterly, a literary journal whose themed issues are anthologies covering many different topics of history and ideas. The issue of Lapham’s Quarterly that I saw on my friend’s table was about music and it is a treasure trove of information for general readers and researchers alike. This is an example of a ‘book’ which would be helpful to music researchers and students in the music departments of libraries, but is likely not found there.

Some time ago I was helping with an inventory of books in the Government Documents department of our university library and ran across things that were not exactly about the government. One was a book on Paul Hindemith, the composer. While it is a government publication, I ordered it be cataloged for the Performing Arts Library. Back when we were working with new tape recorders and needed to know about them, we found a book on tape recording in our Engineering Library, even though the book was all about recording voice and music. I’m not sure who fought for it to be reclassified for the music department, but engineering won…with a set of cards for the music department’s catalog. At the University of Michigan I remember trying to locate a book. I was sent to the college of music way up on a hill called North Campus; a long bus ride down past the river and up into the northern hills. When I got there, I was told it was at the Business Library, a place just across the diagonal from where I started. Duh! It was about music business, so, of course, it should be in the Business library.

A little know trove of information has been around for years in the government National Archives in the form of microfilm. Back in the late 50s many of the thesis, dissertations, and educational programs such as surveys, for which government grants were made, were put on microfilm, and could be searched if you had the specific document number; usually found in a bibliography. Looking for government archives one finds that there are archives in every state as well as the National Archives. For many years and continuing, the GPO (government printing office) published many items having nothing to do with the government, but everything to do with living. Many libraries continue to have those items in “Depository Libraries” even when they have been discontinued in the GPO catalog. I’m not sure about the searching process, but you can browse newest collections of books, ebooks, and pamphlets in the online catalog.

The post Finding Answers – Unexpected Reference Sources first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

So it seems libraries, at least a few academic libraries and public libraries, have caught up with this single search process, known also as federated search, (rather than searching fields in the library catalog,) as a way to introduce the researcher to articles, books, and resources valued enough to show up in the search. Which algorithms are used to go search sites other than just the library or libraries within academic institutions are not always given. For example with Google, we don’t know if there are items valued by payment, by peer review, or customer searching; giving the searcher what the computer thinks the customer wants.

I’ve been a critique of searching different engines which seem to want to tell the customer, “This is what we think you asked for,” instead of giving results one might have wanted which show both sides or even every perspective of a given event, subject, or category. This may be the reason there are now many private search engines. These are the engines that do not track what you search and do not leave cookies on your machine. Oscobo, WhaleSlide, Gyffu, and GoodGopher which have been launched in the last two or three years. Other well-known engines are StartPage, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, and Privatelee.

So as we start using these ‘boxes’ of information we hope we will see complete information, not algorithm-generated results, nor subjective selection. One search engine used mainly for scientific research may be the way of future searching. Semantic Scholar’s AI analyzes research papers, articles, journals, and through data mining pulls out authors, references, figures, and topics. It then links all of this information together into a comprehensive picture of cutting-edge research. This engine sounds like a few of the early MIND-mapping or VISUAL mapping engines which brought related topics to the surface from searching related topics. Unfortunately we don’t see those engines anymore, only the mind-mapping do it yourself software. Over the last ten years there have been several books about semantic search; several available from ALA. We are now seeing many books using terms like Knowledge Graph equating much with the same process as semantic searching.

Resources:

Mother lode of searching databases:

Looking for a specific category database?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_databases

Searching the CIA declassified database.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/sep/22/crest-search-guide/

Ways to search breaking news stories.

http://blog.archive.org/2017/09/21/tv-news-chyron-data/

Tracking corporate violations of law and regulations.

Article: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/from-enron-to-wells-fargo-expanded-violation-tracker-now-covers-18-years-of-corporate-crime–misconduct-300521979.html

Databases:

https://www.goodjobsfirst.org/violation-tracker

https://www.goodjobsfirst.org/

The post Bento Box Searching first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

• We were attending a parade and a man passed by us, saying something to my wife, right up close in her face. Then he walked across the street. He looked rather shabby but was not mean. My wife was uncomfortable when he came back several times saying something to her each time, then walking away. A police department bagpiper came over to stand next to my wife—he had seen what was happening. He started to talk to the man. It turned out the man was homeless. The bagpiper/policeman asked him if he had a place to sleep that night. The homeless man said he did. He also told us proudly what ship he served on in the war. As he said quietly, “I’m just doing the best I can,” then he slid his back down the metal telephone pole he was leaning against until he was sitting on the ground. Our dog, a champion Border Terrier, Duggan, saw this, and went to him, put his paws on either side of his neck and gave him a kiss. The man hugged Duggan back and gave him a few nice scratches. Duggan stayed there with the man for a few more minutes. Tears appeared in my wife’s eyes. Here was a proud man who fought in WWII, was without a home, and found someone, a dog, loving him.
• I recently attended a friend’s brother’s memorial service, and heard stories of a rather remarkable person, not well known with a reasonable job, and never married…but fun, humorous, intelligent, and gracious with others, stories that others will remember for years and share.
• Plateau Area Writers Association launched a “Write Me a Story” contest for middle school students a few years ago, and while I’m not sure I want to remember some of those stories about death and destruction, there were some remarkable entries that caught everyone’s attention; you knew it was from experience; some bad, and some good. The association also has published an anthology Unexpected Heroes, short stories about people who have had great influence on member authors’ lives.
• A few years ago, I received a blank book entitled, Grandpa, tell me your stories. 365 basically blank pages to write a story a day. On each page is a thought or question to start me out, telling my grandchildren what it is like being me.
• At some point I finished reading the first volume of an autobiography of a Tacoma, Washington antique dealer. All the ways I found to Hurt Myself was a humorous look at his life that he could look back and laugh about, but also a bit of history of the area.
• I’m also the holder of a short history of The Alley Cats, a Dixieland band that held forth at many parties on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor; the Savoy in Boston; contest winner of the Arthur Godfrey’s show in New York; and various summer resorts around Michigan between 1949 and 1953. The “history” is entitled, Tales of an Alley Cat: The gospel Truth & Apocrypha: Facts behind the Truth (and also in front of it) by R. Grant Smith (the original piano player, later the clarinetist.) I instigated this work after talking with Bob Milne, the ragtime pianist. Grant writes, “The blame for committing this collection of mind-numbing stories to paper lies solely on the shoulders of Paul Jackson, who urged me to compile this literary ambush. All lawsuits and other legal actions (both criminal and civil) resulting from reading all or any portion of this publication are to be directed to him.” The stories are hilarious, and as ‘designated driver’ in attendance during some of the recited events. I have added addenda facts…err, stories, as I remember them. Grant is also the author of, From Saginaw Valley to Tin Pan Alley: Saginaw’s Contribution to American Popular Music, 1890-1955.

Libraries have many patrons with wonderful stories to tell, and librarians should be working to learn of those, enrich your community by informing others of the great wealth of knowledge among your patrons.

The post Stories Need to be Told first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Now more than fifty years later in this day and age of constricted language like BTW, GGIMA (good grief it’s Monday again,) and ROFL, we end up with “Apps.” In a former language called English, these things are actually computer programmed applications. “Distros” are actually updated software program distribution files which send us apps.

Like the handmade cards above, we now have those kinds of electronic apps; a way to capture important but elusive bits of information not in our databases, but in our cumulative knowledge which can greatly help our customers/patrons.

We are now living in a world of links which are supposed to help us in our daily lives. Often we now find searching for solutions brings us to databases of links to suggested problem solving or forums. The issue is these are often circular, one doesn’t always know exact terms to bring up a solution, and you can spend a good portion of time without getting the answer needed. Computer generated answers to our searches are unlikely to be what we need, and often following them don’t work.

Librarians are in a unique position to find those URL links, phone numbers, and people by collecting these undocumented bits of information, and this collection can be facilitated by certain apps.

We now have, by virtue of the Internet, enough links about apps to keep us searching for what we need for a very long time. Searching for “Librarian’s note-taking app” gives a result of 3,400,000 items. I don’t think there’s time to look and try out all of those.

Of course, each of us have different needs for which some apps might be useful, but our particular way of working doesn’t fit the way the app wants us to work. So is it trial and error that we use apps? Do we get friends to suggest a good app for us? There are of course resources we might use (see below links and reference.)

To fix things; to fix issues, we need to determine, as in all goals, the issue or problem. These are the things strategic planning is all about. What’s the mission, the goal, the tasks needed to achieve? Once we have that information, it is a good hunt, but not an extensive one. I’ve written about finding things; it’s a process which is pretty much the same as for finding the right app:

Example: Do we need to take notes? Do we need to find what notes we made? Is there a search engine for this app? What will it search? What is the criteria needed for my app? In the case of the Evernote app, I found it could search words within photos placed on Evernote. I find that wonderful and fascinating as it was something we tried to do unsuccessfully back in the 1980s. Do I use Evernote? Not now, but I may decide to go back to it if I discover it works better than some of these desktop search programs.

THE APPS LIBRARY FOR LIBRARIANS

ACQUIRING BOOKS

BookBub, a daily email that alerts readers to free and deeply discounted ebooks that are available for a limited time.

BOOKS ABOUT APPS.

Selecting and Evaluating the Best Mobile Apps for Library Services

LISTS OF APPS:

Everything

45 Most Exciting Apps For Librarians – This alternative list to Everything desktop search engine is quite valuable.

10 Must Have iPad Apps For Librarians

Apps for academics: mobile web sites & apps: Library research

TRAINING :

Best Apps for Teaching & Learning 2016

LIBRARY RECOMMENDED APPS:

Mobile Apps for Libraries

Mobile Apps via Alexandria Library

ORGANIZING:

4 Android Apps for Managing Your Personal Book Library – This could come in handy for reference; categorizing books for different research requests.

PUBLIC RELATIONS:

A suite of apps for business, organizations, and churches.

The post Useful Apps for Your Library first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

When we think of libraries, we often think of a space where we work. Our work tends to get specialized over time as we gain experience and often get into areas which may seem to be dead ends. Yet without that part of the process, the book or information doesn’t get to the patron who will need it. Like a well ordered machine, libraries are there to provide information in many different forms, used for different reasons to the end customer.

Whether you are a page, delivery person, mail room clerk, cataloger, supervisor, bibliographer, reference librarian, circulation clerk, or director, it takes everyone to deliver the content to those who will want and need it. People with different skills and talent gets things from one place to another with alacrity— we must re-energize ourselves to build up well-ordered organizations.

Other resources on resiliency:

The Resilient Librarian

Personal Resilience as a Strategy for Surviving and Thriving in the Face of Workplace Adversity

The Eleven Skills and Attitudes That Can Increase Resilience

The post Toiling in Obscurity first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Some of this is due to contractual agreements between the content holder of copyright and the aggregator database provider such as ProQuest and EBSCOhost. We also find individuals lose their rights-to-access because print content that was once available on the Internet Public Library is now only available digitally as part of aggregators such as Project MUSE and JSTOR. Unless the individual has a library nearby which subscribes to these databases, individuals would have to subscribe to the databases when in most case, they only wanted to read one article. This makes libraries indispensable to access, yet perhaps because of the contractual agreement they are not able to give access to the person wanting the information because they are ‘out of bounds’ of the region or the academic institution. I remember once paying $30 gain access to a book my daughter needed for her master’s degree work. Interlibrary Loan system used to work, but with current licensing, that is not always the case.

There is another disappearing act of websites being taken down, though these are sometimes available through the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine. The archive doesn’t capture everything, nor do they capture at any regular interval some of the websites with valuable information and data. I found one university website which was deleted but had come back as the same URL with totally different information. This sort of thing has happened with ISBNs as well; the reuse of them is a serious breach of the program, but it happens frequently enough to be wary of what you are trying to get. In one scenario, a student can’t get access to a certain music methods publication because the database subscribed to by the university dropped the magazine due to their contract with the content owner. In another, the information on Climate Change and Civil Rights was taken down from White House shortly after Trump took office as President.

There have been efforts to save this disappearing data. DataRefuge is one group trying to preserve climate data. GitHub is also working on a method to save digital content from extinction. The Library of Congress, the American Library Association, and CLIR have all been involved in what is now known as “born digital’ information and data and are actively attempting to help contain its demise. Yale University is involved as are many other institutions.

I’m not sure if this loss of digital content will change what our future populations will know as history or not, but some of the information loss will surely change some of the data available to researchers and historians and possible conclusions brought to that research. We do live in a strange universe where we now have researchers trying to replicate standing research to see if it was done correctly with the right conclusions specifically, on health issues. Without that older information, this action would not be available to us, leading us to new information and understanding.

It may be a smart idea for public libraries to update the knowledge found in older work the way law books and encyclopedia’s yearbooks receive updates.  This helps citizens and consumers with information to update their current understanding. With some articles on the net, we often see announcements “updated {date}” but I wonder how many people go back to review the old article (possibly bad or erroneous) or even that updated article, but continue to tell others; spreading the erroneous message/information. And, are libraries capturing this changing information?

The post Information Pulls a Disappearing Act first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Throughout the years, I’ve found these ‘methods’ are always little more than a variety of helpful steps or formulas to help owners and managers formulate a direction for an organization, or person, for the future. A Boeing engineer once asked me what skills potential recruits will need to learn for the future aerospace industry. Researching the futurist literature, the only thing seemingly pertinent was something I read (irretrievable) in The Futurist Magazine over twenty years ago. The late Robert Theobald, economist and futurist author, commented on future education ‘…twenty years from now, one will learn what one needs to know when they need it,’ and now we are doing exactly that. Theobald was repeating the scenario he wrote about in 1967 about the future in 1994¹.

We have been inundated by articles about the future of the library, yet little has been said about the future of librarians; those bastions of information and troughs of information and experience people rely on. Like the oft quoted proverb from Africa “When a knowledgeable old person dies, a whole library disappears,” librarians are surely as much the library as the brick and mortar buildings they work in.

More recently I was at home with our thirteen guests at Thanksgiving, and we played a little game of getting to know each other. We passed around notes from which each person read and told us about their favorite book, their favorite activity, also, my note, “What would you like to be known for?” Well, when I was younger, I was in charge of a youth group and they started calling me “fearless leader.” I kind of liked that. Since then, I’ve come to know that a leader is not born, is not, by education nor effort, a leader. A leader is someone others ascribe that title to; usually because they have already done something significant to help or change the lives of others. This is what I find most librarians do, and thus are leaders, and that won’t go away because a building or printed books aren’t available.

As a recruiter and speaker for organizations, I try to talk about “Options and Opportunities.” What we chose as our role(s) in life, lays out our options and opportunities we may have. I believe librarians must decide to choose their role(s), and when they (we) do, we will survive all things of the future which come to pass.

Back in the 70s we heard a great deal about methods for “creating the future.” Here is another planning method; a book to help us with a range of future possibilities, probabilities, plausible options, and opportunities in creating our future:

It’s YOUR Future… Make it a Good One! by Dr. Verne Wheelwrite, 2012. This tome takes the strategic foresight and scenario planning tools utilized successfully by some corporations and scales them down for the individual.

References

1. Tegs Nineteen Ninety-Four: An Anticipation of the Near Future – June, 1972, by Robert Theobald, Jim Scott.

TEG’S 1994, written in 1967 and published in 1971, was 30 years ahead of its time. It is a portrait of the world in which we live today.

The post The Future of the Librarians first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Irlen describes these visual problems as Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome (SSS) and includes such problems as dyslexia. From my reading of Superlearning (1979) and Superlearning 2000 (1995) by Sheila Ostrander and others, I had become aware of many techniques to learning as well as those learned in education courses for teachers but using colors for reading was new to me.

The correctional library programs, for which I was director, had developed a reading lab which houses special reading materials and uses peer tutors to help inmates and school students with their reading difficulties. I spoke with Laws, who was also a Certified Special Education Teacher and we began to discuss what we might do at the state prison. She was hired as a consultant through a Department of Education grant for “Innovative uses of Technology in Education.” This program would allow us to develop a program based on the use of visual testing and use of colors in reading training. An acquired color machine allowed printed text and graphics to be focused onto a TV monitor with selected colored backgrounds or letters. These would be switched until an optimum combination was found for each student. With the machine we could also alter the size of the letters. By coordinating information from school TABE tests, our library brought together twenty-eight men who volunteered to be part of this program and Laws began meeting one-on-one with the inmates.

She would test the men for their current reading ability and their ability to see through various color overlays or color backgrounds with enlarged type on the color machine. Laws would also test for right and left brain coordination. After doing this for each inmate, she would write a “prescriptive” program for each. Exercises, including eye, breathing and relaxing, reading lists, color overlays, and sometime relaxing music, were all part of the prescription. Twenty-six of the twenty-eight students, we found, could read or see words better with the color overlay, one or two with larger print. Gary, (pseudonym ) on the other hand was found to have no sense of “visualization.” He couldn’t remember what he learned from one day to the next. He hardly could talk, as words did not come to him because of brain damage.

Laws started helping Gary by asking what he was interested in – Cars. He had been a mechanic and knew a great deal about cars. Laws drew a picture of a car and had Gary tell her what the parts of the car were – the hood, the trunk, the bumper, wheels. After about eight items, she wrote the names of the parts with arrows to the drawing of the car. Then she had him make up a large drawing for a book. Each time he and the tutors met, he would learn more words that went with the parts of the car he knew. About two months after this all started, I was present when Gary was able to put together about ten words into a sentence. Not only could he retain the words, but he was beginning to relearn how visualization could help him learn. It was the beginning of retraining the wounded brain. By the time the program ended, Gary had a vocabulary of about 30-50 words.

Many of the other students made remarkable progress as well. At the start of the program, one other inmate was adamant, no one could help him to read. He not only became a model student (less disruptive) at the prison school, but became an advocate of the lab and started helping other students increase their reading ability. Within two months, twenty-six men were reading at least 2-3 grades, if not more, above the ABE tested level when they started working with Laws.

There has been much research on visual and brain cognition, and software from many agencies has helped. Not all the software out there allows for color background or varying text color. Many computer programs in the assistive technology arena are for reading comprehension, not for help with vision. One program which includes adaptive facility for vision and colors, Easy Reader, is now available via Dolphin.

Libraries that aren’t yet involved need to get on board with assistive software for reading. With the visual and brain training techniques we now know of, I believe crime and disruptive behavior in schools and cities could decrease. Having worked ten years with inmates, I believe the frustrations, lack of achievement and concurrent disruptive or unacceptable behavior in adults are more likely to be directly related to the lack of reading ability than any other outside event or condition.¹ Even though reading may not solve all behavioral problems, we can strengthen the whole country through a focus on correcting reading problems through the newest technologies and machinery we already have available.

References

1. Are Reading and Behavior Problems Risk Factors for Each Other? Paul L. Morgan, George Farkas, Paula A. Tufis, and Rayne A. Sperling.

The post Reading With Colors first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Some libraries have automatic approval orders. Those are the kind of orders in which the publishers, jobbers, or distributors send everything, and someone at the library decides whether or not an item is kept or sent back to the publisher or distributor. Many of these returned books end up at bookstores and elsewhere as ‘remainders’ at a very low price.

Recent information from the book world tells us it is currently likely that only 250 copies of a given nonfiction title will ever be sold, and only a 1 percent chance it will show up at a bookstore. Yet, with around 119,500 libraries throughout the U.S., if libraries are really in the business of preserving and giving access to what has been written, it seems strange there wouldn’t be more sales. With 725,000 self-published books available each year, and around 300,000 books published by the big 5 houses, it becomes a gargantuan task. Should libraries try?

Contemporary composers’ alliances and groups are now trying to organize and preserve new music, scores, and recordings of productions. Some collectors are still trying to collect all of the output of some artists’ works and recordings. One has to wonder what the library world is doing to preserve the printed published word. Yes, libraries do have options and opportunities to preserve some things, manage what’s best for their particular audience or customers, and within constraints of budgets, get to preserve some things. And yes there are digitization preservation programs going on to format such printed material in order to have space for it all.

We don’t know what happens to all those returned remainders when no one buys them. Although I know bookstores dump the returns in the dumpsters (after tearing off the covers for returning and getting credit) when they might have been preserved elsewhere. At one point a prison library was able to get a bookstore to donate its unreturnable books, with the library realizing full retail price tax deductions. While the prison was not in the business of preservation, it did in a way, keep the books available if only through Interlibrary Loan. One inmate at the prison wrote to the Detroit Public Library seeking a book, thinking it wouldn’t be in his small prison library; DPL did not have it, the prison library did.

Libraries are doing what they can, but discoverability is becoming increasingly difficult with OP books and OBP (out of business publishers) and M&A (mergers and acquisitions publishers). At a forum of the 66th Frankfurt Book Fair, deputy editor of The Bookseller’s Futurebook, summed it up nicely when he said: “It’s a great thing that everybody can publish a book today, and it’s a bad thing that everybody can publish a book today.”

Mostly, it falls to our national libraries such as the Library of Congress to collect all the books. This works if everyone registers for copyright, as a book or books are to be placed in the LC as part of the copyright process. This kind of preservation won’t work any longer now with eBooks and the cost of changing an address for single book authors. It will be up to consortia to figure out who collects what. Some years ago, the libraries of Wales, United Kingdom had developed a cooperative program to collect all recordings from all labels produced in the country. Different libraries would collect everything in a specified genre, then share (interlibrary loans) when the need required. There are some consortia for cooperative collection development such as ALA’s Transforming Libraries goal and objectives strategic plan of 2010 and the book “Shared Collections: Collaborative Stewardship”. Each group has some documentation of progress in their respective groups, but will there be a central organization to tell us who has what?

We have had Gap Analysis projects for training, diversity, and electronic resources, but in my very short bit of research, I see no Gap Analysis project which tells us what books,genres, and resources libraries don’t have. R. R. Bowker, The Library of Congress, OCLC, Hathi-Trust, WorldCat, and FirstSearch databases are helping, but finding a library with the work one wants and actually has available, is pretty daunting. Will we find a way, both of discovery and retrieval, and for preserving contemporary works? We may need very large initiatives of state-wide and national projects to even come close.

There are of course arguments for and against preserving all information in any of the formats. Is leaving it to the collectors a good plan?

The post Book? Book? Do You Know Where This Book Is? first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

The literature detailing our nation’s divisiveness is expansive, suggesting that we are in deep trouble as a nation and need libraries to help.

• Scott Peck’s The Different Drum (1987) details his community building efforts in Seattle.
• Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble (2011) describes how computer search engines send us search results of what they think we want based on our generated Internet profiles, often showing us results that we agree with, not allowing us to see the other side of arguments.
• Barbara Ehrenreich’s This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation (2009) discusses the growing gulch between the haves and have-nots and what used to be the middle class.
• Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) pretty much tells us where we are and what we might want to do about it.

There have been efforts to counteract this separation.

In 1998, the late futurist/economist Robert Theobald spoke several times on how he looked forward to the twenty-first century as the “healing century.“[1]^,[2] Even Edgar Casey’s notes prophesized hope in the new millennium. Scott Peck’s “community building” efforts were taking place in Seattle before his death at about the same time. Governments and citizens have collaborated on community building ventures. Notable is the Pomegranate Center in Issaquah, Wash., begun around 1996 by Milenko Matanovic. Efforts of those in the past, however, have not produced a great deal of togetherness nationally as outlined in Bishop’s The Big Sort.

What are libraries doing to bring divided communities together? Thankfully, libraries are doing what they can:

• In 2005, the Urban Libraries Council and Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) Institute at Northwestern University, got together to study branch libraries in Chicago, their efforts and report hoped to inspire other libraries. ALA’s website has other reports and direction.[3]
• King County, Wash., is home to two large urban library systems, King County Library System and Seattle Public Library, both effectively building community through their library service.[4]
• Public Libraries Online’s “Community Centered: 23 Reasons Why Your Library Is the Most Important Place in Town” contains many community building references.[5]
• The Institute of Museums and Libraries partnered with the Local Initiatives Support Corporation in 2015 to “support comprehensive community revitalization” and invite other organizations that have mounted programs to be in contact.[6]

Library Journal awarded only ten persons as Community Builders in their Movers & Shakers program in 2013 and 2016, seven in 2014, and eight in 2015. I’m hoping there could be many more—and probably are hundreds—who can find ways to bring diverse people and ideas together to discuss ways to achieve things instead of my way or no way.

My feeling is that the library may be the only—perhaps even the last—place where work can begin again to draw diverse of people, places, thoughts, ideas and feelings back together to share, where our reserved rooms are full not only with study groups but also with town halls and discussions of issues. Open and resource-rich libraries don’t help if people aren’t willing to seek out solutions together. The caution is that, with the current homogeneous nature of communities, the library may play into the same “sort” and will need to reach out to diverse neighborhoods, not just those nearest to the library building.

We’ve become communities—sectionalized, segmented, territorial enclaves of lifestyles, values, and politics—of which even libraries are an integral part. Being aware, libraries need to reach out of bounds sometimes to locate the contrarians who can provide a larger perspective on issues of the day.

References

[1] Robert Theobald, “The Healing Century” (speech, Ontario Arts Council, January 1998), printed in NewStories.org.

[2] Robert Theobald, “The Healing Century: A Message of Hope for the New Millennium,” interview by Phillip Adams, Late Night Live, RN (Australia), September 8, 1999.

[3] Jody Kretzmann and Susan Rans, “The Engaged Library: Chicago Stories of Community Building” (report by Urban Libraries Council, Evanston, IL, 2005).

[4] Rachel Scott, “The Role of Public Libraries in Community Building,” Public Library Quarterly 30, no. 3 (2011): 191–227, doi:10.1080/599283.

[5] Julie Biando Edwards, Melissa S. Rauseo, and Kelley Rae Unger, “Community Centered: 23 Reasons Why Your Library Is the Most Important Place in Town,” Public Libraries Online, April 30, 2013.

[6] “Building Sustainable Communities,” Institute of Museums and Libraries, March 17, 2013.

The post Libraries’ Role in the Big Sort first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

A preconference workshop regarding preservation and digitization of recorded sound was a highlight and while not part of the conference, there were presentations about the program within the conference program. The university’s Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative was shut down for two days for conferees to see and learn what and how things were being done. Presentations were based on the ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation created in collaboration with the Council on Library and Information Resources published in May 2015. Conferees were shown the process of the massive digitization collaboration project between Indiana University and the Memnon Corporation of Brussels, which required a whole new building with three power sources for the building, the equipment, and the recording playback equipment.

This fiftieth Conference returned to the place of the first annual conference of the group in 1967. This first conference occurred after several 1965 steering meetings initiated by Kurtz Myer, director of the Detroit Public Library Music Department, Frank Davis, curator for the Communications Section at the Ford Museum, and me. An exploratory meeting was held with audio experts and archivists at the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan after the Detroit ALA 1965 conference. The group met again in early 1966 at Syracuse University at the invitation of Walter Welch, director for the SU Audio Archives and author of From Tinfoil to Stereo, and the group was founded.[1]  Now with a name, ARSC met again in 1966 at the Library of Congress to decide on bylaws for incorporation.

Originally one of the questions to solve was, “Record, Record, Who’s got the Record?” Many libraries were struggling with that question from patrons. Solutions to finding recordings came slowly, but a bulletin and journal were started, and a directory of collectors and collections was produced early, offering some help as finding aids. Since, ARSC has given out grants for more research and publications, including the production of several membership directories.

While the focus seems now to be on preserving much of what was actually going on before 1965 and now, what happened in the ’60s fifty years ago, the questions still remains. Can we document enough to set up databases common to all collections which could then be searched to find what is needed, whether for more research, more writing, transcribing music lost in paper shuffles or just for a particular celebration of life for an individual library patron?

For now, ARSC, the American contingent of the International Association for Sound Archives are in collaborative efforts to build the largest searchable international collection of bibliographies of discographies of recorded sound. More information can be found here.

References

[1] Paul T. Jackson, “Record, Record, Who’s got the Record?” American Record Guide, April (1966): 676–678.

The post Record, Record, Who’s Got the Record? first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Some libraries included Recorded Sound programs, where music buffs would come together at libraries to share their recordings, listen to some rare treats of opera and soloists, and discuss and critique the music or the recording. Since then there have been many free concerts at night, music during courtyard lunches, and more.

More recently at the Music Library Association meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, public librarians Laurie Bailey (San Diego Public Library) and Steve Kemple (Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County) presented some newer ideas for music in the public library.

One San Diego program, “Jammin’ @ the Library,” offers beginning guitar instructions through a partnership of San Diego State University and Taylor Guitars. Cincinnati Library’s “Little Bits Synthesizer Orchestra” invited participants to assemble unique synthesizers using Korg Little Bits Synth modules and concluded with a performance of the sounds made with their creation. Group instrument lessons have been offered as well, helping patrons enjoy the music found at libraries.

Some of these music programs are documented now on the Internet. A March School Library Journal article contains information about several sing-along events at libraries. Orange County Library lists a number of interesting programs and concerts. Jacksonville Public Library concerts, Music @ Main, have included world premieres of more than a dozen newly-composed works in a variety of vocal, choral, and instrumental styles. Printed program guides accompany each performance, providing information about the compositions and the performers, as well as selective listings of related reading and listening materials available from the library’s superlative collection of music resources.

As people, musicians, and libraries experiment with new ways to draw people in so they can appreciate and understand creative endeavors art and music, we continue to look for ways to engage our public.

The Knight News Challenge accelerates media innovation by funding breakthrough ideas in news and information. Winners receive a share of three million dollars in funding—and support from Knight’s network of influential peers and advisers to help advance their ideas. Innovators from all industries and countries are invited to participate. A recent Knight News Challenge was, “How might we leverage libraries as a platform to build more knowledgeable communities?” There were forty-four participants and 675 ideas, and forty-six ideas were evaluated. Only twenty-one participants won. Although none of the winners were in music programs, it seems every public library could and should have taken part in the challenge to promote their own music (and other) programs. The newest challenge is found here.

Like a writer and their book, one needs to draw the reader into the story. Helping to build those stories can be libraries with innovative and creative music, art, and writing programs. Go ahead, like the NYPL, have a debate between Shakespeare and Mozart.

The post Music in the Library first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

This post provides a short list of resources for public libraries to consider when dealing with privacy policies and cases.

A survey was conducted of the laws of the thirteen states encompassing the Southeastern Library Association. The survey covers what constitutes a library, what indeed is a library record, and differences in the laws of the thirteen states.[1]  According to the survey, all of these states’ library record laws deal with circulation records, but some laws address other items like the use of computers, email, and chat.

A serious law protecting these records was enacted in Michigan; a librarian cannot reveal a child’s reading to a parent or third party[2], and the librarian can be fined if he/she does so; other libraries privacy policies in other states say they will if required.[3] ALA’s book, Fundamentals of Children’s Services discusses the very real conflicts between privacy law, library programs, and parents’ interest and need to know of their child’s reading habits. A discussion of the conflict between parent rights and children’s rights can be found here.

Some libraries are struggling with policies because of the National Rifle Association, FBI, Freedom of Information Act, and other probing by the courts. Others are deleting records so they won’t be available.[4] A source for some privacy information can be found at the Privacy Library of Morrison Foerster (The library indicates they may not have the most current information, and do not include all information related to libraries).

Most states have privacy laws relating to libraries, not just dealing with social, court records and other activities. The succinct rendering of these state laws can be found here: State and Territorial Library Privacy Laws.

References:

[1] Bryan M. Carson, “Surveying Privacy: Library Privacy Laws in the Southeastern United States,” The Southeastern Librarian 49, no. 3 (2001): 18–28, accessed online March 10, 2016.

[2] State of Michigan Legislative Council, “397.604: Violation of MCL 397.603; liability; civil action; damages; attorney fees and costs,” The Library Privacy Act, MI Act 455 (1982), § 397.604, sec. 4, accessed March 10, 2016.

[3] “Privacy and confidentiality of library records: Parents and children,” Multnomah County Library, May 7, 2015.

[4] Sam Thielman, “You are not what you read: librarians purge user data to protect privacy,” Guardian (Manchester), January 13, 2016.

Further Reading:

Lucy Kelly, “Library Records, Patron Privacy, and Library Policies,” Public Libraries Online.

The post Privacy Laws, Libraries, and Librarians first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

I’m sometimes caught with my jaw open. In working with many librarians on various discussion lists, I find they seem to be looking for things and answers only on those databases and aggregators of databases to which they have corporate access, such as ProQuest, EBSCOhost, Gale databases, et al. Of course, this is done because these databases are considered safe and more reliable information than items found on the Internet. But my jaw drops when I find they haven’t made an effort to search the Internet, or they haven’t found what they need from the Internet when indeed it can be found. In any case, the Internet can be and is, for a librarian, a friend.

Lots of information can be found using various search engines and search operands with the Internet. To be honest, it seems the Internet is now about finding more friends or connections than you can deal with, finding more restaurants for which you have no time to eat at, or in the case of a chosen career, finding more jobs for which you won’t ever qualify, and more than you even want to be qualified for. To me, it seems that more people are making money online telling me how to write, how to market, how to publish, and how to annoy as many people as possible to sell my stories, than those actually writing stories and nonfiction.

This piece is about finding resources to help you use the Internet more effectively and efficiently.

Search Engines

There are lots of directories of search engines—engines for countries, for collectors, for researchers, for almost any endeavor you might be engaged in.

Phil Bradley has a short annotated list. The site also has articles about using the different search engines and gives a listing of social media tools, and the blogs about searching can keep you up-to-date.

Mashable has a listing organized hierarchically for general, human-generated, book and library, business, music- and video-related, blog and RSS engines, and miscellaneous topical engines. These are somewhat similar to the Wikipedia layout below.

Wikipedia has an interesting and useful breakdown of search engines and what they do: sorting out those of general content, specific topics, a grouping based on model (hierarchical, index, clustering, meta, semantic, visual, etc.,) and a section telling us which search engine indexes these various engines are using, if not their own.

SearchEngineWatch.com is one of the premier sites to find information about search engines, marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), and many articles about the difference in engines. It was one of the first of such sites and used to have a very easy-to-find chart of all the operands used for the various search engines. Initially SEW was on the top of my list, but it has gone far into the business of marketing and helping webmasters to create pages so search engines can find them, rather than about searching and research.

Using Boolean and Scripts

Operand charts include Google. Many university libraries, like University of New Orleans and Berkeley, already have Boolean charts available outlining operands for several library databases.

Some software programs can generate scripts for searching. A book some might wish to read is Alison and Adrian Stacey’s Effective Information Retrieval from the Internet: An Advanced User’s Guide. I’ve also mentioned Tara Calishan’s book Web Search Garage in another article.

A 2004 presentation by Marcus P. Zillman, “Searching the Internet Using Brains and Bots,” provide for some great—if a bit dated—resources for searching and/or teaching library literacy.

In the music business, finding a piece of sheet music can be difficult, unless you know that various publishers have contractual agreements with publishing groups in other countries. A European publisher will have agents for their works in the U.S. but not necessarily under the original publisher’s name. TRO, Inc. in New York City has or had at one point, contracts with music publishing groups in seventeen countries. You could often go to TRO to find something published in Europe and other countries but unavailable from the original publisher. You can discover who these agents are, usually, by surveying the original publisher’s entire website.

Not everyone can know details about all businesses, but persistent and creative searching can often reveal such things. At this point in time, as essential as bibliographic instruction is, knowledge of searching is at least as important to the librarian, and it really helps to know the inside workings of various fields of business.

The post Search vs. Research first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

If we are asking a question, the way we ask can disrupt the course of inquiry…if we ask the wrong question.

Many other more recent books and search engines have been engaged in struggling with the semantics of questions and queries. The new one by Leslie Stebbins, Finding Reliable Information Online: Adventures of an Information Sleuth, suggests there are many issues related to ‘Search Psychology” when evaluating the reliability of answers.

Whether we are searching online or doing research for a solution, the results are based on the questions we ask and how we ask them. I found recently that when a music library was asking to find opera glass reviews, using those two separate and common words, that search results were about glasses and operas, but little about those little binoculars called opera glasses. Hyphenating the same terms, “opera-glasses,” brought reviews to the top of search results.

We have a number of issues when searching online looking for the right combination of terms and operands such as InURL:PDF and using space between words, such as the undocumented Google proximity operand, AROUND(5). Many of the tips we find for searching exist as a result of others’ trial and error or from reading books of those who have studied search extensively like Web Search Garage, Yahoo to the Max, The Extreme Searcher’s Guide to Web Search Engines, The Skeptical Business Searcher and the newer one mentioned above. Someone, maybe several, have put all the operands on the net.

Organizations have been looking for solutions to good management for decades. Such processes as used by efficiency experts, management by objectives, total quality management, quality circles, Deming methods, re-engineering, strategic planning, and most notably recent, re-branding everything. Since we keep seeing new ideas along with a plethora of books on creative thinking and innovation, perhaps we are not asking the right questions. A few years ago, Special Librarians were asking what they must do to stop their company from closing the corporate libraries, as if they could do something different to make those events stop. As I explained in a long letter to the editor of Information Outlook, “It’s not about us,” it wasn’t our fault.² Mergers require someone to pay the debt created and often some of it is born by those corporate libraries which are closed.

The real question might have been, “How do we stay connected to top management or board of directors who make such decisions?” I’m aware of one library that died and took with it all the microfiche that told the engineers what type of metals were used for connections to underwater cables—a necessary thing—lost information requiring new onsite checks.

In 60 AD, Petronius Arbiter, a Roman Imperial Army officer, was attributed as saying, “I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by re-organizing and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”³

More recently since the 1990s, due to a translation and publication of a Russian book, Theory of Inventive Problem Solving by Genrich Altshuller, U.S. Engineers have become acquainted with TRIZ, a systematic innovation methodology. TRIZ is a process through which engineers can sort out and optimize the best approach to a solution. It’s about finding the right questions as to what is to be solved. Sometimes through the forty principles, finding ‘conflicts’ or ‘contradictions’ lead to new questions leading to different solutions than those anticipated. TRIZ is used at Boeing Company and some others. Some businesses have adapted the program or process. I’m unaware of any libraries using this powerful process, TRIZ, for finding the right questions for organizational development or re-branding.

The recent Gallup poll tells us that only 32 percent of staff of corporations (and maybe large libraries) are really engaged in all of this rebranding, re-engineering, and various innovation programs. Possibly, it is because the emphasis is on changing processes and organizational charts, rather than giving responsibility to line staff for finding solutions at lowest levels. Gaining solutions to library problems and issues should be about finding and asking the right questions. One bad or one good experience with a library with line personnel will color a patron’s confidence in all libraries.

References:

¹ Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. (New York: New American Library, 1953), 1.

² Editor, message from author, June 1, 2004.

³ Petronius Arbiter, quoted in Quote Investigator.

Resources:

Every Google Search Operator You’ll Ever Need

The post Finding Answers III: Searching For the Right Questions first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

In my lectures on literary research to PhD students, I tried to outline the process: coming up with some outlines and resources a researcher could use. I’ve mentioned some of those resources in the first “Finding Answers” article.

The outlines look like this:

Collecting and gathering information:

My notes Chart

(Type in name of Internet resource) _____________________________________

(Type in name of actual record, book, article, etc.) ____________________________________

The chart or spreadsheet above takes care of the process of recording what is found.

Sometimes in searching for information one needs to be reminded of resources and what they offer up in a search:

The process is fairly simple.  Find the beginning topic that will take you to issues and subtopics.  Search for those as well.  Often you can find lots of subissues by searching with “vs.” such as “Christianity vs. Postmodernism.” Document what you’ve found. Analyze what you’ve found, and record your conclusions, or make decisions.  Sure, we can get very bogged down in methods of organizing, subject headings, classifications and whatever, but if we are not helping our patron for on-point information, our credibility suffers.

Many of us know of someone who is an expert on a particular topic, and we often search out that person to ask. I still have a connection in the music industry and often turn to her for some music publishing information. We can find experts in many places and my chart for finding experts looked like this:

Many experts are found online associated with email discussion lists.

Finding discussion lists for your area of need:

The Granddaddy of all search engines for lists is Liszt.com, which has apparently been taken over by Topica. Don’t go there, goto http://lists.topica.com/dir/., which provides adirectory of discussion lists with search engine as well as email newsletters.

http://www.tile.net/lists/  A comprehensive listing and search engine.  Searching in Business, one comes up with 100 or more.

Catalist is the official directory of all public Listserv (maintained with lsoft software known as Listserv) lists http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html   There are over 325,000 lists by Listserv, but only 53,000 or so are public.

Simply clicking on Google Groups, with search term “listserv directory, ” you will be presented with a page that lists various discussion group directories and Listservs (those using L Soft software).

Another resource online is DiRT, http://dirtdirectory.org/about. The DiRT Directory aggregates information about digital research tools for scholarly use. It evolved from “Bamboo DiRT,” a version of the directory developed by Project Bamboo, which itself developed out of Lisa Spiro’s DiRT wiki. The DiRT Directory makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, and from statistical analysis packages to mind mapping software.

The post Finding Answers Part Two — Locating Resources first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

What is becoming increasingly difficult within this plethora of information is finding answers. In 2005, Peter Morville wrote the delightfully entitled Ambient Findability. This should be a mandatory read for librarians. Morville takes us through a discussion of a number of evolutionary methods in the digitizing of data, information, images, and how this affects findability as well as how this journey is changing the way we work and live. The wonderfully informative Web Search Garage by Tara Calishan, who blogs under several titles including ResearchBuzz, tells us how to use the Google search engine to our best advantage. There are many books on searching, with discussions about semantics and federated searching, but I’ve noted some important earlier ones below.

The paradox is that the more things we digitize, even with more and more sophisticated methods of finding them through search and probability engines, the harder it becomes to find these items. Thus we create better software to help us with the finding of digital information. The ebook Desktop Searching Handbook (DSH) arrived in January of 2005 and is a thorough review of several “major” desktop search products.  It reviews Copernic, Google Desktop Search, Lookout for Outlook, MSN Desktop Search toolbar suite, Yahoo Desktop search, and offers a paragraph each on Enfish Find, X1, Blinkx, dtSearch desktop, Ask Jeeves Desktop, Wilbur, and Isys Desktop.  Oddly, they do not include HotBot Desktop toolbar. (HotBot. “Desktop” review of the Beta version, launched in 2004 hhttp://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb040322-1.shtml)  We had software called Kenjin by the company, Autonomy, which similarly searched both desk computer and Internet at the same time. Many of these are gone now, not always replaced with better products. The new Windows 10 now does something similar with its internal program Cortana.

Beyond ‘desktop searching’ we now have some 270 special search engines to help us around the various subjects and types of access. Along with these there are a number of reviews of the Top 10, Top 40, etc. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/alternative-search-engines/ .

With all the help we still have issues about whether the answers give us more questions. Around 2002, PEW Research told us if we used Broadband we’d get more work done. What they didn’t tell us was that the data on which they based the conclusion included listening to radio and watching movies or TV shows. I’m not sure all that was “work” unless one was a reviewer or critic of such things. Thus, defining the context is important as well. I ran into this recently. Someone is doing a survey for “digital humanities librarians.” Without context we don’t know precisely the definition of “digital humanities librarian,” e.g, the subject, Humanities librarians involved in digital projects, or  the activity, Librarians involved in humane/social project such as UNESCO and others.

The government sites tell us veterans will be given long-term health care, but nothing I found seems to tells me how to find out if I’m eligible. The Veterans Administration site also tells us of Medicare and Medicaid help, but doesn’t lead one to discover for oneself what VA eligibility is or how to apply. Other than a phone call, I’m sure it’s all there, but not here, the “Extended Care” page on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ website, http://goo.gl/vZGJp9 . Almost every VA site provides information along with links to additional information, but not the answer to “am I eligible?” or “What are the exact eligibility criteria?”

At one point we had circular references in Statistical Abstracts, e.g., we were told information for one set of statistics came from the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA). When referring to RIAA inquiry of the statistics, they cited Statistical Abstracts as the source. Although dated, perhaps it’s time to get out the The Skeptical Business Searcher: The Information Advisor’s guide to Evaluating Web Data, Sites and Sources, by Robert Berkman: Information Today, Inc., 2005.

Because we librarians are used to looking things up, we forget that calling someone or finding an expert is also a process of accessing information quickly. When I worked at the Lincoln Center (NY) Research Library, we maintained a card file of subjects with names of people and phone numbers whom we could count on to help with answers. Find it Fast, an excellent book which came out many years ago, will be out in a sixth edition by the time readers see this article; Find It Fast: Extracting Expert Information from Social Networks, Big Data, Tweets, and More, Sixth edition by Robert Berkman.

Getting answers is the only reason we need to collect, process, and preserve the tons of digital and print resources being produced each day. Any suggestions or guides to finding answers should be the priority, not just providing information.

The post Finding Answers first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Beyond free books, you can find resources for used books, these include eBay, Amazon, and Powell’s books. One thing to be aware of is bookjacking, similar to the flipping of real estate. The book is listed at a very large markup, the Bookjacker get the customer, then buy the book from the original owner and make a large profit selling at the marked-up price. So just be sure to do a thorough internet search for the book you want before making a purchase. It’s also possible to find stolen books through some of those sellers, which could be called ‘bookjacking’ too. One of the sites covering these issues is Zubal books and their site, a resource for cheap books, ‘books-by-the-foot.”  Their site also lists those known bookjacking sellers here.

Finally, many libraries are reporting ways they weed books–the used, the abused, the discards, and donations which can’t be kept. It seems many have rules against accepting donations. Covering the giving away part, the American Library Association (ALA) has developed a listing of resources mostly for donating or recycling books. Information about this outgoing process is here: http://www.ala.org/tools/libfactsheets/alalibraryfactsheet12 and here: https://delicious.com/alalibrary/bookdonations. This includes ideas for exchanges, which can also be a tool for building your small library collection.

The post Developing Book Donation Resources first appeared on Public Libraries Online.