Special Focus
Jenny's Journal Continued
Monday October 31, 2005
Today I read an Article in Computers in Libraries called Designing a Web Site for One Imaginary Persona that Reflects the Needs of Many. This article brought up an interesting practice of inventing one “prototype user” and designing the website for this type of individual believing that the site will then in turn work for many other populations. The logic behind this idea stemmed from an example of roller suitcases. They were originally designed for flight attendants, but the general public saw how useful they were and a market was created to serve a variety of people from one idea which was originally tailored for a certain demographic. I think it’s a bit of hasty generalization to say that if it worked for suitcases, that it will work for the internet. However, I do believe that when a web team spends time thinking and analyzing their audience, that websites can be designed appropriately to serve a variety of users on a variety of levels. Here, I believe, (and the article fails to mention this concept) is where it is important to build a level of scalability into a website in order to serve multiple populations at once. Yes, I do believe it is important to identify user demographics, but I think it is faulty reasoning to assume designing for one characteristic will automatically work for everyone. This article had an interesting idea, but it needs some work.
On a different note, I was surprised to see a whole issue of a magazine devoted to usability like it was some kind of revolutionary idea. Of course interface should be designed with the user in mind! No one from the public want to have to have to learn “librarianese” before being able to access their information, but I have to remember that most people who are seasoned in the field of library science started their careers when patrons approached the reference desk and the librarian had to find all the information. In this scenario, it makes sense for interface to be designed for the librarian, but I think that time is long gone.
On yet another note, I am a bit overwhelmed at the amount of reading material that is available for an individual to read in the field of education, technology, and libraries. There is more to read than there is time to truly digest. I wish I could stay on top of the learning curve, but I’m not sure if that is possible. I’m glad that a portion of my internship is set aside for reading about what is going on the field. Hopefully it will begin a good habit of keeping up with current literature.
Tuesday, November 1, 2005
Today was possibly my only bad day that I have had or will have at my internship. I had the opportunity to conduct an informational interview with Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services. Deanna provided many insights into the future of libraries. She wonders if reading rooms will become collaborative areas where scholars will come together to create information in electronic form. What then will be the role of the librarian? Will they assist in this process? Will libraries help with publishing vast amounts of electronic information as more and more becomes available online and less is available in print? Will libraries continue exist as a physical location as more information becomes available online? Deanna seems to think so, as she feels that “libraries are a collective symbol of who we are and what we want to become. They symbolize our achievements and our aspirations.” The part of the interview that I did not enjoy was when I asked her about the job market for school library media specialists. She feels that it is not good because schools have to spend more money on areas that directly contribute to students reaching the standards outlined in No Child Left Behind. She feels that while school libraries have potential to help students achieve these goals, there is no empirical evidence to prove that school libraries impact student achievement. Ouch! I really was disappointed by that comment. I agree that the job outlook is less than favorable in some states due to lack of funding, but I can’t say that I honestly feel school libraries don’t help with student achievement.
I was also given a tour of the Hispanic Division today which is located in the Jefferson Building. The art and architecture of the reading room is impressive! Most of the information relating to this division has been dispersed to other parts of the library such as prints and photographs, manuscripts, maps etc. Therefore, they don’t necessarily have their own collection, but work to serve other collections in the library.
Wednesday November 2, 2005
Today I started working with optical character recognition software (OCR). I am working on capturing captions from a cartobibliography and transferring them into electronic format so they can be placed on the internet along with their corresponding images. I always wondered if software existed to change pictures of text into editable text. I guess it does! No wonder students don’t often have access to it; I can see where plagiarism would be an issue. I didn’t think that this activity was time efficient. I think I could have hand typed all the text in less amount of time than it took to copy the pages out of the book, scan each page, and spell check and modify each page of text. Many of the captions were in French and required me to add accents. The OCR software was not able to detect these variations.
Thursday November 3, 2005
Today was not all that different from yesterday. I continued to work on my OCR assignment and then received some instructions on some web work that I will begin tomorrow. We are supposed to have a non-fire evacuation drill this week, but nothing has happened yet. I’ve been bringing my tennis shoes to work every day just in case, as we have to walk four blocks to the evacuation site.
Friday November 4, 2005
I began a project today using Macromedia Dreamweaver. Much of the Digital Team’s documentation is sitting on their computer in Word Perfect Documents and needs to be put on the staff website. My job, therefore, is to go through the documentation, make changes as necessary, and post the information on the website. Some of the documents include images so from screen grabs, so I have to convert them to .gif so they can be displayed on the web. We just got new computers on Wednesday, and I am without Adobe Photoshop for the time being, so have been using Macromedia Fireworks. Today I was very glad that I have had classroom instruction on both pieces of software. I’ve had to use both applications for this internship. This week I had the rare opportunity to visit the Israeli Embassy. Security is awfully tight before entering the building. While I am starting to expect people to look through my purse, ask me to take off my shoes, and walk through a metal detector, I’m not sure that it’s something I will ever get used to, because I always feel like my privacy is being violated. (On the other hand, I’m glad security is this tight at the Library of Congress. It makes me feel safe.) I learned that Israel is only the size of New Jersey, the Wailing Wall only spans over 3% of Jerusalem, and the technology used by the answering machine was invented by Israel. Cool! I read some articles from American Libraries today. One of them was particularly interesting as it was about the impact that hurricane Katrina had on libraries in Louisiana. It was nice to hear that several librarians who were less affected by the disaster were willing to pitch in and help with the relief effort. Many set up public internet access locations where people could download the needed forms on the internet to send in and apply for relief money. I never thought about the lack of internet access that many people were experiencing. This article was an eye-opener! It also mentioned the impact of the hurricane on school libraries. It is estimated that “271 schools in 44 school districts serving 160,000 students was affected by the hurricane.” This week the cataloging software was not available due to updates that are taking place in the system. Namely, diacritics are being added so items created in foreign countries can be accurately cataloged. This has been a major hardship for the cataloging team as they depend on this software to do their work. It was less of a problem for the digital team because we have a variety of other projects to work on.
I was happy because I was given the task of updating the staff web page with digital team documentation using Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Hypersnap. This assignment was a good mix of both instructional design and web design. Many pieces of documentation are housed on the team’s hard drive in Word Perfect documents. Some of them needed updating and some needed graphics added to them so the instructions could become clearer, and beginning interns, such as myself, are able to follow them with clarity. This is an ongoing project which I suspect will continue into next week.
I typically started a page by printing out the text and drawing out the tables that I wanted to design. I then arranged the text in Dreamweaver as I had planned out on paper. Sometimes more information needed to be added or taken out because it is not clear. And, I often had to add screen shots of what the user should be seeing as they follow each step. For this I used a software program called Hypersnap. I took a picture of the screen I wanted and then it opened up in a paint-type program which allows a person to edit the picture and add highlights to any area that should receive special attention. This is definitely a piece of software that I will be buying for my computer should I have to create job-aids or any other instructions.
It’s been nice to have a chance to learn HTML. I have been trying to work in the split view so I can watch how the code is changing as I design a page. I have a long way to go before I understand the ins and outs of HTML and Dreamweaver, but this has been a great opportunity to learn by doing. I am also grateful that I had the chance to learn about the image editing software that this available with Adobe Photoshop and Fireworks. We just had new computers installed, but I didn’t receive Photoshop, so I had to use Fireworks to complete this project. All Federal Offices are closed due to Veterans Day. I again had the opportunity to read some articles from American Libraries, a publication from the American Library Association. I would love to continue to read articles from this magazine; perhaps I should become a member of the organization, or obtain the main articles from SCSU’s databases. I am fortunate to be able to experience the major trends that libraries are experiencing while at work and can read some of these articles with experience behind me. It makes the articles more interesting. For example, I read an article entitled Google Print vs. Onsite Collections which addresses the trends of libraries who send information to a remote site after the information has been made available online. LC is currently seeing this trend; most of the items in the Motion Picture and Recorded Sound Division have already been sent offsite. Just this week, I was in a meeting with the Chief of our Division, John Hebert, who discussed the future of Geography and Map with the Digital Team. He wonders if G&M will become a directory Division instead of the custodial Division that it is now. As more and more information becomes available online, fewer patrons are asking to see physical items while more are seeking to find the same information online. This article that I was reading mentioned how browsing the stacks of books in a library, especially at the Library of Congress, is sometimes the only to find the information that a patron is looking for, as some key words needed to retrieve information cannot be anticipated in advance. (In other words, Google is sometimes of little help.) People need the skills of a librarian in these situations who have knowledge of their collection and can physically browse through items to find the answer. As more and more items become moved offsite, this method of searching will no longer be possible, albeit effective. When I visited the Jefferson Reading Room, I was told by reference librarian, Emily Howie that librarians have to frequently look through the physical stacks and the original card catalog to retrieve needed information. This has to be done because the information available online is not as reliable or complete. I agree with this article. Books and other information mediums need to remain physically located in a library even when the information is available online. Just because information is available in electronic format, it does not make it necessarily easier to locate or utilize. This week I continued to work on converted documentation written by the Digital Team from Word Perfect format to HTML format by using Dreamweaver. The biggest stumbling block that I ran into was trying to organize a page of text in outline format. It is hard to space the information correctly. Tabs don’t seem to work the same in Dreamweaver as they do in Word Processing applications. My colleague, Diane, had to show me how to use HTML code to create ordered and unordered lists. This helped somewhat, but when Diane went to validate the page, several errors were found. I am continuing to see this week that it is important for a web developer not only to know how to design a page, but also have a knowledge about what is being coded as the page is being designed. Perhaps I should read through HTML for Dummies?
Diane has also shown me the role of meta tags and key words. I have to read a page and analyze what it is about and then pick out the key words and list them in the code. This allows users to search by key word to find the page. Developers used to be able to list the same key word multiple times in their coding so that their pages would appear first when searched in Google. Search engines have become wise to this fact, so listed a word ten times in the code has less of a bearing of how far up on the list it will appear in Google.
I also have gotten back into scanning maps this week. One thing which I should receive more training in is safe handling. I can’t say that I’m fully aware of all the factors which could damage a map: light, carrying the item, positioning on a table etc. Apparently, one of my co-workers was unhappy with how I was handling my CIA maps. I need to be more careful next time.
Additionally, I have been learning how to support maps when scanning them so they are able to lie on a more flat surface. For example, sometimes maps are larger than the table on which they are sitting. So, sometimes we have to use stools to create a kind of extension of the table. We also use foam to support pages of a map. This usually only becomes an issue when maps are being scanned as pages of an atlas. The cover and binding create an uneven surface which wouldn’t be an issue if the map was a single sheet. With that said, it’s been amazing to me to see how much physical labor is involved in working in a library. There is much carrying, bending, and lifting of items. There has not been anything I haven’t felt comfortable with doing, but this is not a factor of the work environment that I have considered before.
Finally, I spent most of Thursday morning at the reference desk. There were no patrons to help who physically walked in the door. But, I worked with another reference librarian to answer a question from a woman who wrote in to Ask A Librarian via Question Point. More and more questions are coming in electronically. There is already a digital reference team who only answers questions online all day long. They never see physical patrons. This trend was addressed in my Access to Information course two summers ago. I’m sad to see that’s it’s already happening. I think one of the hallmarks of a reference librarian is the interaction with the public. As more questions are moved online, more people can be served faster, but it again fundamentally changes the role of reference. I again loved what I did with the Washington Center this week. The Non-Profit Leaders visited an organization called City Year which is under the umbrella of Americore. This organization strives to meet the community needs of the inner city youth in Washington DC. They are particularly interested in service projects, improving literacy rates, and preventing HIV/AIDS. (One interesting note, to be a City Year staffer, you must have your library card. They perceive this as being part of a good citizen. Yeah!) We took a leadership course with them where we learned about different leadership styles as compared to compass directions. If you’re a North, you are a bottom line, get things done now, no matter what the cost type of leader. If you’re an East, you are a dreamer and a brain-stormer. Easts are often a visionary individuals, but not always practical. The Southern leaders are very concerned about people and what everyone else thinks. Finally the Wests, people like myself, are those that are very analytical. They examine all sides of an issue and pay attention to all details before making a decision. They are very detail oriented. This was a very good activity for me because it gave me a chance to see other people’s mentalities. There are times when I struggle to understand how others fail to examine a situation in the same amount of depth that I do; this exercise made me realize that this may be because we are all wired differently and have unique strengths and differences. However, I am glad that I have this type of personality because the library work that I am completing this semester has a high level of detail; cataloging, HTML etc. I suspect people who are not detail oriented may not enjoy the work of the Digital Team.
I also had the unique opportunity to listen to the Treasurer of the United States speak this week. She went to Harvard when she still had four young children in the household. She believes that going to school with kids is much harder than going to work with kids. There is never really an “end of the day” there is always something more to do. (Isn’t that the truth!) She spoke on many interesting issues:
I’ve spent the last few days working on a project for one of the Division’s specialists. Her name is Pam van Ee and she wrote a cartobibliography which organizes many maps in the collections that show North America and the West Indies. The Rochambeau Map Collection, which is included in her book, was recently posted online, but no captions were added. So, it was my job to into the cartobibliography and find each map in the Rochambeau map collection, there are 67, and copy the captions into a Word Perfect Document. I started this assignment using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, but quickly learned it was more time efficient for me to key the captions into the Word Perfect Document. This project took awhile, and has been less interesting than other tasks, but it was a good experience to see what other people work on outside of the Digital Team. Today I worked on a photo-duplication request. A PhotoDup Request is generated when a patron would like a scan of an item they have seen in the Reading Room. The Digital Team then scans the image, and gives it to the patron on CD. The cost gained from the fee required helps to fund the digital team’s total operation. Sometimes an item cannot be scanned. This happens when either the item is too fragile, or it is still under copyright. To check if an item is still in copyright, someone from the team has to check upstairs in the Copyright office to see if the map is listed in the card catalog.
It was good for me to work on this PhotoDup request because I was able to see more of how the reference librarians play a role in the library. One of the reference librarians, Ed Redmond, brought the map to the scan lab, but it was unclear what country we were looking at. We had to copy down the coordinates and look in an Atlas to see that it may be present day Tanzania. Once we were able to define the country, we went into the title collection (those items that are not cataloged) and looked at a map of Tanzania. The coordinates matched, so we were able to establish the location. I am continuing to scan more maps created by the CIA. If I can scan and process 95 maps by the time I leave, the Library will have every map online from 2000 forward. I guess the project started 10 years ago and took until 2003 to have 1000 maps online. Now we are on file number 1700. The project has been able to accelerate because the server technology has improved, so files can be moved around faster. It would be nice if the Information Technology Department could take some time to develop a better interface so people could find these maps faster. As it stands currently, a patron would have to type the phrase, “Central Intelligence Agency” into the search box to see a listing of these maps. That’s not so intuitive, but I hope to use this website with teachers because LC owns more of these maps than the CIA, so there is more selection, they are current, and out of copyright.
Today I read a very interesting article in American Libraries called Have MLS Will Travel. I talked about librarians and school library media specialists who have chosen to work in international schools around the world. This intrigues me. My sister-in-law did her student teaching at the American School of Madrid. She loved it and encouraged me to do the same. I’ve always been a little skeptical because I wasn’t sure if other countries have the same technology that we do but I’m sure it would be a fascinating experience. It sounds like sometimes these school libraries in international schools attract people of all ages because they are one of the few locations to have significant information resources. School librarians end up reaching out to much of the public in addition to serving the students. Many librarians in this situation have to set up their own retirement packages, are limited in their ability to see their family, and their orders of books often take months to arrive. However, the overwhelming opinion was that the decision to live and teach abroad was worthwhile. The neat thing about working at the Library of Congress is that you get to meet so many different librarians who have worked in a variety of places. Today I happened to eat lunch with someone who used to work at the New York public library. She said that the books are still being shelved there according to size. My colleague Diane explained that shelving space can be saved when a library chooses to organize materials this way. It is also much easier to reshelf an item and books have less chance to being lost or misplaced. There is always a certain shelf the book will reside in due to its size. This is unlike a system where books are shelved according to subject. They could be placed anywhere on the shelf. The downside of organizing materials by size is that the card catalog must be very accurate as there is really no efficient way to browse the shelves for an item. This type of system would never work for the Library of Congress. To begin with, it would take massive amounts of time to reorganize 530 miles of books. Secondly, the card catalog only shows a piece of what LC owns. If the shelves do not continue to remain browse-able, many items would never be located again. No worries though, LC has no plans to reorganize their collections. The Digital Team authors a web page called Places in the News where they post maps that are related to what is going on in the world. They posted a map of Louisiana when the Hurricane hit and a map of Montgomery, Alabama when Rosa Parks died. Today they gave me the task of visiting various news sites to decide what countries to post. I went to the BBC website because everyone tells me they have the most objective views and global focus. I decided on Iran for the plane crash killing 110 people and Iraq due to the trial of Saddam Hussein. I think this would be a great website for me to use in my school library. I can either have kids involved in creating a similar page, or I could use this page to talk with students about current events. The website can be viewed at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/plnews.html. (Note, I did not write the text or scan the maps, I only picked the countries. These countries are posted often so the material was already available.) One thing the Digital Team has to be careful of when managing this page is not to include maps that are still under copyright. I guess some divisions are a little more casual about including items that are still under copyright but I’m glad G&M follows the law. I think it sets a nice example for others to follow even though it may limit what can be displayed. Colleen and Diane took me out to lunch today to thank me for my work that I completed during my internship. We went to the Dirkson cafeteria. This is where the Senators eat lunch. We got to take the special train over there from the capitol building which you can only board if you work for certain branches of the government. On the way back, we walked above ground and passed the Supreme Court Building. I hadn’t seen it yet, so it was a special treat! Throughout this week and into next, I am working to scan all of the CIA maps from 2000 forward so the most current ones in the collection will be available online. The previous goal was to scan every map in the world, but the Digital Team is unsure whether the CIA made maps of some of the Pacific Islands, or if they are included in maps of Oceania. So, instead of aiming for that goal, so I’m scanning the most recent maps regardless if the country is already represented on the website or not. They weren’t necessarily planning on me scanning this many maps, but Colleen told be that I had already met and exceeded their expectations, so this is why I was given this new task. There are 95 maps to scan and process. This should keep me busy for the rest of my internship. It ends next week and I know I’m going to be sad! I also attended a talent show today put on by the Library of Congress. It was held in the Coolidge Auditorium in the Jefferson Building. I am continually impressed at the size of the library and the fact that they own an auditorium and have enough employees to have a talent show! One man did an oratory reading where he speculated what would happen if Google took over the Library of Congress. He guessed Google would have to appease the Librarian of Congress who is interested in Russia, and move the whole operation to Siberia, renamed Cybereria. All library employees would live in Google-ogs. He was quite funny but I think there is some truth about the amount of information Google is getting their hands on. I really have a hard time believing that digitizing all collections in a library is within the nature of copyright law. Today was a short day because of all the snow (1-2 inches and melting ha ha!). I did look through a book today that describes book lingo: what a first edition is, how to define binding etc. I think I’m going to buy a copy of this and make a bulletin board of this and place it in my media center. I can have a book word of the week. The one I liked the most is bibliomaniac: a person with a wild look in their eye who is crazy for books!
View a Printer-Friendly Version
Washington Center Activities
Monday, November 7th, 2005
Friday, November 11, 2005
Washington Center Activities
This was the best week of programming that we have had so far. I had the unique opportunity to listen to a speaker who started his own non-profit organization in Washington DC. It is called Heads-Up DC and works to support literacy through after school programs in inner-city schools. The speaker had a dream in college to start a program where students could learn how to read and work with role models who would inspire them to continue their education into the college years. Heads-Up DC utilizes college volunteers who are paid through work-study programs and Americore to tutor children after school and read to them. Scholastic has even donated books to the kids and to their school libraries. I was inspired by this man that dreams can become realities through non-profit organizations, and this is a realm that needs visionary leaders.
We also listened to a man named Coleman McCarthy who founded the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington DC. He has helped several colleges and high schools develop peace curriculum in their schools by studying Ghandi and MLK Jr to name a few. I think this is a great idea, but it would prove challenging to implement in primary and secondary schools as state standards dictate much of the curriculum.
Monday November 14, 2005
Tuesday November 15- Friday November 18, 2005
Washington Center Activities
Monday November 28- Tuesday November 29, 2005
Wednesday November 30, 2005
Thursday December 1, -Friday December 2, 2005
Monday, December 5, 2005
Tuesday, December 6, 2005
Wednesday, December 8, 2005
Thursday, December 7, 2005
Friday, December 12, 2005