shimenawa - Latest comments on Quiet in the Research Library

In response to: Quiet in the Research Library

Katherine Kott [Visitor] — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:45:07 +0000

The observation your colleague at the Readex meeting made rings true to my experience in a small liberal arts college environment compared to a research library environment. Clarity of mission is certainly a factor and as Stu observes, faculty status may make a difference. However, I think the biggest difference is human scale. It is just easier to get things done when you can put together a group of 12 or fewer people and include diverse skills and interests in the group. Library and IT folks are more directly connected in a natural way to each other and to faculty and students in a smaller environment. I doubt that there is a lack of awareness in research libraries that change needs to happen, but it is much more difficult to change course with a larger vessel.

On the silence, maybe there is cultural resistance to blogging in research libraries but Paula Kaufman at UIUC blogs about scholarly communication at http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/ and Barbara Dewey at UTK uses an open blog to distribute news items, calls for papers, etc. http://www.lib.utk.edu/news/dean/. Paul Courant is a notable recent addition to the blogesphere at http://paulcourant.net/.

It might be interesting for DLF to offer a blog spot for DLF members--directors and other staff to use. Within research library environments I think many people fear the time investment required to keep a blog fresh, still perceive the noise to signal ratio in the blogesphere to be high and worry about adding one more channel to monitor to their already information-overloaded lives. A collaborative blog would address at least one of those issues. It might be interesting for DLF to set up blog space (within the context of the new web presence?) in which research libraries could participate. A virtual DLF Forum. In fact, I think consortia like DLF offer the perfect opportunity for research libraries to work in collaborations that are less constrained than their home institutions.

A colleague at a research library recently remarked that she finds in-person discussion to be more productive than asynchronous blog post and comment because nuances and misunderstandings can be cleared up in real time. In an effort to bring some efficiency to these larger organizations, they may be trading more open communication on the net for more bounded exchanges that are seen to generate solutions more quickly. Perhaps the research libraries are not quiet but the conversations are happening behind closed doors.

In response to: Quiet in the Research Library

Karen Munro [Visitor] — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:22:28 +0000

And I really should have included at least my blog URL with that, I guess. ;)

In response to: Quiet in the Research Library

Karen Munro [Visitor] — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:21:37 +0000

We're here! We're just swamped with trying to shift the R1 bureaucracy! ;)

I used to work at what we might call an R2 institution, and while I was very busy, I had a greater sense of flexibility and agility (in retrospect, at least.) Units were more closely interconnected, and projects ran faster. Here at UCB, we're in a big ship. It turns very slowly. And it takes a *lot* of work, most of it hidden and frustrating, to make it turn at all. There are times when I go to conferences and sit listening to a librarian from a community college describe how she just put, say, meebo into her web pages, and when she's there she logs in and when she's not she's not, and it's no big deal...and I drool a little bit.

In response to: Quiet in the Research Library

pbrantley [Member] — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 12:20:52 +0000

Stu, if your speculation is correct (and I have some private messages that give corroboration) then I can't think of a stronger indictment of institutions who have embraced a revolution in scholarly communication, and promotion and tenure, than not to press the same theme among their own staff.

In response to: Quiet in the Research Library

Stuart Weibel [Visitor] — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 23:06:20 +0000

It would be interesting to see if the correlation were related to whether an institution's librarians were tenure track faculty, as well. Blogging is still looked down upon by many in the academic community as vanity publishing. Vain though I may be, this strikes me as shortsighted. But if you're playing by different rules, blogging may be substantially worse than neutral in the calculus of career advancement