Heads up!

I owe a million posts. I know. There's a lot going on, now, though, with ALA Midwinter coming up (see you there?) and getting ready for Dale to join me in Alaska and, you know, getting [legally] married [because the ceremonial part is going to wait a while, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that we promised it'd be on the east coast]. No excuse, particularly when I manage to update the other blog far more regularly, but I'm hoping you'll forgive.

And to give you more to forgive....

I'm moving domains. I hate making people change things in their RSS readers, and I acknowledge that this'll probably lose me half of my readership, but my name's changing (as is Dale's--we're all egalitarian like that), and as such, so is my domain. And I'm walking a line between "cheap" and "broke," so I'm not planning to pay for double hosting unless Dreamhost makes me.

So I'm going to try to do this in a series of steps. This will either break terribly or work wonderfully. Let's see. :D

Thoughts on Social Media

I know I owe some posts about learning the things a new librarian learns. I do. It turns out, being a new librarian takes up enough time that blogging about it seems excessive. (Go figure.) That said, I did find the time to write an article for NMRT Footnotes about settling in in a new place—I stand by my suggestions, though, if I'd written it a few weeks later I might have done a better job of acknowledging how tough it can be. It's weird to be in a place—and now I mean "place" metaphorically—where you have some new friends you like a lot and are pretty certain you can rely on, but you still feel kind of like you shouldn't, because you're just not sure you've earned the social capital. And you miss your old friends but feel like it's a slight on your new friends to admit it, while talking about how much you like your new friends also feels like a slight on the old ones ... I'm moving way out of librarianship, here, but I imagine any readers who have moved long distances probably have a sense of what I'm getting at. (And any friends no doubt think I'm being silly. I don't think any one of them, new or old, doubts the high regard in which I hold them.) I addressed how to meet those friends, in the article, but not how to really end up integrated, completely, into your new home and social groups. It wouldn't have been that interesting—I'm pretty certain the only thing for it is time.

Which continues to pass. ("Time is marching on, and time is still marching on. You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older....")

It doesn't help that I have two other blogs. The former is the Moving to Alaska blog, which I nominally share with Dale (he posted once), all about the trip up here and, well, all that stuff I was talking about in the first paragraph—becoming Alaskan, I guess. The second is very my-library-centric. I write it mostly for my coworkers. But if you were really interested in seeing what I'm up to, you'd be welcome to check those out. :D

Excuses aside, I have been thinking. I've composed a couple of blog posts in my head, some of them even about librarianship, but not followed through. I still owe a post about how I think scholarly communication will evolve—at least in the STEM fields—but I'm still rolling that one around.

The thing that brought me to the blog window today, though, was social media. A number of my coworkers seem interested in "this Web 2.0 thing," and I feel like most of them probably participate in some way or other. Some are on Facebook, a few have tried Twitter, nearly all of them read or write blogs... But the thing they lack—and the thing I keep trying to manage for myself—is a method for participating in multiple, but not all, of them sensibly, with as little repeat information as possible. For instance, if all of someone's tweets go to Facebook, why would I be their friend in both places? (Increasingly, the answer is, "I won't.") I continue to passionately hate the posting of piles of Twitter updates to a blog—it's not obviously inappropriate, I suppose, or nobody would do it, but I think it conflates the intended usage of each medium. Either I want to see what you're thinking as you think it—in which case, I will follow your tweets—or I want to see some [more or less] well thought out prose—in which case, I will follow your blog. If you do both well, I'll follow both. But it bugs me to see a bunch of outdated (by the time the harvester puts them on your blog) one- or two-sentence statements where I expect full paragraphs. Maybe I'm getting grumpy in my ... uh, not that old of age, actually. Either way, it's enough to make me unfollow your blog, if you are not in all other ways stunning. The same goes for those awful "feeds"—they may be useful in real time, though I personally just don't care that much about what any one person is doing online—but they are 100% pointless in a blog. If you want to archive that junk, open a blog just for it; don't torture your readers with that inanity, or you'll lose readers.

Wow, feeling a little ranty. Sorry.

I can't control what others do online, but I do have a measure of control of how I interact with it. If a blog becomes a Twitter/stream archive, or if its author is wrong all the time, I unfollow it. If a Twitter account doesn't have enough information or entertainment value, I eventually unfollow it. (I break this rule for friends. I have a couple of friends who post "I ate a sandwich" kinds of things, but I continue to follow them because I like them enough to overlook that.) Similarly, turnabout is fair play: unless you're awesome enough to be worth following with no reciprocation (I'm looking at you, Stephen Colbert), not following me back means, eventually, I'll stop following you.

I've taken to making groups in my Twitter readers, for keeping up with the people whose every tweet I feel like I should read, and I let the rest of it wash by, checking when I have time. I miss a lot—in all honesty, I feel like I'm kind of losing my grip on Twitter, not interacting with more than 10% or so of the people I follow—but I also still gain a fair bit of information, using it that way.

Facebook, I mostly catch up on 2-3 times a day. I try really hard not to send more than 2-3 Facebook updates a day, as well, because I don't want to be annoyingly "noisy" there, in the same way I might on Twitter. It's almost a Twitter "best of," for me.

Meanwhile, my Google Reader is assiduously sorted (though Future Feminist Librarian-Activist should go in "Libraries" half the time and "Social Issues" half the time—and would, if Reader had that kind of granularity in filtering); that is arguably where I'm the most heartless in unfollowing (blogs), because it's impossible to tell who is and is not following your blog; therefore, no hurt feelings. I'm only semi-heartless in unfollowing people who share with me—you have to post a whole lot of irrelevant stuff for me to unfollow you, there, given the ease of scrolling past boring stuff [and my uncertainty in telling whether it's possible to know who is following what you share]—but I'll do it, at need. (Given the number of lolcats I share, I don't feel like I'm justified in being overly judgmental about what others are sharing. ;))

But I'm not sure whether I have an overall "policy" about all of it. Or whether I need one, beyond wanting to be able to explain it, quickly and usefully, to others who want to manage their own social media floods. Frankly, I'm sure I'm not doing it as well as I could be, so I wonder if others have their own policies about all of it, or if everyone flies by the seats of their pants, the way I do. (My social media policy is as disjointed as this post, you could say...)

I'd love to compare notes on all of this, anyway. What do you folks do?

Really quickly

It turns out, I'm not the only one pondering the evanescence of today's information, though I was looking at it from a filter-the-input standpoint, while he's looking at it much more from a preservation standpoint.

Still, it's cool to see others thinking about the same sorts of things...

New Netiquette

These thoughts have been spinning around in my head—and not just mine; I admit, I'm probably repeating a few things I've read over the past six months, as well as adding my own spin—but have started to solidify into something almost blog-worthy.

Over the past few days I've been watching a mini-kerfuffle happening on LITA-L (arguably one of the more tech-savvy mailing lists in libraryland, which might be the source of my surprise), wherein a number of people wrote to the entire list to ask for Google Wave invites—and I won't pretend I didn't let out a tiny annoyed huff and eye-roll, myself, when I saw the flood of short "please give me Google Wave" messages—and a number more wrote back (with a new subject line!), expressing stern opinions about the decline of netiquette and the inappropriateness of sending "short 'me too'" messages out to a list. Then a number more replied to the stern ones, saying, in essence, "Use Gmail and get over it." Then that, too, got discussed, with the "use Gmail" mentality being boiled down, by the stern ones, to victim-blaming. I've seen this argument hashed out and rehashed on other, sometimes far less civil, mailing lists. And, I've found, my views on this subject have evolved from the stern to the, if you want to call it that, victim-blaming.

Now, like I said, I'm running the risk of repeating things others have already said, here. Looking back over my Reader feeds for the past few months, this is definitely one of the things that have affected my thinking on this. There are others. (Neal Stephenson may have had a bit of an effect, as well.) It's hard to say what all the influences in my thinking really are; I'm exposed to more information than I know what to do with, every single day. So, I hope, are you.

Which sort of brings me to my point. This isn't 1990, and to cling [and try to force others to cling] to the netiquette of 1990, in lieu of taking control of your own information influx, seems to me to be backwards-thinking. For the LITA-L list, specifically, people must know that the library field, the IT field, and the crossover between them are huge. Even if everyone follows all the old school rules of netiquette, sending only what's necessary to mailing lists, there's still so much there. And that's without Twitter and Facebook and RSS feeds and the like. Anyone who reads every message coming across every relevant list and RSS feed is clearly not getting any real work done.

What we need to be doing—and we, as librarians, should be helping to train our patrons/customers/users [that terminology is a fight for another blog post] to do—is intelligently filtering all of it, to get the very best of what's out there. There's no perfect system for doing this, yet, but we need to do what we can with the tools we have, even while keeping our eyes open for other tools. For a very easy start, nobody should be reading mailing list traffic without a mail client that supports threading. (Hint: pretty much all of them do, particularly since Gmail came on the scene. Odds are, you can have threading-by-subject in your email without ever giving over your private information to the Google Monster and without leaving your corporate Exchange server.) In this case, when a thread turns into a hundred "me toos," dump it. Easy.

Filtering in RSS readers, Facebook, and Twitter is harder. Certainly, Twitter is trying to help, with its new list functionality. And external tools like TweetDeck (and there are a million others, at this point, probably many I haven't heard of or looked at, hopefully some that do a more thorough job of filtering) can help you follow a conference (via hashtag), a set of users who consistently provide good information, or a particular word that interests you; you can even filter out any one word or phrase from the results. It's not perfect—you'll see junk, and you'll miss good stuff—but it's a start. Google Reader doesn't really seem to allow filtering, beyond which feeds you follow and what folders or tags you want to assign, but I feel fairly confident that it will, eventually, or some better tool will come along that does. I'll go a step further and say, actually, I'm fairly confident that there's already a tool that does this, though I admit I don't know what it is. Facebook is trying to intelligently filter for you, with its News Feed (instead of Live Feed), and it's doing a so-so job, at least for me; I still find that I see more of what interests me by following the Live Feed, turning off certain people, and skimming past anything that does not seem immediately useful, but the News Feed is not entirely useless, either.

This discussion goes beyond email, RSS, and social networking services, though: even if Google Wave supplants all of these, or if we all eventually end up only accessing the Internet through something like World of Warcraft or Second Life, instead of a browser, we're still facing a different information age than the one in which "netiquette" could save us all. As an information consumer in today's world, everyone has the responsibility to filter their own content; sometimes, yes, this means adding tools to their tools (here, I fight the meme urge). And, for the next few years, yeah, it's going to be patchy. We will all have to master the art of letting go; you will not see every message in your Twitter stream, either because you are a master filterer or because you have mastered the Zen necessary to read 20 messages here and 20 there, wherever you have time. Nor will you see every message on every mailing list, every post on every blog, etc. That's the world we live in.

What I'd like to see, instead of librarians arguing about netiquette, about listservs vs. fora, about blogs vs. Twitter, and the like, is librarians helping other librarians—and through them, all of the people we should all be helping—to get a handle on the tidal wave of information coming to all of us through all of these media every single day. Perhaps we should be building tools to do some of this filtering, even.

(If I hadn't exhausted myself, I would now be expanding this discussion to metasearch of libraries' collections and the sheer volume of material produced about pretty much every subject under the sun, nowadays. Thing is, if we can't all master this viewpoint for our own information needs, we're not going to implement it to help our users, are we?)

File-sharing: not just for kids

I'm still wrapping my head around this; it's a report about a bunch of medical professionals setting up a file-sharing forum for articles from non-open access (NOA) journals. Techdirt reports that the site had 100,000 users and that 83% of requested articles were shared—over 5000 articles in a 6-month period. I went to look at the original report and saw a lot of talk about OA vs. NOA journals, but, interestingly, no discussion of institutional repositories. I would love to see an analysis of how many of those articles, despite being published in NOA journals, were freely available online, to begin with.

More broadly, though, this seems like some sort of failure, on some level, by someone. Does the blame fall on publishers for charging too much? (Unsurprisingly, I'm inclined to suggest that's a piece of the problem, yes. The study gives the average "value"—I'm going to use the term "cost," instead—of an article as $30. Seems a bit steep, to me, given that the writing and editing were done for free, from the publisher's standpoint.) Does the fault lie with libraries for failing to make interlibrary loan into a faster, better-used, better-marketed service? Maybe, but, then again, with this kind of volume, mightn't libraries be running into cost and copyright pitfalls, anyway? I'll show some ignorance, here: perhaps public libraries don't offer article-level ILLs; I admit, I've never tried. On the other hand, it's hard to say how many of these researchers already had access to academic or medical libraries that could get these articles for them and opted to go this route, anyway; I would assume a very small percentage, but what if I'm wrong? Do we blame institutions—and, yeah, academic libraries—for failing to build repositories of their scholars' works? Maybe, a little, but a fair portion of the publishers in the biomedical fields seem (by my unscientific sampling) to insist on pre-print only archiving, as well as 6-month to 1-year embargoes. That's a non-ideal scenario, even with 100% participation in institutional repositories, which is, itself, a pipe dream.

I thought this quote, from the original study, was pretty fascinating: "From the participants’ comments made in the forums, however, there does not appear to be any vindictiveness on the part of the participants against the journals or holders of copyright, but a mood of togetherness, of openness and sharing, and communal assistance." So, scientists acting like scientists are supposed to, sharing information freely? The devil, you say!

I don't have any new solutions to offer—that I think social networking tools could make some of this discussion moot is probably no secret [though it may be worth its own post, later in the week]—so perhaps I shouldn't go so far as to say this: journal publishers are now, more and more obviously, getting in the way of scientific progress. Perhaps not as directly as stupid intellectual property policies—companies owning genes and chemical formulas and the like—but, certainly, it's happening. Scientific discussion should be open and accessible, and as libraries struggle with decreasing budgets, while publishers increase the price of journals, that discussion is getting more and more closed, forcing researchers to, in this case, build their own file-sharing networks, to get the information they need. This is a pressing issue for the library, scientific, and academic communities—which, I realize, overlap significantly, though I would argue that sometimes scientists-as-scientists are open to different solutions than scientists-as-academics: the bulk of my favored options require some changes in the tenure system, for instance.

At any rate, have a look at that study, and tell me what you think in the comments. (Maybe one day I'll get Google Wave working with this blog, and we can chat about all of this in real-time.)